For months, U.S. and Israeli officials have been negotiating a plan to shift U.S. aid to Israel from the State Department to the Pentagon. It would integrate parts of the Israeli and American defense industries, and facilitate new joint projects... "It's just going to be repackaged, reframed — and possibly not include the same kind of congressional oversight."

NPR 

What Trump meant when he said the U.S. is cutting aid to Israel

Updated November 10, 20263:20 PM ET

 

Heard on All Things Considered

 

JERUSALEM — On the day of the U.S. midterm elections, when President Trump told Fox News he is cutting $4 billion in U.S. aid to Israel, many Israelis panicked. Israel has been one of the biggest recipients of U.S. military aid for decades.... LISTEN OR READ MORE  https://www.npr.org/2026/11/09/nx-s1-6029320/us-trump-israel-military-aid

Current and former Cisco workers have objected to the company’s role in the Gaza war, calling it a ‘shocking and complete contradiction of values’

Alice Speri

 

Sat 7 Nov 2026

 in The Guardian 

A ‘customer success story’: leaked documents show Cisco doubled down on Israeli military deals during Gaza war

Current and former Cisco workers have objected to the company’s role in the Gaza war, calling it a ‘shocking and complete contradiction of values’

Tech giant leaped to shore up relationship even as company was roiled by worker protest over its role in the war

A year into the war in Gaza, the networks of Israel’s military intelligence community were plagued with technical problems. There were major, multi-hour outages to their systems, and repeated crashes. Built-in debugging mechanisms failed.

The problems, which started as intelligence operations were undergoing updates to digital infrastructure, became so persistent as to undermine the “confidence” of Israeli intelligence agencies in one of their top network providers: the multinational tech conglomerate Cisco.

“This series of events happened during the period of war, deeply impacting customer sentiment,” warned a confidential memo drafted by Cisco and obtained by the Guardian. “During a period of national conflict, these repeated outages severely impacted critical operations.”

The September 2025 draft memo was part of a trove of internal documents leaked by Cisco workers furious with the company’s ties to Israel’s military three years into the war, which has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/nov/07/israel-intelligence-cisco-gaza-palestine

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How much is your support for Israel worth? Try $1 billion [that we know of]... Israel is spending wads of cash on public diplomacy in a desperate attempt to reverse waning American support for the country after it stands accused of genocide in Gaza and pushing the U.S. into the Iran war.

(Quincy Institute's Youtube) https://youtu.be/j1UxyTFGdFk?si=bJGOgQxa0IGDNc9S  

Jul 25, 2026 ALWAYS AT WAR | A QI SHOW

In the latest episode of Always at War, Courtney and Alex examine Israel's $1 billion campaign to shape global opinion and policy toward Israel with the researcher who's done the work to expose it: QI Fellow Nick Cleveland-Stout.

Quincy Institute researcher Nick Cleveland-Stout has the most comprehensive data yet on the extent of this foreign influence campaign

By Courtney Rawlings, reposted from Responsible Statecraft, July 30, 2026

Israel is spending wads of cash on public diplomacy in a desperate attempt to reverse waning American support for the country after it stands accused of genocide in Gaza and pushing the U.S. into the Iran war.

Since Oct. 7, Israel has spent over a billion dollars on global “hasbara” — television appearances, social media campaigns, chat-bot training, and other efforts to influence how people think about Israel. And this “public diplomacy” budget more than quadrupled in the last year alone.

To understand these efforts to win back American hearts and minds, we welcomed Quincy Institute Research Fellow Nick Cleveland-Stout to the latest episode of Always at War. Nick’s latest research is the most-definitive accounting yet of Israel’s new approach to winning over American’s hearts and minds.

Nick’s findings surface a surprising development in Israel’s influence efforts: while the country used to rely almost exclusively on wealthy, sympathetic advocates tilting the policy process toward Israel’s interest via American lobbying groups like AIPAC, Israel has recently been forced to hire U.S. contractors and firms that have to register as foreign agents under FARA.

While the transition signals Israel’s increasing desperation, it also allows us to see who Israel is hiring and for what. Take for example, Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale, who is currently the proud holder of three of Israel’s largest contracts. His main gig: running a mass texting campaign on behalf of Israel while posing as mysterious “peace” groups like “Allies for Peace.” Or, to take another example, the public diplomacy group Targeted Communications Global, which has spent nearly $10 million to run ads on places like X, the Daily Caller, and Breitbart. It turns out, Israel is more worried about maintaining their right-leaning supporters.

But perhaps the most shocking revelation is just how much time and money Tel Aviv is spending on “training” our chat bots — think Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok. The Israeli government is actually paying for “LLM poisoning” — developing pro-Israel websites that feed information to these chatbots whenever they’re asked about Israel. The apparent goal is that, when you ask about a straightforward incident — like Hind Rajab’s murder by the IDF — the chatbot will feed you a “he-said, she-said” story that features Israel’s justifications for shooting a five-year old, not a straight, factual accounting of events... READ MORE  https://israelpalestinenews.org/how-much-is-your-support-for-israel-worth-try-1-billion/

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READ NICK'S NEW RESEARCH: https://quincyinst.org/research/the-e... 

2:45 - Meet the researcher exposing Israel's $1 billion influence machine  

5:07 - Why Netanyahu called this his most important war  

9:34 - How Israel went from AIPAC to hiring Trump's campaign manager 

 24:31 - Who Israel is trying to influence (and why it's not working)  

32:21 - How to manipulate an AI chatbot  

41:19 - $10 million in secret ads — and nobody noticed  

48:08 - Why Israel's influence campaign is backfiring 

Tallying the global cost of the US-Israel war against Iran From thousands of lives lost to an economic shock likely to plunge millions into poverty, the world is paying dearly

Among the lives lost were 120 primary schoolchildren killed on the first day of the war in Iran.

Photograph: Abbas Zakeri/Mehr News/WANA/Reuters

By Oliver Holmes, graphics by Paul Scruton

Mon 15 Jun 2026

It would be hard to find a human on Earth unaffected by the US-Israel war against Iran. Several thousand have been killed. Millions more pay are paying each day in steeper food prices or at the petrol pump, and as inflation eats away at the value of their earnings.

For many, the final bill has not yet come, but it will eventually. They will pay for the long-term damage caused by the biggest threat of all to the global economy: uncertainty.

Uncertainty is hard to measure, but one way is to look at geopolitical risk, which stalls investment and employment. The US Federal Reserve economists Dario Caldara and Matteo Iacoviello have created an index that tracks reports of global tension. It shows the Iran war has been more destabilising than the Covid-19 pandemic, but on a par with either the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 or that of Iraq in 2003.

So how does the world tally the cost of this war? Some costs are easier to calculate than others, such as bills for surface-to-air missiles that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each. Others are harder to quantify, including the damage caused to Iranian and Lebanese hospitals and power networks. Much cannot be valued at all – the lives lost, including the 120 primary schoolchildren in Iran killed on the first day of the war.

Then there are hypothetical costs. A senior UN aid official framed the conflict in terms of opportunity cost, noting that the $2bn (£1.5bn) a day spent on military operations could otherwise cover lifesaving aid for roughly 87 million people.

And what about the beneficiaries of this war, the oil companies and the shareholders of arms manufacturers?

Here are some ways the impact of the war has been assessed: 

READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/15/tallying-the-global-cost-of-the-us-israel-war-against-iran

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From Gaza to Iran, the pattern is the same: precision weapons, chosen blindness, and dead children. The cost of failing to regulate AI warfare is already too high:

 

These aren’t AI firms, they’re defense contractors. We can’t let them hide behind their models

Avner Gvaryahu 

Sun 15 Mar 2026 

There is an Israeli military strategy called the “fog procedure”. First used during the second intifada, it’s an unofficial rule that requires soldiers guarding military posts in conditions of low visibility to shoot bursts of gunfire into the darkness, on the theory that an invisible threat might be lurking.

It’s violence licensed by blindness. Shoot into the darkness and call it deterrence. With the dawn of AI warfare, that same logic of chosen blindness has been refined, systematized, and handed off to a machine.

Israel’s recent war in Gaza has been described as the first major “AI war” – the first war in which AI systems have played a central role in generating Israel’s list of purported Hamas and Islamic jihad militants to target. Systems that processed billions of data points to rank the probability that any given person in the territory was a combatant.

The darkness in the watchtower was a condition of the terrain. The darkness inside the algorithm is a condition of the design. In both cases, the blindness was chosen. It was chosen because blindness is useful: it creates deniability, it makes the violence feel inevitable, it moves the question of who decided from a person to a procedure. The fog did not lift. It was given a probability score and called intelligence.

It may have been chosen blindness that led, at the start of the US-Israeli Iran war, to the strike at the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran. At least 168 people were killed, most of them children, girls aged seven to 12.

The weapons were precise. Munitions experts described the targeting as “incredibly accurate”, each building individually struck, nothing missed. The problem was not the execution. The problem was intelligence.... READ MORE   https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/mar/15/ai-defense-warfare-companies

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Act now: Fund People, Not Bombs .... from Jewish Voice for Peace "This week, the Senate will vote on Joint Resolutions of Disapproval to block the sale of U.S. weapons to the Israeli military. In the coming months, it will also vote on a supplemental request by the Trump administration to fund the war on Iran that may be as large as $80-100 billion. Congress must vote to block these bombs to Israel and oppose any funding for the war. "

Jewish Voice for Peace

@jvplive

The Israeli military is expanding its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza under the cover of the so-called “ceasefire,” continuing to bomb families in tents, preventing the entrance of food, water and medicine, and violently displacing Palestinians into an ever smaller part of Gaza

 Since the “ceasefire” began in October 2025, Israeli strikes have killed over 832 Palestinians in Gaza in daily shelling. In April alone, 111 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military in Gaza. At the same time, the Israeli government continues to impose a deliberately engineered malnutrition crisis on Palestinians there.

Meanwhile the Trump administration, in coordination with the Israeli government, is consolidating the genocide through the Board of Peace. Despite the Israeli government failing to uphold key terms of the ceasefire, the Board of Peace is indicating that the Israeli military might resume its assaults on Gaza.

The Israeli government’s land theft is continuing. Although the “ceasefire” agreement required the Israeli military to withdraw behind an agreed-upon yellow line, last week it quietly released new maps showing Israeli forces controlling nearly two-thirds of Gaza, including a newly defined “orange line” that extends well beyond the boundaries set in the October “ceasefire.”

We see the hypocrisy clearly. The US-backed Board of Peace is allowing the genocide to continue, while the Israeli military appears to be exploring options to return to large-scale aerial bombardment, all with the aim of confining Palestinians to a fraction of their land inside of mass detention camps.

We reject this attempt at the complete erasure of Palestinian history and society.The genocide will persist as long as the US continues sending weapons and military aid to the Israeli government. Call on Congress and demand they fund people, not bombs.

https://x.com/jvplive/status/2054192440072921551 

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JVP Action, our 501c4 organization, is now doing business as JVP; JVP Lab, our 501c3 organization, continues separately and remains focused on our nonpartisan educational and cultural work. 

Jewish Voice for Peace: FUND PEOPLE NOT BOMBS

https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/resource/fund-people-not-bombs/?source=social 

Act now: Fund People, Not Bombs

As the U.S. and Israeli governments continue to wage an illegal and immoral war on Iran, the Israeli military is continuing its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, accelerating its ethnic cleansing of the occupied West Bank, and raining bombs on Lebanon.

Congress will soon have multiple opportunities to block weapons to Israel and to oppose any more funding for the war on Iran.

This week, the Senate will vote on Joint Resolutions of Disapproval to block the sale of U.S. weapons to the Israeli military. In the coming months, it will also vote on a supplemental request by the Trump administration to fund the war on Iran that may be as large as $80-100 billion. Congress must vote to block these bombs to Israel and oppose any funding for the war.

Tell Congress to FUND PEOPLE, NOT BOMBS.

"We're talking about a federal administration that has spent close to $30 billion dollars killing thousands of people at a time when working class people across this country cannot afford the bare minimum," he said. "And to be told that a city-run grocery store is implausible, but spending more than $500 million a day to kill people in Iran and Lebanon is not only plausible but necessary, it speaks to a broken kind of politics." Zohran Mamdani April 17, 2026 NPR interview

The war in Iran speaks to a "broken kind of politics"

That chasm is most clear in his deep opposition to the U.S. war on Iran, he said.

"We're talking about a federal administration that has spent close to $30 billion dollars killing thousands of people at a time when working class people across this country cannot afford the bare minimum," he said. "And to be told that a city-run grocery store is implausible, but spending more than $500 million a day to kill people in Iran and Lebanon is not only plausible but necessary, it speaks to a broken kind of politics."

He said that New Yorkers feel the effects of that war beyond their pocketbook.

"At the core of any war is a dehumanization that takes place, and that dehumanization is not limited to any battlefield," he said. "It extends into the lives of people across this country."

He shared the story of a young Muslim woman he called after seeing the news that she had been thrown to the ground at a New York City subway stop.

"She told me that the first thing her attacker said to her before he attacked her was, 'I wonder how many Iranians we killed today,'" he said. "That is what we are allowing to take hold in our politics."

Zohran Mamdani says Iran war speaks to a 'broken kind of politics'

https://www.npr.org/2026/04/16/nx-s1-5785163/zohran-mamdani-interview-first-100-days 

 

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The United States is destroying itself - The daily news can’t adequately convey the administration’s sabotaging of our government, economy, alliances and environment

‘Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled.’ Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Rebecca Solnit 

Sun 12 Apr 2026

The United States is being murdered, and it’s an inside job. Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled. All this is common knowledge, but because it dribbles out in news stories about this specific incident or department, the reports never adequately describe an administration sabotaging the functioning of the federal government and also trashing the global economy, international alliances and relationships, and the national and global environment in ways that will have downstream consequences for decades and perhaps, especially when it comes to climate, centuries.

Across the branches of government, the services that are supposed to protect us – nuclear stockpile monitoring, cybersecurity, counter-terrorism – are being undermined, understaffed or trashed. A different kind of protection that consists of public health, vaccination programs, food safety, clean air and water, social services, civil rights and the rule of law is also under attack. The federal government that serves us is being starved while the federal government that serves the Trump agenda and the oligarchy is glutting itself on taxpayer money, including the grotesque sums dumped on the Department of Homeland Security and the US military now being warped into Pete Hegseth’s twisted vision of a ruthless mercenary force. Hegseth has reportedly stood in the way of promotions for more than a dozen Black and female officers.

It is striking that the Trump team’s constant refrain is that we cannot afford to protect the vulnerable or provide for the people, which is why the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, atop Doge, destroyed USAID last year, which has already resulted in tens of thousands of deaths from starvation and preventable disease. The Iran war is creating a fertilizer crisis in Europe, Africa and Asia that may also result in widespread famine. Meanwhile, the former head of homeland security Kristi Noem spent more than $200m on an ad campaign starring herself before she was fired.

Although there are far worse things about the utterly gratuitous and literally unjustified war on Iran, the fact that it burns through billions a day is striking, given that huge cuts are being made to environmental protection and national parks, and the forest service is being effectively sabotaged, while public lands are being offered up to fossil fuel companies and mining interests. The forest service headquarters are being moved across the country, which will probably cause many resignations, like the similar move of the Bureau of Land Management in Trump’s first term. More than 50 forest service research stations are being cut, meaning more loss of irreplaceable ongoing research, data, facilities and staff.

Trump said in his droning dullard speech last week: “We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country ... We’re fighting wars ... It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.” Your money, our money, our public lands, our kids. Trump even bribed the builders of offshore windfarms almost a billion dollars to stop, just because he has a personal vendetta against the clean energy systems. The US used to lead the world in scientific research, including medical research, which had led to important breakthroughs in disease treatment and health, but all that has been slashed to the bone and beyond. This is murder.

The old aphorism about how long it takes an aircraft carrier to turn around might be why the nation seems relatively stable... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/12/united-states-trump-destruction

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