Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter

July 20, 2025

Look away! Don’t look away! Can’t look away! Must look away! As Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues, the unbearable draws our attention like a magnet. Available live-streamed 24/7, we see a population of 2 million people starving while 6,000 trucks of food and medicine idle just outside Gaza’s border. Israel’s won’t let them in, offering only one food distribution site in what was formerly the city of Raffah. Desperate people, starving themselves, line up flour or whatever is on offer. They are mostly (not all) young men, risking death in the hope that they can get something for their families. Several dozen are killed each day and many are wounded, shot by US mercenaries and Israeli soldiers. The Hunger Games.

Many analysts conclude, and they are supported by official Israeli spokespersons, that the point of the feeding station is to lure Palestinians from throughout Gaza into a small enclave that Israel has the chutzpah to call “Humanitarian City.” As Ha’aretz writer Gideon Levy notes in an article linked below, Humanitarian City is in fact a concentration camp. No one is allowed to leave. And then, in the course of time, the prisoners will be disposed of: starved to death, die of disease, shot, exported to Libya or wherever. It may be that worse things have happened in my 80 years on this planet, but I haven’t watched them obsessively. Can’t look away! Must look away!

Not surprisingly, “peace talks” are affected adversely when one of the “partners for peace” is on the edge of annihilation, threatened with genocide. “Plan to Indefinitely Displace Palestinians Threatens to Derail Gaza Truce,” report the Deep Thinkers at the New York Times. Should Hamas/the Palestinians surrender, lay down their few weapons of self-defense and count on the fairness and respect for international law of the Israelis? Nothing would be more irresponsible than to expect the survival of one’s people in the captivity of Israeli butchers. Jeremy Scahill lays this out helpfully in a Drop Site article titled “Hamas Says It Won’t Sign a “Surrender” Agreement, As War of Attrition Intensifies” [Link].

What to do? Our leaflet for yesterday’s peace vigil in Hastings advocated boycotting Whole Foods, owned by Amazon, which is now in a billion-dollar contract with Israel to keep the security state informed about the thoughts and whereabouts of its Palestinian captives. Articles below about the work of the UN’s Francesca Albanese in exposing the corporations that profit greatly by working for Israel’s war machine, and about the recent conference in Bogota, Colombia, where 32 nations approved a plan to boycott Israel and its collaborators, give us some inspiration and guidance. Boycott, boycott! A well-intentioned but weak stream of protest is better than nothing, and perhaps some people will learn about the transformation of our giant corporations into Merchants of Death. It’s better than looking away.

ESSAYS ILLUMINATING THE WEEK THAT WAS
(Video) “War on Children”: Doctor in Gaza on Massacres, Starvation and Israel’s Plan for Concentration Camps
From Democracy Now! [July 14, 2025]
---- The official death toll in Gaza has topped 58,000, with Israeli forces continuing to shoot at Palestinians seeking aid and talks over a ceasefire agreement stalled in Doha. This morning’s injured were taken to Nasser Hospital, the largest functioning hospital in Gaza, facing fuel shortages and a widening Israeli offensive in the area. Democracy Now! spoke with Dr. Tarek Loubani, an emergency room medical doctor who has been volunteering in Nasser Hospital in Gaza since June, live from Gaza. “Every day seems to be a new exercise in the depths of human depravity in terms of targeting men, boys, women and children, especially in terms of the youngest children,” says Loubani. “I think every doctor who operates and works in Palestine will tell you that that’s the most jarring, the most terrible part of our job, is just the war on children on every level.” [See the Program]

(Video) “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It”: Prof. Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza
From Democracy Now! [July 17, 2025]
—-- We speak with leading Israeli American historian Omer Bartov about his latest essay for The New York Times, headlined “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” Bartov cites the United Nations definition of “genocide,” which includes an intent to destroy a group of people that makes it impossible for the group to reconstitute itself. “This is precisely what Israel is trying to do,” he says. “Israel is trying to concentrate the population of Gaza in the southernmost parts of the strip, to enclose them and to enforce, eventually, either that they would just die out there or that they would be removed from the Gaza Strip altogether.” [See the Program]

It's Clear – Israel Now Has a Plan for the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians From Gaza
By Gideon Levy. Ha’aretz [Israel] [July 20, 2025]
---- In order to "evacuate" two million people from their country, you need a plan. Israel has been working on one. The first stage involves transferring much of the population into a concentration camp in order to facilitate an efficient deportation. Preparations for the first Israeli concentration camp are in full swing. Systematic destruction is proceeding throughout the enclave so that there is nowhere to return to other than the concentration camp. … Israel is quietly perpetrating a crime against humanity. Not a house here and a house there, no "operational necessities," but a systematic elimination of any chance of life there, while preparing the infrastructure for concentrating people in a "humanitarian" city intended to be a transit camp – before deportation to Libya, Ethiopia and Indonesia, the destinations Barnea specified, according to Channel 12. That is the plan for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Someone conceived it, there were discussions of pros and cons, alternatives were suggested, options of total cleansing vs. stages, and all done in air-conditioned conference rooms with minutes taken and decisions made. For the first time since the war of revenge in Gaza began, it's clear that Israel has a plan – and it's a far-reaching one. [Read More]

THE MAMDANI CAMPAIGN
The Mamdani campaign for Mayor of NYC continues to gather strength, despite efforts from leading Democrats and wealthy New Yorkers to stifle it. Some interesting factoids in the news this week include Mamdani’s support among NYC’s South Asian communities (600,000!) [Link] and African-American voters (Adams and Cuomo splitting the vote, Mamdani has a slight lead over Cuomo) [Link]. And the Mamdani/populist campaigning is contagious, with candidates for mayor in Minneapolis and Seattle generating enthusiasm. For some interesting history about a similar campaign a century ago in LA, read about the excellent radical lawyer Job Harriman in “What California history has to say about the New York mayor’s race,” by Fred Glass [Link].

NEWS NOTES
A recent Gallup Poll report concludes that “Surge in U.S. Concern About Immigration Has Abated”: “Americans have grown markedly more positive toward immigration over the past year, with the share wanting immigration reduced dropping from 55% in 2024 to 30% today. At the same time, a record-high 79% of U.S. adults say immigration is a good thing for the country.” [Read More]

With Senate amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act. The USA now has a military budget for FY 2026 of more than $1 trillion. This of course is the “official” number, but in reality the actual spending plan has been more than one trillion dollar for years, estimated for 2025 as $1.77 trillion. For lots of numbers about US military spending, go here.

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 holds a 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.

Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW

FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
Please Shout Fire. This Theater Is Burning
By Rebecca Solnit, Meditations in an Emergency [July 13, 2025]
---- The United States is being destroyed from within, and mainstream journalism isn't making that clear. When I was a kid, there was a popular phrase--"what if they had a war and no one came?" What if we were in a war and no one noticed? Obviously all the people under direct attack have noticed, along with all the scientists and federal employees who've been fired, the foreign students afraid to come back, the medical professionals who understand what's happening to public health, the economists who see the wrecking ball swinging, the university administrators whose institutions are under attack. I think most of us feel it and see it and know it. But too many of the powerful voices in this country are downplaying the crisis we're in, and that tamps down the reactions that could save us. … The mainstream media are overall failing to raise the alarm, failing to connect the dots, failing to show how all the injuries, in the metaphor above, add up to profound danger to the nation's people, its institutions, and its environment. And maybe global stability, economically, ecologically, and politically. I get that under Trump the next outrage eclipses the last, one after another after another – I mean who remembers that we bombed Iran? That was more than two weeks ago. But some of them are ongoing and the impact is building. There are individual news stories and editorials, but they're dispersed and diluted by the overall tone of the media in this moment of crisis. [Read More]

(Video) Writer Adam Shatz on How Oct. 7 & Israel’s Brutality in Gaza Reshaped the World
From Democracy Now! [July 17, 2025]
---- Adam Shatz, U.S. editor at the London Review of Books, says Israel’s motivation in the Middle East is to “settle accounts with any force in the region that might challenge its domination.” He also notes violent language around foreign policy has become “banal” in many Western countries. “It’s not simply Trump and the far right who speak blithely about overthrowing foreign governments, about bombing other foreign populations. It’s people who have a reputation … for being liberals and moderates,” says Shatz. [See the Progam]

I Teach Creative Writing. This Is What A.I. Is Doing to My Students.
By Meghan O’Rourke, New York Times [July 18, 2025]
[FB - Ms. O’Rourke is the executive editor of The Yale Review and a professor of creative writing at Yale University.]
---- What we stand to lose is not just a skill but a mode of being: the pleasure of invention, the felt life of the mind at work. I am a writer because I know of no art form or technology more capable than the book of expanding my sense of what it means to be alive. Will the wide-scale adoption of A.I. produce a flatlining of thought, where there was once the electricity of creativity? It is a little bit too easy to imagine that in a world of outsourced fluency, we might end up doing less and less by ourselves, while believing we’ve become more and more capable. As ChatGPT once put it to me (yes, really): “Style is the imprint of attention. Writing as a human act resists efficiency because it enacts care.” Ironically accurate, the line stayed with me: The machine had articulated a crucial truth that we may not yet fully grasp. [Read More]

80 Years After Trinity, the Dangers of Nuclear War Have Never Been Higher
By Norman Solomon, The Nation [July 15, 2025]
---- The dangers of nuclear war have never been higher, but political pressure to prevent it is at low ebb. Eighty years after the atomic age began with the Trinity bomb test in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, words can’t possibly be adequate to describe the extent of global horrors that today’s nuclear arsenals are capable of inflicting. But mainstream US media outlets and partisan politics are routinely oblivious to the threat of oblivion. Despite the efforts of individuals and groups striving for arms control, the national discourse ignores the likely results of nuclear buildups—which continue to boost the actual risks of annihilation. Pronouncements from the nuclear establishment about a need to “maintain deterrence” and “modernize” usually go unquestioned as to the underlying assumptions. Senators and representatives praise nuclear systems with components produced in their state or district. Even well-informed and dedicated advocates of halting the arms race are often reduced to arguing for fiscal responsibility. Within the narrow confines of regular “national security” debates, the wisest lobbying tactic appears to be a focus on exorbitant costs of “modernizing” nuclear weapons. Yet cost-cutting arguments bypass how the weapons push the world closer to doomsday. … The history of the last eight decades tells us that Americans will go along with astronomical spending for nuclear weaponry if they believe it makes them safer. Unless we effectively make the case that the opposite is true, the nuclear arms race will continue to play out in media and politics as a pricey necessity. [Read More]

Israel's Tech Boom & the Economy of Genocide [Francesca Albanese]
An interview by Naomi Klein, Zeteo [July 9, 2025]
---- Volvo, Airbnb, Booking.com, Palantir. What do these companies have in common? They, and many others, are all part of what UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, in a new groundbreaking report, calls the “economy of genocide.” It describes how major corporations have been profiting off of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its occupation in the West Bank. … In this episode of ‘Unshocked,’ Naomi Klein brings on Albanese to discuss her key findings, what Klein describes as “an economy that is booming off of annihilation.” … There is a dark side that needs to be discussed. “Israel has used the Palestinians to experiment technologies from military surveillance to the agribusiness industry,” Albanese says. “And these explain why in the past 20 months, why Israel transitioned from an economy of occupation to an economy of genocide.” [Read More]

ALSO OF INTEREST- “Sanctioning Francesca Albanese,” by Richard Falk, The Nation [July 15, 2025] [Link]; “The “Economy of Genocide” report: A reckoning beyond rhetoric,” by Ramzy Baroud, Middle East Monitor [July 10, 2025] [Link]; and “In a historic gathering, 12 countries announce Israel sanctions and renewed legal action to end Gaza genocide,” by María F. Fitzgerald, Mondoweiss [July 17, 2025] [Link].

THE WAR ON PALESTINE
The Road from Gaza
By Doha Kahlout, New York Review of Books [July 18, 2025]
---- At first we convinced ourselves that the chance for me to leave was some kind of joke. Now the joke was over. I took my last step toward the bus that would carry me to another side of the world. My eyes moved across the city, trying to catch a single image—one more moment in its embrace. Fear led me to my mother. I searched her hands to find some tenderness in parting, even in its cruelty. She wrapped me in prayer, a quiet shelter. With my face in her palms, I felt something no one had ever described before. I passed next through the arms of my father and brothers, memorizing their faces, leaving pieces of my own on their shoulders. I waited in the bus for over an hour. Through the window I saw them still: mother, father, three brothers, and Shahd, waiting in heavy silence for my face to disappear, perhaps for the last time. [Read More]

When Israel Attacks Gaza, These People Run to Save Lives
By Huda Skaik, The Intercept [July 7,2025]
---- In the besieged Gaza Strip, three professions have emerged as a lifeline, their practitioners heroic in their efforts to alleviate the worst of the humanitarian catastrophe that is unfolding under Israel’s constant attacks on civilians and civic infrastructure. The rescuers, the healers, and the witnesses — civil defense responders making unimaginable sacrifices to try and save people from the rubble of bombed buildings; medical professionals fighting an impossible battle with poor supplies in hospitals; and journalists risking their lives to expose the truth — are all supporting the entire population enduring genocide and famine. According to the Health Ministry, the Israeli military has killed at least 113 civil defense responders, around 228 journalists, and at least 1,411 medical workers since October 7, 2023. Here are their stories. [Read More]

ALSO OF INTEREST - “‘Like a video game’: Israel enforcing Gaza evacuations with grenade-firing drones,” by Yuval Abraham, 972 Magazine [Israel/Palestine] [July 10, 2025] [Link]; and “Escalating Settler Colonial Violence across the Occupied West Bank,” by Calico, Znet [July 17, 2025] [Link].

WAR WITH IRAN?
[FB – While the US/Israel war on Iran is thankfully on pause, I fear it is far from over. Some of the loose threads that can be pulled and bring on another phase of this war are the competing claims from US and Israeli intelligence services about the extent of damage done to Iran’s nuclear enrichment program during last month’s 12-Day War. In a nutshell, is Iran’s program half-empty or half-full? Initially President Trump claimed that US bombing of 3 Iranian sites completely demolished Iran’s nuclear sites. Then a preliminary report from the Defense Intelligence Agency said that Iran’s capabilities had been set back only a few months. Was Trump wrong, and more bombing was needed? This week another report from NBC news prompted the New York Times’s security analysts to say that Iran had been “badly damaged,” while the Washington Post’s experts interpreted the NBC report to mean that “two nuclear sites were ‘not obliterated.’” (For more balance, another writer concluded that “Iran Could Resume Nuclear Enrichment Within Months.”) Again, the point is not just news accuracy, but that the conclusions drawn by military establishments will have a role in determining whether more bombing will happen.]

THE STUDENTS
Will the Government Ever Do Right by Mahmoud Khalil?
By Elie Mystal, The Nation [July 15, 2025]
---- Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia student activist who was kidnapped by ICE and sent to a detention camp in Louisiana, is now in the process of suing the Trump administration over his abduction and arrest. He’s using a law designed specifically to combat the federal government’s claims of immunity from accountability or liability when it injures people or destroys their property. … Khalil is countersuing the government for $20 million—or an apology—alleging false arrest, false imprisonment, and malicious prosecution. His claim for damages should be allowed under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA). The law, passed in 1946, permits individuals to sue the government for civil damages following government misconduct. In a just country, Khalil would be entitled to legal recourse and monetary recompense for his unlawful arrest and imprisonment. But in this country, six Republicans on the Supreme Court will likely stand in the way of justice and instead continue to protect Donald Trump and his fascist administration from accountability. They’ll do this by weakening the FTCA, if that’s what it takes to help Trump. [Read More]

ALSO OF INTEREST - Four CUNY Professors Say They Were Fired for Supporting Palestine,” by Sanya Mansoor, The Intercept [July 15, 2025] [Link].

CIVIL LIBERTIES
Republic of Fear
By Stephen F. Eisenman, Counterpunch [July 18, 2025]
---- ICE will soon become the largest police force in the country by far. Homeland Security plans to hire at least 10,000 new ICE agents. There will be plenty of applicants: Starting salaries range between about $50,000 and $90,000, with more in overtime and annual bonuses. And after years in the field, agents can earn considerably more. Expect applications from far-right militia members, ex-Marines, and Jan. 6 conspirators. ICE will soon have the capacity to detain and house more than 125,000 people, about the number in the entire Federal Bureau of Prisons. Unlike other cabinet agencies, Homeland Security expenditures are not likely to be clawed back, at least not anytime soon. Federal District courts may temporarily slow the pace of immigrant arrests and detentions, but the Supreme Court will eventually clear the way for more. The only thing that can stop the advance of the carceral state, is mass, public resistance. Some strategically located alligators might help too. [Read More]

(Video) “Purge Palantir”: Day of Action Protests Firm’s Role in Gov’t Surveillance, ICE & Genocide in Gaza
From Democracy Now! [July 15, 2025]
---- Protesters across the United States targeted Palantir Monday in a day of action focused on the technology company’s work with ICE, facilitating President Trump’s expanding immigration crackdown, and work with the Israeli military. New York police arrested at least four people Monday after demonstrators blocked the entrance to the company’s Manhattan offices. Democracy Now! spoke to protesters, including some who work in the technology sector, about the “Purge Palantir” campaign and how Palantir’s data mining, surveillance and automation tools are being weaponized against vulnerable communities. We speak with Wired senior writer Makena Kelly, who has been covering Palantir and says many Silicon Valley firms are “trying to find opportunity in this chaos” as the Trump administration slashes government services and pursues mass deportations. [See the Program]

ALSO OF INTEREST – We in the USA are not alone in confronting a crackdown on civil liberties and the right to dissent and protest. Recommended here are “ “We Are Not Victims. We Are Fighters”: Russian Political Prisoners, Including Left Sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky, Demand Freedom,” by Suzi Weissman, The Nation [July 16, 2025] [Link]; and “Who’s afraid of Palestine Action?” [UK] by Huw Lemmey, London Review of Books [July 24, 2025] [Link].

THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Lights Out [US Energy Policy]
By Jonathan Mingle, New York Review of Books [July 20, 2025]
---- For anyone concerned that the world is hurtling toward three degrees of warming by the end of the century—a future described as “hellish” by the UN secretary general—there is one useful byproduct of the budget reconciliation bill the Republican Party scrambled to push onto President Trump’s desk earlier this month: clarity. Most coverage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” has understandably focused on its cruelest provisions, such as the cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which could lead to 17 million Americans losing their health coverage and six million adults—and the children who depend on them—losing their nutritional benefits. … But when historians write the OBBBA’s epitaph decades from now, they might also view it as a clear inflection point for energy and climate policy. … Long before Americans experience the destabilizing effects of those extra molecules of methane and carbon dioxide, they will feel the effects of the GOP’s disinvestment in the country’s power grid. On his first day in office Trump declared a spurious “energy emergency,” which he cited to justify a spate of executive orders freezing permits for wind projects, discarding rules on pollution from oil and gas wells, and extending the lifespans of coal plants that were about to be shut down. There was, of course, no emergency. The US was—and is—awash in oil and gas, and thanks to the IRA’s catalytic effects and the plunging costs of renewables and batteries, its clean electricity supply was poised for accelerating growth. But with the passage of his bill, Trump has dramatically increased the likelihood of a genuine crisis in the years ahead. [Read More]

THE STATE OF THE UNION
A New Era of Hunger Has Begun
By Tracy Kidder, New York Times [July 14, 2025]
---- The need for SNAP is obvious, dire and nationwide. There is no county in America, no matter how wealthy, where the only hungry people are those on diets. The most recent data available estimates that 47.4 million Americans suffered from the threat of hunger at some point in 2023. Among these people, 13.8 million were children. Almost 7 million households experienced what’s referred to as very low food security, meaning they sometimes had to go without a meal, or even a day’s worth of meals, and often didn’t know where their next meal was coming from. Disproportionate percentages of Black and Latino Americans shared in the misery. According to the Congressional Budget Office, more than two million people will lose their SNAP benefits. At the same time, the law’s changes to Medicaid will save about $1 trillion over 10 years, partly through already complicated work requirements, which are known to stymie enrollments — an old party trick. The law will add 11.8 million Americans to the 26 million who currently lack health insurance. In all, the new domestic policy law will take about $1.2 trillion from social programs over the next decade. Its supporters like to say that their reforms will reduce fraud and waste and save social programs for the future, but part of the intent is clearly to save money for other purposes — such as adding more than $100 billion to help squads of men in masks cleanse America of undocumented immigrants. The Republican Congress also chose to extend the large tax cuts of Mr. Trump’s first term. Mainly for that reason, the law will end up adding about $3.4 trillion to the country’s huge deficit over 10 years, according to the C.B.O.’s estimate. [Read More\

OUR HISTORY
Atomic Nightmare: Remember Los Alamos
By Eric Ross, Tom Dispatch [July 18, 2025]
---- In recent months, nuclear weapons have reemerged in global headlines. Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan approached the brink of a full-scale war, a confrontation that could have become an extinction-level event, with the potential to claim up to two billion lives worldwide. … The nuclear threat endangers not only global peace and security but the very continuity of the human species, not to speak of the simple survival of life on Earth. How, you might wonder, could we ever have arrived at such a precarious situation? … When situated within this broader context of a professed commitment to scientific detachment, Oppenheimer’s behavior becomes more intelligible. In practice, however, his stated ideals stood in stark contrast to his conduct. While he claimed to reject political engagement, he ultimately intervened in precisely such a manner, using his position to advocate forcefully for the bomb’s immediate military use against Japan without prior warning. He emerged as a leading opponent of any prospective demonstration, cautioning that it would undermine the psychological impact of the bomb’s use, which could only be realized through a sudden, unannounced detonation on a relatively untouched, non-military target like the city of Hiroshima. This position stood in sharp contrast to that of the Chicago scientists, of whom only 15% supported using the bomb in such a manner. The current crisis coincides with the 80th anniversary of the Trinity Test, the first detonation of an atomic weapon that would soon obliterate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and so inaugurate the atomic age. So many years later, it’s worth critically reassessing the decisions that conferred on humanity such a power of self-annihilation. After all, we continue to live with the fallout of the choices made (and not made), including those of the scientists who created the bomb. That history also serves as a reminder that alternative paths were available then and that another world remains possible today. [Read More]