From Common Dreams | Original Article

One IDF officer said that not only are Israeli troops killing military-age males, "we're killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs. We're destroying their houses and pissing on their graves."

An Israeli human rights group on Monday published a report in which Israel Defense Forces officers and soldiers who took part in the creation of a buffer zone along Gaza's border with Israel described alleged war crimes including indiscriminate killing, as well as the wholesale deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure in what multiple whistleblowers called a "kill zone."

The new report from Breaking the Silence (BTS) details how Israel—which for decades has dubiously relied upon defensive buffer zones in territories it conquers or controls—decided on a policy of "widespread, deliberate destruction" in order to create a security perimeter ranging between roughly half a mile and a mile in width on the Gaza side of the Israeli-Palestinian border.

"To create this area, Israel launched a major miltary engineering operation that, by means of wholesale destruction, entirely reshaped about 16% of the Gaza Strip... an area previously home to some 35% of Gaza's agricultural land," the report states. "The perimeter extends from the coast in the north to the Egyptian border in the south, all within the territory of the Gaza Strip and outside of Israel's internationally recognized borders."

Click here to see Breaking the Silence Twitter post.

"The mission given to soldiers in the field, as revealed in their testimonies, was to create an empty, completely flat expanse about a kilometer wide along the Gaza side of the border fence," the publication continues. "This space was to have no crops, structures, or people. Almost every object, infrastructure installation, and structure within the perimeter was demolished."

"Palestinians were denied entry into the area altogether, a ban which was enforced using live fire, including machine gun fire and tank shells. In this way, the military created a death zone of enormous proportions," the report adds. "Places where people had lived, farmed, and established industry were transformed into a vast wasteland, a strip of land eradicated in its entirety."

"The testimonies demonstrate that soldiers were given orders to deliberately, methodically, and systematically annihilate whatever was within the designated perimeter, including entire residential neighborhoods, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques, and cemeteries, with very few exceptions," the paper says. "Industrial zones and agricultural areas which served the entire population of Gaza were laid to waste, regardless of whether those areas had any connection whatsoever to the fighting."

"Places where people had lived, farmed, and established industry were transformed into a vast wasteland."

Palestinians who dared enter the perimeter, even accidentally were also targeted, including civilian men, women, children, and elders. The officers and soldiers interviewed by BTS struggled to explain whether noncombatants were informed of the no-go zone's limits, with one saying civilians knew to stay away when they saw that "enough people died or got injured" crossing the unmarked boundary.

Some people who entered the perimeter out of sheer desperation were targeted. Israel's blockade of Gaza has fueled widespread and sometimes deadly starvation, and Palestinians entered the "kill zone" to pick hubeiza, a nutritious wild plant, after the area's farmland was razed.

"The IDF really is fulfilling the public's wishes, which state: 'There are no innocents in Gaza. We'll show them,'" one reserve warrant officer explained. "People were incriminated for having bags in their hands. Guy showed up with a bag? Incriminated, terrorist. I believe they came to pick hubeiza, but... boom," tank shells were fired at him from half a mile away.

In a separate interview with The Guardian, that same officer said that at first, his attitude toward invading Gaza was, "I went there because they killed us and now we're going to kill them."

"And I found out that we're not only killing them—we're killing them, we're killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs," they added. "We're destroying their houses and pissing on their graves."

Another IDF reservist officer told BTS that he was briefed that "there is no civilian population" in the area, where Palestinians are "terrorists, all of them." Asked what the area looked like after the IDF clearing operation, the officer replied: "Hiroshima."

A captain in an armored division of the IDF reserves said "the borderline is a kill zone" where "there are no clear rules of engagement" or "proper combat procedure."

"Anyone who crosses a certain line, that we have defined, is considered a threat and is sentenced to death," the captain added.

The BTS report follows an investigation published last December by Haaretz, Israel's oldest newspaper, in which IDF soldiers and veterans described a "kill zone" in the Netzarim corridor in the heart of Gaza, where troops were ordered to shoot "anyone who enters."

"The forces in the field call it 'the line of dead bodies,'" one commander said. "After shootings, bodies are not collected, attracting packs of dogs who come to eat them. In Gaza, people know that wherever you see these dogs, that's where you must not go."

The new report comes as Israeli forces are carrying out an ethnic cleansing campaign in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are being forcibly expelled from areas of Gaza including the south and an expanded border perimeter. The Associated Pressreported Monday that Israel "now controls more than 50% of the territory and is squeezing Palestinians into shrinking wedges of land."

Israeli troops are moving to seize large tracts of the Gaza Strip for a so-called "security zone" and Jewish recolonization. Members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right government have said the campaign is being coordinated with the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, who in February said that the United States would "take over" Gaza, remove all of its Palestinians, and transform the Mediterranean enclave into the "Riviera of the Middle East."

On Monday, Netanyahu arrived in Washington, D.C. from Hungary for talks with Trump and other U.S. officials regarding topics including a Gaza cease-fire, release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas, Iran policy, and tariffs. Netanyahu is a fugitive from the International Criminal Court, which last year issued arrest warrants for him and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including extermination and using starvation as a weapon of war.

Israel is also facing a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its conduct in a war that has left more than 180,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing in Gaza and almost all of the strip's more than 2 million people forcibly displaced—often multiple times.

Israel's bombing and invasion of Gaza continued on Monday. An early morning IDF strike on a tent where numerous journalists were sleeping outside Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis killed Palestine Today reporter Hilmi al-Faqaawi and another man, who were burned alive as helpless witnesses were unable to douse the flames or rescue victims.

Nine others were reportedly wounded in the attack, which the IDF said targeted a Hamas member posing as a journalist. More than 230 journalists have been killed by Israeli bombs and bullets since October 2023.

From World Beyond War | Original Article

Beginning in March of 2017 and for the following eight years, at 11:00 a.m. on every Saturday morning, a group of New Yorkers has assembled in Manhattan’s Union Square for “the Yemen vigil.” Their largest banner proclaims: “Yemen is Starving.” Other signs say: “Put a human face on war in Yemen,” and “Let Yemen Live.”

Participants in the vigil decry the suffering in Yemen where one of every two children under the age of five is malnourished, “a statistic that is almost unparalleled across the world.” UNICEF reports that 540,000 Yemeni girls and boys are severely and acutely malnourished, an agonizing, life-threatening condition which weakens immune systems, stunts growth, and can be fatal.

The World Food Program says that a child in Yemen dies once every ten minutes, from preventable causes, including extreme hunger. According to Oxfam, more than 17 million people, almost half of Yemen’s population, face food insecurity, while aerial attacks have decimated much of the critical infrastructure on which its economy depends.

Since March 15, the United States has launched strikes on more than forty locations across Yemen in an ongoing attack against members of the Houthi movement, which has carried out more than 100 attacks on shipping vessels linked to Israel and its allies since October 2023. The Houthis say they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and have recently resumed the campaign following the failed ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

The new round of U.S. airstrikes has damaged critical ports and roads which UNICEF describes as “lifelines for food and medicine,” and killed at least twenty-five civilians, including four children, in the first week alone. Of the thirty-eight recorded strikes, twenty-one hit non-military, civilian targets, including a medical storage facility, a medical center, a school, a wedding hall, residential areas, a cotton gin facility, a health office, Bedouin tents, and Al Eiman University. The Houthis claim that at least fifty-seven people have died in total.

Earlier this week, it was revealed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, and other high-level Trump Administration officials had discussed real-time planning around these strikes in a group chat on Signal, a commercial messaging app. During the past week, Congressional Democrats including U.S. Senator Schumer and U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries expressed outrage over the Trump Administration’s recklessness, with Jeffries saying that what has happened “shocks the conscience.”

President Trump commented that there was “no harm done” in the administration’s use of Signal chats, “because the attack was unbelievably successful.” But the Democrats appear more shocked and outraged by the disclosure of highly secret war plans over Signal than by the actual nature of the attacks, which have killed innocent people, including children.

In fact, U.S. elected officials have seldom commented on the agony Yemen’s children endure as they face starvation and disease. Nor has there been discussion of the inherent illegality of the United States’s bombing campaign against an impoverished country in defense of Israel amid its genocide of Palestinians.

As commentator Mohamad Bazzi writes in The Guardian, “Anyone interested in real accountability for U.S. policy-making should see this as a far bigger scandal than the one currently unfolding in Washington over the leaked Signal chat.”

On Saturday, March 29, participants in the Yemen vigil will distribute flyers with the headline “Yemen in the Crosshairs” that warn of an alarming buildup of U.S. Air Force B2 Spirit stealth bombers landing at the U.S. base on Diego Garcia, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean.

According to the publication Army Recognition, two aircraft have already landed at Diego Garcia, and two others are currently en route, in a move that may indicate further strikes against Yemen. The B2 Spirit bombers are “uniquely capable of carrying the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), a 30,000-pound bomb designed to destroy hardened and deeply buried targets … This unusual movement of stealth bombers may indicate preparations for potential strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen or serve as a deterrent message to Iran.”

The Yemen vigil flyer points out that multiple Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs can use their GPS precision guidance system to “layer in” multiple warheads on a precise location, with each “digging” more deeply than the one before it to achieve deeper penetration. “This is considered particularly critical to achieving U.S. and broader Western Bloc objectives of neutralizing the Ansarullah Coalition’s military strength,” reports Military Watch Magazine, “as key Yemeni military and industrial targets are fortified deeply underground.”

Despite the efforts of peace activists across the country, a child in Yemen dies every ten minutes from preventable causes—and the Democratic Representatives in the Senate and the House from New York don’t seem to care.

Kathy Kelly (kathy.vcnv@gmail.com) is board president of World BEYOND War.

From War Is a Crime | Original Article

According to Columbia Magazine, published by Columbia University’s Office of Alumni and Development, but ultimately named for a brutal imperialist mercenary, in 1933 while Nazis in Germany were burning books by Jews, Columbia’s president — and future Nobel Peace Prize recipient — Nicholas Murray Butler “welcomed Hans Luther, the German ambassador to the United States, to Morningside Heights, insisting that he be accorded ‘the greatest courtesy and respect.’” Columbia’s Daily Spectator newspaper “denounced what it saw as Butler’s courtship of the German government and its universities.”

Butler — “a longtime admirer of Benito Mussolini” — mocked protests of his relations with Nazi Germany. In 1934, Butler “fired Jerome Klein . . . a promising young member of the fine arts faculty, for signing an appeal against the Luther invitation; and he expelled Robert Burke, a Columbia College student, for participating in a 1936 mock book burning and anti-Nazi picket on campus.”

Or, as a 2006 column by Stephen H. Norwood in the Columbia Spectator tells it, “Butler had Burke expelled for leading pickets protesting the Columbia administration’s insistence on sending a delegate and friendly greetings to a major propaganda festival the Nazi leadership orchestrated in 1936 in Germany, the 550th anniversary celebration of Heidelberg University. Although he was a fine student and had been elected president of his class, Burke was never readmitted. [Columbia provost Alan] Brinkley and former associate dean Michael Rosenthal . . . show little sympathy for Burke and trivialize Columbia administration actions that helped Nazi Germany enhance its standing in the West. Although the Nazis had expelled Jews from university faculties and the professions, and savagely beat Jews in the streets, Butler joined with the presidents of Harvard and Yale to plan how to deflect criticism of their decisions to send university representatives to Heidelberg. No British university would send delegates. Butler selected professor Arthur Remy as Columbia’s representative, who pronounced the reception at which Josef Goebbels presided ‘very enjoyable.’ . . . Butler’s insensitivity to Nazi outrages against Jews was influenced by his own anti-Semitism. Columbia spearheaded universities’ efforts to sharply restrict Jewish admissions. Butler strongly supported Harvard president James Conant, an early supporter of anti-Jewish quotas, when he invited Nazi academics to Harvard’s tercentenary celebration later in 1936.”

Now, in 2025, Columbia is back, for the first time since 1936, to expelling students for nonviolently protesting Columbian support for genocide — and this time not just threatened genocide but a genocide actively happening and available in reports, photographs, and videos in real time, already identified and condemned by the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and numerous human rights groups and governments.

Is Columbia bowing to U.S. fascist demands to ban speech and assembly against the genocide in Palestine because a small fraction of its funding comes (or came) from the U.S. government?

Or does Columbia have a strong loyalty to whoever is engaged in mass murder?

Or — and this seems the most likely — is Columbia fiercely committed to whatever powerful people deem proper at the moment, even if at one time it’s anti-Semitism and at another time it is a Palestinian genocide with advocacy of peace denounced as “anti-Semitism”?

It’s rather a shame to have institutions of so-called higher learning be run by people so dedicated to avoiding thought, no matter the cost to humanity.

From Zeteo | Original Article

During the last Trump presidency, the same people – then former Obama officials – suggested they had learned their lesson from Yemen.

In November 2018, following more than three years in which Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates turned Yemen into a slaughterhouse, a group of Barack Obama-era foreign-policy practitioners demanded an end to US support for a conscience-shocking war. Even though they were out of power, they had a mechanism to make a difference. Sen. Bernie Sanders had introduced a congressional resolution to stop US military assistance for the assault on Yemen, and it garnered significant bipartisan support in both Congressional chambers. So these former senior officials lent their voices to the cause through an open letter.

Yes, they conceded, many of the signatories of their letter "worked on [Yemen and Middle East] issues… some directly, others less so" under Obama. And it was under Obama that the US began providing "some intelligence, refueling, and logistical assistance to the Saudi-led coalition." But the Trump White House had "doubled down on support for the Saudi leadership's prosecution of the war, while removing restrictions we had put in place."

A "skyrocket[ing]" increase in civilian casualties was on grisly display. The Saudis were bombing "markets, weddings, and school buses." Their US-supported coalition was preventing "critical food and medical supplies from reaching the Yemeni people." Famine was imminent for millions of innocent Yemenis. And the United States, to the horror of these former officials, was "remain[ing] complicit." Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had even "reportedly overruled professionals in the State Department" in order to posture as if the US had gotten Saudi Arabia and the UAE to reduce civilian harm. "[T]he time has come for us to end our support for and involvement in this brutal conflict," they intoned.

Signatories to that 2018 letter included Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Avril Haines, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Samantha Power, and Jon Finer. Little more than two years later, they would return to power as Joe Biden's secretary of state, national security adviser, director of national intelligence, UN ambassador, USAID director, and deputy national security adviser, respectively. And beginning in October 2023, they supported a different Middle East partner's campaign of devastation, weaponized famine, and conscience-shocking assaults on helpless people.

Even before Vice President Kamala Harris lost Tuesday's election, leftists on the internet posted darkly about whether liberals would react to a Trump victory by discovering their opposition to the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and the broader Middle East war spiraling out from it. Posts like those turned my thoughts to that 2018 Yemen letter, issued so earnestly by those who mumbled through their complicity but suggested that they had learned their lesson.

While grace ought to be extended to those who seek to correct their mistakes, the horror of these past 13 months has made it clear that the senior Biden officials who signed that letter, in fact, learned nothing. We shouldn't bother listening should they find themselves roused to speak against any escalation of the combination of genocide and regional war that Trump pursues or tolerates.

As in Yemen, So Too in Gaza

From The Costs of War Project | Original Article

This report covers the human costs of the Hamas strike and Israel’s military operations since October 7, 2023 in Gaza and the West Bank. Costs of War is a research project focused on U.S. military spending, as well as direct and indirect deaths associated with U.S. wars and militarism. In just one year, as a companion report shows, the U.S. has spent at least $22.76 billion on military aid to Israel and related U.S. operations in the region.2 The current report gathers previously published data to provide an overview of the direct and indirect deaths that have resulted, and will continue to result, from U.S.-supported Israeli military operations.

This report covers just one front in the expanding regional war with a summary of events and figures from the past year. While our focus is on the largest impacts, there is additional harm in other areas of the war zone – in Israel, Lebanon, Yemen, and East Jerusalem – that this report does not cover. Further, current violence in Lebanon and elsewhere is not included, nor are some events that occurred in late September/early October 2024. The report includes United Nations estimates of Israeli and Palestinian direct deaths from violence in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank since October 7.

In addition to killing people directly through traumatic injuries, wars cause “indirectdeaths” by destroying, damaging, or causing deterioration of economic, social,psychological and health conditions.3 Most expansively, this report describes the causalpathways that can be expected to lead to far larger numbers of indirect deaths.4 Thesedeaths result from diseases and other population-level health effects that stem from war’sdestruction of public infrastructure and livelihood sources, reduced access to water andsanitation, environmental damage, and other such factors.5

This report builds on a foundation of previous Costs of War research for itsframework and methodology in covering the most significant chains of impact, or causalpathways, to indirect war deaths in Gaza and the West Bank.6 Unlike in combat, thesedeaths do not necessarily occur immediately or in the close aftermath of the battles whichmany observers focus on. While it will take years to assess the full extent of thesepopulation-level health effects, they will inevitably lead to far higher numbers of deathsthan direct violence.

Read the full report here.

1Associate Professor of Anthropology, Bard College (sstamato@bard.edu); Edited by Stephanie Savell, Director of Costs of War and Senior Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs (stephanie_savell@brown.edu). Many thanks to Mimi Healy for copyediting and to Neta C.
Crawford, Catherine Lutz and Darcey Rakestraw for editorial comments.
2 See “United States Spending on Israel’s Military Operations and Related U.S. Operations in the Region, October 7, 2023-September 30, 2024.”
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2024/USspendingIsrael

3 In other words, this war has caused “excess deaths”—that is, deaths that would not have occurred in a counterfactual scenario of no Israeli military operations—including deaths beyond those that occur immediately as a result of military violence. Jamaluddine, Z.; Chen, Z.; Abukmail, H.; Aly, S.; Elnakib, S.;
Barnsley, G.; et al. (2024). Crisis in Gaza: Scenario-based health impact projections. Report One: 7 February to 6 August 2024. London, Baltimore: London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Johns Hopkins University. https://aoav.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/gaza_projections_report.pdf, P. 12.
4 “Causal pathways” is the epidemiological term for this long sequence of war’s consequences, a pattern of damages that can lead to death, disabilities and other long-lasting physical and mental health conditions. Wise, P. H. (2017, January 1). The Epidemiologic Challenge to the Conduct of Just War: Confronting Indirect Civilian Casualties of War. Daedalus, 146(1):139-154, p. 143.
5 A complex issue in scholarly discussions of “indirect deaths” in war is that of intentionality. When warring parties intentionally attack food distribution, for instance, this raises the question of whether the ensuing deaths should actually be considered direct, rather than indirect, results of combat. According to the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, international treaties that are ratified by many countries and form the basis of international humanitarian law, wars’ expected damage to civilians should never be intentional, though the protocols acknowledge that such damage may occur as a side effect. In the case of the Israeli government’s operations in Gaza, the question of intentionality in regards to civilian deaths is being, and will continue to be, debated. For the purposes of this report, however, the category of “indirect deaths” includes all non-violent war deaths, whether intentional or not.
6 Savell, S. (2023, May 15). How Death Outlives War: The Reverberating Impact of the Post-9/11 Wars on Human Health. Costs of War, Watson Institute, Brown University. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2023/IndirectDeaths

This report covers the major economic costs of U.S. support for Israel’s military operations and U.S. regional presence since October 7, 2023. Costs of War is a research project focused on U.S. military spending, as well as direct and indirect deaths associated with U.S. wars and militarism. It has been difficult for the U.S. public, journalists and members of Congress to get an accurate understanding of the amount of military equipment and financial assistance that the U.S. government has provided to Israel’s military during the past year of war. There is likewise little U.S. public awareness of the costs of the United States military’s own, related, operations in the region, particularly in and around Yemen.

In just one year, the U.S. has spent at least $22.76 billion on military aid to Israel and related U.S. operations in the region (through September 30).2 This was true, even before the U.S. expanded its presence in the region in late September/ early October 2024 in events too recent to be included in this report.

This estimate is conservative because, although it includes approved securityassistance funding since October 7, 2023, supplemental funding for regional operations,and an estimated additional cost of operations, it does not include any other economiccosts. For instance, it does not include commitments to future spending that were madethis year. Each part of the report that follows provides a detailed explanation of what is notincluded in the $22.76 billion, as well as what is.

Furthermore, there are other broad categories of spending that are not included,such as increased U.S. security assistance to Egypt, Saudi Arabia or any other countries, andcosts to the commercial airline industry and to U.S. consumers. This report is focusedentirely on United States military spending – it does not include other countries’ spendingon military operations.

Part I of the report focuses on United States military aid to Israel. It is difficult topinpoint an exact dollar figure for this aid, for reasons explained below. The U.S.government has approved at least $17.9 billion in security assistance since October 7,2023, but this is only a partial amount of the financial support provided during and for thiswar.3 For instance, the Biden administration has made at least 100 arms deals with Israelsince October 2023 that fell below the value that would have triggered the requirement tonotify Congress of the details. The U.S. has been Israel’s main supplier of weapons for thepast five decades; weapons deliveries since October 7 include 57,000 artillery shells;36,000 rounds of cannon ammunition; 20,000 M4A1 rifles; 13,981 anti-tank missiles; and8,700 Mk 82,500 pound bombs. On August 13, 2024, the Biden administration announced$20.3 billion in additional arms agreements with Israel to be carried out in future years(although this is currently being debated in Congress).

Part II provides a snapshot of this military aid in historical context. Altogether, Israelis the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. aid since World War II. Even so, the amount ofmilitary assistance approved during this past year -- $17.9 billion – is substantially morethan in any other year since the U.S. began granting military aid, specifically, to Israel in1959.4

Part III provides further information on broader U.S. war-related spending,highlighting how, since October 7, the U.S. Navy has significantly scaled up its defensive andoffensive operations in the region, primarily defending maritime shipping against attacksby Houthi militants in Yemen. This part of the war, which the Houthis claim is related toIsrael’s war in Gaza and is underreported in the U.S. media, has cost the U.S. government$4.86 billion and counting – bringing the total minimum known U.S. spending on one yearof war (with the $17.9 mentioned above) to $22.76 billion.5

Conflict with the Houthis has also cost an additional $2.1 billion in lost maritimetrade, because shippers have been forced to divert vessels or pay exorbitant insurancefees.6 U.S. consumers may experience paying higher prices for goods as a result.

In the context of over $22.76 billion the U.S. government has spent on one year ofwar, it is essential to look at who benefits financially from weapons sales. Part IV of thereport touches on the relationship between U.S. weapons manufacturers such as Boeing,RTX, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics and the Israeli government, who maintainlongstanding commercial relations. The U.S. government has cited these commercial ties asone of the reasons why the U.S. should continue to supply foreign militaries, including theIsraeli military, with weapons and equipment.

This report is a compilation authored by various experts, listed in alphabeticalorder, Linda J. Bilmes, William D. Hartung, and Stephen Semler.

Read the full report here.

1 Authors listed in alphabetical order. Linda J. Bilmes, Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School (linda_bilmes@hks.harvard.edu); William D. Hartung, senior research fellow, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (hartung@quincyinst.org); Stephen Semler, cofounder, Security Policy Reform Institute (SPRI) (snsemler@gmail.com); Edited by Stephanie Savell, Director of Costs of War and Senior Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute (stephanie_savell@brown.edu). Many thanks to Mimi Healy for copy editing and to Neta C. Crawford, Catherine Lutz, Heidi Peltier, and Darcey Rakestraw for editorial comments.
2 The $22.76 billion figure comes from adding $17.9 billion in U.S. security assistance to Israel (footnote 3) and $4.86 billion in U.S. military operations in the region, including against Houthis in and around Yemen (footnote 5).

3 The figure of $17.9 billion was calculated by the author William D. Hartung. See page 4.
4 In the years following the establishment of Israel in 1948, the U.S. provided solely economic assistance, through a combination of grants and loans. The U.S. granted Israel the first military loan in 1959, after which military aid grew rapidly.
5 The figure of $4.855 billion was calculated by the author Linda J. Bilmes. It is rounded to $4.86 billion. Dr. Bilmes also calculated the cost to the maritime trade. See page 18.

From ProPublica | Original Article

In late January, as the death toll in Gaza climbed to 25,000 and droves of Palestinians fled their razed cities in search of safety, Israel’s military asked for 3,000 more bombs from the American government. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew, along with other top diplomats in the Jerusalem embassy, sent a cable to Washington urging State Department leaders to approve the sale, saying there was no potential the Israel Defense Forces would misuse the weapons.

The cable did not mention the Biden administration’s public concerns over the growing civilian casualties, nor did it address well-documented reports that Israel had dropped 2,000-pound bombs on crowded areas of Gaza weeks earlier, collapsing apartment buildings and killing hundreds of Palestinians, many of whom were children. Lew was aware of the issues. Officials say his own staff had repeatedly highlighted attacks where large numbers of civilians died. Homes of the embassy’s own Palestinian employees had been targeted by Israeli airstrikes.

Still, Lew and his senior leadership argued that Israel could be trusted with this new shipment of bombs, known as GBU-39s, which are smaller and more precise. Israel’s air force, they asserted, had a “decades-long proven track record” of avoiding killing civilians when using the American-made bomb and had “demonstrated an ability and willingness to employ it in [a] manner that minimizes collateral damage.”

While that request was pending, the Israelis proved those assertions wrong. In the months that followed, the Israeli military repeatedly dropped GBU-39s it already possessed on shelters and refugee camps that it said were being occupied by Hamas soldiers, killing scores of Palestinians. Then, in early August, the IDF bombed a school and mosque where civilians were sheltering. At least 93 died. Children’s bodies were so mutilated their parents had trouble identifying them.

Weapons analysts identified shrapnel from GBU-39 bombs among the rubble.

In the months before and since, an array of State Department officials urged that Israel be completely or partially cut off from weapons sales under laws that prohibit arming countries with a pattern or clear risk of violations. Top State Department political appointees repeatedly rejected those appeals. Government experts have for years unsuccessfully tried to withhold or place conditions on arms sales to Israel because of credible allegations that the country had violated Palestinians’ human rights using American-made weapons.

On Jan. 31, the day after the embassy delivered its assessment, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted an agency-wide town hall at an auditorium at the State Department headquarters where he fielded pointed questions from his subordinates about Gaza. He said the suffering of civilians was “absolutely gut wrenching and heartbreaking,” according to a transcript of the meeting.

“But it is a question of making judgments,” Blinken said of his agency’s efforts to minimize harm. “We started with the premise on October 7 that Israel had the right to defend itself, and more than the right to defend itself, the right to try to ensure that October 7 would never happen again.”

The embassy’s endorsement and Blinken’s statements reflect what many at the State Department have understood to be their mission for nearly a year. As one former official who served at the embassy put it, the unwritten policy was to “protect Israel from scrutiny” and facilitate the arms flow no matter how many human rights abuses are reported. “We can’t admit that’s a problem,” this former official said.

The embassy has even historically resisted accepting funds from the State Department’s Middle East bureau earmarked for investigating human rights issues throughout Israel because embassy leaders didn’t want to insinuate that Israel might have such problems, according to Mike Casey, a former U.S. diplomat in Jerusalem. “In most places our goal is to address human rights violations,” Casey added. “We don’t have that in Jerusalem.”

Last week, ProPublica detailed how the government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance — the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department’s refugees bureau — concluded in the spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza and that weapons sales should be halted. But Blinken rejected those findings as well and, weeks later, told Congress that the State Department had concluded that Israel was not blocking aid.

The episodes uncovered by ProPublica, which have not been previously detailed, offer an inside look at how and why the highest ranking policymakers in the U.S. government have continued to approve sales of American weapons to Israel in the face of a mounting civilian death toll and evidence of almost daily human rights abuses. This article draws from a trove of internal cables, email threads, memos, meeting minutes and other State Department records, as well as interviews with current and former officials throughout the agency, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The records and interviews also show that the pressure to keep the arms pipeline moving also comes from the U.S. military contractors who make the weapons. Lobbyists for those companies have routinely pressed lawmakers and State Department officials behind the scenes to approve shipments both to Israel and other controversial allies in the region, including Saudi Arabia. When one company executive pushed his former subordinate at the department for a valuable sale, the government official reminded him that strategizing over the deal might violate federal lobbying laws, emails show.

The Biden administration’s repeated willingness to give the IDF a pass has only emboldened the Israelis, experts told ProPublica. Today, as Israel and Iran trade blows, the risk of a regional war is as great as it has been in decades and the cost of that American failure has become more apparent, critics charge.

“The reaffirmation of impunity has come swiftly and unequivocally,” said Daniel Levy, who served in the Israeli military before holding various prominent positions as a government official and adviser throughout the ’90s. He later became one of the founders of the advocacy group J Street and president of the U.S./Middle East Project.

Levy said there is virtually no threat of accountability for Israel’s conduct in Gaza, only “a certainty of carte blanche.” Or, as another State Department official said, “If there’s never any consequences for doing it, then why stop doing it?”

The war in Gaza has waged for nearly a year without signs of abating. There are at least 41,000 Palestinians dead, by local estimates. Israel says its actions have been legal and legitimate, unlike those of Hamas, which killed more than 1,100 Israelis, mostly civilians, on Oct. 7 and continues to hold dozens of hostages.

The U.S. has been a stalwart ally of Israel for decades, with presidents of both parties praising the country as a beacon of democracy in a dangerous region filled with threats to American interests.

In response to detailed questions from ProPublica, a State Department spokesperson sent a statement saying that arms transfers to any country, including Israel, “are done so in a deliberative manner with appropriate input” from other agencies, State Department bureaus and embassies. “We expect any country that is a recipient of U.S. security articles,” he added, “use them in full compliance with international humanitarian law, and we have several ongoing processes to examine that compliance.”

The spokesperson also said Lew has been at the forefront of ensuring “that every possible measure is taken to minimize impacts on civilians” while working on a cease-fire deal to secure “the release of hostages, alleviate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, and bring an end to the conflict.”

Israeli military leaders broadly defend their aerial campaign in Gaza as a “military necessity” to eradicate terrorists hiding among civilians. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also publicly pressured the Biden administration to hasten arms transfers. “Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job a lot faster,” he said in June.

ProPublica sent detailed questions to representatives of the Israeli government as well. A spokesperson said in a statement: “The article is biased and seeks to portray legitimate and routine contacts between Israel and the Embassy in Washington with State Department officials as improper. Its goal appears to be casting doubt on the security cooperation between two friendly nations and close allies.”

Weapons sales are a pillar of American foreign policy in the Middle East. Historically, the U.S. gives more money to Israel for weapons than it does to any other country. Israel spends most of those American tax dollars to buy weapons and equipment made by U.S. arms manufacturers.

While Israel has its own arms industry, the country relies heavily on American jets, bombs and other weapons in Gaza. Since October 2023, the U.S. has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry, which the Israeli military says has been “crucial for sustaining the IDF’s operational capabilities during the ongoing war.” The air defenses that defend Israeli towns and cities — known as the Iron Dome — also depend largely on U.S. support.

There is little sign that either party is prepared to curtail U.S. weapons shipments. Vice President Kamala Harris has called for a cease-fire, lamented the death toll in Gaza and said she supported Palestinians’ right to self-determination as well as President Joe Biden’s decision to pause a shipment of 2,000 bombs in June. She has also echoed a refrain from previous administrations, pledging to “ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.” Harris also said she had no intention of breaking with Biden’s Israel policy.

Republican nominee for president Donald Trump, who has described himself as the “best friend that Israel has ever had,” reportedly told donors that he supports Israel’s “war on terror” and promised to crush pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. Trump was also recently a featured speaker at the Israeli-American Council’s summit, where he cast himself as the most pro-Israel choice in the coming election. “You have a big protector in me,” he told the crowd. “You don’t have a protector on the other side.”

The United States first began selling significant amounts of weapons to Israel in the early 1970s. Until then, Israel had relied on an array of home-grown and international purchases, notably from France, while the Soviet Union armed Israel’s adversaries. Over the past half-century, no country in the world has received more American military assistance than Israel.

The U.S. gives the Israeli government about $3.8 billion every year and much more during wartime to help maintain its military edge in the region. Congress and the executive branch have imposed legal guardrails on how Israel and other countries can use the weapons they buy with U.S. money. The State Department must review and approve most of those large foreign military sales and is required to cut off a country if there is a pattern or clear risk of breaking international humanitarian law, like targeting civilians or blocking shipments of food to refugees. The department is also supposed to withhold U.S.-funded equipment and weapons from individual military units credibly accused of committing flagrant human rights violations, like torture.

Initially, a country makes a request and the local embassy, which is under the State Department’s jurisdiction, writes a cable called a “country team assessment” to judge the fitness of the nation asking for the weapons. This is just the beginning of a complex process, but it’s a crucial step because of the embassies’ local expertise.

Then, the bulk of that review is conducted by the State Department’s arms transfers section, known as the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, with input from other bureaus. For Israel and NATO allies, if the sale is worth at least $100 million for weapons or $25 million for equipment, Congress also gets final approval. If lawmakers try to block a sale, which is rare, the president can sidestep with a veto.

For years, Josh Paul, a career official in the State Department’s arms transfers bureau, reviewed arms sales to Israel and other countries in the Middle East. Over time, he became one of the agency’s most well-versed experts in arms sales.

Even before Israel’s retaliation for Oct. 7, he had been concerned with Israel’s conduct. On multiple occasions, he said, he believed the law required the government to withhold weapons transfers. In May 2021, he refused to approve a sale of fighter jets to the Israeli Air Force. “At a time the IAF are blowing up civilian apartment blocks in Gaza,” Paul wrote in an email, “I cannot clear on this case.” The following February, he wouldn’t sign off on another sale after Amnesty International published a report accusing Israeli authorities of apartheid.

In both cases, Paul later told ProPublica, his immediate superiors signed off on the sales over his objections.

“I have no expectation whatsoever of making any policy gains on this topic during this Administration,” he wrote at the time to a deputy assistant secretary.

During that same time period, Paul circulated a memo to some of the agency’s senior diplomats with recommendations to strengthen the arms sales review process, such as including input from human rights groups. Paul warned that the Biden administration’s new arms transfer policy — which prohibits weapons sales if it’s “more likely than not” the recipient will use them to intentionally attack civilian structures or commit other violations — would be “watered down” in practice.

“There is an inarguable significant risk of civilian harm in the sale of precision-guided munitions to Israel and Saudi Arabia,” the December 2021 memo said. The U.S. government has been historically unable to hold itself to its own standards, he wrote, “in the face of pressure from partners, industry, and perceived policy imperatives emerging from within the government itself.”

It does not appear that recommendations in the memo were implemented either. Paul resigned in protest over arms shipments to Israel last October, less than two weeks after the Hamas attack. It was the Biden administration’s first major public departure since the start of the war. By then, local authorities said Israeli military operations had killed at least 3,300 Palestinians in Gaza.

Internally, other experts began to worry the Israelis were violating human rights almost from the onset of the war as well. Middle East officials delivered at least six dissent memos to senior leaders criticizing the administration’s decision to continue arming Israel, according to those who had a role in drafting some of them. The content of several memos leaked to the media earlier this year. The agency says it welcomes input from the dissent channel and incorporates it into policymaking decisions.

In one previously unreported memo from November, a group of experts across multiple bureaus said they had not been consulted before several policy decisions about arms transfers immediately after Oct. 7 and that there was no effective vetting process in place to evaluate the repercussions of those sales.

That memo, too, seemed to have little impact. In the early stages of the war, State Department staff worked overtime, often after hours and through weekends, to process Israeli requests for more arms. Some in the agency have thought the efforts showed an inappropriate amount of attention on Israel.

The Israelis, however, felt different. In late December, just before Christmas, staff in the arms transfers bureau walked into their Washington, D.C., office and found something unusual waiting for them: cases of wine from a winery in the Negev Desert, along with personalized letters on each bottle.

The gifts were courtesy of the Israeli embassy.

The State Department spokesperson said employees are allowed to accept gifts from foreign governments that fall below a certain dollar threshold. “To allege that any of their allegiances to the United States should be questioned is insulting,” he added. “The accusation that the Department of State is placing a disproportionate attention on Israel is inconsistent with the facts.”

The spokesperson for the Israeli government told ProPublica, “The embassy routinely sends individual bottles of wine (not cases) to many of its contacts to cordially mark the end of the year holidays.”

One month later, Lew delivered his endorsement of Israel’s request for the 3,000 precision GBU-39 bombs, which would be paid for with both U.S. and Israeli funds. Lew is a major figure in Democratic circles, having served in various administrations. He was President Barack Obama’s chief of staff and then became his treasury secretary. He has also been a top executive at Citigroup and a major private equity firm.

The U.S. defense attaché to Israel, Rear Adm. Frank Schlereth, signed off on the January cable as well. In addition to its assurances about the IDF, the memo cited the Israeli military’s close ties with the American military: Israeli air crews attend U.S. training schools to learn about collateral damage and use American-made computer systems to plan missions and “predict what effects their munitions will have on intended targets,” the officials wrote.

In the early stages of the war, Israel used American-made unguided “dumb” bombs, some likely weighing as much as 2,000 pounds, which many experts criticized as indiscriminate. But at the time of the embassy’s assessment, Amnesty International had documented evidence that the Israelis had also been dropping the GBU-39s, manufactured by Boeing to have a smaller blast radius, on civilians. Months before Oct. 7, a May 2023 attack left 10 civilians dead. Then, in a strike in early January this year, 18 civilians, including 10 children, were killed. Amnesty International investigators found GBU-39 fragments at both sites. (Boeing declined to comment and referred ProPublica to the government.)

At the time, State Department experts were also cataloging the effect the war has had on American credibility throughout the region. Hala Rharrit, a career diplomat based in the Middle East, was required to send daily reports analyzing Arab media coverage to the agency’s senior leaders. Her emails described the collateral damage from airstrikes in Gaza, often including graphic images of dead and wounded Palestinians alongside U.S. bomb fragments in the rubble.

“Arab media continues to share countless images and videos documenting mass killings and hunger, while affirming that Israel is committing war crimes and genocide and needs to be held accountable,” she reported in one early January email alongside a photograph of a dead toddler. “These images and videos of carnage, particularly of children getting repeatedly injured and killed, are traumatizing and angering the Arab world in unprecedented ways.”

Rharrit, who later resigned in protest, told ProPublica those images alone should have prompted U.S. government investigations and factored into arms requests from the Israelis. She said the State Department has “willfully violated the laws” by failing to act on the information she and others had documented. “They can’t say they didn’t know,” Rharrit added.

Rharrit said her superiors eventually told her to stop sending the daily reports. (The State Department spokesperson said the agency is still incorporating perspectives from Arab media in regular internal analyses.)

Lew’s January cable makes no mention of the death toll in Gaza or the incidents of the Israelis dropping GBU-39s on civilians. Eight current and former State Department officials with expertise in human rights, the Middle East or arms transfers said the embassy’s assessment was an inadequate but not a surprising distillation of the administration’s position. “It’s an exercise in checking the boxes,” said Charles Blaha, a former human rights director at the agency.

The State Department declined to comment on the status of that request other than to say the U.S. has provided large amounts of GBU-39s to Israel multiple times in past years.

While the U.S. hoped that the smaller bombs would prevent unnecessary deaths, experts in the laws of war say the size of the bomb doesn't matter if it kills more civilians than the military target justifies. Lt. Col. Rachel E. VanLandingham, a retired officer with the Air Force’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps, said the IDF is legally responsible for doing all it can to know the risk to civilians ahead of any given strike and to avoid indiscriminately bombing densely populated areas like refugee camps and shelters. “It seems extremely plausible that they just disregarded the risk,” VanLandingham added. “It raises serious concerns and indicators of violating the law of war.”

Officials at the embassy in Jerusalem and in Washington said that similar concerns have been repeatedly brought to Lew, but his instincts were to defend Israel. In a separate cable obtained by ProPublica, he told Blinken and other leaders in Washington that “Israel is a trustworthy defense articles recipient” and his country team assessments ahead of past weapons sales have found that Israel’s “human rights record justifies the sale.”

Lew went even further and said the IDF’s system for choosing targets is so “sophisticated and comprehensive” that, by defense attaché Schlereth’s estimation, it “meets and often exceeds our own standard,” according to the cable. Two State Department officials told ProPublica that Lew and Schlereth have made similar statements during internal meetings. (The Navy did not make Schlereth available for an interview or respond to a list of questions.)

Early in the war, diplomats at the embassy also reported that Israel had dropped bombs on the homes of some of the embassy’s own staff, in addition to numerous other incidents involving civilians.

As to why Lew’s cables failed to reflect that kind of information, one official said, “My most charitable explanation is that they may not have had the time or inclination to critically assess the Israelis’ answers.”

In Israel’s New York consulate, weapons procurement officers occupy two floors, processing hundreds of sales each year. One former Israeli officer who worked there said he tried to purchase as many weapons as possible while his American counterparts tried just as hard to sell them. "It’s a business,” he said.

Behind the scenes, if government officials take too long to process a sale, lobbyists for powerful corporations have stepped in to apply pressure and move the deal along, ProPublica found.

Some of those lobbyists formerly held powerful positions as regulators in the State Department. In recent years, at least six high-ranking officials in the agency’s arms transfers bureau left their posts and joined lobbying firms and military contractors. Jessica Lewis, the assistant secretary of the bureau, resigned in July and took a job at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. The company is the largest lobbying firm in Washington, by lobbying revenue, and has represented the defense industry and countries including Saudi Arabia. (Lewis and the firm did not respond to requests for comment.)

Paul Kelly, who was the top congressional affairs official at the State Department between 2001 and 2005, during the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, said he regularly “got leaned on” by the private sector to push sales to lawmakers for final approval. “They wouldn’t bribe or threaten me, but they would say … ‘When are you going to sign off on it and get it up to the Hill?’” he told ProPublica.

Three other State Department officials who currently or recently worked on military assistance said little has changed since then and companies that profit from the wars in Gaza and Ukraine frequently call or email. (The agency spokesperson told ProPublica that arms transfers are “not influenced by a particular company.”) The pressure also reaches lawmakers’ offices once they are notified of impending sales. Those measures include frequent phone calls and regular daytime meetings, according to an official familiar with the communications.

In some cases, the efforts appear to have drifted into questionable legal territory. In 2017, the Trump administration signed a $350 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, an extension of Obama’s former policy before he suspended some sales because of humanitarian concerns. For years, the Saudis and their allies used American-made jets and bombs to attack Houthi militant targets in Yemen, killing thousands of civilians in the process.

The following February, the State Department was weighing whether to approve a sale of precision-guided missiles produced by Raytheon to Saudi Arabia. A vice president at the company named Tom Kelly — the former principal deputy assistant secretary of the State Department’s arms transfers bureau — emailed a former subordinate, Josh Paul. Kelly asked to set up a meeting with Paul and a colleague at the company to “talk through strategy” on pushing the sale through, according to an email of the exchange.

Paul wrote back that such a meeting could be illegal. “As you’ll recall from your time here, we’re restricted by the Anti-Lobbying Act from coordinating legislative strategies with outside groups,” he said. “However, I think the potential bumps in the road are relatively obvious.” Those bumps were a reference to recent media articles about mass civilian casualty incidents in Yemen.

“No worries,” Kelly responded. “I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

Kelly and Raytheon did not reply to requests for comment.

The State Department ultimately signed off on the sale.

From Common Dreams | Original Article

"This research provides a view into just how embedded the corporate, profit-fueled war machine is in our higher education and cultural institutions," said one campaigner.

A trio of human rights groups on Wednesday announced a new interactive initiative exposing what the coalition is calling a "Genocide Gentry" of weapons company executives and board members and "54 museums, cultural organizations, universities, and colleges that currently host these individuals on their boards or in other prominent roles."

The coalition—which consists of the Adalah Justice Project, LittleSis, and Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE)—published a map and database detailing the "educational and cultural ties to board members of six defense corporations" amid Israel's ongoing annihilation of Gaza, for which the U.S.-backed country is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice.

" Israel has destroyed every university in Gaza and nearly 200 cultural heritage sites since October 2023, using bombs and weapons manufactured by the companies included in the Genocide Gentry research," the coalition said. "As of April, these attacks have killed more than 5,479 students and 261 teachers and destroyed or critically damaged nearly 90% of all school buildings in Gaza."

"Universities across the country including the likes of Columbia University, Harvard University, the University of Southern California, and New York University have remained largely silent on Israel's genocidal campaign in Gaza," the groups added. "Behind closed doors, these same universities are hosting executives and board members of the companies manufacturing the weapons used in these attacks as board members, trustees, and fellows."

Members of the Genocide Gentry include:

• Jeh Johnson, Lockheed Martin board of directors: Johnson is currently a Columbia University trustee, and sits on the board of directors at MetLife and U.S. Steel. Columbia University notably shut down student protests demanding divestment from weapons companies like Lockheed Martin.
• Brian C. Rogers, RTX board of directors: Rogers is currently a trustee of the Harvard Management Company, tasked with managing the $50 billion endowment. Notably Harvard administrators have cracked down on students demanding divestment from weapons companies like RTX, formerly Raytheon.
• Catherine B. Reynolds, General Dynamics board of directors: Reynolds is a trustee of the Kennedy Center and sponsors a fellowship at New York University, which has also cracked down on anti-genocide protests and recently enacted a policy equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

"Students on university campuses across the country have not only been demanding divestment, but transparency," said Sandra Tamari, executive director of the Adalah Justice Project. "Transparency about their institutions' investments, partnerships, donors, and decision-makers, and their connections to individuals and companies directly enabling and profiting off war and genocide."

"This research helps provide some of this transparency by illuminating just how embedded the interests of the weapons industry are within our institutions, so we can begin chipping away at the power and influence that they wield," she added.

ACRE campaign director Ramah Kudaimi noted that "as part of its genocide since October 2023, Israel has targeted universities and cultural centers across Gaza, destroying campuses, museums, libraries, and more."

"That this is all backed by the United States means U.S. educational and cultural institutions have a responsibility to consider what their role is in helping end these war crimes, and that starts with reconsidering their connections with the weapons companies profiting from the destruction," Kudaimi said.

Munira Lokhandwala, director of the Tech and Training program at LittleSis, said: "This research provides a view into just how embedded the corporate, profit-fueled war machine is in our higher education and cultural institutions. Through this research, we show how the defense industry shapes and influences our civic and cultural institutions, and as a result, their silence around war and genocide."

District court judge found “plausible” case of genocide but dismissed lawsuit on jurisdiction grounds

September 10, 2024, San Francisco – An array of authorities from government to academia to the nonprofit sector is backing Palestinians’ effort to secure court review of their claims that President Biden is enabling genocide in Gaza. Last month, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit affirmed the decision of a lower court, which dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds even as it said Israel’s assault “plausibly” constituted genocide. In an en banc petition filed last month, the plaintiffs argue that courts have a constitutional duty to assess the legality of the Biden administration's actions.

The lawsuit, filed in November, claims Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Austin are violating international and federal law for failing to prevent and being complicit in Israel’s genocide. It asks the court to enjoin the administration from supporting the assault on Gaza with weapons or other means.

If the Ninth Circuit grants the petition for a rehearing, the case would be heard by an eleven-judge en banc court. A case needs to meet at least one of two requirements for en banc review: it must involve a matter of “exceptional importance” or have resulted in inconsistency with other court rulings. The plaintiffs’  petition, filed on their behalf by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Van Der Hout LLP, argues that their case fulfills both.

Amicus briefs submitted by a range of advocates and experts from across the country and the world support the petition:

• Constitutional and international law scholars say the panel, like the district court, “badly misinterpreted the political question doctrine” by claiming courts cannot review allegations of international law violations where U.S. “foreign policy decisions are strongly implicated.” This “breathtaking pronouncement” – which would mean that “a plaintiff could never challenge a U.S. policy that employed or abetted torture or genocide overseas” – ignores longstanding Supreme Court precedent.
  
  
• Former diplomats describe how a refusal by the Ninth Circuit to apply the law would seriously erode the United States’ moral authority and influence on the international stage, and would have lasting impacts on the effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy, as well as on international peace and security writ large. 
  
  
• The Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC) shows that the Biden administration has continued to send large quantities of weapons to the Israeli government even as it uses them to kill civilians in violation of international humanitarian law, and despite the high risk that it will use them to commit atrocities. 
  
  
• Civil rights and grassroots organizations that collectively advocate for the rights and interests of the Palestinian people and of Black, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian communities detail the harms to Palestinian Americans resulting directly from U.S. complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The brief highlights the devastating impact on Palestinian Americans and their families in Gaza as well as here in the United States, from mental anguish to material hardship to discrimination. 
  
  
• Human rights organizations, bar associations, and social justice movement lawyers from around the world assert that domestic courts are supposed to be the primary enforcement mechanism of international law and, in the context of the United States, are the only meaningful forums.
  
  
• The Center for Justice and Accountability outlines one of the most fundamental requirements set out by international law: that U.S. courts must provide access to an effective remedy where the United States is implicated in the commission of gross human rights violations such as genocide.  
  
  
• Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow argue that courts must review the complicity of the United States in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, which not only erases the memory of those Jews and others slaughtered during the Holocaust, but also makes a mockery of the Genocide Convention.
  

The organizational plaintiffs in the case are Defense for Children International – Palestine and Al-Haq. The individual plaintiffs are Dr. Omar Al-Najjar, Ahmed Abu Artema, and Mohammed Ahmed Abu Rokbeh from Gaza; and Mohammad Monadel Herzallah, Laila Elhaddad, Waeil Elbhassi, Basim Elkarra, and Ayman Nijim, U.S. citizens with family in Gaza.

For more information, see the Center for Constitutional Rights’ case page.

The San Francisco law firm of Van Der Hout LLP is co-counsel in the case.

From Monthly Review | Original Article

Go to original article to see table of the universities and their contracts.

Students throughout the United States have called for their universities to disclose and divest from defense companies with ties to Israel in its onslaught on Gaza. While scholars and journalists have traced ties between academic institutions and U.S. defense companies, it is important to point out that relations between universities and the U.S. military are not always mediated by the corporate industrial sector.¹ American universities and the U.S. military are also linked directly and organizationally, as seen with what the Department of Defense (DoD) calls “University Affiliated Research Centers (UARCs).” UARCs are strategic programs that the DoD has established at fifteen different universities around the country to sponsor research and development in what the Pentagon terms “essential engineering and technology capabilities.”² Established in 1996 by the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, UARCs function as nonprofit research organizations at designated universities aimed to ensure that those capabilities are available on demand to its military agencies. While there is a long history of scientific and engineering collaboration between universities and the U.S. government dating back to the Second World War, UARCs reveal the breadth and depth of today’s military-university complex, illustrating how militarized knowledge production emerges from within the academy and without corporate involvement. UARCs demonstrate one of the less visible yet vital ways in which these students’ institutions help perpetuate the cycle of U.S.-led wars and empire-building.

The University of Southern California (USC) has been one of the most prominent campuses for student protests against Israel’s campaign in Gaza, with students demanding that their university “fully disclose and divest its finances and endowment from companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine, including the US Military and weapons manufacturing.”³ USC also happens to be home to one of the nation’s fifteen UARCs, the Institute of Creative Technology (ICT), which describes itself as a “trusted advisor to the DoD.”⁴ ICT is not mentioned in the students’ statement, yet the institute—and UARCs at other universities—are one of the many moving parts of the U.S. war machine that are nestled within higher education institutions, and a manifestation of the Pentagon’s “mission creep” that encompasses the arts as well as the sciences.⁵

Significantly, ICT’s remit to develop dual-use technologies (which claim to provide society-wide “solutions”) entails nurturing what the Institute refers to as “warfighters” for the battlefields of the future, and, in doing so, to increase warfighters’ “lethality.”⁶ Established by the DoD in 1999 to pursue advanced modeling and simulation and training, ICT’s basic and applied research produces prototypes, technologies, and know-how that have been deployed for the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps. From artificial intelligence-driven virtual humans deployed to teach military leadership skills to futuristic 3D spatial visualization and terrain capture to prepare these military agencies for their operational environments, ICT specializes in immersive training programs for “mission rehearsal,” as well as tools that contribute to the digital innovations of global warmaking.⁷ Technologies and programs developed at ICT were used by U.S. troops in the U.S.-led Global War on Terror. One such program is UrbanSim, a virtual training application initiated in 2006 designed to improve army commanders’ skills for conducting counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, delivering fictional scenarios through a gaming experience.⁸ From all of the warfighter preparation that USC’s Institute researches, develops, prototypes, and deploys, ICT boasts of generating over two thousand academic peer-reviewed publications.

I encountered ICT’s work while conducting anthropological research on the relationship between the U.S. military and the media entertainment industry in Los Angeles.⁹ The Institute is located not on the university’s main University Park campus but by the coast, in Playa Vista, alongside offices for Google and Hulu. Although ICT is an approximately thirty-minute drive from USC’s main campus, this hub for U.S. warfighter lethality was enabled by an interdisciplinary collaboration with what was then called the School of Cinema-Television and the Annenberg School for Communications, and it remains entrenched within USC’s academic ecosystem, designated as a unit of its Viterbi School of Engineering, which is located on the main campus.¹⁰ Given the presence and power of UARCs at U.S. universities, we can reasonably ask: What is the difference between West Point Military Academy and USC, a supposedly civilian university? The answer, it seems, is not a difference in kind, but in degree. Indeed, universities with UARCs appear to be veritable military academies.

What Are UARCs?

UARCs are similar to federally funded research centers such as the Rand Corporation; however, UARCs are required to be situated within a university, which can be public or private.¹¹ The existence of UARCs is not classified information, but their goals, projects, and implications may not be fully evident to the student bodies or university communities in which they are embedded, and there are differing levels of transparency among them about their funding. DoD UARCs “receive sole source funds, on average, exceeding $6 million annually,” and may receive other funding in addition to that from their primary military or federal sponsor, which may also differ among the fifteen UARCs.¹² In 2021, funding from federal sources for UARCs ranged “from as much as $831 million for the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab to $5 million for the University of Alaska Geophysical Detection of Nuclear Proliferation.”¹³ Individual UARCs are generally created after the DoD’s Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering initiates a selection process for the proposed sponsor, and typically are reviewed by their primary sponsor every five years for renewed contracts.¹⁴ A few UARCs, such as Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab and University of Texas at Austin’s Applied Research Lab, originated during the Second World War for wartime purposes, but were designated as UARCs in 1996, the year the DoD formalized that status.¹⁵

UARCs are supposed to provide their sponsoring agency and, ultimately, the DoD, access to what they deem “core competencies,” such as MIT’s development of nanotechnology systems for the “mobility of the soldier in the battlespace” and the development of anti-submarine warfare and ballistic and guided missile systems at Johns Hopkins University.¹⁶ Significantly, UARCs are mandated to maintain a close and enduring relationship with their military or federal sponsor, such as that of ICT with the U.S. Army. These close relationships are intended to facilitate the UARCs’ “in-depth knowledge of the agency’s research needs…access to sensitive information, and the ability to respond quickly to emerging research areas.”¹⁷ Such an intimate partnership for institutions of higher learning with these agencies means that the line between academic and military research is (further) blurred. With the interdisciplinarity of researchers and the integration of PhD students (and even undergraduate interns) into UARC operations such as USC’s ICT, the question of whether the needs of the DoD are prioritized over those of an ostensibly civilian institute of higher learning practically becomes moot: the entanglement is naturalized by a national security logic.

A Closer Look

The UARC at USC is unique from other UARCs in that, from its inception, the Institute explicitly targeted the artistic and humanities-driven resources of the university. ICT opened near the Los Angeles International Airport, in Marina del Rey, with a $45 million grant, tasked with developing a range of immersive technologies. According to the DoD, the core competencies that ICT offers include immersion, scenario generation, computer graphics, entertainment theory, and simulation technologies; these competencies were sought as the DoD decided that they needed to create more visually and narratively compelling and interactive learning environments for the gaming generation.¹⁸ USC was selected by the DoD not just because of the university’s work in science and engineering but also its close connections to the media entertainment industry, which USC fosters from its renowned School of Cinematic Arts (formerly the School of Cinema-Television), thereby providing the military access to a wide range of storytelling talents, from screenwriting to animation. ICT later moved to nearby Playa Vista, part of Silicon Beach, where the military presence also increased; by April 2016, the U.S. Army Research Lab West opened next door to ICT as another collaborative partner, further integrating the university into military work.¹⁹ This university-military partnership results in “prototypes that successfully transition into the hands of warfighters”; UARCs such as ICT are thus rendered a crucial link in what graduate student worker Isabel Kain from the Researchers Against War collective calls the “military supply chain.”²⁰

USC was touted as “neutral ground” from which the U.S. Army could help innovate military training by one of ICT’s founders in his account of the Institute’s origin story.²¹ Yet, universities abandon any pretense to neutrality once they are assigned UARCs, as opponents at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa (UH Mānoa) asserted when a U.S. Navy-sponsored UARC was designated for their campus in 2004. UH Mānoa faculty, students, and community members repeatedly expressed their concerns about the ethics of military research conducted on their campus, including the threat of removing “researchers’ rights to refuse Navy directives.”²² The proposed UARC at UH Mānoa occurred within the context of university community resistance to U.S. imperialism and militarism, which have inflicted structural violence on Hawaiian people, land, and waters, from violent colonization to the 1967 military testing of lethal sarin gas in a forest reserve.²³ Hawai’i serves as the base of the military’s U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, where “future wars are in development,” professor Kyle Kajihiro of UH Mānoa emphasizes.²⁴

Writing in Mānoa Now about the proposed UARC in 2005, Leo Azumbuja opined that “it seems like ideological suicide to allow the Navy to settle on campus, especially the American Navy.”²⁵ A key player in the Indo-Pacific Command, the U.S. Navy has long had a contentious relationship with Indigenous Hawaiians, most recently with the 2021 fuel leakage from the Navy’s Red Hill fuel facility, resulting in water contamination levels that the Hawai’i State Department of Health referred to as “a humanitarian and environmental disaster.”²⁶ Court depositions have since revealed that the Navy knew about the fuel leakage into the community’s drinking water but waited over a week to inform the public, even as people became ill, making opposition to its proposed UARC unsurprising, if not requisite.²⁷ The detonation of bombs and sonar testing that happens at the biennial international war games that the U.S. Navy has hosted in Hawai’i since 1971 have also damaged precious marine life and culturally sacred ecosystems, with the sonar tests causing whales to “swim hundreds of miles, rapidly change their depth (sometimes leading to bleeding from the eyes and ears), and even beach themselves to get away from the sounds of sonar.”²⁸ Within this context, one of the proposed UARC’s core competencies was “understanding of [the] ocean environment.”²⁹

In a flyer circulated by DMZ Hawai‘i, UH Mānoa organizers called for universities to serve society, and “not be used by the military to further their war aims or to perfect ways of killing or controlling people.”³⁰ Recalling efforts in previous decades on U.S. campuses to thwart the encroachment of military research, protestors raised questions about the UARC’s accountability and transparency regarding weapons production within the UH community. UH Mānoa’s strategic plan during the time that the Navy’s UARC was proposed and executed (2002–2010) called for recognition of “our kuleana (responsibility) to honor the indigenous people and promote social justice for Native Hawaiians” and “restoring and managing the Mānoa stream and ecosystem”—priorities that the actions of the U.S. Navy disregarded.³¹ The production of knowledge for naval weapons within the auspices of this public, land-grant institution disrupts any pretension to neutrality the university may purport.

Further resistance to the UARC designation was expressed by the UH Mānoa community: from April 28 to May 4, 2005, the SaveUH/StopUARC Coalition staged a six-day campus sit-in protest, and later that year, the UH Mānoa Faculty Senate voted 31–18 in favor of asking the administration to reject the UARC designation.³² According to an official statement released by UH Mānoa on January 23, 2006, at a university community meeting with the UH Regents in 2006, testimony from opponents to the UARC outnumbered supporters, who, reflecting the neoliberal turn of universities, expressed hope that their competitiveness in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) would advance with a UARC designation, and benefit the university’s ranking.³³ Yet in 2007, writing in DMZ Hawai‘i, Kajihiro clarified that while the UH administration claimed that the proposed UARC would not accept any classified research for the first three years, “the base contract assigns ‘secret’ level classification to the entire facility, making the release of any information subject to the Navy’s approval,” raising concerns about academic freedom, despite the fanfare over STEM and rankings.³⁴ However, the campus resistance campaign was unsuccessful, and in September 2007, the UH Regents approved the Navy UARC designation. By 2008, the U.S. Navy-sponsored Applied Research Laboratory UARC at UH Mānoa opened.

“The Military Normal”

UH Mānoa’s rationale for resistance begs the question: how could this university—indeed, any university—impose this military force onto its community? Are civilian universities within the United States merely an illusion, a deflection from education in the service of empire? What anthropologist Catherine Lutz called in 2009 the ethos of “the military normal” in U.S. culture toward its counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—the commonsensical, even prosaic perspective on the inevitability of endless U.S.-led wars disseminated by U.S. institutions, especially mainstream media—helps explain the attitude toward this particular formalized capture of the university by the DoD.³⁵ Defense funding has for decades permeated universities, but UARCs perpetuate the military normal by allowing the Pentagon to insert itself through research centers and institutes in the (seemingly morally neutral) name of innovation, within part of a broader neoliberal framework of universities as “engines” and “hubs,” or “anchor” institutions that offer to “leverage” their various forms of capital toward regional development in ways that often escape sustained scrutiny or critique.³⁶ The normalization is achieved in some cases given that UARCs such as ICT strive to serve civilian needs as well as military ones with dual-use technologies and tools. Yet with the U.S. creation of the national security state in 1947 and its pursuit of techno-nationalism since the Cold War, UARCs are direct pipelines to the intensification of U.S. empire. Some of the higher-profile virtual military instructional programs developed at ICT at USC, such as its Emergent Leader Immersive Training Environment (ELITE) system, which provides immersive role-playing to train army leaders for various situations in the field, are funneled to explicitly military-only learning institutions such as the Army Warrant Officer School.³⁷

The military normal generates a sense of moral neutrality, even moral superiority. The logic of the military normal, the offer of STEM education and training, especially through providing undergraduate internships and graduate training, and of course funding, not only rationalizes the implementation of UARCs, but ennobles it. The fifteenth and most recently created UARC, at Howard University in 2023—the first such designation for one of the historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs)—boasts STEM inclusion.³⁸ Partnering with the U.S. Air Force, Howard University’s UARC is receiving a five-year, $90 million contract to conduct AI research and develop tactical autonomy technology. Its Research Institute for Tactical Autonomy (RITA) leads a consortium of eight other HCBUs. As with the University of Hawai’i, STEM advantages are touted by the UARC, with RITA’s reach expanding in other ways: it plans to supplement STEM education for K–12 students to “ease their path to a career in the fields of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, tactical autonomy, and machine learning,” noting that undergraduate and graduate students will also be able to pursue fully funded research opportunities at their UARC. With the corporatization of universities, neoliberal policies prioritize STEM for practical reasons, including the pursuit of university rankings and increases in both corporate and government funding. This fits well with increased linkages to the defense sector, which offers capital, jobs, technology, and gravitas. In a critique of Howard University’s central role for the DoD through its new UARC, Erica Caines at Black Agenda Report invokes the “legacies of Black resistance” at Howard University in a call to reduce “the state’s use of HBCUs.”³⁹ In another response to Howard’s UARC, another editorial in Black Agenda Report draws upon activist Kwame Ture’s (Stokely Carmichael’s) autobiography for an illuminative discussion about his oppositional approach to the required military training and education at Howard University during his time there.⁴⁰

With their respectability and resources, universities, through UARCs, provide ideological cover for U.S. warmaking and imperialistic actions, offering up student labor at undergraduate and graduate levels in service of that cover. When nearly eight hundred U.S. military bases around the world are cited as evidence of U.S. empire and the DoD requires research facilities to be embedded within places of higher learning, it is reasonable to expect that university communities—ostensibly civilian institutions—ask questions about UARC goals and operations, and how they provide material support and institutional gravitas to these military and federal agencies.⁴¹ In the case of USC, ICT’s stated goal of enhancing warfighter lethality runs counter to current USC student efforts to strive for more equitable conditions on campus and within its larger community (for example, calls to end “land grabs,” and “targeted repression and harassment of Black, Brown and Palestinian students and their allies on and off campus”) as well as other reductions in institutional harms.⁴² The university’s “Minor in Resistance to Genocide”—a program pursued by USC’s discarded valedictorian Asna Tabassum—also serves as mere cover, a façade, alongside USC’s innovations for warfighter lethality.

Many students and members of U.S. society want to connect the dots, as evident from the nationwide protests and encampments, and a push from within the academy to examine the military supply chain is intensifying. In addition to Researchers Against War members calling out the militarized research that flourishes in U.S. universities, the Hopkins Justice Collective at Johns Hopkins University recently proposed a demilitarization process to its university’s Public Interest Investment Advisory Committee that cited Johns Hopkins’s UARC, Applied Physics Lab, as being the “sole source” of DoD funding for the development and testing of AI-guided drone swarms used against Palestinians in 2021.⁴³ Meanwhile, at UH Mānoa, the struggle continues: in February 2024, the Associated Students’ Undergraduate Senate approved a resolution requesting that the university’s Board of Regents terminate UH’s UARC contract, noting that UH’s own president is the principal investigator for a $75 million High Performance Computer Center for the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory that was contracted by the university’s UARC, Applied Research Laboratory.⁴⁴ Researchers Against War organizing, the Hopkins Justice Collective’s proposal, the undaunted UH Mānoa students, and others help pinpoint the flows of militarized knowledge—knowledge that is developed by UARCs to strengthen warfighters from within U.S. universities, through the DoD, and to different parts of the world.⁴⁵

Notes

1. ↩ Jake Alimahomed-Wilson et al., “Boeing University: How the California State University Became Complicit in Palestinian Genocide,” Mondoweiss, May 20, 2024; Brian Osgood, “U.S. University Ties to Weapons Contractors Under Scrutiny Amid War in Gaza,” Al Jazeera, May 13, 2024.
2. ↩ “Collaborate with Us: University Affiliated Research Center,” DevCom Army Research Laboratory, arl.devcom.army.mil.
3. ↩ USC Divest From Death Coalition, “Divest From Death USC News Release,” April 24, 2024.
4. ↩ USC Institute for Creative Technologies, “ICT Overview Video,” YouTube, 2:52, December 12, 2023.
5. ↩ Gordon Adams and Shoon Murray, Mission Creep: The Militarization of U.S. Foreign Policy? (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2014).
6. ↩ USC Institute for Creative Technologies, “ICT Overview Video”; USC Institute for Creative Technologies, Historical Achievements: 1999–2019 (Los Angeles: University of Southern California, May 2021), ict.usc.edu.
7. ↩ Yuval Abraham, “‘Lavender’: The AI Machine Directing Israel’s Bombing Spree in Gaza,” +972 Magazine.
8. ↩ “UrbanSim,” USC Institute for Creative Technologies.
9. ↩ Sylvia J. Martin, “Imagineering Empire: How Hollywood and the U.S. National Security State ‘Operationalize Narrative,'” Media, Culture & Society 42, no. 3 (April 2020): 398–413.
10. ↩ Paul Rosenbloom, “Writing the Original UARC Proposal,” USC Institute for Creative Technologies, March 11, 2024.
11. ↩ Susannah V. Howieson, Christopher T. Clavin, and Elaine M. Sedenberg, “Federal Security Laboratory Governance Panels: Observations and Recommendations,” Institute for Defense Analyses—Science and Technology Policy Institute, Alexandria, Virginia, 2013, 4.
12. ↩ OSD Studies and Federally Funded Research and Development Centers Management Office (FFRDC), Engagement Guide: Department of Defense University Affiliated Research Centers (UARCs) (Alexandria, Virginia: OSD Studies and FFRDC Management Office, April 2013), 5.
13. ↩ Christopher V. Pece, “Federal Funding to University Affiliated Research Centers Totaled $1.5 Billion in FY 2021,” National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, National Science Foundation, 2024, ncses.nsf.gov.
14. ↩ “UARC Customer Funding Guide,” USC Institute for Creative Technologies, March 13, 2024.
15. ↩ “Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDC) and University Affiliated Research Centers (UARC),” Department of Defense Research and Engineering Enterprise, rt.cto.mil.
16. ↩ OSD Studies and FFRDC Management Office, Engagement Guide.
17. ↩ Congressional Research Service, “Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFDRCs): Background and Issues for Congress,” April 3, 2020, 5.
18. ↩ OSD Studies and FFRDC Management Office, Engagement Guide, 18.
19. ↩ “Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT),” USC Military and Veterans Initiatives, military.usc.edu.
20. ↩ USC Institute for Creative Technologies, Historical Achievements: 1999–2019, 2; Linda Dayan, “‘Starve the War Machine’: Workers at UC Santa Cruz Strike in Solidarity with Pro-Palestinian Protesters,” Haaretz, May 21, 2024.
21. ↩ Richard David Lindholm, That’s a 40 Share!: An Insider Reveals the Origins of Many Classic TV Shows and How Television Has Evolved and Really Works (Pennsauken, New Jersey: Book Baby, 2022).
22. ↩ Leo Azambuja, “Faculty Senate Vote Opposing UARC Preserves Freedom,” Mānoa Now, November 30, 2005.
23. ↩ Deployment Health Support Directorate, “Fact Sheet: Deseret Test Center, Red Oak, Phase I,” Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Defense (Health Affairs), health.mil.
24. ↩ Ray Levy Uyeda, “U.S. Military Activity in Hawai’i Harms the Environment and Erodes Native Sovereignty,” Prism Reports, July 26, 2022.
25. ↩ Azambuja, “Faculty Senate Vote Opposing UARC Preserves Freedom.”
26. ↩ Kyle Kajihiro, “The Militarizing of Hawai’i: Occupation, Accommodation, Resistance,” in Asian Settler Colonialism, Jonathon Y. Okamura and Candace Fujikane, eds. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), 170–94; “Hearings Officer’s Proposed Decision and Order, Findings of Fact, and Conclusions of Law,” Department of Health, State of Hawai‘i vs. United States Department of the Navy, no. 21-UST-EA-02 (December 27, 2021).
27. ↩ Christina Jedra, “Red Hill Depositions Reveal More Details About What the Navy Knew About Spill,” Honolulu Civil Beat, May 31, 2023.
28. ↩ “Does Military Sonar Kill Marine Wildlife?,” Scientific American, June 10, 2009.
29. ↩ Joan Fuller, “Strategic Outreach—University Affiliated Research Centers,” Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Research and Engineering), June 2021, 4.
30. ↩ DMZ Hawai‘i, “Save Our University, Stop UARC,” dmzhawaii.org.
31. ↩ University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Strategic Plan 2002–2010: Defining Our Destiny, 8–9.
32. ↩ Craig Gima, “UH to Sign Off on Navy Center,” Star Bulletin, May 13, 2008.
33. ↩ University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, “Advocates and Opponents of the Proposed UARC Contract Present Their Case to the UH Board of Regents,” press release, January 23, 2006.
34. ↩ Kyle Kajihiro, “The Secret and Scandalous Origins of the UARC,” DMZ Hawai‘i, September 23, 2007.
35. ↩ Catherine Lutz, “The Military Normal,” in The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual, or Notes on Demilitarizing American Society, The Network of Concerned Anthropologists, ed. (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2009).
36. ↩ Anne-Laure Fayard and Martina Mendola, “The 3-Stage Process That Makes Universities Prime Innovators,” Harvard Business Review, April 19, 2024; Paul Garton, “Types of Anchor Institution Initiatives: An Overview of University Urban Development Literature,” Metropolitan Universities 32, no. 2 (2021): 85–105.
37. ↩ Randall Hill, “ICT Origin Story: How We Built the Holodeck,” Institute for Creative Technologies, February 9, 2024.
38. ↩ Brittany Bailer, “Howard University Awarded $90 Million Contract by Air Force, DoD to Establish First-Ever University Affiliated Research Center Led by an HCBU,” The Dig, January 24, 2023, thedig.howard.edu.
39. ↩ Erica Caines, “Black University, White Power: Howard University Covers for U.S. Imperialism,” Black Agenda Report, February 1, 2023.
40. ↩ Editors, “Howard University: Every Black Thing and Its Opposite, Kwame Ture,” The Black Agenda Review (Black Agenda Report), February 1, 2023.
41. ↩ David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015).
42. ↩ USC Divest from Death Coalition, “Divest From Death USC News Release”; “USC Renames VKC, Implements Preliminary Anti-Racism Actions,” Daily Trojan, June 11, 2020.
43. ↩ Hopkins Justice Collective, “PIIAC Proposal,” May 4, 2024.
44. ↩ Bronson Azama to bor.testimony@hawaii.edu, “Testimony for 2/15/24,” February 15, 2024, University of Hawai’i; “UH Awarded Maui High Performance Computer Center Contract Valued up to $75 Million,” UH Communications, May 1, 2020.
45. ↩ Isabel Kain and Becker Sharif, “How UC Researchers Began Saying No to Military Work,” Labor Notes, May 17, 2024.