Gaza… A Phoenix Rising from the Ashes of Death

Amira Al-Zaneen

 November 7, 2025

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Gaza — a city unlike any other, a place that breathes life even when surrounded by ruin and death. I have always loved to call her the Phoenix, for she rises from her ashes time and again, declaring to the world that light cannot be extinguished, no matter how deep the darkness becomes.

In Gaza, hope never dies. Those who live there cling to life with every ounce of strength. They smile through pain, dream amid rubble, and believe that tomorrow — no matter how delayed — will come brighter and kinder.

We in Gaza do not know surrender. We are masters of finding light in the deepest night, of creating life from scarcity, and art from suffering. That is why we are rightfully called the People of Strength.

Through two long years of war, we have learned how to live despite loss, how to invent ways to ease our daily pain. Indeed, the saying proves true: “Necessity is the mother of invention.”

Gaza, despite all her sorrow, remains beautiful. She smiles amid the blackness, planting hope in hearts worn by fear. She is a hymn to life, even as discord fills her skies.

As for her future — we see it radiant. Because we, quite simply, love life as much as we can. Every stone destroyed will be rebuilt, and every tear will one day be wiped away by a gentle hand that shapes a new dawn.

We know that parting and death are painful, but we rejoice that those who left are martyrs, alive with their Lord, waiting to meet their loved ones in a land without war.

Freedom has a heavy price, but it is worth every sacrifice. We give our most precious — not because we love death, but because we believe true life can only flourish under freedom’s sky.

We will learn, work, build, live, and rise again. For even in our weakest moments, we are among the strongest peoples on earth — rising each time, restoring to the world the meaning of resilience.

Gaza will shine… and she will be the most beautiful.

For indeed, the dawn of tomorrow is near.

“From Gaza, we rise — again and again.”

Amira Al-Zaneen is a writer in Gaza. She is the co-author of I Am No Longer Afraid to Die: Witness Gaza.

Verdict from the People: Why the Gaza

Tribunal is about Accountability, Not

Symbolism

Ramzy Baroud

November 7, 2025

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Image by Ahmed Abu Hameeda.

In the face of the international legal and political systems’ paralyzing silence and utter failure to hold Israel accountable for its genocide in Gaza, international civil society has refused to stand idly by. Instead, it continues to forge a path, presenting essential working models for what true justice in Palestine must look like.

The latest, and arguably most critical, expression of this global conscience is the Gaza Tribunal. Its final session concluded in Istanbul on Sunday, October 26.

The Tribunal, launched in London in November 2024 and consciously modeled on the historic Russell Tribunal, has a mission to activate global civil society and provide a comprehensive ‘people’s record’ by rigorously documenting Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people.

Its activities involved earlier hearings in Sarajevo and consolidating findings across three thematic chambers: International Law; International Relations and World Order; and History, Ethics, and Philosophy. The Istanbul session culminated with a Jury of Conscience issuing a powerful moral judgment that accused Israel of systematic exterminatory violence.

These civil society-led tribunals are held specifically to fill the ethical and legal void created by the international system’s failure to confront war crimes carried out by powerful states that are, by all appearances, practically immune from accountability.

In the case of Palestine, such initiatives are particularly critical. They contribute to a well-recorded indictment of Israeli war crimes, and of those who enable them through direct funding, the provision of weapons, or the blocking of any punitive actions at international institutions.

Though mechanisms exist through the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and the International Criminal Court (ICC), the US government and other allies of Israel have consistently succeeded in blocking or at best obstructing the legal paths that could have stopped the war of extermination against Palestinians.

The Gaza Tribunal thus becomes a necessary platform for casting educated, evidence-based judgment — the very judgment that should have been adopted by the ICJ and enforced by the UNSC. Those behind these initiatives are well-experienced international law experts, academics, and well-regarded justice activists. They include renowned figures such as Dr. Richard Falk, former UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine, and professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, who served as the Tribunal’s president.

In their ‘Final Findings and Moral Judgment’ statement, the panel of judges condemned the Israeli genocide, referencing its “holistic nature,” its “dehumanization of the people,” and its “sadistic character.”

Among other investigated crimes, the judges indicted and condemned Israel for the crimes of starvation and famine, domicide (the deliberate destruction of homes and shelter), ecocide (the systematic destruction of the environment and ecosystems), reprocide (the destruction of conditions for procreation and reproduction), and scholasticide (the systematic destruction of educational facilities, personnel, and the collective memory of a people).

The judges also condemned the killing of journalists, the very individuals attempting to document and expose the genocide, along with their families. “Silencing these journalists is instrumental to the concealment of the genocide and more journalists have been killed than in any other conflict,” the final statement starkly read.

The statement further condemned the prevalent use by Israel of torture, sexual violence, forced disappearances, and gender-based violence in detention, among a host of other egregious crimes.

Crucially, the final verdict directly assigned responsibility to powerful actors. The Tribunal found that “Western governments, particularly the United States and others,” have been complicit in the Israeli genocide and, in some cases, actively colluded with it.

The scope of complicity and collusion was not limited to state actors. It extended to media and academic institutions that, the Tribunal found, actively justify the Israeli crimes, silence the Palestinian voice, and provide wholesale condemnation of all Palestinians — a position entirely consistent with Israel’s own narrative.

The powerful indictment of Israel is not merely symbolic. Its practical value, however, depends entirely on our collective ability to leverage its findings. We must use this evidence to advance the many legal cases lodged against Israeli leaders, military officials, and individual soldiers.

The massive files, victim testimonies, expert analysis, and eyewitness accounts constitute a treasure trove for those committed to seeing Israeli war criminals punished for one of the worst crimes carried out against a civilian population in modern history.

It is critical to recognize that much of the ongoing legal proceedings concerning Gaza — at the ICJ, the ICC, and in various national courts — have been pioneered and sustained by civil society. These efforts are led by human rights groups, legal research organizations, and justice activists.

The Gaza Tribunal, therefore, is not an endpoint; it is a vital step on the path to justice and accountability. It has consciously built upon the work of past initiatives and now serves as a major, indispensable stepping stone for future action.

Unlike divine judgment, human justice is neither guaranteed nor inevitable; it is a fierce process. Its attainment rests entirely on the determination of those who fight for it and aspire to achieve it.

Friends of Palestine, globally, are unwavering in their resolve to shatter Israeli immunity once and for all. The Gaza Tribunal is a powerful weapon in their arsenal. Its success hinges on our unyielding faith in the process, and our ironclad determination to follow through.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His forthcoming book, ‘Before the Flood,’ will be published by Seven Stories Press. His other books include ‘Our Vision for Liberation’, ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net  

A Samhain Message to an Embattled Trans Youth

Nicky Reid

November 7, 2025

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Image by Delia Giandeini.

Thousands of years ago, on the sacred rock from which my ancestors fled, this season of the year was celebrated as Samhain, an ancient Celtic festival marking the end of the summer harvest and the beginning of the darker months of the year. This was also a time of sacred upheaval and spiritual transformation, when the veil between the material world and the spirit world was thin, allowing lost spirits to return to earth and the normal roles of society to be inverted. At twilight, the craggy hills of the moors were alive with the glow of massive bonfires set by peasants embracing the darkness in drag.

Eventually, this became what is now known as Halloween and it is really little wonder considering those roots that what became known as Halloween became less commonly known among my people as “Queer Christmas.”

Chaos reigns, the young govern the streets after dark and social transgressions typically demonized are set free to be flaunted flamboyantly by the light of the moon. All of which is beautiful enough in its own right, but this season is so much more than that for a person like me who considers their gender identity to be an integral part of their spiritual journey.

I am a Celtic Christian Pagan who reveres the Virgin Mary as a representative of the Tripple Goddess found throughout ancient matriarchal societies. I also pray to the Morrigana, three sister goddesses of ancient Celtic lore typically associated with battle but also with transformation and necessary change.

While there exists little direct evidence of third genders in ancient Celtic society and little direct evidence of much else of these tribes in general, considering that this was one of many sacred oral traditions wiped out by the tyranny of the churches who used the cross as a weapon for conquest and homogeny, the surviving myths of Celtic heathenry are rife with the same narratives of spiritual gender fluidity that defined many neighboring pagan cultures where the history of revered third genders remains very tangible.

My own embrace of a gender identity that refused to be governed by the limitations of the material world triggered the unlocking of decades of repressed trauma at the hands of the Catholic Church, who replaced the Celtic Druids of my ancestral homeland, along with multiple identities representing the young girls these men failed to silence.

Since becoming a woman divided among five personalities, my relationship with Mary and the Morrigana has become quite direct. They speak to me in words too sacred for language and they have a lot to say about the times we live in. Much like the months of the year ushered in by Samhain, these are days of darkness. America’s carcinogenic roots of colonialism and white supremacy are strangling the few illusions of democracy that we once held dear. Soldiers stock the streets of America’s crumbling metropolises while genocide of all kinds has become an open part of public policy.

These forces of unconcealed darkness have decided to make a point of trying to police the young in particular. Those yet to be initiated into their cult of conformity and murder, especially today’s Queer youth who they never seem to stop writing laws against. Literally thousands of laws seeking to render the existence of young gender outlaws intolerable.

An estimated 40% of trans youth between the ages of 13 and 17 live in states with severe restrictions on healthcare that simply allows them to postpone puberty with fewer known side effects than antidepressants. Dozens of states have turned the already carceral compulsory school system in this country into biological apartheid regimes in which adult public servants are granted the ability to police genitalia in bathrooms and locker rooms to insure the purity of their constructed gender binary.

This is all very personal to me, not just because I carry the scars from a transgender childhood but because a culture of survivalism informs the very existence of my modern tribe. In Queer culture if you are an open trans person who has lived passed the age of thirty without being broken or assimilated, you are considered to be an elder and I mean this quite literally. Out of all the activism that I have engaged myself in with organizing Queer resistance in my conservative rural environment, working with young people, specifically Queer and trans youth, is by far the most rewarding.

When you are part of such a small and marginalized minority, surrounded by people who couldn’t possibly comprehend your very existence if they tried, having just a few people in your life who have been there and survived, listening and sharing, can literally be a lifeline.

The sheer amount of destruction I did to myself in a world where there wasn’t even a word for the way I felt other than ‘strange’, or ‘pervert’ is irreversible. Suicide was a viable option on more than one occasion during this bleak existence. So, now when trans youth come to me for advice, I am both humbled and obliged, and the advice that I have to give them during this sacred season of Samhain is to show your teeth and remain ungovernable.

The people currently running this desperate nation are terrified of you and they should be. These are people who define their existence by defining other people’s existence and you are living a lifestyle that defies basic bureaucratic categorization. The most basic principle of centralized government is the tyranny of paperwork, systems upon systems of filing, compiling, defining, categorizing… Reducing humanity into a series of boxes to check on a scantron and the first box is always ‘male or female.’

You have exploded this system simply by crossing out the word ‘or.’ Your average Queer youth in the age of Trump changes their gender identity with the color of their hair and consults their friends online for advice before even thinking about addressing the tyranny of the clinic. They have decided to find themselves publicly and without apology, and their numbers are rising.

In 2023, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention found that about 3.3% of high school students identify openly as trans or non-binary and another 2.2% are questioning their government arranged gender designation. Considering how little teens talk to the goddamn CDC, I don’t think I’m being presumptuous for assuming these numbers merely represent the tip of the iceberg. Pew has found that 5.1% of adults younger than 30 openly identify as trans or non-binary compared to just 1.6% of those between 30 and 49 and 0.3% of those 50 or older.

The hyper-statists of the Christian Right look at these numbers and shutter. They will tell you and any other asshole who will listen that this is all part of some “Cultural Marxist” wave of behavioral decadence that poses an existential threat to Western Civilization, and I actually agree with them on the second part.

After growing bored with Marx myself by my mid-twenties, an old Queer sage named William Burroughs turned me on to a quirky German historical philosopher named Oswald Spengler, best known for his epic treatise Decline of the West. While Spengler is frequently name-dropped by trolls on the right, based on my own studies, I suspect very few of them have actually done their homework. The central point of ‘Decline’ is that all cultures are essentially living organisms that tend to exist in lifespans of about 2000 years and that the final stage of a culture is the sterile stasis of civilization.

Based on his studies on other past empires from the Romans to the Aztecs, Spengler believed the West to be in the twilight of its existence which is an era typically defined by decadence.

However, Spengler didn’t define decadence in terms of sexual perversion or debauchery. He defined this symptom of cultural collapse as being far more defined by the overly rational urban materialist, lost in an overpopulated desert of money and things with no connection to any real spiritual roots but only shallow replicants, like stadium churches and television preachers. Spengler also rejected the notion of culture being defined by blood and soil, stating that its true definition comes from the intimacy experienced between people with a shared history, values and vision of the future.

By Spenglerian definitions, it isn’t today’s trans youth who are the decadents. These children are rejecting the material world to follow the dictates of their souls and leaving today’s temples of emptiness in favor of a spirituality defined by gnosis or personal experience. All of this puts them in line with the values of ancient paganism represented by Samhain as well as movements like Black Power, Aztlan and other forms of indigenous revivalism.

It is our enemies in the Christian Right, with their bourgeoise fantasies of Zionist conquest and white picket fences who are the true decadents and that is why their civilization is dammed to irrevocable decline.

In this time of darkness, with the veil between the spirit world and our universe thinning by the second, I can only tell the youngest members of my culture that they are the ones who carry the light of our ancestors. They are part of a sacred revival that can provide the survivors of Western Civilization with a rare opportunity to start again and possibly even avoid the cycle of destruction represented by the soulless nation state and the fragile empires they aspire to become.

Wake up children. Samhain is upon us. It’s time to stop dreaming and start truly living again. Let the fire burn brightly behind you and may it illuminate your path forward.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.

Fund cultivated-meat research in post-Trump America

Jon Hochschartner

 November 7, 2025

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First cultivated hamburger, 2013. Photograph Source: Mosa Meat – CC BY 4.0

Like most progressives, I was thrilled by the results of the November 4 elections, which featured Democratic victories in just about every competitive race. Perhaps none was as inspiring as democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York City mayoral vote. President Donald Trump and his fascist cronies seem to be unaware their authoritarian escalations are creating a left-wing backlash that will make the New Deal look like the Reagan years.

When we eventually dislodge these would-be tyrants from power, much will need to be done to ensure a similar right-wing power grab is never possible again. At a minimum, Democrats must prosecute fascist lawbreakers, regardless of who Trump might pardon, pack the openly-corrupt Supreme Court, which is deeply out-of-step with the American people, and add potentially liberal-leaning states to the union, like Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.

Amidst this whirlwind of necessary reform, it’s my sincere hope Democrats will direct a massive infusion of federal funding into cultivated-meat research. For those who don’t know, cultivated meat is grown from livestock cells, without slaughter. It offers a number of animal welfare, public health, and environmental benefits over slaughtered meat. The technology exists to create this protein, but it’s currently too expensive to mass produce.

The animal-welfare benefits of cultivated meat should be self-evident. Ideally, cellular agriculture would eventually displace animal agriculture, ushering in a more compassionate world, without battery cages, livestock trucks or slaughterhouses. However, even low adoption rates of cultivated meat have the potential to eliminate a greater amount of nonhuman suffering and premature death than traditional animal activism ever has up to this point.

Zoonotic diseases — which can spawn deadly, global pandemics — frequently trace their origin to close contact between humans and sick animals, as often occurs in the livestock industry. Since animals are removed from the process of creating cultivated meat, there would be no pandemic risk associated with its production. For this reason and others, such as the overuse of antibiotics in farm animals, the new protein would be a boon for public health.

Finally, many people aren’t aware that animal agriculture is one of the leading causes of climate change. Any serious environmentalism must address the issue. Cheap, tasty cultivated meat provides a scalable solution to the problem. While the technology is, of course, still being developed, leading scientists believe the protein will eventually require a fraction of the greenhouse-gas emissions to produce that raising and slaughtering animals does now.

After we defeat the fascists currently occupying the White House, Democrats should allocate a huge investment of federal funding into cultivated-meat research. The money could come from any number of places, including existing subsidies given to factory farms. In the meantime, Democrats at the state level should be funding cellular-agriculture development, as California and Massachusetts already have. Forward-thinking states should follow their lead.

We can create a kinder, healthier and more sustainable world. Accelerating growth of the nascent cultivated-meat industry will go a long way to helping us achieve this. Yes, technological hurdles remain for the protein to be successful, but there’s no reason to believe these can’t be overcome with further publicly-funded research. Democrats should build facilities like the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture at every farm school in the country.

Jon Hochschartner is the author of a number of books about animal-rights history, including The Animals’ Freedom Fighter, Ingrid Newkirk, and Puppy Killer, Leave Town. He blogs at SlaughterFreeAmerica.Substack.com.