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Sanctions Against Israel Are Long Overdue
If Netanyahu’s war machine is not stopped, the annihilation of the Palestinian people will continue, major parts of the Gaza Strip will be annexed with a plan for Jewish resettlement, and the annexation of the West Bank will be finalized.
Aug 02, 2025
The use of sanctions to coerce states to change policy and behavior has a long history, dating back to antiquity. In 432 BC, the Athenian statesman Pericles issued the “Megarian Decree,” which banned merchants of Megara from accessing harbors and marketplaces in the Athenian empire. In the modern times, economic sanctions took primarily the form of naval blockades. The first naval blockade is believed to have been “declared by the Dutch in 1584.” In the 19th century, pacific blockades became a common strategy of powerful European states, with the aim being to weaken the economy of the enemy. In the early 20th century, the League of Nations used sanctions to compel aggressors to abandon the resort to arms, as it did in the case of Italy in order to discontinue that country’s aggression against Ethiopia.
However, since the end of World War II, it has been primarily the United States that has been resorting to sanctions in order to punish nations or non-state actors for pursuing policies or engaging in actions that pose a challenge to its guest for global dominance. The U.S. embargo against Cuba, which has endured for over 60 years and touches every aspect of Cuban life, stands out as the longest sanctions regime in modern history even though it is illegal and has been denounced by the United Nations General Assembly over 30 times. Only Israel sides with the U.S. for the continuation of the economic, commercial, and financial embargo on Cuba.
Because of its unique relationship with the global hegemon, Israel is one country that has escaped comprehensive sanctions against it in spite of what Amnesty International has called its “ruthless policies of land confiscation, illegal settlement and dispossession,” coupled with large-scale massacres and accusations of being an apartheid state that is now committing genocidal acts in Gaza. The time, however, has come for the international community to take strong measures against the far-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and impose “crippling sanctions” on the Israeli economy and thus on its war machine.
Such course of action is long overdue, but it is gaining traction across the globe, even inside Israel. The Hague Group, a group of nations from the Global South, has not only decried Israel’s actions in Gaza but called on all states on July 16 following a two-day summit in Bogotá, which brought together representatives from over 30 states, to impose a series of sanctions against Israel in order to stop the genocide and apartheid. Brazil has already moved forward with imposing forceful sanctions against Israel, which include exports of military material. Brazil’s foreign minister delivered a powerful speech at a high-level United Nations conference on Palestine on July 28 in which he said that his country “will not tolerate Israeli impunity.” High-profile Israeli figures have also urged “crippling sanctions” on Israel over its starvation-driven campaign in Gaza.
The tide is indeed turning. The West’s shameful silence on Gaza for the past 21 or so months is coming to an end.
Very belatedly, but Europe is also losing patience with Israel. Several European countries, which include Spain, Ireland, Slovenia, and lately Sweden, are calling for the suspension of the E.U.-Israel Association Agreement in order to stop the genocide. More than 80 British Members of Parliament and Lords have issued a call for the U.K. government to impose widespread sanctions on Israel. Fifty-eight former ambassadors of the European Union have lambasted the E.U. for its “complicity” over its silence on Israeli genocide and urged all European leaders and government to take immediate measures to end “atrocity crimes against the Palestinian people—above all in Gaza, but also in the occupied West Bank.”
Indeed, in their letter, the 58 former E.U. envoys went to great lengths not only to highlight Israel’s crimes in Gaza but also to underscore the vile plan of the far-right Israeli government for annexation of the occupied West Bank. They wrote:
…Meanwhile, in the West Bank, violent Israeli settlers, with full protection by the Israeli military, have waged a campaign of terror against Palestinian communities. Homes are torched, inhabitants are murdered, families expelled, water sources poisoned, herding animals stolen, olive groves destroyed, and land annexed in violation of international law. The perpetrators who act with impunity are armed and encouraged by state officials. These settlers are not rogue actors—they are the front-line agents of a government-driven agenda to annex and ethnically cleanse Palestinian land.
The tide is indeed turning. The West’s shameful silence on Gaza for the past 21 or so months is coming to an end. In a first, the European Commission recommended the suspension of Israel’s access to the E.U.’s research and innovation fund over the apocalyptic situation in Gaza, but Germany and Italy blocked the proposal.
In the U.S., of course, the situation remains very dismal. The Trump administration is sanctioning individuals who criticize Israel and call for economic sanctions against its key ally, such as Francesca Paola Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, and scolds those European governments that are preparing to recognize a Palestinian state. And the Senate has just rejected a resolution introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to block arms sales to Israel over its destruction of Gaza. Yet, a record number of Democrats voted in support of Sander’s resolution to block U.S. military sales to Israel, while polls show that U.S. public support for Israel’s actions in Gaza has dropped to a new low.
Pending on one’s philosophical perspective on the fundamental nature of reality, the situation on starving and besieged Gaza with regard to the urgent need of imposing “crippling sanctions” on Israel, which Netanyahu and his far-right government has turned into an autocracy, a global pariah, and an outright rogue state, is either a glass-half-full or a glass-half-empty. Regardless, the point is that if Netanyahu’s war machine is not stopped, the annihilation of the Palestinian people will continue, major parts of the Gaza Strip will be annexed with a plan for Jewish resettlement, and the annexation of the West Bank will be finalized.
“Denial” about what is happening in Gaza may be “legitimate” in Israel, as the iconic Israeli journalist Gideon Levy recently put it, but should be seen as a totally intolerable situation for every government across the globe that professes to respect human rights and claims not to tolerate barbarity in our own age, even though we know fully well that what guides state policies are rarely moral considerations. Putting an end to Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank is first and foremost about stopping Israeli killings of Palestinians but is also about restoring human dignity and human decency for our entire species.
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Deluded Don’s Climate Con
Donald Trump is using his bully pulpit to foist fossil fuels on the U.S. and on the world, but his efforts may backfire.
Jul 31, 2025
When I was a cub reporter at the New Yorker in the early 1980s, New York City was actually a somewhat seedy and dangerous (if fascinating) place (sort of fitting the image currently assigned it by MAGA ideologues who have ignored its almost complete makeover into a remarkably safe enclave). In those days, anyone wandering the Times Square neighborhood where I worked could count on seeing a three-card monte game on every block, with fast-talking card sharps hustling the tourists. It wasn’t very sophisticated, but it must have worked because they were out there every day.
The grift playing out this week in the federal government around climate is no more complicated, but it too relies on speed and distraction. On the first day of his term, U.S. President Donald Trump set up the con by asking the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to evaluate its 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions were dangerous. Yesterday, EPA czar and former failed gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin dutifully made his long-awaited announcement: Nothing to fear from carbon dioxide, methane, and the other warming gases.
“Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said when he first announced the idea. “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S., and more.”
Trump didn’t really need to do this in order to stop working on the climate crisis—he’s done that already. The point here is to try and make that decision permanent, so that some future administration can’t work on climate either, without going through the long and bureaucratic process of once again finding that the most dangerous thing on the Earth is in fact dangerous.
The problem with this simple one-two punch from Trump and Zeldin is that someone will challenge it in court as soon as it becomes official. “If EPA finalizes this illegal and cynical approach, we will see them in court,” said Christy Goldufss of the Natural Resources Defense Council. And they’ll have an argument, since—well, floods, fires, smoke, storms. I mean, if carbon dioxide was dangerous in 2009, that’s a hell of a lot more obvious 16 years later. The Supreme Court upheld the idea that CO2 was dangerous in 2007—here’s how Justice John Paul Stevens began that opinion:
A well-documented rise in global temperatures has coincided with a significant increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Respected scientists believe the two trends are related. For when carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, it acts like the ceiling of a greenhouse, trapping solar energy and retarding the escape of reflected heat. It is therefore a species—the most important species—of a “greenhouse gas.”
But that was a different, and non-corrupted, Supreme Court. John Roberts wrote the dissent, and he’s doubtless eager to do with climate change what he’s already done with abortion. But that would be easier if they had some “well-respected experts” to say that there’s not any trouble—stage three of this grift. It’s true that there aren’t any well-respected experts that believe that, but the White House has hired several aged contrarians who have maintained for decades that global warming is not a problem, even as the temperature (and the damage) soared. And yesterday they released a new report that reads more or less like a Wall Street Journal op-ed. In it they cherry pick data, turn to old and long-debunked studies, and in general set up a group of strawmen so absurd that one almost has to grin in admiration. Actual climate scientists were lining up to say their papers had been misquoted, but all you needed was a modicum of knowledge to see how stupid the whole enterprise was. Just as an example, our contrarians hit the old talking point that CO2 is plant food—indeed, “below 180 ppm [parts per million], the growth rates of many C3 species are reduced 40-60% relative to 350 ppm (Gerhart and Ward 2010) and growth has stopped altogether under experimental conditions of 60-140 ppm CO2.” Great point except that there is no one calling for, and no way, to get CO2 levels anywhere near that low. I led a large-scale effort to remind people that anything above 350 ppm is too high, and that was so successful that we’re now at 420 ppm and climbing. Too little carbon dioxide is a problem for the planet in the way that too little arrogance is a problem for the president
And yet, when it finally reaches the court, they will doubtless cite this entirely cynical and bad-faith document to buttress the case that the EPA should be allowed to stop paying attention to carbon dioxide. As I said, it’s a pretty easy to follow swindle, but they count on the fact that most people won’t. Butter won’t melt in their mouths—as Energy Secretary (and former fracking executive) Chris Wright said in his foreword to the new report:
I chose the [authors] for their rigor, honesty, and willingness to elevate the debate. I exerted no control over their conclusions. What you’ll read are their words, drawn from the best available data and scientific assessments. I’ve reviewed the report carefully, and I believe it faithfully represents the state of climate science today.
Every word of that is nonsense, but it doesn’t matter—because it’s an official document on the right letterhead it will do the trick. This is precisely what science looks like when it’s perverted away from the search for truth. It’s disgusting.
Still, there’s another grift also underway this week, and this one that may work the other way and do the world some good. The president announced his new trade deal with the European Union, which calls for 15% tariffs—but it’s sweetened by the European promise to buy $750 billion worth of American natural gas in the next three years. Trump has essentially been using the tariff process as a shakedown, a way to repay his Big Oil cronies for their hundreds of millions in support: it’s pretty much exactly like a mob protection racket, where you buy from the guy you’re told to or you get a rock through the window. The White House quickly put out a list of thank yous, including one from the American Petroleum Institute: “We welcome POTUS’ announcement of a U.S.-E.U. trade framework that will help solidify America’s role as Europe’s leading source of affordable, reliable and secure energy.”
And yet, as Reuters first noted and then many others also calculated, the numbers are clearly nonsense. First, the E.U. actually doesn’t buy any energy itself, and it can’t tell its member states what to purchase; in fact, even those member states usually rely on private companies to buy stuff. Second, it’s physically impossible to imagine the U.S. selling Europe $250 billion worth of natural gas a year. As Tim McDonnell wrote at Semafor:
Total U.S. energy exports to the world were worth $318 billion last year, of which about $74.4 billion went to the E.U., according to Rystad Energy. So to meet the target, the E.U. would need to more than triple its purchases of U.S. fossil fuels—and the U.S. would need to stop selling them to almost anyone else.
“These numbers make no sense,” said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a researcher specializing in European gas markets at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
The biggest reason it won’t happen, though, is that Europe is quickly switching to renewable energy. As Bill Farren-Price, head of gas research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, explained to the Financial Times:
“European gas demand is soft, and energy prices are falling. In any case, it is private companies not states that contract for energy imports,” he said. “Like it or not, in Europe the windmills are winning.”
Trump will doubtless coerce some countries into buying more liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the short run, and that will do damage. Global Venture announced Tuesday that they’d found the financing for the massive Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2) export terminal, which has been opposed by both climate scientists and environmental justice activists. As Louisiana’s Roishetta Ozane said Tuesday:
The CP2 LNG facility is an assault on everything I hold dear. It’s a direct threat to the health and safety of my community and an assault on the livelihoods of our fishermen and shrimpers.
I’ve seen my kids struggle with asthma, eczema, headaches, and other illnesses that result from the pollution petrochemical and LNG plants dump into my community. I won’t stop opposing this project in every way I can, because my children—and everyone’s children—deserve to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live in a healthy environment. I refuse to let Venture Global turn my community into a sacrifice zone for the sake of its profits.
But my guess is that such facilities won’t be pumping for as many decades as their investors imagine. Europe pivoted hard to renewables because Russian President Vladimir Putin proved an unstable supplier of natural gas; Trump’s America is hardly more reliable, since the president has made it clear he’ll tear up any agreement on a whim. Any rational nation will be making the obvious calculation: “I may not have gas of my own, but I’ve got wind and sun and they’re cheap. I’d rather rely on the wind than the windbag.”
Trump’s a conman, but he’s also a mark.
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Netherlands Bans Two Israeli Cabinet Ministers Who 'Called for Ethnic Cleansing' in Gaza
As mass starvation in Gaza reaches horrific new levels, European governments are attempting to pressure Israel to stop blocking humanitarian aid.
Jul 29, 2025
As Israel's starvation campaign in Gaza accelerates, the Netherlands has banned two far-right Israeli ministers from entering the country after they "repeatedly incited violence against the Palestinian population," and "called for ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip."
The officials—National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—are both members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's governing coalition, and they have called for Palestinians to be forced out of Gaza in order to make room for Israeli settlers.
In a letter sent to Dutch lawmakers Monday evening, Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp declared the two ministers "persona non grata," adding that "the war in Gaza must stop."
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reports that one in three people in Gaza is going multiple days at a time without eating. Meanwhile, acute malnutrition rates have quadrupled over the past month to the point where nearly 1 in 5 children is at risk of death from hunger.
"People are starving not because food is unavailable, but because access is blocked, local agrifood systems have collapsed, and families can no longer sustain even the most basic livelihoods," said Qu Dongyu, the director-general of the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Israel said it allowed 120 aid trucks to enter the strip on Sunday. But according to U.N. aid chief Tom Fletcher, that is "a drop in the ocean" compared to what the population needs to survive.
As starvation in Gaza approached what a U.N.-backed report described Monday as the "worst case scenario," Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have doubled down on calls for maximum torment.
After Netanyahu announced that Israel would allow a meager trickle of aid into the strip following international outcry, Ben-Gvir described Netanyahu as "morally bankrupt" for allowing any food into the strip.
"I think at this stage, the only thing you should be sending to Gaza is shells," Ben-Gvir said. "To bomb, conquer, encourage emigration, and win the war."
Last week, at a conference in the Israeli parliament with far-right Jewish settlers, Smotrich discussed plans "to relocate Gazans to other countries," which he said "will serve as a means of facilitating the settlement of the strip" by Jewish Israelis.
In May, Smotrich said, "Within a few months, we will be able to declare that we have won. Gaza will be totally destroyed," and spoke of "concentrating" its civilians in preparation for their mass exodus from the strip.
"They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places," he added.
The Netherlands is not the first country to attempt to punish the far-right ministers.
Earlier this month, Slovenia became the first nation to ban Smotrich and Ben-Gvir from entry, citing their incitement of "extreme violence and serious violations of the human rights of Palestinians" with "their genocidal statements."
The United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Norway have also imposed financial sanctions on the two men.
On Tuesday, the European Commission proposed partially suspending Israel from the $100 million Horizon research program, citing the Gaza famine.
Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof said that unless Israel complies with agreements to allow humanitarian aid access, he would support banning Israel from the prestigious research program and potentially take other "national measures to increase the pressure."
"The government's goal is crystal clear," Schoof said. "The people of Gaza must be given immediate, unfettered, safe access to humanitarian aid."
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