In war, people die for absurd reasons or often no reason at all. They die due to accidents of birth, the misfortune of being born in the wrong place — Cambodia or Gaza, Afghanistan or Ukraine — at the wrong time. They die due to happenstance, choosing to shelter...
Originally appeared at TomDispatch: How strange to be living through it a second time, however different the form. I’m thinking, of course, about a devastating set of totally unexpected attacks on one’s homeland. On September 11, 2001, it was the World Trade Center in...
Originally appeared at TomDispatch: On a picturesque beach in central Gaza, a mile north of the now-flattened Al-Shati refugee camp, long black pipes snake through hills of white sand before disappearing underground. An image released by the Israel Defense Forces...
This hasn’t exactly been a year of good news when it comes to our war-torn, beleaguered planet, but on November 15th, U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping took one small step back from the precipice. Until they talked in a mansion near San...
In my childhood, we at least acknowledged the ominous existence of nuclear weapons, no matter how weirdly. I’m thinking about those times we kids spent at school “ducking and covering” under our desks, practicing for… yes, the atomic annihilation of New York City by...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. One way of understanding the ongoing bloodbath pitting Israel against Hamas is to see it as just the latest chapter in an existential struggle dating back to the founding of the Jewish state in 1948. While the appalling scope,...
At some level, it’s not complicated. Making civilians, including children, responsible for the acts of a guerrilla group should obviously be considered a crime. And that crime is functionally being supported by my country. In early November, after denouncing the acts...
Yes, on a radio show, Israeli Minister of Heritage Amihai Eliyahu insisted that there were “no non-combatants in Gaza” (assumedly including the thousands of young people slaughtered in recent weeks in that “children’s graveyard”). He then added that “one option” for...
I started TomDispatch in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the launching of what President George W. Bush quickly labeled “the Global War on Terror.” And here we are, 22 years after Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stood in the ruins of the Pentagon and told an...
When humans embrace the dehumanization of others, we release our ugliest, most destructive selves. Dehumanization is a perverse force that propagates violence and justifies the lust for war and its atrocities. On August 6, 1945, Sakue Shimohira was 10 years old when...
