The News You Need, Tuesday, July 28th, 2026
Retired Israeli judges tell Trump to intervene in the West Bank, Musk's latest round in his war on truth, Russia's sexual violence against Ukrainian prisoners.
Retired IDF Generals Say the West Bank Will Explode If Trump Doesn’t Rein In Netanyahu
Times of Israel
Palestinians pray inside a mosque that was burned during an attack by Israeli settlers in the West Bank village of Qusra, early in the morning of July 26, 2026. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
Scott: Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and dozens of Israeli generals, admirals and security service heads have made clear that they believe the operations maintained by the Netanyahu government on the West Bank—in which police and IDF units are deployed to back up and protect squatters as they raid villages, torch homes and crops, steal livestock, farm equipment and household possessions, and commit random acts of homicide and mayhem–are on the verge of unleashing a new conflict in the Middle East. Now they have penned a letter to Trump, pleading with him to intervene.
Patrick Chappatte, Le Temps de Genève (2019)
Hundreds of retired IDF generals and colonels urged US President Donald Trump to pressure Israel to crack down on violence against Palestinians by settlers in the West Bank, in a letter published Monday.
The letter comes as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was set to fly to Washington for a meeting with Trump and after a week in which already high settler violence surged after a deadly clash between settlers and Palestinians over the weekend.
“Unless arrested swiftly and decisively, escalating violence in the West Bank is poised to ignite the region and carries severe ramifications for both Israeli security and US regional interests,” wrote Matan Vilnai, a retired major general in the Israel Defense Forces, on behalf of the Commanders for Israel’s Security group.
You can’t name these people. They never existed.
The New Republic
Charles: It is particularly easy to lie after you’ve spent billions of dollars to destroy the idea of truth.
It is easy to forget that as recently as January 28, 2021, Twitter was rational enough to “permanently” ban Donald Trump from its platform after he promoted the attack on the capital, “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
Fifteen months later Twitter accepted Elon Musk’s bid of $44 billion.
Six months after that Musk took control of the platform, on October 27, 2022. A month later he reinstated Trump’s Twitter account.
As soon as he controlled it Musk restored 100,000 previously banned accounts and quickly transformed what he now called X into a sewer of right wing propaganda designed to return Trump to the White House.
Two and a half years after he bought it X agreed to pay Trump $10 million to settle a lawsuit over the nearly two-year-long suspension of his account in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
Thus it was no surprise when Musk repeated his biggest boldfaced lie to the editor of The Economist last week: “Zero died because of DOGE. Zero. Point. Zero.”
As the indefatigable Nick Kristof reported even before Musk’s latest outburst, a Boston University researcher has estimated that the aid cuts have caused more than 750,000 lives worldwide. The British medical journal The Lancet has forecast that at present rates, the aid defunding will cost 9.4 million lives by 2030.
In the New Republic yesterday Greg Sargent and Toby Buckle did an excellent job of unpacking what Musk’s lies to the Economist were really about:
We don’t think Musk intends claims like these to be debated on an empirical level. Rather, Musk is communicating in subterranean tropes that his far-right global audience will instantly find intelligible: He’s advancing the generalized sentiment that due to DOGE cuts, nobody died for whom we need to feel any passing responsibility. Nobody died who’s worthy of our concern.
“They cannot cite a single name of someone who died,” Musk recently posted. “Not a single name!” That’s false, as Kristof demonstrated, and of course it’s absurd to demand single names when we’re talking about enormous numbers of deaths. It’s beyond contestation that USAID’s destruction unleashed fresh humanitarian horrors. But the key event here is Musk continuing to assert otherwise in the face of an escalation of human suffering that’s amply documented: You can’t name these people. They never existed.
As the two of us have detailed, Musk’s rhetoric has grown ominously more oriented around the idea of global race war. Last month, after an immigrant stabbed a white man in Northern Ireland, Musk used his X platform to viciously stoke anti-immigrant anger and helped incite days of far-right riots and pogroms there, often using stark invocations of global racial armageddon to do so.
Musk has elevated eugenicist claims and has even expressly linked the need to protect the white populations of the world—supposedly under siege by nonwhite invasions—to the broader battle to defend “Western civilization.” Indeed, in their great book on Musk’s worldview, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff painstakingly demonstrate that Musk’s conception of the West is deeply “bound up with the survival of white civilization.”
Musk’s “zero died” trope is the latest chapter in this vile story. Even as he was decimating USAID, he explicitly denigrated what he called “civilizational suicidal empathy,” i.e., the idea that if we don’t quickly shrug off all squishy humanitarian sentiments, the West will perish. The USAID cuts, then, were a dry run for the much larger abandonment of responsibility for the civilizational dead weight that may be necessary if and when climate change and/or other problems worsen humanitarian conditions for the global poor in unforeseen ways.
Tellingly, over the weekend, Musk explicitly labeled Beddoes a “traitor to the West” for confronting him with facts about DOGE’s moral crimes. Telling the truth, or even evincing concern, about the humanitarian impact of our actions on the global poor risks aggravating that “civilizational empathy” that so threatens Western civilization, you see. As the West is inseparable from white civilization for Musk, this is tantamount to labeling Beddoes with the white supremacist epithet “race traitor.”
Indeed, if you watch Musk in this interview, as he sits there smugly abusing Beddoes in his edgelordy leather jacket, you can see something remarkable unfolding in real time. As Musk repeats emphatically that “zero died” in the face of obvious contrary evidence, he’s visibly sensing his growing power to communicate with fascistic tropes to like-minded Western- and white-civilizational warriors everywhere.
All this was visible during another big moment in the Economist interview: Musk’s claim that the United Kingdom is slipping into civil war. Musk often describes the U.K. as under criminal and migrant siege, and Beddoes took him to task for it. “You have painted” Europe and the U.K. as “overrun with terrifying Muslim immigrants” and beset with “rape on every corner,” she said acidly.
But Musk stood by his depiction of a Muslim invasion. He insisted a “large and growing” group “whose beliefs are antithetical to western beliefs” had entered the country, predicting it’s only a matter of time until there’s a “reckoning,” which will come when they “try to implement their views.”
🚨 REPORTER: You said civil war is inevitable in Britain.
ELON MUSK: On the current trends, yes.
REPORTER: When’s the last time YOU were in the UK?!
ELON: A few years ago.
REPORTER: I live there. That’s nonsense.
ELON: You live a very closeted existence!
🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/0iuwzTzYEH
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) July 23, 2026
One of us—Toby—lives in the U.K., and can categorically state that Musk’s depiction of the country is complete nonsense. In most major cities you can walk around by yourself late at night without a second thought. The country is palpably safer than it was only a few decades ago, and London would rank among the least violent cities in the U.S.
What’s more, thanks to her empire, Britain has already had centuries of nonwhite, non-Christian immigration. The first curry house opened in 1810. Every generation has seen apocalyptic warnings of immigration unleashing rivers of blood that never materialize. Racist and political violence come almost exclusively from white nativists and the political right. Studies show the areas of the U.K. with the most immigrant settlers have seen the fastest declines in crime.
