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Joshua Frank, Israel’s Onslaught of Revenge

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Forget the dead for a moment and think about the living. We’re talking about a miniscule, 25-mile strip of land on which, before recent events began, an estimated 2.4 million people lived, went to school, worshipped, farmed, did whatever. When Israel responded to Hamas’s nightmarish October 7th attack by bombing northern Gaza into rubble and sending in its military, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowed a “complete siege” of the region with “no electricity, no food, no fuel” for what he called “human animals.” The Israeli military did indeed promptly proceed to destroy most of the homes, schools, and hospitals, you name it in northern Gaza, while encouraging hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants to flee south, many of whom finally ended up in the city of Rafah, where an estimated nearly 1.4 million refugees were lodged, often in crude tent encampments.

Now, jump seven months or so and the Israeli military is, step by step, moving into and destroying parts of Rafah, while once again encouraging its population to flee. In the first weeks after they began doing so, it was estimated that at least one million (yes, 1,000,000!) Gazans did indeed flee that city. As Philippe Lazzarini, head of the chief U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, described it, “Every time they are forced to leave behind the few belongings they have: mattresses, tents, cooking utensils, and basic supplies that they cannot carry or pay to transport.”

And it’s not just the Muslim Gazans who are suffering. The small Christian community there has been brutalized and largely destroyed, too. Talk about a hell on earth! Worse yet, as of now, there’s no end in sight and — imagine this — the Biden administration nonetheless continues to plan to send vast quantities of new weaponry to Israel.

With that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Joshua Frank explore the damage being done and what to make of it. Tom

You Can’t Turn Back the Clock on Genocide

The Bombs, Missiles, and the Damage Done

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As Amal Nassar lay in pain on a bed at the Al-Awda Hospital in the Nuseirat refugee camp in northern Gaza, the echoes of explosions and artillery fire could be heard all around her. It was mid-January and she had made her way to the embattled hospital to give birth to a baby girl she would name Mira. While Amal should have been celebrating her infant’s delivery, instead she was engulfed in fear, surrounded by the relentless nightmare of death and suffering that she and her family had experienced for months.

"I was muttering to myself, 'I hope I die,'" she recalled.

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Michael Gould-Wartofsky, Creating an All-American Homeland Security Campus

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Sometimes it seems as if we just can’t learn, even when we’re talking about America’s centers of higher learning, its colleges and universities. In mid-April — the day after being grilled and intimidated by House Republicans — Columbia University’s president Nemat “Minouche” Shafik decided not to listen to, or even negotiate with, her own students. Instead, she called in the police to dismantle a peaceful tent encampment protesting the horrors then underway in Gaza. For anyone who remembers the past history of on-campus antiwar protests, it was almost ludicrously predictable that, in doing so, she would launch a set of remarkably peaceful protests on more than 500 campuses nationwide that, despite the arrival of so many police on campus and nearly 3,000 arrests, have yet to end (and, in fact, have spread elsewhere on the planet).

And talking about not learning, imagine this: Last October 7th, the Israelis had a thoroughly grim set of war crimes committed against them by Hamas. Their response would prove to be a set of crimes so staggering that they’ve left Hamas’s horrors — and they were horrors of the first order — in the shade, removing almost all sympathy for Israel globally.

Sound familiar? And the thing we so often forget, whether the subject is Israel and Gaza or student protests in this country, is that when such horrors occur, there’s always a history that has, in some grim fashion, prepared the way for them.

With that in mind, consider Michael Gould-Wartofsky’s latest piece on the all too many increasingly armed camps that now pass for colleges and universities. Such campuses, barricaded, walled off, and sometimes occupied by local police, don’t come out of the blue either. In fact, Gould-Wartofsky has been writing about the creation of just such a “homeland security campus” for TomDispatch since 2008 — about the creation, that is, of what, by 2012, he was already calling Repress U.! Tom

Repress U., Class of 2024

How to Build a Homeland Security Campus in Seven More Steps

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The academic year that just ended left America’s college campuses in quite a state: with snipers on the rooftops and checkpoints at the gates; quads overrun by riot squads, state troopers, and federal agents; and even the scent of gunpowder in the air.

In short, in the spring semester of 2024, many of our campuses came to resemble armed camps.

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Nick Turse, The Pentagon’s .00035% Problem

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: You know that I just can’t help it. Once again, I’m pleading with this site’s faithful readers to consider going to our donation page and giving us a boost so that we can keep covering subjects — like Nick Turse’s latest striking report on the killing of civilians in America’s never-ending war on terror — that the mainstream media tends to avoid so much of the time. Take a moment, if you can, to keep this website going in 2024. (And there’s no way I can thank you enough for doing so!) Note as well that TomDispatch will be off-duty on the Memorial Day weekend. The next piece will appear on Tuesday. Tom]

Yes, the number of deaths in Gaza in the last seven months is staggering. At least, 35,000 Gazans have reportedly perished, including significant numbers of children (and that’s without even counting the possibly 10,000 unidentified bodies still buried under the rubble that now litters that 25-mile-long stretch of land). But shocking as that might be (and it is shocking!), it begins to look almost modest when compared to the numbers of civilians slaughtered in America’s never-ending Global War on Terror that began in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and, as Nick Turse has reported in his coverage of Africa, never really ended.

In fact, the invaluable Costs of War project put the direct civilian death toll in those wars at 186,694 to 210,038 in Iraq, 46,319 in Afghanistan, 24,099 in Pakistan, and 12,690 in Yemen, among other places. And don’t forget, as that project also reports, that there could have been an estimated 3.6 to 3.8 million (yes, million!) “indirect deaths” resulting from the devastation caused by those wars, which lasted endless years — 20 alone for the Afghan one — in South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

Today, Nick Turse reports on how the Pentagon has largely avoided significant responsibility for civilian deaths from its never-ending air wars, not to speak of failing to compensate the innocent victims of those strikes. The civilian death toll in this country’s twenty-first-century conflicts is, in fact, a subject he’s long focused on at TomDispatch in a devastating fashion. In 2007, he was already reporting on how the U.S. military was quite literally discussing “hunting” the “enemy.” (“From the commander-in-chief to low-ranking snipers, a language of dehumanization that includes the idea of hunting humans as if they were animals has crept into our world — unnoticed and unnoted in the mainstream media.”) And when it comes to the subject of killing civilians without any significant acknowledgment or ever having to say you’re sorry, he’s never stopped. Tom

Constant Killing

Despite Blood on Its Hands, The Pentagon Once Again Fails to Make Amends

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There are constants in this world -- occurrences you can count on. Sunrises and sunsets. The tides. That, day by day, people will be born and others will die.

Some of them will die in peace, but others, of course, in violence and agony.

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