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Opinion
Europe's Extreme Summer Shows the Climate Can't Be Hushed
As the consequences build, the pressure on decent politicians to act will grow.
Aug 03, 2026
The climate fight moves in stages. A decade ago, we got to the pledge stage. First, governments signed the Paris accords, and then, under pressure from Greta Thunberg’s movement, banks and corporations did the same. Leaders don’t mind making pledges; the hard part is always a few years away, and the pledge itself takes off some of the pressure.
Then other stuff intervened: Covid-19, the invasion of Ukraine, AI, the high prices that those things caused, the fascists that were elected on the back of those high prices. So politicians and corporations began to abandon their climate pledges, in favor of other priorities.
But what do you know, now something else is happening: a global outbreak of extremely high temperatures, and with them all the disasters we’ve come to expect. The question is, will that provide pressure enough to get climate action back on course? We’re going to find out over the next year, and I think we’re going to find out first on the other side of the Atlantic
This spring and summer have been horrific in Europe and the UK. A wavering jet stream—the product of a melting Arctic—has brought heat dome after heat dome to the continent, producing bouts of extraordinarily high temperature. Records have been smashed left and right, and now that heat is producing vast fires, centered in Spain and France, but spreading far afield to the UK, Belgium, and elsewhere.
Why would you recommend a Mediterranean climate at the precise moment that the countries that ring the Med are on fire?
I want to start the account by saying: These are not the worst heatwaves underway in the world. It’s hit 127°F in Iran, even as the bombs are falling; India has seen another brutal spring and summer, and as Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Aakash Hassan write from Andhra Pradesh, the toll on very poor people is unbearable. They describe Mahalaxmi, paid by a government scheme to join with other women in digging a new reservoir by hand:
By 11:00 am, the first shift of their day was over. The women headed home, exchanging few words due to their exhaustion. Mahalaxmi did not speak when she got home, but went straight to the bedroom where she collapsed in apparent sleep.
Unable to rouse her hours later, her husband, Palli Shyam Sundha Rao, rushed to find a doctor. Examining her lifeless body, the doctor concluded Mahalaxmi had died from heatstroke.
“It was such a shock to all of us,” said Purilla. “She always seemed so strong. If the heat can take her like this, then it could take any of us.”
So let that serve as a baseline. Scary as what’s happening in Europe and the US is, we retain some wealth to buffer our lives and our communities. That’s not true elsewhere. Still, it’s been wildly hard in Europe. As Mark Landler and Chico Harlan reported on Thursday:
Ravenous fires. Searing heatwaves. Freakish storms. The summer of 2026 has already shattered meteorological records in several European countries. On a continent that has weathered centuries of upheaval—ruinous wars, deadly pandemics—it is the weather itself that now has Europe feeling close to a breaking point.
It has displaced more than 300,000 people in France and Spain, where the largest fires in those countries’ modern history have led to their largest peacetime evacuations, with villages destroyed and hundreds of thousands of acres incinerated. It has left millions more desperate for relief from temperatures that routinely soar above 40°C, or 104°F.
And there is absolutely no doubt how connected all this is to global warming—that is, to our longstanding habit of burning coal and gas and oil. Raymond Zhong, writing in the Times, says new research makes that clear:
For central Spain, the scientists found that the intense heat and dryness in July had roughly a 17% probability of occurring in a given year in the present-day climate. In the preindustrial world, however, the likelihood of such conditions would have been one-twentieth as high, the researchers estimated.
In fact, we can say with increasing specificity what happened, and it’s very similar to things we’ve seen elsewhere, and that I described a few weeks ago in an interview with University of California climate scientist Daniel Swain. What we’re seeing is what he calls “weather whiplash,” when the extreme rains that climate change produces cause a massive growth of vegetation in the spring, only to see these new high temperatures produce “flash droughts” that turn those green grasses and shrubs into tinder, waiting for lightning to strike. The folks at Yale Environment 360 quoted:
Francesca Di Giuseppe, fire forecast coordinator at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, who said the “rebound” from a wet winter to a dry summer was a key factor. After an exceptionally rainy winter spurred the growth of vegetation, an unusual summer drought turned that new growth to tinder.
The results have been brutal. I won’t bother cataloguing deaths and dollars—if we’re “lucky,” the former will be measured in the many tens of thousands, and the latter in the hundreds of billions—but I do want to give some small sense of what life is like. Madeline Schwartz, editor of the international journal the Dial, writes from Paris that:
This summer has unleashed a special kind of hell on France: not just several heatwaves with temperatures reaching as high as 112°F, but drought and forest fires, some right next to Paris. On my street, the leaves have already turned brown; a once lush lawn now looks like burned straw. Across the country, farmers are reporting that crops have withered in the blistering conditions.
The British paper The Express reports that signs in grocery stores warn produce buyers about high prices and unavailable items:
“Produce such as carrots, onions, and potatoes will likely be hit the hardest due to dry soil shrinking crop sizes, while leeks, cabbage and cauliflower could also become harder to find.”
Salad crops such as lettuce may also face a price hike, as they could be replaced by pricier imports due to the heavy irrigation required.
Cupboard essentials such as bread, pasta, and cereal could be affected too, as wheat and barley crops come under heat stress.
Pippa Neill describes the stress on farmers:
“The vines are dying. The grass is yellow and now we can smell the smoke,” Uyen Do, an organic farmer in the Dordogne region of France says, almost in tears. “It’s already very difficult to survive economically and now with climate change it’s becoming a struggle that I’m not sure we’re capable of going through.”
But British farmer Brian King says drought is just one part of the problem. During the recent heatwaves, which saw several days where temperatures exceeded 30°C, “the environment was so hostile that the plants are so stressed they want to die because they just can’t take it”.
Drought has pushed the Rhine River to its lowest recorded levels, stranding the barges that normally carry coal and gas. As Eamon Farhat reports:
The cost to ship diesel from Rotterdam to Karlsruhe—further inland from the closely watched Kaub chokepoint—has climbed to the highest since Bloomberg began compiling the data in 2009.
“With every centimeter it’s getting more difficult,” said Florian Krekel at Germany’s WSV, which manages the country’s waterways. “There’s no rain in sight.”
As river levels fall, Hungary and France are having to shut some nuclear power plants because they can no longer safely cool them; oh, and a sunken Nazi warship has reappeared along the dwindling Danube in Serbia, so that’s nice. The Royal Horticultural Society, meanwhile, may have to move its hydrangea garden to the north of England
But it’s the fires that have really left their mark on this European summer. As Margherita Stancati, Noemie Bisserbe, and Ed Ballard wrote in The Wall Street Journal last week, the continent has never seen anything on this scale before:
In Spain, the fires have destroyed more than 370,000 acres so far this year. Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the leader of Madrid’s local government, earlier this week described the Madrid wildfires as perhaps “the worst natural catastrophe in Spain’s history.”
The intensity of the fires has created large, fire-fueled thunderstorms, known as pyrocumulonimbus clouds, for the first time in France’s recent history. The clouds, which have been observed during wildfires in Canada and Australia, are created by intense heat that lifts hot smoky air and causes the water vapor to condense into ash. The clouds can generate lightning, further spreading the fires.
The US is so vast that sometimes we barely notice things happening in the other corner: There are big wildfires burning in Oregon right now, for instance, (and the chance for many more over the course of a windy weekend). But we forget how compact European countries are. France is among the largest of its nations, but the Tour de France had to be shortened on its final day in order to free up policemen to go help with firefighting in other regions of the country. So there’s no escaping the smoke, or its political meaning. And that’s what we need to talk about.
All this comes after a period of what American politicians have called “climate-hushing,” when even non-MAGA leaders have been backing away from the steps needed to speed up the energy transition. That’s been true in other places too. Bill McGuire, a climate researcher at University College London, wrote that:
Such is the astonishing scale of the wildfires burning at the gates of Bordeaux and Madrid, that if they had happened 20—even 10—years back, they may well have shocked the world into taking action on the climate crisis. But like the proverbial frog in a pot of slowly heating water, we have become inured; not only to the ever more devastating impacts of climate breakdown, but increasingly to the actions needed to bring global heating to heel.
Even as more than 35,000 wildfires rage across the surface of our world, and as we continue to rewind our planet’s climate so it resembles hotter episodes from its distant past, governments and trading blocs are very deliberately turning away from climate action.
The latest evidence that we are not only doing too little but actually doing less as time goes by is provided by the climate action media platform, We Don’t Have Time. It reported last week that the 12 months to July this year saw the reversal across the world of 45 climate policies. The retreat on climate action is global, but Europe—previously seen as a leader in emissions reductions—is in the vanguard, weakening measures across the board, including in the areas of carbon pricing, methane emissions, and the phasing out of petrol and diesel vehicles.
There are even some who are seizing on the new disasters to urge… less action. In a truly remarkable essay for Britain’s conservative Telegraph, pundit Allister Heath used the fires to say that the “war against global warming has been lost” and hence it was time to
accept this sobering reality, cut our losses, cease tilting at (and building) windmills, ditch the despicable con that is net zero, and learn to cope with, and even enjoy, a warmer, drier, more volatile Mediterranean climate.
This is monumentally stupid on several different levels, and Alan Rusbridger, former editor of The Guardian now proprietor the the British magazine the Prospect outlines a number of them in a (highly enjoyable) takedown. But mainly: Why would you recommend a Mediterranean climate at the precise moment that the countries that ring the Med are on fire? And of course it’s not as if you get to choose even the current, fiery Mediterranean climate. If you abandon “net zero,” or the other attempts to rapidly build out solar panels and windmills, you’ll get an ever hotter version.
That hasn’t stopped Britain’s Conservatives from purging party members who want to continue the energy transition, and there are at least some signs that England’s new prime minister, Labour’s Andy Burnham, is tilting in somewhat the same direction. The Murdoch tabloids have been mounting a crusade to open up new oil wells in the North Sea, and Burnham said this week that the country needed to be “pragmatic” in the face of rising energy costs, never mind that the global price of energy won’t budge one pence with whatever new supply can be found in the dwindling deposits off the UK coast.
But my guess is that Burnham may well decide to stand up to Murdoch et al. and turn his back on more drilling, simply because the heat and the smoke have made the case for climate action so wildly clear. As Fiona Harvey and a team at The Guardian reported yesterday, a rebellion is brewing because many Labour parliamentarians
are increasingly worried about how support for expanded drilling will play with an electorate alarmed by the worst drought since 1976, soaring temperatures, wildfires, and climate-related food inflation and potential supply shortages.
They worry about losing more voters to the Greens: Zack Polanski’s party has stressed its opposition to further new licences for the North Sea, including the Jackdaw gasfield in the North Sea and the Rosebank oilfield, west of Shetland. A decision to go ahead with the projects could trigger a new surge in defectors from Labour.
Rachael Maskell, the Labour MP for York Central, urged ministers to “keep carbon in the ground”, and watch the recent national emergency climate briefing. She added: “We’re seeing ice caps melting, seas warming up, hotter and hotter summers. This summer has been a warning that we have to go towards a sustainable future fast.”
Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South, said there was “no legitimate reason” to press ahead with Jackdaw because it would make only a negligible difference to energy prices while sending the wrong signal internationally as Europe experienced record heat.
Lewis said approving the field would show Burnham was “not looking at the evidence” and that Labour risked adding “the stain of the climate crisis” to the party’s record, alongside Gaza.
Indeed, Britain’s brand new Foreign Minister Ed Miliband, who had been its energy and climate minister until last week, has already issued a joint communique with his Spanish counterpart calling for deeper climate action:
At a time when Europe is facing record heatwaves and terrible wildfires as a consequence of the climate crisis, the two Ministers agreed that this summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.
Both parties agreed that tackling the climate crisis was an urgent policy priority for all countries—to tackle the cost of living, protect health and well-being, and to ensure European economic and energy security. The two Ministers noted that climate action was essential to protect not just current generations, but our children and grandchildren too.
The two Ministers underscored the priority they attach to combating climate change within their foreign policy and agreed on the need to co-lead the green transition, convinced that decarbonisation, energy security, environmental protection, and resilience are inseparable from our security and the prosperity and competitiveness of our economies.
I think that this is a good sign—and I think it’s a dry run for what the whole world is going to go through over the next 12 months. The signs keep mounting that the El Niño building in the Pacific is going to be massive in scale. As United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said last Friday:
This is only a warm-up act. El Niño is strengthening, adding fuel to a planet already on fire.
As the consequences build, the pressure on decent politicians to act will grow. Obviously the Trump administration, and its fascist friends elsewhere, will continue to coddle the fossil fuel industry—but it will be harder and harder for others to turn aside renewed climate fears. I’d be willing to bet that climate will be a key issue in the Democratic primaries (and campaigning for those will be well underway by this time next year).
In fact, there’s already an effort underway—the veteran campaigner Margie Alt is helping lead a Climate Action Campaign this summer to get the issue back on the political… front burner.
Actions began on Thursday and will take a variety of forms. In Michigan, participants will demonstrate against the Republican representative Bill Huizenga who voted for Trump’s so-called big beautiful bill, which boosted planet-heating fossil fuels.
In Arizona, young activists will meet with the Democratic representative Adelita Shirley Grijalva, a climate champion, and encourage her to continue talking about global warming. In other districts, organizers have circulated petitions calling on the House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, and Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, to prioritize climate issues or plan to call on their representatives to connect the climate crisis to recent heatwaves.
I have no doubt it will annoy some Democrats—and no one is saying the issue should dominate the midterms, which must be fought on the value of democracy and the cost of living. But every politician worth her salt should at every opportunity at least mention the anti-renewables jihad that the Trump administration has launched—the number of Americans who support shutting down 90% finished wind farms is tiny, and the rest of us are truly annoyed.
And in many ways this generation of politicians is the luckiest yet, because they have a tool to call on that make those pledges relatively easy to fulfill. With ever-cheaper power from the sun, wind, and batteries, this ultimate cycle of the climate fight will look different than the ones before. We’re going to get a last chance to get this crisis at least a little right. We dare not lose it.
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Conflating American Jews With Israel Is Wrong and Dangerous
Criticizing individual Israeli leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu should not be seen as an attack on all Jews.
Aug 03, 2026
Does criticizing actions of the Israeli government or the behavior of its prime minister fuel antisemitism? Despite the stretch of logic required to make this argument and the danger its bizarre conflation presents to American Jews, some US pro-Israel organizations are working overtime to establish the case that criticizing Israel puts American Jews at risk. Their view on this matter has now been echoed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who, before leaving Israel for his meeting with US President Donald Trump, used an interview with an American TV network to level this very charge against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
While tensions between Mamdani and pro-Israel groups have been brewing since his 2025 election campaign, it was recently reignited in the lead up to Netanyahu’s announced visit to the US. Mayor Mamdani was asked by a reporter whether he would fulfill a campaign pledge to arrest the Israeli prime minister as a war criminal, as per the indictment issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
In response, the mayor convened a group of legal experts who concluded that the city, on its own, did not have the authority to make an arrest—only the federal government could do that. In an effort to put the matter to rest, Mamdani released a short video in which he acknowledged that he lacked the power to order an arrest but nevertheless called out Netanyahu as a war criminal responsible for the deaths of “more than 73,000 people” and stated that he would not welcome him in New York City. In his video, Mamdani did not mention Israel, nor did he mention the Jewish people or the citizens of Israel. This was, he observed, simply about Netanyahu’s crimes cited in the ICC arrest warrant.
Some pro-Israel groups immediately denounced Mamdani’s video and charges against the Israeli prime minister. They accused him of “repeatedly singling out the world’s only Jewish state…leaving many Jewish New Yorkers feeling targeted and unwelcome.” One group characterized the video as “blood libel and outrageous lies.” While still another charged Mamdani with “fomenting antisemitism.”
A few days later, a Hispanic man, whom police said had mental health issues, allegedly stabbed two people, one was Asian and another Jewish. In both instances, observers said they heard the attacker shouting “Allahu Akbar.”
The same pro-Israel groups that have been conflating Israel with American Jews and relentlessly condemning Mamdani leapt into the fray, blaming the mayor for making New York unsafe for Jews by “using his platform to viciously attack Israel.” One prominent Jewish leader called on the mayor to resign, charging him with “dereliction of duty.”
Mamdani immediately responded to these charges condemning the stabbings as “hateful and despicable attacks that have no place in our city” and noted that his administration had already dramatically increased investment in hate crime prevention “so that we can start to address the root causes of this bigotry and hatred, as we look to root out the scourge of antisemitism.”
The mayor added: “When it comes to my comments about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they are critiques based not on my personal analysis, but rather on objective facts. They are critiques of a political leader, not of people of a specific faith or religion or background. And my responsibility as mayor of the city is to keep every New Yorker safe, no matter where they come from, what they believe in or frankly, even if they agree with my politics. My job is to keep them safe.”
The mayor was not without defenders in the Jewish community. Brad Lander, who describes himself as a liberal Zionist and who recently defeated a pro-Israel congressman, described the attacks as “almost certainly an antisemitic hate crime and quite likely an anti-Asian hate crime, but they are not the fault of the mayor for calling Netanyahu a war criminal.” Lander added, “The effort to connect the mayor to that… is a political effort to shut down criticism of Israel,” and called it “weaponizing antisemitism.”
Peter Beinart, one of America’s most thoughtful progressive Jewish thinkers, directly took on the pro-Israel Jewish establishment by noting that it was they, not the mayor, who are conflating Israel with the Jewish community. Beinart wrote: “Zohran Mamdani keeps saying again and again that his critique of Israel… has nothing to do with his feelings toward Jews in New York, because he separates Israel, as a state, from Jewish New Yorkers. The people who are making this conflation… are the very establishment Jewish leaders who are now attacking Mamdani.”
The problem here is two-fold. Antisemitism is real, and conflating American Jews with Israel is wrong and dangerous whether it is done by pro-Israel advocates who want to identify all Jews with Israel for political purposes, or by haters of Jews who want to hold Jewish people, in general, responsible for the crimes committed by that state. In the first instance the effort is designed, as Lander notes, to silence criticism of Israel claiming that charges leveled against that state put all Jews at risk. In the second instance, the conflation serves to fuel the preexisting bigotry of some by holding all Jews responsible for the crimes committed by others.
The bottom line is Mamdani, Lander, and Beinart are right, and the pro-Israel establishment is wrong.
Those Who Said Diplomacy With Iran—Not War—Were Right
A modicum of peace in the Middle East will be achieved only when the kind of mutual respect and forbearance enshrined in the UN charter is widely observed.
Aug 03, 2026
Those who anticipated that a US war against Iran would risk igniting a region-wide conflagration are looking prescient.
The latest metastasis of the conflict has included airstrikes by both the United States and Saudi Arabia in Iraq, against Iraqi militias seen as allied with Iran. The Houthi regime in Yemen, as a direct outgrowth of the US-Iran war, has renewed attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. This has led to new fighting between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia, which is preparing a possible new offensive in Yemen and is attempting to draw in dozens of other countries on its side of this fray.
The Iranian strategy of responding to the US and Israeli aggression through horizontal escalation has drawn in still more countries. Iranian strikes against Saudi Arabia and the UAE have led to Saudi and Emirati attacks in Iran. Other Iranian retaliatory strikes have occurred in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Jordan, scene of the most recent American casualties.
Violence spread last week to Egypt’s Mediterranean port of Damietta, where a drone of unknown origin caused fires on two vessels. Some suggest Iranian allies may have been responsible, but Iran, which has good relations with Egypt, denies any connection and suggests it may have been an Israeli false flag attack.
The violence related to the war in Iran is spreading far enough to start overlapping the Russian war against Ukraine, with a Ukrainian strike against a Russia-bound Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea. A merging of the wars in Iran and Ukraine would appeal to at least one Middle Eastern state: Israel.
In addition to the actual spreading of violence, there is the threat of still more. President Donald Trump has at various times threatened not only to escalate attacks against civilian infrastructure in Iran but even to attack Oman, which has been one of the mediators trying to de-escalate the violence.
Violence related to the current war with Iran builds on lines of conflict that existed prior to the war. The United States already was using Iraqi territory—where, of course, it had waged an earlier major war of aggression—to do battle with Iran when it used a missile strike at the Baghdad airport in 2020 to kill Iranian military commander and political figure Qassem Soleimani. Iran retaliated with a missile attack on a base in Iraq housing US troops.
Yemeni-Saudi fighting today was preceded years ago by a devastating Saudi air war against Yemen and extensive interference by both the Saudis and Emiratis in Yemen to promote an alternative to the Houthis. A later disagreement between those two Gulf Arab allies—with the UAE supporting a secessionist movement in southern Yemen—has taken a violent form on Yemeni territory.
The Houthis’ interference with Red Sea shipping reprises their earlier use of this tactic in response to the inhumane Israeli operations in the Gaza Strip. Other examples of extensive region-wide Israeli violence include past and present attacks in Lebanon and occupation of Lebanese territory, a prolonged air war against Syria, expanding occupation of Syrian territory, aerial attacks on the territories of Iraq and Qatar, and clandestine assassination operations in Iran, Jordan, and elsewhere.
The Middle East has come to look like—to borrow a phrase from the seventeenth century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes—a war of all against all. The region is not unique in this regard; some parts of central and eastern Africa have exhibited comparable pervasive and contagious violence. But the Middle East currently stands out, especially in ways relevant to US policy. Life in some of the hardest hit parts of the region, including but not limited to the Gaza Strip, is—to use another phrase from Hobbes—nasty, brutish, and short.
Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, who presents himself as a friend of the United States and just last month met with President Trump at the White House, stated that the recent US and Saudi attacks on militia targets in Iraq were a “flagrant violation of sovereignty.” A breakdown of the concept of national sovereignty characterizes the region-wide picture of attacks on, or occupation of, other nations’ territories.
Respect for the sovereignty of nation states is a bedrock principle of order in the current international system. The United Nations charter explicitly incorporates the “principle of the sovereign equality of all its members” and obligates members to “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”
The only recognized justifiable exception to noninterference in the affairs of other states is the Responsibility to Protect, which involves intervention to forestall genocide or other severe offenses against human rights. But cross-border violence in the Middle East today is not protecting human rights and, in many cases, constitutes an offense against human rights.
The concept of sovereignty of nation states is usually traced to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. It thus was originally a European concept, but today non-Europeans place at least as much emphasis on it. China especially stresses the importance of non-interference in the affairs of other states, a theme that has resonance in most of the Global South.
The Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War in central Europe, which in its complexity, persistence, and number of belligerents resembled in many ways the contemporary Middle East. Each situation had a religious dimension, which in seventeenth century Europe was a contest between Catholics and Protestants. In the contemporary Middle East, there is animosity between Shia and Sunni and, insofar as Israel is concerned, Jewish nationalism. Each situation involved rivalries among lesser actors in the area in which warfare was waged as well as intervention by larger powers, which in the Thirty Years War mostly meant France and Sweden.
The fact that the Thirty Years War ended with a comprehensive peace settlement that incorporated an enduring principle of international order might give rise to optimism when thinking about the current disorder in the Middle East. But there is at least as much ground for pessimism, as well as cautionary lessons.
The Thirty Years War took a terrible toll. It ended not with kumbaya but instead with sheer exhaustion. It is not the kind of experience to be wished on any region, however hopeful one might be that exhaustion will lead to peace.
Intervention by major powers did not help and only made things worse by prolonging the warfare and the suffering. This was true of France’s intervention midway through the Thirty Years War. It is true as well of some of the US military interventions in the Middle East, including the current one.
Hobbes’s thinking was influenced primarily by civil war in his native England but probably also by the mayhem on the European continent. His most famous work, Leviathan, was published three years after the Thirty Years War. His solution for establishing order within a single nation was an all-powerful sovereign who ruled with the implied consent of a social contract. The corresponding solution among a group of nations would be a hegemon strong enough to impose international order.
The Thirty Years War and Westphalia, however, showed that this was not a viable solution. The obvious would-be hegemon in that situation was the Habsburg monarch in Vienna, who as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, was supposed to have some order-enforcing authority over the portions of Europe where the war was fought. But the extent of that authority was itself an issue, in addition to the religious divisions, among the duchies and principalities that waged the war. The peace settlement affirmed the monarch’s sovereign power over the lands he ruled directly but weakened his role as emperor.
One lesson for contemporary US policy on the Middle East is that hegemony — by the United States or anyone else, and even assuming it could be achieved — does not provide a way out of the current disorder.
Another lesson, consistent with the principle of nation-state sovereignty, is that victory by one ideological or religious camp over another is also not a way out of disorder. A modicum of peace in the Middle East will be achieved only when the kind of mutual respect and forbearance enshrined in the UN charter is widely observed, regardless of the inevitable continuing differences in the politics, ideologies, and religious faiths among states in the region.
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Trump's Attack on International Law Will Take Us All Down With It
The effort to sideline the International Criminal Court may prove more costly than it looks.
Aug 03, 2026
At Camp David on July 31, Donald Trump said plainly what Washington’s fight with the International Criminal Court is now about. The US government's campaign to weaken the court, he said, was meant to defend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and “various other people,” not himself. Marco Rubio added that five countries had announced plans to leave the ICC since the administration began its latest push against it. That makes the dispute larger than one court or one case. The real question is what the United States gives up when it treats an institution as useful against an adversary but intolerable when it reaches an ally.
Military strength, economic weight, and alliances matter, of course, but they are not the whole story of great-power influence. For decades, the United States also benefited from helping write the rules and from being able to say that those rules reflected something more than American preference. The postwar legal and institutional order became part of US power itself. It helped Washington isolate rivals, keep allies together, and present its policies as defenses of a wider system. That is why the current approach carries a cost that is easy to miss. In protecting allies from legal pressure today, Washington may be spending some of the credibility it will need tomorrow.
The contrast with Russia is especially hard to explain away. During Joe Biden’s presidency, Washington backed accountability efforts over Russian crimes in Ukraine, and Congress loosened restrictions on U.S. assistance to the ICC for its Ukraine investigation. The tone changed once the court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in November 2024. Trump’s 2025 executive order authorized sanctions connected to ICC actions against the United States and Israel. Since then, the administration has broadened the pressure to include travel restrictions, more sanctions, and diplomatic pressure on governments that continue to support the court.
There is a serious legal argument on the American side, and the article does not depend on pretending otherwise. The United States never joined the Rome Statute; Israel did not either. US officials have long objected to the prosecution of nationals of non-member states without their governments’ consent. The ICC answers that it has territorial jurisdiction over Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Those are competing legal positions. But there is still a difference between challenging a court’s jurisdiction and punishing its officials while urging other countries to abandon it. One contests a ruling. The other can end up weakening the institution that produced it.
That is where the damage to American credibility begins. A legal order does not have to be perfectly consistent to matter, but it cannot survive for long if its most powerful defenders appear to want one standard for opponents and another for friends. After the Netanyahu and Gallant warrants, Josep Borrell, then the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said the decisions were binding on EU member states. Outside the West, the contradiction is even harder to ignore. Washington asks governments to uphold sovereignty, accountability, and international rules in one crisis, then attacks an institution applying those rules in another. That does not erase U.S. power, but it makes American appeals less persuasive.
A common reply is that international law has always followed power. Courts have no armies, and major states can often avoid consequences that weaker ones cannot. There is plenty of truth in that argument. Still, political protection has a way of expiring. Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998 on a Spanish extradition request. Former Chadian president Hissène Habré was eventually tried in Senegal and sentenced to life imprisonment. Slobodan Milošević was put on trial after he lost power, though he died before a verdict. The legal routes in those cases were different, but the lesson is similar: power can postpone accountability. It does not always cancel it.
The value of the ICC should therefore not be judged only by how many people it immediately puts behind bars. Warrants can change diplomatic calculations even when an arrest never happens. After the court issued a warrant for Vladimir Putin in 2023, he did not attend the BRICS summit in South Africa in person. Pretoria, as a member of the ICC, would otherwise have faced intense pressure over whether to arrest him. That episode was modest compared with a trial, but it showed that legal exposure can narrow a leader’s room for maneuver.
This matters even more because the international system around the United States is changing. Western governments once had far more influence over the institutions and language used to define international legitimacy. They still have enormous influence, but not the near-exclusive position they once enjoyed. South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice is one sign of the shift. Governments in the Global South are increasingly using the same legal institutions that Western states helped build, sometimes in ways Washington and its allies did not expect. The argument is no longer only about whether international law matters. It is also about who gets to interpret it.
That is why the effort to sideline the ICC may prove more costly than it looks. Washington can sanction officials, restrict travel, and encourage governments to leave the court. It may even succeed in making the institution weaker. But weakening a forum also means giving up some ability to shape what that forum becomes. Rules are not written once and then left alone; they are interpreted, challenged, and remade over time. A country that walks away whenever the outcome is inconvenient leaves more room for others to do that work.
America’s problem, then, is not really one arrest warrant. It is the gap between claiming leadership of a rules-based order and accepting the rules only when they produce comfortable results. Shielding an ally from immediate legal pressure may look like a win in Washington. The harder question is what happens when the next crisis requires the United States to persuade other governments that sovereignty, accountability, and legal restraint should apply even when compliance is costly.
The coming international order will not be shaped by aircraft carriers, GDP, and military budgets alone. Legitimacy will matter too, especially as more states compete over how global rules are read and enforced. The United States helped build a system that gave it unusual influence over that process. Its gamble now is that it can weaken parts of that system without weakening its own position inside it. That may turn out to be a much more expensive bet than Washington expects.
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The Rotten Stench of Elon Musk's Political Money
The mega-billionaire's promise to spend somewhere between $100 and $120 million on congressional races this year shouldn’t be viewed as a problem. It should be recognized as an opportunity.
Aug 03, 2026
Elon Musk will be spending $100 million to $120 million in at least eight states to help elect Republicans in November, according to The New York Times.
Musk’s spending is set to begin next month, targeting Senate races in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, and Ohio, and potentially North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas. Musk will also spend in House races in states including California, Wisconsin, and Washington.
The money won’t be spent only on TV advertising. Musk’s “America PAC” is lining up firms that focus on knocking on voters’ doors. Fake grassroots.
But Musk’s money shouldn’t be viewed as a problem. It’s an opportunity.
A Republican candidate who stinks of Musk must be presumed to be against average working Americans.
Recall that Musk spent millions of dollars on a pivotal election for Wisconsin’s highest court in April 2025. It pitted Musk’s candidate — Trump-endorsed former Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel — against progressive Dane County Judge Susan Crawford. The winner would determine the supermajority of the court.
Schimel lost, largely due to Musk’s support — which backfired. The public was outraged that the richest person in the world was spending some of his massive wealth on the election. They also recoiled at the wreckage Musk wrought at DOGE. And his unbridled racism.
In Crawford’s victory speech, she acknowledged the significance of Musk’s money to the outcome of the race. “As a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls, I never could have imagined that I’d be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin,” she said. “And we won.”
She described the election as a victory over an “unprecedented attack on our democracy, our fair elections and our Supreme Court,” adding “Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price. Our courts are not for sale.”
Musk’s support will backfire again this year, in race after race — if voters know about it.
So let’s make it a kind of smell test for any Republican that Musk and his “America PAC” are supporting. A Republican candidate who stinks of Musk must be presumed to be against average working Americans.
Keep your nose to the ground. If you get a whiff of Musk, alert your family, friends, neighbors, and associates. If they’re even slightly uncertain about whom to support, the Musk test should convince them.
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How a Manufactured War Scare Could Produce a $50 Million Insider Windfall
Advance knowledge of both a military threat and its cancellation could allow politically connected traders to profit from the oil market twice—first from the panic, then from its disappearance.
Aug 03, 2026
Military threats move markets before they move armies. Announce a massive strike against Iranian oil, military, and infrastructure sites, and traders will immediately begin pricing in damaged production, regional retaliation, interrupted shipping, higher insurance costs, and possible disruption of the Strait of Hormuz. No missile needs to be launched. The announcement itself can add a substantial geopolitical premium to every barrel of oil.
Cancel the attack a few days later, however, and much of that premium may disappear just as quickly. Oil prices fall as traders conclude that the threatened supply disruption will not occur.
For ordinary investors, this is an exceptionally dangerous sequence. They must guess whether the threat is credible, whether an attack will happen, how much damage it might cause, whether Iran will retaliate, and how long any disruption will last. But for someone possessing advance knowledge of both the threat and its prearranged cancellation, the same sequence could provide an extraordinary opportunity to profit from a government-created price movement in both directions.
Consider a hypothetical political-corruption scheme.
Before the threat is announced, politically connected insiders go long 1,000 crude-oil futures contracts at $75 per barrel. A standard crude-oil futures contract represents 1,000 barrels, so 1,000 contracts provide exposure to one million barrels of oil. At $75 per barrel, the position has a notional value of $75 million.
This hypothetical identifies a corruption risk that should not be dismissed merely because it does not resemble the traditional envelope of cash passed beneath a table.
The traders do not necessarily put up the entire $75 million. Futures are leveraged instruments. Depending on prevailing exchange requirements, broker rules, and market volatility, a position of that size might require roughly $9 million in initial collateral, although a broker could demand considerably more for such a concentrated and conspicuous trade.
Then comes the public announcement: a massive military strike is imminent.
Television networks display maps of Iranian oil facilities. Analysts speculate about retaliation. Commentators warn that the Strait of Hormuz could be closed. Traders who had bet on lower oil prices rush to cover their short positions, while momentum buyers pile into the market out of fear that oil will soon become still more expensive.
Suppose the price rises from $75 to $100 per barrel.
The insiders close their 1,000 long contracts. A $25 increase across one million barrels produces a gross profit of $25 million.
But they are not finished.
Knowing the military threat is scheduled to be withdrawn, they immediately reverse direction and sell short 1,000 contracts at $100. To the public, the crisis appears to be intensifying. To the insiders, the ending is already known.
A few days later, the attack is canceled. With the immediate threat to oil production receding, the geopolitical premium collapses and oil falls from $100 back to $75. The insiders buy back the 1,000 contracts they previously sold short, earning another $25 million.
The two trades produce a combined gross profit of approximately $50 million. Measured against the roughly $9 million initially posted as collateral, that is about a 556% gross return. Not bad.
That figure should not be confused with a risk-free return on an ordinary $9 million investment. Technically, the traders would still control positions with notional values ranging from $75 million to $100 million. Futures margin requirements might rise. Prices could temporarily move against them. A broker might require additional collateral. A position of 1,000 contracts could attract regulatory scrutiny, although that possibility could be alleviated.
Inside information would not make those risks literally disappear. It would, however, radically reduce the central uncertainty facing everyone else: that is, which direction the market will move after each announcement. Knowing both turning points would make the enormous notional exposure far less worrisome than it would be to an ordinary trader.
Who pays for the insiders’ profits?
During the first phase, traders who had previously sold oil short may be forced to buy back their contracts as prices rise. Those purchases can accelerate the spike and provide liquidity for insiders closing profitable long positions near the top.
During the second phase, the losses fall on investors who buy after hearing the military threat. These late buyers are not necessarily irrational. They are reacting to public information supplied by government officials and to the genuine possibility of war, damaged infrastructure, and interrupted oil supplies. But they do not know that the threat is scripted to disappear.
When the attack is canceled and oil falls, those buyers are left holding the bag. Their losses become the economic counterpart of the insiders’ second profit.
What appears to the public as an unfolding geopolitical emergency therefore appears to the insider as a price chart whose two principal turning points have been conveniently set.
This hypothetical does not establish that any particular official, relative, donor, associate, or political ally has executed such trades. Suspicion is not proof. A serious allegation would require trading records, beneficial-ownership information, communications, financial disclosures, and evidence connecting traders to those controlling the announcements. Examining such records could be discouraged.
What appears to the public as an unfolding geopolitical emergency therefore appears to the insider as a price chart whose two principal turning points have been conveniently set.
This hypothetical identifies a corruption risk that should not be dismissed merely because it does not resemble the traditional envelope of cash passed beneath a table.
Government officials possess the power to create market-moving information. Military threats, sanctions, tariff announcements, regulatory decisions, and abrupt policy reversals can generate billions of dollars in gains and losses within hours. When advance notice of those actions is shared selectively—or when public policy is manipulated for private profit—the government itself becomes the instrument of market manipulation.
That possibility demands safeguards: timely disclosure of officials’ financial interests, meaningful restrictions on trading by senior policymakers and their households, scrutiny of unusual commodity positions surrounding major announcements, preservation of relevant communications, and investigation of accounts whose beneficial owners may be concealed behind partnerships, trusts, or shell entities.
The central question is not whether a hypothetical insider could make money from a manufactured crisis. The arithmetic shows that the opportunity is obvious.
The question is whether anyone with access to the script could begin trading before the public learns how the drama will end.
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Who Will Govern Humanity's New Cognitive Infrastructure?
Because AI does not recognize national borders, its governance cannot remain confined within them.
Aug 02, 2026
Humanity faces no shortage of challenges. Wars continue to claim lives, climate change threatens the stability of our ecosystems, and growing economic inequality undermines social cohesion. Now another transformative force has entered the global stage: artificial intelligence.
Unlike previous technological revolutions, AI is not simply another tool. It has the potential to reshape economies, education, science, healthcare, communication, and political decision-making. Properly governed, it could become one of humanity’s greatest allies in addressing the crises we already face. Poorly governed, it could deepen inequality, intensify geopolitical rivalry, and create entirely new existential risks.
This is why governments, scientists, and international organizations are increasingly debating not only how AI should be developed, but who should govern it.
A remarkable convergence is emerging across very different parts of the world. Despite profound political and cultural differences, major international initiatives increasingly describe AI as a technology whose significance extends far beyond commercial innovation.
At the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi in February 2026, participating nations adopted the New Delhi Declaration on AI Impact, calling for human-centered, inclusive, and accessible artificial intelligence guided by the principle of Sarvajan Hitaya, Sarvajan Sukhaya—”Welfare for all, Happiness for all.”
Only months later, at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed an international AI governance framework based on four principles: openness and shared benefit; security and meaningful human control; inclusion through learning among civilizations; and solidarity through multilateral governance. China increasingly presents AI not merely as an industry, but as foundational infrastructure capable of shaping civilization itself.
A third initiative emerged from a very different direction. On July 16, more than 200 Nobel laureates, scientists, diplomats, and global leaders signed the Rome Declaration, calling simultaneously for a coordinated slowdown in the development of frontier AI and the verifiable elimination of nuclear weapons. Their concern is that humanity is approaching two technological frontiers whose interaction could prove catastrophic.
That concern was captured during the Rome conference, organized by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), the Global Nobel Assembly, and the Vatican. In an interview afterward, former IPPNW President Dr. Ira Helfand summarized the challenge in six words:”Don’t Let AI Get the Bomb.”
The slogan captures perhaps today’s most urgent AI governance challenge: preventing artificial intelligence from becoming integrated into nuclear command-and-control systems. Delegates warned that combining autonomous decision-making with nuclear weapons would dramatically increase the risk of accidental or unintended nuclear war.
The United States, meanwhile, has largely approached AI through three priorities: maintaining technological leadership, fostering commercial innovation, and strengthening national security. This strategy has fueled extraordinary investment and rapid technological progress, but it also raises an important question: Can competition among corporations and geopolitical rivals coexist with the international cooperation required to govern a technology that transcends national borders?
Taken together, these initiatives reveal something remarkable. India emphasizes human welfare, China stresses multilateral coordination, the Rome Declaration warns of existential risk, and the United States prioritizes innovation and strategic leadership. Although they differ substantially in emphasis, each recognizes that artificial intelligence has become too consequential to be treated as merely another commercial technology.
Yet none fully answers the central political question. If AI is becoming a global cognitive infrastructure, who should legitimately determine the rules under which it develops? Should they be negotiated primarily among governments? Set by technology companies? Driven by military priorities? Or should the people whose lives will be transformed by these systems have a meaningful voice in shaping them?
The economic trajectory of AI also remains uncertain. Hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into chips, data centers, and computing infrastructure, while predictions of rapid, large-scale job displacement remain largely speculative. Similar forecasts accompanied earlier technological revolutions—from the internet to autonomous vehicles—yet history suggests that technological transformation often unfolds more gradually, and in less predictable ways, than initial expectations.
History also reminds us that foundational technologies rarely develop along a single path. During the early internet era, proprietary systems appeared poised to dominate. Yet open-source software, especially Linux, ultimately became the backbone of much of the world’s digital infrastructure. AI may evolve similarly, with proprietary and open-source models coexisting and competing for influence.
The central question, therefore, is not simply who will build the most powerful AI, but who will establish the principles governing humanity’s emerging cognitive infrastructure.
Roads shape how people move. Electrical grids shape how societies generate and distribute energy. The internet transformed how humanity exchanges information. Artificial intelligence may become the infrastructure through which humanity increasingly learns, creates, communicates, and even makes collective decisions. If that is the case, the challenge before us is no longer merely technological. It is ethical, political, and civilizational.
Every major infrastructure eventually required public institutions, shared rules, and democratic accountability because its effects extended far beyond its original creators. A global cognitive infrastructure should be no different. Because AI does not recognize national borders, its governance cannot remain confined within them.
This may become humanity’s first truly global democratic challenge. Will the rules be written primarily by governments, military establishments, and technology corporations? Or will they emerge through meaningful participation by scientists, educators, workers, artists, civil society organizations, and citizens across every continent?
Just as previous generations fought to establish human rights, democratic institutions, and international law, ours may be called upon to establish the principles that govern intelligence itself. Those principles should rest on human dignity, transparency, shared knowledge, international cooperation, and a commitment to the well-being of all humanity.
The question is no longer simply how we regulate artificial intelligence. It is who will govern the cognitive infrastructure through which humanity increasingly exercises its collective intelligence. The answer will shape not only the future of AI, but the future of civilization itself.
This article was first published on Pressenza and is also available in Spanish.
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A FIFA World Cup and a Village's Stolen Dream
While the world celebrated football at its highest level during the World Cup, one small village has been left without the field that connected generations to the game.
Aug 02, 2026
In the middle of the global celebration of football, when stadiums are full, screens are glowing, and millions are watching the World Cup, a small Palestinian village near Bethlehem experienced something very different.
Battir lost its only football field.
For most of the world, football is entertainment. In Battir, it is something else entirely—it is space, identity, and a rare place where young people can breathe beyond the pressures of daily life.
The field was not a stadium. It had no grandstands, no giant screens, and no professional facilities. It was a simple community pitch. Yet for generations of children and young people in Battir, it meant everything. It was where they played after school, where friendships were built, where confidence grew, and where dreams quietly took shape.
Football, in its global form, is about glory, competition, and spectacle. But in places like Battir, it is about something more basic: the right to play, the right to gather, and the right to feel normal for a moment.
The field itself was not new. It had existed since the early 1980s and had served the village for more than four decades.
I grew up playing there.
One of my earliest memories is returning home covered in mud after a rainy afternoon match, exhausted but happy. Like many children around the world, I fell in love with football while watching my first FIFA World Cup in 1982, when Spain hosted the tournament. The game became part of my childhood, and the field became part of my life.
Football accompanied me through school, university, and adulthood. Between 2009 and 2016, while serving as secretary of Battir Sports Club, I helped organize annual Ramadan football tournaments on the same field. These competitions brought together local teams and became cherished community events. The field also welcomed visitors from abroad and served as a meeting point where sport connected people across cultures and backgrounds.
For many years, residents hoped to improve the field. In 2022, Battir Sports Club, Battir Municipality, and members of the local community launched a project to rehabilitate the existing facility. The goal was not to build a completely new football ground, but to upgrade a long-standing community space with artificial turf, lighting, changing rooms, and basic infrastructure. The vision was simple: to provide a safe and dignified place where both boys and girls could participate in sport.
For a village that had waited decades to improve its only football field, the project represented hope.
That hope came to an abrupt end on June 30, 2026, when Israeli authorities demolished the field following orders that halted rehabilitation works. What disappeared that day was not merely a construction project. It was a community space that had shaped the lives of generations.
Battir Football Field is demolished. (Photo by Mahmoud Al-Butmeh)
The demolition did not make international headlines. There were no cameras, no commentary panels, and no countdown clocks. But for the children and young people who used the field, the loss was immediate and deeply felt. A place once filled with movement, laughter, and possibility became empty ground.
In a place like Battir, there are few alternatives. There are no nearby facilities waiting to replace what was lost. When one space disappears, it is not easily replaced. It simply vanishes from everyday life.
The timing is difficult to ignore. While the world celebrated football at its highest level during the World Cup, one small village has been left without the field that connected generations to the game.
Football, in its global form, is about glory, competition, and spectacle. But in places like Battir, it is about something more basic: the right to play, the right to gather, and the right to feel normal for a moment.
What remains now is not only an empty field, but also a question that lingers in the community: Where do the children go next?
This is not just a story about a football field. It is a story about how everyday spaces shape childhood, how communities invest hope in shared places, and how quickly those places can disappear.
And it is a reminder that while the World Cup shows us football at its peak, there are places where the game survives only in memory—and in the hope that one day it might return.
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De-ICE Citizens Bank: A Model of a Successful Civil Resistance Campaign
The grassroots effort was a textbook example of sustained, targeted civil resistance that can undermine Trump administration policies; by chipping away at corporate supporters of programs like ICE, citizen activism can erode and stop these initiatives.
Aug 02, 2026
Just as a great loaf of bread requires the right ingredients to rise, a winning civil resistance campaign needs three essentials to rise up: a compelling vision, broad community engagement, and a spark for action.
The De-ICE Citizens Bank campaign had all these ingredients, which is why it succeeded in forcing Citizens Bank to stop financing prison company giants, CoreCivic and GEO Group, operating dozens of detention centers for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Rhode Island bank severed its ties in mid-July after months of protests and other targeted actions across the country.
Hundreds of rallies, faith-led actions, shareholder demands, billboard and flyover campaigns, and withering financial pressure—withdrawals totaling $380 million, with more still happening—created a tsunami of opposition the bank could not ignore.
It is a textbook example of sustained, targeted civil resistance that can undermine Trump administration policies. By chipping away at corporate supporters of programs like ICE, citizen activism can erode and stop these initiatives.
While Bank of America and a half-dozen other banks ended their relationships with private prison companies in 2019, Citizens strengthened its ties, providing more than $2.8 billion in loans and other credit to CoreCivic and GEO Group over a dozen years.
“No, Citizens Bank won’t credit you at all for its decision, but it is what it is,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said, during a 10-minute segment on the campaign win in late July. “Actions have consequences, including when you work hard, when you organize, and when you decide to just never give up.
"And then the day does come when you win.”
It Started With One Person
This civil resistance story began with a single person, a woman in Texas, taking a stand. She didn’t carry a protest sign or march alone. She built a website.
Horrified by ICE’s mass incarceration campaign early last year, research-nerd activist Laura Berlin, a mother of two teenagers, built a website, boycottcitizens.org, to expose Citizens Bank’s role.
While Bank of America and a half-dozen other banks ended their relationships with private prison companies in 2019, Citizens strengthened its ties, providing more than $2.8 billion in loans and other credit to CoreCivic and GEO Group over a dozen years.
Drawing on Securities and Exchange Commission filings and other documents, the website showed Citizen’s duplicity, loan-by-loan, year-by-year. Still, the website didn’t get much attention when it was launched 13 months ago, only a dozen or so views a day in the first few months.
That all changed in January when ICE’s aggressive crackdown sparked and exploded. Just as a dozen Northeast activists were organizing their first coordinated protest day against Citizens Ban—an effort of the new De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition—mother and poet Renee Good was gunned down January 7 by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.
Campaign interest and traffic on Berlin’s website took off. When Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse, was shot and killed 17 days later in the same city, momentum skyrocketed.
And It Kept Growing
On January 24, the campaign held three-dozen rallies in six states. By March, there were 70 protests in a dozen states. Three months later, 140 protests were organized nationwide, drawing in thousands of regular people angry about an immigration crackdown that has booked and detained more than 600,000 people, 66,000 of whom have been deported.
As protests swelled, coalition members brought new partners into the campaign. One brought in a key union group and activist students at Brown University. Others brought in faith groups. Dozens of local Indivisible groups also joined, including a Rightful Resistance group in New York City that specialized in billboard campaigns.
The Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO), a powerful faith group with deep historic ties to Citizens Bank, was an especially important partner.
The city’s pullout was a bit of a surprise, with the vote and initial withdrawal of $150 million happening in less than 24 hours. It was a clear sign that the campaign, which had swelled to 175 groups in 17 states, was now a movement.
In the early 2000s, GBIO teamed up with Citizens to offer a financial literacy program for its immigrant members around Boston. The bank also lowered fees for immigrants sending remittances to their families. “We were proud to bank with Citizens, and I was proud to be a member of the bank’s board of directors at that time,” wrote Rev. Ray Hammond, a key GBIO leader, in a recent column.
By winter 2026, the good vibes were over.
In early March, GBIO sent a letter to the bank requesting it cut financial ties with the prison companies. In April, Hammond and other shareholders confronted Citizens CEO Bruce Van Saun at the bank’s annual meeting in Providence. As Van Saun answered questions about reputation and legal risks, hundreds of protesters, young and old, sang and chanted loudly outside. They also pledged to withdraw their deposits if changes were not made.
The financial pressure campaign, "Not with Our Money, Citizens," came at a key moment. While rallies and billboards boosted awareness and sullied the bank’s reputation, the campaign now had a lever to harm the bank financially.
Within a few weeks, GBIO and the coalition had mobilized $20 million in withdrawal pledges by churches, synagogues, nonprofits, and individual customers angered by the bank’s role in bankrolling prisons. By May, GBIO had pulled $2 million of its deposits, while a similar faith organization in Ohio, the Greater Cleveland Congregations, was threatening to do the same.
Millions of withdrawals may sound like a lot, but it’s relatively small for a bank like Citizens, with $233 billion in assets. At weekly meetings, coalition members brainstormed how it could increase the financial bleeding—to turn those millions into hundreds of millions.
New Jersey Takes a Stand
The answer came in June and the spark came from New Jersey. After weeks of hunger strikes and protests at GEO Group’s Delaney Hall ICE prison in Newark, municipalities started fighting back. The first blow was Jersey City’s June 7 vote to close its accounts with Citizens and pull all $276 million of its deposits.
The city’s pullout was a bit of a surprise, with the vote and initial withdrawal of $150 million happening in less than 24 hours. It was a clear sign that the campaign, which had swelled to 175 groups in 17 states, was now a movement.
One month later, Montclair, New Jersey did the same—another $91 million in deposits out the door. And other communities, including Bloomfield and Hoboken, were looking to follow suit.
Three days after Montclair’s vote, Citizens Bank called it quits. With no public fanfare, it released a statement to a Boston Globe reporter saying, “Citizens has determined that it is now appropriate to exit the credit facilities for these clients.”
The bank called it a ‘business decision,” while repeatedly downplaying the role of activists.
We know better.
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How Living in a 'Digital First' World Has Made Our Lives Smaller
We are stuck in info-bureaucracies—just like real-life bureaucracies, only much more effective at giving us the runaround, wasting time, and conditioning us to accept the absurd as normal.
Aug 02, 2026
Drowning in my usual sea of online media saturation, I recently spotted an article in The Boston Globe that validated a long but increasingly less lonely quest against the perils of technocracy. It focused on a security safeguard we all know and love: two factor authentication and how it’s driving most of us bonkers:
How hard can it be to grab your phone, retrieve a six-digit code, and type it in—seemingly the simplest task in the world—to avoid, oh, having your bank account emptied, your identity stolen, or yourself rendered a kind of stateless person, adrift without access to your own life? Don’t get Thomas Lee, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital physician, started. “Two-factor authentication is sapping my will to live,” he said. Or litigator Kara Thorvaldsen. “It’s the bane of my existence,” she said. “Every time my husband tries to log into NESN, it somehow requires me to get a code and unlock something with Face ID, etc., etc., ad nauseam.” Or Kim Smith, a playwright, an actor, and an empty nester. “Sometimes the only reason I hear from my [youngest] daughter is when she needs the code that’s been sent to my phone,” she said. As porch pirate thefts mount, residents feel besieged. As two-factor—or, even worse, multifactor—authentication becomes inescapable, it’s safe to say that somewhere in America, a spouse is shouting from another room, “Did you get my code?” An employee can’t get into his work platform because he left his phone at the gym, or thinks he did. And an adult child is trying to help her cognitively faltering parents pay a bill, but can’t, for lack of that darn code.
Not a pretty picture but one that we all know all too well. For some reason, it got me thinking about T.S Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock," a masterwork. In one of the more memorable lines, a disillusioned elderly man complains to himself muttering: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” He was basically lamenting that he has let himself be lulled into a diminutive humdrum existence—characterized by small and inconsequential actions making his own narrow life feel smaller and smaller.
This line keeps surfacing in my ruminations about our culture’s slow steady march into some kind of technocratic dystopia—a digital panopticon where we all peck our way through life… where every action, gesture, word, deed, or genetic footprint is recorded and—a more alarming trend of late—presumably watched. In a curious inversion, this humdrum and plodding digital existence has turned out to be the precise opposite of the “machines of loving grace” meme introduced decades ago by another poet, Richard Brautigan—one often quoted by the techno-utopians who are now in charge of… well… almost everything it seems. Then I came across a similar lament from Alex Ross writing in The New Yorker:
You wake up and brace yourself for the barrage of toxic gibberish that constitutes the modern public sphere. Your email is overrun with spam, scams, and smut. There are voice mails from no one about nothing… Publications from the Times on down employ clickbait headlines that treat you like a starving rat in a Pavlovian experiment. AI systems simulate the experience of talking to an arrogant 10-year-old boy who knows far less than he thinks he does. When pressed, the chatbots admit that they cannot “naturally understand human morality, dignity, culture, or meaning.” It all adds up to a continuous discursive tinnitus—a buzz of random, fake, stupid, sinister chatter that nobody wants and nobody can stop.
Living our collective cultural experience by “measuring our life in coffee spoons” seems to resonate perfectly. We seem to be in some kind of number punching purgatory like the four sad corporate drones struggling to reclaim their humanity in the popular TV series Severance. We click away and are hypnotized by our screens. We overdose on mandatory cuteness courtesy of goofy cartoonish emojis and robot figures that some programmer seems to think is going to brighten our day.
Red Lights and Info-bureaucracies
As a thought experiment, I started musing about how much of my own time is frittered away on digital trivia. Elaborate verification processes just to use basic services. Endlessly punching numbers and codes into phones and computers and often reaching a dead end. The constant use of codes just to access our own stuff as if in some kind of military intelligence operation. Forcing us to constantly look over our shoulder about being hacked. (Is my life savings still there today?) Frequent visits to customer service hell which are only going to get worse as more and more AI chatbots get added to the mix by clueless companies. (Why is it that many popular companies can’t seem to figure out that customer service is the heart of their business?) Waiting on infinite hold because we might refuse to talk to some cartoon-like chatbot that’s clueless about dealing with anything with the slightest bit of complexity. (Wasn’t AI supposed to be “smart”? Or do companies just like to use “dumb AI” when it suits their purpose?)
I call the framework for these experiential trips to digital purgatory info-bureaucracies. They’re like real-life bureaucracies—only much more effective at giving us the runaround, wasting time, and conditioning us to accept the absurd as normal like the poor souls in Terry Gilliam’s strange but prescient movie Brazil. So here we are frittering away our already scarce and valuable time on these mindless digital chores when we could be doing things that enrich and sustain our lives.
Now that we’re rapidly moving to an “AI first” world, we won’t even be able to navigate these info-bureaucracies ourselves. Unfortunately, this will probably get worse before it gets better. Tech-enamored companies are increasingly using AI agents for customer service and the results are horrendous. Being able to speak to a human agent means mastering different workarounds for every 800 number you might have to call. And we can easily spend hours of our day on hold listening to someone else’s mind-numbing idea of snazzy music.
I believe that—right now—we’re at a unique crossroads in history where we have a window of opportunity to shape the future and our quality of life. But this may involve some hard choices.
Years ago, studies were done to determine how much time Americans spent waiting for red lights. According to some researchers, people in the US spend about 300 hours a year driving, a significant portion of which is spent waiting for traffic lights. One research organization calculated that this “comes up to a whopping four months of your life if you drive seven days a week for 50 years.”
Of course, arguably, this is simply one of the inconveniences we tolerate as expected time wasted in the complicated business of contemporary living. But I couldn’t help but think how much of our valuable quality time we now waste on the continual care and feeding of our Lilliputian-like digital lives. And how much already scarce quality time is also being spent on meaningless tasks plodding through digital labyrinths designed to increase corporate profit; unburden huge corporations from the anguish of having to hire more customer-service staff; and save them time while, of course, wasting ours.
More often than not, the AI agents we encounter turn out to be quite stupid by any human metric. I can assure you from years of working in high tech that companies unquestionably have the technical ability to provide much more user-friendly systems. But this isolation from human agents is intentional and serves their own interests. Many customers just give up trying to fix order problems and take a financial hit out of frustration. And these are vital systems of daily life. We’re talking about essential services such as banking, credit card transactions, paying taxes, and other functions. And once you’re in the tech soup, you’re forced to stay there if the matter is important enough.
Henry David Thoreau admonished us to “simplify, simplify.” But how can we accomplish this as the digital maze envelops us? I believe that—right now—we’re at a unique crossroads in history where we have a window of opportunity to shape the future and our quality of life. But this may involve some hard choices. I believe that Americans are intuiting this, and the AI data center pushback is a healthy and hopeful expression of this.
Another great American poet, Wendell Berry, captured it well. In “Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition,” Berry said: “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” It seems clear that this is the unavoidable existential choice we now face. We have to decide what kind of world we want to live in and then summon all the agency we can muster to bring it about.
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USDA Agribusiness Integration With Israel Subsidizes Settler Expansionism
While Congress advances the US-Israeli military integration plan, Israel and the US attempt to expand their “soft power” through agritechnology development across the region.
Aug 02, 2026
Congress’ proposed National Defense Authorization Act’s Section 219 ‘US-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative’ would require the countries to expand intelligence sharing and grow joint weapons research and production, including artificial intelligence surveillance, lethal drones, arms, tanks, and munitions. This comes as Israel’s military decimation of Gaza, apartheid rule over the West Bank, and occupation of southern Lebanon have triggered opposition across the world. Meanwhile, a more subtle, parallel violence grows in the form of US-funded Israeli agricultural occupation of Palestinian lands. This partnership expands Israel’s regional control spatially and financially, with US backing, but with little public knowledge.
Three years into the deliberate starvation of Gaza, the US and Israel have expanded and entrenched their longstanding agricultural cooperation through the US-Israeli Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund (BARD-ISUS). Despite global allegations of genocide against Palestine, weaponizing hunger and even of food aid itself, BARD-ISUS just approved $13.2M US for research and development of Israeli agritech on Palestinian lands.
Established in 1978 by the US and Israeli governments, BARD-ISUS has granted a total of nearly $430 million USD (as of 2024) to over 1,700 projects. In the US, the USDA Agricultural Research Service is on 19% of projects and top universities include University of California Davis (11% of projects); Cornell University (7%); and University of Florida (5%). Universities or public agencies in 48 US states (all except Alaska and North Dakota) have hosted hundreds of BARD-ISUS grants over decades. Nearly $84 million USD has gone to research grants partnering with California land grant institutions alone. The US Farm Bill has allocated additional funds to BARD-ISUS to go directly to agritech research, but also to fund Israeli postdoctoral fellows to be placed at US universities and Israeli graduate students to conduct research with US teams.
Meanwhile, the House of Representatives version of the Farm Bill (HR 7567—Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026), tucks in a proposed expansion of BARD to signatories of the Abraham Accords—a 2020 mechanism by which the Trump regime pressures regional countries to normalize relations with Israel, in this case with additional promises for hundreds of millions of dollars of agritech transfer. The House passed another bipartisan amendment (H.R.7587 United States-Israel Agriculture Cooperation Improvement and Expansion Act) reiterating the expansion of BARD to Abraham Accord signatories, which also fast tracks commercialization of ag tech research in and with Israeli institutions and companies, while expanding the overall budget of BARD to $12M each year until 2030. The US Senate Committee on Agriculture has approved the extension of BARD-ISUS funding until 2031, with an allocation of $20 million per year ($80 million overall), atop the lucrative annual proceedings BARD receives from its $110 million endowment. Tellingly, as of 2020, BARD funding can now go to Israeli agricultural research projects in the West Bank’s Area C and the occupied Golan Heights.
The funding increase to BARD-ISUS and expansion of eligibility to Abraham Accords nations indicate a coercion of regional powers to normalize relations with Israel at a time of mass popular support for Palestinian sovereignty.
While BARD research appears at first glance to be apolitical “basic science” efforts to “improve crop productivity and resilience,” their website contains no mention of Palestine, or even euphemistic mentions of conflicts over land in the region. The well-funded BARD-ISUS has “generated a multitude of agricultural innovations, practices, and patents, impacting economies, industries, academia, and human health in both countries and beyond, with a high return on investment”—a claim that erases Palestinian land and agriculture, and distracts from the violence of settler occupation and genocide.
This year’s BARD grants were the “the highest funding amount awarded in the last 20 years,” indicating an entrenchment of US and Israeli academia and agrobiotech industries. The domestic relevance for this BARD expansion becomes acute amid the Farm Bill’s deference to the 2025 HR 1’s $187 Billion cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Even atop the ongoing deprivations in Gaza, BARD expansion comes as millions of people in the US in need are being kicked off SNAP, USDA employees are facing mass layoffs, and US farmers are reeling from the impacts that US and Israel’s attacks on Iran have had on fertilizers and fuel prices. Increasing funding for Israeli ag tech redirects resources away from urgent domestic agrifood needs.
The BARD-ISUS expansion also comes at a time when Israel and the US rapidly expand their targeting and destruction of not just Palestinian food systems and agricultural production, but rural and agrarian communities across Southwest Asia, in what Paul Kohlbry has termed “agrarian annihilation.” Israel continues to target Palestinian and Lebanese farmers and food systems, from the deliberate starvation of Gaza documented by international law and global civil society to the destruction of farms and waterways in the Occupied West Bank and now southern Lebanon. Israeli forces, funded by the US, continue to attack Palestinian villages, destroy agricultural lands, capture waterways, and kill farmers and pastoralists throughout the West Bank—with settler attacks hitting an “all-time high” in July 2026 according to the United Nations. The West Bank’s Jordan Valley and South Hebron Hills have long endured Israeli settlements and violence—all of which have proliferated in recent years and especially in recent months. In the Jordan Valley, where an estimated 65,000 Palestinians farm some of the most fertile land in the West Bank, B’Tselem has recorded repeated demolitions of Palestinian water cisterns—structures that families build to collect rainwater because they are legally barred from connecting to piped water networks.
The expansion of USDA-funded agritechnologies—and BARD pressure for corporate commercialization—undermines the viability of Palestinian and Lebanese food security and food sovereignty; unchecked, it jeopardizes the long-term stability and viability of rural communities in the region who are increasingly displaced with these US-subsidized high-tech ag research projects. Rather than establish accountability for Israeli forces’ years of deliberate famine in Gaza, such funding subsidizes more land dispossession and obscures the well-documented starvation of Palestine with claims of agribiotechnology research for Global Food Security. BARD-ISUS just launched a new Food Security Technology Accelerator to “support collaborative R&D projects between Israeli and American agritech researchers and corporations, so as to “foster innovation in food security.” How can the countries responsible for massive food insecurity and famine across the region claim to be able to “foster food security”?
While Congress advances the US-Israeli military integration plan, Israel and the US attempt to expand their “soft power” through agritechnology development across the region. The funding increase to BARD-ISUS and expansion of eligibility to Abraham Accords nations indicate a coercion of regional powers to normalize relations with Israel at a time of mass popular support for Palestinian sovereignty. This would deploy more USDA funds to agritech development in countries willing to support an Israeli regime perpetrating genocide in Palestine, invading Lebanon, and initiating a war with Iran. In short, this USDA multimillion dollar agribusiness integration with Israel subsidizes expansionism and impunity—further undermining any authentic peace in the region.
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