Before the war, our home garden was more than just a patch of green. It was a refuge I retreated to whenever the world felt too heavy. Bougainvillea climbed the walls, and flowers in every color filled the corners — tended by my mother as if they were her own children. In one corner stood a pomegranate tree we had brought from a nursery in Beit Lahia in northern Gaza — a city long known as the…
Source
As I headed to my local “No Kings” protest on March 28, I tuned in to the livestream of the far right Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to listen to a man who is currently cheering on a war in order to rule as a monarch over my homeland. “Can you imagine Iran going from ‘Death to America’ to ‘God bless America?’” Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last shah, asked the CPAC crowd…
Source
This story originally appeared in Jacobin on April 01, 2026. It is shared here with permission.
One of the most appalling aspects of the Gaza genocide — besides its near-unprecedented slaughter of children and other innocents and its near-obliteration from existence of an entire society, unpparalleled in the modern era — is that officials in both the United States and Israel were overtly hoping to make it the new, horrifying standard for modern war. As we’re seeing right now in Iran and Lebanon, they’re not wasting any time applying that standard elsewhere.
Last year, as Gaza lay in ruins with more than 10 percent of its population killed or injured, the New Yorker ran a chilling story related to the Gaza genocide. The magazine reported that a variety of US military lawyers and legal experts viewed Israel’s spree of murder and destruction in Gaza as not just a completely acceptable way to prosecute a war but as “a dress rehearsal” for a future conflict with a US adversary like China: namely, one free of restraint, adherence to international law, and squeamishness about killing civilians.
What Israel did with full US backing in Gaza, in other words, should be the new normal for war, at least when “our side” does it.
The report sat uncomfortably alongside a pattern of US and Israeli officials incessantly invoking the Allies’ carpet bombing campaigns during World War II to justify the genocide they carried out. For almost the entire period after the war, those bombing campaigns were universally understood to be war crimes and a moral horror — including by Curtis LeMay himself, the psychotic general who led the firebombing of Japan and later itched for nuclear war with the Soviet Union —
New York police say they foiled an assassination attempt against Palestinian American activist Nerdeen Kiswani. She describes the terror of finding out about the plot and why it reflects the “impunity” with which Zionist groups have targeted pro-Palestine voices. “It really made me feel even more vulnerable than I already do as a Palestinian activist,” says Kiswani, co-founder of the group…
Source
Gaza has long been described as an “open-air prison.” The more I reflect on the term, the more it feels like a painful truth rather than mere hollow rhetoric. A suffocating blockade has been imposed for decades, with two border crossings sealed shut depending on the political climate and circumstances, often leaving no feasible exit for patients seeking medical referrals or students hoping to…
Source
Al-Funduqumiya, West Bank — On March 21, a Palestinian vehicle collided with an ATV near the village of Beit Imrin in the West Bank, killing the ATV driver. Had it not been for the fact that the driver of the ATV was 18-year-old Yehuda Sherman of the illegal Israeli outpost of Shuva Yisrael Farms, the incident would likely have been handled as an ordinary traffic accident. Instead…
Source