Israeli forces killed at least 217 journalists and media workers in the first 15 months of the genocide in Gaza. The attacks on those who risked their lives to tell Palestinian stories included drone strikes, sniper fire, strikes on shelters, the bombing of a camp in a hospital complex, and airstrikes on journalists at home with their families. While Israel has escalated these assaults to unprecedented levels, its military has killed journalists with impunity for decades.

This piece is from the upcoming book Palestinians, Israel, and American Money. You can reserve a free ebook/audiobook copy below.

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On October 13, 2023, seven journalists with Reuters, Agence France-Presse, and Al Jazeera reported from southern Lebanon. They wore vests marked “PRESS” and worked near a car with “TV” in large print on its hood. From about 5 p.m., the group was stationary in an open area, around one kilometer from Israel’s border.

Reporting on cross-border fire while “between one and two kilometers” from the hostilities, the Reuters crew broadcast about 45 minutes of live footage, and the Al Jazeera team taped two live reports. An Israeli Apache helicopter hovered overhead “for more than 40 minutes,” and the group’s footage shows a line of sight to an Israeli observation tower.

This piece is from the upcoming book Palestinians, Israel, and American Money. You can reserve a free ebook/audiobook copy below.

Abdelaziz was only a few hours old when he died. He was born prematurely, on February 24, 2024, to a “severely malnourished mother.” Human Rights Watch investigated his short life, reviewed his death certificate, and spoke to his father. According to the father, the infant struggled to breathe and was put on a ventilator. Just hours after taking his first breath, the hospital ran out of fuel, and the ventilator stopped: “Abdelaziz died immediately.” 

Human Rights Watch also reported on Joud, a newborn who succumbed to “starvation-related complications” at the same hospital. According to her father, the family survived on just bread before her birth. Her mother could not produce milk, and store-bought milk was hard to find. Joud died at eight days old.

These stories, and those of far too many others who struggled to survive, were the result of Israel’s policy to starve Palestinians in Gaza. Strikes on food sources, attacks on aid workers, and the obstruction of humanitarian aid made this policy clear. All the while, Israeli officials publicly stated their intent.

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This piece is from the upcoming book Palestinians, Israel, and American Money. You can reserve a free ebook/audiobook copy below.

Gaza’s water “comes from wells with salt water unfit for consumption. They have water treatment plants, Israel should hit those plants. When the entire world says we have gone insane and this is a humanitarian disaster — we will say, it’s not an end, it’s a means.” That was the opinion of Giora Eiland, adviser to the defense minister and former head of the Israeli National Security Council, writing in Yedioth Ahronoth on October 9, 2023.

Already by November, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that “around 70% of the population in Gaza is drinking salinised and contaminated water.” By July 2024, Oxfam reported that “people in Gaza have had only 4.74 litres of water per person per day” since the start of Israel’s offensive, well below the World Health Organization’s minimum needed for survival in a humanitarian emergency.

Israel's control over life’s most essential resource did not arise overnight. After occupying Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, it quickly established a system to extract water for its own use while restricting Palestinian access. For decades, this policy forced the indigenous population into dependence and precarity, while Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories — illegal under international law — enjoyed “privileged access to water.”

Qualified immunity has faced backlash in recent years following multiple widely publicized deaths of Black civilians at the hands of police. This legal doctrine has been used as a defense in cases ranging from the tazing of a disturbed man hospitalized with pneumonia who was resisting medical care to a truly bizarre case where a federal court granted qualified immunity to officers accused of stealing over $225,000 of “property seized pursuant to a warrant.”

Qualified immunity is an attempt to protect government employees (including police officers) from ambiguities in the law, but it begins to look more like a legal loophole as we dig into how it’s being applied. Under this doctrine, government officials “generally are shielded from liability for civil damages” for actions taken in the performance of their duties if a court decides that their alleged actions were not a violation of the plaintiff’s “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known” at the time.

The rise in opioid-related overdose deaths is one of the greatest public health crises in modern American history. Between 1999 and 2019, opioid overdoses caused nearly 500,000 deaths in the United States. This crisis can be seen in three concurrent trends over the same time period: a more than 6-fold increase in the number of opioid overdose deaths, a more than 7-fold increase in the number of deaths per year from heroin overdose, and an almost 50-fold increase in the number of overdose deaths per year from synthetic opioids (including fentanyl but not including methadone).

How did we get here?

The Fraudulent Marketing Behind OxyContin

In 1995, Purdue Pharma received FDA approval for its drug OxyContin, a controlled-release pain reliever. Focus groups which Purdue used for market research showed that “physicians had great reservations about prescribing OxyContin” because of its potential for addiction and abuse. These same focus groups revealed to Purdue “that physicians wanted a long lasting pain reliever that was less addictive and less subject to abuse and diversion."

Although this momentous legislation was passed over a year ago, the hard-fought bipartisan victory for workers’ rights is still relatively unknown. According to the Executive Office of the President, the new law “empowers survivors of sexual assault and sexual harassment by giving them a choice to go to court instead of being forced into arbitration” when bringing claims against their employer. 

Arbitration is a private, non-court method of dispute resolution in which the parties meet with a third-party mediator who hears the evidence and makes a binding decision.

According to a 2018 study by the Economic Policy Institute, 50.4% of U.S. nonunion private sector employers require their employees to sign mandatory arbitration agreements, which “bar access to the courts for all types of legal claims, including employment discrimination and sexual harassment claims.”  Another 3.5% of employers “adopt arbitration procedures simply by announcing that these procedures have been incorporated into the organization’s employment policies.”  Employees are sometimes unaware that they are bound by these agreements until it’s time to bring a claim against their employer.

The use of body-worn cameras (BWC) has the potential to aid police reform, but the NYPD’s BWC program shows that turning the cameras on is not enough. More than 6 years after this program began, gaining access to footage continues to be an obstacle for civilians bringing claims against the police.

The NYPD began its rollout of BWCs in 2017. The NYPD reports that over 24,000 of its members are equipped with a BWC, including “all Police Officers, Detectives, Sergeants and Lieutenants regularly assigned to perform patrol duties throughout the city.”

The New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), an independent agency empowered to investigate "complaints against New York City police officers alleging the use of excessive or unnecessary force, abuse of authority, discourtesy, or the use of offensive language,” uses BWC footage to resolve complaints against officers. 

However, the CCRB has had long-standing issues obtaining BWC footage from the NYPD.  

A Slow Start, Plagued with Delays and “False Negatives”