OCHA, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said the bodies were recovered after a “complex, week-long rescue operation” that involved using bulldozers and heavy machinery to unearth the victims and their battered vehicles from under sand.

“Health workers should never be a target. And yet, we’re here today, digging up a mass grave of first responders and paramedics,” Jonathan Whittall, the head of UNOCHA in the occupied Palestinian territories, said from the site.

...

Video shared by the UNOCHA showed a bulldozer digging through dirt and moving debris as emergency responders used shovels to reach the victims. Several bodies were seen being pulled from sand, some wearing PRCS vests and showing signs of decomposition.

Early information indicates the first team of aid workers dispatched to the area were killed by Israeli forces on March 23 and other emergency aid crews were struck over the following several hours as they searched for their missing colleagues, UNOCHA said.

“One by one, they were hit, they were struck, their bodies were gathered and buried,” Whittall said. “We’re digging them out in their uniforms, with their gloves on.”

Ambulances, as well as UN and civil defense vehicles, were found crushed and buried under the sand, Whittall added, accusing Israeli forces of trying to cover up the scene.

In mainstream discourse, it's become standard to blame the excesses of the right on liberals, the left, feminists, Black Lives Matter, affirmative action, environmental protection, and BIPOC and LGBTQ people. It's a way that the right is granted masculine prerogatives and the left feminine responsibilities for the right's behavior. It's also routine to blame the Democratic Party for what the Republican Party does. The two parties are unconsciously regarded as akin to a husband and wife in a traditional marriage in which it's the job of the wife to placate and soothe the husband and help him realize his goals or be held responsible for his outbursts and outrages.

And in the same way the diverse population left of center is supposed to make nice to the right or be responsible for when the right goes wrong. These stories amount to "the left was so annoying about pronouns or liberals made people feel so guilty about plastic straws they had no choice but to get on board with the second coming of the Third Reich and the destruction of the planet." Behind these stories is the assumption that some people matter more than other people, and that we who matter less have to pander to those who matter more – conservatives when they are imagined as straight, as white, as male, as rural, as salt of the earth, as the real Americans, unlike us ethnic/ immigrant/ urban/ non-male/ non-straight people.

...

The always trenchant Rebecca Traister writes at New York Magazine: "Pundits and politicians from across the ideological spectrum have joined in rare consensus: that it was 'identity politics,' known more commonly as 'wokeness,' that is largely to blame for Trump’s destructive return to the Oval Office. Liberals and centrists arrived at this conclusion with a speed and ardor only available to people who’d been dying to crow about this for years. Prominent leftists are also onboard, making one righteous argument at the expense of another."

In fact identity politics as reproductive rights prompted one Democratic victory after another in the immediate wake of the June 2022 overturning of Roe vs. Wade. Joe Biden's huge victory after the police murder of George Floyd and the summer of Black Lives Matter protests, while he promised to put a Black woman on the Supreme Court and protect reproductive rights and the climate, could be seen as a sign that identity politics can also be winning politics. Traister notes "advice that Democrats should get quieter on ideas that are simply the right thing to do and that helped motivate millions to vote for them just reaffirms a pallid insincerity, and is therefore politically suicidal." It's the politics of appeasement, and it doesn't work with abusers on any scale.

Besides, straight white male is an identity too, and the right pushes a hateful, regressive version of those identity politics, though no one blames straight white male identity politics for Republican losses. It was never "he made her do it." Those identity politics are rendered invisible or treated as beyond question. But I'm here to question them.

Because she didn't make him do it.

It was surreal listening to my friends recount everything they had done to get me out: working with lawyers, reaching out to the media, making endless calls to detention centers, desperately trying to get through to Ice or anyone who could help. They said the entire system felt rigged, designed to make it nearly impossible for anyone to get out.

The reality became clear: Ice detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.

Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It’s a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560m from Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts.

The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly. What I had experienced was finally starting to make sense.

This is not just my story. It is the story of thousands and thousands of people still trapped in a system that profits from their suffering. I am writing in the hope that someone out there – someone with the power to change any of this – can help do something.

Olúfémi Táíwò

no. 57

May 2021

Except for the Miracles

Liberation as the Fine Art of Losing "Confronting the extreme inequality around the globe, and the grotesque imbalance of power, while knowing that time is running short because of climate change, requires staring directly into the face of what Price and Kariuki felt: agonizing, crushing defeat. If we fight this fight—as we should, as we must—we will come up short. Our best shot is not in denying this—but in accepting it—and fighting anyway. ....In Rosa Luxemburg’s last written words before she was tortured and killed, she insisted on the importance of understanding defeat. “The question of why each defeat occurred must be answered,” she wrote. “Was it a case of raging, uncontrollable revolutionary energy colliding with an insufficiently ripe situation,” she wonders, “or was it a case of weak and indecisive action?” Nostalgia for fallen heroes and heroic campaigns cannot displace analysis, and mimicry is only warranted should we desire the fate that befell them."

Attacks on Israel’s critics have become the template for efforts to suppress climate activism, gun control advocacy, and other progressive movements.

Alex Kane

April 4, 2022

In late 2016, as a Republican member of the Texas state legislature, he co-authored legislation that banned the state from doing business with companies or individual contractors who withheld their investments or services from the State of Israel. The legislation, later signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott, is meant to combat the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights, which calls for boycotts of Israeli products, divestment from corporations that do business in Israel, and sanctions on the state.

Isaac realized he could apply a similar logic to those who might seek to hobble the energy industry. Prompted by his conversations with fossil fuel executives, he drafted legislation preventing state agencies from contracting with companies that boycott or divest from fossil fuels.

..Palestinian rights advocates say the wave of bills targeting climate activism show how attacks on Israel’s critics have formed the basis for the suppression of other kinds of progressive activism. “They’re shrinking the space for public debate and action on some of the most important issues of our time,” said Meera Shah, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, which defends the free speech rights of Palestine solidarity activists. “It points to why it’s so dangerous to permit this kind of Palestine exception to speech. Because not only is it harmful to the Palestinian rights movement—it eventually comes to harm other social movements.”

Mahmoud Khalil is the first person Trump’s administration has disappeared for political reasons. The choice of victim is extremely strategic. Defending Khalil invokes political costs they don’t believe either Columbia University or the Democrats are willing to incur. So far, they are correct.

...The Democrats, in a move that should surprise no one at this point, have made no moves at all. Did anyone think they would, for someone like Khalil? That party is so allergic to even the appearance of support for the Palestinian people that the Harris campaign ordered volunteers to mark fundraising feedback that involved Gaza as “no response.” In fact, they refused to even categorize opposition to genocide “out of fear that [the] category would be leaked.”

.....“Terrorist” has always been a remarkably elastic word. For over two decades now, America has used that label to justify atrocities—usually against people who are brown, Muslim, and/or from a country we despise. The Trump administration’s use of terrorism to justify the blatantly illegal disappearance of a peaceful activist—whose ties to Hamas appear to consist exclusively of opposition to ethnic cleansing—stretches the term even further. By all appearances, they’re just getting started.

In January, the House reintroduced a bill to designate “Antifa” as a domestic terror organization. Trump has repeatedly declared his intent to prosecute people released without charges during the 2020 protests. Kash Patel’s FBI recently announced that it would stop monitoring far-right extremism and instead focus on “things like BLM and Antifa.” Patel does not need a bill or even an executive order to make that happen; he can crack down on BLM terrorists all by himself with the FBI and the ATF, plus assistance from Kristi “puppy-killer” Noem’s DHS as needed.

...Those of us outside the halls of power have far fewer options. We can contact our representatives and demand that they condemn Khalil’s detention and take some of those actions I just listed. We can e-mail Columbia University interim president Katrina Armstrong and demand that the school condemn Khalil’s detention (officeofthepresident@columbia.edu, kaa2210@cumc.columbia.edu). Action Network has a great tool that can help you e-mail your representatives and Columbia’s administrators all at the same time. The ACLU has Know Your Rights training twice a month that can teach you how to keep your community safer if the regime keeps pretending to care about the law sometimes.

When you have a new, abusive technology, you can't just aim it at rich, powerful people, because when they complain, they get results. To successfully deploy that abusive tech, you need to work your way up the privilege gradient, starting with people with no power, like prisoners, refugees, and mental patients. This starts the process of normalization, even as it sands down some of the technology's rough edges against their tender bodies. Once that's done, you can move on to people with more social power – immigrants, blue collar workers, school children. Step by step, you normalize and smooth out the abusive tech, until you can apply it to everyone – even rich and powerful people. Think of the deployment of CCTV, facial recognition, location tracking, and web surveillance.

All this means that blue collar workers are the pioneering early adopters of the bossware that will shortly be tormenting their white-collar colleagues elsewhere in the business. It's as William Gibson prophesied: "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" (it's pooled up thick and noxious around the ankles of blue-collar workers, refugees, mental patients, etc).

...the liberalism that comes after the 1960s is so much smaller—its visions are smaller, its ideas of state capacity are smaller. And that does not necessarily lead inherently to neoliberalism, but the liberalism that remains seems to me to be very cramped in terms of its goals and its vision.

...So I’m really puzzled by the fact that in this moment, Hakeem Jeffries and others are basically saying, “Our hands are tied.” Where is their technical mastery of the rules of Congress and Senate? Where is the intricate knowledge of how we can use institutional choke points and leverage to slow things down? Where is that? Even an internal mode of struggle seems absent right now. That, to me, shows the complete political and moral vacuousness of where this has led. We’re going to have to do it ourselves.

..It also strikes me that the contemporary Democratic Party is locked into the logic of an earlier era of politics it cannot escape. Their appeals to work with the Republican administration hearken back to that era when bipartisanship was the best possible thing you could do. This institutionalism has kept the Democratic Party from moving more boldly in the last four years. It does seem like the older version of liberal politics is acting as a set of handcuffs on the current Democratic Party.

In order to move forward, not only are they going to have to shed those commitments to bipartisanship and institutionalism, but as the administrative state is deconstructed, they’re also going to have to become visionaries. It’s not going to be enough to just hire back a bunch of people—you’re going to have to sell a new vision. If state capacity has been fundamentally destroyed, it’s not enough to just try to breathe life into institutions created in the 1930s. They’re going to have to go back to the drawing board.

So the white nationalist hammer is coming down on Columbia University, which is being made an example of, in order to scare all institutions of higher education into falling in line with the Musk/Trump plan to destroy any and all potential civil society nodes of resistance to the authoritarian regime they are putting in place. Don’t be fooled: the excuse they are using to destroy the institution—that Columbia is incorrigibly antisemitic—is, of course, the exact opposite of what is happening. They are coming after Columbia precisely because the University is, to the (not-) “populist” base in front of whom they perform their Hitler salutes and at whom they hose their antisemitic memes, an emblem precisely of Jewishness: it’s “globalist,” “cosmopolitan,” New York-based, “liberal,” etc.

Of course the nationalists coming after us are also pro-Israel—they love the idea that there is an ethnonationalist garrison state to which all Jews should send themselves, and which will most likely self-destruct anyway in a cataclysmic orgy of Armageddon-like violence. And the Netanyahu-aligned establishment Jewish [sic] organizations, such as the ADL, who today are cheering on the destruction of Columbia, are more than happy to make common cause with their fellow nationalists—so long as the billions and billions of dollars’ worth of bombs keep flowing Israel’s way.

But the other tent poles of the Democratic Party’s sad, caution-driven approach to partisan warfare have more clearly exceeded their usefulness. We can confidently down-weight the input of pollsters and strategists, without necessarily expressing open disdain for them, because—whatever we think about the work they did a decade or two ago—they are trained to win normal elections not to resist fascism.

The notion that Democratic leaders would outsource so much judgment to professional-services providers has never made sense to me. Washington is full of professional-services providers (some good, some bad) but the nature of these fields is essentially to keep clients out of trouble. A huge share of the guidance they give amounts to “don’t stick your neck out.” Does that sound like good advice for someone seeking votes in an attention economy? Does that sound compatible with political leadership that rallies the masses?

We can see this in the sad-sack advice influential operators like David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel have for Democrats, suddenly confronted with a president seeking to steal their legitimate power: Don’t go to bat for foreign aid. They opine as if this were actually a debate over how much the country spends on foreign aid, rather than over whether Trump gets to dissolve government agencies by fiat.

...The party bet it all on a strategy that would allow them to ignore the populist surge within their base, instead pinning their hopes on the mythical swing voter to deliver them to victory. They didn’t need voters to choose them, they would instead choose their voters. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia”, proclaimed Chuck Schumer, making it clear the voters to their economic left were not needed.

Early on, Ta-Nehisi Coates observed, “We are at a moment right now where people are asking themselves why can’t the Democratic Party defend this assault on democracy . . . and I would submit to you that if you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.”

-Ta-Nehisi Coates: If Democrats can’t draw the Line at Genocide, they can’t Draw the Line at Democracy

In the fallout of the election, a stream of social media content—some from passionate Harris supporters, some from lesser-evil Democratic voters, and some, presumably, from people simply lashing out, horrified and distraught at Trump’s win—took to blaming Palestinians for the outcome.

My initial fury at these statements eventually gave way to analysis. How could so many people be so callous and so wrong? The tendency to scapegoat in moments of crisis, along with pervasive anti-Palestinian racism, are surely factors, but there are larger forces at work as well.

...Simply put, most people have no idea to what extent this genocide is being perpetrated not only by Israel but also by the United States. For a solid majority of the center-left, what is happening in Gaza is tragic but ultimately less important than the most significant existential threat: the ascendance of Trump. During the run-up to the election, the argument goes, we Palestinian and Arab Americans should have understood that resisting fascism in the United States is the primary goal and gotten in line accordingly.

But resisting fascism is our collective goal. We just know that in order to resist it, we have to fight it on two fronts of U.S. state violence: at home and abroad. Because if the United States, together with Israel, manages to disembowel the ICJ, the ICC, the UN, and a broader global order built after the Holocaust and World War II, no one is safe. The fact that Israel has committed genocide, turned humans into walking bombs in its pager attack in Lebanon, and decimated countries while the UN Security Council watches passively should concern all of us. As Colombian President Gustavo Petro warned back in December 2023, “What we are seeing in Gaza is a rehearsal of the future.”

..In his searing 1950 polemic Discourse on Colonialism, Martinican writer Aimé Césaire wrote of the “boomerang effect,” whereby violence in the colonial periphery manifests itself in the colonial metropole. Hitler’s genocide of European Jews, he noted, was modeled after European rule over African and Asian colonies. (He may have had in mind the German extermination of the Nama and Herero people in Namibia during their period of colonial rule from 1884 and 1915—a period of brutality that scarcely registered in Europe while it was taking place.) Some seventy-five years later, Césaire’s point has been borne out many times over: there is no clear dividing line between a colonial power’s imperial geography and its metropole.

In the aftermath of pro-Palestinian encampments last year, colleges across the country announced new policies that effectively ban many forms of protest. In addition to chilling dissent, the new university rules also allow for campus surveillance and overreach by law enforcement. 

..

Despite the opacity of government agencies, universities, and private groups, available information highlights how policies intended for safety can lead to overreach and expose marginalized groups and student activists to greater surveillance. The potential for overreach only heightens when it’s unclear who universities are collaborating with and what tools are at their disposal. 

“It comes back to the question of: safety for who?” said Porell. 

Stanford researchers have shown that this dearth of quality local news has resulted in a less informed and more divided electorate, empowered local corruption, and measurably shifted electoral outcomes. A recent study out of Northwestern University found that Trump won 91 percent of “news desert” counties by an average of 54 percentage points. 

..As a result, corporatist media has lost the trust of the public thanks to feckless, ad-engagement-chasing “view from nowhere” journalism. This is journalism that prioritizes clicks, access, and the interests of the ownership class, while a right-wing disinformation machine, built over the last 45 years, convinces impressionable Americans to celebrate their self-immolation. 

...To be clear, millions of Americans adore the racism, sexism, and authoritarianism Donald Trump is selling. They applaud the vitriol, mockery, and trolling of their ideological enemies. Millions of Americans signed up for Trumpism with clear eyes about the vast horrors to come. Trump supporters should, in no way, be declared free of agency.

But to be just as clear: Untold millions of Americans voted for Trump with a violently distorted understanding of who the candidate is, what he supports, what his policies will actually accomplish, and how severely his second term will hurt them and those they love.

..Republicans have long since cultivated a massive Spanish-language propaganda apparatus Democrats have no answer for....

Meanwhile the Democratic Party establishment, stale gerontocratic messaging in hand, is still trying to figure out where it left its pants. Democratic media regulators can’t even acknowledge that anything out of the ordinary is happening. The Republican assault on informed reason has been largely met with abject fecklessness by Democratic officials.

t might seem paradoxical that even as Trump sinks in popularity, weighed down by a widely disliked agenda, Democrats are even more disliked by the public. But the two facts are connected: Pushing a hard-right agenda allows Trump to maintain his support among Republicans even as Democrats and independents turn against him. By contrast, congressional Democrats, under the craven leadership of Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, are despised by their own party (for failing to fight Trump) as well as Republicans (for just being Democrats).

The difference between 2017 and 2024 is one of leadership among congressional Democrats. In 2017, congressional Democrats harnessed the popular anger at Trump (fueled by a grassroots resistance movement) and marked out a clear position of opposition. In 2024, congressional Democrats have been much more “timid,” as my Nation colleague David Zirin recently noted. Zirin offered a number of explanations for the pusillanimity of the Democratic leadership—including the reliance on wealthy tech donors, the fact that centrist Democrats share Musk’s cost-cutting agenda, and the stranglehold of Clintonian and Obamaite thinking leaving the party helpless to respond to current realities. One could add that Schumer in particular is clearly putting his hopes on the courts (which he calls “the first line of defense”) to stop Trump’s steamrolling of the government—a plan that, even if it had theoretical plausibility (and if you think the courts are going to save us, I might try to sell you some of Trump’s cryptocoins) will simply demobilize Democratic voters. At the end of the day, defeating Trump is a matter of politics, not the courts.

...

Apart from the dispiriting level of current Democratic leadership, there are some striking voices in the party (or allied with it) who are gaining a wide and appreciative audience precisely for their willingness to speak out against Trump: not just stalwart leftists such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez but also more mainstream figures such as Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy.

Democrats now have a clear choice: They can ramp up anti-Trump anger by elevating these forceful voices—or they can continue to let the Schumer/Jeffries do-nothing strategy drag their party down to future defeat