Progressive Political News

Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan, was once eagerly awaited in Gaza, a rare occasion that brought a sense of joy and normalcy. Its preparations began days in advance — homes were cleaned, a fresh touch of decoration was added and families made sure everything was in place for the celebration. Parents saved…

In March 2023, Meeta, who worked as a community mobilizer and network coordinator with a prominent Delhi-based Indian NGO, lost her job of 15 years. Meeta was fired less than a month after her organization lost its status under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA), which governs the receipt and use of foreign funds by…

Every Saturday morning for the past eight years, a group of New Yorkers has assembled in Manhattan’s Union Square for the weekly “Vigil against the War in Yemen.” Their largest banner proclaims: “Yemen is Starving.” Other signs read: “Put a human face on war in Yemen,” and “Let Yemen Live.” 

Participants in the vigil decry the suffering in Yemen where one of every two children under the age of five is malnourished, “a statistic that is almost unparalleled across the world.”  UNICEF reports that 540,000 Yemeni girls and boys are experiencing severe and acute malnourishment, an agonizing, life-threatening condition which weakens immune systems, stunts growth, and can be fatal. 

The World Food Program says “a child in Yemen dies once every ten minutes from preventable causes, including extreme hunger.” According to Oxfam, more than 17 million people, almost half of Yemen’s population, face food insecurity, while aerial attacks have decimated much of the critical infrastructure on which its economy depends.  

Since March 15, the United States has launched strikes on more than forty locations across Yemen in an ongoing attack against members of the Houthi movement, which has carried out more than 100 attacks on shipping vessels linked to Israel and its allies since October 2023. The Houthis say they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and have recently resumed the campaign following the failed ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. 

The new round of U.S. airstrikes has damaged critical ports and roads which UNICEF describes as “lifelines for food and medicine,” and killed at least twenty-five civilians, including four children, in the first week alone. Of the thirty-eight recorded strikes, twenty-one hit non-military, civilian targets, including a medical storage facility, a medical center, a school, a wedding hall, residential areas, a cotton gin facility, a health office, Bedouin tents, and Al Eiman University. The Houthis claim that at least fifty-seven people have died in total.

Earlier this week, it was revealed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, and other high-level Trump Administration officials had discussed real-time planning around these strikes in a group chat on Signal, a commercial messaging app. During the past week, Congressional Democrats including U.S. Senator Schumer and U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries expressed outrage over the Trump Administration’s recklessness, with Jeffries saying that what has happened “shocks the conscience.”

President Trump commented that there was “no harm done” in the administration’s use of Signal chats, “because the attack was unbelievably successful.” But the Democrats appear more shocked and outraged by the disclosure of highly secret war plans over Signal than by the actual nature of the attacks, which have killed innocent people, including children. 

In fact, U.S. elected officials have seldom commented on the agony Yemen’s children endure as they face starvation and disease. Nor has there been discussion of the inherent illegality of the United States’s bombing campaign against an impoverished country in defense of Israel amid its genocide of Palestinians.

As commentator Mohamad Bazzi writes in The Guardian, “Anyone interested in real accountability for U.S. policy-making should see this as a far bigger scandal than the one currently unfolding in Washington over the leaked Signal chat.”

On Saturday, March 29, participants in the Yemen vigil will distribute flyers with the headline “Yemen in the Crosshairs” that warn of an alarming buildup of U.S. Air Force B2 Spirit stealth bombers landing at the U.S. base on Diego Garcia, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean.

According to the publication Army Recognition, two aircraft have already landed at Diego Garcia, and two others are currently en route, in a move that may indicate further strikes against Yemen. The B2 Spirit bombers are “uniquely capable of carrying the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), a 30,000-pound bomb designed to destroy hardened and deeply buried targets . . . . This unusual movement of stealth bombers may indicate preparations for potential strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen or serve as a deterrent message to Iran.” 

The Yemen vigil flyer points out that multiple Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs can use their GPS precision guidance system to “layer in” multiple warheads on a precise location, with each “digging” more deeply than the one before it to achieve deeper penetration. “This is considered particularly critical to achieving U.S. and broader Western Bloc objectives of neutralizing the Ansarullah Coalition’s military strength,” reports Military Watch Magazine, “as key Yemeni military and industrial targets are fortified deeply underground.” 

Despite the efforts of peace activists across the country, a child in Yemen dies every ten minutes from preventable causes—and the Democratic Representatives in the Senate and the House from New York don’t seem to care.

Labor researchers have long argued that America needs unions to preserve and strengthen the middle class. But now, when American democracy is hanging in the balance, we also need unions to stand up for democracy. And for unions to be effective agents for democracy, they need to truly practice it. 

If my experience as a public school teacher in New Hampshire is any guide, these challenging times present us with an opportunity to increase engagement within our unions, a first step to re-democratizing the voices of workers everywhere. Unions without democratic structures or cultures become fatigued and moribund, or develop an entrenched status quo that makes organizing more difficult. But a culture of debate and a steady infusion of leaders from rank-and-file members on the “shop floor”—or in my sector’s case, the classroom—can keep unions engaged with their members in a way that is not only responsive and effective, but can make unions a social and political pillar of democracy.

In 2021, when I saw the rise of an expansive voucher system in my home state and the passage of a law aimed at restricting the teaching of honest history, I could not help but notice that these attacks on public schools and intellectual freedom coincided with a decline in democratic engagement in our union.

Like many teachers across the country, my first response was to get involved locally. Working with fellow teachers and administrators, we applied for and were awarded a grant to diversify our class bookshelves. Later, a number of those books were confiscated as a result of the chilling effect from a law to censor history instruction, which became known as the “Divisive Concepts” law of 2021. Similar laws have been enacted in other states, and the federal Department of Education has embraced a similar legal strategy to New Hampshire’s, with the goal of chilling classroom dialogue.

After serving as the vice president of our local, an opportunity came my way when a board member at the state level of my union resigned. Few teachers I spoke to knew what the board really did. I counted myself among the mystified members, and I wanted to see if joining the board could provide a way for me to change things, to prevent more books being taken away from students and teachers. But an entrenched status quo was an obstacle that my coworkers and I had to overcome.

The status quo in unions has long been the “service model” of operation, which tends to emphasize elite advocacy over building real power among rank and file members to effect change in our communities. The service model goes hand in hand with the staying power of “business caucuses”—cliques of long timers within unions that see the role of the union as simply to deliver the services of contract negotiation, legal advice, elite level lobbying in capitals, and credit card promotions—and leaves little room for new avenues for member-driven change. This status quo is maintained to the detriment of democratic engagement, leadership development, and organizing.  

But to fulfill the promise of organized labor, and the promise of democracy, unions must be more than transactional. They must be based on the common value that we share as workers: that our worth is more than our paychecks, our value more than the dues we pay, and that, in my case, we as classroom educators are the heartbeat of public schools in America. Sooner or later, unions that become distanced from their rank-and-file membership place themselves on life support. That’s why it’s so important to shrink the distance between members and leadership.

A first step that teachers unions around the country can take to democratize themselves is to rotate leadership from the classroom into positions of power. When the “leadership ladder” has been pulled up, or when there has been a lack of investment in developing future leaders, long-time leaders can become entrenched, and knowingly or unknowingly perpetuate an anti-democratic culture within the union. This can look like an overreliance on one leader, a hollowing out of democratic protections such as term limits, or a decline in the solicitation of member feedback.

For rank-and-file members in our state, democratizing unions meant devoting time to create competitive races for leadership positions. As the saying goes, movement forward requires friction, and friction produces heat. In our attempt to bring about a bolder vision, organizers in my union worked with fellow members, spoke up for a living wage for support staff, and tried to be the leadership we wished to see. Bringing candidates together from around the state, we ran as a slate for positive change in the union and  propelled a record turnout, garnering more than one-third of the vote and attracting support from many long-time members who were first-time union election voters. While we ultimately lost this election, our team of educators celebrated the progress we made in starting to shift the culture within the union toward a democratic classroom orientation.

During the historic wave of “Red for Ed” protests in 2018 and 2019, it was rank-and-file members who came together to spur on the movement, which culminated in legislative wins in West Virginia, Arizona, and other states. West Virginia, which ranked close to the bottom nationally in teacher pay, saw a 5 percent increase in pay following their labor action. Teacher activism in Arizona yielded a $273 million increase from the state aimed at improving teacher pay. But unions nationwide still continue to wrestle with elevating democratic culture and practices that allow the people who are most affected by the issues of the day to have the greatest role in shaping the fight for a better future.

The trajectory for becoming a democratic union that can fight and win is a long one. It’s a process that even long-established traditions of union activism can struggle to sustain. The United Teachers of Los Angeles’s (UTLA’s) tremendous win in elevating Cecily Myart-Cruz to the union’s presidency is an example of how the struggle can be successful. Myart-Cruz, part of the Union Power Caucus, ran as part of a slate of educators bringing energy and a commitment to union democracy back to their union. Together, they negotiated victories for the “common good” including caps on class sizes, the creation of dedicated green spaces at schools, and the defeat of a two-tiered health care plan. Their work has been chronicled by Alex Caputo-Pearl, who himself ascended from the rank-and-file to UTLA President before eventually returning to the rank-and-file. The dynamic of power-sharing, stewardship, and an adherence to a democratic process resulted in major gains for public schools in Los Angeles, with the union adopting more broad-based community visions of what they could accomplish.

Our union in New Hampshire is much smaller than UTLA, but the size of the union hasn’t limited our capacity to be a proof point in the movement for union democracy. Seizing the momentum, our team launched a raft of reform resolutions. We proposed that the union take on issues such as promoting mental health supports for students and staff and creating a culture of belonging in our schools. We went further, proposing that the union adopt resolutions on gun-free school zones, universal public pre-K, play-based learning, access to nature, universal free breakfast and lunch in all public schools, and supporting the freedom for every student to learn and read what they want, especially in the face of book bans and assaults on teaching accurate histories. These measures were all adopted at the union’s annual meeting in 2024.  

By addressing “low-hanging fruit” with our resolutions, we were able to show members what kind of union we could be, and that all of us could have a say in its collective vision. Successfully running candidates for union office and passing resolutions got the wheel of democracy to slowly start turning in our union again. Now, rank-and-file members are seeing that it’s possible to run for office, to bring a new idea forward, to become part of the fabric of our union, and to create changes to the union’s constitution and bylaws to better reflect the values from the classroom and give locals a leg to stand on when it’s time to advocate in schools. All across New Hampshire, members can now say that universal free school lunch is our state union’s position, and that we can all work toward realizing this policy goal.  

Unions must dream big to act big. We must revitalize our organizations to address the inequities of our current system of education all across the United States. We can’t afford to have our public schools crumbling under the feet of our students. 

Educators and allies, it’s time we build the unions that our profession, our communities, and our nation deserve.

These views are of the author alone and do not represent his employer, union, or any affiliates.

For the past five years, I have engaged in an activist strategy known as “protective presence” in the West Bank. The premise is absurd, but simple: When more privileged people are around—particularly white, Jewish Israeli citizens—settler and military violence towards Palestinians is less likely to happen. 

Whenever something does happen, we put our bodies in between Palestinians and violent actors while filming everything. All of our footage is then used for legal documentation and to raise awareness through NGOs, news publications, and social media. 

A poll conducted by the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel shows that this activism works. Ecumenical Accompaniers (EAs) affiliated with the program offer a protective presence by witnessing the daily struggles of people living under occupation. 

More than half of Palestinians surveyed at Israeli checkpoints said they benefited from the presence of EAs during inspections. Anecdotally, the stories of settler and military brutality that my Palestinian friends and colleagues have shared with me are much more extreme than what typically occurs in my presence. However, I recently briefly experienced a tiny taste of what it is like to be Palestinian in the eyes of Israel.

On March 12, I went to the village of Jurat al-Khail as a field coordinator for Rabbis for Human Rights, which brings volunteers into protective presence networks in solidarity with Palestinian communities. The community there had fled rampant settler violence in October 2024, but later received a warrant from the Israeli Supreme Court allowing them to return to their land with the assistance and protection of the military. I went to join the villagers of Jurat al-Khail, but was quickly ordered by the army to leave. Because of the various checkpoints, gates, and road closures I encountered on the way there, my car was far away, and it was a long trek back.

Just as I was approaching my car alongside an American volunteer from Rabbis for Human Rights, two soldiers approached. I had inadvertently parked near a military pillbox, and the soldiers demanded that I identify myself and explain what I was doing. I complied, but the soldiers quickly became aggressive, and one began filming and stuck his phone in the volunteer’s face. I began filming in response, and one soldier immediately yelled, “Oh, you just wasted six hours of your life,” referencing the fact that military detention can legally last up to six hours.

He threw me to the ground and began beating me while accusing me of attacking him. He stole my phone and tried to open it through biometric locks, which I do not use. He told me to give him the code, and when I replied that a warrant is required to search a phone, he threatened to kill me. Under duress, I complied: Legality does not matter if the legal body itself does not care. 

The volunteer and I were both brought into the pillbox, where we were further threatened and abused, and one of the soldiers threatened to rape the American volunteer. We were zip-tied, blindfolded and forced to kneel on the ground. But when the soldiers realized that I am Jewish and an Israeli citizen—I heard one say, “He’s Jewish, apparently. His name is Shmuel [the Hebrew version of Samuel] and he speaks Hebrew”—the abuse became significantly milder. They berated me and called me a traitor while looking through my Instagram account on my phone, but only hit me once or twice more. The commander even loosened my zip ties and blindfold, and I could feel my heart rate slowly return to normal. I no longer feared for my life.

After a few hours of kneeling on the ground blindfolded and zip-tied in the military pillbox, I was placed under arrest. The American volunteer was released with no charges. While the police station was an overall safer environment, they continued violating my civil liberties there. 

I was deprived of my right to privacy with my lawyer, as the officers refused to walk away while I was on the phone with her. The police also interrogated me in Hebrew and failed to provide me with a translator during the interrogation, as is legally required. Eventually, I was released on probation with a fifteen-day ban from the location of the incident.

The roughly fifteen minutes during which the soldiers thought I was Palestinian were the scariest of my life. Having had extensive legal training, I know the rights of both Palestinians under military law and non-Palestinians under Israeli civil law. It did not matter: If the state has no interest in enforcing its own law, those laws effectively do not exist. 

This was nothing I did not already know, but I have now internalized it on a deeper level. Even with my status as an Israeli Jew, it was clear during my interrogation that if the police wanted to break the law, there was no way to stop them—as I saw again less than two weeks later, when No Other Land co-director Hamdan Ballal was beaten by Israeli settlers and then detained by police in the West Bank.

This is not a uniquely Israeli problem: In the United States, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) illegally arrested and detained Palestinian solidarity activist Mahmoud Khalil, even though he is a lawful permanent resident with a green card. Amnesty International has accused Japan of abusing inmates. India has a documented record of oppressing religious and ethnic minorities. The list goes on and on. 

Many or all of these human rights abuses violate the legal codes of the countries committing them. But the expectation that these states will hold themselves accountable is absurd and farcical. Whatever systems of checks and balances we may rely on inevitably fail when powerful governments refuse to play by their own rules. 

These abuses are a symptom; the disease is hierarchy. And as long as we conform to systems that afford state forces unequivocally higher status than civilians, we are tacitly agreeing that cases like mine—and the much more severe ones that happen every day, in the West Bank and throughout the world—are part of the deal.

I would not wish my experience on anyone, and yet, in some ways, I’m glad it happened. I am glad to better understand what Palestinians go through every day. I am glad that when Hamdan Ballal and two of his neighbors describe spending an entire night on the ground in a military base, I have a tiny bit of context for what that experience feels like. 

I hope that this experience helps me to become a better ally and activist; in line with the internal logic of protective presence work, the sad truth is that more people will empathize with this story when it happened to an Israeli Jew instead of to a Palestinian. For about fifteen minutes, I was effectively Palestinian, and I now know better than before: Protective presence works.

Editor’s note: The Progressive and others are calling for an immediate investigation into Stein’s forceful detention and full accountability for the actions of the soldiers involved. On March 15, The Progressive sent a formal letter to both the Israeli Defense Forces and the Israeli Ministry of Defense Complaints Unit raising concerns about Stein’s treatment and requesting a written response. As of press time, no response, nor any acknowledgement of these letters has been received.