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Helen Benedict, Ending the Cycle of Revenge

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Honestly, on October 8, 2023, one day after Hamas’s horrific assault on Israel, with 1,200 dead, thousands wounded, those rapes, and 251 hostages taken, if I had told you that, in response, almost one year (yes, one year!) later, Gaza itself would lie in utter ruins — mosques, churches, schools, hospitals all destroyed — infrastructure bulldozed out of existence (as is also happening on the West Bank), at least 41,000 Palestinians dead (and many more possibly under the rubble of that tiny 25-mile strip of land), god knows how many wounded, and children devastated in too many ways to even imagine, or that the war Israel launched against Hamas in response would now be spreading all too horrifically, thanks to exploding pagers, walkie-talkies, missiles, and bombs, to southern Lebanon, some of which would also be left in “smoldering ruins” (with hundreds, possibly thousands more dead, including once again children), and the possibility that, by the time Helen Benedict’s latest piece is posted at TomDispatch, Israel might already have begun an invasion of that region (as it has), or that the war started on October 7th might be threatening to spread to Iran, Iraq, Yemen, and who knows where else in the Middle East, or that the U.S., which has been reinforcing its military personnel in the region (now at almost 50,000) and has an aircraft carrier strike group there, might even join the fighting, or that in those grim 12 months, Israel would have become a pariah state, I doubt you would have believed me for a second.

And yet here we are.

Fortunately, today TomDispatch regular Benedict, a journalism professor at Columbia University and the author most recently of the novel The Good Deed, offers us voices from Israel and Palestine of a sort we normally don’t hear in this all too violent world of ours, Israelis and Palestinians who actually have the urge to break the cycle of revenge and engage in some process of genuine reconciliation. Just having Israelis and Palestinians talking together about how to create a better world is, I think, deeply moving. Tom

“What Should I Do With This Pain?”

Bereaved Israelis and Palestinians Use Their Grief to Advocate for Reconciliation and Peace Together

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With the first anniversary of the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel approaching, the death toll in Gaza climbing to more than 41,500, and Israel inflicting ever more extreme violence on the West Bank and now on Lebanon as well, something very different happened recently in a poky classroom at Columbia University. Two young men, one Palestinian and one Israeli, both of whom had lost people they deeply loved to the conflict, came to speak not about fear and anger, revenge or oppression, but about reconciliation, friendship, and peace.

One of them was Arab Aramin, a 30-year-old Palestinian from Jerusalem whose little sister, Abir, had been shot and killed in front of her school by an Israeli soldier. She was 10 years old.

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Karen Greenberg, The Forever Prison and the Forever Wars

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Can you even imagine a world where the response of President George W. Bush to al-Qaeda’s acts of horror in September 2001 wasn’t the launching of “the Global War on Terror” which, from Afghanistan and Iraq across the Middle East and deep into Africa, became a global set of disastrous conflicts that might, in truth, have been al-Qaeda’s dream? Well, dream on.

And while you’re at it, keep in mind that, according to the remarkable Costs of War Project, this country ended up spending at least $8 trillion on those wars. (Imagine how that money might have been used to help rather than hurt people globally!) According to that project, an estimated 940,000 people died directly thanks to America’s war on terror (almost half of them civilians) and 3.6 to 3.8 million indirectly in its war zones, bringing the total to nearly five million dead. Meanwhile, that group has estimated that 38 million other human beings were displaced from their homes, lives, and often worlds.

And if that isn’t the definition of a nightmare, I’m not sure what is. As it happens, TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg has followed that “war” (those wars? Those armed disasters?) all too grimly and strikingly for years now, while focusing particularly on the issues of torture and imprisonment. Yes, this country proved all too quick to begin torturing its war on terror prisoners — though the term the Bush administration preferred to use was “enhanced interrogation techniques” — while creating a series of strikingly grim offshore sites of imprisonment beyond the rule of American or any other law, particularly — and on this subject Greenberg has made herself a leading expert — the prison the Bush administration set up at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Today, while thinking about all those years in which she covered the horrors of those ongoing wars, Greenberg wonders whether it is indeed finally, in some sense, all over. Let her explain. Tom

Will the Forever Wars Ever End?

The War on Terror 23 Years Later

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September marked the 23rd anniversary of al-Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on the United States, which left nearly 3,000 people dead. For the two decades since then, I've been writing, often for TomDispatch, about the ways the American response to 9/11, which quickly came to be known as the Global War on Terror, or GWOT, changed this country. As I've explored in several books, in the name of that war, we transformed our institutions, privileged secrecy over transparency and accountability, side-stepped and even violated longstanding laws and constitutional principles, and basically tossed aside many of the norms that had guided us as a nation for two centuries-plus, opening the way for a country now in Trumpian-style difficulty at home.

Even today, more than two decades later, the question remains: Will the war on terror ever end?

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William Hartung, Bringing the Militarization of University Research Back to Earth

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Pentagon expert William Hartung first wandered into TomDispatch in March 2008, less than seven years after this country’s Global War(s) on Terror were launched, full-scale disasters that were already costing the American taxpayer a fortune and a half — or perhaps, given the subject, all too literally an arm and a leg. As he wrote then, “How much, for instance, does one week of George Bush’s wars cost? Glad you asked. If we consider the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan together — which we might as well do, since we and our children and grandchildren will be paying for them together into the distant future — a conservative, single-week estimate comes to $3.5 billion. Remember, that’s per week! By contrast, the whole international community spends less than $400 million per year on the International Atomic Energy Agency, the primary institution for monitoring and preventing the spread of nuclear weapons; that’s less than one day’s worth of war costs.”

Only $650 million or so of that weekly sum, he estimated, was “spent on people.” So, he wondered, “where does the other nearly $3 billion go?” The answer he offered then: “It goes for goods and services, from tanks and fighter planes to fuel and food. Most of this money ends up in the hands of private companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and the former Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root.” And knowing about that expense of $3.5 billion a week “and counting” on America’s wars, he added sarcastically, “Doesn’t that make you feel safer?”

Ever since then, Hartung, a Pentagon expert, has focused on this strange reality of ours: no matter how many wars the United States loses, it only pours yet more taxpayer dollars into the Pentagon budget and into the coffers of those giant weapons-making companies of the military-industrial-congressional complex. Even the titles of a few of his pieces over the years catch the grim spirit of his all-too-striking analysis: “There’s No Business Like the Arms Business, Weapons ‘R’ Us (But You’d Never Know It)” (July 2016); “The Urge to Splurge, Why Is It So Hard to Reduce the Pentagon Budget?” (October 2016); “The American Way of War Is a Budget-Breaker, Never Has a Society Spent More for Less” (May 2017); “Merger Mania, The Military-Industrial Complex on Steroids” (July 2019); “America Dominant Again (in Arms Sales), And Again… and Again… And Again” (May 2021); “Fueling the Warfare State, America’s $1.4 Trillion ‘National Security’ Budget Makes Us Ever Less Safe” (July 2022); “Spending Unlimited, The Pentagon’s Budget Follies Come at a High Price” (March 2024).

And of course, that’s just a small dip into the pieces he’s written for TomDispatch. Yet, after all these years, what couldn’t be more striking today is that, in the same spirit as those older pieces, Hartung focuses (as he so often has) on a different aspect entirely of the Pentagon’s distinctly over-funded world, one that, amid all the news coverage in this country, gets little or no attention: how the Pentagon, as he puts it, “goes to school” to enlist American science in the battle to create yet more horrific weaponry. And so it goes, again and again and again. Tom

The Pentagon Goes to School

The Battle for the Soul of American Science

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The divestment campaigns launched last spring by students protesting Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza brought the issue of the militarization of American higher education back into the spotlight.

Of course, financial ties between the Pentagon and American universities are nothing new. As Stuart Leslie has pointed out in his seminal book on the topic, The Cold War and American Science, “In the decade following World War II, the Department of Defense (DOD) became the biggest patron of American science.” Admittedly, as civilian institutions like the National Institutes of Health grew larger, the Pentagon’s share of federal research and development did decline, but it still remained a source of billions of dollars in funding for university research.

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