Zionist Israel: The Scourge of Our Times

M. Reza Behnam

 February 6, 2026

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The investment of American governmental and corporate forces (systems) in defending and/or downplaying Israeli genocide has numbed the conscience and accelerated ferocity in a nation fully steeped in a violent reality; a reality playing out on its streets today.  

Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, effectively expressed what many are feeling about the ongoing genocide in Gaza and how it is different from others. In her 15 September 2025  “Gaza – The Shame of Our Time” press briefing, she stated:

“It [today’s genocide] is openly incited, cynically denied, and relentlessly supported, armed, and weaponized, while those who oppose it are silenced,  beaten, criminalized, and smeared. This is why I say this is the shame of our         time and the collapse of the international legal order in this moment, not only for the Palestinians, but for all of us. So I asked, prime ministers, presidents, foreign ministers, so-called world leaders. How do you sleep? When will you act, truly act beyond the words?”

Albanese is correct; it is the greatest shame of our time.  It is, however, Israel and the United States that carry that great shame; an ignominy that will live in the timeline of history.  

Numbers cannot capture the depth of the suffering; they are, however, vital in  helping end it.  

Numerous reports indicate that the following crimes against humanity have been committed against the Palestinians in Gaza by the Zionist regime from 7 October 2023 to January 2026:    

+ Israel has killed 71,800 from direct fire (half of the casualties women and children); with more than 10,000 buried under the rubble.

+ Israel has injured 171,555.

+ Israel has killed 234 Palestinian journalists and associated media personnel.

+ Israel has starved to death 440 (including 147 children).

+ Israel has made orphans of more than 19,000 children.

+ Israel has caused more than 58,000 children to lose one or both parents.

+ Israel’s bombing has resulted in some 6,000 amputees (1,500 or more are children).

+ Israel has created insecurity and hopelessness, causing 80 percent of Gaza’s 1.1 million children to suffer acute trauma. 

+ Israel has destroyed 95 percent of agricultural land.

+ Israel has destroyed 2,308 educational institutions and facilities (kindergarten to universities); all universities have been demolished.

+ Israel has damaged and completely destroyed 81-92 percent of all structures, including 89 percent of the infrastructure.  

+ Israel has detained without charges over 12,000 Gazans; its military has “disappeared” approximately 2,000.  

+ Israeli bombs have exposed Gazans to numerous toxic materials and environmental contaminants, creating long-term health risks.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been killed. The Gaza Health Ministry has relied, until now, solely on hospital records; therefore, the number of deaths is an undercount.  Since there are no fully functioning hospitals left in Gaza, the Ministry has had to augment its reporting based on information from first responders and reliable media sources.  

As Stephanie Savell, director of Brown University’s Cost of War Project, informed us, “Every single person in Gaza is sick, injured or both.”

Gaza was only the beginning for the murderous Zionist regime.  According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs , between 7 October 2023 and 16 January 2026, Israeli soldiers or Zionist colonizers have killed 1,049 Palestinians (at least 229 children) in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.  

According to the Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, illegal colonizers carried out nearly 4,723 attacks against Palestinians and property in the West Bank in 2025, forcing the displacement of 13 Bedouin communities.

Palestinians have always been seen by the United States and other Western countries as expendable. That was borne out in 1948 when the U.S. and its allies pressured the newly-created United Nations to give international legitimacy to the Zionist claim to Palestine. That the establishment of an ethnocentric colony on another people’s land meant the displacement and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population mattered little to them.   

Genocide was the inexorable last act for a colonizing power founded on the supremacist national ideology of Zionism.  

Interestingly, by 1975, the international community recognized the dangers of a nation born in ethnic cleansing.  They understood that:

• Israel had no intention of ever withdrawing, as designated in UN Security Council Resolution 242, from Palestinian and Syrian land it had illegally occupied since the 1967 War.

• Israel’s doctrines of exclusiveness, supremacy and settler-colonialism were reflected in its ruthless practices of racial discrimination and oppression against the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

• Zionism was a threat to the peace and security of the region and the world.  

Championed by the Arab League, Muslim majority and Soviet bloc countries and the Non-Aligned Movement, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in November 1975 adopted Resolution 3379, officially determining that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”

Supporters of the resolution saw it as a means to address issues of colonialism and oppression, while Israel and its allies, particularly Washington, employed the tactical antisemitism designation to abrogate it. 

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. at the time, used inflated language to denounce the resolution: “The UN is about to make anti-Semitism international law…The [US] does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act…a great evil has been loosed upon the world.”

After a decade of intense lobbying and making its participation in the 1991 Madrid peace conferencecontingent upon revocation, Israel secured the votes to reverse the resolution; which it did on 16 December 1991.  

Resolution 46/86, in one briskly-worded sentence,—“The General Assembly decides to revoke the determination contained in its resolution 3379 (XXX) of 10 November 1975—set aside the “Zionism is racism” determination.

The “infamous act” (a UN resolution) that Ambassador Moynihan railed against pales in comparison to the gravity of Israel’s “infamous genocidal acts”— an “evil” that “has been loosed upon the world.” 

Astonishingly, it took a genocidal Zionist war on a defenseless population for the Western world to begin to listen to them, to realize the terror and humiliation they have endured for more than eight decades at the hands of a diabolical “state.”

Israel’s systemic violence, dehumanization of Palestinians, prolonged apartheid occupation and atrocities in Gaza reflect an unhinged society in moral crisis.  Unfortunately, we see the same cruel indifference to Palestinian suffering from those in the United States who control the levers of political, economic and military power, determine policy and convey information.  

Palestinians will endure—justice and righteousness are on their side. Until they return home to Palestine, there will be no peace and justice in the world. 

True justice would see Palestinians returning home to their ancestral land, as Gaza begins to heal.  It may not happen today; maybe not tomorrow; but one day it will. Insha’Allah.

Dr. M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist who specializes in comparative politics with a focus on West Asia.  

Health Care Workers Remember Alex Pretti

Julius Bravo - Arcelita Imasa - Seiji Yamada

 February 6, 2026

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In On Freedom, Timothy Snyder writes,

“The German philosopher Edith Stein put her own body forward during the First World War. A graduate student, she took leave to volunteer as a nurse. When she returned to her dissertation, her time with the wounded guided her argument about empathy. “Do we not,” she asked, “need the mediation of the body to assure ourselves of the existence of another person?” [1]”

The German word she used for “body” was “Leib.”

Snyder argues that for freedom to exist, a person must inhabit their living-body (Leib). If you are starving, exhausted, or living in constant fear, you are reduced to a mere body-object (Körper). You cannot exercise sovereignty if your physical self is under siege.

This physicality is also reflected in the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates who describes racism as a visceral experience that “dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, and breaks teeth.” In a letter to his son, he reminds him that in America, his body can be destroyed at any moment with little to no legal consequence. [2]

Alex Pretti put his own body forward. On January 24, 2026, Alex Pretti’s Leib was pinned down and beaten. Ten bullets in under five seconds: his life, his autonomy, his freedom gone.

Some days before he was executed by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents, The Guardian published a video of Alex Pretti kicking at the taillight of a car being driven by federal agents. Might this diminish the image that we have of Alex as a Gandhian, turn-the-other-cheek pacifist? Hadn’t we learned that he was an ICU nurse? Nurses take care of us when we are sickest, when we are the most vulnerable. Surely nurses are the most humanitarian among us. Perhaps CBP tracked Alex after his outburst, though, and targeted him to be neutralized.

Minneapolis is under siege by masked gunmen, terrorizing its people, seizing them from their cars, detaining and deporting them. People are afraid to leave their homes, to go get groceries, to go to work or school, or go to the clinic for medical attention. When you don’t go to your prenatal care appointment, you risk a poor birth outcome. When you don’t take your child who is wheezing, she might stop breathing. When you don’t get seen for your abdominal pain, your appendix might burst. When you don’t get seen for your chest pain or have trouble talking, you might just die at home of a heart attack or a stroke. ICE tactics are taking its toll on mental health, causing anxiety, depression, and trauma symptoms.

Let us remember that the first Trump administration came up with family separation and kids in cages, and the Biden administration continued to keep kids in cages.

What is happening in Minnesota falls on the spectrum of state-sanctioned violence – at the extreme end of which lies genocide. The Biden administration supported the genocide just as much as the Trump administration has. Most recently, Hawaiʻi’s U.S. Congressional representatives (our whole delegation is Democrats), voted to continue to fund weapons for Israel. Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper about Venezuela, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller said, “we live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” The genocide in Gaza foreshadows the future for all humans that the strongmen deem expendable.

For us, as health care workers, this is unacceptable. This goes against how we understand how our society is supposed to work. We see, however, for those in power, the norms of civil society do not matter. For over two years, we have watched our elected officials support, fund, and provide political cover for a genocide – which we used to think of as the crime of all crimes. We have watched Palestinian hospitals bombed to rubble, doctors tortured to death, toddlers shot by snipers in the head and the chest, children starved to death.

As the surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sitta points out in his conversation with psychologist Lara Sheehi, the targeting of hospitals and health care workers is intentional. Why? Because the clinic is a site of “resistance, refusal, and liberation.” [3] When a patient presents to the clinic, she can tell immediately whether or not the health care workers there have her best interests in mind. All of us as health care workers know what this is about. Without it, there is no healing relationship, because the patient can tell if there isn’t one. Health care is not merely a matter of fixing the biology. It is a moral undertaking between humans who recognize each other as such.

To be truly free, we must not only inhabit our own lived bodies but also recognize the living-body in others. Freedom is not a solitary project. Alex recognized our shared humanity, our collective freedom. Without it, freedom ultimately fails. By turning our bodies against our wills, authoritarianism succeeds. The strongmen in charge, and the brownshirts brandishing their weapons want to destroy our shared humanity, our collective freedom. They want people to cower in fear. They want people to die unseen and uncared for. Alex Pretti did not cower in fear. Alex Pretti confronted the masked men who had descended on his city to pluck his neighbors, haul them off to a detention center, and deport them.

Alex Pretti fought back. Alex Pretti was a warrior for health. This is how we will remember Alex Pretti.

Our demands are simple and human:

First, protection of the dignity and safety of migrants. No one should be abused, neglected, or left to die because of where they were born or what papers they carry.

Second, transparency about what is happening to migrants who are detained. Families, communities, and we as health workers have the right to know who is being held, what conditions they are facing, and what is being done to them in our names.

Third, we insist that migrants are not criminals. We need community solutions, not detention and deportation—solutions rooted in housing, healthcare, language access, and care, not in surveillance, cages, and violence.

As health care workers and community members, we are not powerless. There are concrete next steps we can take together:

At your workplace, push for clear policies that limit and challenge ICE presence and activities in clinics, hospitals, and community health spaces. Ask what your institution’s policy is, and if it doesn’t protect migrants, organize to change it.

Use your professional voice: write medical testimonies for detained migrants, documenting the physical and psychological harms of detention, and supporting their cases for release. Some of us are already doing this. Let us know if you want to get connected about writing medical testimonies.

Write letters to people in detention centers, so they know they are not forgotten, and that there is a community fighting for them on the outside.

As we mourn, we are also choosing to organize. We invite each of you to choose at least one action this week—one policy to push on, one letter to write, one organization to join, one training to attend.

Our collective grief can become collective power. Our love for our patients, our families, and our communities can become a shield for migrants—and a force that makes detention and deportation impossible to ignore, and ultimately impossible to sustain.

+ End detention and medical neglect of migrants in detention!

+ Stop ICE raids in our communities and hospitals!

+ Healthcare, not violence of immigration enforcement!

Notes.

1. Timothy Snyder. On Freedom. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2024.

2. Ta-Nehisi Coates. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.

3. Psychic Militancy – Ghassan Abu Sittah: Clinic as site of resistance. Jan 6, 2026.https://podscan.fm/podcasts/the-east-is-a-podcast/episodes/psychic-militancy-ghassan-abu-sittah-clinic-as-site-of-resistance

Julius Bravo is a licensed clinical social worker and PhD student in Hawaiʻi. Arcelita Imasa and Seiji Yamada are family physicians in Hawaiʻi.