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Israel: The Country Whose Actions Never Represent Itself
As a country that invests heavily in public relations and presenting itself in a positive light, Israel often claims its representation lies in anything but its own actions.
May 22, 2026
On Wednesday, Israel’s Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, publicly shared videos of the mistreatment of the activists of the Global Sumud Flotilla, illegally intercepted by Israeli forces earlier this week in international waters, including in broad daylight.
In addition to condemnation by representatives of several countries, Ben Gvir also faced internal criticism. Israel’s Prime Minister himself, Benjamin Netanyahu, expressed his disapproval by saying that “[t]he way that Minister Ben-Gvir dealt with the flotilla activists is not in line with Israel's values and norms.”
This is where I invite you to pause the unfolding story. Let’s put what we are seeing in other words: Israel’s Prime Minister, who has an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity, is telling one of his ministers that his treatment of illegally captured activists doesn’t match Israel’s values and norms. Netanyahu says that after congratulating the Israeli army for intercepting the flotilla just days ago. According to him, this kind of abuse is not what Israel is about; Ben-Gvir, his own minister, should not form our image of Israel.
A question comes to mind: If it is not his own government official's, whose actions, according to Netanyahu himself, should we consider as we form an image of Israel’s values and norms?
For the ones willing to listen, Israel’s actions have spoken louder than any of its hasbara statements and have represented its values and norms very clearly.
Could it be when the Israeli soldiers continuously brag about their looting in Gaza on social media, when armed settlers—protected by the Israeli army—increasingly torch Palestinian houses in the West Bank, or when “Death to Arabs!” is being shouted with pride by the marchers on Jerusalem Day each year?
Would any state policy exemplify those values and norms? Like what we can read in the multiple reports describing systematic torture and sexual violence in Israeli detention (reports by the United Nations, B’Tselem, and Amnesty International)? And if someone argues that the Israeli government is not in fact showing what has become normalized through this specific state policy, it is difficult not to wonder what its values and norms have become when the detention of prison guards, caught brutally sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee on camera, is protested by fellow Israelis, when they are welcomed to Israel TV stations, and finally acquitted of any crime?
This is what this story illustrates: While Israel claims to represent many (for example, the global Jewish community), conveniently, no one seems able to represent Israel itself. Because if official state policies, military instructions and actions, public demonstrations, and the conduct of prison guards supported by the people do not represent Israel’s values and norms, the notion of Israel’s representation has become nothing more than what we find in political dystopias: just words we are supposed to accept.
The words become both the representation and the represented: The world’s most moral army is so because that is how it describes itself; there is no forced starvation because those responsible deny it; the abuse of the Global Sumud Flotilla crew is an exception because the war criminal in charge says he does not approve of it.
This is how simple Israel’s hasbara has become. And if it purely relies on the credulousness of its audience, who is left in that audience by now?
It is clear to see that this Orwellian reality is cracking. US citizens’ support for Israel is at an all-time low. The petition to suspend European Union-Israeli trade reached over a million signatures. Even something as seemingly unshakable as Europe’s fascination with Eurovision saw five countries and many viewers boycott the show due to Israel’s participation. The Government Pension Fund of Norway, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, divested from 11 companies, including Israeli banks, because of Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank. For the ones willing to listen, Israel’s actions have spoken louder than any of its hasbara statements and have represented its values and norms very clearly.
Ultimately, what Netanyahu’s comment shows is a complete disconnect from reality. And perhaps that is the ultimate representation of how Israel and its supporters are left to operate.
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Trump Goes on a Global Killing Spree Then Insults His Victims
“It’s filthy dirty, disgusting dirty,” Trump said of Somalia, but in truth, that’s a more apt description for the soul of the country that exports slaughter, year after year, and is led by a man who revels in it.
May 22, 2026
“It’s got no anything,” President Donald Trump said of Somalia in a recent xenophobic rant. “All they do is run around shooting each other.”
As is true of so much with this administration, every accusation is also a confession.
US troops have been shooting Somalis since the early 1990s, after lame duck President George H. W. Bush launched an ostensibly humanitarian intervention there that would be embraced by his successor, Bill Clinton. By June 1993, US and United Nations troops had begun attacking various targets in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, linked to warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who had helped overthrow dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.
The next month, in a major escalation, US helicopter gunships attacked a house in that city where a group of Somali clan leaders was meeting. The International Committee of the Red Cross said 54 people were killed and 161 wounded. Aidid claimed that 73 Somalis had died, including women and children, and more than 200 had been wounded. US forces suffered no casualties whatsoever.
Less than a year and a half into Trump’s second term, the US has already killed more than 2,000 civilians from Latin America to the Middle East and Africa.
And it wasn’t long before—in the early 2000s, under Bush’s son, George W., as part of what became known as the Global War on Terror—American troops began slaughtering Somalis again. In addition to major conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush, the younger, launched early drone wars from Pakistan to Yemen, including in Somalia. His successor, President Barack Obama, upped the Forever War ante, becoming an assassin-in-chief in Somalia and beyond. Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, continued the drone war there, too, when he entered the White House.
However, for all those years of slaughter in Somalia, no American president has ever attacked Somalis with the persistence and at the rate of President Donald J. Trump, especially in his second term in office.
The second Bush administration conducted 11 airstrikes in Somalia, killing as many as 144 people—including possibly 55 civilians, according to the think tank New America. Obama presided over 48 strikes during his eight years in office that killed as many as 553 people. Trump’s first term saw a massive escalation in such drone strikes. Over his first four years, Trump carried out 219 attacks, a 271% increase over the 16 years of the George W. Bush and Obama presidencies. But even that spike has paled in comparison to the relentless rate of attacks during Trump’s second term in office. While Biden exceeded Obama’s total in half the time—51 strikes in four years—Trump is already set to eclipse his own infamous first-term record in less than a year and a half. He has presided over at least 190, if not more, air strikes in Somalia.
Trump’s killing spree in Somalia is just a small part of his wider war on the world. It’s no exaggeration to say that he has the US military “run[ning] around shooting” people on an epic scale. During his two terms in office, Trump has overseen armed interventions and military operations—including air strikes, commando raids, proxy conflicts, so-called 127e programs, and full-scale wars—in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, Ecuador, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Venezuela, Yemen, and an unspecified country in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as attacks on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean. His second term has, in fact, been a furious blitz of global war making, only half noticed by the American news media. In March, for example, the United States made war on three continents during just three days, conducting attacks in Africa, Asia, and South America. During that span, the US also struck a civilian boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
Less than a year and a half into Trump’s second term, the US has already killed more than 2,000 civilians from Latin America to the Middle East and Africa. “This is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of theaters where harm to civilians has been reported within such a short space of time,” said Megan Karlshoej-Pedersen, a policy specialist with Airwars, a British-based organization that tracks civilian harm globally. She also pointed to attacks in the Caribbean Sea, the eastern Pacific Ocean, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.
A War on Children
Since the US began conducting air strikes in Somalia back in 2007, as many as 170 civilians have been killed, according to Airwars. The US military has, however, only admitted to six of those deaths and 11 other injuries—and has never publicly apologized to any families of the victims or those who survived its attacks.
In one April 2018 attack in Somalia during Trump’s first term, a US drone strike killed at least three (and possibly five) civilians. A woman and child were among the dead, according to formerly secret US military investigation documents, but the same report concluded that their identities might never be known. A 2023 investigation I undertook for The Intercept, however, exposed the details of that disastrous attack. The woman and child—22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse—survived the initial strike but were killed by a double-tap attack as they fled for their lives. Abdi Dahir Mohamed, one of Luul’s brothers, said of the Americans who killed his sister and niece: “They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized. No one has been held accountable.”
More recently, President Trump has been responsible for the slaughter of scores, if not hundreds, of children in his war of choice in Iran. “US-Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 2,362 civilians, including 383 children, and injured over 32,314 civilians, according to official figures,” Raha Bahreini, a regional researcher with Amnesty International’s Iran Team, told this reporter and other journalists during a recent press briefing. The deaths include more than 150 children killed in a Tomahawk missile strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in southern Iran. The preliminary findings of a US military investigation into that attack acknowledged that the United States was indeed responsible, contradicting assertions by President Trump that Iran struck the school. Publicly, however, the Pentagon continues to evade responsibility. “This incident is currently under investigation,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently told lawmakers, refusing to answer questions about the attack during testimony on Capitol Hill.
Attacks in Somalia tripled after Trump once again relaxed targeting principles and (all too predictably) US military and independent estimates of civilian casualties across multiple US war zones spiked.
The administration has also been responsible for a steady drumbeat of attacks on civilians in the waters surrounding Latin America. Under Operation Southern Spear, the Trump administration has conducted around 60 attacks on so-called drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing close to 200 civilians since last September. Trump officials have insisted that the victims are members of one of at least 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name. Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress from both parties insist that the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians—even suspected criminals—who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.
Trump has also killed and wounded many people in Yemen, including dozens of Ethiopian civilians killed in an attack on an immigrant detention center there last year. “The Trump administration’s Yemen campaign, and this attack in particular, should have set off alarm bells for anyone invested in how the US military operates, and the amount of care or disdain it shows for civilian life,” Kristine Beckerle, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said recently. “One year on, not only has there been no discernible progress towards justice and reparation, but we’re still lacking basic information about what happened in the Yemen attack, why it happened and what steps if any the US military has taken to address it.”
In the spring of 2025, Airwars tracked reports of at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed by US airstrikes during the Trump administration’s campaign of air and naval strikes (codenamed Operation Rough Rider) against that country’s Houthi government. The Yemen Data Project put the death toll at a minimum of 238 civilians, with another 467 civilians injured.
Such deaths are just part of a long butcher’s bill in Yemen stretching back to the very beginning of Trump’s first term. A report by the Yemen-based group Mwatana for Human Rights examined 12 US attacks in Yemen between January 2017 and January 2019, 10 of them “counterterrorism airstrikes.” The authors found that at least 38 Yemeni civilians—19 men, six women, and 13 children—were killed and seven others injured in the attacks. Among them was a raid by Navy SEALs on a Yemeni village just days after Trump took office for the first time in which women and children died. A year later, the US fired a missile into a sports utility vehicle near the village of Al Uqla. Three of the men inside were killed instantly. Another died days later in a local hospital. The only survivor, Adel Al Manthari, was gravely wounded and forced to turn to a GoFundMe campaign in 2022 to save his life.
“The Attack Was Horrible and Their Response Was Horrible. I Lost a Wife and a Child”
“It’s a horrible place,” Trump said of Somalia during that same racist rant. “Everything is horrible over there.”
Horrible is a word I also recall from my trip to Somalia to meet the family of Luul Dahir Mohamed and Mariam Shilow Muse in 2023.
The US attack that killed the mother and daughter was the product of faulty intelligence as well as rushed, imprecise targeting by a Special Operations strike cell whose members, according to the military investigation conducted later, considered themselves inexperienced. That inquiry led to an admission that civilians were killed and a strong suggestion of confirmation bias (a psychological phenomenon that leads people to cherry-pick information confirming their preexisting beliefs). Despite that, the investigation exonerated the team involved.
To date, no one has ever been held accountable for the deaths of Luul or Mariam—or any other civilians killed in Trump’s war in Somalia.
“The strike complied with the applicable rules of engagement,” according to that investigation. “[N]othing in the strike procedures caused this inaccurate [redacted] call.” Luul’s husband and Mariam’s father, Shilow Muse Ali, was stunned as he tried to process those words. “The attack was horrible and their response was horrible. I lost a wife and a child,” he told me. “But I cannot understand the explanation in the investigation. How can you admit that you killed two civilians and also say the rules were followed?”
Trump had, in fact, secretly issued loosened rules for counterterrorism “direct action” operations, including for drone strikes in places like Somalia, according to a partially redacted copy of the document. By the end of March 2017, the number of US airstrikes in Somalia had skyrocketed. “The burden of proof as to who could be targeted and for what reason changed dramatically,” retired Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, who led Special Operations Command Africa at the time, recalled. During the Obama administration, by contrast, strikes required high-level approval, according to a drone pilot and strike cell analyst, who served in Somalia the year Luul and Mariam were killed. “Giving strike authority down to a ground commander was a massive difference,” he explained. “It had a big effect.” Attacks in Somalia tripled after Trump once again relaxed targeting principles and (all too predictably) US military and independent estimates of civilian casualties across multiple US war zones spiked.
“They have nothing but crime,” President Trump—himself a convicted felon 34 times over—said of Somalia, as he raged on about that country.
To date, no one has ever been held accountable for the deaths of Luul or Mariam—or any other civilians killed in Trump’s war in Somalia. Nor has anyone been held responsible for those killed in the strike in Yemen that gravely wounded Adel Al Manthari. Or those slain in the raid on a Yemeni village by Navy SEALs. Or the innocents who died in the attack on an immigrant detention center in that country. Or in the strikes on drug boats in the Caribbean Sea. Or for the attack on Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Iran.
Some of those attacks could well have been categorized as crimes of war. Others are certainly extrajudicial killings—or, simply put, outright murders. Those deaths and so many others can be traced back to Donald Trump and his contempt for the lives of people across this planet.
“It’s filthy dirty, disgusting dirty,” Trump said of Somalia, but in truth, that’s a more apt description for the soul of the country that exports slaughter, year after year, and is led by a man who revels in it. “It’s a horrible place,” he continued about Somalia.
And once again, every accusation of his should be considered a confession, too.
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The US Fails Young People by Mobilizing for War, Not Jobs
A country is not secure simply because it can strike targets, protect bases, or surge forces across oceans. It is secure when its people can see a future worth defending.
May 22, 2026
Washington usually measures American decline in external terms: China’s rise, Russia’s revisionism, strained alliances, and military crises in the Middle East. But one of the clearest warnings is coming from inside the United States. In 2025, only 43% of Americans ages 15 to 34 said it was a good time to find a job where they lived, 21 points below Americans 55 and older. In no other surveyed country was the generational gap this wide.
That finding should unsettle a country that is still speaking the language of primacy. Young Americans are not turning gloomy because they have forgotten how to be optimistic. They are reading the economy in front of them. Youth unemployment stood at 9.5% in April. Renter cost burdens hit a record 22.7 million households in 2024. The share of first-time home buyers fell to a record-low 21%, while the median first-time buyer’s age rose to 40. For a generation told that education, discipline, and work would translate into stability, the bargain looks broken.
This is not only a domestic story. It is also a foreign policy failure, because budgets reveal what a government treats as urgent. The Defense Department’s 2026 request totaled $961 billion, among the largest inflation-adjusted requests of the past half century. Additional military-related funding has pushed “national defense” spending beyond $1 trillion. The point is not that every dollar spent on the Pentagon could be mechanically converted into a job, an apartment, or a mortgage. The point is that Washington still knows how to mobilize at scale—but most reliably when the beneficiaries are weapons programs, contractors, and permanent military infrastructure.
The war with Iran has made that imbalance harder to ignore. By May, the US campaign had cost an estimated $29 billion, including operations and equipment repair or replacement. The conflict has also disrupted energy flows through one of the world’s most important corridors, raising the risk that households already squeezed by rent, debt, insurance, and food costs will face still more pressure. For young workers, “foreign policy” is not abstract when it comes back as higher prices, lower confidence, and another delay in leaving home.
If Washington continues to protect an empire more energetically than it protects the next generation’s prospects, the damage will not remain hidden in surveys.
Washington often treats these costs as unfortunate side effects of leadership. They are better understood as evidence of an outdated model of security. A country is not secure simply because it can strike targets, protect bases, or surge forces across oceans. It is secure when its people can see a future worth defending. A state that can finance escalation faster than housing, debt relief, or public investment teaches its younger citizens a bleak lesson: Their insecurity is manageable, but imperial credibility is an emergency.
A serious foreign policy would start from that recognition. It would pursue diplomacy with Iran rather than convert each crisis into a test of dominance. It would restore the congressional role in decisions of war and peace. It would subject military spending to the same moral and fiscal scrutiny imposed on social programs. And it would treat economic security at home as part of national security, not as an afterthought to be discussed after the next supplemental defense bill.
This is not a call for withdrawal from the world. It is a call to abandon the habit of confusing militarization with responsibility. The United States can cooperate, mediate, trade, provide humanitarian assistance, and support climate resilience without treating armed escalation as the default proof of seriousness. In fact, a foreign policy built around restraint would be more credible abroad precisely because it would be more defensible at home.
The warning from young Americans is not just that the job market feels weak. It is that the future feels rationed. If Washington continues to protect an empire more energetically than it protects the next generation’s prospects, the damage will not remain hidden in surveys. It will appear in politics, institutions, and the country’s declining ability to persuade anyone—including its own citizens—that American power still serves a public purpose. The real measure of decline is not only what rivals do to the United States. It is what the United States keeps choosing to do to itself.
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Donor-Advised Funds Banning the Southern Poverty Law Center Threaten Democracy
The actions of these DAFs directly undermine democracy by excluding a group the administration has targeted and potentially denying funding to other targeted groups.
May 22, 2026
We know the Trump Department of Justice has threatened individuals they consider political opponents. Echoing authoritarian regimes worldwide, they’re now indicted Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC.
In response, major Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs), including Vanguard, Fidelity, and Schwab, have prevented clients from donating to SPLC, cutting the organization off from funding without even a shred of due process. If the DAFs follow this precedent, it could eliminate a key source of funding for any nonprofits this—or any future—administration chooses to attack.
The funds claim their action is necessary because, according to the administration, it constituted fraud for SPLC to have paid hate group informants. But federal and state law enforcement agencies have known about the infiltrations for years, using information they provided to help secure indictments and convictions. So the charges are spurious.
Fidelity justified its actions by citing a policy of pausing DAF giving if an organization “is being investigated for alleged illegal activities… such as terrorism, money laundering, hate crimes or fraud,” or if “state and federal agencies” are investigating a charitable organization. Schwab’s fund quietly removed SPLC from its list of eligible nonprofits, and a representative read me similar boilerplate, saying the fund was deciding on next steps.
If the Trump administration and its enablers can do this to SPLC, they can do it to far smaller and more vulnerable nonprofits.
The danger is far larger than the SPLC case. The listed criteria would let federal or state authorities cripple any nonprofit they choose, simply by launching an investigation. The organization doesn’t have to be convicted, or even indicted. They just have to be investigated, which makes this a perfect way to target political opponents. The administration has already issued a memorandum promising investigations of groups that promote “anti-fascism,” “anti-Christianity,” or “hostility” toward “traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” It’s threatened Wikipedia, the Vera Institute for Justice, and the governmental watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, not to mention major universities. All the federal government, or even a state government, would need to do to launch a DAF freeze is to open an official public investigation. And these major DAFs would then block the targeted organization from receiving funding.
The implications aren’t confined to the Trump administration. Under this precedent, Democrats holding power could do the same to disfavored nonprofits. Just launching an investigation would cut off a significant part of a targeted organization’s money flow. The defunding or banning of targeted NGOs is exactly what Vladimir Putin did in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. It’s a classic way to eliminate opposition and consolidate power. And the anticipatory compliance of Vanguard, Fidelity, and Schwab is the exact kind of response that empowers would-be dictatorships, whatever their politics.
If a nonprofit is convicted of fraud or money laundering, it’s of course legitimate to remove or suspend their 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. But SPLC has neither been tried nor convicted, so the DAFs are letting a hostile administration’s mere accusation of wrongdoing become an excuse to block funding. The $326 billion of money that DAFs hold is part of the lifeblood of nonprofits. The actions of these DAFs directly undermine democracy by excluding a group the administration has targeted and potentially denying funding to other targeted groups. That’s true whatever you think of SPLC.
If there’s a nonprofit that could weather this, it’s SPLC, with its $786 million endowment. I don’t give to them because I think other groups are more impactful for the money they spend. But if the Trump administration and its enablers can do this to SPLC, they can do it to far smaller and more vulnerable nonprofits. For instance, they could target nonpartisan voter engagement groups, drying up funding (including pledged contributions) at the point when these groups need it the most to engage citizens in democracy. Damaging attacks on nonprofit funding also don’t have to come from the federal Department of Justice. Under Fidelity’s criteria, attacks could come from state governments as well, with potential targets including either conservative or liberal groups depending on which party runs a particular state.
But ordinary citizens have the power to change this. The campaigns that got ABC to reinstate Jimmy Kimmel offer a model. This issue has less visibility, but for the nonprofits it could affect is equally critical. If we have money in a DAF, our calls or emails could well make the difference. Schwab told me that they’d been getting lots of critical responses. But even if we don’t have a DAF, nearly 60% of us have retirement or other investment accounts, with most housed at the major affiliated brokerages. So we can reach out as well, threatening to switch our investments to brokerages that don’t empower authoritarian initiatives, like TIAA-CREF (at least for now Merrill Lynch-Bank of America is still putting through grants as well), and, if we have DAF’s, transfer them to ones that haven’t banned SPLC contributions, like Amalgamated Bank, Impact Assets, or Daffy. A group of socially responsible investment advisers have created a sign-on letter. New York’s historic Riverside Church just divested $12 million from Vanguard. A long-time activist friend created a leavefidelity.com site with cut and paste templates to send to the companies involved.
The goal is to echo what people did in the Kimmel situation when they boycotted the channels, advertisers, and theme park properties of national ABC-Disney and local Sinclair and Nextstar stations. People also protested in front of affiliated ABC stations—something they could do at the headquarters of the relevant brokerage houses. While DAFs are technically separate entities, they share investment management, administration, and the parent brand, which offers them as an incentive for clients. So we’re far from powerless.
The job of the brokerage houses is not to police client giving. Their affiliated DAFs need to allow donations to all legitimate nonprofits, whether or not the Trump administration—or any administration—agrees with what they do.
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