Law, Power, and Justice

THEY DON’T GO INTO POLITICS AND BECOME CORRUPT, THEY GO INTO POLITICS BECAUSE THEY ARE CORRUPT.

New Year’s Day, Thursday 1 January 2026

Audio diary kept by Hanya Aljamal, a 28-year-old Palestinian living in Gaza.  She, her parents, and five siblings share a tiny apartment.  Their home in southern Gaza was destroyed.

“Foreign journalists…are banned by Israel from reporting freely from Gaza.”

After they found out that their childhood home had been destroyed…“..it took my dad and my mom almost a couple of weeks at least to stop with the incessant crying.”

“…we’ve been hearing endless strings of explosions for the past 48 hours.”

“No one, no one is taking real steps to end it.”

“It’s really hard to have faith in humanity.  It’s getting really, really, hard.”

“We are terrified, me and my family.  We already lost almost everything we own.”

“…we would probably be fully homeless once this is over, if this is ever over, which is seeming less likely every day now.”

From her balcony, she watched one of her neighbors, an old man, growing plants in his tiny garden.  Hanya described it as “the purest form of resistance.”

“…I don’t know,” she said once.  “Maybe there’s hope.”

“I almost lost my mind.”

“How much is enough?”

“This is how the world sees us, the way the world would always see us.  Replaceable.  Collateral damage.  And it breaks my heart.”

“I am more terrified of grief than I am of death of losing them, being lost.”

“The old man…cultivating in his tiny garden had to dig up most of the vegetation…”

“I miss not feeling fundamentally broken, and unreal.”

“I struggle to feel any genuine hopefulness about not just Gaza but the general state of the world.”

Recommended Reading

Bamio, Lazaro and Amy Schoenfeld Walker (12/31/26) “Trump’s Tangled Web…” New York Times.  Donald Trump is amassing an increasingly impressive fortune for himself and his family using the federal government as his instrument.  So, the government is not just a way of keeping himself from being prosecuted, but a way of arranging deals and scams and payoffs.  There has never been a more scandal ridden administration in the history of the country.  It is a dismal way of starting the new world. 

      I used to tell my students that men didn’t go into politics and then become corrupt.  They went into politics because they were corrupt.  And here we are. As Hanya said:  “No one, no one is taking real steps to end it.”