It is almost poetic in its cruelty: the president who vowed to “Make America Great Again” decreeing that, if your city, state, or university dared to boycott Israeli companies, you would lose the very federal disaster relief meant to protect you in floods, hurricanes, or wildfires. The Trump administration just tied $1.9 billion in FEMA preparedness grants to a pledge of non-participation in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement—effectively turning support for genocide into a condition of survival here at home.
A few days before, on the other side of North America, President Trump threatened to “tear up” the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement simply because Canada’s incoming government signaled recognition of a Palestinian state. “Very hard,” he declared, “when you reward Hamas”—an astonishing admission that geopolitics and genocide outrank national solidarity and economic partnership.
Imagine communities plunged into despair, watching levees fail or firestorms encroach, only to be told, “I’m sorry—you chose justice for the oppressed, so you don’t get help.” In Texas, local officials openly discussed conditioning Harvey relief on promises not to boycott Israel. A lawsuit later challenged that policy as unconstitutional.
This grotesque bargain proves what many of us have said (with receipts) for years: the United States is hostage to Israel’s political agenda. When your own president holds your people at ransom to shield a government accused of genocide, the hallmark of sovereignty has been surrendered.
And what does Israel do in return? In Gaza, an aerial bombardment so relentless it has reshaped the map of human suffering.
A senior official in Netanyahu’s office just said to Israeli media, “The decision has been made—we’re going to occupy Gaza. Hamas will not release more hostages without complete surrender… If we do not act now, the hostages will die of starvation—and Gaza will remain under Hamas control.”
This admission should end all polite debates about Israel’s intentions. The rhetoric of self-defense cannot mask the hubristic language of empire. When leaders invoke genocide as policy, claiming ethnic cleansing is “liberation,” they declare war on humanity itself.
Israel has built what Michael Fakhri, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, called “the most efficient starvation machine you can imagine.” He warned of this in February 2024 and reiterated that “no one should act surprised” at the horrors unfolding now that famine thresholds have been met and mass starvation is well underway.
By December 2023, 80 percent of Palestinians in Gaza faced catastrophic hunger. Today, children under five suffer rates of severe acute malnutrition unseen this century. Hospitals lie in ruins, water supplies are poisoned, and what little aid trickles through is met with gunfire.
As starving Palestinians gather at aid distribution points run by the so-called U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), they are met with bullets. In the last three months, aid sites have become death traps: nearly 1,400 people shot dead waiting for food. Contractors who worked there, described them as “killing fields”.
The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights confirms that the majority of aid-related deaths trace back to GHF distribution centers. Doctors Without Borders decried “slaughter masquerading as aid”.
Inside the West Bank village of Umm al-Khair, settler Yinon Levi who shot Awdah Hathaleen, a beloved teacher and activist featured in an Oscar-winning documentary, in the chest with an excavator looming behind him is back in the village, roaming free a week later to continue leveling farmland, under the protection of armed escorts, while Hathaleen’s family mourns and pleads for justice.
This is state-sanctioned terror: settlers empowered, emboldened, and shielded by the very governments claiming to defend “democracy.”
Across Europe, Israel’s standing as a pariah state grows. In Lithuania, pro-Palestine activists staged protests during President Isaac Herzog’s official visit to Vilnius, banners demanding “Herzog to The Hague” and demanding an end to genocide, call into question Lithuania’s cozy cooperation with Tel Aviv into question.
In the United Kingdom, the Royal Ballet and Opera (RBO) scrapped its planned 2026 Tosca production in Tel Aviv after 182 members—from dancers to stagehands—signed an open letter denouncing the institution’s complicity with genocide. They refused to lend their art to whitewash mass murder and forced their leadership’s hand.
This is proof that a moral line is being redrawn. Cultural workers, artists, and intellectuals are prescient; they sense that neutrality in the face of genocide is complicity.
As Doechii reminded us a few days ago during her Osheaga set:
”Y'all can't be scared to stand up for what you believe in.
You can't be scared to say what matters. Free Palestine.”
President Trump’s pledge to “Make America Great Again” rings hollow when greatness is sacrificed on the altar of empire. When disaster relief hinges on pro-genocide pledges, when cultural institutions and places of higher learning like Columbia University, fall in line, and when aid workers turn into faux gatekeepers for mass-murder.
Expecting Donald Trump to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza is like asking the arsonist to fight the fire he started. His entire career has been built on transactional loyalty to extremist donors and echo-chamber propaganda that masks a grotesque violation of human rights. As Kenneth Roth, who joins me on my podcast this week, kindly noted, “You don’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for aiding and abetting genocide and finally getting it to stop,” underscoring the absurdity of Trump’s posturing on the world stage.
Even if he slashes aid to Israel, it would be a cynical bid to remold his legacy, not a genuine moral reckoning. Only an unrelenting groundswell of global outrage and political isolation could possibly force his hand—and history shows he’ll ignore it.
So, today, it matters where we put our focus. And there is reason for hope: vast groundswell movements are signaling that conscience outpaces compliance. Grassroots pressure can still break this hostage-taking arrangement.
But to act, we must first name the crime: genocide. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu and his defense minister for starvation as a method of warfare: a war crime.
If making America or any place great again, it must mean mean standing for the weak, defending the starved, refusing to let democracy bow to genocide. To withhold aid from citizens in order to protect mass murderers is not cunning statecraft; it is moral bankruptcy.
Our solidarity with the oppressed must be stronger than their blackmail.
Is Trump running the show or Netinyahoo? I think Israel is a colony of the United States, and the holocaust and the Jewish religion have been hijacked by the powers be to main this colony and power in the Middle East!
It's too much to bear