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foreign policy
The Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza Must End Now
How does a genocide end? And specifically, how do people of conscience, acting with majority support of the U.S. public, organize to end it?
May 23, 2025
The horrific images of children starving in Gaza, due to Israel's cruel, inhumane blockade of all humanitarian aid since early March, shock the world's conscience. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's recently announced plan to distribute aid, while forcing Palestinians in Gaza to move yet again, is a spurious cover for his and U.S. President Donald Trump's ethnic cleansing scheme.
Yet concrete action to end this calamity is hard to organize. How does a genocide end? And specifically, how do people of conscience, acting with majority support of the U.S. public, organize to end it?
The lack of true democracy in the United States, so evident in domestic policy on many issues, is even worse in terms of foreign policy, especially regarding the mostly ironclad support for Israel. However, cracks are showing, and they must be exploited quickly.
Will any of these efforts, along with many others, overcome powerful political forces that perpetuate genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid against the Palestinian people?
Earlier this month, U.S. Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) brought his S. Res. 224, calling for an end to the humanitarian blockade on Gaza, to the Senate floor. The resolution had the support of all Democrats, except Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and the two Independents who caucus with the Democrats, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Angus King (I-Maine).
The resolution was predictably blocked from getting a vote by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair James Risch (R-Idaho), but was significant as no other legislative measure in the year and half since the war on Gaza began has garnered such widespread, albeit partisan support (no Republicans supported it, nor have any called for a cease-fire or cutting off U.S. weapons to Israel).
A companion resolution in the House of Representatives will be introduced very soon, and while both would be nonbinding, they represent progress in the long struggle to exert pressure on Israel, and Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem are keenly aware of U.S. political developments. Additionally, the Senate will likely soon vote on Joint Resolutions of Disapproval (JRDs) to stop specific U.S. weapons transfers to Israel. Sen. Sanders forced such votes twice since November, and while they failed, the upcoming votes should attract more support, and add to the pressure on the Israeli government, which of course is opposed by most Israelis.
Legislative initiatives are far from the only strategies and tactics being employed by peace and human rights activists. Other recent and upcoming events and opportunities include the following:
Activists led by Montgomery County, Maryland Peace Action showed up at new U.S. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks' (D-Md.) "Sick of It" rally protesting the Trump-Musk cuts to health programs, and had a strong showing about also being sick of the Gaza genocide, including confronting the senator. It may have had some impact, as she later signed onto Sen. Welch's resolution, after having been largely silent on the genocide in Gaza, and voting against Sen. Sanders' most recent JRDs.
The impressive anti-genocide commencement speech by George Washington University student Cecelia Culver has received significant media coverage. She is now shamefully being investigated by the university. Similarly, New York University student Logan Rozos condemned the Gaza genocide in his commencement speech, and the university is withholding his diploma. Both students, along with other students similarly persecuted for speaking out for an end to the horrors in Gaza, deserve support and solidarity.
Reprising and expanding an effort from last year, New Hampshire peace activist Bob Sanders is conducting a cross-country bike ride to raise awareness of the dire situation in Gaza.
Veterans for Peace and other allies are supporting a 40-day fast for Peace in Gaza.
Groups in Philadelphia will hold a People's War Crimes Tribunal on May 31, building on the difficult but necessary advocacy aimed at Sen. Fetterman.
Lastly, Do Not Turn on Us is a new initiative calling on military and National Guard personnel to refuse unlawful, fascist orders. While more aimed at stopping fascism in the United States, it certainly is a contribution to the overall movement to establish peace, human rights, and the rule of law, domestically and internationally.
Will any of these efforts, along with many others, overcome powerful political forces that perpetuate genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid against the Palestinian people? No one can know for sure, but all are worthy of support and persistence. As Ms. Culver stated, none of us are free until Palestine is free.
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Trump’s Illiberal Democracy Threatens Our Foundational Moral Principles
This administration rejects American values as it embraces bribes from foreign dictators, harasses journalists, imprisons op-ed writers, and threatens judges.
May 19, 2025
At its deepest level, government is a moral force grounded in a moral view of the world.
It may not comport with morality as most of us view it; the Saudi oppression of women, the Russian violence against the queer community, and the Iranian brutal suppression of that nation’s democracy movement are all examples of things most Americans consider immoral.
But each is grounded in a particular moral worldview that those governments and their leaders have adopted.
While America has experienced many dark moral episodes throughout our history, we’ve always held or at least espoused a basic set of moral principles:
- That all people are born equal under the law; that power should flow up from the people rather than down from elected leaders;
- That a free press, free speech, and freedom from religion are essential to liberty; and
- That defending the basic rights of all people to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is the core function of a democratic republic.
Until now.
Republicans in the House of Representatives just inserted into their must-pass “Big, Beautiful” multi-trillion-dollar-tax-break-for-billionaires legislation a provision that would enable the president to designate any nonprofit—from Harvard to the American Civil Liberties Union to your local Democratic Party—a “terrorist-supporting organization” that then loses their tax-exempt status, effectively putting them out of business.
And who decides who gets that designation? The president. And he gets do to it in secret.
When we abandon our own stated principles in foreign relations, those first laid out in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, the results are almost uniformly bad for us, for them, and for democracy around the world.
This is exactly how both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán first destroyed dissent and free speech in Russia and Hungary.
U.S. President Donald Trump has been pursuing this for a decade, from his trying to designate Antifa a “terrorist organization” to his attacks on our universities to his use of Stalin’s phrase “enemy of the people” to describe journalists and opinion writers like me.
One level above these core democratic principles—of free speech, the right to protest, and the power of the people in free and fair elections to change our leadership—are two major reformations that came about after major national upheavals.
The first was after the Civil War, when the nation (at least in principle) embraced the humanity and citizenship of nonwhite people with Reconstruction and the 13th through the 15th Amendments to the Constitution. The second was during the Republican Great Depression, when FDR rebooted our republic to become the supporter of last resort for the working class, producing the world’s first more-than-half-of-us middle class.
Now Trump, Elon Musk, and their cabal of right-wing billionaires are trying to dissolve virtually all of this, replacing it with the sort of “illiberal democracy” we see in Russia and Hungary, where there are still elections (but their outcome is pre-determined), still legal protections for the press and free speech (but only when that speech doesn’t challenge those in power), and only the wealthy can truly enjoy safety and security.
After the Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari governments each gave the Trump family massive gifts in the form of billion-dollar development and Trump hotel or golf course licensing deals, Trump made a speech in which he abandoned our 250-year history of advocating democracy around the world.
Of course, as mentioned, we’ve often failed at that mission in the past. Former President Ronald Reagan’s support for the death squads in Central America haunt our southern border to this day; former President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s embrace of the Shah of Iran still rattles the Middle East; and former President Richard Nixon’s tolerance of Chinese brutality led us to, in the name of capitalism, help that nation’s communist leaders create the most powerful and medieval surveillance state in world history.
But these exceptions prove the rule: When we abandon our own stated principles in foreign relations, those first laid out in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, the results are almost uniformly bad for us, for them, and for democracy around the world. And it becomes even more destructive when this administration rejects American values as it embraces bribes from foreign dictators, harasses journalists, imprisons op-ed writers, and threatens judges.
This issue of morality in government has been at the core of our political debate for centuries. Then-President Harry Truman was explicit about it way back in 1952:
Now, I want to say something very important to you about this issue of morality in government.
I stand for honest government… To me, morality in government means more than a mere absence of wrongdoing. It means a government that is fair to all. I think it is just as immoral for the Congress to enact special tax favors into law as it is for a tax official to connive in a crooked tax return. It is just as immoral to use the lawmaking power of the government to enrich the few at the expense of the many, as it is to steal money from the public treasury. That is stealing money from the public treasury…
Legislation that favored the greed of monopoly and the trickery of Wall Street was a form of corruption that did the country four times as much harm as Teapot Dome ever did.Private selfish interests are always trying to corrupt the government in this way. Powerful financial groups are always trying to get favors for themselves.
Tragically, for both America and democracy around the world, this is not how Donald Trump was raised and does not comport with the GOP’s current worldview. Fred Trump built a real estate empire through racism, fraud, and deceit. He raised Donald to view every transaction as necessarily win-lose, every rule or regulation as something to get around, and every government official as somebody to be influenced with threats or money.
The GOP embraced a similar worldview with the Reagan Revolution as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich notes in his must-read Substack newsletter:
But starting with Reagan, America went off the rails. Deregulation, privatization, free trade, wild gambling by Wall Street, union-busting, record levels of inequality, near-stagnant wages for most, staggering wealth for a few, big money taking over our politics.
Stock buybacks and the well-being of investors became more important than good jobs with good wages. Corporate profits more important than the common good.
Greed is a type of moral stance. It’s not one that open, pluralistic, democratic societies embrace beyond their tolerance of regulated capitalism, but it is a position that expresses a certain type of morality, one most famously expounded by David Koch and Ayn Rand.
It’s inconsistent with the history of humanity itself, as I document in detail in The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living. From Margaret Mead pointing out how healed leg bones in hundred-thousand-year-old skeletons show that ancient societies cared for their wounded to the ways Native American tribes dealt with people who stole or hoarded even without the use of police or prisons, the triumph of greed has historically been the exception rather the rule.
When Donald Trump said, “My whole life I’ve been greedy,” it was one of the few honest bits of self-appraisal he’s ever tendered. And it should have warned all of us.
Greed and hunger for power are, ultimately, anathema to our traditional American values.
And it’s high time we began to say so, and to teach our children the difference between a moral nation that protects its weakest citizens while promoting democracy around the world and an “illiberal democracy” like Russia, Hungary, and the vision of today’s GOP.
We’ve been better than this in the past, and it’s high time we return to those moral positions that truly made America great.
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How the Vietnam and Gaza Wars Shattered Young Illusions About US Leaders
Emerging generations learned that moral concerns about their country’s engagement in faraway wars meant little to policymakers in Washington.
Apr 30, 2025
Eight years before the U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam collapsed, I stood with high school friends at Manhattan’s Penn Station on the night of April 15, 1967, waiting for a train back to Washington after attending the era’s largest anti-war protest so far. An early edition of the next day’s New York Times arrived on newsstands with a big headline at the top of the front page that said “100,000 Rally at U.N. Against Vietnam War.” I heard someone say, “Johnson will have to listen to us now.”
But President Lyndon Johnson dashed the hopes of those who marched from Central Park to the United Nations that day (with an actual turnout later estimated at 400,000). He kept escalating the war in Vietnam, while secretly also bombing Laos and Cambodia.
During the years that followed, anti-war demonstrations grew in thousands of communities across the United States. The decentralized Moratorium Day events on October 15, 1969 drew upward of 2 million people. But all forms of protest fell on deaf official ears. A song by the folksinger Donovan, recorded midway through the decade, became more accurate and powerful with each passing year: “The War Drags On.”
By remaining faithful to the war policies of the president they served, while discounting the opinions of young voters, two Democratic vice presidents—Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris—damaged their efforts to win the White House.
As the war continued, so did the fading of trust in the wisdom and morality of Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon. Gallup polls gauged the steep credibility drop. In 1965, just 24% of Americans said involvement in the Vietnam War had been a mistake. By the spring of 1971, the figure was 61%.
The number of U.S. troops in Vietnam gradually diminished from the peak of 536,100 in 1968, but ground operations and massive U.S. bombing persisted until the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in late January 1973. American forces withdrew from Vietnam, but the war went on with U.S. support for 27 more months, until—on April 30, 1975—the final helicopter liftoff from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon signaled that the Vietnam War was indeed over.
By then, most Americans were majorly disillusioned. Optimism that public opinion would sway their government’s leaders on matters of war and peace had been steadily crushed while carnage in Southeast Asia continued. To many citizens, democracy had failed—and the failure seemed especially acute to students, whose views on the war had evolved way ahead of overall opinion.
At the end of the 1960s, Gallup found “significantly more opposition to President Richard Nixon’s Vietnam policies” among students at public and private colleges than in “a parallel survey of the U.S. general public: 44% vs. 25%, respectively.” The same poll “showed 69% of students in favor of slowing down or halting the fighting in Vietnam, while only 20% favored escalation. This was a sharp change from 1967, when more students favored escalation (49%) than deescalation (35%).”
Six decades later, it took much less time for young Americans to turn decisively against their government’s key role of arming Israel’s war on Gaza. By a wide margin, continuous huge shipments of weapons to the Israeli military swiftly convinced most young adults that the U.S. government was complicit in a relentless siege taking the lives of Palestinian civilians on a large scale.
A CBS News/YouGov poll in June 2024 found that Americans opposed sending “weapons and supplies to Israel” by 61-39%. Opposition to the arms shipments was even higher among young people. For adults under age 30, the ratio was 77-23.
Emerging generations learned that moral concerns about their country’s engagement in faraway wars meant little to policymakers in Washington. No civics textbook could prepare students for the realities of power that kept the nation’s war machine on a rampage, taking several million lives in Southeast Asia or supplying weapons making possible genocide in Gaza.
For vast numbers of Americans, disproportionately young, the monstrous warfare overseen by Presidents Johnson and Nixon caused the scales to fall from their eyes about the character of U.S. leadership. And like President Donald Trump now, President Joe Biden showed that nice-sounding rhetoric could serve as a tidy cover story for choosing to enable nonstop horrors without letup.
No campaign-trail platitudes about caring and joy could make up for a lack of decency. By remaining faithful to the war policies of the president they served, while discounting the opinions of young voters, two Democratic vice presidents—Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris—damaged their efforts to win the White House.
A pair of exchanges on network television, 56 years apart, are eerily similar.
In August 1968, appearing on the NBC program “Meet the Press,” Humphrey was asked, “On what points, if any, do you disagree with the Vietnam policies of President Johnson?”
“I think that the policies that the president has pursued are basically sound,” Humphrey replied.
In October 2024, appearing on the ABC program “The View,” Harris was asked: “Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?”
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris replied.
Young people’s votes for Harris last fall were just 54%, compared with 60% that they provided to Biden four years earlier.
Many young eyes recognized the war policy positions of Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris as immoral. Their decisions to stay on a war train clashed with youthful idealism. And while hardboiled political strategists opted to discount such idealism as beside the electoral point, the consequences have been truly tragic—and largely foreseeable.
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