Apr. 5, 2024 ❧ Israel bombs aid convoy, "Trump 2028," and safe injection shot down in Philly
Plus: Millennial nepo baby billionaires, Louisiana prisons get more brutal, North Carolina's tenants union, woke scones, and owls in cactuses
And God said, “Let there be news,” and there was news.
BIG STORY
ISRAELI AIRSTRIKE KILLS SEVEN AID EMPLOYEES IN STARVING GAZA
This week in the Gaza Strip, seven workers for the World Central Kitchen, a renowned humanitarian aid organization, were killed when the Israeli military launched at least three airstrikes upon a convoy of aid vehicles.
The WCK has provided humanitarian aid to war and disaster zones around the world since 2010 and has delivered more than 32 million meals to the people of Gaza, who face starvation as the result of the Israeli military’s blocking of humanitarian aid. According to a new Oxfam analysis, just 41 percent of the food necessary to feed the population has been allowed to enter the Strip since October, with people in the North of Gaza living on just 245 calories a day.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the strike a “tragedy,” but insisted that it was unintentional. Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, blamed a “misidentification” even though the convoy was clearly marked with the emblem of the aid organization, which has long coordinated its routes and aid activities with the IDF.
WCK founder Jose Andres was unconvinced by Israel’s denials, noting in an interview with Reuters that, “They were targeting us in a deconflicting zone, in an area controlled by IDF.” He later added, “The airstrikes on our convoy I don't think were an unfortunate mistake. It was really a direct attack on clearly marked vehicles whose movements were known by everybody at the IDF.”
This certainly seems probable. More than 200 aid workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7, making it the deadliest conflict zone in the world for humanitarians. This is also far from the first time Israel’s military has fired on humanitarian aid deliveries. In late February, Israeli troops fired upon Palestinians collecting flour from an aid truck, killing at least 112 and wounding more than 700, an atrocity dubbed the “Flour Massacre.”
According to The Guardian, that attack was far from an anomaly:
There have been at least 14 similar reported incidents between mid-January and the end of February of the shooting, shelling and attacking of Palestinians who had gathered to receive humanitarian aid from trucks or airdrops.
This pattern of attacking aid deliveries, as well as Israel’s aggressive attempts to undermine other aid agencies like UNRWA with bogus claims that they were involved in attacks on Israel, serves as strong evidence of the United Nations’ suggestion that they are using starvation as a weapon of war. This attack appears to be furthering that goal, as the WCK has suspended its aid operations in Gaza, along with the American Near East Refugee Aid which has operated in the Strip for the last 55 years. Likewise, the United Arab Emirates, the largest provider of aid to Gaza, has halted its aid operations citing concerns for the safety of its workers.
But even if you accept Israel’s contention that every strike they conduct has a military objective, new reporting from +972 Magazine shows that the Israeli military, at best, often targets militants with either callous disregard for civilian bloodshed, and at worst takes measures that maximize civilian casualties.
The report unearthed the IDF’s use of an artificial intelligence system known as “Lavender” to identify the locations of militants. According to the six Israeli intelligence officials who spoke with the magazine, “During the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.”
The targets the machine identified were hardly vetted by human intelligence officers, who usually gave them only “20 seconds” of scrutiny before authorizing a bombing. According to the report,
This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as ‘errors’ in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.
Even worse, the report continued, the IDF relied on another automated system known as “Where’s Daddy?” that was meant to identify when militants would be in their family residences because “from an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses.” As a result, “the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity.” The sources testify that thousands of innocent women and children were likely killed as a result of this program.
While doing damage control following the attack on the World Central Kitchen, Netanyahu’s foreign policy adviser, Ophir Falk, dismissed any possibility that the attack on the aid convoy was deliberate. “That's absurd,” he said. “The last thing we would want in the world is to endanger civilian lives.” White House spokesman John Kirby has echoed this denial (and even more astonishingly claimed that Israel has never violated international law during this war, which is obviously untrue).
Regardless of whether civilian carnage is intentional or just a byproduct of war, that doesn’t change the obvious fact that Israel’s war is inflicting mass death and starvation on the people of Gaza. After six months, it should be obvious that leveling civilian infrastructure will kill tons of civilians and that cutting off and bombing aid trucks will starve them. Continuing to do that, when you know the consequences, is a choice.
And yet, on the same day that the Biden White House gave an emotional statement acknowledging that the attack on the World Central Kitchen was a “tragedy” and “not a stand-alone incident,” his State Department approved the shipment of more than 2,000 bombs to Israel.
Biden has used America’s massive amount of leverage to force Israel to open a new port of entry for aid supplies. And while this is a positive development, it raises the question of why this wasn’t done months ago and why Biden won’t use that leverage to pursue his administration’s putative goal of an “immediate ceasefire.”
Six months in, everybody knows that as long as this war goes on, civilians will continue to be slaughtered and starved. Biden can make all the statements he wants urging Israel to prevent slaughter and starvation. But if you are supplying the people doing the slaughtering and starving, you are culpable for their actions, even if you do it with a somber look on your face.
FIGHTING BACK
NORTH CAROLINA GETS A STATEWIDE TENANT UNION
In North Carolina, like a lot of places in the United States, the situation is rough for renters. From 2023 to 2024, the median rent in the state increased by 16.1 percent, higher than the 12.6 percent increase for the U.S. as a whole. As the Longview News-Journal notes, that’s the 7th biggest increase in the country. In some parts of North Carolina, rents have risen by a whopping 69 percent (not nice) over the last five years. Meanwhile, so-called “landlords’ rights” bills have been introduced in the North Carolina legislature that would force tenants to pay the legal fees if they challenge an eviction (regardless of the outcome!), allow landlords to discriminate against disabled tenants if they can’t produce specific kinds of documentation, and generally tilt the balance of power in favor of property owners. Grim stuff.
There is, however, a spark of hope. Over the last few years, regional tenants unions have started popping up across North Carolina to challenge the high costs and unfair conditions of housing in the state. There’s the Triangle Tenant Union, which represents renters in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill; the New Hanover Tenants Union, based in Wilmington; Housing Justice Now in Winston-Salem, and several others. Now, six of these regional unions have combined to form a statewide North Carolina Tenants Union, which will fight for the rights of all the state’s renters.
It’s extremely important for people to organize and gain control over their housing situation, just as it is in the workplace. Landlords already understand the power of organization, getting together in “property associations” to plot and scheme new ways of raising rent, eroding tenants’ rights, and generally being odious. As Nick Macleod—the new director of the North Carolina Tenants Union—says, “Almost always, when a tenant tries to fight their landlords on their own, they lose.” But together, it’s a different story.
Back in 2022, members of Crystal Towers United—a small tenants union that organizes just one public housing building—successfully organized to prevent the sale of that building. In Connecticut, the Blake Street Tenant Union forced a New Haven property company to enter negotiations with its members last September. As it turns out, organizing works. A few states, like Washington and Connecticut, already have statewide tenant unions; now North Carolina joins their ranks. For people everywhere to have fair and affordable housing, a lot more ought to follow.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ The American Conservative magazine is making the case that Trump should be allowed to run for a third term. In an op-ed titled “Trump 2028,” author Peter Tonguette, made the case for throwing out the 22nd Amendment, which restricts presidents to two terms, arguing that it is “an arbitrary restraint on presidents who serve nonconsecutive terms.” While The American Conservative is stacked with Christian authoritarian lunatics, they are quietly influential, serving as partners for “Project 2025,” the officially sanctioned agenda for a second Trump administration, which lays out in disturbing detail the plan to give the president near-absolute power. Matt Ford of The New Republic suggests that the op-ed may be a “trial balloon” to test how the idea of Trump Mach 3 plays with the public.
Given how much focus is (rightfully) placed on Trump’s dictatorial ambitions, it’s surprising that so few people have considered the possibility that he’d try to run for a third term even if the Constitution forbids it. Trump has repeatedly noted his envy at the fact that authoritarians like Xi Jinping get to rule for life, saying, “I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday” and earlier this year posted a video essentially fantasizing about getting re-elected every four years for infinity.
It’s easy to forget that we’ve never actually witnessed Trump willingly relinquish power: In 2016, he said he’d only accept the election result if he won, in 2020 he attempted to overturn his electoral loss to the point of violence, and he’ll surely attempt to contest the result if he loses again in 2024. Why should we expect him to go gently into that good night, even if he is constitutionally required to? Perhaps the only thing that could stop him is if Obama decided to run for a third term too.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ Cops in Tallahassee, Florida filmed themselves planting evidence on a Black man during a traffic stop. As Max Herle first reported for Our Tallahassee, 56-year-old Calvin Riley was stopped by the police back in May 2023. His drivers’ license had been suspended, something he’d only been notified of a few weeks prior to the incident. Under Florida law, this wouldn’t necessarily lead to an arrest, since it was Riley’s first such offense. But as bodycam footage reveals, the police soon manufactured a reason to arrest him anyway.
After first attempting to claim that Riley smelled like marijuana, Officer Kiersten Oliver—a new recruit to the Tallahassee Police Department—appears to have opened a sealed bottle of cognac that Oliver had in his car, poured out the contents on the side of the road, and tossed the empty bottle onto the car’s floorboards. She and her partner then arrested Riley for a DUI. His trial is set for April 5, and the judge has already said that “I heard what I thought was a seal being broken” in the footage, so in theory, it should be an open-and-shut case.
But in the U.S. court system, and especially in the South, actual justice for African Americans can be hard to come by. It’s worth considering, too, that this is a situation where the cops apparently forgot to turn their bodycams off while planting evidence and making a false arrest. How many similar cases never come to light at all?
❧ Louisiana’s new “tough on crime” prison plans will endanger the lives of medically vulnerable prisoners. When Republican Jeff Landry was sworn in as Governor of Louisiana, one of his first priorities was to call a special session on crime and imprisonment. The laws that emerged from that session are among the strictest in the country. Among other things, Louisiana now has laws banning parole in almost all cases, lowering the age to be tried and imprisoned as an adult to 17, and requiring prisoners to serve at least 85 percent of their sentence before early release for good behavior becomes a possibility.
These laws will dramatically expand the incarcerated population, threatening to overwhelm Louisiana’s already-crowded prisons. And for anyone with an underlying health condition, being imprisoned could easily become a death sentence. As Richard A. Webster writes for Verite News, health and safety conditions in the Louisiana carceral system are already appalling. In 2021, a federal judge ruled that the healthcare at the state penitentiary—which was built on a former slave plantation, and better known as “Angola” today—is so bad it’s unconstitutional, and a 2023 ruling reaffirmed that the conditions constitute “abhorrent cruel and unusual punishment.” Speaking to Verite News, the mother of one prisoner described what it’s like inside Angola. As fair warning, this is disturbing:
Janice Parker has observed the conditions in the medical ward on her frequent visits, nearly every month for more than a decade. The smell of urine and feces permeates the infirmary. Tables and medical equipment are covered in dust and grime, she said. Patients, suffering from open wounds and sores, scream in pain throughout the day. On one visit, she said, clumps of her son’s hair had fallen out and the bare patches of his scalp were covered in scabs. He told her he hadn’t been bathed in weeks. Another time, she found him lying in his own feces, suffering from an infection after bacteria had “entered his blood from his stool,” according to the 2015 lawsuit filed by her son and other inmates[...]
Kentrell Parker was paralyzed in a prison football game, and his mother says she “feared for his life” due to the terrible standard of healthcare. With good reason: according to The Guardian, at least 500 incarcerated people have died in Louisiana prisons in the last three years alone. In an unbelievable display of ignorance and cruelty, Jeff Landry defended these conditions during his time as Louisiana's attorney general, arguing that prisoners should only get “adequate” medical care. Now, he’s trying to inflict those conditions on as many people as possible. Bruce Reilly, a nonprofit director activist for prisoners’ rights in the state, says that Landry’s new laws seem designed to guarantee that “everyone will die in prison.” Those laws need to be fought on Eighth Amendment grounds, and any lawmaker who aids and abets Landry’s barbaric policy needs to lose their seat in office as soon as possible.
❧ A federal judge has dismissed a case that would have re-opened safe injection sites in Philadelphia. A hotspot for the opioid epidemic, Philly was poised to become one of the first American cities to have these sites, which people addicted to drugs like heroin and fentanyl could use under supervision to prevent overdoses. Safe injection sites are new to North America, but where they’ve been introduced they’ve proven successful. When Toronto first opened them in 2017, they saw a significant reduction in overdose mortality in neighborhoods that had them, according to a study in the Lancet. New York’s OnPoint facilities, meanwhile, say they have prevented more than 1,000 overdoses in just two years.
Efforts to establish similar sites in Philadelphia failed to get over the pushback. The religious nonprofit Safehouse, which sought to open the injection centers for years, was repeatedly bogged down by lawsuits and NIMBY opposition. Safe injection sites were never opened, and the city council banned them in 2023.
In a last-ditch attempt to keep up their efforts to establish the safe sites, they brought a lawsuit alleging that federal law enforcement’s threats to prosecute them violated their First Amendment rights to religious liberty. They invoked the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which has in the past allowed Hobby Lobby to deny birth control to its employees, to argue that their facilitation of illegal drug use was “out of an exercise of faith” and done with the goal of saving lives. But despite their “noble intentions” the judge denied their argument, saying that “their religious inspiration does not provide a shield against prosecution for violation of a federal criminal statute barring its operation.”
From a legal perspective, this is the right decision. The people at Safehouse shouldn’t be granted an exception to federal law because they claim to be motivated by “classic Judeo-Christian beliefs.” We don’t accept these arguments in cases like Hobby Lobby or last summer’s Supreme Court case allowing a Christian web designer to discriminate against gay clients. So we shouldn’t accept it for things we agree with, like drug legalization, either.
But that doesn’t mean that putting the kibosh on safe injection sites is good. Philadelphia had a record number of overdoses in 2023. And a study by the city estimates that adopting, Toronto’s effective safe-injection system would save 25 to 75 lives each year and prevent 230 HIV and hepatitis cases. Ultimately, drug usage should be treated as a medical rather than a criminal problem. Every day, Philadelphia suffers the cost of our small-minded leaders’ refusal to consider solutions beyond throwing addicts in jail.
PAST AFFAIRS
“What If We Didn’t Consider Criminalization an Option?” by Nathan J. Robinson, from Feb. 2024
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the President of Egypt, has been sworn in for a third term. El-Sisi has been in power since 2013, when he used his position as leader of the Egyptian military to overthrow President Mohamed Morsi in a coup d’etat. Since then, he was reelected in 2018 with 97 percent of the vote (not suspicious at all), and again in 2023 with 89.6 percent. Each time, the elections could hardly be called legitimate. Opponents of El-Sisi’s rule are routinely imprisoned, with “tens of thousands of people detained solely for peaceful speech or criticism” according to Human Rights Watch, and the 2023 vote was preceded by “a wave of arrests, intimidation, and excessive requirements for candidates that essentially prevented meaningful competition.” In short, El-Sisi is a dictator. He’s also proven to be an enemy of the Palestinian people, cracking down on solidarity protests for Gaza within Egypt’s borders. But none of that has prevented the United States from forming a cozy alliance with El-Sisi and sending $235 million in military aid to Egypt in 2023, despite the country’s widespread and obvious human rights abuses. (So much for defending democracy!) El-Sisi came to power as the result of an unfinished revolution in the 2010s Arab Spring; now, it looks like only another upsurge of mass protest could bring Egypt real reform.
.jpg){kind=link}
MEANWHILE, IN BRITAIN…
❧ Worldwide, there are 15 billionaires under the age of 30. According to research by Forbes, every single one of them inherited their unfathomable wealth. The Guardian’s wealth correspondent, Rupert Neate writes:
All of the world’s billionaires younger than 30 inherited their wealth, the first wave of “the great wealth transfer” in which more than 1,000 wealthy people are expected to pass on more than $5.2tn (£4.1tn) to their heirs over the next two decades.
There are already more billionaires than ever before (2,781), and the number is expected to soar in the coming years as an elderly generation of super-rich people prepare to give their fortunes to their children…
A total of $70tn is expected to be inherited by the next generation over the next 20 years, according to estimates by the consulting firm Cerulli Associates. The transfer is expected to make millennials the “richest generation in history”, says research by the real estate agent Knight Frank.
This is a rosy projection for a generation that notoriously struggles with the outrageous costs of living and the even more outrageous cost of avocado toast. But the implication that this wealth will be broadly shared across the entire millennial cohort is absurd. Millennials with rich parents will be able to afford avocado toast by the truckload. But the vast majority of people—70 to 80 percent of households—receive no inheritance at all, while over half of those who do inherit less than $10,000 on average. While wealth is certainly stratified by age, simply dropping most of it to a tiny, lucky sliver of the young will do nothing but re-make the class inequality of the previous generation.
There is a solution to this that should be obvious in any society that claims to value “meritocracy”: taxing the hell out of giant inheritances and using the windfalls to pay for things like universal housing, healthcare, and free-at-the-point-of-service avocado toast dispensaries.
OWL FACT OF THE WEEK
Some owls live in cactuses, like the cactus ferruginous pygmy owls of southern Arizona and northern Mexico.
Photo by Aaron Flesch, National Geographic
According to National Geographic, these owls are around six inches tall and weigh less than a deck of playing cards, but are some of the desert’s most ferocious hunters, often taking down prey twice their size. Nestling inside saguaro cacti, often after they have been drilled into by woodpeckers, helps make this possible, disguising them from both their prey and larger predators.
But as desert climates are ravaged by wildfires and human expansion and invasive species raze their cactus homes, pygmy owls teeter dangerously close to extinction, with a population of fewer than a hundred. Last year, after years of advocacy from conservation groups they were once again added to the list of threatened species after being delisted in 2006 following a lawsuit from land developers.
“The fierce little cactus ferruginous pygmy owl needs our care and protection and after a long fight it finally got it,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “If we lose this owl, we’ve lost the Sonoran Desert and so much more. We have to protect more of the natural world, invest in environmental restoration and phase out fossil fuels to halt this extinction crisis.”
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. Fact-checking by Justin Ward. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
Current Affairs is an independent left media organization supported entirely by its readers and listeners. We offer a beautiful bimonthly print and digital magazine, a weekly podcast, and a regular news briefing service. We are registered with the Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with EIN 83-1675720. Your gift is tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. Donations may be made through our website, via wire transfer, or by sending us a check. Email help@currentaffairs.org with any questions.