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.”⁠^[1] 

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.⁠^[2]

These stories, and those of far too many others who struggled to survive, were the result of a deliberate 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. 

* * *

Israeli forces killing clearly marked journalists is nothing new. In 2018, following a series of protests that came to be known as The Great March of Return, a UN commission “found reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli snipers shot at journalists, health workers, children and persons with disabilities, knowing they were clearly recognizable as such."⁠^[3]

And as seen in the case of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American⁠^[4] and 25-year reporter for Al Jazeera Media Network⁠^[5] who was shot to death in 2022 by Israeli forces⁠^[6] while "clearly identifiable" as a journalist,⁠^[7] those deaths, even when investigated by international bodies, are often met with impunity and inaction.

As this article will show, this pattern has continued throughout the current conflict, in which, according to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, “More journalists have reportedly been killed over a four-week period than in any conflict in at least three decades.”⁠^[8] The impunity with which these killings are carried out is another constant.

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^[9] 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.”⁠^[10]

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.⁠^[11]

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.⁠^[12] 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).⁠^[13]

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.⁠^[14] 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."⁠^[15]

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.⁠^[16] 

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.”⁠^[17]  Another 3.5% of employers “adopt arbitration procedures simply by announcing that these procedures have been incorporated into the organization’s employment policies.”⁠^[18]  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.⁠^[19] 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.”⁠^[20]

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,”⁠^[21] uses BWC footage to resolve complaints against officers.⁠^[22] 

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

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