Weekly Grounding #108
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
If you’re already subscribed and want to help the publication grow, consider sharing Handful of Earth with a friend.
“Palestinian Child Seeking Aid Tortured in Israeli Military Detention Camp”
The Defense for Children International - Palestine reports on the Israeli torture of Omar Nizar Mahmoud Asfour, a 16-year-old Palestinian boy: “Israeli forces arbitrarily detained and tortured 16-year-old Omar Nizar Mahmoud Asfour for 26 days at Sde Teiman military detention camp, located in southern Israel, after apprehending him near an aid distribution site in Gaza on June 29, according to documentation collected by Defense for Children International - Palestine. Omar was released back to southern Gaza at the Karam Abu Salem crossing on July 24 after enduring solitary confinement, torture, starvation, and deplorable conditions at Sde Teiman.”
After being kidnapped by Israeli Defense Forces forces at an aid distribution site in Gaza, “Omar was…interrogated and ordered to provide details of his family and relatives. Dissatisfied with Omar’s responses, the interrogator subjected Omar to torture. Omar was brought to the roof of the building and tied to a rope, where he was left hanging upside down for an extended period. Later, the interrogator released the rope, causing Omar to plummet to the ground, dropping the height of roughly five floors before the rope became taut again, stopping his fall about half a meter (20 inches) above the ground, where he was left suspended for approximately 20 minutes. The torture caused Omar to urinate, as he was left struggling to breathe and suffocating. ‘It felt as though I was teetering on the brink of death,’ recalled Omar.”
After describing more disturbing details, the report notes that “Torture, the deprivation of a fair and regular trial, and unlawful confinement of a protected person are not only blatant war crimes, but are considered grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute. Israel, as a State party to the Convention against Torture, is legally obligated to prevent, investigate, and prosecute such acts. Instead, its forces continue to carry out systematic torture of Palestinian children with complete impunity. The ongoing failure of the international community to hold Israeli officials accountable enables the continued assault on Palestinian children’s rights, safety, and dignity. Under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Israel is further obligated to ensure that no child is subjected to arbitrary detention or unlawful deprivation of liberty, and that every detained child is treated with respect for their inherent dignity.”
“‘We Can’t Have Greece Become a Playground For IDF Soldiers’: Israeli Tourists Traveling to Greek Islands Met With Pro-Palestine Protests”
Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers, many of whom have engaged in torture and other war crimes, gallivant around Europe on summer vacation. Drop Site News reports that “An Israeli cruise ship making repeated tours of Athens and the Greek islands has been met by protests nearly every time it docks this summer, as Palestine solidarity demonstrators in Greece escalate actions and tactics amid growing anger over Israel’s genocide in Gaza…Israel’s starvation campaign in Gaza that is causing a widening famine—along with Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to invade and ethnically cleanse Gaza City—has only fueled the recent protest actions in Greece. Activists and organizers who spoke to Drop Site News also pointed to growing frustration over what they said is a recurring pattern of Israeli tourist provocations—sometimes involving off-duty IDF soldiers.”
“The original call for a day of mass protest was first made by March to Gaza, Greece, which dubbed it a ‘Day of Action on islands and tourist destinations … Against the genocide of the Palestinian people and their supporters.’ The initiative read in part: ‘As millions of tourists flood the country, let’s make our presence visible and loud. Let's turn islands, beaches, alleys, mountaintops, and shelters into places of solidarity—not relaxation for murdering IDF soldiers. The organized effort to make Greece a “haven” for those who participate or support the slaughter in Palestine will not pass!’”
The article notes that “Greece has long been a popular destination for Israeli tourists who arrive en masse every summer to vacation on the country’s islands. Some 621,000 Israelis visited Greece in 2024, according to data from the Institute of the Greek Tourism Confederation (INSETE), generating 419 million euros in revenue—an increase of 55 percent from 2023. Yet as Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza continues, Israeli tourists in Greece this year are facing a growing backlash.”
“Israeli Government Official Arrested in Nevada in Internet Crimes Against Children Sting”
The Guardian reports that the executive director of the Israel Cyber Directorate was arrested in Las Vegas and subsequently allowed to return to Israel: “Tom Artiom Alexandrovich, 38, faces felony charges of luring a child with a computer for a sex act, alongside several other suspects who were apprehended during the two-week sting operation, the Las Vegas metropolitan police department said in a statement published on Friday. He has since been released from custody on $10,000 bail after an initial court appearance, records show, and returned to Israel.”
Alexandrovich was in the United States to attend a Black Hat cybersecurity conference, about which he wrote: “Two things you can’t escape at Black Hat 2025: the relentless buz [sic] of generative [artificial intelligence] and the sound of Hebrew… in every corridor…The key takeaway? The future of cybersecurity is being written in code, and it seems a significant part of it is being authored in #TelAviv and powered by LLMs. An exciting time to be in the field!”
The article reports that “Nevada’s internet crime against children taskforce helmed the operation which resulted in the arrests of Alexandrovich and seven other men in the city of Henderson, which is near Las Vegas. All of the suspects believed they were meeting minors when undercover officers instead confronted and arrested them, police said.” The Las Vegas police report on Alexandrovich reveals that he also met with FBI and NSA officials while in the United States prior to his arrest.
“Las Vegas Shouldn’t Exist”
Speaking of Las Vegas, at Unherd
describes her view of the city “as human folly, a mistake, an aberration, and most importantly an environmental catastrophe.”“Consumption is one of the engines fuelling the Vegas that many people come to the city to experience. The year…[I was] there, the hotels, casinos and restaurants alone were creating over half a million tons of garbage a year—enough to fill an American football field 10 metres high every day…Despite the pretence that ‘much of our waste gets recycled,’ most of it ends up in landfill. All across Nevada, the stuff we no longer need or know what to do with has been sent into the desert to be incinerated, buried, left to rot, decompose or, in the case of plastics and forever chemicals, left there to sit out the end of time. It isn’t just the ‘normal’ waste—the Styrofoam cups, chicken bones, water bottles and candy wrappers—that are exiled to the desert near Vegas: there is plenty of the more insidious stuff, the stuff which decomposes over hundreds if not thousands of years.”
Pocock writes that “During the Fifties, Vegas promoted what it called ‘Atomic Tourism,’ with one casino owner declaring that the nuclear blasts were the best thing to happen to Las Vegas. Guests would stay up all night to wait for the spectacular desert sunrise and sip their final highball as nuclear bombs were detonated at dawn. Bikini-clad women jostled for the title of Miss Atomic Bomb. The winner modelled a bathing suit with ruffles up the front emulating the famous shape of a mushroom cloud. It is still possible to experience a simulacrum of all this in the National Atomic Testing Museum, where for a few dollars you can experience your very own imitation bomb blast or learn how to survive an atomic explosion by going beyond the basic ‘duck and cover’ position. Gone are the days when the Rat Pack and fellow cocktail drinkers would watch atomic testing from the roof of a casino as a form of entertainment, but we are still living in the Atomic Age. The fallout is all around us. Those who grew up downwind of the bomb blasts do not need any of this simulated for them because they are living with the cancers, the deaths and the birth defects. For most people today, the Atomic Age is less of a spectacle or a beauty pageant and more of a slow, poisonous drip, drip, drip.”
“The Crisis of the University Started Long Before Trump”
At
, argues that “The University of Chicago is in crisis. Under extraordinary financial strain, it has diminished its faculty-student ratio and hired hundreds of ‘lecturers’: teachers whom it pays little and whom it does not expect to do research. It has deliberately driven down the percentage of undergraduate tuition that it devotes to actually teaching undergraduates. This summer it proposed to ‘merge’ (read: ‘close’) departments; send some students online—or perhaps put them on buses—to study at other institutions; and teach some languages via ChatGPT. It is freezing budgets, closing academic units, slashing doctoral education, and contemplating the use of restricted endowment payouts to support functions not covered in the gift agreements.”“It is tempting to ascribe this betrayal of implied contract—with students, parents, and donors—to the pressure that the Trump administration is placing on higher education,” Ando writes. “If this were in fact what is happening, the university’s actions would be lamentable but necessary. But that would be false. The effect of the administration’s moves on university operations—in Chicago’s case—is likely to be small. The true problem is the debased ideals of the university’s leadership and the extraordinary debt it has taken on in pursuit of them. The university’s trustees and leaders view it preeminently as a tax-free technology incubator, and its debt load is so great that it is abandoning ideals it once held dear in order to sustain that goal. We are simply choosing not to be a university.”
“Speaking Reassurance to Power”
At Harper’s Magazine, Pankaj Mishra argues that “A professionalized, even bureaucratized, and politically neutered literary-intellectual elite long ago shredded whatever countercultural aura the vocation had acquired over centuries; its compromised and enfeebled state is more vividly revealed today by the demons of sadism and stupidity rampaging across the United States.”
He offers a scathing critique of writers and intellectuals in the postwar United States: “For all its claims to superior virtue, the liberal American intelligentsia manifests very little of the courage and dignity it has expected from artists and thinkers in less fortunate societies, as hooded and masked officials disappear students for the crime of writing school-newspaper op-eds and liking social-media posts. Dissenters from far-right orthodoxies in the United States did not face such a concerted onslaught even in the early Fifties, when, threatened by the House Un-American Activities Committee, pursued by the FBI, and canceled by the Library of Congress, Thomas Mann departed the arsenal of democracy for Switzerland. Today, the ‘disgusting exhibition,’ as Mann saw the witch hunts of McCarthyism, ‘of primitive Puritanism, hatred, fear, corruption and self-righteousness’ is much more extensive. The destruction of U.S. institutions in order to suppress criticism of Israeli war crimes speaks to a pathology of self-mutilation that is striking even when measured against Stalin’s and Mao’s regimes (which, though infinitely more brutal, cared, above all, about projecting an image of national autonomy and sovereignty).”
Mishra observes that “More than seven hundred writers signed a letter endorsing Kamala Harris. No one among them attempted, against the genocidal foreign policy of a senile president and his loyal deputies, the type of mild but prominent dissent voiced by Robert Lowell in an open letter to Lyndon Johnson that the New York Times published on its front page on June 3, 1965: ‘I . . . can only follow our present foreign policy with the greatest dismay and distrust.’ Resistance liberalism yet again demonstrated its limits when Anne Applebaum, one of the most voluble heralds of global ‘autocracy,’ took a strict vow of silence over the American-Israeli campaign of extermination—perhaps because she had once argued, in an article titled ‘Kill the Messenger,’ that assassination was a legitimate strategy against Palestinian journalists.”
He concludes: “It will be hard, though not impossible, for the beneficiaries of the remarkable American bonanza of grants, fellowships, and awards to break out of their elitist self-isolation and turn into dissidents. At the same time, adaptation to a regime of insolent cruelty and mendacity would require an amount of shitty cynicism that is fatal to intellectual and imaginative work. Too many consciences will be torn and shaken. American intellectual and literary culture may or may not abandon its deference to power and wealth and go to that necessary war against itself in order to salvage its dignity and purpose. But there is some cause for hope in the certainty that the best and brightest in the American intelligentsia won’t go looking for crumbs from the presidential table. Spurning breezy despair and jovial resignation, they might even assume the usual condition of writers elsewhere: a bitter but spiritually liberating powerlessness.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.