Dear Progressive Reader,

News headlines this morning announced what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called war. “Citizens of Israel, we are at war. Not an operation, not a round [of fighting], at war! This morning Hamas initiated a murderous surprise attack against the state of Israel and its citizens,” he announced in a video statement about 11:00 a.m. local time. As of early this morning (U.S. Central Time), the death toll was reported at about forty Israelis killed and many more wounded. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) response was swift and large, with missile strikes against Gaza resulting in numerous deaths and injuries in an operation dubbed “Iron Swords.” WAFA, the Palestinian News and Information Agency based in the West Bank, reports: “The death toll of the brutal Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip has risen to 198, with 1,610 others injured, since early today morning, according to an update by the Ministry of Health.”

The Turkish magazine TRT World reported two years ago, “Israel has one of the world’s most modernized armies equipped with a nuclear arsenal. On the other hand, Palestinians, having no real state and regular army, don’t have much to defend themselves.” The article went on to note that the IDF had about 170,000 active military members (between ten and twenty times their estimate for Palestinian fighters), together with a budget of about $20.5 billion. This imbalance of force is reflected over and over in conflicts between the two groups. Writing this week about a trial in Israel following the beating of U.S. peace and justice activist Cassandra Dixon by an Israeli settler earlier this year, journalist Sam Stein notes, “Harassment and attacks on human rights activists in Palestine are rarely punished.” Dixon is one of many activists that have sought to accompany everyday Palestinians attempting to simply live their lives in peace on the land where they and their families have lived for generations.

The Progressive, throughout its history, has opposed the use of military force to attempt to settle conflict. As legendary journalist I.F. Stone wrote in the pages of our magazine nearly a half century ago, “If we do not pursue the path of reconciliation, the Jewish people will be transformed in the span of a generation; we cannot harden our hearts against our Arab brothers and remain the kind of people we have been proud of being for 2,000 years. We will begin to turn our backs on everything we have been proud of, everything that the Bible and the Prophets stand for. It would not be the first time. . . . we are in danger of bowing down to the idols of militarism and force and realpolitik.”

On our website this week, Jeff Abbott reports on the recent decision in Mexico to legalize abortion nationwide; Michaela Brant describes how the state of Illinois became the first in the nation to eliminate cash bail; Mike Ervin chronicles the story of a Missouri pastor who was expelled from a local school board after ignorantly claiming that disability was a form of demonic possession; Michelle Chen responds to the Supreme Court’s recent decision on Affirmative Action in college admissions noting, “Affirmative Action is necessary, but it has never been adequate.” Plus Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies look at the recent calls in the United Nations for a peaceful solution to the war in Ukraine; Glenn Daigon speaks to Skye Perryman, a leader in efforts to combat book bans and other rightwing attacks on public education; and Annette M. Rodríguez pens an op-ed on the cruel efforts in Texas to block migrants from crossing the Rio Grande with buoys and steel wire.

Our new Hidden History of the United States Calendar for 2024 is almost ready to mail. October 6, the calendar states, is the anniversary of the birth in 1917 of civil rights, women’s rights, and democracy rights advocate Fannie Lou Hamer. As historian and activist Barbara Ransby wrote on our website in 2016 (for what would have been Hamer’s ninety-ninth birthday), “Hamer's eloquence and insight countered the assumption that poor Black Southerners were too uninterested or not smart enough to be political actors. Her struggle and endurance belied any notion that poor people were lazy or unmotivated.” The excellent 2021 biography of Hamer by scholar Keisha N. Blain, Until I Am Free, reminds us that the “work of democracy remains unfinished, and the roadblocks are many, but Hamer’s vision of America and her enduring message to all Americans offer a way forward.”

Monday, October 9 is celebrated as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, first proclaimed as a national observance by President Joe Biden in 2021—although it is still not observed as a national holiday nationwide. Our newest issue of The Progressive features two important columns to read on this day. In the first, a reminiscence of her life of activism, Winona LaDuke says, “Indigenous people have long experienced the U.S. government’s commitment to extinction. The strategy [must be] survival and cooperation, not competition and conquest.” In the next, an interview with activist and scholar Nick Estes by David Barsamian, Estes says, “Human culture is constantly evolving. There are always things—inequities within ourselves, our relationships to each other, as well as the land—that need to be resolved. However, that transformation, when they say revolution, it’s not an instantaneous thing. It’s something that unfolds over generations.” And finally, in this issue we also remember the writing of Mark Anthony Rolo, a regular columnist for The Progressive, who passed away in May 2020. In his 2017 column “The Indian Wars Have Never Ended,” Rolo wrote, “To most Americans, the clash between the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and the Dakota Access Pipeline seems like a rare, even surreal, resurrection of a last-century American Indian uprising. . . . But it is in fact part of a never-ending dynamic, one that has raged since the arrival of the first Puritans on the country’s eastern shores. It is a conflict that continues to define the broader relationship between tribes and the U.S. government.”

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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