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nationalism
Consensus Finally Reached: Israel Is Committing Genocide
Palestinians have been screaming for the world to stop this for nearly two years; we should listen to them and heed the call to act.
Jul 30, 2025
For nearly two years, the Israeli military has been relentlessly obliterating everything in Gaza. That destruction has not been hidden. The Palestinians who live in Gaza, the majority of whom are refugees forced to flee what became Israel in 1948, have been documenting every moment of the carnage. And in fact, Israeli soldiers have gleefully shared photos and videos of themselves destroying everything they see. The Israeli government has openly and repeatedly declared its intent to annihilate Palestinians.
For decades, Israel has denied it planned and carried out ethnic cleansing in 1948. It has insisted that the Nakba—the permanent expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians by Zionist militias—was actually the fault of everyone but Israel. Now, nearly 80 years later, Israeli politicians at the highest level openly plot to ethnically cleanse all of Gaza. It has been clear since October 7, 2023 that the current Israeli assault is the culmination of more than 140 years of colonization, dispossession, expulsion, and repeated massacres. This is genocide.
Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence that Israel’s actions have nothing to do with “self-defense” nor is the ongoing slaughter “just a war,” many continue to deny the reality of the situation. However, there is now a public consensus among the major human rights organizations in the world. Palestinians and Palestinian organizations have been at the forefront of imploring the world to recognize what is happening and to act. Al-Haq, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, and Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights have been documenting Israel’s crimes for years. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), and many other organizations have now carefully assessed the best available evidence and determined that Israel is committing genocide.
And finally, B’Tselem, the leading Israeli human rights organization, along with Physicians for Human Rights-Israel have joined the international consensus in recognizing Israel is committing genocide. All of that sits alongside the United Nations bodies and many scholars of international law, human rights, and genocide and Holocaust studies that have also recognized the genocide. The International Criminal Court has charged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with war crimes, and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) case against Israel is ongoing. Those are positive developments even as they are too late and insufficient. However, we do not need to wait for consensus among experts to make clear moral and ethical determinations. Palestinians have been screaming for the world to stop this for nearly two years; we should listen to them and heed the call to act.
Like the American genocide of Indigenous peoples, the erasure of Palestine and Palestinians, literally and figuratively, is intrinsic to Israel’s existence.
Even if Israel is found guilty at the ICJ, genocide denial will continue. Many of those who support Israel’s actions will not be convinced by facts. In that case, we need to build the power necessary to confront and challenge those who defend genocidal violence. The ideological and propaganda apparatuses dedicated to obfuscating and denying reality are finally beginning to show cracks. We need to exploit and further break open those fissures. “Stand with Israel” dead-enders will be judged the same as any other genocide supporters and enablers throughout history.
The State of Israel, like many countries, was founded on crimes against humanity. Its project of exclusionary ethno-religious nationalism is a 19th-century anachronism that has brought untold death and destruction. It will fail. Israel’s live-streamed genocide is its undoing. Every pretense has been stripped away. Israel as its supporters imagine it never existed, and even that fantasy is gone.
Like the American genocide of Indigenous peoples, the erasure of Palestine and Palestinians, literally and figuratively, is intrinsic to Israel’s existence. But there is no going back. Palestinians will be free, and what the ICJ calls Israel’s “institutionalized régime of systematic oppression and domination of one racial group over another” will be dismantled in favor of equality and democracy. It is only a matter of time.
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Why Does Trump Really Hate Internationalism? It’s Bad for Billionaires
As he has thrown international rules to the side and tried to strong-arm other countries into concessions, his list of demands has resembled Wall Street’s much more than Wisconsin’s.
Jul 12, 2025
If you take U.S. President Donald Trump’s word, his foreign policy will finally make American workers great again. Where weak-willed attempts to work with other countries hollowed out the American economy, his belligerent nationalism will push the U.S. up and the rest of the world down. The globalists are for them; Donald Trump is for you!
But taking Donald Trump at his word is never a good idea. As he has thrown international rules to the side and tried to strong-arm other countries into concessions, his list of demands has resembled Wall Street’s much more than Wisconsin’s. He has fought Japan’s car safety standards and India’s price cap on coronary stents. He has gotten Canada and India to drop taxes on tech giants. And in perhaps his biggest victory, six major countries recently caved to his escalating threats and hollowed out a global plan to enforce a minimum tax on big corporations.
That Trump has fixed his ire on this international agreement reveals a broader truth: Internationalism is bad for billionaires. The misguided approach of neoliberal globalization opened up a lane for nationalists to claim that they defend the working class. But in reality, Donald Trump and his billionaire buddies would like nothing more than to play governments against each other. Billionaires can take fragmented countries to the bank—only international cooperation can build a united front strong enough to beat them.
Trump’s Revenge on the Global Corporate Minimum Tax
The global corporate minimum tax is a good example of this. (The details are a little complicated, but the super-rich would like to keep it that way, so bear with me as I explain.) In recent decades, major corporations have gotten spectacularly effective at avoiding taxes. Last year, Tesla made a profit of $2.3 billion in the U.S. but paid zero federal income tax. Neither did Merck, Pfizer, and Johnson and Johnson, despite making $45 billion around the world.
Two global dynamics help them achieve this. First, corporations use sophisticated accounting tricks to make their profits show up in countries where they do little actual business, like Ireland and the Cayman Islands—which just so happen to have very low taxes. Second, when countries attempt to raise taxes, corporations threaten to move elsewhere, creating fears of job losses and economic slowdowns that can convince governments to keep taxes low.
Trump’s global bullying successfully beat back two things he hates: international cooperation and taxing the rich.
In 2021, most of the world’s countries agreed to a tax deal that aimed to counter these dynamics. It was highly imperfect, with too many exceptions and rules skewed against developing countries, but it was still an important step forward. One of its key rules was a global minimum corporate tax of 15%. Suppose a Brazilian company paid just 10% in tax for income earned through its Swiss subsidiary. The deal would allow Brazil to apply a top-up tax and collect the remaining 5% itself. This 15% floor meant corporations could no longer drive a race to the bottom in tax rates, as any tax haven with a rate below 15% would just be leaving money on the table—someone else would tax it anyways.
And because congressional Republicans blocked the U.S. from implementing the deal—instead relying on a weaker U.S. version of the minimum tax—that’s what could have happened to American companies. This was how the agreement was supposed to work: If a country like the U.S. was too silly to make sure its companies paid at least 15% in tax, other countries would.
But Donald Trump hated the idea that countries could work together to make sure the likes of Apple, Facebook, and Eli Lilly would pay a fair share of taxes toward schools, hospitals, and roads. In an attempt to spook other countries out of making the corporate minimum tax work, Trump’s tax bill included a “revenge tax” provision that would have hiked taxes on companies from countries that applied it.
In a moment of deep cowardice, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom folded: they agreed to exempt American companies from the minimum tax in exchange for Congress removing the revenge tax provision. While the exact details are not yet clear, it is certain to give a leg up to American corporations avoiding taxes at home and abroad. It will also create a perverse incentive for foreign companies to relocate their headquarters to the U.S. in order to avoid taxes—or at least to hang that fear over countries that consider raising taxes on them. Trump’s global bullying successfully beat back two things he hates: international cooperation and taxing the rich.
Building the International “We” That Can Beat the Super-Rich
The way big corporations have played countries off each other to avoid taxes echoes a tried-and-tested strategy of advancing the interests of the rich. Corporations threaten to move investment out of countries that raise minimum wages or strengthen environmental standards. When countries reject austerity, financial markets often sell off their currency or demand higher interest rates on government bonds.
Rather than falling into this trap, some countries are demonstrating the unity needed to advance a more equitable economy. Last week, Spain, Brazil, and South Africa launched an alliance for wealth taxes on high-net-worth individuals, while eight countries took steps toward taxing first-class plane tickets and private jets. A major United Nations conference led to an initiative that could coordinate developing countries as they borrow funds, rather than leaving them isolated against their lenders.
These efforts model an internationalism different from the form of globalization that dominated the past few decades. Neoliberal globalization advanced a web of agreements that coordinated countries to place a ceiling on taxes and labor standards, not to raise the floor. Developing countries were markets to be opened, not publics to work alongside.
Corporate globalization needed to end—but the problem was that it was corporate, not that it was global. Nationalists promised to reverse this globalization and take back the spoils unjustly taken by others. But Trump has been far more successful int expanding American corporations’ ability to pillage than enabling everyday Americans to prosper. A balkanized world ensures no one is ever powerful or coordinated enough to subordinate the interest of the super-rich to the interests of the public. It doesn’t have to be that way. We can beat the super-rich, but only if that “we” is big enough to include those beyond our borders.
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Finding Hope for the Future in a Gaza Mother and Doctor
This is peace—this is love—standing in the aftermath of war, refusing to give up.
May 30, 2025
The slaughter goes on, usually in the name of war, which reduces human life to, at best, a strategic abstraction. Dead civilians—dead children—are collateral damage, which means they’re nothing at all.
How can we be more than just spectators as we learn, every day, more stunning details about the hell going on across the planet? How can the human race stand up collectively to the cancer of war? Humanity, in the name of nationalism, has essentially organized itself against itself: We’ve declared one another “the enemy,” which means that only some of us are human. The others are simply in the way.
And nowhere, as we all know, is the news more hellish and shocking than the stories that emerge daily from Gaza, which continues to undergo, in full view on social media... genocide. It looks like this, according to CNN:
Dr. Alaa al-Najjar left her ten children at home on Friday when she went to work in the emergency room at the Nasser Medical Complex in southern Gaza.
Hours later, the bodies of seven children—most of them badly burned—arrived at the hospital, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. They were Dr. Najjar’s own children, killed in an Israeli airstrike on her family’s home... The bodies of two more of her children—a 7-month-old and a 12-year-old who authorities presume to be dead—remain missing.
Only one of her ten children, 11-year-old Adam, survived. Dr. Najjar’s husband Hamdi, himself a doctor, was also badly injured in the strike.
This is the context in which another piece of news emerges, an opposite event, a beam of light which, oh God, I pray represents the dawn of humanity’s future: Veterans For Peace, along with 28 co-sponsoring organizations, has launched a 40-day fast calling for an end to Israel’s genocidal war on, and starvation of, Gaza. Some of the participants gather daily in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York, aligning themselves—in all their vulnerable humanity—with the organization’s founding purpose.
A letter the fasters wrote to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres concludes: “Uppermost in our minds with this request to meet with you at your earliest convenience is the U.N. founding goal to save ‘succeeding generations from the scourge of war.’”
I quote these words not with a sense of “yeah, yeah” abstraction but rather because the writers are people like you and me, stepping out of their daily lives and into a determination to be part of, and help create, a world beyond war—beginning with an Israeli cease-fire and the salvation of Palestine, but hardly stopping there.
To put it another way: The words attempt to link individuals with a global institution. What I hear in these words is the call for a collective, planetary effort to transcend war. This effort must include every single human on this planet, including you and me, and demands our participation and sacrifice, not simply our shrug of hope. I hear a call for the United Nations to reinvent itself as United Humanity. And thus the future emerges.
One of the participants in the fast is my old friend Kathy Kelly. I talked to her on day six of the fast. Participants are limiting themselves to consuming 250 calories a day, she noted, which is about the amount Palestinians have available to them. Several hundred people are participating in the fast in New York, with more people, around 600 in total, throughout and beyond the United States. If you’re interested in joining the effort, visit the websites of either Veterans for Peace or Friends of Sabeel North America.
The fast is very much a public event, Kathy told me. On Memorial Day, for instance, a few days into the fast, they ceremonially honored not just veterans but some of the victims of the current genocide, bringing the al-Najjar family into public grief by reading the names of the children who were killed.
Kathy gave me a list of their names and ages. I feel like they belong here: Yahya: 12 years old; Rakan: 10 years old;; Eve: 9 years old; Jubran: 8 years old; Ruslan: 7 years old; Reval: 5 years old; Sadin: 3 years old; Luqman: 2 years old; Sidra: 6 months old. Adam, age 11, the sole surviving child, was critically injured.
Yeah, this is war. Its details matter. And as an American, I am complicit in the hell this country’s militarism has wreaked throughout my lifetime: the collateral damage, the environmental damage, it has bequeathed Planet Earth, followed by nothing more than an indifferent, strategic shrug.
So I feel compelled to return for a moment to Alaa al-Najjar, the doctor and mom who recently lost 9 of her 10 children, with her husband and last surviving child seriously injured. Her niece told CNN that
Dr. Alaa broke down when she showed the last bottle of breast milk she had expressed for her infant daughter, Sidra, whose body remains missing.
She told me today that her chest aches so much as she was breastfeeding, every day at work, Dr. Alaa pumped milk to provide for Sidra, and today she showed me the last bottle she prepared for her.
Dr. Alaa can barely speak. If you could see her face, you would understand her pain. She is only praying for her son and husband to recover.
And also, this: According to a fellow doctor at the hospital, Alaa al-Najjar has “continued to work despite losing her children, while periodically checking on the condition of her husband and Adam.”
This is peace—this is love—standing in the aftermath of war, refusing to give up. I see hope for the future here. I see humanity’s role model.
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