Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter

July 6, 2025

It was not a good week for humans. Here at home, Trump and his party passed legislation that transferred more than a trillion dollars from the pockets of the poor to the coffers of the rich. The legislation was saturated with cruelty. The warfare state’s budget was further bloated, and is now headed towards $2 trillion per year. Sadly, this may be only the beginning.

For nearly 20 months, CFOW and this newsletter have protested what Israel and the USA have been doing in Gaza and now the West Bank. Under Biden, and even now under Trump, the Democrats and their supporters have been collaborators with what most experts call a genocide. Protests around the world focused on Israel’s deliberate starvation of Palestinians – and now on assassinating those desperately seeking food – have found only a faint echo in the United States. This is an incredible dereliction of moral duty that will be remembered in anger for generations to come.

Will the slaughter in Gaza soon come to an end? Next week Israeli prime minister Netanyahu will visit Washington to talk about a US-initiated peace proposal. In articles linked just below, it will be seen that the “peace deal” remains as distant from that needed to end the war as previous “peace deals.” Whether Hamas/the Palestinians are so desperate to stop the killing and end the starvation that they will accept defeat and possibly national annihilation remains to be seen.

Finally, a new section in this newsletter focuses on “the ICE invasion of America.” In Trump’s new budget, $150 billion (over several years) was allocated to immigration enforcement. Of this, $45 billion will go directly to ICE. According to a spokesperson for the American Immigration Council, “ICE will now be flushed with more cash than the Federal Bureau of Investigations; Drug Enforcement Administration; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; U.S. Marshals Service; and Bureau of Prisons combined.” In fact, ICE will become the largest federal law enforcement agency “in the history of the nation.” [Link]. Once again, this may be only the beginning in a goose-stepping march towards a police state.

ILLUMINATING THE WEEK THAT WAS
Israel continues to Starve, Target Gaza Civilians in ongoing Genocide
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment [July 6, 2025]
---- Israel is deliberately starving children. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimated in mid-June that 18,741 children have been hospitalized for acute malnutrition since the beginning of the year. And mind you, few hospitals are functioning even at a basic level in Gaza, because Israeli troops have deliberately destroyed them. The harried doctors and nurses who haven’t been assassinated by the Israeli army are trying to deal with those injured in the war, and you wonder if they can do much for children with stick-like arms and distended bellies. They don’t have food aid to give out, and what food there is has become extremely expensive. That is, by the way, typical of famine situations, which usually develop not because there is no food at all but because people cannot afford what little there is. That is how a million Irish died during the Potato Famine in the mid-nineteenth century, when British landlords continued to export food from the country. [Read More]

The Devil in the Details of Trump’s "Final Proposal" for Gaza Ceasefire
By Jeremy Scahill, Drop Site News [July 3, 2025]
---- On Tuesday, President Donald Trump touted the new U.S.-promoted Gaza “ceasefire” framework as the “final proposal,” but while it contains some substantive changes to the previous terms crafted by the U.S. and Israel, the plan would still allow Israel to resume its genocidal war against the Gaza Strip after an initial 60-day truce. “Trump is a crucial part of Israel's deception operation,” a Hamas official told Drop Site News. The official characterized the proposal, which was also obtained by Drop Site, as containing mostly “rhetorical changes,” though he acknowledged that some of the amended language describing Trump’s desire to end the war was clearly aimed at convincing Hamas to support the agreement.” … The Hamas official said the “new” draft was largely a repackaging of terms that the U.S. and Israel tried to strong arm Hamas into accepting in late May. That deal would have allowed some Israeli forces to remain entrenched in Gaza, offered no clear guarantees for a permanent end to the war, and allowed Israel to effectively maintain control of food and aid distribution in Gaza. [Read More]

Next week, Trump and Netanyahu will meet at the White House to plan their ‘New Middle East’
By Mitchell Plitnick, Mondoweiss [July 4, 2025]
---- U.S. President Donald Trump seems to have largely moved on from Iran and is now setting his sights on instituting a broader new order in the Middle East. Trump’s vision consists of an Israel-centric regional order that sees Iran and Hezbollah defeated and normalization with Israel spreading across the region, from Lebanon and Syria to Oman and Saudi Arabia. Joining him in creating this vision is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is slated to visit the White House on Monday. While there are potentially many obstacles to enacting this U.S./Israeli plan, it is clear that one focus is to quash any Palestinian aspirations for freedom. … The Palestinians are, once again, being set up for abandonment. The question is how long Arab leaders can keep a lid on the outrage throughout the region and how long Western leaders will continue to ignore and repress the growing anger over the support Israel is getting from our governments. [Read More]

NEWS NOTES
Modes of heroism. To start: last month Harvard Divinity School graduate and commencement speaker Zehra Imam went off message by using the word genocide in her speech centered on Palestine. Immediately censored, the speech is now available and you can listen to her thoughtful words here.

Another off-message speaker this week was Joy Metzler, who quit the US Air Force as a conscientious objector over US support for Israeli atrocities in Palestine. Recently she joined the 40-day Veterans for Peace hunger strike for Gaza. She ended her fast by being arrested, along with 28 other veterans and allies, in front of the Israeli Consulate in NYC. You can read her story here.

On the eve of the Second World War, thousands of Jewish children were sent by their parents to refuge in Britain and other European countries. The rescue mission was known as the Kindertransport. Probably few of the parents, and probably none of the children, knew what the immediate future held in store for them. What was separation like? Who were the families who took the children in and cared for them throughout the war? The week The New York Times published interviews with seven surviving “kinder,” now about 100 years old. Amazing.

CFOW NUTS & BOLTS
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) The Northwest Yonkers Neighbors for Black Lives Matter has resumed its weekly Monday afternoon vigil at 5:30 pm at the corner of Warburton Ave and Odell. The CFOW newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com, and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. Another Facebook page focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a CONTRIBUTION, please make out your check to “Frank Brodhead,” write “CFOW” on the memo line, and send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks

REWARDS!
This week’s Rewards come from Leonard Cohen, whose music has been missing from these pages for too long. Among many, many favorites, I hope that you will enjoy "Everybody Knows," "The Partisan," and “Anthem”. So many great ones are on-line.

Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW

FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
Americans Fought Off This Awful Idea in Trump’s Bill
By Terry Tempest Williams, New York Times [July 6, 2025]
---- America’s public lands are safe — for now. A provision proposed by Senator Mike Lee of Utah in the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill that would have required the Bureau of Land Management to sell as much as 1.225 million acres of public lands is dead. It died when Mr. Lee raised a white flag in defeat. … Public lands are our public commons, breathing spaces in a country that is increasingly holding its breath. There we are free to roam and wander and believe in what we see: rock, water, sky; pronghorn in sagebrush, eagles in flight, a night sky of stars above a silhouette of mountains. These are places of peace and renewal, where landscapes of beauty become landscapes of our imaginations. We stand before a giant sequoia and remember the size of our hearts instead of the weight of our egos. If we allow these lands to be developed in the name of profits, we will lose the wide open spaces that define us as Americans. [Read More]

NATO’s Hallucinations
By Vijay Prashad, Counterpunch [July 3, 2025]
---- By the end of the annual meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in The Hague in June 2025, it became clear that everything was about money. In fact, the final communiqué was perhaps the shortest of any NATO meeting – only five points, two about money and one to thank the Netherlands for hosting the summit. … It was clear that the United States simply did not want to permit a laundry list of NATO’s obsessions. It was instead the US obsession that prevailed: that Europe increase its military spending to compensate for the US protective shield around the continent. Having agreed to increase their military spending to 5% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the European states have created a series of problems for themselves. The first problem is that they would have to invent the money out of their tight budgets. To raise their military expenditure to 5% of GDP would require them to reduce their social spending – in other words, to deepen the austerity policies that are already in place. https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/07/03/natos-hallucinations/ ALSO OF INTEREST is “Europe Puts Social Programs on Chopping Block to Appease Trump on NATO Funding,” by Sasha Abramsky, Truthout [July 3, 2025] [Link]

The End of Multilateralism
By Walden Bello, Counterpunch [July 4, 2025]
---- The recent unilateral strikes by the United States on Iran’s nuclear development sites underline the fact that multilateralism is dead, and has been so for some time. It is not only when it comes to the question of the deployment of military power that multilateralism is shown to be dead or dying. The key institutions of Western-led globalization are no longer functioning or are in sleep mode. … The United States has been decisive in this retreat from multilateralism, and this process unfolded long before the advent of Donald Trump. It is Trump, however, who has cut the cant, shed the hypocrisy, and sounded the death knell on the grand strategy of liberal internationalism that served as the guiding U.S. strategy over the last 80 years, when it was committed to engaging threats to U.S. capital and U.S. state power where ever they were threatened globally. … Replacing such a system will not be easy, however, and there will be setbacks and derailments in this process. As the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci famously said, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Getting to a safe harbor is not possible without taking great risks, and, as with Ulysses, the proverbial monsters of Scylla and Charybdis may still menace the voyage. [Read More]

Social Self-Defense: From Protest to Contest
By Jeremy Brecher [July 2, 2025]
----In a Strike! Commentary posted May 21, 2025 I wrote, it is “likely” that Trump “in the face of declining power and support” will “increasingly utilize repression and violence.” Internally this would mean a fuller suspension of civil liberties and the rule of law; a more brutal war on dissent; martial law; use of the military in domestic conflict; and a mobilization of violent MAGA supporters for direct vigilante action. Internationally it would mean escalating use of violence, leading to accidental or deliberate wars – not excluding accidental or intentional nuclear escalation. I cite this, not to claim prophetic powers that allowed me to predict Marines in Los Angeles and bunker busters in Iran, but because this dynamic is shaping the context for the movement to defend society against the MAGA assault. The growing power of Trump’s opponents, and his escalation in response, creates new strategic problems and opportunities for the movement. This requires an assessment of the current state of the conflict in preparation for its next phase. [Read More]

WHY THE MAMDANI ELECTION IS SO IMPORTANT
Democrats Need to Understand That Opinions on Israel Are Changing Fast
By Peter Beinart, New York Times [July 6, 2025]
---- Mr. Mamdani’s victory illustrates the huge gulf between many ordinary Democrats and the Democratic establishment on one subject in particular: Israel. Mr. Mamdani focused his message on making New York City affordable. The campaign of the race’s presumed front-runner, Andrew Cuomo, in addition to attacking Mr. Mamdani as inexperienced and soft on crime, focused intensely on his opponent’s unapologetic commitment to Palestinian rights. That commitment was one reason that many political commentators and operatives assumed Mr. Mamdani, a young state assemblyman, could not win. They didn’t appreciate how broadly public opinion on this issue has changed. … Only one in three Democrats now view Israel favorably, according to Gallup. That makes Israel significantly less popular than Cuba, and only slightly more popular than China. Despite this, the party’s most powerful figures — from the minority leaders Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries to many of the Democrats likely to run for president in 2028 — oppose conditioning U.S. military support on Israel’s willingness to uphold human rights. This places them in clear conflict with their party’s base. … Mr. Mamdani’s victory is not a fluke. It’s a sign of things to come. [Read More] ALSO OF INTEREST is “The Rage of Billionaires and the Frenzy to Stop Zohran Mamdani From Becoming New York’s Mayor,” by Norman Solomon, Znet [June 30, 2025] [Link].

THE WAR ON PALESTINE
All Hostages, Israeli and Palestinian, Must Be Released From Captivity
By Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz [Israel] [July 6, 2025]
---- The most urgent emergency measure required now, besides ending the massacres in Gaza, is the rescue of all the captives, Israelis and Palestinians, from the abysmal conditions in which they are held. The Gaza tunnels or Megiddo Prison, Hamas captivity or Shin Bet captivity, both are nearly indescribable evil. It's a pity that not a single relative of the Israeli hostages has called also to release the Palestinian hostages, or at least to ease their incarceration conditions. … Not only can Israel's sadism affect the conditions in which our own captives are held, but there is also this simple moral consideration: When Israel abuses the hostages and detainees that it holds in the way that it does, it loses all moral right to call for the release of its own hostages. [Read More]

Valor in the Face of Inhumanity
By Stan Cox, Counterpunch [July 3, 2025]
---- Donya Ahmad Abu Sitta and her family were first displaced just four days into the war, on October 11, 2023. She told me, “They bombed our neighborhood in Khan Younis, so we evacuated to a nearby school that had been converted into a shelter. We were thinking the school would be safer than our home because it was under UN control. But after we were there for a month, they bombed the building next to the school. It was 6 a.m.; I awoke covered by glass shards because the blast broke the window beside me.” Everyone fled the school. Donya and her family went to stay at a friend’s place. The next day, however, that apartment block was bombed, so, with nowhere else to go, they returned to the school. With bombs continuing to strike in and around the school grounds every day, Donya says, “We were forced to evacuate again, this time to another city, Rafah. But I felt like a part of my heart was still in Khan Younis.” “The first thing I did in Rafah was to write my first article of the war, titled ‘We Died Four Times but We Are Still Alive.’ With that, I mean that we were targeted four times and survived, but we don’t want this survival after living a nightmare.” [Read More]

ALSO OF INTEREST - “Every child is precious unless that child is Palestinian,” by Dina Elmuti, Mondoweiss [July 6, 2025] [Link]; and “The Israeli Plot to Extinguish the Journalists Documenting Genocide,” by Neha Madhira, The Intercept [July 3, 2025] [Link].

Profiting From Genocide
By Chris Hedges, Znet [July 3, 2025]
---- The latest United Nations report names hundreds of corporations, banks, technology firms, universities, pension funds and charities that profit from the Israeli occupation and genocide. War is a business. So is genocide. The latest report submitted by Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, lists 48 corporations and institutions, including Palantir Technologies Inc., Lockheed Martin, Alphabet Inc., Amazon, International Business Machine Corporation (IBM), Caterpillar Inc., Microsoft Corporation and Massachusetts Institue of Technology (MIT), along with banks and financial firms such as Blackrock, insurers, real estate firms and charities, which in violation of international law are making billions from the occupation and the genocide of Palestinians. The report, which includes a database of over 1,000 corporate entities that collaborate with Israel, demands these firms and institutions sever ties with Israel or be held accountable for complicity in war crimes. It describes “Israel’s “forever-occuption” as “the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and Big Tech – providing significant supply and demand, little oversight, and zero accountability – while investors and private and public institutions profit freely.” … Genocide requires a vast network and billions of dollars to sustain it. Israel could not carry out its mass slaughter of the Palestinians without this ecosystem. These entities, which profit from industrial violence against the Palestinians and mass displacement, are as guilty of genocide as the Israeli military units decimating the people in Gaza. They too are war criminals, They too must be held accountable. [Read More] ALSO OF INTEREST - “Tech giants, arms dealers, and banks are not bystanders to Israel’s assault — they are complicit, and they are cashing in,” by Ahmad Ibsais, [July 3, 2025] [Link].

“HUNGER GAMES” IN GAZA
Every time I go to a U.S.-run ‘aid’ center in Gaza, I know I might not come back
By Hassan Herzallah, Mondoweiss [July 4, 2025]
---- It was 4:00 a.m. The air was thick with fog, and we could barely see a few meters ahead of us. I walked alongside my friend, Ahmad, toward the Israeli and American-controlled aid distribution center, run by the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. It felt like we were marching toward our own deaths, but we had no other option. Our tents had no food. We only left because we had heard that the American distribution point might open at dawn. Everyone was saying to be there early — “Maybe you’ll get something.” Even though the chance was slim, it was better than sitting and starving. Ahmad and I had gone with nothing but the last drop of strength left in us. We were sitting far from the sound of random gunfire, but even that wasn’t safe. One bullet could end you, and no one would find you. [Read More]

ALSO OF INTEREST - “Is the US now funding the bloodbath at Gaza aid centers?” by Stavroula Pabst, Responsible Statecraft [July 1, 2025] [Link]; “Swiss Authority Orders Dissolution of Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” from The Palestine Chronicle [July 2, 2025][Link]; and “When the Helping Hand Holds a Machine Gun,” by Jeffrey St. Clair, Counterpunch [June 28, 2025] [Link].

THE WAR ON IRAN
Iran: The Things It Won’t Do to Say
By Kevin Young, Common Dreams [July 1, 2025]
---- In his unpublished preface to Animal Farm, George Orwell remarks that “the sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that, or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady.” With the Israeli and U.S. aerial invasions of Iran on June 13 and June 21, respectively, the Victorian convention remains intact. There are certain questions it won’t do to ask. Are the invasions legal under international law? Are they morally justified? And who has the right to make those determinations? … These questions would be central in a media sphere that values legal and moral consistency. In Western media, by contrast, asking them is like mentioning trousers before a lady. Political debate focuses instead on U.S. President Donald Trump’s personality flaws or on speculation about whether the bombing will succeed in its stated aims. The nearly universal embrace of the Victorian norm is apparent when we consider The New York Times, a liberal paper known for confronting Trump on many matters. [Read More]

ALSO OF INTEREST - “Misreading and Misrepresenting Iran,” by Ali Abootalebi, Informed Comment [July 2, 2025] [Link]; “Iran and the Nuclear Order,” by John Feffer, Counterpunch [July 4, 2025] [Link]; and “How Biden Is to Blame for Israel and the U.S.’s 12-Day War Against Iran,” by Jamal Abdi, The Intercept [June 29, 2025] [Link].

AMERICA INVADED BY ICE
A Show of Force
By Fintan O’Toole, New York Review of Books [July 24, 2025 issue]
---- Donald Trump’s desire to militarize American politics and politicize the American military is unfinished business. Militarizing American politics means defining all those who do not conform to his version of normality as mortal enemies to be confronted as though they were hostile foreign nations. Politicizing the military means dismantling its self-image as an institution that transcends partisan divisions, is broadly representative of the US population, and owes its primary loyalty not to the president but to the Constitution. These aims are intertwined, but the first cannot be consummated until the second has been accomplished. Trump failed to do this in his first term, but he is determined not to be thwarted again. [Read More]

From COINTELPRO to Project Esther: The evolution of domestic counterinsurgency in the U.S.
By Carrie Zaremba, Mondoweiss [July 3, 2025]
---- By the time DHS agents showed up at Mahmoud Khalil’s door, a full-spectrum campaign had already marked him as a target. Columbia professor Shai Davidai had posted Khalil’s name and image online, called him a terrorist, and urged Secretary of State Marco Rubio to deport him. The smear was picked up by a network of doxxing accounts like “Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus,” which publicly lobbied for the revocation of Khalil’s visa. … This episode captures a defining feature of our current conjuncture: counterinsurgency is no longer the exclusive domain of state intelligence agencies. It has been privatized, digitized, and reframed as “civic action,” with Zionist nonprofits, right-wing law firms, and data-harvesting platforms organizing in concert with universities and police departments to neutralize Palestine organizing. Though today’s tactics may look different, they reflect a familiar story. The FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was a covert program aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations deemed subversive. … Today, Project Esther attempts to do the same to the Palestine solidarity movement, this time with the help of civil society proxies. [Read More]

ALSO OF INTEREST - “Opening the House of Labor,” by Piper French, New York Review of Books [July 1, 2025] [Link]; and “ICE Agents Deserve No Privacy,” by Natasha Lennard, The Intercept [July 1, 2025] [Link].

THE CLIMATE CRISIS
People Want Climate Action. This Data Shows It.
By Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation [July 3, 2025]
---- When The Guardian, Agence France-Presse, and dozens more of the world’s leading news organizations began reporting the 89 percent story in April, it was because new peer-reviewed science had affirmed a potentially game-changing fact: Eighty to 89 percent of the world’s people think their governments should “do more” to tackle climate change. At a time when many elections are decided by a tiny margin and a 60 percent result is routinely labeled a “landslide,” this 80 to 89 percent tally represents an extraordinary popular mandate that extends across partisan divides and national borders. And it runs counter to most media narratives about climate change, which is that it’s a deeply polarized issue, evenly split. [Read More]

CIVIL LIBERTIES
By Ruling Against Nationwide Injunctions, SCOTUS Affirms the Imperial Presidency
By Marjorie Cohn, Truthout [June 30, 2025]
---- Continuing in their shameful deference to the president, Donald Trump’s lackeys on the Supreme Court once again affirmed the superiority of the executive over the other two branches of government. Last year, the high court ruled that presidents are immune from prosecution when they carry out official functions. Now, that same court has stripped federal judges of their authority to protect people throughout the nation when the president breaks the law. More than two dozen nationwide (“universal”) injunctions blocking several of Trump’s policies were in effect as of mid-May. … Instead, in a shocking decision, the Supreme Court held that federal judges cannot issue universal injunctions for actions that are almost certainly illegal. “Never before has the Supreme Court imposed such restrictions on the ability of courts to provide relief against unconstitutional acts,” Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky wrote in the Los Angeles Times. [Read More]

OUR HISTORY
A Different Revolution [1776 and all that]
By Ace Thelin, Consortium News [July 4, 2025]
---- It’s long past time Americans face the truth about the Founding Fathers. A critique that places events being celebrated on the Fourth of July in a much larger world historical narrative is urgently needed. The power of empire is not only the power to control land, labor, armies and financial industries, but also to control minds. The dominion of the U.S. Empire has turned history upside down. It has transformed some of the biggest criminals into heroes. A history that emphasizes the U.S. as an exemplar of democracy and human rights and holds the constitution as sacrosanct is a history that lies by omission and ignores some of the most important events in its story. Historian Gerald Horne places the creation of the United States in a larger context in his seminal work, The Counter-Revolution of 1776- Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. He points out that while so many historical accounts of the American War for Independence begin in the 1770s or the decades preceding it, to understand the forces at play we must go back at least to the late 17th century and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 in England. [Read More]

Gaza’s Hunger Games
By Chris Hedges, Scheer Post [June 30, 2025]
---- Israel’s weaponization of starvation is how genocides always end. I covered the insidious effects of orchestrated starvation in the Guatemalan Highlands during the genocidal campaign of Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, the famine in southern Sudan that left a quarter of a million dead — I walked past the frail and skeletal corpses of families lining roadsides — and later during the war in Bosnia when Serbs cut off food supplies to enclaves such as Srebrencia and Goražde. Starvation was weaponized by the Ottoman Empire to decimate the Armenians. It was used to kill millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor in 1932 and 1933. It was employed by the Nazis against the Jews in the ghettos in World War II. German soldiers used food, as Israel does, like bait. They offered three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to lure desperate families in the Warsaw Ghetto onto transports to the death camps. “There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several days to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman writes in “The Ghetto Fights.” “The number of people anxious to obtain the three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.” And when crowds became unruly, as in Gaza, the German troops fired deadly volleys that ripped through emaciated husks of women, children and the elderly. This tactic is as old as warfare itself. [Read More]