By Norman Solomon / The Guardian

More than nine months after Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued reports that concluded Israel was committing genocide – and more than a month since key Israeli human rights groups asserted the same – the American political establishment remains in rigid denial while horrors continue nonstop in Gaza. Virtually all Republicans and most Democrats in Congress still support massive US arms shipments to Israel, so they certainly can’t admit that the weaponry is making genocide possible.

Central to rationales for arming Israel is the claim that it is the nation of “the Jewish people”.

When the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, spoke via video to a conference in Jerusalem three months ago, he declared: “There can be no nuanced separation of hatred of Israel and hatred of the Jewish people.” Rubio added: “Those who call for the destruction of Israel are calling for the destruction of the Jewish people.” Last month, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, reinforced the same message while visiting Israel, where he reportedly said that the West Bank was “the rightful property of the Jewish people”.

Such rhetoric – equating Israel with all Jews and Israel’s future with theirs – is an effort to sanctify Israel and shield it from criticism by brandishing the charge of antisemitism.

Fusing Israel with “the Jewish people” is a key propaganda technique. The fact that it’s so ubiquitous makes it no less ridiculous, or dangerous. A comment attributed to Voltaire applies: “As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.”

And atrocities continue with no end in sight. Israel has persisted with methodical – and clearly intentional – killing of Palestinian civilians not only with bombs, missiles and bullets but also with starvation as a weapon of war. Blockage or extreme constriction of humanitarian aid has been the norm. All summer, Israel has ignored the United Nations warning issued in June that food intake in Gaza had dropped far below “survival” level. By then, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross said conditions there had become worse than “hell on earth”.

Ironically, the country that we’re told is the ultimate target of antisemitism is now, in reality, the world’s most powerful cause of antisemitism. By insisting that it is the embodiment of Jews all over the world, the state of Israel seeks to associate Jews everywhere with its systematic war crimes and genocide in Gaza along with deadly ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank.

The Israeli government, esteemed by a dwindling number of Americans, conflates itself with Judaism and “the Jewish people” in a marketing pattern so familiar that it blends into the wallpaper of media echo chambers. The crux of pro-Israel messaging is to promote a set of false equations: Israel = Jews. Support for Israel = support for Jews. Denunciations of Israel = antisemitism. And a functional subtext of those equations is this one: Israeli government = impunity.

[Click here to real full article on The Guardian website.]

By Norman Solomon / TomDispatch

Killing from the sky has long offered the sort of detachment that warfare on the ground can’t match. Far from its victims, air power remains the height of modernity. And yet, as the monk Thomas Merton concluded in a poem, using the voice of a Nazi commandant, “Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.”

Nine decades have passed since aerial technology first began notably assisting warmakers. Midway through the 1930s, when Benito Mussolini sent Italy’s air force into action during the invasion of Ethiopia, hospitals were among its main targets. Soon afterward, in April 1937, the fascist militaries of Germany and Italy dropped bombs on a Spanish town with a name that quickly became a synonym for the slaughter of civilians: Guernica.

Within weeks, Pablo Picasso’s painting “Guernica” was on public display, boosting global revulsion at such barbarism. When World War Two began in September 1939, the default assumption was that bombing population centers — terrorizing and killing civilians — was beyond the pale. But during the next several years, such bombing became standard operating procedure.

Dispensed from the air, systematic cruelty only escalated with time. The blitz by Germany’s Luftwaffe took more than 43,500 civilian lives in Britain. As the Allies gained the upper hand, the names of certain cities went into history for their bomb-generated firestorms and then radioactive infernos. In Germany: Hamburg, Cologne, and Dresden. In Japan: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.

“Between 300,000-600,000 German civilians and over 200,000 Japanese civilians were killed by allied bombing during the Second World War, most as a result of raids intentionally targeted against civilians themselves,” according to the documentation of scholar Alex J. Bellamy. Contrary to traditional narratives, “the British and American governments were clearly intent on targeting civilians,” but “they refused to admit that this was their purpose and devised elaborate arguments to claim that they were not targeting civilians.”

Past Atrocities Excusing New Ones

As the New York Times reported in October 2023, three weeks into the war in Gaza, “It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign. In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II — including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to try to defeat those countries.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told President Joe Biden much the same thing, while shrugging off concerns about Israel’s merciless killing of civilians in Gaza. “Well,” Biden recalled him saying, “you carpet-bombed Germany. You dropped the atom bomb. A lot of civilians died.”

Apologists for Israel’s genocide in Gaza have continued to invoke just such a rationale. Weeks ago, for instance, Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, responded derisively to a statement by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer that “the Israeli government’s decision to further escalate its offensive in Gaza is wrong.” Citing the U.S.-British air onslaught on Dresden in February 1945 that set off a huge firestorm, Huckabee tweeted: “Ever heard of Dresden, PM Starmer?”

By Norman Solomon / The Hill

After three and a half years of carnage in Ukraine, the meeting expected soon between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin is an opportunity to finally find a peaceful solution to a terrible war. Genuine diplomacy to end the bloodshed is long overdue.

Up to 100,000 Ukrainians are estimated to have been killed, many of them civilians, along with more than twice that number of deaths among Russian troops. Hundreds of thousands more have been wounded on each side, and Russian bombardment has devastated many of Ukraine’s cities and towns.

Condemnations of the Trump-Putin summit are predictable from congressional Democrats more interested in scoring political points than opening a diplomatic door for peace. While most Republican leaders will praise Trump no matter what he does, pressure from the so-called national security establishment could damage prospects for a peaceful outcome in Ukraine.

Since early 2022, the U.S. government, on a largely bipartisan basis, has provided upwards of $67 billion in military aid to Ukraine. Supporters of continuing the massive arming of Ukraine claim the highest moral ground, while others do the killing and dying. Even after it became clear that the war could go on indefinitely without any winner, the message from Washington’s elite politicians and pundits to the Ukrainian people has amounted to “let’s you and them fight.”

Last week, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) introduced a bill to give Ukraine $54.6 billion in aid over the next two years, with many billions going directly to arm the Ukrainian military. If the Trump-Putin summit is unsuccessful, the currently dim prospects for such legislation could brighten. This dynamic gives war enthusiasts and advocates for the military-industrial complex a motive to throw cold water on the summit.

While Murkowski now represents a minority view on Ukraine among fellow Republicans, Shaheen is decidedly in the mainstream of her Senate Democratic colleagues. Even after all the suffering and destruction in Ukraine, few seem really interested in giving peace a chance.

As for Trump, he has sometimes talked about seeking peace in Ukraine, even while greenlighting large quantities of weapons to the Kiev government. Given his mercurial approach, there is no telling what his mindset will be after meeting with Putin.

Most Democrats in Congress seem content with continuation of a war that has no end in sight. Little is being accomplished in military terms other than more killing, maiming and destruction.

During recent months, Ukrainian forces have lost ground to Russian troops. While some hawks still pretend that Ukraine could “win” the war with enough missiles, bombs, ammunition and other supplies from the U.S., realists scoff at such claims.

Unfortunately, while the war drags on, Democrats in Congress are prone to treat diplomacy as a third rail. To a large extent, their partisan template was reinforced nearly three years ago, making “diplomacy” a dirty word for the Ukraine war.

The fiasco began in late October 2022 with the release of a letter to President Biden signed by 30 House Democrats, led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The letter was judicious in its tone and content, affirming support for Ukraine and appropriately condemning “Russia’s war of aggression.” But the signatories got in instant hot water because the letter balanced its support for arming Ukraine with sensibly urging steps that could stop a war without a foreseeable end.

[Click here to real full article on The Hill website.]

By Norman Solomon / The Hill

[Click here to real full article on The Hill website.]

By Norman Solomon

For decades, countless U.S. officials have proclaimed that the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable. Now, the ties that bind are laced with genocide. The two countries function as accomplices while methodical killing continues in Gaza, with both societies directly – and differently – making it all possible.

The policies of Israel’s government are aligned with the attitudes of most Jewish Israelis. In a recent survey, three-quarters of them (and 64 percent of all Israelis) said they largely agreed with the statement that “there are no innocent people in Gaza” – nearly half of whom are children.

“There is no more ‘permitted’ and ‘forbidden’ with regard to Israel’s evilness toward the Palestinians,” dissident columnist Gideon Levy wrote three months ago in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “It is permitted to kill dozens of captive detainees and to starve to death an entire people.” The biggest Israeli media outlets echo and amplify sociopathic voices. “Genocide talk has spread into all TV studios as legitimate talk. Former colonels, past members of the defense establishment, sit on panels and call for genocide without batting an eye.”

Last week, Levy provided an update: “The weapon of deliberate starvation is working. The Gaza ‘Humanitarian’ Foundation, in turn, has become a tragic success. Not only have hundreds of Gazans been shot to death while waiting in line for packages distributed by the GHF, but there are others who don’t manage to reach the distribution points, dying of hunger. Most of these are children and babies…. They lie on hospital floors, on bare beds, or carried on donkey carts. These are pictures from hell. In Israel, many people reject these photos, doubting their veracity. Others express their joy and pride on seeing starving babies.”

Unimpeded, a daily process continues to exterminate more and more of the 2.1 million Palestinian people who remain in Gaza – bombing and shooting civilians while blocking all but a pittance of the food and medicine needed to sustain life. After destroying Gaza’s hospitals, Israel is still targeting healthcare workers (killing at least 70 in May and June), as well as first responders and journalists.

The barbarism is in sync with the belief that “no innocent people” are in Gaza. A relevant observation came from Aldous Huxley in 1936, the same year that the swastika went onto Germany’s flag: “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” Kristallnacht happened two years later.

Renowned genocide scholar Omer Bartov explained during an interview on Democracy Now! in mid-July that genocide is “the attempt to destroy not simply people in large numbers, but to destroy them as members of a group. The intent is to destroy the group itself. And it doesn’t mean that you have to kill everyone. It means that the group will be destroyed and that it will not be able to reconstitute itself as a group. And to my mind, this is precisely what Israel is trying to do.”

Bartov, who is Jewish and spent the first half of his life in Israel, said:

“What I see in the Israeli public is an extraordinary indifference by large parts of the public to what Israel is doing and what it’s done in the name of Israeli citizens in Gaza. In part, it has to do with the fact that the Israeli media has decided not to report on the horrors that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is perpetrating in Gaza. You simply will not see it on Israeli television. If some pictures happen to come in, they are presented only as material that might be used by foreign propaganda against Israel. Now, Israeli citizens can, of course, use other media resources. We can all do that. But most of them prefer not to. And I would say that while about 30 percent of the population in Israel is completely in favor of what is happening, and, in fact, is egging the government and the army on, I think the vast majority of the population simply does not want to know about it.”

In Israel, “compassion for Palestinians is taboo except among a fringe of radical activists,” Adam Shatz wrote last month in the London Review of Books. At the same time, “the catastrophe of the last two years far exceeds that of the Nakba.” The consequences “are already being felt well beyond Gaza: in the West Bank, where Israeli soldiers and settlers have presided over an accelerated campaign of displacement and killing (more than a thousand West Bank Palestinians have been killed since 7 October); inside Israel, where Palestinian citizens are subject to increasing levels of ostracism and intimidation; in the wider region, where Israel has established itself as a new Sparta; and in the rest of the world, where the inability of Western powers to condemn Israel’s conduct – much less bring it to an end – has made a mockery of the rules-based order that they claim to uphold.”

The loudest preaching for a “rules-based order” has come from the U.S. government, which makes and breaks international rules at will. During this century, in the Middle East, the U.S.-Israel duo has vastly outdone all other entities combined in the categories of killing, maiming, and terrorizing. In addition to the joint project of genocide in Gaza, and the USA’s long war on Iraq, the United States and Israel have often exercised an assumed prerogative to attack Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran, along with encore U.S. missile strikes on Iraq as recently as last year.

(more…)

By Norman Solomon / The Hill

Halfway through 2025, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is the embodiment of the kind of leader that his party’s base clearly does not want.

A new Reuters-Ipsos poll found that 62 percent of self-identified Democrats agreed that “the leadership of the Democratic Party should be replaced with new people.” And key findings from that survey indicate that Schumer is the party’s most out-of-step leader.

The poll showed that a large majority of Democrats want elected officials to reduce “corporate influence,” while a whopping 86 percent “said changing the federal tax code so wealthy Americans and large corporations pay more in taxes should be a priority.”

But Schumer’s record is the epitome of corporate influence. For decades, he has given priority to protecting the financial interests of the wealthy and of large corporations.

Schumer vowed not to step aside after he infuriated the vast bulk of congressional Democrats with his vote for President Trump’s spending bill in March. That vote also incensed grassroots Democrats across the country, to the point that he felt compelled to abruptly call off an imminent, long-planned publicity tour for his new book that month.

In effect, Schumer has become persona non grata among his party’s voters in many blue states. More than three months after his “postponed” book tour, it has not been rescheduled — the Senate’s top Democrat is evidently wary of photo ops of protests against him by Democrats around the country. He remains the top Democrat in the Senate at a time when he is deeply unpopular among voters eager for leadership to put up a fight against the Trump administration.

If Senate Democrats are serious about reversing their party’s tailspin and improving its public image, they should insist on ending Schumer’s stint as minority leader. It is time for Democratic colleagues to put their foot down instead of deferring to New York’s senior senator.

[Click here to real full article on The Hill website.]

By Norman Solomon

Whatever the outcomes of Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House on Monday and the latest scenario for a ceasefire in Gaza, a bilateral policy of genocide has united the Israeli and U.S. governments in a pact of literally breath-taking cruelty. That pact and its horrific consequences for Palestinian people either continue to shock Americans or gradually normalize indifference toward ongoing atrocities on a massive scale.

Recent news reporting that President Trump has pushed for a ceasefire in Gaza is an echo of a familiar refrain about peace-seeking efforts from the Biden and Trump administrations. The spin remained in sync with the killing – not only with American bombs and bullets but also with Israel’s refusal to allow more than a pittance of food and other essentials into Gaza.

Last year began with a United Nations statement that “Gazans now make up 80 per cent of all people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, marking an unparalleled humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip amid Israel’s continued bombardment and siege.” The UN quoted experts who said: “Currently every single person in Gaza is hungry, a quarter of the population are starving and struggling to find food and drinkable water, and famine is imminent.”

In late February 2024, President Biden talked to journalists about prospects for a “ceasefire” (which did not take place) while holding a vanilla ice cream cone. “My national security adviser tells me that we’re close, we’re close, we’re not done yet,” Biden said, before sauntering off. He spoke during a photo op at an ice cream parlor in Manhattan, while the UN was sounding an alarm that “very little humanitarian aid has entered besieged Gaza this month.”

During the 16 months since then, variants of facile verbiage from top U.S. government officials have repeated endlessly, while normalizing genocide with a steep race to the ethical bottom, so that – in Orwellian terms, much like “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength” – genocide is not genocide.

Refusal to acknowledge the complicity and impunity is most of all maintained by avoidance and silence. The process makes a terrible truth inadmissible rather than admittable.

All the doublethink and newspeak must detour around the reality that the U.S.-supported Israeli siege of Gaza is genocide, which the international Genocide Convention defines as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” – with such actions as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Israel’s actions in Gaza clearly meet that definition, as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have unequivocally concluded with exhaustive reports.

But under the cloaks of the Israeli and American flags, the official stories insist that the unconscionable should be invisible.

Liberal Zionist groups in the United States are part of the process. Here’s what I wrote in an article for The Nation early this year after examining public statements by the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group J Street:

“Routinely, while calling for the release of the Israeli hostages, the organization also expressed concern about the deaths and suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. But none of J Street’s 132 news releases between October 7 and the start of the [temporary] ceasefire in late January 2025 called for an end to shipments of the U.S. bombs and weapons that were killing those civilians while enforcing Israel’s policy of using starvation as a weapon of war – a glaring omission for a group that declares itself to be ‘pro-peace.’ It was as if J Street thought that vague humanistic pleas could paper over these gaping cracks in its stance.

“However, J Street felt comfortable taking a firm line on the question of whether Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. Here, it aligned itself completely with the position of the U.S. and Israeli governments. In mid-January 2024, when oral arguments ended at the International Court of Justice in the case brought by South Africa that charged the Israeli government with violating the Genocide Convention in Gaza, a news release declared that ‘J Street rejects the allegation of genocide against the State of Israel.’ Four months later, on May 24, J Street responded quickly when the ICJ ordered Israel to ‘immediately halt its military offensive’ in Rafah. ‘J Street continues to reject the allegation of genocide in this case,’ a news release said.”

Likewise, with rare exceptions, U.S. news media and members of Congress dodge the reality of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

Meanwhile, the events in Gaza and the evasions in the United States have been enormously instructive, shattering illusions along the way. Many Americans, especially young people, know much more about their country and its government than they did just two years ago.

What has come to light includes mass murder of certain other human beings as de facto policy and functional ideology.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine,” includes an afterword about the Gaza war.

By Norman Solomon

The Supreme Court’s first chief justice, John Jay, would have empathized with the billionaires who’ve been freaking out ever since Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York last Tuesday. “Those who own the country ought to govern it,” Jay insisted. But now, oligarchs accustomed to such governance are furious that the nation’s capital of capitalism is in danger of serving people instead of megaprofits.

Meanwhile, among progressives, euphoria is especially fitting because the Mamdani campaign’s win was truly a people-powered victory, thanks to active efforts of 40,000 volunteers. In a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans six-to-one, the Democratic nomination would ordinarily be a virtual guarantee of winning the general election. But the forces of oligarchy now mobilizing could disprove a claim that “Mamdani’s widespread appeal represents the total collapse of a Democratic Party establishment.”

Such a collapse is very far from certain.

On the surface, Andrew Cuomo’s decision to stay on the fall ballot as an “independent,” while incumbent Mayor Eric Adams does likewise, seems to foreshadow splitting the anti-Mamdani vote. But Cuomo still has a substantial electoral following. And the corrupt Adams – who cut a deal with President Trump to viciously betray immigrants and got his criminal indictment thrown out by Trump’s Justice Department – has no better ethics than the disgraced former governor Cuomo. Bankrolled by wealthy donors, the pair might make some kind of pact, with one of them telling his followers to unify behind the other before voting begins this fall.

In any case, a key context of the upcoming election battle is that hell hath no fury like corporate power scorned.

A social-media screed by hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman (net worth: upward of $9 billion) was damn near apoplectic that activists and voters had so terribly transgressed. Ackman described himself as “a supporter of President Trump” while expressing a fervent desire “to save the Democratic Party from itself.” Mamdani’s policies, Ackman wrote late Wednesday night, “would be disastrous for NYC. Socialism has no place in the economic capital of our country.”

But Ackman held out hope that those owning the city of New York could continue to govern it: “Importantly, there are hundreds of million of dollars of capital available to back a competitor to Mamdani that can be put together overnight … so that a great alternative candidate won’t spend any time raising funds. So, if the right candidate would raise his or her hand tomorrow, the funds will pour in. I am sure that Mike Bloomberg will share his how-to-win-the-mayoralty IP [intellectual property] and deliver his entire election apparatus and system to the aspiring candidate so that the candidate can focus all of his or her energy on the campaign.”

Another aggrieved hedge-fund multibillionaire, Daniel Loeb, opted to be concise: “It’s officially hot commie summer.” Many other moguls have also sounded alarms. But beneath all the froth and bombast, extremely wealthy individuals are busy gauging how to prevail against the threat of democracy and social justice.

In the Empire State, there are many ways for the empire to strike back. The constellation of forces now regrouping with a vengeance includes titans of Wall Street, enormous real estate interests, pro-Israel groups, corporate media, the anti-progressive rich and assorted smear artists.

(more…)

By Norman Solomon

Twenty years ago, one day in June 2005, I talked with an Iranian man who was selling underwear at the Tehran Grand Bazaar. People all over the world want peace, he said, but governments won’t let them have it.

I thought of that conversation on Saturday night after the U.S. government attacked nuclear sites in Iran. For many days before that, polling clearly showed that most Americans did not want the United States to attack Iran. “Only 16 percent of Americans think the U.S. military should get involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran,” YouGov pollsters reported, while “60 percent say it should not and 24 percent are not sure.”

But as a practical matter, democracy has nothing to do with the chokehold that the warfare state has on the body politic. That reality has everything to do with why the United States can’t kick the war habit. And that’s why the profound quests for peace and genuine democracy are so tightly intertwined.

On Saturday evening, President Trump delivered a speech exuding might-makes-right thuggery on a global scale: “There will be either peace or there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days.”

More than ever, the United States and Israel are overt partners in what the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946 called “the supreme international crime” – “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression.”

Naturally, the perpetrators of the supreme international crime are eager to festoon themselves in mutual praise. As Trump put it in his speech, “I want to thank and congratulate Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. We worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before.” And Trump added: “I want to thank the Israeli military for the wonderful job they’ve done.”

A grisly and nefarious truth is that, in effect, the Israeli military functions as part of the overall U.S. military machine. The armed forces of each country have different command structures and sometimes have tactical disagreements. But in the Middle East, from Gaza and Iran to Lebanon and Syria, “cooperation” does not begin to describe how closely and with common purpose they work together.

More than 20 months into Israel’s U.S.-armed siege of Gaza, the genocide there continues as a joint American-Israeli project. It is a project that would have been literally impossible to sustain without the weapons and bombs that the U.S. government has continued to provide to the Orwellian-named Israel Defense Forces.

The same U.S.-Israel alliance that has been committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has also enabled the escalation of KKK-like terrorizing and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people in the West Bank. The ethnocentric arrogance and racism involved in U.S. support for these crimes have been longstanding, and worsening along with the terrible events.

The same alliance is now also terrorizing Iranian society from the air.

As we have seen yet again in recent hours, the political and media culture of the United States is heavily inclined toward glorifying the use of the USA’s second-to-none destructive air power. As if above it all. The conceit of American exceptionalism assumes that “we” have the sanctified moral ground to proceed in the world with a basic de facto message powered by military might: Do as we say, not as we do.

While all this is going on, the word “surreal” is apt to be heard. But a much more fitting word is “real.”

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction,” James Baldwin wrote, “and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” Now, people in the United States have real-time historic opportunities – to do everything we can to take nonviolent action demanding that the U.S. government end its monstrous role in the Middle East.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine,” includes an afterword about the Gaza war.