The encomiums have flowed voluminously for Henry Kissinger, and there have been some condemnations too. But even in the latter, little attention has been paid to his efforts to prevent peace from breaking out in the Mideast — efforts which helped cause the 1973 Arab–Israeli War and set in stone the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This underappreciated aspect of Kissinger’s career adds tens of thousands of lives to his body count, which is in the millions.

Kissinger, who died at 100 on Wednesday, served in the U.S. government from 1969 to 1977, during the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations. He began as Nixon’s national security adviser. Then, in Nixon’s second term, he was appointed secretary of state, a position he held on to after Ford became president following Nixon’s resignation.

In June 1967, two years before the start of Nixon’s presidency, Israel had achieved a gigantic military victory in the Six-Day War. Israel attacked Egypt and occupied Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, and, following modest responses from Jordan and Syria, also took over the West Bank and the Golan Heights. 

In the following years, the ultimate fallout from the war — in particular, what, if any, of the new territory Israel would be able to keep — was still fluid. In 1968, the Soviets made what appeared to be quite sincere efforts to collaborate with the U.S. on a peace plan for the region.

The Soviets proposed a solution based on United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. Israel would withdraw from the territory it had conquered. However, there would not be a Palestinian state. Moreover, Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Arab–Israeli War would not return to Israel; rather, they would be resettled with compensation in Arab countries. Most importantly, the Soviets would pressure their Arab client states to accept this. 

This was significant because at this point, many Arab countries, Egypt in particular, were allies of the Soviets and relied on them for arms supplies. Hosni Mubarak, who later became Egypt’s president and/or dictator for 30 years, started out as a pilot in the Egyptian air force and received training in Moscow and Kyrgyzstan, which was a Soviet republic at the time.

When Nixon took office in 1969, William Rogers, his first secretary of state, took the Soviet stance seriously. Rogers negotiated with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the U.S., for most of the year. This produced what American diplomat David A. Korn, then assigned to Tel Aviv, Israel, described as “a comprehensive and detailed U.S. proposal for a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.” 

One person prevented this from going forward: Henry Kissinger. Backstage in the Nixon administration, he worked assiduously to prevent peace.

This was not due to any great personal affection felt by Kissinger for Israel and its expansionist goals. Kissinger, while Jewish, was happy to work for Nixon, perhaps the most volubly antisemitic president in U.S. history, which is saying something. (“What the Christ is the matter with the Jews?” Nixon once wondered in an Oval Office soliloquy. He then answered his own question, explaining, “I suppose it’s because most of them are psychiatrists.”)

Rather, Kissinger perceived all the world through the prism of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Any settlement at the time would require the involvement of the Soviets, and hence was unacceptable to him. At a period when it appeared in public that an agreement with the Soviets might be imminent, Kissinger told an underling — as he himself recorded in his memoir “White House Years” — that was not going to happen because “we did not want a quick success [emphasis in the original].” In the same book, Kissinger explained that the Soviet Union later agreed to principles even more favorable to Israel, so favorable that Kissinger himself didn’t understand why the Soviets acceded to them. Nevertheless, Kissinger wrote, “the principles quickly found their way into the overcrowded limbo of aborted Middle East schemes — as I had intended.”

The results were catastrophic for all involved. Anwar el-Sadat, then Egypt’s president, announced in 1971 that the country would make peace with Israel based on conditions in line with Rogers’s efforts. However, he also explicitly said that a refusal of Israel to return Sinai would mean war.

On October 6, 1973, it did. Egypt and Syria attacked occupied Sinai and the Golan Heights, respectively. Their initial success stunned Israeli officials. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was convinced Israel might be conquered. Moreover, Israel was running out of war matériel and desperately needed to be resupplied by the U.S.

Kissinger made sure America dragged its feet, both because he wanted Israel to understand who was ultimately in charge and because he did not want to anger the oil-rich Arab states. His strategy, as another top diplomat put it, was to “let Israel come out ahead, but bleed.”

You can read this in Kissinger’s own words in the records of internal deliberations now available on the State Department website. On October 9, Kissinger told his fellow high-level officials, “My assessment is a costly victory [for Israel] without a disaster is the best.”

The U.S. then did send huge amounts of weaponry to Israel, which it used to beat back Egypt and Syria. Kissinger looked upon the outcome with satisfaction. In another high-level meeting, on October 19, he celebrated that “everyone knows in the Middle East that if they want a peace they have to go through us. Three times they tried through the Soviet Union, and three times they failed.”

The cost to humans was quite high. Over 2,500 members of the Israeli military died. 10,000-20,000 were killed on the Arab side. This is in line with Kissinger’s belief — recorded in “The Final Days” by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — that soldiers are “dumb, stupid animals to be used” as pawns in foreign policy.

After the war, Kissinger returned to his strategy of obstructing any peaceful settlement. In another of his memoirs, he recorded that in 1974, just before Nixon resigned, Nixon told him to “cut off all military deliveries to Israel until it agreed to a comprehensive peace.” Kissinger quietly stalled for time, Nixon left office, and it didn’t come up with Ford as president.

There’s much more to this ugly story, all available at your local library. It can’t be said to be the worst thing that Kissinger ever did — but as you remember the extraordinary bill of indictment for him, make sure to leave a little room for it.

The post On Top of Everything Else, Henry Kissinger Prevented Peace in the Middle East appeared first on The Intercept.

Israel has been widely condemned for its brutal response to the October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas. With the coming expiration of the ceasefire, this will only become more vociferous. But many U.S. supporters of Israel have responded to the criticism with a question: What else is the beleaguered country supposed to do?

The answer is simple. Israel should do what it has never done before: agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state, based on international law.

This straightforward statement is scarce in mainstream U.S. political culture. In the speeches of politicians and in newspaper op-eds, it’s a matter of faith that Israel has always yearned for peace but has been constantly rebuffed by the Palestinians. The Palestinians, according to this narrative, prefer holding onto a dream of destroying Israel. 

This is not quite 180 degrees the opposite of reality, but close. In the actual world outside of high-level American political rhetoric, Israel could have had peace at many times in the past 75 years. However, such a peace would have required Israel giving up most of the Palestinian land — specifically, Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem — it conquered in the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel has always preferred conflict with stateless Palestinians to that.

Amos Malka, one-time head of Israeli military intelligence, explained it straightforwardly in 2004. “It is possible to reach an agreement,” he said, “under the following conditions: a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and sovereignty on the Temple Mount; 97 percent of the West Bank plus exchanges of territory in the ratio of 1:1 with respect to the remaining territory; some kind of formula that includes the acknowledgement of Israel’s responsibility for the refugee problem and a willingness to accept 20,000-30,000 refugees.”

In polite circles of U.S. power, these facts are considered preposterous. Anyone describing them exiles themselves from serious discussion of the issue. It’s similar to the situation before the invasion of Iraq, when there was uniform agreement across the political spectrum that Iraq possessed so-called weapons of mass destruction. Any claims to the contrary were seen as self-evidently ludicrous, as ludicrous as now saying that Israel is a huge obstacle to peace.

From the Beginning

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not unfathomable. It’s a fight over land.

The British Peel Commission was tasked with investigating violent clashes between Arabs and Jews in Mandatory Palestine. It proposed in 1937 that the historic area of Palestine be partitioned into a Jewish state, making up about 17 percent of the area, and an Arab state, granted 75 percent. The remainder, including Jerusalem, would be under intentional supervision.

In 1947, following World War II and the Holocaust, the United Nations approved another partition plan. This gave Israel-to-be 56 percent of the area, and a Palestinian nation 43 percent.

In the standard U.S. story, the Zionist movement accepted both two-state solutions, and the Arab world rejected both. In fact, neither side accepted either. 

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not unfathomable. It’s a fight over land.

The Arab side formally rejected the plans. The Zionist movement rejected the specifics of the Peel proposal and accepted the U.N. plan — but only in public. The founders of Israel privately agreed that once the country came into being, they would consolidate their power and then take over as much additional land as possible. David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister, put it this way in a famous 1937 letter to his son: “A Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning. … The establishment of a state, even if only on a portion of the land, is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country.” 

In any case, the U.N. adoption of the partition plan in November 1947 led to a moderate civil war between the Jewish and Arab populations. Then during the Arab–Israeli War of 1948 following Israel’s declaration of independence, the new country conquered 78 percent of Palestine, leaving 22 percent in Arab hands. Egypt controlled Gaza, and Jordan controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Palestinians experienced the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” in which 700,000 people were expelled or fled, and 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed.

Subsequent history shows Ben-Gurion and other Israeli leaders meant what they said. In 1956, Israel joined with France and the U.K. to invade Gaza and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, though it was ultimately forced to withdraw by the Eisenhower administration. In the 1967 war, Israel took over Sinai and Gaza again, as well as the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights in Syria.

Israel would eventually be forced to return the Sinai Peninsula following the 1973 Arab–Israeli War but has held onto everything else since.

The Early Years

It’s generally believed in the U.S. and Europe that after Israel’s founding, the Arab world spent decades devoted to destroying it. This is not so. There were absolutely factions in Arab politics who wished to reverse the establishment of Israel, and a great deal of blood-curdling Arab rhetoric on this subject. But various leaders of the relevant countries at various times — including Syria, Egypt, and Jordan — showed they understood the balance of forces and were willing to consider a compromise.

However, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary in 1949 that Abba Eban, the Israeli ambassador to the U.N., “sees no need to run after peace. The armistice is sufficient for us; if we run after peace, the Arabs will demand a price of us: borders or refugees or both. Let us wait a few years.” That year Ben-Gurion also told his cabinet, as paraphrased by British–Israeli historian Avi Shlaim: “With the passage of time, the world would get used to Israel’s existing borders, and forget about U.N. borders and the U.N. idea of an independent Palestinian state.” 

The U.S. pushed Israel to participate in a peace conference in Switzerland during the middle of 1949. The Arab position was that Israel’s borders should be not the armistice lines giving it 78 percent of Palestine, but the partition plan’s borders granting it 56 percent. The Arab participants also demanded that refugees from areas designated for an Arab state be able to return to their homes. Israel rejected both concepts. One of the Israeli delegates privately noted that his country’s government “think they can achieve peace without paying any price, maximal or minimal.” A cable from a U.S. State Department delegate asserted, “There never has been a time [during negotiations] when a generous and far-sighted attitude on the part of the Jews would not have unlocked peace. … As an advocate of the new state I hope they come to it eventually. Otherwise there will be no peace in the Middle East.” 

The Emergence of the PLO

The Palestinian Liberation Organization was founded in 1964 and represented the increasing coherence of Palestinian national consciousness.

Following the 1967 war, the international consensus gradually came to be that peace would require the creation of a Palestinian state. At the same time, the PLO accepted internally that the overall war was over, and they had lost: They were therefore willing to make peace in return for a state on the 22 percent of Palestine constituting Gaza and the West Bank. A 1976 draft resolution at the U.N. Security Council called for this and stated that Israel should “withdraw from all the Arab territories occupied since June 1967.” The PLO supported the resolution. Every country on the Security Council except the U.S. — including the U.K., France, Italy, Japan, and Sweden — voted for it. But Israel had no interest in it, and the U.S. vetoed it. Instead of encouraging further moderation from the PLO, Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 with — according to Zeev Maoz, an Israeli historian who served in the military during three of the country’s wars — several goals. The first was to destroy the PLO and hence Palestinian nationalism.

Bill Clinton’s Catastrophic Failure

In 1981, the PLO formally endorsed a Soviet proposal calling for a Palestinian state and “the security and sovereignty of all states of the region including those of Israel.” In 1988, the PLO officially recognized Israel and accepted its right to exist in peace and security.

Israel still had no interest in the establishment of a Palestinian state. And by the beginning of the Clinton administration in 1993, the PLO was not what it once had been. It was headquartered in Tunis, and little respected by younger Palestinians who had led the first intifada of the late 1980s. Then the PLO’s leader, Yasser Arafat, made the unfortunate decision to back Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War.

The PLO’s weakness made Arafat eager to accept a terrible deal in the 1993 Oslo Accords. While they were greeted with rapture in the U.S. media, there was nothing in them that would necessarily lead to the creation of a Palestinian state and peace. Indeed, one of the signatories, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, soon explicitly explained, “We do not accept the Palestinian goal of an independent Palestinian state between Israel and Jordan. We believe there is a separate Palestinian entity short of a state.” 

What happened then was exactly what anyone paying attention would anticipate: The PLO essentially took over security for Israel in some 18 percent of occupied territories — Israel solely controlled about 60 percent and shared responsibility for the remainder — and enriched itself, while the occupation and Palestinian misery continued unabated. But by the end of President Bill Clinton’s second term in the summer of 2000, he was eager to leave a legacy other than his affair with Monica Lewinsky. He cajoled Arafat to come to Camp David to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, in hopes of conjuring a conflict-ending agreement.

The Palestinian attitude was that they had already made a gigantic compromise by accepting just the 22 percent of historic Palestine for their state. They were willing to compromise still more — but not much more.

Barak had no understanding of this. At Camp David, he offered the Palestinians what were essentially three disconnected bantustans — i.e., the equivalent of the separate black “homelands” in apartheid South Africa — in the West Bank, with Israel occupying and controlling the border with Jordan for some long period of time. Clinton tried to pressure Arafat to accept this; he did not. Long afterward, Shlomo Ben-Ami, a key Israeli negotiator at the talks, said, “Camp David was not the missed opportunity for the Palestinians, and if I were a Palestinian, I would have rejected Camp David as well.”

Clinton had promised Arafat that he would not blame him if the talks failed. He then reneged after the summit ended. Nonetheless, the Israelis and Palestinians continued to negotiate through the fall and narrowed their differences. 

Clinton came up with what he called parameters for a two-state solution in December 2000. Several weeks afterward, Clinton proclaimed, “Both Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat have now accepted these parameters as the basis for further efforts. Both have expressed some reservations.”

In the 22 years since, Bill Clinton has lied over and over again about what happened, claiming that Arafat was the one who rejected a settlement.

The Israelis and the Palestinians kept talking in late January 2001 in Taba, Egypt. It was not the Palestinians but Barak who terminated the discussions on January 27, a few weeks before Israeli elections. The negotiators issued a joint statement that the two sides had “never been closer to reaching an agreement and it is thus our shared belief that the remaining gaps could be bridged with the resumption of negotiations.”

This was in fact true: The records of the Taba talks show the Israelis and Palestinians had come agonizingly close to specific solutions to what the territory of a Palestinian state would be and whether and how any Palestinian refugees could return to Israel, with less progress on who would control which parts of Jerusalem.

But Barak was defeated by Ariel Sharon, who did not want a Palestinian state and did not restart the talks. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared that the Clinton parameters “are not binding on the new government to be formed in Israel.”

Clinton then made a fateful, disastrous decision. In the 22 years since, he has lied over and over again about what happened, claiming that Arafat was the one who rejected a settlement. This has convinced both Israelis and Americans that Clinton made every effort to give Palestinians a state. But it was impossible, because — in what became a standard formulation — there was “no partner for peace” on the Palestinian side. Hillary Clinton, who was elected to the Senate in 2000 and later became secretary of state, also joined in this key deception.

The Arab Peace Plan

In 2002, Saudi Arabia proposed a solution to the conflict known as the Arab Peace Initiative. The API called for a settlement along the standard lines that had been known for decades: an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories with some small adjustments, a fair division of Jerusalem, and “a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem.” The 22 members of the Arab League endorsed it, as did the 57-state Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Israel, with Sharon leading the country, simply ignored it.

The Olmert Offer

The two sides again came close after Sharon suffered a debilitating stroke and Arafat died. Ehud Olmert became the Israeli prime minister. Olmert was right-wing but had become convinced that Israel had to settle the conflict with Palestinians for its own safety. 

In the standard U.S. narrative, Olmert made a wonderful offer to Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, and Abbas either rejected it or never responded. In reality, Olmert and Abbas held 36 secret meetings between 2006 and 2008. 

However, Olmert, under investigation for accepting bribes, resigned from his position in 2008. He later said, “If I had remained prime minister for another four to six months, I believe it would have been possible to reach an agreement. The gaps were small.” 

Olmert was succeeded as prime minister by Benjamin Netanyahu, who has consistently opposed a Palestinian state throughout his career and had no interest in continuing the talks with Abbas.

Lost Opportunities With Hamas

In the U.S., Hamas is considered anathema, for understandable reasons. Its original 1988 charter is explicitly antisemitic and calls for the obliteration of Israel. (A new Hamas charter was issued in 2017 and states that “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion.”)

However, there have long been clear signs that factions within Hamas were moderating and open to long-term agreements with Israel. In 1997, Khaled Mashal, then the top Hamas leader, offered a 30-year ceasefire to Israel. Israel did not respond — but did immediately try to assassinate Mashal in Jordan.

In 2004, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’s chief religious leader, called for a 10-year truce with Israel if it returned to its pre-1967 borders. Israel assassinated him two months later.

In 2006, Hamas won Palestinian elections over the PLO-affiliated Fatah. The new Palestinian prime minister, Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh, wrote secretly to President George W. Bush. Haniyeh told Bush, “We are so concerned about stability and security in the area that we don’t mind having a Palestinian state in the 1967 border and offering a truce for many years.” Haniyeh also wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post, in which he said Palestinians priorities “included resolution of the refugee issue from 1948; reclaiming all lands occupied in 1967; and stopping Israeli attacks.” The Bush administration did not respond.

Around the same time, Mashal said Hamas would not oppose the Arab Peace Initiative. An Israeli spokesman responded that this was irrelevant “verbal gymnastics.”

In 2009, Efraim Halevy, the former head of Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, wrote that Hamas has recognized “its ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future,” but “Israel, for reasons of its own,” was not interested in such a discussion.

The same year, the U.S. Institute of Peace, a think tank funded by the federal government, reported that Hamas had “sent repeated signals that it may be ready to begin a process of coexisting with Israel.”

There are many more examples of this, along with Israeli disinterest demonstrated in the most extreme ways possible. In 2012, according to an Israeli peace activist, the head of Hamas’s military wing had become convinced that Palestinians should negotiate a long-term truce with Israel. On the same day Ahmed Jabari, Hamas’s military chief, was reviewing a draft proposal for such a truce, Israel assassinated him.

It is, of course, possible that this has all been a PR operation by Hamas, and that it has been making the same calculation as the Zionist movement originally did — i.e., that it could accept a partition of Palestine and then later expand to take the whole thing. But given the relative power of the two sides, this seems unlikely — and even if true, largely irrelevant.

Where Things Stand Now

It’s true that it may now be, from a political standpoint, impossible for Israel to make peace. Thanks to decades of nationalist propaganda, most left-of-center Israelis believed even before October 7 that there was no way to make peace with Palestinians. Meanwhile, right-wing nationalists and religious conservatives simply want to keep the West Bank and so wouldn’t make peace even if they thought it were possible. 

Now, after last month’s shocking Hamas assault, the situation appears insoluble. Any Israeli leader who tried to do what’s necessary for a two-state solution, especially withdrawing settlers from the West Bank, would face the possibility of a revolt from a faction of the Israeli military and would personally be in great physical danger.

Nevertheless, we are where we are. What hope there is lies in the fact that the world — at least, the world minus the U.S., Israel, and the tiny island of Nauru — recognizes the incredible urgency of peace. The appalling suffering of Palestinians remains what it has been for 75 years: a sanguineous wound, both literally and metaphorically, at the center of the Middle East. If it is never healed, we will continually face the possibility of regional or even larger wars. Long ago, James Baldwin observed that “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” We don’t know if this horrendous tragedy can be ended, but if it can be, the first thing Americans and everyone else have to do is face reality.

The post All the Times Israel Has Rejected Peace With Palestinians appeared first on The Intercept.

The Israeli government narrative surrounding the Palestinian prisoners being released during this temporary ceasefire is both insidious and dishonest. Interior Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has banned Palestinians from celebrating their release. “My instructions are clear: there are to be no expressions of joy,” he said. “Expressions of joy are equivalent to backing terrorism, victory celebrations give backing to those human scum, for those Nazis.” He told Israeli police to deploy an “iron fist” to enforce his edict.

The Netanyahu government and its supporters have promoted a narrative that these prisoners are all hardened terrorists who committed violent crimes. This assertion relies on a farcical “Alice in Wonderland”-inspired logic of convicting them by fiat in public before any trial, even the sham trials to which Palestinians are routinely subjected. Israel released a list of the names with alleged crimes they committed. And who is making these allegations? A military that acts as a brutal occupation force against Palestinians in the West Bank.

The vast majority of the 300 Palestinian prisoners proposed for release by Israel are teenage boys. According to the list, 124 of the prisoners are under the age of 18, including a 15-year-old girl, and many of the 146 who are 18 years old turned so in Israeli prisons. According to the definitions laid out in the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, these Palestinians were children when they were arrested by Israel. 

Of the 300 names Israel proposed for potential release, 233 of them have not been convicted of any crimes; they are categorized simply as “under arrest.” Police and prosecutors all over the world make allegations later proven false during a fair trial. The Israeli narrative promotes the fiction that these Palestinians are in the middle of some sort of fair judicial proceeding in which they will eventually be tried in a fair and impartial process. This is a complete, verifiable farce. Palestinians are not prosecuted in civil courts; they are tried in military courts. They often are denied access to lawyers and to purported evidence against them, and are regularly held in isolation for extreme periods and subjected to other forms of abuse. Israel is the only “developed” country in the world that routinely tries children in military courts, and its system has been repeatedly criticized and denounced by major international human rights organizations and institutions.

Palestinians are not prosecuted in civil courts; they are tried in military courts.

If, as Israel alleges, these people have committed violent crimes, particularly against civilians, then Israel should give them full rights to due process, to see the alleged evidence against them, and they should be tried in civilian courts with the same rights afforded Israeli defendants. That would also mean allowing Palestinians who do commit acts of political violence, particularly against the military forces of a violent occupation, to raise the context and legality of the Israeli occupation as part of their defense. Israel is asking the world to believe that these 300 people are all dangerous terrorists, yet it has built a kangaroo military court system for Palestinians that magically churns out a nearly 100 percent conviction rate. All of this from a country that constantly promotes itself as the only democracy in the Middle East.

Palestinians on this list are from the occupied West Bank and have lived their entire lives under an apartheid regime. Palestinians taken by Israel, including some on the list of prisoners proposed for release, have certainly committed violent acts. But to pretend that the context of this violence is irrelevant is as absurd as it is unjust, given the appalling conditions Palestinians have lived under for decades. Contrast this to the widespread impunity that governs the actions of violent Israeli settlers who mercilessly target Palestinians in an effort to expel them from their homes.

All nations should be judged by how they treat the least powerful, not the most powerful or only those from a certain religion or ethnicity. This is why many leading civil liberties lawyers in the U.S. opposed the use of Guantánamo Bay prison and military tribunals and continue to oppose U.S. laws or rules that deny the accused a fundamental right to a proper defense.

The post Israel’s Insidious Narrative About Palestinian Prisoners appeared first on The Intercept.

In both 2021 and 2022, I wrote a Thanksgiving article listing 10 things for which Americans should be grateful. Now I have 10 more things, 21 through 30, for which we can give thanks this holiday.

Scientific studies have found that focusing on gratitude doesn’t just make you more pleasant to be around. It’s good for you, physically and psychologically. It even makes you sleep better.

One thing for which I’m personally grateful is that I can get away with writing pieces like this. I’m actually paid money to do it, which I then exchange for broccoli seeds. (See No. 3 below.) Did you know there are approximately 137,600 individual seeds in one pound of broccoli seeds? Please write to my editors and tell them how much you value this kind of information, so I can continue producing these pieces and buying broccoli seeds indefinitely.

References to the First Thanksgiving

The “first Thanksgiving” took place in 1621, when 90 Wampanoag and 52 English settlers came together in present-day Massachusetts to celebrate a successful harvest by the colonists — one made possible by the Wampanoag sharing their knowledge. The English always fondly remembered this assistance, although not so fondly that they didn’t kill 40 percent of the Wampanoag later in the 17^th century and then sell many surviving Wampanoag into slavery.

For this reason, positive references to the first Thanksgiving are bleakly funny. For instance, Yale academics Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian are big supporters of the Trump administration’s Abraham Accords. In the midst of the current Israeli assault on Gaza, they just organized an attempt in New Haven, Connecticut, to revive the agreements between Israel and various Arab states. As they describe it, “Yale hosted an Arab-Israeli diplomatic dialogue on campus that harkens to the first Thanksgiving, a dialogue that promoted harmony across cultural divides.”

You can imagine how excited people across the Mideast will be to learn they are playing the role of Native Americans circa 1620 and what this portends for their bright future ahead. With leaders as wise and self-aware as Sonnenfeld and Tian, we are surely on the right course.

Inverse Vaccines

Vaccines prime your immune system to recognize bacteria or viruses as foreign bodies to be destroyed. But humanity also suffers from autoimmune disorders, such as Type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis, in which our immune system mistakenly believes some of our own cells are foreign, and so attacks them.

Right now, there are promising “inverse vaccines” that remove the immune system’s conviction that the relevant tissue is its enemy. This kind of human creativity and intelligence makes me want to run up to the scientists responsible and embrace them. Then I will awkwardly stand nearby so I end up in pictures taken of them when they win a bunch of prizes.

The Health Smoothie

I have a family member whose blood pressure was much too high, even though they’re on medication. So I started making them a daily smoothie with every food I could find that reportedly can reduce hypertension: broccoli sprouts, moringa powder, flax seeds, and blueberries. 

The results were dramatic. Their systolic blood pressure number dropped quickly by about 40 points. Their blood pressure is now so low that their doctor may take them off some of their prescription drugs. Moreover, some of these ingredients also appear to have cancer-suppressive properties. Don’t take it from me; take it from researchers at Johns Hopkins.

I would like to become the world’s most peculiar dictator and force everyone to drink this every day. But there’s a problem with my potential reign of terror: Broccoli sprouts are hard to find in stores and expensive, about $5 per daily dose. The good news is that you can buy broccoli seeds and easily grow your own at home for one-tenth the cost. Please contact me if you’d like to have an intense, detailed conversation on this subject.

Flaco

Flaco is a Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from Manhattan’s Central Park Zoo last February after a lifetime of captivity. Zoo personnel initially tried to recapture him but failed, and he’s been living in the 843-acre park ever since (with a short detour to the Lower East Side). I like to imagine him belting out “Free Bird” as he swoops around his new domain. 

Flaco appears extremely wise, but owl brains only weigh two grams and have limited processing power. However, he is strikingly beautiful. If you are a tourist visiting New York who sees Flaco, remember that while he is one of the city’s many celebrities, he is also just a Eurasian eagle-owl like any other Eurasian eagle-owl. Please try to be cool and don’t hassle him.

Oral Histories

Regular history concentrates on nations and kings and therefore misses 99.9 percent of most people’s experience of being alive. On the other hand, oral histories capture what normal humans think of as they live through shattering catastrophes. It’s generally less about shifting geopolitical alliances and more about starving and/or having severe diarrhea. 

For instance, if you want to understand World War II, skip the History Channel and try the Nobel Prize-winning work of Svetlana Alexievich. Her oral histories “The Unwomanly Face of War” and “Last Witnesses” will convince you that war is an extremely bad idea that should be avoided at almost any cost.

Siblings

I have one older sister, plus a longtime friend whom we recently forcibly incorporated into our family without asking. We decided that, while he may not be genetically related to us, we are all spiritually and intellectually related and he should be our brother. Whether this adoption turns out to be a positive thing for him remains to be seen, but it’s too late for him to do anything about it now.

My sister supported this despite the fact she felt one brother, me, was already too many brothers. During family gatherings, she prefers to quietly read a book or teach herself Hungarian via her phone’s Duolingo app. But I have A LOT ON MY MIND that I need to interrupt whatever she’s doing to tell her. I suspect our family’s future will involve her and our new brother forming an alliance against me.

The point here is that siblings are wonderful because they’re stuck with you, so you can irritate them to the end of all of your lives and there’s nothing they can do about it.

Words

John Ralston Saul is a Canadian writer whose books are passed around in obscure corners of the world like samizdat. I first heard of his odd masterpiece “Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West” from my fellow temp word processor at a giant, evil law firm in midtown Manhattan as we both worked the midnight to 8 a.m. shift finalizing a weapons contract between the federal government and Lockheed Martin.

In it, Saul argues, “It seems the word is a fragile blossom. But one step back from this immediacy is enough to reveal the power of language. Nothing frightens those in power so much as criticism. … Even the fool has been banished from the castles of modern power.”

That’s why it’s important to learn how to use words. The process of doing that will also make you sensitive to how the powerful hate words and try to empty them of meaning to control you. 

Jokes

My personal favorite form of words is jokes. Everyone’s head is full of white noise about getting their 6-year-old to a doctor’s appointment, how much their elbow itches, and something intensely embarrassing they did in eighth grade. You may hear perhaps one out of every four words other people say to you.

Jokes are unique because if you can make someone laugh, you know you’ve pierced the mental haze in which we’re all enveloped and successfully communicated with them. Real laughter is involuntary and can only happen if other people understand what you’re saying and have had their worldview suddenly shifted.

Forgiveness

In an 1820 letter, Thomas Jefferson said this about slavery: “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” This is a universal attitude among “enlightened” people committing great evil: What we’re doing may be bad, but we can’t stop doing it, because our victims will then immediately seek revenge.

One of the most incredible things about human beings is that this is wrong. People who’ve been hurt have an almost infinite capacity for forgiveness — if those who hurt them stop doing it, genuinely consider what they’ve done, and repent. Go ahead and let the wolf go. You’ll be fine, as long as you recognize that this wasn’t a wolf after all, but just people like yourself.

Humans must have this capacity in order to survive, because every single one of us, if you go back far enough, is the descendant of both perpetrators and victims of genocide.

Having No Alternative

It’s true that we’re a hard species to get behind. The unique creativity and intelligence that we use to come up with inverse vaccines also makes it possible for us to create 20-foot long tungsten rods to drop on other people from space. 

The good news, sort of, is that we don’t have any alternative but to endorse humanity. There’s only one option on this menu. Moreover, we’re at our most inventive when our backs are to the wall, which is where they are right now. This Thanksgiving, let’s be grateful for that, and get started.

The post 10 More Things to Be Grateful for This Thanksgiving appeared first on The Intercept.

On Tuesday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton published an opinion piece in The Atlantic headlined “Hamas Must Go.” Why does she believe this? The subhead explains: “The terror group has proved again and again that it will sabotage any efforts to forge a lasting peace.” 

The article is the latest chapter of Clinton’s press tour following the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks, including an appearance on the daytime talk show “The View.” Both in The Atlantic and on “The View,” Clinton explained why a ceasefire in Israel’s current war on Gaza would be a terrible mistake.

Everything Clinton has said is part of a peculiar genre of self-defeating “liberal” propaganda on the topic of Israel–Palestine. Clinton is rational and informed and understands, as she writes in The Atlantic, that “the only way to ensure Israel’s future as a secure, democratic, Jewish state is by achieving two states for two peoples. … There is no other choice.”

She cannot acknowledge, however, the historical events that have led to the present situation, which clearly show that the primary obstacle to a two-state solution is not any Palestinian faction: It’s the government of Israel.

She repeatedly claims that it’s been Palestinians who have stood in the way of any kind of permanent peace. Of course, this makes her call for a two-state solution appear like the worst kind of liberal naïveté — and is therefore a huge gift to the U.S. and Israeli right. After all, if even the extremely liberal Hillary Clinton admits that Palestinians don’t want peace, why should Israel even try?

If even the extremely liberal Hillary Clinton admits that Palestinians don’t want peace, why should Israel even try?

The degree to which Clinton’s Atlantic essay is riddled with historical inaccuracies is startling, especially given that she brags about her “decades of experience in the region.” The article begins in November 2012 with a tale of her knocking on the door of President Barack Obama’s hotel room early in the morning during a visit to Cambodia. “Then, like now,” Clinton writes, “the extreme Islamist terror group Hamas had sparked a crisis by indiscriminately attacking Israeli civilians.” She and Obama debated whether she should fly to the Middle East and try to broker a ceasefire in what Israel had dubbed Operation Pillar of Defense. 

This was a difficult decision, she writes, because she and Obama “knew Hamas had a history of breaking agreements and could not be trusted.” Nevertheless, they decided she should go. She succeeded in negotiating a halt to the conflict, after about 100 Palestinian and two Israeli civilians died, along with military personnel on both sides. 

Clinton says she was left uneasy. “I worried that all we’d really managed to do was put a lid on a simmering cauldron that would likely boil over again in the future,” she writes. “Unfortunately, that fear proved correct. In 2014, Hamas violated the cease-fire and started another war.”

This is close to the opposite of reality. 

Sparking a Conflict

Israel had, in collaboration with Egypt, imposed a brutal blockade on Gaza since 2007. Blockades are arguably acts of war, and one place you can find it argued is on the website of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs: “The blockade is by definition an act of war, imposed and enforced through violence. Never in history have blockade and peace existed side by side.”

This is an excerpt from a June 1967 speech by Abba Eban, then the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, right after the end of the Six-Day War. Eban was explaining why Israel had not started the war, despite the fact that it had struck Egypt first. Because Egypt had imposed a blockade on the Straits of Tiran the month before, Eban said, it was actually Egypt who was responsible for the war.

In the years leading up to Operation Pillar of Defense, Hamas leaders said over and over that they were willing, at a minimum, to accept a long-term truce with Israel. Even the U.S. Institute for Peace, a think tank funded by federal government, acknowledged that Hamas had “sent repeated signals that it may be ready to begin a process of coexisting with Israel.”

This did not interest the Israeli government. On November 14, 2012, Israel assassinated Ahmed Jabari, the head of Hamas’s military wing. 

Gershon Baskin, an Israeli peace activist, had been in communication with Jabari long before the assassination. According to Baskin, Jabari had come to believe that it was in the best interest of Palestinians for Hamas to negotiate a long-term truce. Jabari, Baskin asserted, had on several occasions acted to prevent Hamas from firing rockets at Israel. In Baskin’s telling, just before the assassination, he gave Jabari a draft proposal for such a truce to review and approve. The draft was agreed to by Baskin and Hamas’s deputy foreign minister, and Baskin also said he had previously shown it to Ehud Barak, then the Israeli minister of defense.

After Israel assassinated Jabari, Reuven Pedatzur, a military analyst for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, reported: 

Our decision makers, including the defense minister and perhaps also Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, knew about Jabari’s role in advancing a permanent cease-fire agreement. … Thus the decision to kill Jabari shows that our decision makers decided a cease-fire would be undesirable for Israel at this time, and that attacking Hamas would be preferable.

Baskin himself told the story in a column for the New York Times. “Israel has used targeted killings, ground invasions, drones, F-16s, economic siege and political boycott,” he wrote. “The only thing it has not tried and tested is reaching an agreement (through third parties) for a long-term mutual cease-fire.”

While there had been tit-for-tat attacks, Israel’s assassination is widely seen as the proximate cause of the eight-day flare-up of violence in November 2012 — the one Clinton left Cambodia to deal with.

Breaking the Ceasefires

Clinton’s claim that “Hamas violated the cease-fire and started another war” in June 2014 is also highly misleading. 

The period from November 2012 to June 2014 was generally presented in U.S. media as one of quiet in the Israel–Palestine conflict, because in this time only seven Israelis — three soldiers and four civilians, of which three were West Bank settlers — were killed by Palestinians. During the same year-and-a-half period, over 60 Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza were killed by Israelis.

Among those killed were two Palestinian teenagers who were shot by Israeli forces on May 15, 2014, during a West Bank commemoration of the Nakba, the mass dispossession and expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 at the founding of Israel. Then, in June, three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped by Palestinians from a West Bank settlement.

To this day, it’s unclear what connection, if any, Hamas had to the abduction. At the time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed, “Hamas is responsible, and Hamas will pay.” An Israeli intelligence officer, though, anonymously said that there was no evidence for this, and “we have come to conclude that these men were acting on their own.”

Hamas proposed a 10-year ceasefire. Israel studiously ignored this proposal and went on to kill over 2,000 people in Gaza.

In response to the kidnapping, Israel launched Operation Brother’s Keeper, during which it arrested hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank — most of whom were members of Hamas — and tortured many of them. It also killed seven civilians. It was all for naught: The teenagers were found dead several weeks after they were taken.

Escalations followed — Hamas fired rockets, doing little damage — until Israel launched Operation Protective Edge, another bombing and invasion of Gaza, on July 8. 

Several days later, Hamas proposed a 10-year ceasefire, on the condition that Israel would release the Palestinian prisoners, and the blockades of Gaza in the Mediterranean Sea and along its border with Egypt would be lifted. Israel studiously ignored this proposal and went on to kill over 2,000 people in Gaza, about two-thirds of whom were civilians. Seventy-two Israelis died during the operation, nearly all of them soldiers.

Revisionism

Clinton’s appearance on “The View” last week was propagandistic in all the same ways, with an added wrinkle of nonsense regarding President Bill Clinton’s involvement in the conflict. According to Hillary Clinton, “My husband with the Israeli government at the time in 2000 offered a Palestinian state to the Palestinians at that time run by [then head of the Palestinian Authority Yasser] Arafat. … Arafat turned that down.” She added, “There would have been a Palestinian state now for 23 years if he had not walked away from it.”

In reality, it was Israel that walked away from what was possibly the best chance there will ever be for a resolution to the conflict.

Bill Clinton did propose what he called parameters for a two-state solution in December 2000. In early January 2001, with less than a month to go in his presidency, Clinton announced, “Both Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat have now accepted these parameters as the basis for further efforts. Both have expressed some reservations.”

Negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians continued later that month in Taba, Egypt. But they were terminated by Barak on January 27, ahead of upcoming elections in Israel. The negotiators issued a joint statement that the two sides had “never been closer to reaching an agreement and it is thus our shared belief that the remaining gaps could be bridged with the resumption of negotiations.”

Barak, however, was defeated by Ariel Sharon, who opposed a two-state solution and did not restart the talks. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs put out a statement that the Clinton parameters “are not binding on the new government to be formed in Israel.”

Bill Clinton has since lied over and over again about what happened, contradicting his own words at the time, claiming that Arafat was the one who rejected a settlement. 

There’s much more detail to this story, of course, but together Hillary and Bill Clinton have done an extraordinary amount of damage to any hope for peace in Israel and Palestine. If they really care about the lives of Israelis and Palestinians, they should both correct their farragoes of deceit — or, at the very least, just stop talking.

The post Hillary Clinton Is Lying About the History Between Hamas and Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

It was Thursday night when we started to negotiate. Do we need to evacuate to the south or not? The F-16s did not leave the sky, the bombing did not stop, the live ammunition was very close. The sky was foggy, gas bombs and white phosphorus filled the sky. It was hard for us to even breathe.

Our job is to document the war, to let the world know what is happening. How could we leave? For hours, we asked the question. I had a headache from overthinking. 

“What if they kill us? What if they arrest us?” one guy asked. 

“I am not leaving, I prefer dying here,” another said. 

“We should leave, we have kids and families.”

“We did everything we can. We reported everything.” 

Despite the sound of the bombs, I urged myself to sleep. I wondered if this might be my last night in the office, my last night in the city.

Our job is to document the war, to let the world know what is happening. How could we leave?

We had evacuated from the office three times in 30 days. We evacuated from the office to Roots Hotel, but journalists there were targeted, so we evacuated to Al Shifa Hospital. After the threats the hospital received, we chose to risk it and go back to our three-room office in the Al Rimal area, near Al Saraya. 

I used to live on a mat on the floor in the office. I had a private bathroom. 

The 11th floor office had the best view of Gaza. It was home when we were displaced. It was our tiny home. 

I slept as my colleagues were still debating.

It was 6:30 when my colleague Ali woke me up. “Get ready, we are leaving,” he said hurriedly.

“Go where? Nowhere,” I told him. “Let’s find another place to go. I do not want to leave.”

“Hind, yalla, no time to negotiate, we do not have a lot of time,” he stressed while he was packing his cameras in his backpack.

I stood up from the mat. Everyone was packing, searching for their stuff. I realized that I do have ADHD, as I’ve always suspected, because I had no idea where to start.

It was less of a problem because I barely have clothes anyway — a couple of dirty sweaters, my laptop, and my camera. I have been displaced since October 9.

I grabbed my bag and hurried with Ali to pick up his injured mom and my cousin. Ali drove so fast. We parked away from the Al Shifa entrance. The entrance to a hospital has become a danger zone, with several having been bombed recently.

We started walking so fast trying to enter the hospital. It was crowded, people were rushing out.

We started pushing people. It took us more than 10 minutes to reach the building from the entrance, a distance that normally takes just a minute or less to cross.

I went to find my cousin, Sara. She works as a surgeon and has been in Al Shifa hospital since day one. Ali went to get his injured mom and sister.

I started knocking on the door. “Sara, open the door. It’s me, Hind.”

I kept knocking for three minutes until another doctor opened the door. Sara was sleeping.

I woke her. “Hurry up, we are leaving,” I told her.

She gave no reaction. She began packing her clothes.

Ali took his mother in a wheelchair. I took my cousin with a couple of doctors.

The corridors were becoming empty, everyone in a rush. Even patients were evacuating.

By now, we were far too many to fit in the car, so we began to walk. We walked with thousands of other civilians. I even saw a hospital bed being pushed along the way.

Children, people in wheelchairs, the elderly, babies — everyone was carrying their backpacks, pillows, and mats.

We waited at the intersection for 40 minutes until Ali met us. Together, we walked. 

I studied the looks on people’s faces. Terrified, they were holding white flags.

A truck that normally carried cows was packed with people. Another truck that used to transport gas canisters took people to the south.

People crying, angry, sad, eyes filled with fear.

My emotions were blocked. All I could think was that I do not want to leave, that it was wrong to leave, that I must not leave.

Everything was destroyed. Even the streets were damaged and destroyed. My eyes were trying to document everything, I tried my best to capture everything in my eyes. I wanted to cry my tears out, but I held them inside me.

It’s not time to cry, I will cry later, I told myself.

We started walking from the “Doula Square” — the launching point.

We found donkey carts. They called out that they would take us as far as the Israeli tanks.

We reserved two carts. The owner was in a hurry; he charged us 20 NIS — around $5 — for a 10-minute donkey ride. Some could not afford it, so they walked on foot.

I saw people carrying cats, carrying their birds in their cage, holding their bags, taking as much as they could.

We reached the area scraped flat by bulldozers. I saw one bulldozer, two tanks, and a dozen soldiers. 

This was the first time many people in Gaza — especially kids — would see a tank or an Israeli soldier.

The owner of the donkey carts told us that this was as far as he could take us. All the people started holding out their green IDs, raised their hands and their white flags. Everyone was terrified. This was the first time many people in Gaza — especially kids — would see a tank or an Israeli soldier.

I saw Israeli soldiers in 2016 when I left the Gaza Strip through Erez, the fortified border in the north. I was not scared.

We were still walking. I was holding two bags, one on each shoulder. Ali’s injured sister was leaning on me all the way. She got shrapnel in her leg when the Israelis targeted the Al Shifa hospital entrance.

As I was walking with the crowd, I was looking toward the ground. I saw baby blankets, baby slippers. I saw clothes, toys, bags. I’m sure people were too scared to go back and pick up the stuff they dropped.

We walked over dead, decomposing bodies.

We were thousands of us pushing each other on this one-way road. We wanted this to end. To our left was a tank and soldiers holding their rifles, watching us through binoculars on a sand hill. To our right were four soldiers standing in front a bombed-out building, posing and taking selfies on the rubble.

Our group was stopped more than four times (for no reason) — and let go for no reason.

As we approached the soldiers, I saw a naked man standing in front of the sand hill alongside three other men with their heads down.

Another man with a yellow five-gallon water jug and a blond child were called over by the soldiers. They asked the small boy to step closer without his father. The boy was terrified. Those of us walking past worried the boy would be taken. 

The soldier told him there was nothing wrong, he just liked blond kids.

We kept walking. As we walked, pushing each other, we saw bombed cars and dead bodies inside the cars.

Flies filled the cars, feasting on the blood and the bodies inside.  

A newborn in front of me was crying. The mom was trying to make food for her as we were walking. She started nursing her without stopping the walk. Another mom was pulling her kids in their baby seats with a rope.

A man pushed an injured woman in her wheelchair. It kept getting stuck in the sand.

We kept walking, stopping, then walking, the soldiers a constant threat.

It felt like years of walking, though it was only hours. It was packed, and we constantly looked between the crowds for each other. On the other side were people who were already in the south and came to pick us up. People in the south were searching for us, for people coming from the city. Everyone was tired. Everyone was thirsty.

I had lost my cousin in the crowd of thousands, but found her at the end. She was crying, her leg had given out. She was in intense pain. We helped her keep moving until we could find a car.

I can’t describe the sadness. We escaped from being killed or injured, but I did not want to leave — and did not want to leave the city.

As we walked closer to where the cars were stationed, people started distributing water to us. They told us we were welcome and that their homes were open to us.

We were so tired. I could not feel my shoulders or my legs.

Everyone was happy we evacuated; everyone was hugging us. We had safely made it.

But I did not feel the same. A piece of my heart was left in the city, and I may never be able to go back to get it. It is impossible for me to imagine I abandoned my father’s house, left it alone. He built that home with his own hands, and when he died in 2012, it stayed with the family. Our house in my family is something so precious to us. We do not know if our house is still standing or not, but we know that we are not in it.

Fifteen minutes after we arrived, the people walking behind us were bombed.

The post I Joined Gaza’s Trail of Tears and Displacement appeared first on The Intercept.

Today America faces a profound choice: Should we analyze the Israeli-Palestinian conflict using our large human brains, or instead respond to it with the enraged hooting and screeching of baboons?

Much of the U.S. political class has decided to take the hooting and screeching approach. One popular method they use to oppose thinking, especially as Israel’s attack on Gaza has intensified, is to call all actions supporting a ceasefire “pro-Hamas.” Given the Hamas atrocities of October 7, which killed about 1,400 Israelis, this is simultaneously vicious, dangerous, and extraordinarily stupid.

This primate-like shrieking appeared over and over again during Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declared that students in his state are making “common cause with Hamas.” Nikki Haley spoke about “everybody that’s protesting on these college campuses in favor of Hamas.” Vivek Ramaswamy was slightly more generous, explaining that student demonstrators were “fools” who “have no idea what the heck they’re even talking about when they’re siding with Hamas over Israel.” Meanwhile, 22 Democrats voted for a resolution censuring Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib for having “defended” Hamas’s October 7 attack.

You can learn elsewhere about the many, many people on earth who are pro-Hamas because they want Israel to cease military actions that are mostly killing women and children. There’s protesters generally, foreign students, colleges, Google employees, South Africa, Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, Jordan, Bolivia, Colombia, Honduras, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, and (obviously) Joe Biden.

It’s exhausting to say anything about this deeply inane subject. Anyone involved in the protests against the Iraq War in 2003 can remember being called “pro-Saddam.” 

In retrospect, of course, it’s clear that protesters were not in fact “pro-Saddam,” but rather “anti-pointless carnage that will help take the lives of 4.5 million people.” Nonetheless, the same factions that used this tactic before are bringing it back for a return engagement, at a moment when over 10,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s bombing campaign, with many more destined to die.

But of course, this embarrassing nonsense is not unique to America. In 2015, when an Egyptian court defined the military wing of Hamas as a terrorist organization, some Gazans denounced Egypt as “pro-Zionist.” When a meeting was held in Iraqi Kurdistan two years ago to discuss normalizing relations with Israel, the Iraqi Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr denounced it as “terrorist-Zionist.”

What makes today’s “pro-Hamas” accusations especially preposterous is that we know for a fact who in the West was pro-Hamas for many, many years. These miscreants did not just call for a ceasefire or ostentatiously wear kaffiyehs, but provided Hamas with lavish funding and support. This was, of course, the government of Israel.

What makes the “pro-Hamas” accusations especially preposterous is that we know for a fact who in the West was pro-Hamas for many years: Israel.

First Israel busily went about helping to create Hamas in Gaza as a counterweight to the secular Fatah. Then more recently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained to his party’s caucus that he permitted Qatar to send huge amounts of money to Hamas because this would separate Gaza and the West Bank and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Likewise, Saddam Hussein’s biggest supporters had once been U.S. Republicans, especially during Iraq’s war with Iran in the 1980s. Everyone’s seen the photograph of Donald Rumsfeld sharing a chummy handshake with Saddam in 1983 when he was Ronald Reagan’s special envoy to Iraq. When Iraqi jets attacked the USS Stark in 1987, killing 37 sailors, this was not a problem for the Reagan administration. 

As late as April 1990, Wyoming Republican Sen. Alan Simpson participated in a friendly meeting with Saddam. Iraq had just executed a reporter from the Guardian; Simpson seized that moment to commiserate with the Iraqi dictator about the criticism he’d received from what Simpson called the “haughty and pampered press.” 

But again, this is not an American problem. It’s a primate problem. Our genetic relatives have less complicated minds. They can’t conceive of agriculture, or antibiotics, or airplanes. They also can’t conceive of the possibility that there can be more than two sides in any conflict. They certainly don’t ask themselves whether their tribe’s leaders are often in a weird, tacit alliance with their enemy tribe’s leaders, as a way to keep all the regular tribe members in line.

However, we can do all of these things, thanks to our large prefrontal cortex — the part of our brains that does the most thinking and is much larger than what baboons possess. Or we can do what we’re doing now, and discard our human capacity for thinking, and punish those who wish to protect civilian lives. As a BBC Earth documentary about rival tribes of baboons puts it, “Acts of disloyalty in a time of war are given swift and brutal punishment.” 

The human version of the baboons’ swift and brutal punishment is being meted out now. Decreeing that large swaths of people around the world calling for a ceasefire are “pro-Hamas” and hence in favor of its vicious murders, is tremendously alarming. It damages individual lives and will likely get people killed. It makes a mockery of our purported belief in free speech and association. This kind of screeching will make it even more difficult for this tormented region to find peace.

The post GOP and Dems Unite to Smear Gaza Ceasefire Supporters as “Pro-Hamas” appeared first on The Intercept.

Since the Supreme Court demolished the right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization last June, the GOP has been trying to douse the fury of reproductive justice defenders and dam the torrent of their victories at the polls.

They’ve been failing.

At first, they banked their hopes on changing the subject, from the pesky question of women’s existential equality to the rising prices of gas and groceries. That hopey-changey stuff did not work out for them in the 2022 midterms. After that, Republicans turned to election interference, trying to subvert reproductive freedom initiatives by making it harder to amend state constitutions. In both Ohio and Arkansas, that tactic lost big.

Where they couldn’t stand in the way of steamrolling support for a pro-abortion measure, they returned to a time-honored tactic: lying — replacing the texts of proposed constitutional amendments on the ballots with their own, baldly inaccurate summaries. The ruse didn’t stop Ohio voters from enshrining abortion rights in their constitution by healthy margins this week. Missouri’s attorney general is trying the same trick in anticipation of a 2024 initiative. But advocates are fighting back, and he looks weak.

So, after 18 months of watching its take-no-prisoners politics repudiated at the polls, the anti-abortion movement has adopted a new look: “moderation.” The centerpiece of this strategy is a “limit” on terminations after 15 weeks’ gestation, which proponents describe as “reasonable” and “commonsense.”

The first test of anti-abortion neo-moderation was in Virginia this week. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin campaigned hard for his party members, leading his pitch with a “15-week bill.” His star candidate — and perhaps the most persuasive propagandist of this approach, after presidential contender Nikki Haley — was three-term state Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant. “Abortion should remain legal up to 15 weeks. After 15 weeks there should be reasonable exceptions, for rape, incest, life of the mother, and severe fetal anomalies,” said the OB-GYN and mom in a campaign ad. Claiming (falsely) that her state “allows for abortion up to the moment of birth,” she called current policy “unnecessary, extreme, and heartbreaking.” The Washington Post characterized Dunnavant’s approach as “a nuanced stance on a polarizing topic.” But, it turned out, not a convincing one.

Youngkin’s goal was to flip the Democrat-controlled Senate and, with an all-red statehouse, pass a conservative agenda that would set him up as Donald Trump’s 2028 heir apparent. Instead, the lower house flipped blue, and the Dems held the Senate — thanks, in part, to Dunnavant’s loss. In a term-limited seat, Youngkin is a lame duck. And neo-moderation took a hit.

Despite the setback in Virginia, the GOP is unlikely to ditch this strategy. National-level candidates are adopting it, following the lead of the influential Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, whose president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, has vowed that SBA will “oppose any presidential candidate who refuses to embrace at a minimum a 15-week national standard to stop painful late-term abortions while allowing states to enact further protections.”

In the second Republican presidential primary debate, in September, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis endorsed the 15-week federal limit. In the third, on November 8, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott did too. Haley has said she’d sign one but has also hedged, citing the unlikelihood of such a bill getting through Congress. In the debate she espoused, as usual, “consensus.” The next day, one New York Times commentator called her “sensible and realistic on abortion.” Another thought Haley’s stance would “connect with both primary and swing voters.”

Of course, not everyone in the movement is on board. Abortion abolitionists such as Students for Life of America and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul will accept nothing less than constitutional rights for every fertilized egg. National Right to Life Committee President Carol Tobias has called the 15-week limit a “mistake,” because it would permit most abortions, which occur before that time. 

Given the sensitivities of the anti-abortion base, it’s not surprising that many candidates are remaining as vague as possible. On ABC News, for instance, Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., spoke of a “middle ground,” which she defined as “some sort of gestational limits, not at nine months but somewhere in the middle.”

Against this thrust from the right, the left has not yet parried strategically. So far two responses have dominated. One is simply to assert that 15 weeks is not a limit or a standard. “Now they’re pushing for a 15-week ‘standard’ on abortion — which, to be clear, would be a ban,” wrote Jessica Valenti in the New York Times. “A ban is a ban,” said Schuyler VanValkenburg, Dunnavant’s Democratic opponent in Virginia, “and she’s proposing a ban.”

The other is to call the 15-week proposals undemocratic, because Americans show high levels of support for abortion in all or most cases. In an editorial condemning a North Carolina law shortening the period of legal abortion from 20 weeks’ gestation to 12, the Charlotte Observer referred to polls finding majority support in the state for the rights the old law protected. The ban’s partisans call it “mainstream,” said the Observer, but it “is anything but.”

These arguments have some strengths. Indeed, a 15-week limit does ban abortions after 15 weeks, which are now legal, for instance, in Virginia. A federal 15-week limit would slash abortion rights in the 24 states that have either left legal abortion in place or succeeded in protecting or expanding those rights. In another interview, VanValkenburg clarified: “If something’s legal and then it becomes illegal, it’s a ban.”

Majorities do support abortion in all or most cases, and that support has reached record highs since Dobbs, including in red states. But here’s the rub: The “most cases” that two-thirds of Americans support fall in the first trimester — before 12 weeks. Might this squishy pro-choice bloc look at a federal 15-week limit as a step in the right direction — a law protecting some abortion rights, when we’ve never had a federal law explicitly protecting any? 

Denying America’s nuanced — and yes, moderate — views on abortion does not magically make them more pro-abortion. Calling a law that doesn’t ban all abortions a ban is not effective argument. Facing a suddenly warm and fuzzy-looking opponent, how should defenders of reproductive justice proceed?

Seize the enemy’s most reliable weapon: fear.

What’s moved voters is not the exhortations of our side but the viciousness of theirs.

The purpose of moderation is to calm. If total bans, election interference, and transparent lies are fire, the 15-week limit is aloe. If you can’t win the other side over, you can soothe the middle into inaction. With electoral margins so slim, you don’t need many middle-of-the-roaders to roll over and go back to sleep on Election Day.

But if moderation calms, fear mobilizes. In fact, what’s moved voters thus far is not the exhortations of our side but the viciousness of theirs. Republicans have always been better at deploying fear than Democrats. The joke on them is that Americans have been pushed, trembling in fear, to the left.

Our job is to wake up the sleepy middle by scaring the bejesus out of them.

The first task is to disarm the disarming: expose the currently moderate as only temporarily moderate.

Dunnavant has lovely bedside manner. But her record belies the sweetness. NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia gave her 0 percent ratings in her first two terms, 25 percent in the third, and 17 percent in 2022. If she’d won, there’s no knowing what she’d have supported.

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America is leading the charge on 15 weeks. But it is patently speaking to this moment. Its website declares that it “exists to end abortion” and that “every human life begins at conception.” Where does a 15-week limit fit in that vision? The organization’s dishonesty and expediency will attract and encourage more dishonesty and expediency. Case in point: Ron DeSantis. A month before he signed onto SBA’s pledge, he averred that abortion policy should be left to the states. To cover his bases, he signed two different bans in Florida: in April, six weeks; in September, 15.

Another peril to publicize is the one blowing from Washington. If the neo-moderates pull in enough middle-of-the-road voters in national elections, the gusts will build to a Category 5 hurricane. Not least of the coming destruction: A Republican Senate and White House will finish filling the federal bench with extreme right-wing judges, who hold lifetime appointments.

Anti-abortion activists, including many of these judges, never intended to stop at states’ rights to decide on abortion. Federalism was only a way station in the quest for the true grail, a nationwide ban superseding all state legal frameworks. Hence, the challenge in Texas federal courts to the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs was the first brick in an edifice of precedent that could uphold the federal criminalization of abortion. If the court hears the FDA case, a ruling in the challengers’ favor might be the next.

Remember that the subject of Dobbs was Mississippi’s 15-week ban. But Mississippi was not defending a 15-week ban. Two weeks after the ruling freed it to do so, the state criminalized all abortion.

These arguments are mostly rational. They’re meant to invoke fear by unmasking the truth, exposing the pussycat’s claws. The left trusts reason more than emotion; the abortion rights movement has used facts to counter the other side’s lies, even as facts lose their persuasive potency. Truth is still good political discourse. But politics are 90 percent emotional.

The right’s advantage in stirring political emotion is the willingness to lie. When there’s not enough to fear (or the wrong things are fearsome, like the climate crisis), the right invents monsters: the Mexican rapist, the woke gender ideologue or critical race theorist, the abortion profiteer. The beauty of an imaginary opponent is that it can morph and multiply to fulfill any brief. 

Many on the left consider the political use of fear to be intrinsically dishonest and generative only of division and violence. They see instrumentalizing fear as fearmongering, the antithesis of progressive values, including the value of truth. But right now, both truth and fear are on our side. In case you haven’t noticed, reality is terrifying.

The most terrible of realities — the one that has driven millions to the polls to vote to protect reproductive rights — is the permanent loss of bodily freedom. And that is the post-Roe endgame: the enshrinement of fetal personhood, which is the denial of the personhood of already born pregnant people.

If bodily autonomy is a fundamental right, it is nonnegotiable.

Roe had its flaws, starting with the wobbly foundation on privacy rather than freedom. But the ruling changed the status of the pregnant and potentially pregnant in more than one monumental way. “While we conventionally think of Roe as the decision that defined the constitutional right to not be pregnant, it also delineated — and was in fact the first articulation of — rights a woman has while pregnant,” wrote Lynn Paltrow, Lisa Harris, and Mary Faith Marshall in the American Journal of Bioethics. That lasted 50 years.

In a short 18 months, their predictions about looming abortion bans have come hideously true: “Anyone who becomes pregnant … will become newly vulnerable to legal surveillance, civil detentions, forced interventions, and criminal prosecution.” As they warned, the red states have created “a new class of persons for whom fundamental constitutional rights don’t apply.”

Dobbs turned 25 million women of reproductive age into second-class citizens. But coast-to-coast criminalization will make of every uterus-bearing person what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben called a “margizen,” a nominally legal citizen of a nation-state, who lives both inside society and outside it. The margizen — the prisoner, the homeless person, the migrant — exists in a “state of exception,” their rights suspended until such time as full social and legal citizenship can be attained. It may never be attained.

Those who have been denied abortions, particularly when they or their fetuses are sick or dying, already have felt themselves slip from the inside to the outside. Those who live within the historical legacies of unfreedom and exclusion have felt it before, and the Dobbs decision reanimates that feeling. If you have not been there yet, imagining yourself or your daughter or partner in that place should be enough to displace comfort with legitimate anxiety. Enough to wake the complacent.

Fifteen weeks is not a step in the right direction. It is a step rightward, and downward. But even to be drawn into haggling over six weeks or 15, 26, or 40 sets us plunging. If bodily autonomy is a fundamental right, it is nonnegotiable. No compromise can be reached. From 15 weeks the distance down is immeasurable, and of that we should all be very afraid.

The post To Defeat Anti-Abortion “Moderation,” Mobilize Fear appeared first on The Intercept.

The activists of Siskiyou Rising Tide are not new to being watched. Founded in 2016 under the name Southern Oregon Rising Tide, the direct action climate justice group was a key player in the yearslong battle to stop the Jordan Cove Energy Project, a 229-mile natural gas pipeline that threatened to be the largest single emitter of greenhouse gasses in Oregon.

Alongside a coalition of environmental and Indigenous groups, Siskiyou Rising Tide faced major police counterinsurgency efforts, including aggressive monitoring funded by Pembina Pipeline Corporation, the Canadian fossil fuel company behind the project. But a dense web of interagency and corporate surveillance was unable to curtail the Jordan Cove opposition: In a rare victory for the climate movement, Pembina canceled the project in 2021.

A new trove of internal police emails, however, reveals that the intrusive and overreaching surveillance practices that developed around the pipeline project have remained firmly in place, even years after Pembina pulled out of the area.

Obtained through public records requests by Information for Public Use and Siskiyou Rising Tide and shared exclusively with The Intercept ahead of their publication, the emails show a policing apparatus that treats even the most placid social justice activities — like vigils and Juneteenth celebrations — as sites of criminal threat.

“As the Jordan Cove pipeline was defeated around 2020, Siskiyou Rising Tide pivoted to focusing on housing and racial justice issues, and these records requests were part of an attempt to understand what the surveillance landscape looked like post-Jordan Cove,” the Information for Public Use said in a statement shared with The Intercept.

The emails show that, from 2016 to 2023, the Medford Police Department coordinated heavy-handed police responses to peaceful rallies and protests, tracked activist groups’ social media pages, and consistently treated typical, First Amendment-protected activity as a potential crime worthy of law enforcement scrutiny.

Sam Becker, a member of Information for Public Use, wrote in a Signal message that the Medford Police Department’s overreach included surveilling a Black teenager’s vigil, pushing back against the Oregon Health Authority’s choice to fund a harm reduction nonprofit, and monitoring a reproductive justice organization after receiving a tip from a member of an evangelical anti-abortion group. 

Information for Public Use and Siskiyou Rising Tide believe that the surveillance activities revealed in the email trove constitute a violation of both First Amendment protections and an Oregon-specific law, ORS 181A.250, which prohibits law enforcement agencies from collecting and maintaining “information about the political, religious or social views, associations or activities” of individuals, groups, or business, unless the police have “reasonable grounds to suspect the subject of the information is or may be involved in criminal conduct.”

“Monitoring social media accounts available to the general public does not violate any part of the constitution or any Oregon statute,” wrote Medford City Attorney, Eric B. Mitton, in a statement to The Intercept. “Law enforcement agencies, including the Medford Police Department, actively look at the public social media profiles of organizations and individuals when there is reported or self-evident concern of a public safety interest.”

While some activists involved in Jordan Cove protests had been arrested in the past, the police department emails do not contain evidence of ongoing criminal conduct. Rhetoric about “usual suspects” is scattered throughout the emails, but the activities which they are suspected of carrying out are peaceful protests, mutual aid projects, and protected political speech. The surveilled events are often described as involving a few dozen activists, gathering to express support for social, racial, and reproductive justice, before returning home without incident.

Oregon has long been a hub for far-right, white supremacist organizing, and Medford is located in a firmly conservative county. As is all too common, and indeed unsurprising, antifascist and left-wing organizers take up an outsized amount of law enforcement focus. The obtained emails evidence both the police’s disconcerting commitment to monitoring the left and an embarrassing squandering of city, state, and federal resources toward activities like picking through social media posts about social justice issues.

In one email exchange from June 2020, Medford Police Department patrol lieutenant Darrel J. Graham asked then-Medford Police Department crime analyst Divya Fisher to identify and investigate Siskiyou Rising Tide’s members after the group condemned local law enforcement officers’ treatment of unhoused people during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In response, Fisher and other officers combed through social media posts until landing on a Facebook post of one man, Leonard Higgins, who cited the Rising Tide and encouraged people to email the Medford City Council to urge an end to police harassment of unhoused people. The police then ran a background check on the 68-year-old longtime environmental activist.

In the entire email thread, “there is no focus on addressing the complaints against the police, i.e. remedying the wrong being done to unhoused people,” noted the Information for Public Use’s statement. A member of Siskiyou Rising Tide told The Intercept that at the time of that email exchange, the online information was out of date and Higgins was no longer involved with the group.

The monitoring of protests and events for racial justice — predominantly after the summer of 2020, when nationwide Black liberation uprisings followed George Floyd’s murder — were particularly egregious in their overreach. The emails show numerous officers across departments dedicating hours of time and research to scrutinize people who attended a vigil organized for Aidan Ellison, a Black teen from nearby Ashland who was shot dead by a middle-aged white man.

Dozens of emails back and forth in late 2020 focus on the vigil and its organizers. One email thread contains an information sheet from the Medford Police Department’s “Tactical Information Unit,” offering a summary of research on the vigil plan. Other emails note that a camera installed by the city the previous summer could be used to watch the vigil, as well as the Facebook feeds of local activists known to the police.

As the vigil for the slain teen began, the cops quipped about the host of the Facebook livestream. “I figured he’d be there,” Jenette Bertocchi of the Ashland Police Department wrote to Medford’s Fisher while tuning in the organizer’s social media feed.

Fisher replied that “it wouldn’t be a party” without the activist in question. (Ashland Police did not respond to a request for comment. Fisher did not respond to The Intercept’s attempts to reach her.)

In another multi-agency email thread from 2022, officers discuss the then-upcoming trial of Floyd’s murderer, former cop Derek Chauvin. “As you know, I believe these officers will be acquitted of the murder charges,” wrote Medford Police Sgt. Jason Antley. (In 2012, Antley was cleared of wrongdoing by a grand jury for shooting and killing a man wielding a knife.)

“This is likely to spark another large scale set of protests,” Antley added and asked his colleague to “dig around on social media to see if anyone is talking about this.” No disruptive protests took place in the area.

Following the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the police focus turned toward reproductive rights protests. One group, the Rogue Valley Pepper Shakers, a queer-led organization founded in 2020 by young people in the area, was actively monitored for its reproductive justice activism; the group distributes contraception and reproductive health information, shares information about anti-abortion extremists, supports local queer spaces, and promotes harm reduction. According to an email from Medford Police Department’s Antley, the police were alerted to one planned abortion rights protest by Brett White, a member of the Rogue Valley Saltshakers, a far-right anti-abortion group that galvanized the creation of the Pepper Shakers.

“Seeing these emails has proven to us that the police see us as an active threat to our communities, even in the absence of evidence.”

“Seeing these emails has proven to us that the police see us as an active threat to our communities, even in the absence of evidence,” Sam Strong, a member of the Rogue Valley Pepper Shakers, told The Intercept. “The observation and keeping tabs is no shock to us however it’s extremely concerning.”

In some of the most recent email exchanges obtained, police and city officials expand on their surveillance efforts with an attempt to intervene in a radical health care group’s funding. In March, Stabbin’ Wagon, a harm reduction group that distributes free clean syringes and opioid reversal medications like Narcan, was awarded $1.5 million from the Oregon Health Authority to build a peer-respite center: a community-based alternative to the hospitalization model of recovery and mental health treatment.

In one email, the Medford City Manager Brian Sjothun asks a city lobbyist who they “need to contact at the State regarding this grant,” calling it a “disaster waiting to happen.” In another email, Medford Chief of Police Justin Ivens contacted the Oregon Health Authority directly, expressing “concerns” — seemingly an effort to pressure a state agency out of awarding funds to a legitimate, deserving nonprofit. In a 2021 email between the police department’s former crime analyst, Fisher, and other officers, Stabbin’ Wagon’s founder Melissa Jones was named as one of the cops’ “known protest players.”

The specific emails discussing Stabbin’ Wagon’s funds were already reported by Oregon-based independent news service, The Lund Report, in September. Now, they can now be understood in the context of years of police communications committed to suppressing and criminalizing all aspects of liberatory organizing in the local area — including efforts like Stabbin’ Wagon to provide services to simply keep people alive during an ongoing, deadly opioid crisis. Despite police and city meddling, Jones is reportedly on track to receive the Oregon Health Authority grant.

“City staff expressing opinions about a State grant award or asking State officials questions about that State grant award is not uncommon,” wrote Mitton, the city attorney. “It is routine and appropriate for inquiries to be made to public entities like the State of Oregon about how that public entity is allocating its resources.”

Stabbin’ Wagon is not alone in continuing its work despite the knowledge of consistent police surveillance and targeting; the heavily surveilled activists in Medford and beyond expect little else from law enforcement. Strong of the Rogue Valley Pepper Shakers told The Intercept, “I hope the police enjoy watching us serve our community with dignity and autonomy and even learn something from it, but then again — if they had any dignity, they wouldn’t be cops.”

The post Oregon Police Obsessively Spied on Activists for Years, Even After Pipeline Fight Ended appeared first on The Intercept.

Wars, assassinations, coups — the perpetrators of violence confidently believe that the consequences will be discrete and limited to their own goals. They’ll kill their enemies, raise their arms in simian triumph, and that’s the end of the story. 

In reality, committing violence is like kicking a football covered in razors into history, where it lunges around, bouncing this way and that, slicing open random people across the world in a trajectory so complex that no human being can predict it.

This is frightening to think about, especially because there are thousands of these footballs caroming around the globe at any one time, occasionally smashing into each other and each then spiraling off in even more erratic directions.

But there’s good news. Standing up against the aggression of your own country or faction or “side” has effects that also travel in unpredictable waves across space and time, just more softly and quietly, without the exploding joint direct attack munitions. It often seems futile, but that’s an illusion: Just as no one can perceive the infinitely complex results of violence, no one can see the subtle effects of resisting violence. Both are equally real.

So if you’re considering participating in tomorrow’s demonstrations against the U.S.–Israeli assault on Gaza, I hope you will. You just have to make peace with the fact that you may never, ever know what you accomplished. The appalling reality is that you might not save the lives of any Palestinians. However, you will quite likely participate in saving someone’s life, even though you will never know who they are, and even though they will never know they’re alive because of you. This will even be the case if the person whose life you save is you.

Here’s one peculiar story about how violence begets more violence, far beyond what its instigator intended, setting death zigging and zagging around the earth.

On July 3, 1988, the missile system supervisor on the USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf pushed a button, firing two surface-to-air missiles toward Iran Air Flight 655. By doing this, he killed my high school biology lab partner Sam 181 days later, at 3:10 a.m. on December 31.

The Vincennes had been sent to the Persian Gulf to prevent attacks against oil tankers by either side during the Iran–Iraq War. Flight 655 was a civilian airliner with 290 people aboard, scheduled for a 28-minute trip from Iran across the Strait of Hormuz to Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Thinking Flight 655 was a jet fighter attacking it, the Vincennes shot it down, killing all 290 people aboard. This was, depending on who you believe, either appalling recklessness or an innocent mistake anyone could make.

Five months later, on December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland. All 270 passengers died. According to the U.S. government, two Libyans were responsible. In reality, the bombing was almost certainly carried out at the instigation of the Iranian government as revenge for Flight 655. (The U.S. has preferred to blame Libya rather than Iran for various geopolitical reasons, including a wish not to open that particular can of worms.)

Sam and three of his fellow bright friends had been thrilled by the chemistry course of one of our high school’s best teachers. Having read about the Pan Am bombing, and filled with the sense of invincibility of teenage boys, they wondered: Could we make a similarly powerful explosive? They constructed their experiment in the garage of one of their families. While working on it in the middle of the night, they accidentally set it off, killing them all.

This is just one of millions or billions or trillions of tales like it. Essentially everyone who’s ever lived has been touched by violence in some way, even if they were unaware of its origin.

But there are other stories, ones just as complex and even harder to discern, about nonviolence.

During the 1980s, the Reagan administration helped kill perhaps 200,000 people across Central America via support for our allied governments in El Salvador and Guatemala and insurgents trying to overthrow our enemy government in Nicaragua. The violence was unspeakably grotesque.

And this was, as bitter as it sounds, a great victory for peace movements in the U.S. It’s forgotten now, but the Reagan administration came into office in 1981 with hopes of waging a full-scale war in Central America. The aim of one Reagan faction was to blockade Cuba, directly overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and possibly bring the entire weight of the U.S. military to bear in running El Salvador. However, as soon as the hawks began to mobilize, the remnants of the Vietnam anti-war movement mobilized in response, and the Reaganite plans never got off the ground. As movement participants have said, as bad as the U.S.-backed death squads were, Vietnam-style carpet bombing would have been even worse. 

Asking who specifically was saved is an impossible question; we will never know the answer. But given how the U.S. prosecuted the Vietnam War, the number of people is plausibly in the hundreds of thousands or millions.

A similar dynamic played out in 2002 and 2003 in the run-up to the Iraq War. Millions of people around the world came out in opposition to the war and were dubbed “the other superpower” — that is, in addition to the U.S. — by the New York Times. Then the war happened anyway, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. 

But what didn’t happen was more wars. A senior official in the George W. Bush administration at the time was famously quoted as saying, “Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran.” And not just Tehran: Wesley Clark, onetime commander of NATO, later revealed that a senior U.S. military official told him of plans to intervene in Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan.

Given the devastation of Iraq, it feels disrespectful to Iraqis, and generally excruciating, to say this was any kind of victory for the other superpower. But it was. The same may end up being true regarding Gaza. The death toll there is now over 9,000. As the things currently stand, it seems certain thousands more will be killed. Yet as horrifying as it is to say, Israel is likely restrained from killing even more by the pressure being generated by protests in the U.S., Europe, and across the Mideast. Moreover, many in the U.S. foreign policy blob are ardently pushing to widen the war to Iran. The greater the opposition to the attack on Gaza, the less likely that will happen.

Then there’s another reason for people in the U.S. and allied countries to oppose the current war: the most direct, visceral self-interest. 

Soon after the 9/11 attacks and the deaths of 3,000 people, Bush told Congress, “Americans are asking ‘Why do they hate us?’ They hate what they see right here in this chamber … They hate our freedoms.”

The people who run the U.S. are well aware that this was preposterous nonsense. Al Qaeda’s motivation was America’s foreign policy, not some kind of objection to our freedom. In fact, in a 2004 statement, Osama bin Laden quasi-joked, “Contrary to Bush’s claims that we hate freedom … let him tell us why we did not attack Sweden for example.” 

And a large part of Islamist hatred of U.S. foreign policy involves America’s unyielding support for Israel, no matter what it does. What was true 22 years ago remains true today, especially as the Muslim world watches President Joe Biden literally and figuratively embrace Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There are people who see this who will want to try to kill Americans in revenge.

What could plausibly give such people pause, however, is seeing large numbers of Americans turning out to say no to Biden and Netanyahu. Indeed, reporting in the 2000s found that this had happened regarding the Iraq War demonstrations. One would-be British Muslim jihadi was quoted as saying, “You’d see Bush on the television building torture camps and bombing Muslims and you think – anything is justified to stop this.” But after witnessing a million non-Muslims protesting the Iraq War in London, she concluded, “How could we demonize people who obviously opposed aggression against Muslims?”

Today, the same is even more true for the large, impressive protests about Gaza led specifically by Jewish Americans. There have also been smaller protests in Israel calling for a ceasefire.

Of course, there are Americans and Israelis who believe that obliterating Gaza will make them safer — or that even if it won’t, they support doing it anyway. For everyone else, however, this is a situation in which the moral thing to do and what’s best for you personally coincide.

If you are participating in the protests tomorrow, it is necessarily as an act of faith. Your faith will be rewarded. No such action can be wasted. But it is not given to us to understand exactly how.

The post The Gaza Protests Can Save Lives — Maybe Even Your Own appeared first on The Intercept.

William Nordhaus, who turned 82 this year, was the first economist in our time to attempt to quantify the cost of climate change. His climate-modeling wizardry, which won him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2018, has made him one of the world’s most consequential thinkers. His ideas have been adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, global risk managers, the financial services industry, and universities worldwide that teach climate economics. Nordhaus’s work literally could affect the lives of billions of people. This is because his quantification of the immediate costs of climate action — as balanced against the long-term economic harms of not acting — is the basis of key proposals to mitigate carbon emissions. It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that the fate of nations and a sizable portion of humanity depends on whether his projections are correct.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has assumed Nordhaus is to be trusted. The integrated assessment models used at the IPCC are based on Nordhausian visions of adaptation to warming that only marginally reduces global gross domestic product. If future GDP is barely affected by rising temperatures, there’s less incentive for world governments to act now to reduce emissions.

Nordhaus’s models tell us that at a temperature rise somewhere between 2.7 and 3.5 degrees Celsius, the global economy reaches “optimal” adaptation. What’s optimal in this scenario is that fossil fuels can continue to be burned late into the 21st century, powering economic growth, jobs, and innovation. Humanity, asserts Nordhaus, can adapt to such warming with modest infrastructure investments, gradual social change, and, in wealthy developed countries, little sacrifice. All the while, the world economy expands with the spewing of more carbon.

His models, it turns out, are fatally flawed, and a growing number of Nordhaus’s colleagues are repudiating his work. Joseph Stiglitz, former World Bank chief economist and professor of economics at Columbia University, told me recently that Nordhaus’s projections are “wildly wrong.” Stiglitz singled out as especially bizarre the idea that optimization of the world economy would occur at 3.5 C warming, which physical scientists say would produce global chaos and a kind of climate genocide in the poorest and most vulnerable nations.

In a journal article published last year, Stiglitz and co-authors Nicholas Stern and Charlotte Taylor, of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, declared that Nordhausian integrated assessment models are “inadequate to capture deep uncertainty and extreme risk.” They fail to incorporate “potential loss of lives and livelihoods on immense scale and fundamental transformation and destruction of our natural environment.”

Climate change is one of the instances, Stiglitz and Stern told me in an email, in which “it is generally agreed there is extreme risk — we know there are some really extreme events that could occur — and we know we cannot pretend (i.e., act as if) we know the probabilities. Nordhaus’s work doesn’t appropriately take into account either extreme risk or deep uncertainty.”

In other words, the economist who has been embraced as a guiding light by the global institution tasked with shepherding humanity through the climate crisis, who has been awarded a Nobel for climate costing, who is widely feted as the doyen of his field, doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Among most scientists, it’s lunacy to discuss optimization of anything anywhere when the globe hits even 2 C warming. Climate researchers Yangyang Xu and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, in a widely cited 2017 paper, defined 1.5 C warming as “dangerous” and 3 C or greater as “catastrophic,” while above 5 C was “beyond catastrophic,” with consequences that include “existential threats.” The late Will Steffen, a pioneering Earth systems thinker, warned alongside many of his colleagues that 2 C was a critical marker. At 2 C warming, we could “activate other tipping elements in a domino-like cascade that could take the Earth system to even higher temperatures.” Such “tipping cascades” could lead quickly to “conditions that would be inhospitable to current human societies,” a scenario known as hothouse Earth.

But the path to hothouse Earth will be long and tortured. When I interviewed him in 2021, Steffen, who died last January at age 75, was concerned about “near-term collapse” of the global food system. Drought and heat have already reduced global cereal production by as much as 10 percent in recent years, according to Steffen. “Food shocks are likely to get much worse,” he wrote in a 2019 piece co-authored with Aled Jones, director of the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University. “The risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing, and rises much faster beyond 1.5 C of global heating. … Such shocks pose grave threats — rocketing food prices, civil unrest, major financial losses, starvation, and death.” 

In a 2022 report titled “Climate Endgame: Exploring Catastrophic Climate Change Scenarios,” 11 leading Earth systems and climate scientists, Steffen among them, concluded there is “ample evidence that climate change could become catastrophic … at even modest levels of warming.” According to the report:

Climate change could exacerbate vulnerabilities and cause multiple, indirect stresses (such as economic damage, loss of land, and water and food insecurity) that coalesce into system-wide synchronous failures. … It is plausible that a sudden shift in climate could trigger systems failures that unravel societies across the globe.

What these scientists are describing is global civilizational collapse, possibly in the lifetime of a young or even middle-aged reader of this article. 

According to the “Climate Endgame” report, the current trajectory of carbon emissions puts the world on track for a temperature rise between 2.1 C and 3.9 C by 2100. This is a horrific prospect. Earth systems analysts tell us that habitable and cultivable land in a 3 C to 4 C warming regime would be so reduced and ecosystem services so battered that the deaths of billions of people could occur in the next eight decades or less.

Terrible numbers get thrown around. But scientists mean what they say. Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester in the U.K. and Uppsala University in Sweden, asserts that “something like 10 percent of the planet’s population — around half a billion people — will survive if global temperatures rise by 4 C.” He notes, with a modicum of hopefulness, that we “will not make all human beings extinct as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive. But I think it’s extremely unlikely that we wouldn’t have mass death at 4 C.”

Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and a leading researcher on climate tipping points and “safe boundaries” for humanity, projects that in a 4 C warmer world, “it’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that.” Global population today stands at 7.6 billion, with 80 million people added every year.

By contrast, when Nordhaus looked at the effects of 6 C warming, he did not forecast horror. Instead, we should expect “damages” of between 8.5 percent and 12.5 percent of world GDP over the course of the 21st century. Writing in the Economic Journal, Stern set Nordhaus straight in the harshest terms: “We could see deaths on a huge scale, migration of billions of people, and severe conflicts around the world,” he wrote. “It is profoundly implausible that numbers around 10 percent of GDP offer a sensible description of the kind of disruption and catastrophe that 6 C of warming could cause.”

In an email to The Intercept, Nordhaus characterized his colleagues’ critiques as “a distorted and inaccurate description of the work and my views. I have long supported carbon pricing and climate-focused [research and development], which are key to slowing climate change. The proposals in my writings have pointed to targets that are FAR more ambitious than current policies.” He declined to elaborate on any distortions or inaccuracies.

To understand the gap between climate scientists and climate economists, one must first understand that most economists — the folks we call mainstream or neoclassical economists — have little knowledge of or interest in how things really work on planet Earth. The problem of their ecological benightedness starts as a matter of training at university, where a typical undergraduate course in economics prepares students for a lifetime of abject ignorance about the complex underpinnings of the thing called the “market.”

Start with your typical textbook for the dismal science — say, the definitive one by Paul Samuelson, co-written with Nordhaus, titled “Economics.” The book is considered “the standard-bearer” of “modern economics principles.” You’ll find in its pages a circular flow diagram that shows “households” and “firms” exchanging money and goods. This is called the market. Households are the owners of land, labor, and capital, which they sell to firms for the manufacture of goods. Households then buy the goods, enriching firms, which allows the firms to buy more land, labor, and capital, enriching households. The quantity in the flow diagram, in ideal circumstances, is ever expanding: The profits of firms grow and so does the income of households.

A simple, imperturbable closed system that’s also ludicrous, fantastical, a fairy tale. In the circular flow diagram of standard economics, nothing enters from the outside to keep it flowing, and nothing exits as a result of the flow. There are no resource inputs from the environment: no oil, coal, or natural gas, no minerals and metals, no water, soil, or food. There are no outputs into the ecosphere: no garbage, no pollution, no greenhouse gasses. That’s because in the circular flow diagram, there is no ecosphere, no environment. The economy is seen as a self-renewing, perpetual-motion merry-go-round set in a vacuum.

The economy is seen as a self-renewing, perpetual-motion merry-go-round set in a vacuum.

“I taught that foolish little diagram to undergraduates at Louisiana State University for 30 years,” the late Herman Daly, one of the 20th century’s great dissenters from standard economics, told me in an interview before his death at age 84 last year. “I thought it was just great. I was well beyond a Ph.D. before it came crashing in on my head that this is a very bad paradigm.”

In the 1970s, working at the University of Maryland, Daly pioneered the field of ecological economics, which models the biophysical reality that delimits all economies. “The human economy,” wrote Daly, “is a fully contained wholly dependent growing subsystem of the non-growing ecosphere” — a commonsense observation that amounted to heresy in mainstream economics. Daly emphasized that the economy depends on nonrenewable resources that are always subject to depletion and a functioning biosphere whose limits need to be respected. His most important contribution to the literature of this renegade economics was his famous (in some circles, infamous) “steady state” model that accounts for biophysical limits to growth. Daly paid the price of heterodoxy. His fellow economists declared him an apostate.

E.F. Schumacher arrived at similar conclusions about mainstream economics in his 1973 book “Small Is Beautiful,” which became a bestseller. “It is inherent in the methodology of economics to ignore man’s dependence on the natural world,” Schumacher wrote, the emphasis his. Economics, said Schumacher, only touches the “surface of society.” It has no capacity to probe the depths of the systemic interactions between civilization and the planet. Faced with the “pressing problems of the times” — the negative environmental effects of growth — economics acts “as a most effective barrier against the understanding of these problems, owing to its addiction to purely quantitative analysis and its timorous refusal to look into the real nature of things.”

Purely quantitative analysis is the amphetamine of the mainstream economist. The steady dosing keeps his pencil sharp and his eyes blind. It has not gone unnoticed that graduate schools produce a kind of ingenious hollowness in economists who race to the finish on the schools’ assembly line. As early as 1991, a report from a commission on “graduate education in economics” warned that the university system in the United States was churning out “too many idiot savants,” economists “skilled in technique but innocent of real economic issues” — unable, that is, to look into the real nature of things.

By what mathemagical sorcery has Nordhaus, celebrated member of the Ivy League elite, arrived at projections that are so out of line with those of climate scientists?

The answer is in something called DICE, the mother of integrated assessment models for climate costing. It stands for dynamic integrated climate-economy. Nordhaus formulated DICE for the first time in 1992 and updated it most recently last year.

In DICE, the effect of a warmed climate is measured solely as a percentage loss (or gain) in GDP. Growth of GDP is assumed to be “exogenously determined,” in the language of economics theory, meaning it will persist at a set rate over time regardless of climate shocks. Earth systems scientists will tell you that to assume exogenously determined growth is the height of hubristic arrogance. By contrast, Nordhaus assures us in his DICE model that growth continues like a cruising Cadillac on the California coast with an occasional pothole. But the reality is rainstorms, mudslides, earthquakes, and other drivers on the road.

This blithe presumption of constant growth in a climate-damaged future is the first of Nordhaus’s errors, as Stern and Stiglitz point out. “Nordhaus’s model doesn’t fully take into account the fact that if we don’t do more to avert climate change, climate change will affect growth rates,” they told me in an email. “We will have to spend more and more repairing damage, leaving us less and less to spend on growth-enhancing investments.” And, they add, some outcomes arising from weak climate action could profoundly alter what is possible in terms of economic activity. Extreme heat, submergence, desertification, hurricanes, and so on: Such weather events and broad climatic shifts could render large areas of the world low productivity, unproductive, or uninhabitable.

The second of Nordhaus’s errors is the use of reductionist mathematical formulas. He employs something called a quadratic to calculate the relationship between rising temperatures and economic outcomes. Among the properties of a quadratic is that it permits no discontinuities; there are no points at which the relationship implied by the function breaks down. But smooth functions chart smooth progressions, and climate change will be anything but smooth. Such calculations do not account for extreme weather, vector-borne diseases, displacement and migration, international and local conflict, mass morbidity and mortality, biodiversity crash, state fragility, or food, fuel, and water shortages. There’s no measurement of amplifying feedbacks and tipping points such as Arctic sea ice loss, shutdown of vital ocean currents, collapse of the Amazon, and the like.

The third of Nordhaus’s errors is related to similarly simplistic formulas. Nordhaus calculates GDP of a particular location as fundamentally related to the temperature of that place. So, if in 2023 it’s a certain temperature in London, and the GDP in London is such-and-such, it’s reasonable to assume that when latitudes north of London rise in temperature in the future, GDP will rise to be the same as London’s today. Make of this what you will — it’s foolishness on a grand scale, and yet it’s central to the Nordhaus model.

The fourth fatal error Nordhaus makes is the most farcical. In a 1991 paper that became a touchstone for all his later work, he assumed that, because 87 percent of GDP occurs in what he called “carefully controlled environments” — otherwise known as “indoors” — it will not be affected by climate. Nordhaus’s list of the indoor activities free of any effects from climate disruption include manufacturing, mining, transportation, communication, finance, insurance, real estate, trade, private sector services, and government services. Nordhaus appears to be conflating weather with climate. The one can make trouble for outdoor dining plans on your yacht. The other sinks the yacht. 

Ignorance of systems has its way of plowing forward, juggernaut-like. Nordhaus has opined that agriculture is “the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change,” but because it accounts for just 3 percent of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a “very large effect on the U.S. economy.” It is unfortunate for his calculations that agriculture is the foundation on which the other 97 percent of GDP depends. Without food — strange that one needs to reiterate this — there is no economy, no society, no civilization. Yet Nordhaus treats agriculture as indifferently fungible.

This crude mess of a model is what won him the Nobel. “It shows how little quality control goes into selecting a winner in economics that he was even nominated for the prize,” Steve Keen, a research fellow at University College London and self-described renegade economist, told me. Keen has authored numerous books that question the orthodoxy of mainstream economics. He was an early critic of the integrated assessment models at the IPCC that owe their optimistic sheen to Nordhaus’s methodology. His caustic 2021 essay, “The Appallingly Bad Neoclassical Economics of Climate Change,” delved into the problems of Nordhausian models.

“When it comes to climate, the guy is an idiot: an idiot savant, but still fundamentally an idiot.”

“Any investigative journalist who overcame a fear of equations and simply read Nordhaus’s texts would have known that his work was nonsense,” Keen told me. “Assuming that 87 percent of the economy would be ‘negligibly affected by climate change’ because it takes place in ‘carefully controlled environments’?”

“When it comes to climate,” Keen said, “the guy is an idiot: an idiot savant, but still fundamentally an idiot.”

And it’s not just Nordhaus. Climate economists have followed dutifully in his footsteps and come up with cost models that appear to have no relationship with known laws of physics, the dynamics of climate, or the complexities of Earth systems.

A 2016 study by economists David Anthoff of University of California, Berkeley; Francisco Estrada of the Institute for Environmental Studies in Amsterdam; and Richard Tol of the University of Sussex offers one of the more egregious examples of Nordhausian nonsense. (Tol is one of Nordhaus’s protégés, and Nordhaus is listed as a reviewer of the paper.) The three academics boldly assert that shutdown of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC — a pivotally important Earth system that loops warm equatorial water toward the Arctic and cold water back south — could have beneficial effects on the European economy.

Over the last several thousand years, the AMOC, also known as the thermohaline circulation, has functioned to keep Europe relatively warm in winter because of the warm water it draws northward from the equator. The slowing and eventual shutdown of this system could plunge Europe and broad parts of the Northern Hemisphere into extreme cold. Such a shutdown is a growing likelihood as glacial melt pours into the North Atlantic and alters the delicate balance of salt water and fresh water that drives the looping current. 

For Tol, Anthoff, and Estrada, however, collapse of one of the Earth systems that undergirds the climatic stability of the Holocene might be a good thing. “If the [AMOC] slows down a little, the global impact is a positive 0.2-0.3 percent of income,” they concluded. “This goes up to 1.3 percent for a more pronounced slowdown.” They argued that while climate heating cooks the rest of the world, European countries will benefit from a cooling effect of the current’s collapse.

This sunny assessment comes as a surprise to James Hansen, father of climate science, who has calculated that a massive temperature differential between the poles and the equator would occur with an AMOC shutdown, producing superstorms of immense fury across the Atlantic Ocean. According to Hansen, the last time Earth experienced those kinds of temperature differentials, during the interglacial Eemian era roughly 120,000 years ago, raging tempests deposited house-sized boulders on coastlines in Europe and the Caribbean. Waves from the storms were estimated to have surged inland to 40 meters above sea level.

Under these extreme conditions, what would happen to shipping lanes, coastal cities and ports, and trans-Atlantic traffic of all kinds? For the climate simpletons Tol, Anthoff, and Estrada, the question doesn’t come up. “It will be a helluva lot stormier on the North Atlantic, especially for Europeans,” Hansen told me in an email. His study team concluded that shutdown of AMOC “is in the cards this century, possibly by mid-century, with continued high emissions.”

It gets worse. Simon Dietz, at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and his fellow economists James Rising, Thomas Stoerk, and Gernot Wagner have offered some of the most ignorant visions of our climate future, using Nordhausian math models. They examined the consequences to GDP of hitting eight Earth system tipping points that climate scientists have identified as existential threats to industrial civilization. The tipping points are as familiar as a funeral litany to anybody schooled in climate literature: loss of Arctic summer ice; loss of the Amazon rainforest; loss of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets; release of ocean methane hydrates; release of carbon in permafrost; collapse of the AMOC; and collapse of the Indian monsoon.

Dietz and friends came to the astounding conclusion that if all eight were tipped, the economic cost by 2100 would amount to an additional 1.4 percent of lost GDP on top of the roughly 8 to 12 percent that Nordhaus projected.

Think of this projection in commonsense terms: A negligible effect on world affairs when the Arctic during summer is deep blue rather than white; when the jungle of the Amazon is no longer green but brown savannah or desert; when in Greenland and the West Antarctic, white ice is barren rock. A transformation of immense proportions on the Earth’s surface, in the atmosphere, and in terrestrial biotic communities. Ocean methane hydrates have an energy content that exceeds that of all other fossil fuel deposits. Permafrost holds an amount of carbon roughly twice the current carbon content of the atmosphere. With the weakening or collapse of the AMOC, Europe could be plunged into conditions akin to the Little Ice Age, with drastic reduction of the land area suitable for wheat and corn farming. Increased variability of the Indian monsoon would jeopardize the lives of over a billion people.

“The claim that these changes would have effectively zero impact upon the human economy is extraordinary,” wrote Keen. The reality is that if all eight Earth system tipping points were reached, humanity would be in terrible trouble.

An uncharitable view of the work of climate economists in the Nordhaus school is that they offer a kind of sociopathy as policy prescription. Nordhaus estimates that as economic activity heads poleward with warming, the massive reduction in GDP in the tropics will be offset by optimal adaptation in the Global North. “Massive reduction in GDP,” of course, is not explicitly understood by Nordhaus as food system collapse across the equator, followed by social collapse, mass death, wars, and biblical exoduses that produce cascading nonlinear effects drawing the world into a nexus of unknowns.

Nothing to worry about, assures Nordhaus: The violent extinction of low-GDP nations will hardly affect the outlook for economic growth because things will improve in the cold Global North. This is an embrace of imagined silver linings in a climate genocide.

This is an embrace of imagined silver linings in a climate genocide.

Do governments, policymakers, and the public have any clue that the message from climate economist elites is unhinged? So far, we have followed along in the belief that all is well. One of the better indicators of this lemming-like fealty to a narrative of delusory optimism is in the financial sector.

Keen authored a report for investors this year in which he noted that pension funds have swallowed whole the Nordhausian projections of our sunny future as the climate system collapses. “Following the advice of investment consultants, pension funds have informed their members that global warming of 2-4.3 C will have only a minimal impact upon their portfolios,” Keen wrote. “This results in a huge disconnect between what scientists expect from global warming, and what pensioners/investors/financial systems are prepared for.” Keen does not expect things to end well for investors.

When I asked him what needed to be done to alter policy at the IPCC, Keen replied, “We need everyone to be as angry as I am.” Negligence by economists like Nordhaus, he said, “will end up killing billions of people.”

Andrew Glikson, who teaches at Australian National University in Canberra and advises the IPCC, has written about the coming era of mass human death, what he calls the Plutocene, the natural successor to the Anthropocene. Global governments, he charges, are “criminals” for ushering in the Plutocene in pursuit of short-term political and economic gain. I first reached out to him during the black summer of bushfires that raged across Australia in 2020. Glikson’s mood was foul then, and it has not gotten better since.

“The governing classes have given up on the survival of numerous species and future generations,” he told me, “and their inaction constitutes the ultimate crime against life on Earth.” Part of the reason for inaction is the false cheer that Nordhaus has spread with his math-genius, climate-idiot models.

The post When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics appeared first on The Intercept.

After Elon Musk finalized his purchase of Twitter on October 27, 2022, I wrote an article in which I warned, “We need to take seriously the possibility that this will end up being one of the funniest things that’s ever happened.”

Today, I have to issue an apology: I was wrong. Musk’s ownership of Twitter may well be — at least for people who manage to enjoy catastrophic human folly — the funniest thing that’s ever happened. 

Let’s take a look back and see how I was so mistaken.

Musk began his tenure as Twitter’s owner by posting this message to the company’s advertisers, in which he said, “Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise. … Twitter obviously cannot be a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences! In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all.”

Musk had to say this for obvious reasons: 90 percent of Twitter’s revenues came from ads, and corporate America gets nervous about its ads appearing in an environment that’s completely unpredictable. 

I assumed that Musk would make a serious effort here. But this was based on my belief that, while he might be a deeply sincere ultra-right-wing crank, he surely had the level of self-control possessed by a 6-year-old. He does not. Big corporations now comprehend this and are understandably anxious about advertising with a company run by a man who, at any moment, may see user @JGoebbels1488 posting excerpts from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and reply “concerning!”

The consequences of this have been what you’d expect. The marketing consultancy Ebiquity represents 70 of the 100 companies that spend the most on ads, including Google and General Motors. Before Musk’s takeover, 31 of their big clients bought space on Twitter. Last month, just two did. Ebiquity’s chief strategy officer told Business Insider that “this is a drop we have not seen before for any major advertising platform.” 

This is why Twitter users now largely see ads from micro-entrepreneurs who are, say, selling 1/100th scale papier-mâché models of the Eiffel Tower. The good news for Twitter is that such companies don’t worry much about brand safety. But the bad news is that their annual advertising budget is $25. Hence, Twitter’s advertising revenue in the U.S. is apparently down 60 percent year over year.

I also never imagined it possible that Musk would rename Twitter — which had become an incredibly well-known brand — to “X” just because he’s been obsessed with the idea of a company with that name since he was a kid. It’s as though he bought Coca-Cola and changed its name to that of his beloved childhood pet tortoise Zoinks. The people who try to measure this kind of thing claim that this has destroyed between $4 and $20 billion of Twitter’s value. (As you see in this article, I refuse to refer to Twitter as X just out of pure orneriness.)

Another of my mistaken beliefs was that Musk understood the basic facts about Twitter. The numbers have gone down somewhat since Musk’s purchase of the company, but right now, about 500 million people log on to Twitter at least once a month. Perhaps 120 million check it out daily; these average users spend about 15 minutes on it. A tenth of these numbers — that is, about 12 million people — are heavy users, who account for 70 percent of all the time spent by anyone on the app.

Musk is one of these heavy users. He adores Twitter, as do some other troubled souls. But this led him to wildly overestimate its popularity among normal humans. A company with 50 million fanatically devoted users could possibly survive a collapse in ad revenue by enticing them to pay a subscription fee. But Twitter does not have such users and now never will, given Musk’s relentless antagonizing of the largely progressive Twitterati. 

So how much is Twitter worth today? When Musk became involved with the company in the first months of 2022, its market capitalization was about $28 billion. He then offered to pay $44 billion for it, which was so much more than the company was worth that its executives had to accept the offer or they would have been sued by their shareholders. Now that the company’s no longer publicly traded — and so its basic financials don’t have to be disclosed — it’s more difficult to know what’s going on. However, Fidelity Investments, a financial services company, holds a stake in Twitter and has marked down its valuation of this stake by about two-thirds since Musk bought it. This implies that Twitter is now worth around $15 billion.

The significance of this is that Musk and his co-investors only put up $31 billion or so of the $44 billion purchase price. The remaining $13 billion was borrowed by Twitter at high interest rates from Wall Street. In other words, Musk and company are perilously close to having lost their entire $31 billion.

In the end, I did not understand Musk’s determination to torment himself by forcing his entire existence into an extremely painful Procrustean bed. The results have been bleak and awful for Twitter and the world, but not just bleak and awful: They have also been hilarious. Anyone who likes to laugh about human vanity and hubris has to appreciate his commitment to the bit.

The post One Year After Elon Musk Bought Twitter, His Hilarious Nightmare Continues appeared first on The Intercept.

Three days before Hamas committed the bloodiest attack on Israeli civilians in that country’s history, four days before the Israel Defense Forces responded with the most devastating collective punishment of Palestinian civilians in a long history of collective punishment, Palestinian and Israeli feminists gathered to demand peace.

On October 4, hundreds of them, dressed in white and turquoise, in hijabs and sun hats, met at the wall between West Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank (many Palestinian women missed the event because they could not get authorization to cross). Under a canopy of white umbrellas, they walked to the Tolerance Monument in Jerusalem for a rally, then rode to the Dead Sea. On the beach around a symbolic negotiating table, alongside diplomats and other public figures, they read a “mothers’ call” for a nonviolent resolution to the conflict.

Written jointly by the Israeli organization Women Wage Peace and the Palestinian Women of the Sun, the declaration begins: “We, Palestinian and Israeli mothers, are determined to stop the vicious cycle of bloodshed and to change the reality of the difficult conflict between both nations, for the benefit of our children.”

Or, as Huda Abu Arqoub, director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace, put it: “We want our kids to be alive rather than dead.”

Calling the document a “mothers’ call” is both heartfelt and strategic. “Women and children,” especially “mothers and children,” is both powerful and pernicious. For the press, it is convenient shorthand for “human.” For propagandists, it raises any stakes. Hamas is “a murderous terror group, responsible for the murders and kidnappings of babies, women, children and the elderly,” declares the IDF. For some feminists, it signals that the biological capacity to give birth makes women naturally pacific and confers a unique responsibility to oppose violence.

At the same time, the trope “women and children” infantilizes women. It’s worse to kill a woman than a man because women, like children, are defenseless, passive, innocent. This is ironic in Israel, a nation that prides itself on gender equality as a founding principle and mandates military service for all adult Israeli citizens (except Arab Israelis and Orthodox Jews). It is insulting in a conflict where women, both Israeli and Palestinian, are the boldest peacemakers.

Should women speak as women against war? It’s a point of perpetual feminist debate. But this much is indisputable: Feminists should, and must, speak as feminists against this war, against Israel’s occupation and its current pummeling of Gaza. Said the veteran Israeli feminist Hannah Safran: “How can you ask freedom for yourself if you don’t ask it for other people?”

In fact, as the guardians of everyday life, women are disproportionately affected by war and occupation. A 2022 statement from the director of the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling, a feminist human rights organization in the West Bank city of Ramallah, describes how Israeli policies such as home demolition, movement restrictions, night raids, and child arrests increase the burdens of family and household, reinforcing women’s “traditional roles within the Palestinian patriarchal society.” Coupled with discriminatory laws pertaining to family reunification and marriage and cultural policing by radical Islamists, these policies exaggerate male domination and female dependency and trap women in abusive relationships.

Women are also differently affected: Violence is gendered. “In conflict settings, rape and sexual violence are used as strategic, systematic, and calculated tools of war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide,” write the authors of a recently published study of wartime rape in Ethiopia. They cite some rough prevalence rates: 39 percent of women raped during the Rwandan genocide, 25 percent in Azerbaijan, 33.5 percent in Liberia. Rape, they write, may also be “a final act of humiliation before killing the victim.” Those who survive often become social pariahs, their children banished from the community as spawns of the enemy. 

But if this specificity of experience inspires women to speak as women against war, it is the embrace of universal human rights that has mobilized contemporary feminist movements for Palestinian liberation and nonviolent reconciliation.

For Palestinian feminists both in the Middle East and the diaspora, the connections between male domination and colonial oppression are self-evident. The U.S.-based Palestinian Feminist Collective, for instance, describes itself as “a body of Palestinian and Arab feminists committed to Palestinian social and political liberation by confronting systemic gendered, sexual, and colonial violence, oppression, and dispossession.” The Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling bridges “the need to address discrimination and violence against women within Palestinian society, and the need to support the national struggle for freedom and independence from Israeli occupation.”

Filastiniyat, which supports female journalists, particularly from Gaza, and publishes their work on the NAWA Online Women Media Network, also advocates “on issues related to freedoms, media development, women’s rights, and human rights.” Lest anyone think this media organization is a neutral platform, its hashtag is #GazaGenocide.

It took Israeli feminists a while to connect the dots. “In the past we would say we are feminist to struggle for women’s rights and to go to the army, and it had no relationship to the situation of Palestine,” Safran told the journalist Peter Beinart. The Israel Women’s Network, founded in 1984 by the recently deceased second-wave leader Alice Shalvi, has long advocated for women’s equal participation in every aspect of Israeli public life, including the military.

But not every second-wave feminist wanted in on everything Israeli men were doing. Marcia Freedman, a U.S.-born left-wing feminist who was the first openly lesbian member of the Knesset, was early to champion a two-state solution. The IDF’s rhetoric about protecting women and children notwithstanding, she saw the link between militarism and violence against women. In 1976, Freedman introduced the issue of domestic violence to the governing body, where she was ridiculed and dismissed.

The Israel Women’s Network “were fighting for women to be pilots. [They believed] we have to be in every place where there is decision-making power,” said Safran. In Israel, a high military rank is almost a prerequisite for high political office. “We did not support women” — or anybody — “joining the army.”

On this point, liberal feminism won the day. Thanks to decades of lawsuits and legislative battles, women’s presence in the IDF has steadily increased in every function and at every rank. But a thoroughly militarized society like Israel’s — basic training “turns civilians into soldiers,” boasts the IDF — is a masculinist society. And that means women must be feminized, even while carrying guns. Women are exempted from service when they start doing womanly things, like marrying and having children. They are rarely called up as reservists, 360,000 of whom have been mobilized to fight in Gaza. And while women have risen in the ranks, male soldiers keep them in their place. A 2021 government report found that over a third of women serving in the armed forces had been sexually harassed.

The public demonstration by Israelis of the conviction that a movement for women’s full citizenship must be for everyone’s full citizenship was a first step toward collaboration across the checkpoints. During the Second Intifada, the leaderless Women in Black began vigils every Friday against the occupation. Soon, Arab Israelis joined the demonstrations, and Women in Black spread to Palestine and around the world.

Eventually, some liberal feminists came around too. In 1991, after more than a decade directing an experimental school in Jerusalem for Orthodox girls, Shalvi was forced to resign. It was not because she instituted controversial programs, like classes in family planning and conflict resolution, but because she invited Arab girls to those classes, participated in dialogues with Palestinian women, and supported the Israel–Palestine peace process.

If not every feminist, whether Palestinian or Israeli, makes these links among women’s, Palestinians’, and human rights, their enemies certainly do. The situations are not exactly parallel, but feminists in both Israel and the Palestinian territories are under attack by the most tribalist elements of their societies, each of which envisions its own version of a “pure” society, whose achievement requires the modesty, piety, and subservience of women.  

In forming a coalition between his own Likud and the extreme-right Religious Zionists, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu created the most radically nationalist and religiously influenced government in Israel’s history. Among its targets for destruction are women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. It turned the formerly independent Authority for the Advancement of the Status of Women into a politically appointed body. It rescinded support for the Istanbul Convention on combating violence against women and weakened anti-discrimination laws and enforcement of protection orders against domestic abusers — even as femicide is reportedly rising, with most of the murders committed by male partners or family members.

The messianic Zionists who want to expand Jewish ownership to every inch of territory from the Jordan River to the sea are equally eager to erase women from every inch of public life. The effort to kneecap the Supreme Court is coupled by efforts to fortify the rabbinic courts and, indeed, transform Israel into a theocracy where civil, criminal, and personal life conforms to rigid halachic, or religious Jewish, law. One of the goals of the religious parties is to end gender integration in the army and finally get women out altogether. Women’s job is to make and raise as many Jewish babies as possible.

In Netanyahu’s administration, only nine of 64 positions are occupied by women. Perhaps the most cynical appointment is May Golan as minister for the advancement of women. A virulent hawk and self-proclaimed “proud racist,” Golan is also no friend of feminist peaceniks, to say the least. “I’ve never seen so many feminists being silent at the same time,” she told a sycophantic interviewer on TalkTV last week. “The only time they’re silent is when a Jewish woman or an Israeli woman is being raped or murdered.” During a 20-minute rant, she invoked her bona fides “as a woman and as the minister for the advancement of women” to legitimize her conviction that Palestinians in Gaza, all of them, deserve no mercy. “I know the situation of Arab women around the world,” she declared. “This is a dark, dark culture. … The difference between us and them [is] between good and evil.”

Meanwhile, in Gaza and the West Bank, radical Islamists including Hamas are growing increasingly repressive and aggressive. At mosques and on social media, campaigns against child marriage and gender-based violence, and for safe abortion, gender equality within the marriage, LGBTQ+ rights, and sexual freedoms are denounced as corrupting “foreign agendas” in violation of Shariah law. Attacks on feminists, journalists, LGBTQ+ people, and human rights advocates are constant, and sometimes fatal. These are not the acts of rogue terrorists. The Ministry of Education in the West Bank, for instance, is cracking down on women’s studies and eliminating many secular, rights-based programs in public schools.

According to Amnesty International, “Palestinian authorities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip continued to heavily restrict freedom of expression, association, and assembly. They also held scores of people in arbitrary detention and subjected many to torture and other ill-treatment.” Twenty-nine killings of women and girls by family members were reported in the occupied territories in 2022, but the courts impeded complaints of domestic violence. In July of that year, “security forces stood by and watched as a mob beat youths and children participating in a parade … in Ramallah that included rainbow flags.”

Religious fundamentalists on both sides accuse feminists of fomenting chaos by undermining gender and the patriarchal family. Ultranationalists condemn feminist human rights advocates for muddying the lines of battle by insisting on the equal value of every life. These accusers are right.

Feminism is, at heart, a movement against domination. It is feminist to demand an end to Israeli apartheid and occupation of Palestinian lands. Feminism is a movement against violence. It is feminist to denounce barbarity, no matter how enormous the crimes that motivate it. To oppose domination and violence, feminists — not as women or mothers, Israelis or Palestinians — must demand an immediate ceasefire and end to the siege, an arms embargo from the Western powers, and the implementation of a massive humanitarian operation in Gaza.

Feminism is a movement built on the possibility of profound human transformation. That means sustaining a belief in the possibility of a negotiated solution in Israel–Palestine, whether one state or two, with freedom and democratic rights for all.

The post It’s Feminist to Demand a Ceasefire in Israel–Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.

The Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy, an Israeli think tank, published a paper last week stating that thanks to the vicious Hamas attacks of October 7, “There is currently a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip.”

The paper continues, “There is no doubt that in order for this plan to be enacted, many conditions need to exist in parallel. At the moment, these conditions exist, and it is unclear when such an opportunity will arise again, if at all.” Approximately 1,400 Israelis were killed during the initial assault.

The think tank advocates a bizarre scheme in which Israel would ethnically cleanse the entirety of Gaza and pay Egypt to house its former inhabitants in currently empty apartments near Cairo. (The paper was first reported and translated from Hebrew by Mondoweiss.)

The Misgav Institute is headed by Meir Ben Shabbat. Ben Shabbat served four years as Israel’s chief of staff for national security after being appointed to the position in 2017 by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He previously was a senior official in Shin Bet, the approximate equivalent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the U.S. Other former top members of the Israeli government have also held prominent positions at the institute, as Mondoweiss explains.

This specific language — right-wing leaders enthusing about the “opportunity” that arises from massive suffering of their own people — is a kind of macabre universal following eruptions of ultraviolence.

On September 19, 2001, then-President George W. Bush proclaimed, “Through my tears, I see opportunity.” Several months later, Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, explained, “[T]his is a period not just of grave danger, but of enormous opportunity. Before the clay is dry again, America and our friends and our allies must move decisively to take advantage of these new opportunities.” There were 2,977 people who died at the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and aboard United Airlines Flight 93.

Osama bin Laden also used language similar to that of the Misgav Institute — to describe the invasion of Iraq by the U.S. and its allies. In 2004, bin Laden said in an audio message, “Targeting America in Iraq in terms of economy and losses in life is a golden and unique opportunity. Do not waste it only to regret it later.” Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed during the conflict.

For Netanyahu’s part, he spoke in 2002 of the “golden opportunity” presented by the Al Qaeda bombing of a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya. In that attack, 13 people were killed, including Israeli brothers Noy and Dvir Anter, ages 12 and 13. CNN reported at the time that “screaming children covered in blood searched desperately for their parents amid the wreckage.”

While he used different words, Netanyahu also saw a bright future on September 11, 2001, when he was working in the private sector after his first period as prime minister. Asked by the New York Times what the attacks meant for U.S.–Israeli relations, he responded, “It’s very good.” Netanyahu then walked back his first remarks, saying, “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.” At that moment, it was believed that far more people, about 20,000, had been killed at the World Trade Center than later turned out to be the case.

As this all demonstrates, while the deaths of regular human beings are an unmitigated catastrophe for them and their families, our leaders often see a silver lining in our pain — a chance to do what they had always wanted to but had not been able to before.

The post Hamas Attack Provides “Rare Opportunity” to Cleanse Gaza, Israeli Think Tank Says appeared first on The Intercept.

On Wednesday, the United States was the only country to vote “no” on a proposed U.N. Security Council resolution authored by Brazil that called for “humanitarian pauses” in Israel’s bombing of Gaza. Twelve countries voted for the resolution, including several surprising ones, such as France and the United Arab Emirates. Two more, Russia and the U.K., abstained. But according to the Security Council’s rules, America’s sole “no” vote meant that the resolution failed.

Human Rights Watch criticized America’s actions, saying, “Once again the U.S. cynically used their veto to prevent the U.N. Security Council from acting on Israel and Palestine at a time of unprecedented carnage.”

The Security Council has 15 countries. Ten are rotating members, elected by the U.N. General Assembly and serving on the council for a period of two years. Five are permanent members: the U.S., Russia, China, France, and the U.K. If any of the permanent members vetoes a resolution, it will not pass, no matter how many votes are in favor. This means that any of the permanent members can veto any action by the Security Council.

Since Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has made impassioned speeches several times decrying the injustice of the veto power, which Russia has used on four occasions regarding Ukraine.

Here’s some of what Zelenskyy said directly to the Security Council six weeks after Russia’s attack on Ukraine: 

We are dealing with a state that is turning the veto in the U.N. Security Council into the right to die. This undermines the whole architecture of global security. It allows them to go unpunished, so that they’re destroying everything that they can. So, if this continues, the countries will rely only on the power of their own arms to ensure their security and not on international law, not rely on international institutions. The United Nations can be simply closed. … The U.N. system must be reformed immediately so that the veto is not the right to die, that there is a fair representation in the Security Council of all regions of the world.

Zelenskyy spoke again on this subject just last month in a long Twitter thread:

It is true Zelenskyy does not have any principled disagreement with the veto power. He has said nothing about the U.S. veto this week. Moreover, he also does not have any principled objection to a nation invading and occupying other people’s land, as illustrated by his unqualified support for Israel since the October 7 attacks by Hamas. Like most world leaders, he’s a hilarious, garden-variety hypocrite who wants different rules for himself and his allies of the moment.

Nonetheless, what Zelenskyy said about the Security Council veto power is accurate. It is a core flaw of the U.N. and must be rectified if the institution is ever to serve a useful purpose. It’s just difficult to see how that could happen.

To understand this situation, it’s necessary to go back and examine why the veto power was created in the first place.

The U.N.’s charter gives the Security Council “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security” — that is, anything involving war.

The structure of the Security Council was negotiated in San Francisco in 1945. The fights over it were so vociferous that the room where it took place was nicknamed “Madison Square Garden.” 

The strife was straightforward. The five countries that would become the Security Council’s permanent members were essentially the victors in World War II. (China’s seat was held by Taiwan until 1971.) They all believed that their possession of exclusive veto power was a super idea, while other countries could not muster the same enthusiasm. 

To the victors went the spoils. Democratic Sen. Thomas Connally of Texas was one of the main U.S. representatives in San Francisco. He straightforwardly explained that the U.S. would kill the U.N. completely rather than give up its own proposed veto power. “You may, if you wish, go home from this conference and say that you have defeated the veto,” said Connally, while tearing up a copy of a draft of the U.N. charter. “But what will be your answer when you are asked, ‘Where is the charter?’”

Francis Wilcox, a U.S. State Department official, later wrote an unusually honest academic article on what had happened. The veto was the issue “that raised the most controversy,” Wilcox explained, because it “reinforced the special position of the permanent members.” And not just that — they could also veto any attempts to amend the U.N. charter to take away their veto, thus guaranteeing that “their special position could not be changed.” For many Americans there, the veto was “defective because it would permit Russia, Great Britain, China, and France to block action in the Council,” yet “to many of those people its main virtue lies in the fact that it also gives the United States that same veto.”

The Security Council veto was used solely by the Soviet Union from the U.N.’s founding in 1945 until October 1956. Wonderfully enough, this streak was finally broken when the U.K. and France vetoed an American draft resolution calling on Israel to halt its attack on Egypt during the Suez Crisis.

Things have changed a great deal since then. The first U.S. veto to protect Israel occurred in 1972. Since then, the U.S. has vetoed about four dozen more resolutions criticizing Israel. In the decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has similarly vetoed numerous resolutions to protect its own client state, Syria, as well as itself concerning Ukraine. 

In other words, since the U.N.’s founding, it has largely always been a debating society because the world’s most powerful countries, led by the U.S., want it that way.

There has recently been renewed energy at the U.N. to change things. However, given the fact that the five permanent members can block any changes, the best idea that anyone could come up with was to ask them nicely to change. France and Mexico proposed that the five powers “voluntarily and collectively suspend the use of the veto in cases of mass atrocities.” There has also been hopeful discussion about expanding the Security Council to 25 members, with Germany, Brazil, India, and Japan joining as permanent members.

The chances of any of this going anywhere are slim, however. Following the U.S. veto of Brazil’s resolution this week, Brazil’s U.N. representative observed, “Sadly, very sadly, the Council was yet again unable to adopt a resolution on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Again, silence and inaction prevailed. To no one’s true, long-term interest.”

The post The U.N. Is Powerless to Help Gaza. That’s How the U.S. Wants It. appeared first on The Intercept.

The sweeping Republican effort to ban books from schools could not succeed solely on the backs of fervid state lawmakers and extremist school board members. Reactionary demands to censor books on topics ranging from Black history to LGBTQ+ existence have been abetted by the timid acquiescence of school districts, superintendents, and others in educational leadership. Now, Scholastic, the world’s largest children’s book publisher, has joined the constellation of parties tacitly aiding the GOP’s suppressive agenda.

For its thousands of book fairs in elementary schools this year, the company has segregated books focusing on a huge array of topics and stories — fiction and nonfiction — that share little in common aside from not centering white, heterosexual experience. Books on Black identity, picture books with LGBTQ+ characters, stories of Indigenous history and migration, among others, have been grouped together in a collection under the cloying title “Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice.” School officials can then opt to exclude the entire section from their schools’ book fairs in one fell swoop. As Judd Legum reported, one librarian called the option a “bigot button.”

The policy design bends toward censorship: Librarians are offered the choice to include the collection, but exclusion is the baseline. Book Riot, an independent book industry website, noted that Scholastic is “the de facto school book fair provider”: a billion-dollar multinational corporation that hosts 120,000 book fairs in the United States each year. The scales of power do not weigh heavily on the publisher to bend so readily to far-right pressure.

The company has hardly been restrained in its selections: Titles up for en masse exclusion include nothing so radical as a biography of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a picture book about the late Rep. John Lewis, a collection of poems by National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman, and numerous kids’ books that dare to show that LGBTQ+, Black, Indigenous, and disabled people exist. In previous years, such titles would have simply been mixed in with other offerings.

Book bans have been a major front in the Republicans’ Christo-nationalist refashioning of the education system. According to a report from PEN America, in the 2022 to 2023 school year there were 3,362 recorded instances of book bans in U.S. public school classrooms and libraries. “Authors whose books are targeted are most frequently female, people of color, and/or LGBTQ+ individuals,” the report noted. In the last two years, 15 states have passed legislation to ban books in all school grades that relate to some mangled notion of critical race theory or anything that challenges racism and introduces gender nonconformity. Similar bills have been proposed in more than a dozen states.

“Because Scholastic Book Fairs are invited into schools, where books can be purchased by kids on their own, these laws create an almost impossible dilemma,” the company said in a statement published in response to criticism. “[B]ack away from these titles or risk making teachers, librarians, and volunteers vulnerable to being fired, sued, or prosecuted.”

The deflection to issues of teacher liability is a cheap abdication. As a powerful corporate enterprise, the publisher could throw its weight behind challenging book bans and defending imperiled teachers who fight for anti-racist education. Instead, it is making the enactment of reactionary laws easier. That a billion-dollar firm has not taken the righteous path comes as no shock.

Scholastic’s decision is all the more feeble given the weaknesses of the book ban laws and removal policies in question. The language of the laws themselves is extremely vague. For instance, Arizona bans “instruction that presents any form of blame or judgment on the basis of race, ethnicity or sex.” Florida is particularly expansive but no more specific, barring “any training or instruction that ‘espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels’ belief in certain ideas about race, sex, color, or national origin.” Arkansas legislation simply states that public institutions are barred from the “teaching or training of divisive concepts.”

The laws’ ambiguity gives the state expansive leverage to reprimand and punish schools, librarians, and individual teachers should a prosecutor choose to apply the law aggressively. The imprecision, however, also gives educators and school officials more ground to push back — especially as fights against these laws continue in federal court.

School districts and educational companies like Scholastic need not jump so readily through right-wing hoops.

Instead, school districts have mostly responded with vigor in removing books from shelves. Teachers and librarians should not, of course, have to risk their livelihoods, and schools should not have to risk losing funding, in order to keep diverse books on shelves. But school districts (those not already under the yoke of extremists) and educational companies like Scholastic need not jump so readily through right-wing hoops. The progressive-lite ring of “Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice” does not drown out the fact that the billion-dollar company is offering up censorship on a platter.

The answer to the GOP’s ideological warfare has never been to put our faith in private corporations like Scholastic to maintain kids’ access to diverse reading material, just as Bud Light and Target will not carve the path for trans liberation by market-testing LGBTQ+ inclusivity.

Scholastic Book Fairs are themselves a reflection of an underfunded, unequal public school system, in which a private company sets up shop inside schools to sell to the parents and libraries that can afford to spend the money. “School book fairs are a public display of disposable income,” wrote Book Riot’s Danika Ellis, “it is school-sponsored consumption.”

But for the sheer fact of offering books that tell stories beyond whiteness and gender conformity, Scholastic has — like Disney — drawn the ire of far-right zealots. Legum noted, “In recent months, Scholastic has faced sustained criticism from Brave Books, a publisher created to counter ‘the progressive agenda in so many of today’s children’s books.’” The group plans to offer alternative book fairs to meet more reactionary tastes. Their titles include such dross as “Elephants Are Not Birds,” which teaches children that “boys are not girls,” by failing to understand how the constructs of gender, sex, and, indeed, language and meaning work.

Brave Books are hardly a threat to Scholastic’s near monopoly on school book fairs, but like every corporation erroneously branded “woke,” the publishers’ commitment to social justice, even in its most tepid form, goes as far as it serves profit margins and no further. The “Share Every Story” bundle is a dodge, aiding book bans while keeping the market share for sales of texts celebrating diversity. If the company wants to protect teachers, librarians, and schools from the consequences of rightfully defying book bans, it can throw its money behind getting Christo-fascists out of office, or supporting lawsuits and legislation to stop book bans and protect educators who won’t be coerced out of teaching inclusive titles.

The post Scholastic Makes It Easy to Ban Black and LGBTQ+ Books appeared first on The Intercept.

Cory Doctorow’s latest book is “The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.”

The techlash has finally reached the courts. Amazon’s in court. Google’s in court. Apple’s under EU investigation. The French authorities just kicked down Nvidia’s doors and went through their files looking for evidence of crimes against competition. People are pissed at tech: about moderation, about monopolization, about price gouging, about labor abuses, and — everywhere and always — about privacy.

From experience, I can tell you that Silicon Valley techies are pretty sanguine about commercial surveillance: “Why should I care if Google wants to show me better ads?” But they are much less cool about government spying: “The NSA? Those are the losers who weren’t smart enough to get an interview at Google.”

And likewise from experience, I can tell you that government employees and contractors are pretty cool with state surveillance: “Why would I worry about the NSA spying on me? I already gave the Office of Personnel Management a comprehensive dossier of all possible kompromat in my past when I got my security clearance.” But they are far less cool with commercial surveillance: “Google? Those creeps would sell their mothers for a nickel. To the Chinese.”

What are they both missing? That American surveillance is a public-private partnership: a symbiosis between a concentrated tech sector that has the means, motive, and opportunity to spy on every person in the world and a state that loves surveillance as much as it hates checks and balances.

Big Tech, cops, and surveillance agencies were made for one another.

The Privacy Deficit

America has a privacy law deficit. While U.S. trading rivals like the EU and even China have enacted muscular privacy laws in response to digital commercial surveillance, the U.S. has slept through a quarter-century of increasing corporate spying without any federal legislative action.

It’s really something. America has stronger laws protecting you from video store clerks who gossip about your porn rentals than we do protecting you from digital spies who nonconsensually follow you into an abortion clinic and then sell the data.

In place of democratically accountable privacy laws, we have the imperial fiat of giant tech companies. Apple unilaterally decided that in-app surveillance should be limited to instances in which users explicitly opted in. Unsurprisingly, more than 96 percent of iOS users did not opt into surveillance (presumably the remaining 4 percent were either confused, or Facebook employees, or both).

When Apple finally allowed its users to block Facebook surveillance, they cut off a torrent of valuable data that Facebook had nonconsensually acquired from Apple device owners, without those owners’ permission. But — crucially — it was Apple that decided when consent was and wasn’t needed to spy on it customers. After 96 percent of iOS device owners opted out of Facebook spying, Apple continued to spy on those users, in precisely the same way that Facebook had, without telling them, and when they were caught doing it, they lied about it.

Which raises a question: Why don’t Apple customers simply block Apple’s surveillance? Why don’t they install software that prevents their devices from ratting them out to Apple? Because that would be illegal. Very, very illegal.

One in four web users has installed an ad blocker (which also blocks commercial surveillance). It’s the “biggest boycott in world history.” The reason you can modify your browser to ignore demands from servers to fetch ads — and reveal facts about you in the process — is that the web is an “open platform.” All the major browsers have robust interfaces for aftermarket blockers to plug into, and they’re also all open source, meaning that if a browser vendor restricts those interfaces to make it harder to block ads, other companies can “fork the code” to bypass those restrictions.

By contrast, apps are encrypted, which triggers a quarter-century-old law: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, whose Section 1201 makes it a felony to provide someone with a tool to bypass an “access control” for a copyrighted work. By encrypting apps and locking the keys away from the device owner, Apple can make it a crime for you to reconfigure your own phone to protect your privacy, with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine — for a first offense.

The Rise of Big Tech

An app is best understood as “a webpage wrapped in just enough IP to make it a crime to install an ad blocker” (or anything else the app’s shareholders disapprove of).

DMCA 1201 is only one of a slew of laws that restrict the ability of technology users to modify the tools they own and use to favor their interests over manufacturers’: laws governing cybersecurity, trademarks, patents, contracts, and other legal constructs can be woven together to block the normal activities that the tech giants themselves once pursued.

Yes, there was a time when tech companies waged guerrilla warfare upon one another: reverse-engineering, scraping, and hacking each others’ products so that disgruntled users could switch from one service to another without incurring steep switching costs. For example, Facebook offered departing MySpace users a “bot” that would impersonate them to MySpace, scrape their inboxes, and import the messages to Facebook so users could maintain contact with friends they’d left behind on the older platform.

That all changed as tech consolidated, shrinking the internet to what software developer Tom Eastman calls “five giant websites, filled with screenshots of text from the other four.” This consolidation was not unique to tech. The 40-year drawdown of antitrust has led to mass consolidation across nearly every sector of the global economy, from bottle caps to banking. Tech companies merged, gobbled up hundreds of small startups, and burned billions of investor dollars offering products and services below cost, making it impossible for anyone else to get a foothold.

Tech was the first industry born in the post-antitrust age. The Apple ][+ hit shelves the same year Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail. When tech hit its first inter-industry squabble, jousting with the much more mature and concentrated entertainment industry during the Napster wars of the early 2000s, it was trounced, losing every court, regulatory, and legislative fight.

By all rights, tech should have won those fights. After all, the tech sector in the go-go early internet years was massive, an order of magnitude larger than the entertainment companies challenging them in the halls of power. But Big Content was well-established, having boiled itself down to seven or so companies (depending on how you count), while tech was still a rabble of hundreds of small and medium-sized companies that couldn’t agree on its legislative priorities. Tech couldn’t even agree on the catering for a meeting where these priorities might be debated. Concentrated sectors find it comparatively easy to come to agreements, including agreements about what to tell Congress and federal judges. And since those concentrated sectors also find it easy to agree on whose turf belongs to whom, they are able to avoid the “wasteful competition” that erodes their profit margins, leaving them with vast war chests with which to pursue their legislative agenda.

As tech consolidated, it began to feel its oats. Narrow interpretations of existing laws were broadened. New, absurd gambits were invented and then accepted by authorities with straight faces.

Just as important as the new laws that tech got for itself were the laws they kept at bay. Labor laws were treated as nonexistent, provided that your boss was an app. Consumer protection laws were likewise jettisoned.

And, of course, the U.S. never passed a federal privacy law, and the EU struggled to enforce its privacy law.

Cops and Spies

Concentrated sectors of large, highly profitable firms inevitably seek to fuse their power with that of the state, securing from the government forbearance for their own actions and prohibitions on the activities they disfavor. When it comes to surveillance, the tech sector has powerful allies in government: cops and spies.

It goes without saying that cops and spies love commercial surveillance. The very first Snowden revelation concerned a public-private surveillance partnership called Prism, in which the NSA plundered large internet companies’ data with their knowledge and cooperation. The subsequent revelation about the “Upstream” program revealed that the NSA was also plundering tech giants’ data without their knowledge, and using Prism as a “plausible deniability” fig leaf so that the tech firms didn’t get suspicious when the NSA acted on its stolen intelligence.

No government agency could ever hope to match the efficiency and scale of commercial surveillance. The NSA couldn’t order us to carry pocket location beacons at all times — hell, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention couldn’t even get us to run an exposure notification app in the early days of the Covid pandemic. No government agency could order us to put all our conversations in writing to be captured, stored, and mined. And not even the U.S. government could afford to run the data centers and software development to store and make sense of it all.

Meanwhile, the private sector relies on cops and spies to go to bat for them, lobbying against new privacy laws and for lax enforcement of existing ones. Think of Amazon’s Ring cameras, which have blanketed entire neighborhoods in CCTV surveillance, which Ring shares with law enforcement agencies, sometimes without the consent or knowledge of the cameras’ owners. Ring marketing recruits cops as street teams, showering them with freebies to distribute to local homeowners.

And when local activists and town councils ponder limitations on this kind of commercial surveillance, the cops go to bat for Ring, insisting that every citizen should have the inalienable right to contribute to an off-the-books video surveillance grid that the cops can access at will.

Google, for its part, has managed to play both sides of the culture war with its location surveillance, thanks to the “reverse warrants” that cops have used to identify all the participants at both Black Lives Matter protests and the January 6 coup.

Distinguishing between state and private surveillance is a fool’s errand. Cops and spies need the surveillance industry, and the surveillance industry needs cops and spies. Since the days of the East India Company, monopolists have understood the importance of recruiting powerful state actors to go to bat for commercial interests.

AT&T — the central node in the Snowden revelations — has been playing this game for a century, foiling regulators attempts to break up its monopoly for 69 years before the Department of Justice finally eked out a win in 1982 (whereupon antitrust was promptly neutered, allowing the “Baby Bells” to merge into new monopolies like Verizon).

In the 1950s, AT&T came within a whisker of being broken up, but the Pentagon stepped up to defend Ma Bell, telling the Justice Department that America would lose the Korean War if they didn’t have an intact AT&T to supply and operate their high-tech backend. America lost the Korean War, but AT&T won: It got a 30-year reprieve.

Stumping for his eponymous antitrust law in 1890, Sen. John Sherman thundered, “If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade.”

Today, as our snoopy tech firms hide in the skirts of our spies and law enforcement agencies, we have to get beyond the idea that this is surveillance capitalism. Truly, it’s more akin to surveillance mercantilism: a fusion of state and commercial power.

The post Why Big Tech, Cops, and Spies Were Made for One Another appeared first on The Intercept.

On the night of September 11, 2001, I sat on the stoop of my apartment building in Greenwich Village and drank some abominable wine coolers with my neighbors. I’d bought them from a nearby store that had already started wild profiteering and was charging three times the normal price. We were two miles north of the site of the World Trade Center; the neighborhood smelled of acrid smoke, which turned out to be preferable to the stench of burnt, rotting bodies that would develop later that week.

Now, according to a plethora of voices, with the vicious recent attacks by Hamas, Israel has experienced its own 9/11. “This is our 9/11,” says the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. “This is our 9/11,” says the Israeli military’s spokesperson. “This is the equivalent for Israel of probably what happened in the United States in September 11th,” says Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. “Israeli Faces Its 9/11,” says the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. If you’d like to see 37,000 more examples, have at it.

The point of all these comparisons is obvious. Former Rep. Joe Walsh expressed it here:

In other words, Israel, like the U.S., had been innocently walking through the world when SUDDENLY, OUT OF NOWHERE, it was inexplicably attacked by inhuman barbarians. Therefore Israel, like the U.S. was, is entitled to do anything whatsoever in response. A recent estimate found that the U.S. war on terror has directly and indirectly caused over 4.5 million deaths.

I don’t agree with Walsh’s conclusion. But certainly everyone here is starting from the correct premise — that this is Israel’s 9/11 — even if they don’t understand why.

First of all, something like Hamas’s attack on Israel, as with something like 9/11, was going to happen eventually. Israel and the U.S. constantly deal out ultraviolence on a smaller scale (Israel) and a huge scale (the U.S.). Anyone in either country who believed this would never come home was living in a vain fantasy.

Likewise, the establishments of both Israel and the U.S. were well aware of this: that their policies would inevitably lead to the deaths of their own citizens. Richard Shultz, a longtime national security state intellectual, wrote in 2004 that “a very senior [Special Operations Forces] officer who had served on the Joint Staff in the 1990s told me that more than once he heard terrorist strikes characterized as ‘a small price to pay for being a superpower.’” Eran Etzion, onetime member of Israel’s national security council, just explained that from the government’s perspective, “the relatively small price that Israel paid every so often” for its policy toward Gaza was the deaths of dozens of Israelis.

What stunned both the U.S. and Israel was that anyone managed to briefly deal out damage on a scale they’re used to delivering. Israel killed over 10,000 Palestinians from 2000 through last month. God only knows how many hundreds of thousands the U.S. killed in the Middle East in the lead-up to 9/11.

Then, as now, anyone pointing out these obvious facts was smeared as “supporting” or “justifying” the vicious blowback. It’s frustrating and suggests that it’s impossible for human beings to be rational about this subject. If you tell someone that pouring gas on a pile of shredded newspaper and then throwing a match on it will probably make the newspaper catch on fire, you are not “supporting fire” or “justifying fire.” On the contrary, you’re trying to reduce the amount of fire in the world by describing reality.

Another similarity is that both Israel and the U.S. generated their own enemies. The U.S. famously nurtured fundamentalist Islamic opposition to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, said in a 1998 interview that this had been “an excellent idea” and he had no regrets about these “stirred-up Muslims.” Israel did essentially the same thing in miniature in the occupied territories, encouraging the growth of Hamas to damage the secular Fatah. “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” according to one of the Israelis who worked on this clever project.

As with 9/11, the attacks on Israel could only have succeeded on the scale they did because of the monstrous incompetence of the relevant leaders. “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” the CIA told George W. Bush in August 2001. Bush ignored this. Dick Cheney actually pushed back at the intelligence world’s many warnings because he believed Al Qaeda was merely feinting and trying to get the U.S. to expend resources preventing something that would never happen. Likewise, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was apparently warned by Egypt that something bad was coming but ignored it. We’ll inevitably learn shocking details soon about Netanyahu’s general indifference to what was on the horizon.

This is all of a piece with the irrelevance of citizens’ lives to leaders like Netanyahu and Bush. They gnash their teeth and rend their garments about how enraged they are by attacks by foreigners, yet in their hearts they don’t care about us at all. Immediately after 9/11, the Bush administration falsely told New Yorkers that the city air was perfectly safe to breathe.

Finally, the revenge that Israel will now exact will be hideous, as was that taken by the U.S. There is nothing on earth like the fury of the powerful when they believe they have been defied by their inferiors.

This is something my neighbors and I agreed on as we drank those awful wine coolers on 9/11. We were frightened deep in our guts by what had happened that morning. For anyone who wasn’t in New York then, let me tell you — Al Qaeda truly put the terror back in terrorism. But what we were most scared of was what our own government was about to do next. Ever since that moment, my dream has been that someday the regular people of the world — all of us, on every “side” — will form an alliance against our grotesque leaders.

The post Yes, This Is Israel’s 9/11 appeared first on The Intercept.

The recent explosion of violence in and around the Gaza Strip, triggered by a Hamas assault that killed hundreds of Israelis, including scores of civilians, has drawn the U.S. back into a region from which the Biden administration has spent years trying to pivot away from. The U.S. has reportedly begun to move naval assets into the Mediterranean to provide support for Israel’s military operation against Gaza, a full-scale invasion that will likely take weeks, if not longer, to complete.

The new outbreak of intense violence represents a total failure of the Biden administration’s Middle East policy. The administration has centered its regional policy on the expansion of the “Abraham Accords,” a set of diplomatic normalization agreements between Israel and regional Arab countries. It is an effort in which President Joe Biden has sunk much resources and political capital.

The de facto premise behind the accords, initiated under former President Donald Trump and led by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, was to “solve” the Israel–Palestine conflict by simply ignoring the Palestinians and treating their conditions as irrelevant. This weekend’s events show that this approach, premised on Palestinian invisibility, has now collapsed. Indeed, the expectation that Palestinians would simply resign themselves to a slow death, an assumption evidently carried forth by Biden, was never realistic.

“If you pay attention to their public statements, every government in the Middle East has been saying for years that you need to pay attention to the Palestinian issue and that it cannot be ignored,” said Yousef Munayyer, a nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington. “The Biden administration’s policy has been to simply ignore the tragic situation on the ground, perhaps more than any other administration. It’s deliberate ignorance that has had very devastating consequences.”

Days before the conflict began, speaking at a public event on September 29, national security adviser Jake Sullivan praised the administration’s Middle East policy, stating that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”

“The ignorance and hubris it took to make a statement like that is stunning,” said Munayyer.

There have been long warnings that conditions in the Gaza Strip were a ticking time bomb. Gaza’s residents have lived under permanent siege for over a decade and a half, without the prospect of a diplomatic process anywhere on the horizon — let alone a solution. Their desperation had been building for years prior to the present war. Palestinian demonstrators, many of whom had never left Gaza in their lives, have organized several large protest marches toward the Israel-run border fence in recent years. They were met with indiscriminate gunfire from Israeli forces that killed civilians as well as medical personnel — as well as indifference by the international community, which carried on in the aftermath of the killings with business as usual.

In the meantime, the U.S. has sat on the sidelines as diplomatic off-ramps were proposed — and floundered. In 2018, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar wrote a letter in Hebrew to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asking him to take a “calculated risk” in agreeing to a long-term truce with Hamas. The truce would have led to an end to Hamas rocket fire against Israel, in exchange for the reestablishment of economic infrastructure on the territory. Although some aid reached Gaza, Netanyahu ultimately rejected the entreaty for a broader truce. The U.S. did not apply any notable pressure on Israel to pursue this or other possible openings.

The U.S. government under both Trump and Biden administrations has remained AWOL in the years since and left the situation in the territory to fester, while U.S. diplomats spent time in distant Dubai and Riyadh dreaming up splashy new economic and political agreements to sell as successes to domestic audiences. Under Biden, the U.S. has devoted little effort to seeking even tactical détente, let alone peace, between Israel and the Palestinians, preferring instead to continue the Trump administration’s approach of ignoring the Palestinians to seek quid pro quo diplomatic deals between Israel and foreign Arab and Muslim countries with whom Israel has no direct conflict.

Even as the massive bloodshed began around Gaza this week, with Hamas militants massacring Israeli civilians and Israel apparently indiscriminately bombing the Gaza Strip, the administration has rushed to try and salvage its approach to the region. The New York Times reported on Sunday that top Biden aides were scrambling to “reaffirm their commitment to the idea of potential normalization of diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel.” This shoddy simulacrum of real diplomacy — which inevitably requires resolving tough differences between enemies — has now collided with horrifying reality in Gaza and southern Israel.

Precise numbers of the dead are unclear, as the Israeli government carries out a campaign of airstrikes and prepares for a ground offensive that it says is aimed at ending Hamas’s ability to conduct military operations in the future. But conservative estimates say that hundreds of both Palestinians and Israelis are already dead. It is almost certain that the toll will rise in the weeks ahead, particularly among Palestinian civilians, as the campaign inside Gaza gains steam.

Palestinians, Israelis, and officials of neighboring states have long tried to warn of the impending calamity that is now playing out. They warned that the rotten status quo in Gaza was close to producing a new and bloodier conflict. The Biden administration is not primarily responsible for the horror now taking place. But given the U.S.’s pivotal role in the region, it undoubtedly deserves a large share of the blame. A conflict that sat upon several major civilizational, religious, ideological, and racial fault lines deserved real diplomatic resources and attention from the U.S., rather than the pursuit of vanity projects focused on winning points in domestic politics. Once the bloodshed eventually stops, it is unclear how much may be left to salvage.

The post Biden Doubled Down on the Abraham Accords — to “Devastating Consequences” appeared first on The Intercept.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Matt Gaetz is not serious. At all. About anything. 

I don’t happen to believe that’s the case, but I can understand why somebody would. But I don’t think it matters. It doesn’t matter, because he’s now the equivalent of a free radical bouncing around the molecular structure of Congress, and nobody quite knows how the drama currently unfolding will end. Including Gaetz, as he conceded even before he launched his successful putsch against Kevin McCarthy, rendering the House speakerless since Tuesday. 

On Wednesday, taking Gaetz’s grievances about the way the House is run seriously, Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna proposed a series of reforms that would reduce the power of big money in politics, ban stock trading by members of Congress, and democratize the functioning of the House.

On Thursday, Gaetz responded: “Ok. Let’s negotiate.” 

Gaetz noted that his GOP colleagues want to change the rules around the “motion to vacate,” which was the procedural tool he used to oust McCarthy. His colleagues don’t want a small handful of renegades to have that much leverage, so they want to require a higher number of members for the motion to be able to be brought up for a vote. “If we enact the reforms @RepRoKhanna lays out here,” Gaetz tweeted, “how high would you like the MTV threshold to be? Because I’ll basically give you whatever you want on the MTV for this stuff.”

So what is this stuff? 

Khanna laid out a five-point program:

1. Ban money from lobbyists and political actions committees to congressional candidates 
2. Ban members of Congress from trading stocks and from ever becoming lobbyists
3. Term limits for members of Congress
4. Term limits for Supreme Court justices
5. An ethics code for Supreme Court justices

The first objection from Democrats about Gaetz’s offer to implement these ideas in exchange for handing over his MTV weapon is that the stuff could never pass and he isn’t serious. But it doesn’t matter if he’s serious: He and his small crew of Republicans teamed up with Democrats to oust McCarthy. There is quite literally, and quite seriously, nothing stopping them from doing the same to reform the House rules. 

Some immediate objections arise, of course. When I floated some of this on what’s left of Twitter, Chris Hayes noted, “You can’t do a term limit without a constitutional amendment so it’s a non starter.” He is correct that constitutional scholars agree that term limits would require an amendment. 

And I’d go further than Hayes and say term limits are an actively bad idea. They’re the kind of thing that’s appealing as a last resort to an enormously frustrated electorate, but it’s merely nostalgia for a citizen legislature that never existed, where yeomen farmers would serve their country in Congress and then return to the fields. In reality, in states with term limits, politicians just race up the ladder as fast as possible and then when they’re termed out, they cash in as lobbyists. It makes the swamp swampier rather than draining it. 

But some of the other reforms go the opposite direction and turn public service back toward what it ought to be: serving the public rather than enriching oneself or one’s corporate backers. In response to Hayes, Khanna noted — in apparent acknowledgement of the constitutional hurdles — that his main bullet points are the ban on lobbying by members of Congress and the ban on contributions by PACs and lobbyists. He noted that the Supreme Court term limits would be constitutional, though the justices would have to be given seats on a lower court. The ban on stock trading would also be warmly met by the public.

Knowing our Supreme Court, anything could be ruled unconstitutional, and those reforms, if passed, could be challenged, too — but it’s still a fight worth having. Make the justices overturn immensely popular ethics reforms while facing their own ethics scandal. 

And even if some of these reforms wouldn’t make it through the Senate, they could be written into the House rules in such a way that they’d have a deterrent effect.

Gaetz’s unprecedented ouster of a speaker has produced a rare moment in Washington in which nobody can truly be certain how it ends. The key part of his response was “let’s negotiate.” Term limits are counterproductive? Fine, ditch those and come up with something new to suggest — like, say, a requirement that the president get congressional authorization before deploying troops overseas. Republicans want to reform the rules to change the way you can boot a speaker. So while they have the hood up, let’s see what else we can do to that engine.

Gaetz, at least, is continuing to negotiate. This evening, he responded to Hayes’s response to my post, saying: 

Things in Khanna-Gaetz that can happen merely by changing House Rules:

– Ban lobbyist and PAC donations to members

– Lobbyist/Foreign Agent Registration Ban for former members 

– Ban Congressional Stock Trading

– Increase MTV threshold

– Single Subject Spending Bills requirement

Most of that is self-explanatory, but “single subject spending bills requirement” was the bone he picked with McCarthy, complaining that the House hadn’t passed all 12 of its appropriations bills. Insisting the House does so is reasonable, and could also be overcome by suspending the rules to avert a shutdown, which requires two-thirds of the House. But if Gaetz thinks Congress can work the way it used to and pass spending bills one by one rather than lumping them all together, let him try.

Republicans plan to return next week to elect a new speaker — and even Donald Trump is threatening to go to Capitol Hill to see whether he wants the job. 

Even if Democrats aren’t serious about seeing any of Khanna’s reforms make it into the rules or into law, they could at least behave cynically. Both parties are good at that, after all. Democrats who are so sure Gaetz and his gang are faking their offer to negotiate have nothing to lose by taking them up on it and making them walk away publicly. Let the Republicans kill the reforms that poll at 90 percent. And if, by cynically supporting these ideas in hopes of making Republicans look bad, Democrats accidentally turn them into law, oh well. We won’t tell anybody they never meant it to happen.

The post Matt Gaetz Says He Wants to Negotiate. Democrats Should Take Him Up on It. appeared first on The Intercept.