Danaka Katovich, CODEPINK

In an era of high prices for fuel, food, and housing, an extra $4,000 could make a life-saving difference for many families. But instead, that’s what the average household had to shell out for the Pentagon last year.

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That’s right: The average U.S. taxpayer in 2025 had over $4,000 taken out of their paychecks to fund the Pentagon, according to the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. In the coming years, that amount is set to rise as Congress considers a $1.5 trillion war budget for 2027.

For the growing number of working poor in the United States, that money can mean the difference between making rent or falling behind, or between being able to afford an emergency trip to the doctor or going without care.

Money directed to the Pentagon represents nothing but betrayal for many Americans. A large majority oppose our wars, especially the latest conflict in Iran. And roughly half of the Pentagon’s budget flows to for-profit contractors, fueling the billionaire (and now even trillionaire) class.

Take SpaceX, one of many companies built on government contracts funded by taxpayer dollars. Elon Musk’s company would not exist without U.S. taxpayers. As early Tesla investor Ross Gerber put it, “There would not be (Tesla and SpaceX) if it weren’t for the government.”

Early investments and contracts from the U.S. government helped propel SpaceX to success, while continued awards from the Pentagon provided the stable revenue that made the government one of Musk’s largest customers. The company is now valued at more than $1 trillion. Private investors alone did not make Musk a trillionaire — taxpayers across the United States did.

But Musk isn’t the only person who made himself rich off the backs of American workers.

Lockheed Martin receives over 70 percent of its revenue from U.S. government contracts. The numbers for Raytheon and General Dynamics are similar. These military contractors simply would not exist without the taxpayers — and a new $1.5 trillion budget would send hundreds of billions of dollars more to people who already have more than most Americans could even conceptualize.

At the same time, while taxpayers are subsidizing the military-industrial complex, the jobs those industries are allegedly providing are in decline, with the war industry creating over 2 million fewer jobs than it did forty years ago.

Worse still, under the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” Republicans passed a year ago, the money for these ever-rising Pentagon budgets comes directly from SNAP, Medicaid, and other programs that help Americans make ends meet.

Under those cuts, millions of Americans — including children — have lost SNAP benefits already. And that’s impacting not just families but the farmers who helped feed them.

SNAP benefits were “guaranteed money in the pockets of farmers,” said Reese Amxy, a policy organizer at the Illinois Stewardship Alliance. But 150,000 people in the state have already lost eligibility.

It’s not just Illinois. Arizona has seen the steepest decline, with 50 percent of recipients — nearly half a million — already losing benefits. Louisiana (21 percent), Florida (20 percent), Oklahoma (16 percent), and Virginia (16 percent), Texas (14 percent), Wyoming (13 percent), and Arkansas (12 percent) round out the rest of the hardest hit states so far.

Yet the person who lost SNAP and the farmer who lost their income alike will be asked to foot the bill for the $1.5 trillion war budget. This is Robin Hood in reverse. Worse still, the weapons those taxes buy are often to use to kill children like ours in Gaza and Iran.

The weapons and tech CEOs that would benefit from the massive war budget, and the politicians bought off by them, seek to keep this cycle going next year at an even grander scale. Americans need to demand their lawmakers say no more Pentagon spending — and invest in the things that actually keep our communities safe instead.

We need an investment in the people—not profit. What would you fund instead of war? Take our poll now!

Danaka Katovich is the National Co-Director of CODEPINK. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

By: Nuvpreet Kalra, CODEPINK

In June 2026, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu wrote to Republican Representative Marlin Stutzman of California, saying that “the time has now arrived [for Israel] to move from aid recipient to partner” with the United States. Yesterday, on Fox News, Netanyahu again repeated the proposal to move “from aid to partnership“.

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What Netanyahu proclaims is at the core of the proposed “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative”, which has been included in a section of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that seeks to push the Pentagon budget to $1.5 trillion in 2027. This proposal to the annual military policy bill aims to essentially merge the Israeli and the US militaries.

While the initial bill, the “United States-Israel FUTURES Act,” failed as a standalone bill, the core provisions have been included in the NDAA. This aims to “expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation” between the US and Israel, led by an “executive agent” decided by the US Defense Secretary.

This merger would integrate the United States and Israeli occupation militarily, including “data fusion”, “network integration”, research and development, weapons and bio-manufacturing, and collaboration with AI, cyber, and quantum machine learning technologies. While the Israeli occupation forces and US military are already deeply connected and share many of their genocidal tactics, this represents a significant entanglement of the two most belligerent and murderous militaries in the world.

If passed, this would be the most integrated the United States is with any country on earth. It is perhaps unsurprising for Israel to be that partner, given it is a proxy for the United States used to entrench its hegemony in the region and provide a base for attacks, particularly against Iran. The Israeli occupation is totally reliant on the United States. The US has given Israel at least $300 billion in military money since 1948. It uses US-made weapons, relies on training and intelligence from the US, and is armed by many US citizens. So just like when the Trump administration re-named the “Department of Defense” to the “Department of War”, this is yet another overt action that reveals the reality that has always been there.

In 2008, the US passed a law requiring it to protect Israel’s “military edge” against other countries in the region. The US is required to give Israel at least $3.8 billion a year in military funding until 2028. Israel has always been a major priority of the United States - this only makes that clearer.

This new integration differs from the way the US engages with its other allies. While NATO countries and partners share a degree of military integration with global weapons supply chains, intelligence sharing, military bases, and more, this removes the limitations in existence for military cooperation. Already, the US war drive through NATO has impacts across society beyond what might be recognised as purely military-related, given the military-industrial complex and integration of the US military in all aspects of life. In this case, the merger will deepen ruptures across the political, social, and economic system as the United States moves closer to its proxy. The main beneficiaries of this will be the weapons companies that profited immensely from and have made Israel’s genocide in Gaza possible, as they enter into new seamless contracts.

Israel is increasingly viewed across the world, and within the United States, as a pariah state. In the US, 60% of adults have an unfavourable view of Israel. This push to further integrate with Israel puts the US on the line in an attempt to ensure the continuation and longevity of the settler colonial project. By entrenching the US military with Israel’s own, it provides a layer of protection that goes even further than the impunity that has given Israel full rein to commit a holocaust in Gaza and further colonisation of the occupied West Bank. This integration will mean that Israel is given unfettered support to carry out its genocidal trajectory for the total colonisation of Palestine, inhibiting any future presidents from changing this relationship, if that were to ever occur.

This is the US empire defending itself, as the zionist state becomes isolated, by trying to make its proxy appear more robust and independent, while maintaining its unbreakable connection to the core. This is a clear response to the massive movements that have erupted across the world for nearly three years in opposing Israel’s genocide and the role of countries in facilitating it. The US is, in a way, absorbing Israel to provide the legitimacy being chipped away at internationally and domestically, ending the narrative opposition to unlimited foreign aid to Israel, which has garnered bipartisan support.

Israel is occupying at least 60% of Gaza. Palestinians are being pushed into a shrinking concentration camp, where they are bombed every single day and refused aid during what is described as a ceasefire. For US taxpayers, this merger would put even more of our money into funding this horrific genocide.

This NDAA is dangerous. Through the US-Israeli integration, it would facilitate more deadly technology, more weapons for genocide, and make it nearly impossible to sever support for Israel by the US. Through the $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget, it would funnel money out of welfare into more war and violence across the world. For the sake of humanity, we have to dismantle this apparatus of death that is the US empire, which is in a perpetual, ever-growing state of war to maintain its system of exploitation and plunder.

We need an investment in the people—not profit. What would YOU fund instead of war? Take our poll now!

Nuvpreet Kalra is CODEPINK’s digital content producer. She completed a Bachelor’s in politics and sociology at the University of Cambridge, and an MA in Internet Equalities at the University of the Arts London. As a student, she was part of movements to divest and decolonize, as well as anti-racist and anti-imperialist groups. Nuvpreet joined CODEPINK as an intern in 2023 and now produces digital and social media content. In England, she organizes with groups for Palestinian liberation, abolition, and anti-imperialism.

June 24 marked the start of the biennial Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercises, the world’s largest international naval war games. Led by the U.S., the military exercises bring together 31 countries and include more than 25,000 personnel, 40 surface ships, 5 submarines, and 140 aircraft. The event, which will run until July 31, marks the newest escalation of U.S. preparations for war on China, further militarizing the Pacific and normalizing the prospect of conflict through increasingly large-scale exercises and an ever-expanding web of alliances and military bases.

At the same time, the U.S. and partner nations kicked off the ten-day Valiant Shield 2026 exercises across Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Japan, and surrounding seas, submerging the entire Pacific into an intensive military operation zone.

At a moment of intensifying climate disasters and growing economic insecurity, the message from Washington is clear: there is always more money for war. RIMPAC comes as Congress is attempting to approve a staggering $1.5 trillion war budget, even as communities across the world are facing deadly heat waves, floods, and other climate-fueled disasters.

This past week, while U.S. military vessels practiced war off their coasts, super typhoon Bavi pummeled Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Only a week into the typical typhoon season, this is already the second major typhoon to hit the islands. Many locals were still without power from the last super typhoon Sinlaku, which killed 17 people and caused over $1.5 billion in damages.

Climate scientist Kristina Dahl remarked, “In both of these cases we can see the fingerprint of climate change on the storms and that has really devastating consequences for the people who are repeatedly in their paths.”

These overlapping crises reveal a profound imbalance in priorities. As Pacific communities contend with increasingly severe climate disasters, the United States continues to invest staggering sums in military expansion and war preparations. The irony is especially stark given that the U.S. military is the world’s largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels and one of the largest institutional greenhouse gas emitters, while decades of U.S. military activity has caused lasting environmental and human harm across Pacific Island communities.

Instead of pouring resources into preventing climate change and protecting people on the frontlines of the climate crisis, the U.S. continues to pump money into its bloated war budget. In the Pacific, military expansion is justified by the increasing push toward war on China. The 2026 National Defense Strategy committed to “deterring China in the Indo-Pacific through strength” by “erect(ing) a strong denial defense along the First Island Chain” so that “Joint Force always has the ability to conduct devastating strikes and operations against targets.”

The U.S. conception of “deterrence” is both illogical and hypocritical in nature. In the name of “protecting” the Pacific from a future imaginary threat, the United States is harming the very communities it claims to defend through military buildup, environmental degradation, and the transformation of islands into staging grounds for war. The narrative of an imminent Chinese takeover of the Pacific is often treated as a foregone conclusion despite there being no evidence that China seeks to invade or occupy Pacific nations. Rather than making the region safer, the pursuit of “deterrence” risks turning the Pacific into a battlefield while diverting resources away from the urgent challenges that communities are actually facing today.

A recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies found that the U.S. military’s economic benefits to Hawaiʻi have been significantly overstated and that local communities bear enormous hidden costs from its presence. The report estimates that military demand for housing drove Oʻahu rents up by 7.1 percent in 2024 alone, costing non-military renters an additional $234.8 million. It also found that cleaning up PFAS contamination at just three military installations could cost at least $493 million, with broader health and environmental damages potentially reaching into the billions. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has leased more than 46,000 acres of Hawaiian land for just $1 leases, despite the land’s estimated fair market value reaching as high as $133.7 billion. Far from protecting Pacific communities, the U.S. military buildup has contributed to housing insecurity, environmental contamination, and the dispossession of Indigenous lands.

Similarly, U.S. militarization of Guam has severely impacted local communities. The U.S. military controls roughly 27 percent of the island’s land, while decades of military activity have left behind contaminated groundwater, hazardous waste, and damaged ecosystems. PFAS “forever chemicals” linked to military firefighting foam have been detected in Guam’s drinking water wells, threatening the island’s primary freshwater source. Military expansion has also endangered coral reefs, sensitive coastal habitats, and wildlife.

These events, which are just a few of many examples of the environmental and human costs of militarization, reveal the deep hypocrisy of the U.S. strategy of “peace through strength.” Rather than protecting local communities, militarization leaves them more vulnerable. All the while, massive military spending diverts resources away from urgent needs such as climate relief.

The proposed $1.5 trillion war budget will only deepen these harmful priorities, while large-scale military exercises like RIMPAC intensify U.S.-China tensions, heighten the risk of dangerous encounters at sea, and increase the possibility of pulling the Pacific into a devastating war.

We need an investment in the people—not profit. What would you fund instead of war? Take our poll now!

Megan Russell is CODEPINK’s China Campaign Coordinator.

Megan graduated from the London School of Economics with a Master’s Degree in Conflict Studies. Prior to that, she attended NYU where she studied Conflict, Culture, and International Law. Megan spent one year studying in Shanghai, and over eight years studying Chinese Mandarin. Her research focuses on the intersection between US-China affairs, peacebuilding, and international development.

Episode 359: From the River to the Sea: Dr. Maha Nassar, an associate professor at the University of Arizona, presents the chant “From the River to the Sea” as a call for liberation that embraces Palestinian personal ties to the land of Palestine. Dr. Nassar was a guest on the CODEPINK Summer Series: Challenging Zionism in Schools.

“We’re used to people saying ‘fuck no’ and doing it anyway.” These words were seemingly spoken by our very own Governor Gretchen Whitmer earlier this month, caught on a hot mic chatting with Oracle executive Clay Magouryk. The two were celebrating breaking ground on the controversial new AI data center in rural Saline, Michigan — currently the largest data center project in the country. Governor Whitmer is apparently happy to sell Michigan out to military tech giants OpenAI and Oracle. This is the latest in a series of data center projects being forced into communities that have made their opposition crystal clear. Michiganders are ‘fighting like hell’ because they understand exactly what is at stake; Southwest Michigan residents have already filed a class-action lawsuit for the 24/7 noise nuisance that disrupts daily life and reduces property values.

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The development of AI data centers creates harm and destruction. The companies that drive this development, such as OpenAI and Palantir, have contracts with the U.S. military and government agencies like ICE. Locally, the influx of these data centers provides infrastructure for mass surveillance and diverts municipal resources. Globally, the push for data center expansion demands massive amounts of minerals and fossil fuels from resource-rich countries in the Global South, which are obtained through U.S. military intervention and U.S.-backed militia groups. As such, we as Michiganders must continue to oppose these data center projects.

The harm these data centers inflict ripples across the world. Data center development depends on imported critical conflict minerals and massive amounts of electricity generated by fossil fuels, which contribute directly to U.S.-backed conflicts and war on Venezuela, Iran, and in the Congo. Tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold, referred to as 3TG, are essential, and their extraction is linked to financing armed groups and militias. The struggle for control over mineral-rich areas has led to prolonged violence in the DRC, contributing to millions of deaths and leaving entire regions destabilized.

Detroit is becoming a hub for technology, manufacturing, and the military-industrial complex, where events like the annual Reindustrialize conference bring together defense contractors, surveillance firms, and policymakers to strategize a future built on automated warfare and mass data extraction. Palantir, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing attended, representing key pillars of the U.S. defense and surveillance industry. Palantir’s Project Maven and Where’s Daddy track individuals and automate kill chain recommendations with little human oversight. Lockheed Martin and Boeing produce the missiles, bombs, warcraft, and strike systems that turn algorithmic targeting into genocide.

It’s understandable that some Michiganders might think the development of AI data centers is a good thing, or at least an inevitability. Governor Whitmer, for one, claims that if Michigan does not lead the charge on these data centers, “they’ll be done elsewhere… with lower wages in a way that abuses the natural resources and jacks up energy prices.” Thus far, this seems to mean that companies that develop these data centers can receive tax breaks and circumvent public input, which sets a disadvantageous precedent. These data centers, furthermore, are not an inevitability, and they can drastically impact resource usage in their regions. At the Saline data center, even with the closed-loop cooling system to reduce on-site water consumption, water will be consumed indirectly: Increased electricity needs increase the need for water and oil consumption for local power plants. There is also no guarantee that any jobs created will be given to local residents. None of the reported advantages are worth the imperialism needed to supply resources to these data centers, nor the mass surveillance apparatus that comes with them.

Governor Whitmer’s hot mic comment confirmed what we already suspected: our voices and opposition are flat-out ignored in favor of destructive corporations. Michiganders across the state have stood up and said ‘fuck no’ to data centers and more war, yet projects keep moving forward. Residents deserve better than politicians who prioritize tech billionaires and war profiteers over their own people.

Let’s build a joint struggle against data centers and the war economy that drives and supplies them.

Jackie Barlow is an anti-war activist, nature lover, and avid gardener in Metro Detroit. Through organizing with CODEPINK Detroit, she works to end militarism and corporate greed that destroy ecosystems, public resources, and local communities.

Stewart Mitchell is an organizer with CODEPINK Detroit. He is an educator and, thus far, lifelong Michigander.

With the 32 North ATLANTIC Treaty Organization (NATO) member countries in Ankara, Turkey, for their annual meeting this week, July 7 and 8, many of the militaries of NATO countries are halfway around the world in the PACIFIC ocean in war preparation maneuvers.

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Ten NATO countries, almost one-third of all NATO countries, have sent military forces, land, air, and sea, to Hawaii to participate in the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC), a 38-day (June 24-July 31, 2026) war drill.

Forty naval vessels, headed by the U.S. aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, 5 submarines, 206 aircraft, land forces from 15 nations, and over 30,000 military personnel.

These war drills are specifically directed toward the propagandized military threat of China, when China’s main “threat” is its economic challenge to the “West,” not military confrontation.

Thirty countries are spending lots of their national budgets to send some of their military forces to one of the most isolated island archipelagos in the world, the Hawaiian Islands.

Of the 10 countries from NATO countries, only two have shores on the Pacific Ocean- the United States and Canada.

The other eight NATO countries in RIMPAC are sending vessels and military forces all the way from Europe: Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Additionally, there are 5 NATO “partners” sending aircraft, ships, and land forces to Hawaii that have Pacific Ocean coasts: Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Korea, and Colombia, the only country in Latin America to be a “partner” in NATO.

The other 14 countries with shores on the Pacific or Indian oceans that are sending military forces to Hawaii for RIMPAC 2026 are: Brunei, Chile, Fiji, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Tonga.

The 6^th NATO “partner” in RIMPAC 2026 is Israel. Israel has an office in NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, and is well integrated into NATO operations through its deep association with the United States military. Israel brings to NATO first-Hand experience in the assassination of national leaders, journalists, ordinary citizens, and in the AI development of targeting infrastructure and surveillance around the World

Israel is the U.S. partner in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and tragically brings the most recent combat experience among RIMPAC militaries with land, air, and sea combat operations in Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon, and Iran.

Israel is the first country from the Middle East to send military to RIMPAC, providing first-hand experience not only in conducting a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza with the weapons provided by the United States, but also offering the latest artificial intelligence programs for the assassination of national leaders, journalists, and ordinary citizens, targeting of infrastructure and surveillance of areas anywhere in the world to the NATO war machine.

RIMPAC Is Not the Only Big Naval War Practice in the Pacific

While RIMPAC is one of the largest war practices, each year the US Pacific Command, by its own count, sponsors over 1,500 war practice maneuvers and other engagement activities with military forces from other countries in Asia and the Pacific.

In fact, the week of June 22-July 1, 2026, as RIMPAC began in Hawaii, the war practice Valiant Shield ended in the front yard of China near Guam, the Northern Marianas, and Okinawa. Valient Shield is held every two years, just as RIMPAC is. The U.S., Japan, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand participated in Valiant Shield, only the second time Japan has sent military forces since Valiant Shield began in 2006.

The Navy described Valiant Shield as an anti-submarine warfare exercise, high-altitude balloon launch, MQ-28 Ghost Bat drone surveillance flight, bilateral medical operations, bilateral resupply and cross-decking, and a live fire of the medium-range intercept capability.

The United States sent the aircraft carrier, Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George Washington (CVN 73), the guided-missile cruiser USS Robert Smalls (CG 62), the guided-missile destroyers USS Shoup (DDG 86) and USS Benfold (DDG 65), and Virginia-class fast-attack submarine USS Minnesota (SSN 783) to Valiant Shield.

The Japanese ships included the helicopter destroyer Kaga, the guided-missile destroyer Fuyuzuki, and the attack submarine JS Jingei.

Japanese air and ground Self-Defense Forces also participated in Valient Shield 2026, with 4,100 Japanese ground forces, 150 vehicles, and 60 aircraft involved in the war maneuvers.

The Royal Canadian Navy frigate HMCS Charlottetown (FFH339) and a P-8A Poseidon MPA from the Royal New Zealand Air Force and Royal Australian Air Force also participated in Valiant Shield 2026

The story of the 2026 Valient Shield sinking of the current USS Juneau by a Japanese torpedo a strange chapter in military history. It’s the Second Time a Japanese submarine sank ships named the USS Juneau!

A Navy press release about Valiant Shield enthusiastically read that “The pinnacle event was the sinking exercise (SINKEX) of the decommissioned Austin-class amphibious transport dock USS Juneau (LPD 10) in the Philippine Sea, June 27. The SINKEX brought together air, surface, and subsurface assets in coordinated strikes, allowing crews to sharpen critical skills in weapons employment and target engagement under realistic conditions that no simulator can fully replicate.”

The amphibious transport dock USS Juneau (LPD 10) entered service in 1969 and saw action in the Vietnam War and Operation Desert Storm before being decommissioned in 2008 and being made ready to be sunk as part of military war practice, 18 years later, in 2026.

June 2026 U.S. Navy images show that aircraft dropped bombs on the USS Juneau. But, according to the U.S. Navy, the final hit that sank the USS Juneau was a torpedo strike from a Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force submarine.

The Captain of the Japanese submarine JS Jingei, whose torpedo finally sank the USS Juneau in Valiant Shield 2026, perhaps did not know the history of the ships that have carried the name USS Juneau, or he might have passed up the opportunity to give the final blow to this USS Juneau in June 2026.

Japanese submarine sank the USS Juneau in 1942 during World War II, killing 600 sailors

In 1942, during World War II, the namesake of the 2026 Valiant Shield, USS Juneau, was sunk near the Solomon Islands when torpedoes from a Japanese submarine split the light cruiser in half, sinking it almost immediately. More than 600 sailors died that day, including perhaps the most well-known case of brothers killed during the war.

The Sullivan brothers, five brothers from Waterloo, Iowa—Albert, Francis, George, Joseph, and Madison Sullivan—all served as shipmates on the USS Juneau. Normal protocol during wartime required siblings to be assigned to different units to prevent one family from having to endure such a hardship should tragedy strike. But the Sullivans insisted that they serve together and requested special permission to do so from the Secretary of the Navy.

Tragically, all five brothers were killed in action when their ship, the USS Juneau, was sunk on November 13, 1942, by Japanese submarine torpedoes.

Reminder that the “Killer US Submarine” USS Charlotte is operating in RIMPAC 2026

In RIMPAC 2026, the notorious USS Charlotte, a U.S. nuclear attack submarine, torpedoed and sank in March 2026 the Dena, an Iranian naval frigate, 2,000 miles from Iran as it was leaving a regional military exercise in the Indian Ocean, killing 87 Iranian sailors.

Ann Wright served 29 years in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves and retired as a Colonel. She was also a U.S. diplomat for 16 years but resigned 23 years ago in March 2003, in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq. She is a member of Veterans For Peace, World Beyond War, International Peace Bureau, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, and Hawaii Peace and Justice. She lives in Honolulu, Hawaii. She is the co-author of “Dissent: Voices of Conscience.”

Last week, millions of people around the world were subjected to record-breaking heatwaves. At least 25 deaths in the U.S. from this heat dome were reported. The French government also counted over 2,000 excess deaths during the June heatwaves. At the same time, this past weekend, a devastating super typhoon hit the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam, leaving islands like Rota, where 2,000 people live, without running water and most buildings impacted.

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In both cases, the people least responsible for the climate crisis are the most vulnerable to its effects. And in both cases, people’s ability to withstand crises have been made dramatically worse by militarization. Those most threatened by heatwaves are too often in neighborhoods subjected to militarized policing, economic abandonment, and the exploitation of their communities. Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands are occupied by the U.S. military and subjected to environmentally destructive bases and training exercises.

These climate disasters are not new, but they are coming at a moment when we have an opportunity to do something about it. Congress will soon vote on the Pentagon budget. This year’s proposed budget is an obscene $1.5 trillion, and the cumulative amount of military spending would be even higher. For the first time in years, there will likely be a notable number of Democratic Party votes against it. Senator Ed Markey has also introduced a bill to cut it in half. Cutting this budget could be one of the only pieces of climate policy that can meet the speed and scale of the climate crisis. Fighting it could open up new organizing terrains and break down movement silos that have prevented traction for so long.

Even without redistributing that $1.5 trillion, cutting the Pentagon’s budget could do wonders for the planet. The Pentagon is the world’s largest institutional polluter. It has over 800 bases worldwide. Each base acts as part of the permanent enforcement mechanism for the fossil fuel industry, driving ecocidal resource wars and entrenching U.S. corporate dominance in oil- and mineral-rich regions. This budget also opens a direct line of funding for more data centers that poison communities and drive further resource wars to power them. At least $30 billion is requested for direct Department of War-owned data centers, over $58 billion is requested for AI capabilities more broadly, and over half of the proposed budget is going to private weapons contractors whose AI programs are directly supported by the data centers being developed around the country. Companies building these centers, like OpenAI, Meta, and Amazon Web Services, have all passed their own multi-billion-dollar deals with the Pentagon.

What could we do with that money instead? The scale of the Pentagon’s environmental destruction and its financial power is unfathomable; each of those 800 bases has generations of stories of destruction, displacement, and long-term illness. Each transaction covers multiple continents. And so the scale of possibility — what we could do alternatively with these resources — is equally immense.

According to the National Priorities Project, the current $1 trillion Pentagon budget could fund a year’s solar electricity for 1.92 billion homes for instance. And according to the Climate and Community Institute (CCI), the proposed $500 billion increase alone could cover 60% of U.S. homes. $500 billion could also end the wildfire crisis in California and restore 100 million acres of forest. Of course, the current oil-motivated wars, like the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran, are quite costly. The CCI report estimates that as of early April 2026, the $37 billion that the U.S. had spent on the assault on Iran could have paid for pre-k for every four-year-old in the country, green retrofits for 2,000 public schools, and over double the cost of restoring Trump’s cuts to SNAP benefits.

We can also point to other pathways for addressing the climate crisis: Instead of funding missile development, we could fund clean technology development. The land taken up by massive, sprawling, and toxic bases could be cleaned up and devoted to cultural sites, schools, agro-ecological farms, regenerative production, and the return of land to indigenous sovereignty and stewardship. New jobs and training programs could be created in all of these areas while, of course, avoiding false solutions such as carbon credits, carbon capture technology, and nuclear energy.

Without more money to new bases increasingly encircling China, we could collaborate on green technology instead of starting a new ecocidal cold war, and we could stop trampling on the sovereignty of countries throughout the Asia-Pacific like the Northern Mariana Islands. We could move toward a fossil fuel treaty and work with extremely vulnerable countries being occupied and sanctioned like Cuba to move their own holistic climate adaptation plans forward.

Fossil fuel supply chains are global, as is the impact of the U.S. military. Many states in the Global South continue to be dominant producers of fossil fuels due to debt traps and sanctions. Global climate finance could help alleviate that debt and fund a transition to truly renewable energy, free from the reproduction of violent extraction often enacted through the mining of so-called “critical” minerals (often deemed “critical” for the sake of military usage), also carried out in states like New Mexico and on indigenous territory.

This is, of course, just a sliver of what is possible, based on projects, blueprints, and visions already developed by those on the front lines of the climate crisis for decades. In recent years, these visions have been defined and revised in the People’s Agreement of Cochabamba, The Red Deal, and A People’s Green New Deal. This year’s People’s Declaration for a Rapid, Just, and Equitable Transition, was developed from a global summit made up of 900 civil society organizations in Santa Marta, Colombia. Notably, its 12th principle emphasizes the irreplaceable and central role of dismantling U.S. imperialism and militarism globally within the much larger framework for confronting the climate crisis — we can and should be just as clear-eyed in our organizing.

When we cut the Pentagon budget, we can be imaginative. We can see a world where the iron claw of extraction is weakened, and we can begin building something new in its place. The Pentagon budget is a clear target, with potential to address rising environmental, economic, and public health crises globally. At a time when most environmental policy is almost impossible to pass at the federal level, we can fight against this Pentagon budget and choose to breathe new life into our movements and our world.

Take action for the people and the planet! Tell us what you would fund instead of war!

Aaron Kirshenbaum is CODEPINK's War is Not Green campaigner and East Coast regional organizer. Based in, and originally from, Brooklyn, New York, Aaron holds an M.A. in Community Development and Planning from Clark University. They also hold a B.A. in Human-Environmental and Urban-Economic Geography from Clark.

Some of the most peaceful moments of my life were spent standing on the deck of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier just before dawn. It feels like looking over the entire ocean, into endless blue water. An aircraft carrier is massive — like a floating city on the sea — and yet you can still feel the gentle rocking from the ocean’s waves through the soles of your feet. When you breathe into this moment — the salty air filling your lungs — you’re reminded of how incredibly small you are in the grand scheme of things. The realization causes a sort of lightness and fluttering within the chest, an overwhelming sense of gratitude for all that you cannot understand.

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Then the day begins. The launch of the first F/A-18 fighter jet tears a sonic hole through the silent morning. Naval airmen run around the deck, bracing themselves and clutching their headsets to evade the thundering sound. The whole ship shakes as it launches jet after jet, white and gray trails marking their courses across the serene blue sky. Fuel and oil cover the hands and faces of mechanics working throughout the day and into the night to make sure the jets keep coming and going, launch after launch. There is not enough ocean breeze to prevent the sweat that stains our coveralls. The mixture of stenches — salt, oil, sweat — sticks to the hair inside your nostrils. It is the same the next day and the next. Preparation for war — for terror — is a never-ending, completely mundane affair. We eat our oatmeal, we don our coveralls, we load the jets, we drop the bombs, we do it all again.

I currently work for the antiwar organization CODEPINK, but long before that, I was an enlisted member of the U.S. Navy. My last job in the Navy was easy compared to others. I was the Operations Specialist for a squadron of fighter pilots. I worked with the commissioned officers, pilots whom I affectionately called “the frat boys of the Navy.” They were young, zealous, mostly white men hyped about their jobs. I mean, they got to fly ultrafast planes and practice dropping bombs all day. Isn’t this the American boy’s dream? I sat in their lounge every day, making sure everything was documented and accounted for to get them launching and landing their jets with enough fuel, with the right parachutes, and at the right times.

I joined the military for the same reasons many young people do. My parents couldn’t afford to send me to college. I was desperate to get out of the house, stuck in a place whose only immediate opportunities were casinos and hospitality work, and burdened with a brain and heart that were very eager to prove something. Along came Polly — or, in my case, a Navy recruiter. Travel? Free college? Free basic housing? A mission bigger than myself?! I thought about it for half a second before I signed up.

American warmaking is in the mundane. I’ll say it again and again. Most of us are mere assembly workers in a war-making factory, so disconnected are we in this 21st-century age of war. Most of us are kept far away from the bloody realities of our jobs. At the end of the day, my job was to push paper. I saw a copy machine more than I did a gun. I don’t have valiant stories of combating ISIS. I never leapt onto a grenade to save my comrades. And yet, my spirit and conscience would not let me get away with this blissful ignorance, this American-made delusion, for long.

My saving grace — and the start of my awakening — was the fact that I was a loner. I had a unique job; no one else did what I did. I was kept away from my peers and didn’t care to belong. On the weekends, when many Naval airmen would go out partying, drinking, and building all that collective trauma and camaraderie together, I’d drive four hours from the coast of Virginia to its forest interior. I was always looking for a good hike, a mountain to climb, a waterfall to swim in. In my solitude, I felt an ancestral sense of connection to the land and stars. I could feel love in the light glow of the sun that somehow still reached me between the dense forest trees. Swimming at the base of a waterfall felt like a gentle cleansing — a return to the womb of the Earth herself. There was an innate sense of safety that would wash over me as I lay under the night sky, waiting for asteroids to streak across the stars and rain down on me.

I fell deeply in love. I started going to school while still on active duty. I decided to study Environmental Science. When I told the pilots about my studies and my evolving love of the sea, they laughed, saying, “Well, don’t pay attention to how much fuel we dump in the ocean.”

That statement stayed with me. It followed me onto that deck of the aircraft carrier, lingering with me on those quiet mornings when I looked over the sea. What kind of world was I actually building? What kind of destruction could I possibly be contributing to?

They say that if you’re lucky, you can see dolphins swimming, leaping in the waves close to the ships. I was never blessed with such a sight. But I began to think about that fuel, clogging their blowholes, poisoning their lungs. I began to think about the places where we dropped boots and bullets and bombs. I thought of the people that I deemed enemies and yet knew nothing about. Do they not deserve to enjoy the refreshing peace of a waterfall too? Do their lungs know the crisp, clean air of a mountain walk, away from bullets and the exhaust of aircraft engines? Something broke within me then — something irreparable. And I could no longer pretend to belong.

I don’t think I am the only person feeling this way. And those who do, I invite you to sit with me in this feeling of brokenness, and to step outside of the American delusion of warmaking and “peace through strength” — the normalization of coercion and dominance. This is an invitation to see what you see, to let it wash over your conscience and compel you to change course. Yes, it is frightening to grapple with the truth, but to ignore it guarantees our collective death, both in spirit and in the material world.

I have seen nothing that so succinctly explains and connects the U.S. military’s active demolition of people with the destruction of the environment until I watched Abby Martin’s 2025 documentary film, Earth’s Greatest Enemy. It offers thorough, undeniable evidence that our country’s ongoing military campaigns and occupations are destroying entire communities and ecosystems. To me, this film encapsulates both a sense of grief and of hope: grief over the horror that U.S. militarism has inflicted upon us and the planet, and hope, embodied in the people who continue defending their homelands, waterways, and communities against the seemingly insurmountable force that is the U.S. military. Earth’s Greatest Enemy is available now on major streaming platforms. I invite you to watch the film, to invite friends to watch the film, and then tell me what you saw, tell me what you felt.

In every person, there is a soldier or warrior spirit, long waiting for a direction worth fighting for. This Earth is a place worth protecting, and in its people is a common humanity worth putting your body on the line for.

Watch Earth’s Greatest Enemy at home NOW or organize a screening near you!

Mercedez is CODEPINK’s Campaigns Assistant.

Mercedez is a community organizer and storyteller devoted to building culture, connection, and collective action through narrative. Her work spans environmental justice, political organizing, media, and the arts, with experience in grassroots organizing, advocacy, outreach, and community storytelling.

As the country and this administration launched its America 250 and Freedom 250 “Celebrations”, what we experienced in the nation’s capitol and a city of 700,000 residents replicated what the United States does to other parts of the world. The streets were invaded by the military, public spaces barricaded with multiple levels of security checkpoints, and the sky full of military flyovers, including a seven-hour schedule of flyovers on July 4th.

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Military flyovers come at a devastating cost–economically, psychologically and environmentally. The most recent ones came in the middle of a heatwave where even Trump’s American State Fair closed after people were baptizing themselves in the religious tent to prevent heat stroke. But flyovers are not new and have been used as a propaganda tool for military recruitment during NFL games and summer festivals. The militarization has been so normalized for so long.

This past weekend, thousands of people cheered on the flyovers, but many did not. The sounds of war shook windows, terrified children, animals, and those suffering from PTSD. Washington DC is made up of 700,000 people without statehood, leaving it little power to push back at the military occupation of the city, let alone the military playground.

In passing, I overheard folks sneering “here’s where all our money goes,” and another asking “is this what Iran sounds like right now?” These flyovers, an exercise of an illusion of force, domination, and strength. All to further prop up hyper nationalism and militarism. But we were lucky it was just for a “show”. The bombs did not drop on the occupied city of Washington, D.C., as they do from some of the same jets that fly over places like Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran.

As an Iranian immigrant, as I watched my children tremble and cover their ears at the roar of bombers and fighter jets over our home, so loud the walls vibrated, I was struck by a haunting duality. My heart broke because I knew what that sound means to children just like them back in Iran. My children know they can cover their ears, cuddle in close to me, and wait it out. The planes will pass, the ground will stop trembling, and we can return to their bedtime routines. But for children just like them in my home country of Iran, for their families, for our brothers and sisters in Palestine, Lebanon, and so many other places devastated by Western imperialism, those same sounds mean something entirely different. They mean bombs falling on schools, neighborhoods erased in seconds, families torn apart before they can say goodbye. They also cuddle in close to their loved ones, but they do so knowing it may be the last time.

As they try to normalize the militarization of our streets and skies here, these displays, framed as celebration and “freedom,” also serve another grim reminder. We, in the diaspora, are forced to fund our own oppression twice over: first with the bombs dropping on our families abroad, then with that same taxpayer money reverberating back to our doorsteps here. Hovering over our neighborhoods and our children’s heads, and terrorizing our communities instead of feeding, healing, and sustaining them. We must not allow ourselves to grow desensitized to the reality of what our tax dollars could be funding instead of the spread of surveillance, destruction, and devastation. And we must make it clear that we will never mistake the roar of engines overhead for the promise of peace, whether that is abroad or here.

Every dollar spent on one of these performative fighter jet overpasses is a dollar stolen from our communities. The budget is a clear reflection of what the country values, and right now, our budget says we value genocide, destruction, and the theater of war over the substance of peace and the actual betterment of our communities, our country.

The America and Freedom 250 celebrations ask us to reflect on what our nation stands for, a nation started by genocide, carried out by slavery, fueled by exploitation, and exposing how militarism, racism, and fascism are on full display. Why do we spend trillions to destroy and destabilize the world, while spending pennies on investments to make our own communities actually safe?

Trump & Congress are proposing a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget. We need an investment in the people—not profit. What would you fund instead of war? Take our poll now!

Bita Iuliano is a Washington DC Iranian-American activist. Olivia DiNucci is CODEPINK’s DC Coordinator and an anti-militarism organizer.

Episode 358: From the UK to U.S. Classrooms: Challenging Zionism: This week on CODEPINK Radio, Marcy Winograd and Medea Benjamin bring us another edition of Empire on the Rocks from the UK, highlighting efforts to build a global Jewish anti-Zionist movement. In the second half, Marcy features highlights from CODEPINK’s Challenging Zionism in Schools summer series with Emmaia Gelman, who examines the history and political role of the ADL, and Merrie Nijimy, who shares strategies for organizing educators in support of Palestinian rights and responding to political pushback in schools.

As the Trump administration and the U.S. Congress continue to ramp up rhetoric of “China is our enemy,” 2026 is the 30^th year that the United States has organized the largest naval war practice in the world, called Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC). For 37 days from June 24 through July 31, the RIMPAC war “games” will be held in the waters off the state of Hawaii.

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This year, 31 countries have sent naval, air, and land military forces to Hawaii for RIMPAC. Interestingly, 50% of the participating countries are members or “partners” of NATO, the NORTH ATLANTIC Treaty Organization. 8 of the 10 NATO countries are from Europe: Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, United Kingdom.

Canada is the only other NATO member from the Western Hemisphere, along with, of course, the host country, the United States. 5 of the 6 NATO “partners” have Pacific Ocean coasts: Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Korea and Colombia.

Israel is also participating. Invited from its wars in the Middle East, Israel, the U.S. partner in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, the destruction of southern Lebanon, and the war on Iran, will also have a presence in RIMPAC as it continues to weave itself into the fabric of the U.S. military. Although RIMPAC has not specified what the role of the Israeli military delegation is, one can surmise that they will act as liaison officers, planners, observers, or staff officers participating in command-and-control and multinational planning activities and giving lessons learned in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

Around 40 military ships, including 13 from the U.S., 200 aircraft, 25,000 military personnel and five submarines will practice their violent mission of war in this year’s RIMPAC which will include live fire and bombings on the Pohakuloa range on the Big Island of Hawaii, sinking a large retired U.S. navy ship off the island of Kauai and amphibious landings on the turtle hatching beach of Bellows on the island of Oahu.

Harm to marine mammals created by the large numbers of ships continues to be a major concern. The number of “takes” or deaths of marine mammals allowed by the U.S. government permits is horrendous.

On February 28, 2026, the Trump administration allowed itself to get suckered into joining Israel in attacking Iran. The massive bombings and missile attacks from the U.S. and Israel assassinated the Iranian supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and many other senior Iranian officials on the first day of the war on Iran.

Also killed on February 28, 2026, the first day of the U.S./Israeli attack on Iran, were 156 civilians, including 120 school children, when a U.S. missile destroyed the Shajareh Tayyebe Elementary School in Minab, southern Iran.

One of the five submarines in 2026 RIMPAC is the U.S. Navy’s USS Charlotte. On March 4, 2026, five days after the U.S.- Israel war on Iran began, the USS Charlotte torpedoed and sank the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena in international waters 19 nautical miles off the southern tip of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean.

The USS Charlotte torpedoing of the Dena killed 104 Iranian sailors. At the time of the attack, Dena had a crew of 136 personnel, and only 32 survived. According to reports, the remains of 20 of the deceased were not recovered.

It is the only instance since World War II in which a United States Navy submarine sank a surface vessel using torpedoes.

The Iranian ship was 2300 miles from Iran in mid-February 2026 and participated in the multilateral naval exercise MILAN and in the International Fleet Review 2026 held at the Indian port of Visakhapatnam.

The U.S. sent U.S. Pacific Fleet commander Admiral Steve Koehler, the highest-ranking naval officer in the Pacific Command, to the International Fleet Review. Ironically, a US Navy release revealed that a P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft took part and conducted anti-submarine warfare drills with other participating forces in MILAN 2026.

The United States Navy was to have sent the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Pinckney (DDG-91), but participation was cancelled at the last minute for undisclosed operational reasons. According to an article in the Maritime Executive written before the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran started, the Indian military was probably not concerned about the lack of U.S. participation, “As the It would have been embarrassing for the Indian hosts to have had Pinckney moored alongside IRINS Dena, should war have broken out with Iran during the period of the fleet review.”

After the USS Charlotte sank the Dena, India allowed the Iranian warship IRIS Lavan to dock at the port of Kochi on 4 March 2026 with an 183-member crew housed at naval facilities. Sri Lanka allowed another Iranian warship, IRIS Bushehr, to dock at Trincomalee port and housed its 208-member crew at the naval camp on 5 March 2026.

India’s former chief of naval staff, Admiral Arun Prakash, commented that “It’s a bit of treachery of the US to attend a peaceful function side-by-side with the Iranian navy, where there’s a lot of camaraderie, and then the moment the Iranian ship pops out of harbour, it’s sunk ... They could have delayed this action to spare India this embarrassment.”

That comment and India allowing one Iranian ship to seek safe harbor in an Indian port after the USS Charlotte torpedoed the IRIS Dena, is probably the reason why the massive U.S. military unified command “Indo-Pacific Command,” and host of RIMPAC, recently dropped “Indo” from its name and is now called the “Pacific Command,” even though its area of responsibility still includes the Indian subcontinent. The U.S. Central Command said that the U.S. has now sunk/destroyed 60 Iranian naval vessels.

However, those of us who live in Hawaii and those from Japan remember another tragic incident with a U.S. submarine homeported in Pearl Harbor.

On February 9, 2001, the U.S. Navy’s USS Greenville conducted an “emergency” surfacing with 16 VIP civilians onboard as part of the US Navy’s Distinguished Visitor Embarkation (DVE) program. The USS Greeneville came up under the Japanese student training vessel Ehime Maru, 9 nautical miles off the island of Oahu, breaking the hull of the ship, which quickly sank. 35 people were aboard the Ehime Maru, of whom 26 were rescued, one with serious injuries. Nine were killed, four high school students, two teachers, and three crew members, with US Navy and Japanese divers retrieving eight of the nine bodies from the sunken vessel, which was raised from the ocean floor during October 2001. Thankfully, the USS Greeneville is not participating in RIMPAC 2026 and is now homeported in San Diego.

Every year, RIMPAC is protested by citizens in Hawaii. On June 24, a spirited ceremony and procession preceded the protest at the gates of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Numerous persons will be at the gates of Pearl Harbor over the next few weeks to continue the challenge to the war practice called RIMPAC.

Ann Wright was in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves for 29 years and retired as a colonel. She was also a U.S. diplomat for 16 years but resigned in March 2003 in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq.

“We have nothing to do with that.” An American Medical Association staff member said this to me with a look of disdain on her face. I was at the AMA’s annual conference in Chicago, urging the doctors in attendance to speak up for their imprisoned Palestinian colleague, pediatrician and neonatologist Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. My group posted up outside conference rooms and handed out informational flyers uplifting his story. Dr. Abu Safiya has been held in brutal Israeli detention for over 500 days without charge; you would think these details would trigger some sympathy or at least curiosity in his American counterparts, but the opposite happened. We were flocked by security guards, verbally harassed, and treated as if we were doing something much more nefarious than handing out harmless pieces of paper.

A male security guard was threatening to get physical with me when the AMA staffer walked past — but instead of intervening, she joined in with him, egging him on. I asked her, “Do you know why we’re here, though? You guys need to speak up for your colleagues in a genocide.” She shook her head snidely, showcasing an apathy that was almost laughable considering the irony of the situation: A staff member for the country’s leading medical institution — one that prides itself on its ethics — couldn’t even pretend to care about a Palestinian doctor being tortured by Israel.

It’s quite maddening when you think of how much support the AMA gave Ukraine when the Russian invasion began. They quickly put out statements of condemnation that the healthcare sector was being impacted, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid were given almost instantly. It has been three years since Gaza’s healthcare sector was completely reduced to rubble, and the AMA has yet to say a single word about it. A year and a half has passed since Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya was abducted from the hospital that Israel besieged.

Coincidentally, the same week the AMA was meeting in Chicago, new photos of Dr. Abu Safiya emerged, the first in many months. He’s shown handcuffed and alone in a sterile white room, apparently on a video call with the Israeli courts.

Dr. Abu Safiya before Israeli prison

Dr. Abu Safiya after 1.5 years in Israeli prison

The new image of Dr. Abu Safiya breaks my heart. He’s lost so much weight, and there’s scarring and scabbing on his arms that weren’t there before, obvious signs of torture. Israeli prisons are vile and dangerous; they are places where military personnel can go rogue with no fear of punishment and enact their most atrocious desires. After all, these prisons are run by the likes of Ben Gvir, a racist, sadist, and war criminal. I just don’t understand how physicians in the AMA can consciously look at this photo of Dr. Abu Safiya and have nothing to say.

When Israelis are permitted to commit war crime after war crime, including holding medical professionals hostage, it sets a precedent. They’re not only killing and kidnapping healthcare workers in Gaza, but in Lebanon and Iran, too. Is it just because these are brown Muslim people that the AMA refuses to speak out? For an organization that claims a commitment to human rights and dignity, its racism is loud, and its participation in the white supremacist attitudes of Western imperialism is staggering.

This conference was a place for the AMA to discuss policy, especially around advocacy. CODEPINK staff, volunteers, and coalition partners were outside and inside the conference every single day. Our presence sparked awareness and conversation among the members, and we learned that there were debates inside on an issue the organization could no longer ignore: Palestinian healthcare workers.

Although they didn’t mention Dr. Abu Safiya by name, it’s clear that the AMA heard our collective message and that the friends of the movement inside the AMA were emboldened by our consistent energy. During the conference’s scheduled time to amend, remove, and propose new policies, a handful of resolutions were introduced about Palestine and the blatant attacks on its healthcare workers and infrastructure. There was one resolution in particular that was proof that our work was changing hearts and minds. It reads as follows:

“RESOLVED, that our AMA supports efforts to protect, release, and provide restitution to detained noncombatant healthcare workers in all areas of conflict, including Gaza.”

Ultimately, this specific resolution was not passed. But the mere inclusion and debate of the topic means that our persistence illuminated the issue of Palestine to every single person at the conference. And, because of that, the AMA delegates managed to pass 2 resolutions about the general “protection of healthcare workers and facilities in conflict areas.”

The AMA staff member and security guards knew what we were talking about; they knew the story of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. Whether they feel a moral obligation to do anything about it is beyond me, but we got confirmation that they knew exactly what we are organizing for. And even if the people in positions of power at the AMA don’t feel inclined to do anything about genocide, it is very clear that the general body does care.

The AMA was founded, in part, to lay out a strict code of ethics for medical professionals in the United States. These principles explicitly highlight the responsibility of physicians to advocate for human dignity, human rights, public health, and medical access for all. What has happened in Gaza over the past three years has been nothing short of an abomination of human dignity and rights. Israel and the U.S. have bombed Gaza’s public health system to the ground, and now the one million Palestinians in Gaza have been left without access to proper medical care for three years. If the AMA were run by individuals who actually practiced their own code, they would have been the first to advocate against medicide in Gaza. Unfortunately, the organization seems to favor quiet comfort over the actual embodiment of its values.

I am reminded of the photo that came out of Gaza just a few weeks after the genocide began. At a press conference outside an exhausted hospital, dead bodies of children in bags surrounded the podium, traumatized men stared at the camera, and some of the most courageous healthcare workers I have ever seen spoke out, pleading for the world to do something.

Press conference outside of Al-Ahli Hospital on October 18th, 2023.

I see the photo above, and the photo of Dr. Abu Safiya — these are just a handful of Palestinian healthcare workers making tremendous sacrifices to protect human life and dignity. They physically put themselves in the line of fire; meanwhile, the AMA doctors can’t even put out a statement. It is well past time that they break their silence. If the AMA chooses to advocate for the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, they very well might save his life.

AMA: Demand the Release of Dr. Abu Safiya!

Jenin is CODEPINK’s Palestine Campaigner

Jenin graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Public Policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago in December of 2023. For over five years, Jenin has been a community organizer and dedicated individual focused on the Palestinian movement through advocacy, digital storytelling, and grassroots mobilization. She is a firm believer in intertwined struggle and liberation for all.

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Episode 357: Challenging Zionism: In this episode, CODEPINK host Marcy Winograd interviews Ben Freeman of the Quincy Institute on the war budget that fuses the US and Israeli militaries. In the second half of the program, we bring you highlights of CODEPINK'S summer series: Challenging Zionism in Schools. Guests include Adam Sanchez, an editor at "Rethinking Schools" magazine, and Rick Chertoff, co-author with Marcy Winograd of "What's Missing in Holocaust Education?"

The 60-day extension of the ceasefire between the United States and Iran may lead to lasting peace or it may be over within a week, doomed by the dysfunctional alliance between the US and Israel. If it holds, it could mark the beginning of a transition away from the doctrine of “low-intensity conflict” that has shaped U.S. foreign policy for decades.

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Talks between the US, Iran, Pakistan and Qatar began in Switzerland on June 21st. But Iran was firm that it holds the United States responsible for Israel’s violations of the US-Iran memorandum, and cannot move forward with other parts of the agreement until the US fulfills its part in Article 1, which requires an actual Israeli ceasefire and withdrawal from Lebanon.

If the memorandum agreed between Iran and the United States fails, the world will be left with vastly reduced oil and gas supplies and a regional war between Iran, Israel and the United States from Lebanon to the Persian Gulf.

This entire crisis is one more devastating result of the world community’s failure to tame Israel’s war crimes and genocide or end its illegal occupation of Palestine and attacks and invasions in neighboring countries - all of which the United States continues to enable and support through its military and diplomatic alliance and arming of the Israeli military.

Trump seems to understand the rapidly deteriorating position of the US and Israel, and to recognize that his own political future now depends on extricating the US from the war on Iran that he and Netanyahu cooked up. Voices of peace from around the world support the tentative ceasefire extension and oppose efforts to sabotage it by politicians in Washington and Tel Aviv.

But to understand the roots of this crisis in US foreign policy, we have to look back. Since the 1980s, aggressive US foreign policy has dragged the Middle East and much of the world into a state that US military planners call “low-intensity conflict” or “LIC.”

Under this doctrine, the United States, and now its protégé Israel, claim the freedom of action to use military force in flagrant and widespread violation of international law, while deterring the rest of the world from mustering the political will to enforce the law or hold them accountable.

The US doctrine of low-intensity conflict was a deliberate policy choice by the Reagan administration in the 1980s, after the US defeat in Vietnam. After Bush II and Cheney’s catastrophic full-scale US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama, Trump and Biden reverted to low-intensity warfare, but globally expanded its scope.

This US choice to expand low-intensity warfare followed the example and the techniques of the British Empire in its final phase in the 1950s. From the Suez crisis to guerrilla war against communist revolutionaries in Malaya and Mau Mau torture camps in Kenya, the deliberate and deadly violence of Britain’s imperial policies was hidden from its own people and the world behind a tapestry of lies.

In 1989, Michael Klare and Peter Kornbluh edited a book titled Low-Intensity Warfare: How the USA Fights Wars Without Declaring Them.

They wrote that the official description of low-intensity warfare was deliberately broad and ambiguous, embracing drug interdiction in Bolivia, the occupation of Beirut, the invasion of Grenada, the airstrikes on Libya in 1986, as well as covert “special operations,” “special activities,” and “unconventional warfare.”

They concluded that low-intensity conflict was in fact “a strategic reorientation of the US military establishment, and renewed commitment to employ force in a global crusade against Third World revolutionary movements and governments.”

Today’s nominal but false ceasefires in Gaza, Lebanon and the Persian Gulf fit squarely within that doctrine. They allow the US and Israel to continue illegal uses of force while appearing to respond to international demands for negotiations and diplomacy.

But the US involvement in low-intensity conflict today is not limited to the Middle East. It also encompasses the proxy war on Russia centered in Ukraine; the savage, deadly siege of Cuba; US and western piracy on the high seas; the kidnapping of President Maduro of Venezuela and his wife; and economic and financial coercive measures or “sanctions” that impact about 40 countries.

Today’s low-intensity warfare also includes deploying US special operations forces in up to 140 countries. Since 2001, US special operations forces claim to have suffered 40% of all US military casualties, including many of the 8,492 American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Concentrating such a large share of US war casualties in such a small force - about 70,000 men and women at any one time - helps to give most American families the illusion of living in peace, even as the United States projects military force across the world and kills thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of people abroad.

The doctrine of low-intensity warfare depends on a fundamental assumption: that the countries targeted by the United States and its allies will remain too weak, too isolated or too divided to effectively resist. But that assumption is increasingly being tested.

Iran has made great strides in developing effective military defenses and demonstrating to shocked US and Israeli officials that it can now defend itself. But the deadly results of false ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon stand as concrete evidence that Israel and the United States still favor low-intensity warfare over real peace.

Even as Trump presents himself as a peacemaker, he remains committed to funding an enormous war machine that can ratchet the intensity of military and covert operations up and down in different parts of the world as it adjusts to new forms of resistance and responds to fluctuating international diplomatic pressures.

But the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza opened the eyes of a new generation of people all over the world to the reality of US imperialism. The official lies that undergird low-intensity warfare are wearing dangerously thin. People are no longer swallowing the false narratives of US and Western politicians and establishment media.

US political, military and business leaders face a crisis of credibility and legitimacy that only grows as they take off the gloves and ratchet up the intensity of these campaigns, from escalating the war on Russia and the brutal blockade of Cuba to murdering innocent fishermen and ferry passengers in the Caribbean and Pacific and threatening traditional allies like Canada and Denmark.

In the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and the negotiations to end it, we are witnessing a serious effort by an attacked country to stand up to the bullies, redress the imbalance of power and uphold international law.

Whatever one thinks of the Iranian government, Iran’s pursuit of a durable peace based on sovereignty, security and international law deserves the support of governments and people around the world, including Americans.

This moment could become a critical turning point in reining in U.S. aggression and Israeli regional expansion. It could even give humanity a chance to end this cycle of endless war and begin working together to address the existential crises threatening the world in the 21st century.

As the people of the United States commemorate the 250th anniversary of its founding, and the violence of the US empire comes home to attack us and our neighbors in our own homes and streets, we should find common cause with, and learn from, our neighbors around the world who have been resisting US imperial violence for generations.

It is ultimately up to us to take our future in our own hands and begin the essential transition from empire to democracy.

That is why CODEPINK is calling for a Summer of Peace and Love, a time to reject fear, militarism and empire, and to organize our communities around the simple but radical demand that our country stop making war on the world and start investing in life.

Ready to challenge the war marchine? Get involed with CODEPINK TODAY!

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, now in a revised, updated 2nd edition.

Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

Episode 356: From Media Madness to Cuban Solidarity: On Empire on the Rocks, Marcy Winograd & Medea Benjamin discuss CODEPINK’s media complicity in the war machine and CODEPINK’s demands to meet the press. On the second half of our program, Marcy interviews activists with Hands off Cuba on their recent trip to the island nation to support international worker solidarity.

Episode 355: Disrupting the War Machine: On this episode of CODEPINK Radio, host Marcy Winograd highlights CODEPINK disruptions of Capitol Hill hearings with architects of foreign and domestic wars: SOS Rubio and Sec. DHS Mullen. On the second half of the program, Marcy interviews Nuvpreet, coordinator of CODEPINK’s Bases Off Cyprus campaign, on protests over the UK’s role in transporting weapons to Israel.

Last week, the Cuban Center for Molecular Immunology (CIM) announced a major health breakthrough with VAXIRA, a vaccine treatment for lung cancer. This is a remarkable achievement, made only more impressive by the fact this is Cuba’s second lung cancer vaccine.

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The vaccine stops the progression of cancer by developing the patient’s immune system to fight off cancer cells. This has proven to significantly prolong people’s survival. Since 2013, the vaccine has been monitored, trialled, and tested on more than 1,300 patients. Over a ten-year period, patients survived a median of 76.6 months with 20% of all patients who were given VAXIRA experienced unexpected long-term survival. Last year, VAXIRA was awarded the Technological Innovation Prize in Cuba for its contribution to healthcare in Cuba. This is an incredible feat for humanity and the battle against cancer - and it is being done by a country facing the longest and most severe blockade in history.

In 2011, Cuba developed CIMAvax, which remains the world’s only approved lung cancer vaccine. This vaccine works to induce the immune system to stop the growth of cancer cells to slow the progression of a tumors. This vaccine has already treated more than 5,000 people across the world and many more thousands in Cuba itself. Given the immense significance of the vaccine, the United States agreed to a special arrangement to trial the vaccine in the US. The Roswell Park Cancer Institute in New York has been running clinical trials with CIM since 2018. They have run the first clinical trials of CIMAvax in the United States. The very same nation that is imposing a genocidal blockade on Cuba is also benefiting from the historic breakthroughs in healthcare.

These major developments in medicine to treat cancer are not Cuba’s only awe-inspiring health achievements.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Cuba produced five vaccines: Ablada, Soberana 01, Soberana 02, Soberana Plus, and Mambisa. Cuba had one of the lowest COVID deaths in the Western Hemisphere - and by 2021, Cuba’s fatality rate was just 0.59% compared to the 2.2% worldwide average. The vaccines were produced without need for specialist refrigeration which meant they could be easily transported and also distributed across the world to places where accessing such infrastructure would be impossible. Quickly, Venezuela, Iran, Vietnam, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Mexico all picked up the vaccine to protect their population.

By 2023, Cuba had the third highest rate of vaccinations per 100,000 people. Despite the fact the U.S. banned the country from importing the syringes necessary to immunize their own population. In this context, Cuba was the first country in the world to vaccinate toddlers and children, as part of their push to re-open schools safely.

Cuba, like the United States, offered its COVID vaccines to the world. While Cuba donated vaccines to St Vincent and the Grenadines and sold them as cheap as they could, the U.S. bullied countries into putting up their assets, like embassy buildings and military bases, in order access vaccines. This was to “protect” against future legal challenges that vaccine recipients might file against the manufacturer of the vaccine. This profit-motive was a major cause for the vaccine apartheid in the distribution of COVID protection across the world. As of August 2024 in high-income countries, more than 222 doses had been distributed per 100 people. While in low-income countries, this was less than 46. In 2021, US pharmaceutical companies that produced COVID vaccines (Moderna, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson) collected an eye-watering revenue of $31 billion. The concept that companies and shareholders should make money from a pandemic should be utterly outrageous.

Biotechnology

Cuba leads the world in its vaccine breakthroughs. But, how is this all possible? It is not by accident that Cuba is able to develop world-leading health breakthroughs in medicine. Cuba has developed a world-class biotechnological sector that is state-owned and operates in the interests of the people, not profit. There are no profit motives to producing vaccines, research and development is for collective benefit, and resources are shared to better the process of scientific development. This is quite the opposite situation in capitalist countries where biotechnology is a major competition dominated by pharmaceutical companies motivated entirely by profits, which often means that when there are major developments in health - they are not accessible for people.

In 1981, Cuba opened the Biological Research Center, despite the blockade stopping entry of equipment, materials, access to research journals, and medicines. In the first 9 years, the Center produced three products. Between 1990-2000, it produced 18, and 2001-2010 it produced more than 40. Today, that figure continues to grow. The Center flourished into a world-class biotechnological sector that has made major health breakthroughs. Cuba produced the world’s first human vaccine to contain a synthetic antigen, for Haemophilus influenzae type B.

In 1989, Cuba produced the world’s first Meningitis B vaccine during a severe breakout of the disease in the country. This was the first ever vaccine produced to protect against Meningitis B and was exported to protect people in countries across Latin America. The U.S. approved its first vaccine for Meningitis B in 2014.

The following year, Cuba produced a vaccine for Hepatitis B. They joined just five other countries as a manufacturer of Hep B vaccines: France, South Korea, United States, Indonesia, and Britain. As the US blockade made it virtually impossible and far too expensive to import the vaccine, Cuba produced their own and eliminated Hepatitis B under 15.

In 2006, Cuba developed Heberprot-P, the only medicine in the world to reduce the amputation rate of patients with diabetic foot ulcers by 75%. Within 10 years, it was used in 23 countries. It has treated more than 400,000 people with foot ulcers. In 2024, the United States even broke their own blockade and approved it for trials and use. The very thought that Americans who suffer from diabetes might be treated by Cuban medicine while being fed propaganda against Cuba and funding a war against the very Cuban researchers and scientists helping them reveals how inhumane this blockade is.

By 2015, Cuba became the first country in the world to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis. Cuba managed this because of its socialist model, which is the same reason why it is not celebrated in mainstream media and looked to as a center for health advances in the U.S. This world historical achievement came as a result of Cuba’s universal health system that integrated maternal and child health programs with HIV and STI treatment. Cuba has one of the lowest rates of AIDS in the world and the lowest in the Americas, thanks to the free provision of antiretroviral treatment it has been distributing since 2001. Its vaccination programs have eradicated diseases that continue to cause death and suffering around the world including diphtheria in 1979, measles in 1993, whooping cough in 1994, and rubella in 1995. Cuba has also developed the highest control on blood pressure in the world.

The same principles that lead Cuba to produce world-leading medical breakthroughs is similar to its success in eliminating diseases. Cuba’s vaccination model is motivated by protecting its people. The National Immunization Program, which began in 1962, has saved the lives of at least 560,000 children who would have otherwise contracted diseases if it weren’t for the program. This is motivated by four directives: equity of vaccine distribution; integration of vaccination in primary healthcare; the inclusion of active community participation; and to provide vaccines free of charge. These guiding principles indicate how central the health of all society is, not corporate interests or greed.

Cuba’s approach to providing healthcare is indicative of the nature of the revolution: to serve Cubans and the oppressed across the world. Before the revolution in 1959, 300 children were paralyzed by polio each year. One of the first measured by the revolutionary government was immunization for Cuban society. In 1962, the polio campaign launched through mobilizing 100,000 members of newly founded revolutionary committees to conduct a population census and vaccinate all children. Within months, polio was eradicated in Cuba making it one of the first countries in the world to do so. Polio is still a leading cause of paralysis and death across the world.

These health achievements have massively benefited people across the world through access to new treatments and cures, affordable and accessible vaccines and medicines, and models for healthcare. But, another awe-inspiring element of Cuba’s healthcare is its international solidarity.

Cuba has restored the eyesight for more than four million people with its joint program with Venezuela, Operation Miracle. They have sent more than 600,000 health workers on medical missions to 160 countries in response to pandemics, epidemics, natural disasters, and other crises where no other country would act. They have and continue to train doctors from the Global South for free so they go back to their home countries to practice medicine.

Cuba makes these miraculous achievements for humanity while facing a blockade that causes shortages of medicines in pharmacies across Cuba, blocks researchers from accessing health journals, and prevents the entry of equipment, spare parts, and laboratory materials that could make it easier and faster to conduct research. The U.S. blockade should be seen as an attack on humanity itself. This is a genocidal act of war against a population that exports doctors across the world by an empire that exports bombs, fighter jets, and invading soldiers.

Cuba once had amongst the lowest rates of infant mortality in the world. But since 2019, with the increase of more than 250 additional sanctions on Cuba, the rates of infant mortality have risen by 148%. It is estimated this has cost 1,800 lives of infants. This is the material result of a blockade that intends to kill, punish, and destroy a country for asserting its own sovereignty. Yet, even still, Cuba’s infant mortality rate is lower than that in the United States. The U.S. enforces its blockade on Cuba so that it can try to claim Cuba is a “failed state”, which also means its universal, free healthcare system “fails”; all so it can maintain its abysmal healthcare system that operates purely for profit, despite the level of death, bankruptcy, and suffering it causes to poor Americans.

The truth is that even with this genocidal blockade, Cuba maintains the principles of its revolution and the motivation to better the world.

Like Fidel Castro said in 2003: “Our country does not drop bombs on other peoples, nor does it send thousands of planes to bomb cities; our country does not possess nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, or biological weapons. Our country’s tens of thousands of scientists and doctors have been educated in the idea of saving lives. It would absolutely contradict this concept to put a scientist or a doctor to work to produce substances, bacteria or viruses to kill other human beings.”

Join our next Cuba Community Call on June 16!

Nuvpreet Kalra is CODEPINK’s Digital Content Producer and co-ordinator for the international Bases off Cyprus campaign.

Last week, the world watched as Donald Trump wrangled up his bro-squad of capitalist billionaires and chartered them across the world to China. We watched in disbelief as the China-hating Trump administration paraded around Beijing gawking at beautiful ceilings and giant rose bushes. “China is beautiful,” Trump said.

All the while, the top U.S. oligarchs met with Chinese officials, hoping to find openings they could slither into China’s large, booming markets and siphon off even more wealth that they most definitely don’t need. Fortunately, China just wasn’t that interested.

Even though nothing much came of the meetings, all the China hawks in Washington were on the edge of their seats, anxious that better relations with China would risk their favorite justification for raising the military budget to an unprecedented 1.5 trillion dollars. But we need to prepare for war with China by 2025… no 2027… wait maybe 2030? Forever?

Mainstream media had a lot to say about the meeting. The Guardian was especially deceptive, with one article titled:

This is the kind of headline we’ve come to expect from outlets like the New York Post, whose credibility is on par with a spam email. In fact, they did have a similar article:

It’s not a huge surprise that western media is trying to make it sound like war was China’s idea, when it’s the U.S. who has been actively preparing for it the last decade. It’s part of their strategy to use misleading headlines to stoke fear about China so nobody pays attention to the war-antagonizing behavior of the United States.

When President Xi Jinping speaks about the “Thucydides Trap,” he is warning the U.S. against treating war with China as inevitable, and to instead pursue diplomacy and cooperation. Many U.S. policymakers, however, continue to frame China’s rise primarily as a military threat, expanding military posturing across the Asia-Pacific in an effort to preserve U.S. dominance even at the risk of escalation.

It’s reported that Trump and Xi also talked at length about the U.S. war on Iran. This conflict — as well as U.S. military actions in Venezuela — are also tied to the broader U.S. confrontation with China. Both countries possess major oil, gas, and critical mineral reserves and have become important economic partners to China. By targeting two of China’s key energy suppliers, the U.S. is attempting to limit China’s access to the resources, while hoarding them for itself (and Israel).

The U.S. war on Iran has been a disaster, which is one of the reasons Trump is in China, hoping for concessions. It’s not just energy dominance the U.S. is worried about. While oil and gas prices are skyrocketing around the world, Iran has made an exception for Chinese oil tankers, which trade with Iran using the Chinese yuan, For decades, U.S. global power has depended on the petrodollar system, which keeps global energy trade tied to the U.S. dollar and gives the U.S. enormous economic warfare abilities. But China’s continued purchase of Iranian oil using the yuan, along with growing efforts by countries across the Global South to trade outside the dollar system, threatens to weaken that dominance.

The global order is clearly shifting toward a more multipolar world. The question is whether the U.S. will respond with diplomacy or attempt to preserve unipolar dominance through military confrontation with China. To prevent escalation, we must reject the idea that war between great powers is inevitable. And we must also demand media coverage that accurately and credibly covers the role the United States is playing in escalating tensions. That includes news outlets like The Guardian, who clearly prioritize painting China as the villain over credible and in-depth reporting.

Write to The Guardian: Stop Inciting War with Deceptive Articles and Learn From CODEPINK!

Megan Russell is CODEPINK’s China Campaign Coordinator.

Megan graduated from the London School of Economics with a Master’s Degree in Conflict Studies. Prior to that, she attended NYU where she studied Conflict, Culture, and International Law. Megan spent one year studying in Shanghai, and over eight years studying Chinese Mandarin. Her research focuses on the intersection between US-China affairs, peacebuilding, and international development.

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Episode 353: Flights to Cuba-Flotillas to Gaza-Resistance: On this episode, host Marcy Winograd features CODEPINK’s response to reports the Trump administration wants to investigate CODEPINK for bringing baby food to Cuba during Trump’s blockade of the island. Then we turn to special guest Ann Wright, CODEPINK Board member, who reports from Istanbul where she organizes flotillas to break the Israeli siege on Gaza. This episode also features CODEPINK-San Pedro’s Peace Week resistance to the military’s Fleet Week parade of warships. Listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!

The second-largest school district in the country has brought down the hammer on social justice educators following last year’s passage of AB 715, an “antisemitism” bill sponsored by the California Israel lobby and rubber-stamped by its minions in the state legislature and Governor Gavin Newsom.

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has ordered Ethnic Studies and social studies teachers at the Downtown Business Magnet (DBM) to remove Palestinian and Black Lives Matter flags and require them to undergo training on the use of “neutral terms” to describe sensitive topics, including Israel’s slaughter and starvation of Gaza.

The order from the District’s Office of Student Civil Rights came after Emet Legal Services, contacted by another teacher at DBM, filed a complaint of antisemitism last February objecting to social studies and health teacher Tiffany Do’s display of a Palestinian flag and anti-genocide poster, as well as the wearing of a keffiyeh in class. In its 19-page “Report of Findings,” which Do said was not shared with DBM teachers, the District said the keffiyeh could stay, but advocacy posters had to go.

Community rallies in solidarity with Do

At a lively after-school protest in front of the Downtown Business Magnet on May 16, teacher and Union del Barrio organizer Ron Gochez said the District’s silencing of teachers in the face of a U.S.-subsidized genocide was like telling teachers in Nazi Germany to take a neutral stance on the Holocaust.

School psychologist Clemen Avalos also spoke at the rally sponsored by LA Educators for Justice in Palestine, Association of Raza Educators, Union del Barrio, Community Self-Defense Coalition and others. Avalos said, “Palestinian students, Mexican students, students born north or south of the border, Black students, Indigenous students–all of our students deserve the right to learn about the truth about their history, their identity and their culture.”

Ethnic Studies under attack

Avalos’ comments speak to AB 715’s threat to Ethnic Studies as an interdisciplinary study of decolonization that centers stories and struggles of people of color. The California Department of Education’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) underscores solidarity with the oppressed as a foundational value of Ethnic Studies, a course originally required for high school graduation under 2021 legislation, but now stalled due to zero funding in the state budget. From the start, the Israel lobby – JPAC/Jewish California and the California Legislative Jewish Caucus (LJC) — has objected to the mere mention of Palestine in Ethnic Studies, introducing one bill after another to either restrict Ethnic Studies to domestic issues or otherwise police the discipline’s teachers with AB 715, authored by Assemblymember Rick Chavez-Zbur (D-Santa Monica).

DBM Ethnic Studies and health teacher Do (Tido) told teachers, students, parents and community members gathered in the blistering sunlight in front of the school, “AB 715 is an erasure of marginalized people. The order to remove a Palestinian flag during an active genocide is actually Islamophobic, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian.”

The Institute for the Understanding of Anti-Palestinian Racism (IUAPR) is a non-profit of scholars and researchers that encourages victims of anti-Palestinian racism to report incidents to the organization for “education” and “advocacy.” IUAPR defines anti-Palestinian racism as a form of racism that “silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives.” Its list of examples of such racism includes “failing to acknowledge Palestinians with a collective identity, belonging and rights in relation to occupied and historic Palestine”… “pressuring others to exclude Palestinian perspectives” … and “defaming Palestinians and their [non-Palestinian] allies with slander such as being inherently anti-semitic.”

Back at the rally

Against a backdrop of teachers holding signs that read “Protect Ethnic Studies” and “Defend Palestinian Voices,” Do animatedly addressed an estimated 40 people — including Colin Hernandez, Zbur’s challenger in the June 2nd primary.

“AB 715 weaponizes civil rights advocacy against the people it was meant to protect, so that just the mere existence of a Palestinian flag is now considered antisemitic, but the overreach of AB 715 does not stop with Palestinians,” said Do. The crowd shouted, “That’s right! That’s right!” Do continued. “Under AB 715, the statement ‘Black Lives Matter’ is painted as discriminatory bias. Under AB 715, historical injustices like the theft of Native American land cannot be righted under the banner of ‘Land Back.’”

Since the District began its investigation, Do says she has removed the Palestinian flag, along with the BLM flag, Landback flag, and Puerto Rico flag.

Daniel, a member of Roybal Learning Center’s Social Justice Club, said students in the club stand behind Do in their outrage over AB 715’s straitjacket on speech and attack on Ethnic Studies. “From the Nakba to the current genocide, AB 715 is a violation of the First Amendment,” said Daniel, who noted Israel had infiltrated the US government, from the federal to the state level.

Following its investigation, the District determined that Do’s conduct “subjected students to discrimination on the basis of shared ancestry or ethnic characteristic in violation of the Civil Rights Act.” The report also noted, however, that “Students generally described her classroom environment as open, nonjudgmental, comfortable.”

The charge of discrimination based on “shared ancestry” assumes that all Jews and Israelis identify and support the State of Israel and perceive solidarity with Palestine or a Palestinian flag as antisemitic.

Not everyone agrees.

Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist organization that features keffiyehs and watermelon caps on its website, argues that both Jewish and Arab peoples have ancient, ancestral, and spiritual ties to the land in West Asia. According to JVP, asserting exclusive Jewish rights to Palestine inevitably leads to the displacement of Palestinians and the erasure of their connection to the same ancestral land. Thousands of JVP members and supporters – some carrying Palestinian flags — have occupied state capitols, subway stations, and lawmakers’ offices to demand the US stop funding what Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry have all termed Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Daniel, the DBM student, also challenged the notion that expressing solidarity with Palestine was antisemitic or discriminatory. “A Semite is someone who speaks a Semitic language, of which includes Arabic,” said Daniel, adding that a Semite is not just limited to Jewish people. Being a Semite extends to the same people being murdered every day by Israeli bombs. To want Palestinians to live a peaceful life and talking ill of the Israeli government–that is not antisemitic; it is the opposite.”

“Israeli genocide bill”

Educator unions, administrator associations, Jewish Voice for Peace chapters and the ACLU all opposed AB 715 due to concerns over the chilling of instruction and conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism — yet the state legislature approved AB 715 after midnight on 9/13/25, prompting a protester to shout from the Senate balcony, “This is an Israeli genocide censorship bill and you all know it … this bill is aiding and abetting a genocide that is ongoing. You all have blood on your hands.”

AB 715 establishes a politically-appointed antisemitism coordinator to monitor teacher training and in-class instruction beginning with four-year-olds in transitional kindergarten, and to follow up on complaints which can be filed anonymously by those not directly harmed by alleged discrimination. So in theory, an IDF soldier in occupied Palestine could file a complaint against California teachers based on hearsay, and demand LAUSD administrators drop what they’re doing to pursue investigations of educators.

The District’s corrective actions, with a June 10th deadline for compliance, include administrative review of all DBM history, social science and Ethnic Studies displays and content; department-wide professional development on addressing sensitive topics; and implementation of a site-based review process for supplemental instructional materials. According to Do, DBM’s principal has already delivered the mandated professional development, reviewing the corrective actions, including follow-up monitoring to, in the District’s words, “verify continued compliance with nondiscrimination neutrality.”

Such mandates raise the question: What is neutral language for Israeli slaughter, starvation, and torture of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, for Israel’s obliteration of every school in Gaza and killing of over 200 journalists? The District’s condemnation of classroom bias also raises the question of whether the District’s repeated description of the genocide as a“conflict” reflects a pro-Israel bias. A conflict suggests two equal sides. Israel is a nuclear-armed state controlling over four million Palestinians living under military occupation. The “two sides” are not equal.

The avalanche

The controversy at DBM is not an isolated example of the Israel lobby’s attempt to chill debate over Israel’s colonization of Palestine. The District’s mandates come amid an avalanche of Public Record Requests from Israel supporters seeking copies of hundreds of LAUSD teacher lesson plans, according to one LAUSD high school teacher contacted by the District. In addition, the lobby is asking the Governor to approve $10 million more for the California Teachers Collaborative on Holocaust and Genocide Education to deliver Anti-Defamation League curriculum that includes a definition of contemporary antisemitism as demonization of Israel of Israel and that excludes the Gaza genocide from lesson plans.

As the State and District seek to silence teacher opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, annexation of the West Bank, and bombardment of Lebanon and Iran, Gochez suggests that instead of removing Palestinian flags from classrooms, teachers might all post Palestinian flags in a collective act of resistance. Similarly, the four teachers at DBM who, according to the District, removed their “Stop Genocide” posters might display them once again, with other teachers at the high school and across the District displaying the same message.

Or imagine faculties and students all wearing keffiyehs in solidarity with Palestine.

Dr. Lupe Carrasco Cardona, an Ethnic Studies adjunct professor and chair of the Association of Raza Educators, seconded the call for solidarity with all educators who “courageously, honorably and respectfully teach young people the truth about what is happening in our world.” Said Cardona, “Education should never be about fear, censorship, or intimidation. We cannot accept the banning of books, posters or flags, nor can we accept attacks on academic freedom and the professional integrity of educators.”

Ready to challenge Zionist brainwashing in our schools? Join our Summer Workshops June 15-18!

Marcy Winograd is a retired public high school teacher and coordinates CODEPINK’s Drop the ADL campaign.

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