Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Thoughts on Grief and the Grieving Process
The grieving process is horrible but not hopeless.
May 27, 2023
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[Glenn Greenwald, David Miranda, 2021]

Note to Readers: Returning to more frequent written journalism is something I have been wanting to do for some time. The combination of David's 9-month hospitalization and the need to launch our nightly Rumble show during that excruciating experience made it virtually impossible to find the time and energy for that. It is something I am still eager to do -- I'm writing an article now about the life of Daniel Ellsberg and my friendship with him for Rolling Stone, as the 92-year-old Pentagon Papers whistleblower nears the end of his spectacular life due to terminal pancreatic cancer. I originally started writing the following thoughts on grief for myself, with no intention to publish it, but decided to do so in part because I know it may give comfort to others (as the article I discuss below gave to me), but also because, for reasons I can't explain, it sometimes helps to write about this for others, and my view of the grieving process has become that you should do whatever provides any help at all to get you through the next day. I realize this is not for everyone but it's what I'm capable of and what is dominating my thoughts right now. I hope to be able to return to producing more traditional written journalism soon. 


 

The pain, sadness, and torment of grief deepens as you move further away from the moment of the death of a loved one. It keeps getting worse – harder not easier – with each passing day and each passing week. I know that it will begin to get better or at least more manageable at some point, but that can and will happen only once the reality is internalized, a prerequisite for healing and recovery. But the internalization that someone is really dead - that there's absolutely nothing you can do to reverse that - requires ample time given its enormity. Three weeks is nowhere near sufficient.

One of the hardest challenges of grief, of the grieving process, is finding the balance between confronting the pain, loss and sometimes physically suffocating sadness – all without wallowing in it to the point that it completely consumes and then incapacitates you. But while you can't let yourself endlessly drown in it, you also can't let yourself use some mixture of distractions, work, exercise and other "return-to-normal" activities to remain in a state of denial or escapism, to avoid the pain and suffering, to deny the need to process a reality this immense and horrible, to anesthetize yourself from the mourning. The pain and suffering is going to come sooner or later, and the longer you evade or postpone it, the more damage it will do.

If you try to close yourself off to it entirety, to pretend it's not there, that attempt will fail. The pain and sadness will come at the worst times, when you're least prepared for it, in the most destructive form, and will find the unhealthiest expression. But if you force yourself to swim in those waters with too much frequency, for too much time, without maintaining a vibrant connection to the normalcy of life, to the people around you whom you love, and to the things you still cherish, it will paralyze and consume you - drain all your energy and life force and replace it with total darkness, mental paralysis and physical exhaustion: just a cold, inescapable sense of bottomless dread. 

There's no perfect sweet spot, but every day, you have to keep trying to find the right balance between confronting and avoiding. What's most daunting is realizing how long this process of processing and acceptance will be: very possibly endless. During the first week after David's death, I told both myself and our kids that the first two weeks would be hard but not the hardest, that worse days lay ahead, once the shock begins to wear off and the inescapable reality sets in, once the ceremonies were over and everyone else moved on and want back to their lives. I knew we would then be left with nothing but the reality of this enormous loss and horrific absence, and that was when the worst days would commence.

But telling yourself that is one thing; experiencing it is something completely different. Even when you think you're momentarily safeguarded from it, it can just penetrate without warning in the sharpest ways. On Thursday, I stumbled into this Guardian article about a top-secret leak in Australia and there was a description of David in the article's second paragraph, printed below, that was the first time I saw this formulation in print. It fell so heavily and jarringly – at a moment when I wasn't prepared for it – because no matter how hard you try and how much effort you devote to it, the reality of death takes a long time to fully internalize. It's just very hard to believe that the person with whom you expected and wanted to share all of your life – decades more – is instead not coming back, ever, in the only form you know, that a person so full of life and strength and force is no more:

I don't know why that phrase packed such a punch. I've seen hundreds of articles and tributes talking about David's death. But this phrase casually indicates that he is someone of the past, with no present and no future in our world. It didn't just talk about the fact that David died but referred to him as a now-and-forever dead person. That subtlety had an impact far more painful and destabilizing than I could have anticipated. It disrupted my emotional state until I could find a way to move on to something else: the central challenge of every day.


 

All of this is complicated -- a lot -- by the need to find this balance not only for yourself but also for your kids, whose grieving is as intense but also different. It's at least just as hard to know how much space to give them to use distractions like entertainment, sports, friends and school to find some breathing space. There's a strong temptation to encourage them to use escapism because one so eagerly -- instinctively -- wants to see one's kids smiling and laughing rather than crying and suffering.

But their own need to feel this loss, the mourning, the sadness, the pain is just as inescapable as your own. There's no avoiding it. It's coming one way or the other, so you often find yourself in the disorienting position of watching your kids cry and show pain, and you feel a form of comfort and relief from seeing it because you know it's good and healthy and necessary that they feel that, even while you are submerged in that sharp, expansive pit in the center of your being that comes from having to watch your own children suffer.

[Rio de Janeiro, March 30, 2022: four months, 1 week before David's hospitalization]

For those interested, I want to highly recommend this op-ed from last week by New York Times editor Sarah Wildman, whose 14-year-old daughter, Orli, just died after a somewhat lengthy and evidently very difficult battle with cancer. Without thinking about it, I messaged her to thank her for her article and we shared experiences, condolences and advice. One thing I did not expect was how much comfort I get from hearing from others - people I know well, people I don't know well, people I don't know at all – describe their own experiences with grief and loss. There's that old cliché that physical death is the great equalizer: the inevitable destination awaiting all of us regardless of status and station. 

That is true of death, but it's also true of grief. Unless one chooses never to love in order to avoid the pain of loss – a dreary, self-destructive, even tragic calculation – the impermanence of everything material that we love means we will all experience grief and the pain of loss until we die ourselves. There's now a substantial body of research on people's end-stage regrets: what humans who know they are dying say they wish they had done more of and less of. 

Virtually nobody nearing the end of life on earth says they wished they worked more or made more money (many say they regret working too much). Most say they wish they had spent more time with loved ones. When all is said and done, one of the few enduring things we really value and from which we derive meaningful pleasure - something we are built and have evolved to crave and need – is human connection. We're tribal and social animals. That's why isolation is one of the worst punishments society can impose, or that one can impose on oneself. And that's why, looking back over these last weeks and even during David's entire hospitalization, thoughts and notes and comments and kind gestures from so many people, to say nothing of those who took their time to write to me to share, often at great length, their own experience with long-term hospitalization of loved ones and profound grief, provided so much more comfort than I ever imagined it would have.

Wildman's op-ed is raw, moving and unsettling. She doesn't falsify or prettify anything for the sake of making her daughter's death more comfortable for others or herself. The death of someone you love at a young age is not pretty or comfortable. It's tragic and deeply sad and incomparably painful and there's no getting around that. Some of the best advice I got in the last couple of weeks was to avoid lionizing David or erecting a mythology around his life or around his death. I loved a human being, not a flawless saint or an icon or an otherworldly deity. And one of the things that moved me most about Wildman's op-ed was her frank discussion of her daughter's fear of dying. It would be so much more palatable - for yourself or others - to say and believe that the person you lost was at peace with dying. Her daughter wasn't at peace with dying, nor was David. They wanted to live and fought to live and were afraid to die.

That's a hard and painful truth that does sometimes make things much more difficult – it means you focus not only on what you lost, not only on what your kids lost, but on what the person who died lost – but one can also find beauty and grace and meaning and inspiration by confronting that rather than whitewashing it. It's disrespectful to someone's life to build mythologies about them - about their life and their death - no matter how comforting those mythologies might be. Wildman's op-ed refuses to do that, yet it leaves no doubt that her daughter inspired her and others not just in how she lived but in also in how she died: with her determination, courage and strength. 

I blocked it out and denied it at the time because I wasn't able to accept it, but David's doctors made clear in the days after he was first hospitalized in ICU last August that the probability that he would survive the week was very low. His inflammation and infection had already incapacitated his pancreas and caused full renal failure within the first 48 hours. By the end of the week he was intubated because sepsis delivered that inflammation to his lungs. Even a quick Google search reveals how dire that state of affairs is for anyone, no matter their age or overall health. 

That David fought so hard to live and return to us over nine excruciating months brought some horrifically difficult moments – watching him and his body get battered over and over every time it looked like he was possibly recovering was probably the worst thing I ever had to witness – but it also gave us and our kids some of our most moving, profound, genuine, loving and enduring moments with him and with one another that I and they will cherish forever, as I wrote about a couple months ago, in the context of gratitude, when I thought he was improving. 

It may seem at first glance that had he died a quick death in that first week, David would have spared himself and us a lot of agony. That may be true. But I am absolutely convinced that had he died in that first week without giving us and himself these opportunities, all of this would be infinitely worse. Every moment you share with someone you love - even if it's in an ICU ward with every machine imaginable connected to them - is a blessing and a gift, and David's characteristic fight gave us so many of those moments that, by all rights, we never should have had.

I really wish there some singular book or some magic phrase or some way of interpreting all of this that would make the still-growing and still-deepening pain disappear for myself, for mine and David's kids, for those who loved him, for those who love and lose anyone that matters so much in their life. There is no elixir. But that does not mean that nothing helps, that one is doomed to a life of endless pain, sadness, and dread, that it is impossible to find comfort and inspiration and even greater love in the grieving process. 


 

For that to happen, you need humility and an acceptance of what you cannot control. I can't bring David back - that's obvious - but I also can't find a way to entirely avoid the type of pain and sadness and despair that is sometimes utterly debilitating. I realized that very early on and so I'm no longer trying to avoid it entirely. 

Sometimes it comes when I seek or summon it, and sometimes it comes when I think I am far away from it - like happened this week when I saw the adjective "late" before his name and on a thousand other occasions when I looked at a photo of him and his eyes connected to mine, or when one of our kids shared a memory they had of him that brought him so vividly to life. When that pain comes, I don't try to fight it or drive it away. I let it come and sometimes stay in it on purpose, until I can no longer physically endure it. Other times I allow myself to be distracted: through work, though entertainment, through proximity to my kids, through conversations with them that are not directly about sharing our mutual grief over the loss of their father and of my husband.

I don't know if I returned to work too early or, instead, am sometimes succumbing too much to my desire not to work. Each day, I try to follow my instinct about what is best for me and for our kids, and to give myself a huge amount of space and forgiveness to calculate wrong and make the wrong decisions. Down every road lies sadness and even horror, but some of those paths also offer some beautiful moments of family and connection, ways to find inspiration, to embrace the spirit and passion and compassion and strength that defined David and his life.

I'm certain that one of the things that is helping most is our unified devotion to concretizing, memorializing and extending his legacy. One of David's greatest joys in life was seeing the construction and opening of the community center we built together in Jacarezinho, the community that raised him. It offers free classes in English and computers, psychological services and addiction counseling, support for animal protection and pet care, and meals for that community's homeless. We are going to create and build "The David Miranda Institute" to extend that work beyond that community. My kids are eager to assume a major role in working on this institute and community center – they know instinctively that it honors David and would make him so proud – and working on this together is one of the few things that provides us unadulterated comfort and uplifting energy. 

The grieving process is horrible but not hopeless. I'd be lying if I denied that it sometimes seems unbearable. Every day the reality that David lost his life and that we lost David in our lives gets heavier and more painful. But humans are resilient. We are adaptive. I can't prove it and there was a time in my life when I not only rejected but mocked this idea, but I believe our life has a purpose and, ultimately, so do our deaths. Each day I see that my suffering and our kids' suffering deepen and worsen for now. 

But I also see us, together, creating ways to find and remain connected to that purpose. David's life, David's spirit, David's legacy, and somehow even David's death are what is propelling us, elevating us, toward that destination. I would trade anything for David to be back with us, but since that option does not exist, getting through the pain and then finding a way to strengthen us is our overarching challenge.

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I've been reporting for several months now on the Trump administration's systematic efforts to force American universities to adopt expanded hate speech codes. Remember, for so long, conservatives hated hate speech codes on college campuses. They condemned it as censorship. They said it's designed to suppress ideas. 

Oftentimes, those hate speech codes were justified on the grounds that it's necessary to protect minority groups or that those ideas are hateful and incite violence. And all of this, we were told by most conservatives that I know, I think, in probably a consensus close to unanimity, we were told that this is just repressive behavior, that faculty and students on campus should have the freedom to express whatever views they want. If they're controversial, if they are offensive, if they are just disliked by others, the solution is not to ban those ideas or punish those people, but to allow open debate to flourish and people to hear those ideas. 

That is a critique I vehemently agree with. And I've long sided with conservatives on this censorship debate as it has formed over the last, say, six, seven, eight years when it comes to online discourse, when it comes to campus discourse, free speech is something that is not just a constitutional guarantee and according to the Declaration of Independence, a right guaranteed by God, but it is also central to the American ethos of how we think debate should unfold. We don't trust the central authority to dictate what ideas are prohibited and which ones aren't. Instead, we believe in the free flow of ideas and the ability of adults to listen and make up their own minds. 

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I want to make clear I'm not talking here about the controversies over deporting foreign students for criticizing Israel. That's a separate issue, which is part of this discussion, but that's totally ancillary and secondary. I've covered that many times. That is not what I'm discussing. 

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The public opinion in the United States has rapidly spiraled out of control against Israel as the world turns against that country, and particularly what it's doing in Gaza. Huge amounts of sympathy for that country emerged in the wake of October 7. Almost every country expressed support for it and was on its side, but what they have done, using October 7 as a pretext, to achieve what were in reality long-term goals of many people inside the Israeli government, similar to how many American neocons used the 9/11 attacks to achieve all kinds of pre-existing goals, 9/11 and 9/11 became the pretext for it, including the invasion of Iraq, but a whole variety of other measures as well.

 Large numbers of people have turned against Israel in the United States, which funds the Israeli military, which funds Israeli wars, which gives $4 billion to that country automatically every year under a 10-year deal signed by President Obama on the way out, much of which is required to be used to buy weapons from American arms dealers – it's basically a gift certificate offered by the American people to Israel to go on a shopping spree in the military industrial complex. But not all of it is required for that. And then every time Israel has a new war or wants to go fight somebody else, the United States not only transfers billions more to them. 

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Israel-Made Famine Crisis Finally Recognized
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Ever since the start of the destruction of Gaza by the Israeli government following the October 7 attack, there have been all kinds of concerns that one of the things the Israeli government would do is impose mass starvation and famine on the population of 2.2 million people of Gaza. At least that was the population when all this began; half of that population, 1.1 million, are children, under the age of 18. 

This has been something we've seen evidence of, and in part, people were concerned about it because the Israeli government immediately announced that that was their intention. We've now gotten to the point after a full-scale Israeli blockade – and by blockade, I don't mean that Israel is failing to feed the people of Gaza, I mean that the people, groups and organizations that are trying to bring food into Gaza are physically impeded from doing so by the IDF as a result of official Israeli policy. 

There was a complete and full blockade for three months; at the same time, they imposed policies such as destroying any fields or plants where food could grow. They are now killing or at least arresting anybody who tries to just go a little bit out – remember, Gaza has a beach and a sea – to try to fish for food. That is also prohibited. It clearly is a policy designed to starve the population to death, which is why even Israeli experts in genocide who long resisted applying the word genocide to what Israel is doing in Gaza have now relented and said it's the only word that applies. 

The number of groups, governments and people who previously supported what Israel was doing or at least refused to acknowledge the full extent of the atrocities, have now, in their view, no choice but to do so. The evidence is starting to become so overwhelming that only the hardcore Israel loyalists are left to try to deny it or blame somebody else for it.

 ABC News today brings this headline: “More than 100 aid groups warn of 'mass starvation' in Gaza amid Israel's war with Hamas. Their statement warned of "record rates of acute malnutrition." They are the World Health Organization and groups from all over the planet that have immense credibility in having worked with conflicts many times before. 

A leading Israeli newspaper, the daily Haaretz, which has been more critical of the Netanyahu government than most, but which at the same time was supportive for months of what Israel was doing in Gaza following October 7,  had its lead editorial yesterday under this headline: “Israel Is Starving Gaza.” The language they used was so clear, straightforward and direct that it's unimaginable to think of any large corporate Western media outlet saying anything similar.

Last Monday, we interviewed a leading scholar of famine, who has studied famines around the world for his entire life and not only did he describe how what's taking place in Gaza is unprecedented, at least since World War II, because of how minutely planned it is and because they're unlike famine, say, in Ethiopia, or Sudan or Yemen. There are all sorts of organizations with immense expertise and resources that are just a couple of miles away from where children are starving to death, have huge amounts of food and other aids that they want to bring to the people of Gaza and yet are blocked from doing so by the IDF. 

Although I suppose it's encouraging, or at least better than the alternative, that even Western governments and the longstanding Israel supporters who are American politicians are now issuing statements about how disturbed they are by the mass famine in Gaza, how Israel needs to immediately cease this inhumane activity, none of this is surprising. None of it is new. Israel made very clear from the very beginning what exactly their intentions were, and people just decided that they were too scared to stand up and object at the time. 

Oftentimes, you hear that it's only far-right extremist ministers in Netanyahu's government who say things like this, like Ben Gvir, Smotrich, or people like that. In reality, the Israeli defense minister was one of the moderate people comparatively at the start of the war, to the point where Netanyahu ended up ousting him and he was the one who ordered a "complete siege" on the Gaza Strip, saying Israeli authorities would cut electricity and block the entry of food, water and electricity. 

In April of this year, just three months ago, another Israeli minister, Smotrich, said at a conference:

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 Proudly boasting of the actions that the Israeli military, the Israeli government intended to take and then took. In his words, to ensure that not even a grain a wheat entered, a place where 2.2 million people, or 2 million people, or 1.9 million people are clinging to survival in between dodging shelling from tanks and bombs and having everything from schools and U.N. refugees and refugees in even their own tents being blown up. From CNN, in May:

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Just as a reminder, it was in February, after Trump was inaugurated, that Israel explicitly announced to the world that it was blockading all food from entering Gaza. They didn't hide it. It wasn't in dispute. It wasn't in doubt. It was an official Israeli policy to starve the entire population, which is collective punishment as a way of forcing Hamas to negotiate or to surrender. This is exactly sort of the thing that, after World War II, we decided would be intolerable, that people who did it would be guilty of war crimes and treated as such, the way that the Nazis who did things similarly, like starve entire cities, starve entire ghettos of Jews, were treated as war criminals and held responsible and actually executed. 

So, none of this is new for all the people who are now just seeing the babies who are emaciated in skin and bones and dying of malnutrition and increasingly older children and adults as well, to suddenly come out and say, “Oh my God, I can't believe this. What have we been supporting? This has to stop.” 

This is all months in the making, and, as hunger experts and famine groups will tell you, once it gets to this stage, where people are actually dying now of famine in large numbers, it becomes irreversible. Irreversible physically because even if you get the food in, their bodies aren't equipped to process it. They need much more extensive medical care than that. Of course, in children, it impedes brain growth for life and physical vitality for life, to say nothing of the mass death from starvation, which we're now starting to see. 

That's why all these attempts to distance themselves that we're seeing from Western governments and Western politicians are utterly nauseating. They're the ones who enabled it, they're the ones who have been paying for it, they're the ones who have been arming it, they're the ones who've been cheering for it, despite Israeli vows to starve to death the people of Gaza. 

We've been hearing for a year and a half about stories of doctors in Gaza having to perform major surgeries, amputations on children, without so much as any painkillers, let alone anesthesia. Horror stories of the worst kind imaginable. But what we're now seeing is a body of evidence so conclusive and so indisputable from so many different sources that it has essentially become impossible for denialists of these atrocities to maintain their denialism any longer. 

Here is Nick Maynard. He's a British physician who was on the mainstream program “Good Morning Britain,” just like “Good Morning America” in the United States. And he got back from Gaza. He's a surgeon. And here's what he described in his own words. 

Video. Nick Maynard, “Good Morning Britain.” July 25, 2025.

He just gets done saying exactly what he's been seeing that every day, for fun almost, IDF soldiers pick which part of the body they're going to snipe young children, teenagers, young teenagers with, oh, today their heads, tomorrow their chests. How about their kneecaps? How about their testicles? And they come in in clutches with all the same injury. We've been hearing stories of IDF soldiers purposely targeting young boys who come in with bullets in their brains. We've been hearing about this for quite a long time now. He's in Gaza. He saw exactly what he's describing. 

Here he is again, talking about something in one way, not quite as brutal, but in another way, almost more horrific in terms of the intentionality that it shows in terms of what the Israeli government and the IDF are actually up to in terms of their objectives in Gaza. 

Video. NICK MAYNARD, GOOD MORNING BRITAIN. July 25, 2025.

If you are deliberately preventing the entrance in Gaza of baby formula, knowing that there is severe malnutrition among the women giving birth to these babies and not when Hamas operatives are trying to bring them in, but from Western doctors who work with organizations known around the world for treating people with injuries in war zones, if that isn't evidence of genocidal intent, someone needs to tell me what is. 

Here's Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat from Minnesota, with a very steadfast pro-Israel record in the Senate for the entire time she's been there. Yesterday, she decided to stand up on the Senate floor to talk about how deeply worried and concerned and upset she is by the stories about nutrition coming out of Gaza and the role that the Israelis are playing in blockading food to starve the people in Gaza to death. She's so moved by it. She had to stand up and make her voice heard. Here's what she said. 

Video. AMY KLOBUCHAR, C-SPAN. July 24, 2025.

I've heard enough of that performance. Very well delivered. The voice cracking was a nice touch. But as you'll see, as you will notice, there's no advocacy of any concrete call. You would think this is just some country doing this, that the United States has nothing to do with. 

The United States pays for the Israeli military. It pays for their wars. It pays for the munitions they use to carry all of this out and has for decades. Amy Klobuchar is a steadfast supporter of that, as are pretty much all of her colleagues in the Senate from both parties. 

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Here is a photograph of 14 senators, seven from the Republican Party and seven from the Democratic Party, the perfect balance to illustrate how bipartisan the reverence and support for Israel is in Washington. There you see Amy Klobuchar. She's right here smiling. And here's Benjamin Netanyahu. Here's Chuck Schumer, here's Ted Cruz, here's Adam Schiff. Just all the kinds of people we're constantly told can never get along with anything. There they all are gathered. You see Netanyahu sort of posing there in front of everybody as some kind of warrior strut. 

Benjamin Netanyahu is an indicted war criminal required to be arrested by any signatory to the International Criminal Court, just like Vladimir Putin is. Just the week before, the IDF soldiers and settlers in the West Bank murdered yet another American citizen, this one 20 years old, who was born in the United States, lived in the U.S., and was visiting relatives in the West Bank. And not only did settlers at the back of the IDF storm their house and beat him to death, but they also then blocked ambulances from getting to the scene to pick him up and bring him to get medical care, and the American citizen died, killed by Israelis. None of these people had anything to say about this, because their loyalty is more to Israel than to even their own fellow citizens.

 So, it's nice that Amy Klobuchar wants to engage in public displays of emotion about how deeply moved she is, except she was just standing right next to the leader of the government responsible. Again, this is not anything new. He is indicted exactly for these kinds of crimes, for deliberate starvation, among many other things. 

I should also point out that Amy Klobuchar's statement about the hostages is preposterous. The Netanyahu government has said many times, very explicitly, that even if Hamas turned over every hostage today, they've said this for months, that they would not stop their war. Their war aim is not to get the hostage back. That's the pretext. Even the hostages' own families know that and have said that, which is why they have deprioritized getting the hostages back because that's not their role. Their goal is to expel all Arabs and Palestinians from all of Gaza, as another minister in the Israeli government said yesterday, and make sure that all of Gaza is exclusively Jewish. They want to cleanse all of Gaza of every Arab and Muslim who lives there, every Palestinian, including Christian Palestinians and Palestinian Catholics, and make it part of the Israeli state where only Israeli Jews are permitted to live. That's the goal of the war. It doesn't have anything to do with the hostages. That's a pretext. 

There's an Israeli scholar who is one of the leading scholars on Holocaust studies and the study of genocide, named Omer Bartov and he served in the IDF. He's an Israeli and he now teaches at Brown University, where he teaches Holocaust studies and the study of Genocide. And for quite a long time, until very recently, he rejected the idea that the word genocide applies to what Israel is doing in Gaza. Even when other human rights groups and other experts in genocide were saying, “The word absolutely applies,” he was insisting it did not. He then wrote an op-ed in The New York Times last week where he said, “I'm an expert in genocide. I know it when I see it,” and laid out a very long case with documentation and evidence. Again, this is an Israeli citizen who fought in the IDF, who dedicated his life to Holocaust studies as a steadfast supporter of Israel, writing in The New York Times op-ed, “I long resisted the conclusion, but there's no other word that can be used to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza besides genocide.” He laid out a long case using his historical understanding, his scholarly analysis of what genocide means and how it's been applied in the past and why it applies today. He then went on Piers Morgan and elaborated on his view and here's part of what he said. 

Video. Omer Bartov, Piers Morgan Uncensored. July 24, 2025.

And that's been true for a very long time. The war aim of this war has always been to destroy civilian life in all of Gaza, whether by killing the people there or making life so impossible that it forces them to try to find some way out. That's the goal. It has nothing to do with the hostages or dismantling Hamas or anything else. It's to steal the land that the fanatics in the Israeli government believe God promised to them, without regard to what the rest of the world believes or thinks about international borders or anything else. And they don't regard the people in Gaza as human. That's the reality. Israel, as a country, obviously has lots of exceptions, but the prevailing ethos in Israel is that these are not human beings. These are less than human beings, which is why there's very little opposition – some have grown, but it’s still an absolute minority in Israel who are objecting to any of this. 

In response to this Israeli scholar of the Holocaust and genocide, not just pronouncing that what Israel is doing is a genocide, but laying out a very extensive case, for whatever reason, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, you might recall, is the Secretary of Health and Human Services, not the Secretary of State, compelled to go onto Twitter and to say this in response to somebody who denied this claim:

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So, have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – who is not Jewish, of course, he's part of a Catholic family – accusing Israeli Jews of spreading blood libel against Jews, because they invoke their field of expertise and the decades long study that they've done of genocide to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza as the manifestation of genocidal intent, is a blood libel against Jews.  

Blood libel is now a term that has the same effective definition operationally as antisemitism, which just means criticizing Israel. I have, though, been really amazed. I've noticed this for quite some time now, the way in which non-Jewish supporters of Israel – you can call them Christian Zionists, or Zionists in general – I don't think RFK Jr.'s reverence for Israel comes from any kind of evangelical Christianity, just think it comes from political expediency. 

He was on my show once, talking about it, where he gave this big, long speech about how we have to immediately stop financing the war in Ukraine because we can't afford it any longer. All of that, all of which was true. All of which I agreed with. And then I asked him, Does that same thing apply to Israel? And he immediately rejected it, started saying how Israel is a crucial ally, blah, blah, although, at the end, he did say, you know what, maybe you're right, maybe it is time to stop funding Israel and let them stand on their own two feet. But then the Democrats decided to attack RFK Jr. as antisemitic, and he ran into the arms of the most extremist Israel supporters like Rabbi Shmuley. Ever since, he has been as extreme a supporter of Israel as it gets to the point that he now accuses Israeli professors of Holocaust studies of spreading blood libels against Jews. 

One of the most repugnant things I've seen is this new attempt, this new PR attempt, to shift from, “Oh, no, there's no problem in Gaza with food. There's no famine in Gaza. They have plenty of food.” And then for a while, it became, to the extent people don't have food, “It's Hamas's fault, they're stealing the food.” And then the question is, where are they getting it from to steal it? No food can be allowed in. They destroyed the ability to grow food and crops. They shoot and kill, or at best arrest, people who try to fish off the coast. So, that denialism didn't work any longer, and now the shift in rhetoric has become, “Oh, it's the U.N.'s fault. There's all this aid sitting there that they refuse to distribute.” 

The last time the U.N. tried to take food into Gaza, when they finally got the authorization of the Israeli military to allow trucks to come in, was July 20, which is four days ago. And what happened was, even though they had the authorization of the IDF to come, as soon as they entered with trucks of food, desperate Gaza civilians whose families are dying of hunger, ran over to the trucks. And when they did, the Israeli military, the IDF, started gunning them down, started massacring them. And obviously, when you're shooting that many bullets at people by U.N. trucks, you are also endangering the lives of the drivers of those trucks and the aid workers who are on those trucks. 

Cindy McCain, who tries to be very, very diplomatic, because that's her job, when talking about the role Israel is playing, she's the head of the World Food Program, but it's also her job to get food to the people of Gaza. And she comes from a family that is as pro-Israel as it gets. Her husband was John McCain. Even more fanatically pro-Israel is her daughter, Megan McCain, who accuses everybody of antisemitism daily, basically, if you don't support everything Israel is doing, that's the family she comes from. That's the political tradition out of which she emerged. And so, she's often very careful and cautious in her words. And she wants to be able to get food to the people of Gaza as well. That's her job. And yet, for Cindy McCain, this was quite an extreme language. She went on CNN the following day to describe the massacre aimed at the people getting the food from the U.N., and also the U.N. aid workers themselves, imposed by the Israeli government. 

Here's what she said. 

Video. CINDY MCCAIN, CNN. July 21, 2025.

The last time the U.N. tried to deliver aid and food into Gaza, they were massacred by the Israeli military and now, the IDF and the Gaza Health Foundation, guided by scumbags who used to work for the Obama administration, who are paid to advise them on PR strategies, have told them to stop denying that there's hunger and famine in Gaza, and instead blame the U.N., a group that has been desperately trying to get food to the people of Gaza for more than a year. 

The Prime Minister of Australia came out yesterday with a statement, very melodramatic, about how upset he is and how disturbed he is; 29 countries issued a letter that we read to you late last week. This is all just symbolic. This is a way of, as that book cover says, pretending that they were against this all along. 

Only the West and particularly the United States has the power to stop the Israelis from what they're doing and instead, the American government, like they did in the Biden administration, now under the Trump administration, is doing the opposite, expressing more and more support for what Israel is doing. 

We're just witnessing in real time the kind of war crimes and atrocities that 20, 50, 100 years from now, people are going to be reading their history books, looking back and wondering how this could possibly have happened. And we're seeing it unfold, right in front of our faces, and we all do bear a significant amount of responsibility for it. 

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