Invisible Rivals: How We Evolved To Compete In A Cooperative World – Book Review

"Invisible Rivals: How We Evolved to Compete in a Cooperative World," by Jonathan R. Goodman

 June 22, 2025

By Eurasia Review

To save democracy and solve the world’s biggest challenges, we need to get better at spotting and exposing people who exploit human cooperation for personal gain, argues Cambridge social scientist Dr Jonathan Goodman.

In Invisible Rivals, published by Yale University Press today, Dr Goodman argues that throughout human history we have tried to rid our social groups of free-riders, people who take from others without giving anything back. But instead of eliminating free-riders, human evolution has just made them better at hiding their deception.

Goodman explains that humans have evolved to use language to disguise selfish acts and exploit our cooperative systems. He links this ‘invisible rivalry’ to the collapse of trust and consequent success of political strongmen today.

Goodman says: “We see this happening today, as evidenced by the rise of the Julius Caesar of our time—Donald Trump— but it is a situation that evolution has predicted since the origins of life and later, language, and which will only change form again even if the current crises are overcome.”

Goodman argues that over the course of human evolution “When we rid ourselves of ancient, dominant alphas, we traded overt selfishness for something perhaps even darker: the ability to move through society while planning and coordinating.”

“As much as we evolved to use language effectively to work together, to overthrow those brutish and nasty dominants that pervaded ancient society, we also (and do) use language to create opportunities that benefit us … We use language to keep our plans invisible. Humans, more than other known organisms, can cooperate until we imagine a way to compete, exploit, or coerce, and almost always rely on language to do so.”

Goodman, an expert on human social evolution at the University of Cambridge, identifies free-riding behaviour in everything from benefits cheating and tax evasion, to countries dodging action on climate change, and the actions of business leaders and politicians.

Goodman warns that “We can’t stop people free-riding, it’s part of our nature, the incurable syndrome… Free riders are among us at every level of society and pretending otherwise can make our own goals unrealistic, and worse, appear hopeless. But if we accept that we all have this ancient flaw, this ability to deceive ourselves and others, we can design policies around that and change our societies for the better.”

Lessons from our ancestors

Goodman points out that humans evolved in small groups meaning that over many generations we managed to design social norms to govern the distribution of food, water and other vital resources.

“People vied for power but these social norms helped to maintain a trend toward equality, balancing out our more selfish dispositions. Nevertheless, the free-rider problem persisted and using language we got better at hiding our cheating.”

One academic camp has argued that ancient humans used language to work together to overthrow and eject “brutish dominants”. The opposing view claims that this never happened and that humans are inherently selfish and tribal. Goodman rejects both extremes.

“If we accept the view that humans are fundamentally cooperative, we risk trusting blindly. If we believe everyone is selfish, we won’t trust anyone. We need to be realistic about human nature. We’re a bit of both so we need to learn how to place our trust discerningly.”

Goodman points out that our distant ancestors benefitted from risk-pooling systems, whereby all group members contributed labour and shared resources, but this only worked because it is difficult to hide tangible assets such as tools and food. While some hunter-gatherer societies continue to rely on these systems, they are ineffective in most modern societies in our globalized economy.

“Today most of us rely largely on intangible assets for monetary exchange so people can easily hide resources, misrepresent their means and invalidate the effectiveness of social norms around risk pooling,” Goodman says.

“We are flawed animals capable of deception, cruelty, and selfishness. The truth is hard to live with but confronting it through honest reflection about our evolutionary past gives us the tools to teach ourselves and others about how we can improve the future.”

Taking action: self-knowledge, education & policy

Goodman, who teaches students at Cambridge about the evolution of cooperation, argues that we reward liars from a young age and that this reinforces bad behaviour into adulthood.

“People tell children that cheaters don’t prosper, but in fact cheats who don’t get caught can do very well for themselves.”

“Evolutionarily speaking, appearing trustworthy but being selfish can be more beneficial to the individual. We need to recognise that and make a moral choice about whether we try to use people or to work with them.”

At the same time, Goodman thinks we need to arm ourselves intellectually with the power to tell who is credible and who is not. “Our most important tool for doing this is education,” he says. “We must teach people to think ethically for themselves, and to give them the tools to do so.”

But Goodman cautions that even the tools we use to expose exploiters are open to exploitation: “Think about how people across the political sphere accuse others of virtue signalling or abusing a well-intentioned political movement for their own gain.”

Goodman believes that exposing free-riders is more beneficial than punishment. “Loss of social capital through reputation is an important motivator for anyone,” he argues, suggesting that journalistic work exposing exploitation can be as effective at driving behaviour change as criminal punishment.

“The dilemma each of us faces now is whether to confront invisible rivalry or to let exploiters undermine society until democracy in the free world unravels—and the freedom of dissent is gone.”

Trump’s Really Going To Try It

By Henry A. Giroux, David Pakman 

June 20, 2025

Source: David Pakman Show

Henry Giroux, Chaired Professor of Scholarship in the Public Interest at McMaster University, joins David to discuss neo-liberal fascism and whether fascism and authoritarian are valid descriptors of what Donald Trump has promised for his second term

Nuclear Options

By Tariq Ali

June 20, 2025

Source: New Left Review

US nuclear weapons test at Bikini in 1946

The expansion of the war from Palestine to Iran, which began on 13 June, signals an Israeli obsession persisting for four decades. As the Trump administration was negotiating in bad faith with Iran over its nuclear programme, the Israeli regime took advantage of an interval to bomb Tehran, assassinating leading scientists, a senior general and other officials, some of them engaged in the talks. After a few unconvincing denials, Trump admitted that the US had been informed of the attack ahead of time. Now the West is backing Israel’s latest onslaught, despite what Tulsi Gabbard, the Trump-appointed Director of National Intelligence, said as recently as 25 March: ‘The Intelligence Community continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003.’  

The IAEA inspectors know full well that there are no nuclear weapons. They have simply been acting as willing spies for the US and Israel, providing pen-portraits of the senior scientists who have now been killed. Iran has belatedly realised that it was pointless letting them into the country and a parliamentary bill has been drafted to throw them out. The country’s leadership had nothing to gain from sacrificing this part of their sovereignty, yet they clung to the lame half-hope, half-belief that if they did as the Americans wanted, they might get the sanctions lifted and a US-guaranteed peace.  

Their own historical experience should have taught them otherwise. Iran’s elected government was overthrown with covert Anglo-American aid in 1953 and its secular opposition destroyed. After a quarter of a century of Western-backed dictatorship, the Pahlavi dynasty was finally overthrown. But a year after the 1979 Revolution, the West – as well as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait – funded Iraq to start a war against Iran and topple the new regime. It lasted eight years and left half a million people dead, mostly on the Iranian side. Hundreds of Iraqi missiles hit Iranian cities and economic targets, especially the oil industry. In the war’s final stages, the US destroyed nearly half the Iranian navy in the Gulf and, for good measure, shot down a civilian passenger plane. Britain loyally helped in the cover-up.  

Since then, the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy has always put the regime’s survival at its centre. During the Iran–Iraq war, the clerics had no hesitation in buying arms from their avowed enemies, Israel included. Their solidarity with oppositional forces has been fragmentary and opportunist, devoid of any consistent anti-imperialist strategy, except in their lonely but crucial capacity as a defender of Palestinian rights, in a region where every single Arab government has capitulated to the hegemon. On 15 June, soon after the Israeli attack, there was a remarkable procession of over fifty donkeys in Gaza, the animals garlanded and covered with silk and satin robes; as they were led down the street, children stroked them with genuine affection. Why? ‘Because’, explained the organiser, ‘they have been more help to us than all the Arab states put together’.  

Following the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Iranians no doubt hoped that collaborating with Washington – clearing the path for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar – would win them some respite. In many respects, the ‘War on Terror’ was not a bad time for the Islamic Republic. Its standing in the region soared together with oil prices, its enemies in Baghdad and Kabul were brutally removed, and the Shia groups it had been backing since 1979 were brought to power in neighbouring Iraq. It’s difficult to imagine that neither the Bush politburo (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice) nor its unofficial US-based Arab advisers (Kanaan Makiya, Fouad Ajmi) could have foreseen this outcome, but that appears to have been the case. The first non-Western foreigner to visit the Green Zone as an honoured guest was President Ahmedinejad. 

Both Sunni and Shia nationalists came together to oppose the occupying forces, firing rockets and mortar at the US embassy. It was Iranian state intervention that split this opposition, ensuring that a united Iraqi resistance movement descended into a futile and destructive civil war. Muqtada al-Sadr, a key Shia leader in Iraq, had been shocked by the atrocities in Fallujah and led a series of popular uprisings against the US coalition. At the height of the conflict, he was invited to visit Iran and ended up staying – or being kept there? – for the next four years. The subsequent entry of ISIS onto the battlefield strengthened this tactical US–Iran alliance, with the Pentagon providing air support to aid the assaults being carried out by the 60,000 strong Shia militants on the ground.

Most of these forces were under the indirect command of Qassem Soleimani, who was in regular communication with General David Petraeus. Soleimani was a gifted strategist, yet susceptible to flattery, especially from the Great Satan. He was the main thinker behind the expansionist tactics deployed by Tehran after 9/11, but his tendency to boast to his US counterparts alienated some of them, especially when he explained accurately how the Iranians had foreseen and exploited most US mistakes in the region. Spencer Ackerman’s description rings true: 

He was pragmatic enough to cooperate with Washington when it suited Iranian interests, as destroying the Caliphate did, and was prepared to clash with Washington when it suited Iranian interests, as with Soleimani’s backstopping of Syria’s Bashar el Assad or earlier with IED modifications that killed hundreds of US troops and maimed more. Soleimani’s impunity infuriated the Security State and the Right. His success stung.  

Yet even as Iran’s regional power increased, social tensions at home were rising. The revolution had excited hopes at first, but the ensuing war with Iraq was debilitating. Partly for this reason, Iran took a tougher stance on the nuclear question, asserting its sovereign right to enrich uranium. Domestically, this was seen as a means of reuniting the population. Externally, it has a perfectly logical defensive purpose: the country was in a vulnerable position, encircled by atomic states (India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Israel) as well as a string of American bases with potential or actual nuclear stockpiles in Qatar, Iraq, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. Nuclear-armed US aircraft carriers and submarines patrolled the waters off its southern coast.  

Totally forgotten in the West is the fact that the nuclear programme was an initiative first taken by the Shah in the 1970s with US support. One of the companies involved was a fiefdom of Dick Cheney, Bush’s sleazy Vice President. Khomeini halted the project when he came to power, considering it un-Islamic. But he later relented and operations restarted. As the programme ramped up in the mid-2000s, Iran and its supreme leader found that their attempts to placate Washington had come to nothing. They were still in the West’s crosshairs. The Bush White House gave the impression that either a direct US strike against Iran, or an attack via its tried-and-tested regional relay, Israel, might soon be on the cards. The Israelis, for their part, were virulently opposed to anyone challenging their nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. Iran’s leader was described by the Israeli government and its loyal media networks as a ‘psychopath’ and a ‘new Hitler’. It was a hurriedly manufactured crisis, of the sort in which the West has become a specialist. The hypocrisy was breathtaking. The US had nuclear weapons, as did the UK, France and Israel; yet Iran’s search for the technology required for the lowest grade of nuclear self-defence provoked moral panic.  

In the scramble by European powers to enhance their standing with Washington following the invasion of Iraq, France, Germany and Britain were keen to prove their mettle by forcing Tehran to accept stringent limits on its nuclear activity. The Khatami regime immediately capitulated, imagining it was really being invited in from the cold. In December 2003, they signed the ‘Additional Protocol’ demanded by the EU3, agreeing to a ‘voluntary suspension’ of the right to enrichment guaranteed under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Again, it made no difference. Within months, the IAEA condemned them for having failed to ratify it and Israel was boasting of its intention to ‘destroy Natanz’. In the summer of 2004, a large bipartisan majority in the US Congress passed a resolution for ‘all appropriate measures’ to prevent an Iranian weapons programme and there was speculation about an ‘October surprise’ in the run-up to that year’s election.  

At the time, I argued inthe Guardian that ‘to face up to the enemies ranged against Iran requires an intelligent and far-sighted strategy – not the current rag-bag of opportunism and manoeuvre, determined by the immediate interests of the clerics’. A number of liberal and socialist Iranian intellectuals wrote back from Tehran to express strong agreement, especially with my conclusion:  

Clearing the way for the overthrow of the Iraqi Ba’ath and Afghan Taliban regimes and backing the US occupations has bought no respite. The US undersecretary of state has spoken of ‘ratcheting up the pressure’. Israeli defence minister Shaul Mofaz has said that ‘Israel will not be able to accept an Iranian nuclear capability, and it must have the capability to defend itself with all that this implies, and we are preparing.’ Hillary Clinton accused the Bush administration of ‘downplaying the Iranian threat’ and called for pressure on Russia and China to impose sanctions on Tehran. Chirac has spoken of using French nuclear weapons against such a ‘rogue state’. Perhaps it is simply high-octane rocket-rattling, the aim being to frighten Tehran into submission. Bullying is unlikely to succeed. Will the West then embark on a new war?  

US foreign policy was aptly summarised by Bush’s laconic avowal in 2003, ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’. Britain, Canada, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Australia needed no convincing. To this day, Iraq has not returned to the social and economic stability that it had before ‘regime-change’. A million plus casualties and five million orphans was the price it was forced to pay after its government was mendaciously accused of harbouring WMDs. Western companies now siphon off the bulk of Iraqi oil.  

Many who waged the Iraq war have since regretted it, but that has not stopped imperial strategists from carrying on in similar fashion elsewhere. In Gaza, the horror continues. Bombs, deaths, starvation and a callousness that evokes how the Wehrmacht treated the Slav Untermensch. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has published an editorial, tougher than anything that has appeared in liberal dailies in the Euro-Atlantic zone, which attacks European leaders’ pathetic decision to sanction only the two outright fascists in Netanyahu’s government and instead demands total sanctions against Israel itself. This is what real friends of Israel should be demanding, rather than encouraging its kamikaze politics and genocidal campaigns.  

After Israel’s near-complete success in levelling the Strip and exterminating tens of thousands of its people, the Netanyahu government clearly felt it was time to expand the war to other targets. First there was the IDF’s campaign against Hezbollah, which killed much of its leadership and left the organisation greatly weakened, bringing Lebanon to heel. (It is no surprise that young Lebanese have since climbed onto their roof terraces to cheer on the Iranian drones.) Then came Syria, where Israel launched multiple attacks without even pretending it was self-defence. In collaboration with NATO-member Turkey and remnants of the Ba’athist apparatus, Israel helped to install a puppet government under a well-trained US stooge, the former al-Qaida operative Jolani.  

The stage was now set for the assault on Iran. As always, Western double-standards are at work when Israel is involved. Israel has not joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has not signed the Biological Weapons Convention and the Ottawa Convention, has not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention and has disregarded international law and UN resolutions for decades, with ICJ arrest warrants now issued against Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, plus an ongoing genocide investigation . . . This is what a rogue state looks like.  

The two countries are currently communicating via drones, F35s and missiles. Both Tehran and Tel Aviv have suffered hits. The declared Israeli aim of destroying the nuclear reactors has not been accomplished and Netanyahu’s boast that he will bring about regime change has produced the opposite effect. Hijabless women have been demonstrating in the streets, chanting ‘Get an atom bomb’. One of them told a reporter: ‘In parliament, they’re discussing closing down the Hormuz Straits. No need to discuss. Just close them down.’ Trump is insisting that the war can only end once Tehran surrenders completely. Many Iranians now believe that the recent nuclear negotiations were always a feint. In 2020, Trump used similar tactics to carry out the assassination of Soleimani, persuading the Iraqi Prime Minister to act as a mediator in US–Iran talks so as to lure the General to Baghdad. So far, the Iranians have withstood the assault. The country that urgently needs regime change is Israel. Email

Tariq Ali

Writer, journalist and film-maker Tariq Ali was born in Lahore in 1943. He owned his own independent television production company, Bandung, which produced programmes for Channel 4 in the UK during the 1980s. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio and contributes articles and journalism to magazines and newspapers including The Guardian and the London Review of Books. He is editorial director of London publishers Verso and is on the board of the New Left Review, for whom he is also an editor. He writes fiction and non-fiction and his non-fiction includes 1968: Marching in the Streets (1998), a social history of the 1960s; Conversations with Edward Said (2005); Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London, Terror (2005); and Speaking of Empire and Resistance (2005), which takes the form of a series of conversations with the author.

BUSH JR. IRAQ WAR LIES ABOUT WMD

TRUMP IRAN WAR LIES ABOUT WMD

Shifts In US Public Opinion Could Fundamentally Alter US-Israeli Relations

By Jooel Heinonen

June 19, 2025

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Photo by Manuel Elias / United Nations

Earlier this month, Washington vetoed yet another UN security council resolution,  supported by all the other members, calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Commenting on the council’s failure to pass the resolution, China’s ambassador to the  UN, Fu Cong, accurately remarked that the vote result “once again exposes that the  root cause of the council’s inability to quell the conflict in Gaza is the repeated  obstruction of the US”. Indeed, as long as Israel can rely on the protection of its  superpower patron, it can feel empowered to disregard the increasing global pressure against it to cease its crimes. The horrors in Gaza have reached such levels of cruelty  and devastation that even the governments of Canada, the UK, and France have now  strongly denounced Israel’s atrocities, threatening Israel with “concrete actions” if it  persists in its campaign in Gaza. The Trump administration, though, has remained  steadfast in its support for Israel, surpassing even Joe Biden’s extreme support for  Israel’s actions. Therefore, the Israeli government can feel unthreatened by (from its point of view) irrelevant global denunciations of its crimes, and Israeli Prime Minister  Benjamin Netanyahu can continue to make a mockery of the UN, dismissing it as an  “antisemitic swamp”. 

US support for Israel, however, is not set in stone, and there has been a remarkable  shift in US public opinion concerning Israel in recent years. A Gallup poll conducted  earlier this year found that less than half in the US are now sympathetic toward Israelis,  the lowest level of support for the key American ally in the Middle East in 25 years of  Gallup’s annual tracking of the measure. Meanwhile, the number of US adults who  sympathize with the Palestinians (33 %) is the all-time highest reading by two points.  There is also a deep partisan split on the issue, with Republicans inclined to have a far  more favorable attitude towards Israel than Democrats, although even the number of younger Republicans with negative views on Israel has dramatically increased in recent  years. These significant shifts (which will probably intensify as Israel solidifies its status  as a global pariah through its lawlessness and destruction of Gaza) are not, however,  reflected in policy yet. Bipartisan support for Israel remains strong, and figures like  Congressman Thomas Massie and the progressives Democrats that are critical of Israel are still a minority in US Congress.  

It is, however, conceivable that the US public’s increasingly critical views on Israel  could eventually compel the political leadership in Washington to change course on the  Israel-Palestine issue. The US government could, for instance, be pressured to follow  the radical course of abiding by US law. The Leahy Law explicitly forbids the US 

government from providing military assistance to foreign security force units that are  involved in serious human rights violations. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) should  undoubtedly be disqualified from receiving US military aid under this law, given its  conduct in the current Gaza conflict (not to mention its decades-long oppression of the  Palestinian people). However, as Charles Blaha, a former US State Department official,  has stated, information that “for any other country would without question result in  ineligibility is insufficient for Israeli security force units”, criticizing the Department for  “non-compliance with the law”. In 2021, US Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth  Warren proposed conditioning US military aid to Israel on Israel ending its human rights  violations and illegal settlement expansion in the occupied territories. Last fall, Sanders  undertook a failed effort in the Senate to block arms sales to Israel (with most Democrats joining all Republicans in opposing the move). In 2021, Congresswoman Betty McCollum, with the support of 13 progressives in the US House of  Representatives, introduced a bill that would prohibit US aid from being used to fund  violations of Palestinians’ human rights. Earlier this year, Congressman Massie urged the US government to end all military aid to Israel. Combined with the pressure and  protests of a dedicated US public, these initiatives could bring about a fundamental  change in US-Israel relations, which could compel Israel to seriously sue for peace and  facilitate the realization of the two-state solution. 

It could also be noted that the supporters of Israel realize perfectly well that these shifts  in public opinion could erode future US support for Israel. A paper published earlier this  year by the Institute for National Security Studies, a major Israeli think tank, warns that  “[t]he dangers of diminished US support, particularly as it reflects long-term and deeply  rooted trends, cannot be overstated” and that “[i]f current trends continue, rank and  file members of Congress will almost certainly include more critics of the US-Israel  alliance and more members for whom it is simply not a priority”. To ward off this  danger, the paper’s author, professor Theodore Sasson, suggests, among other things,  that “Israel should pursue bilateral security agreements with the United States that  leverage the Republican administration’s political support and bind future governments  to the US-Israel alliance”. In other words, Israel should seek to make US support  immutable and irreversible, no matter what the US public may prefer in the future.  Similar worries were reflected in AIPAC’s spending bonanza last year to ensure the  defeats of pro-Palestine candidates in Democratic primaries. AIPAC spent $8.5 million to defeat Democratic Congresswoman Cori Bush in Missouri, while also devoting $17 million to bring down Democratic Congressman Jamal Bowman in New York.  

Despite the trends in US public opinion towards greater sympathy for the Palestinians  and the (limited) calls from lawmakers for a change in course, Biden and especially  Trump have been very reluctant to exercise US leverage on Israel to influence its  behavior. Biden did suspend some arms shipments to Israel, but his administration still  provided Israel with $17.9 billion for its military operations in Gaza and elsewhere

during the first year of the Gaza offensive, and under Trump, this support continues  even more strongly. This is, however, a somewhat substantial change from earlier  years, when various US presidents had no qualms in exerting US influence to modify or  temper Israel’s actions. In 1952, former US President Harry S. Truman threatened to  withhold economic aid to Israel unless it replaced notoriously violent guards along the  Jordan river, and Israel obeyed. In 1957, following the Israel-UK-France invasion of the  Suez Canal, parts of the Sinai and Gaza, former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower  managed to force Israel to withdraw with a threat of severe sanctions, including the  termination of all military assistance. Even the revered conservative hero, former US  President Ronald Reagan, often applied pressure on Israel, threatening to withhold US  military aid unless it complied with US demands. In one famous case, Reagan told  former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to stop the shelling of Lebanon, or the  future of the US-Israeli relationship would be “endangered”. Begin called Reagan 20  minutes after this ultimatum to inform him that Israel was complying. In 1992, when  Israel was seeking US financial assistance to resettle Soviet Jews, former US President  George H.W. Bush conditioned the approval of US loan guarantees to Israel on the  cessation of settlement expansion in the occupied territories. The Israeli Prime Minister  at the time, Yitzhak Rabin, relented and announced a halt on settlement construction,  although he did not really make good on his promise.  

Given the vast quantities of military aid Israel receives from the US, the American role in  reining in Israeli violence is crucial. However, a broader arms embargo on Israel would  also be desirable, and countries such as Spain, Japan, and Belgium have already  suspended arms sales to Israel. As with the application of the Leahy Law in the US,  there is nothing radical about this move, at least if we have even a minimal commitment  to international law. As UN experts have pointed out, “[a]ny transfer of weapons or  ammunition to Israel that would be used in Gaza is likely to violate international  humanitarian law and must cease immediately”, and “Israel has repeatedly failed to  comply with international law” in its Gaza offensive.  

The failure of the US and many other Western countries to honor their obligations under international law once again demonstrates that international law is invoked very  selectively. It is commonly used as a weapon against official enemies, while completely  ignored when adherence to it would be inconvenient. When Russia illegally invaded  Ukraine in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin was widely denounced as a  war criminal, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) subsequently issuing an arrest  warrant for him was greatly cheered in the West. Meanwhile, many Western countries  still refuse to even suspend arms shipments to Israel, even though those arms are  being used in some of the most egregious assaults on civilians in recent history.  Furthermore, the ICC was subjected to angry, bipartisan denunciations in the US after it  issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli 

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, even though any person with a moral bone in their body  would consider such arrest warrants to be obviously justified. 

Nevertheless, there is hope for the future. It is not a law of nature that the US should  have a government which ignores not only international and domestic laws but also  American public opinion. A committed US public could influence Washington’s stance  on the Israel-Palestine issue, which might enable the just aspirations of the Palestinian  people and help secure enduring peace.

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Jooel Heinonen

Jooel Heinonen has a masters degree in social sciences from the University of Helsinki, Finland. He can be reached at jooeljheinonen@gmail.com.

Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation applies for $30m in US funding

The US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose operations in Gaza have seen hundreds of Palestinians shot dead while trying to reach aid distribution sites, has said that the civilian population in the devastated enclave "desperately need more aid". The group has petitioned the US development agency for $30 million so it can continue its operations.

Issued on: 21/06/2025 - 

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FRANCE 24

Palestinians carry sacks and boxes of food and humanitarian aid that was unloaded from a World Food Program convoy that had been heading to Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip, Monday, June 16, 2025. © Jehad Alshrafi, AP

A US- and Israeli-backed privately run aid organisation brought in to distribute food rations in war-hit Gaza last month has asked the administration of US President Donald Trump to step in with an initial $30 million so it can continue its operations. The group said on Saturday that people in the Palestinian territory "desperately need more aid".

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) began operations at the end of May when Israel eased a two-month blockade on Gaza that the United Nations said had produced famine-like conditions.

The group's operations have been marked by near-daily fatal shootings of Palestinians trying to reach the distribution sites. Major humanitarian groups also accuse the foundation of cooperating with Israel's objectives in the 20-month-old war against Hamas in a way that violates humanitarian principles.

A funding application from the group submitted to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) seen by the Associated Press showed the group has asked the Trump administration to step in with an initial $30 million so it can continue its Gaza operations. 

The application was being processed this week as potentially one of the agency's last acts before the Republican administration absorbs USAID into the State Department as part of deep cuts in foreign assistance.

In a statement on Saturday, GHF interim executive director John Acree said that the organisation was "delivering aid at scale, securely and effectively ... But we cannot meet the full scale of need while large parts of Gaza remain closed".

He added: "The people of Gaza desperately need more aid and we are ready to partner with other humanitarian groups to expand our reach to those who need help the most."

"We are working with the government of Israel to honour its commitment and open additional sites in northern Gaza."

'Simply apocalyptic' and 'too risky': Papers react to Gaza aid distribution deaths

PRESS REVIEW © FRANCE 24

According to figures issued on Saturday by the health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, at least 450 people have been killed and nearly 3,500 injured by Israeli fire while seeking aid since late May, many near GHF sites according to rescuers.

GHF has denied responsibility for deaths near its aid points, contradicting statements from witnesses and Gaza rescue services.

It has said deaths have occurred near UN food convoys.

Gaza's civil defence agency said Saturday that Israeli troops had killed another eight people who were seeking food.

Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that three people were killed by gunfire in the southern Gaza Strip, with another five killed in a central area known as the Netzarim corridor, where thousands of Palestinians have gathered daily in the hope of receiving rations from a GHF centre.

Israeli restrictions on media in the Gaza Strip and difficulties in accessing some areas mean AFP is unable to independently verify the tolls and details provided by rescuers and authorities.

UN agencies and major aid groups have refused to cooperate with GHF over concerns it was designed to cater to Israeli military objectives.

On Tuesday, the UN's World Health Organization pleaded for fuel to be allowed into Gaza to keep its remaining hospitals running, warning the Palestinian territory's health system was at "breaking point".

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and AP)