Erik Prince has been many things in his 54 years on Earth: the wealthy heir to an auto supply company; a Navy SEAL; the founder of the mercenary firm Blackwater, which conducted a notorious 2007 massacre in the middle of Baghdad; the brother of Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s secretary of education; a shadow adviser to Trump; and the plaintiff in a lawsuit against The Intercept.

Last November, Prince started a podcast called “Off Leash,” which in its promotional copy says he “brings a unique and invaluable perspective to today’s increasingly volatile world.” On an episode last Tuesday, his unique and invaluable perspective turned out to be that the U.S. should “put the imperial hat back on” and take over and directly run huge swaths of the globe.

Here’s are Prince’s exact words:

If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries … ’cause enough is enough, we’re done being invaded. …

You can say that about pretty much all of Africa, they’re incapable of governing themselves.

Prince’s co-host Mark Serrano then warned him that listeners might hear his words and believe he means them: “People on the left are going to watch this,” said Serrano, “and they’re going to say, wait a minute, Erik Prince is talking about being a colonialist again.”

Prince responded: “Absolutely, yes.” He then added that he thought this was a great concept not just for Africa but also for Latin America.

Prince and Serrano either do not know or do not care that previous bouts of the European flavor of colonialism led to the deaths of tens of millions of people around the world. Then in the 20th century, the ideology of colonialism gave birth to Nazism.

Like the previous enthusiasts of imperialism, Prince is completely blind to his own motivations and where they inevitably lead. He doesn’t want to do this for America’s benefit, you see. No, it’s because “if you go to these countries and you see how they suffer, under absolutely corrupt governments that are just criminal syndicates, a lot of them deserve better.”

This was the rationale for Britain’s white man’s burden, France’s mission civilisatrice, Spain’s misión civilizadora, Portugal’s missão civilizadora, and even imperial Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which aimed to conquer every nearby country for the benefit of all. Imperialists have always told themselves that they are subduing other lands to help their benighted inhabitants. This beneficence somehow always leads to mass death.

This curious psychological phenomenon is famously portrayed in “Heart of Darkness,” the 1899 novel by Joseph Conrad. The book’s narrator, Charles Marlow, describes his voyage up a river into the interior of an unnamed African country that is obviously Congo in the process of being colonized by Belgium.

Marlow explains:

It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale … the conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea — something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.

Marlow attempts to find out what happened to Mr. Kurtz, an upriver colonial agent. When he arrives, he finds Kurtz is living in a villa surrounded by heads stuck on spikes. Marlow learns that Kurtz has written a report for the “International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs.” It begins with Kurtz declaring, “By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded.” Before long it degenerates into an exhortation to “exterminate all the brutes!”

That’s in fiction. In reality, Belgium’s well-meaning imperialism killed perhaps 10 million Congolese.

It always seems to work this way. For instance, here are a series of 2003 quotes about the Iraq War from Mississippi’s Trent Lott, then the GOP’s Senate minority leader:

March 27: “I ask Mississippians of all faiths to pray for all our coalition forces and the Iraqi people as they engage in an intense but noble battle against what is nothing but sheer evil.”

April 15: “We went in there to free those people.”

October 28: “If we have to, we just mow the whole place down, see what happens.”

Serrano at least is more in touch with the grimy reality of what they’re talking about, and he excitedly mentions how America could bring lesser nations “the professionalism they need to capitalize on their natural resources.”

In any case, Prince’s words illustrate that we are living in a time in which many of humanity’s worst ideas, ones we thought were long dead and buried, have risen from the grave and are now staggering about again.

Fascism? Maybe things went off the rails last time, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. A pea-brained fear of vaccines? Sure, why not? A conviction that the old lady who lives in the forest is stealing our children and vivisecting them to consume their adrenochrome? That makes perfect sense.

Later in the show Prince also resurrects another old popular favorite, The Enemy Within Is in League With the Enemy Without. “You get the BLM and the Hamas militias of the Democrat Party, very active in the United States this summer,” he says. “When that BLM or Hamas militia shows up to start wrecking things, you show them what law and order looks like, immediately.”

So that’s where we are in today’s America. Maybe we could return to medicine based on the four humors, in which all human afflictions are due to imbalances in your phlegm, blood, and yellow and black bile. And why not give chattel slavery another shot? If we’re going to do imperialism again, really, the sky’s the limit.

The post Erik Prince Calls for U.S. to Colonize Africa and Latin America appeared first on The Intercept.

Many people are unhappy about some recent pensées from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, headlined “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom.” Friedman explains that “Iran is to geopolitics what a recently discovered species of parasitoid wasp is to nature.” He informs us that Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq are like caterpillars in which this wasp lays its eggs, and those eggs are the “Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Kataib Hezbollah.”

This is imperialistic blather straight out of the 19^th century, except horribly written — imagine Rudyard Kipling after an anvil fell on his head. But the column is useful because it reconnects us to a 1982 incident that illustrates how, when it comes to the Middle East and Israel, the management of the Times has sometimes been to the right of Friedman.

In 1982, Friedman was a mere reporter, recently hired by the Times and stationed in Beirut. Israel had invaded Lebanon that June, in an effort largely aimed at destroying the Palestinian Liberation Organization. A front-page story by Friedman, dated August 5, reported that “Israeli planes, gunboats and artillery rained shellfire all across west Beirut today.”

That was not exactly what Friedman had filed, however. He had written that the shellfire was “indiscriminate.” That word was quietly deleted from the article by editors in New York. Notably, the Washington Post ran a piece the same day describing the shelling as Friedman had: indiscriminate.

Friedman was outraged at his editors. He sent a memo back to the Times headquarters, arguing that “I am an extremely cautious reporter. I do not exaggerate. … You knew I was correct and that the word was backed up by what I had reported. But you did not have the courage — guts — to print it in the New York Times. You [emphasis in original] were afraid to tell our readers and those who might complain to you that the Israelis are capable of indiscriminately shelling an entire city. … I am filled with profound sadness by what I learned in the past afternoon about my newspaper.”

Then the memo was leaked to the Village Voice. What happened next is described in “Freedom of Speech: Mightier Than the Sword” by David Shipler, Friedman’s fellow Times reporter and co-recipient with him of the Polk Award for their coverage of the war in Lebanon.

According to Shipler, Abe Rosenthal, then the executive editor of the Times, demanded that Friedman fly to the U.S. for a dressing-down. However, “by the time Friedman arrived in New York, Rosenthal had been calmed down by other editors. The two had a stern talk and Friedman kept his job. … His success since has made him practically invincible to retribution for speaking up, which he says he feels free to do.”

This is a compelling story with many morals.

First, at the summit of the U.S. media, it reveals the lines that reporters may not cross, at the cost of potentially losing their jobs. Normally these lines are invisible to news consumers. As The Intercept reported last month, CNN runs its Israel and Palestine coverage through its Jerusalem bureau, where its reporters operate under the shadow of the country’s military censor. And an extensive exposé published Sunday by The Guardian illustrates that staffers at CNN believe the network is skewing its reporting on Israel, much as the Times did in 1982.

Second, despite the conservative belief that corporate media outlets are anarcho-syndicalist collectives run by their workers, it turns out these outlets have owners and executives who are in charge and ultimately determine what the outlets run. Not surprisingly, what they run tends to heavily favor Israel, as The Intercept recently noted. It’s encouraging, however, that journalists at these organizations occasionally rise up as Friedman did in 1982: The Times is currently dealing with a wave of internal debate over its reporting on sexual violence during the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas. 

Third, this aspect of how the world works tends to drop out of history. Even Friedman does not mention his 1982 outburst in “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” his famous book covering his sojourn as a reporter in the Middle East. Had you ever heard about it before? My guess is you have not, unless you are either professionally peculiar, or a friend of mine who I recently called to harangue about this.

Fourth, people and institutions are complicated. In a famous review of “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said describes Friedman’s writing as “strangely ignorant,” full of “comic philistinism,” and “offering dictums that are “moronic and hopelessly false.” On the other hand, Said writes, Friedman is “capable of uncompromising analysis” and “compassion and affection thus occasionally get through Friedman’s remorseless machine.”

The same thing is true for the Times itself. Somehow it is simultaneously the worst and best newspaper on earth. On the one hand, it runs crimes against human cognition about the insects living in the Middle East. On the other hand, it also regularly produces brilliant investigative reporting, sometimes even about Israel. 

This complexity is extremely cold comfort for the people who are brutalized by the U.S. and its allies. Nonetheless, it’s important to comprehend if we’re trying to understand reality — something we should want to do, no matter how difficult and frustrating it can be.

The post Thomas Friedman and the Red Lines in Journalism on Israel and Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.

This likely broke several laws of war, including the prohibition against perfidy and the killing of protected people.

According to the New York Times, Hamas issued a statement acknowledging that one of the men was a leader in its armed wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades. His name was Muhammad Jalamneh, and the Israeli military said in a statement that he “planned a raid attack inspired by the October 7th massacre.” Islamic Jihad claimed that the other two men, Mohammad Ghazawi and Basil Ghazawi, who are brothers, belonged to its organization.

The exact circumstances of the killing of the three men is not yet clear, with differences in different reporting. 

The hospital’s director, Dr. Naji Nazzal, told Reuters that the Israelis “executed the three men as they slept in the room. … They executed them in cold blood by firing bullets directly into their heads in the room where they were being treated.”

However, Nazzal only identified one of the men, Basil Ghazawi, as being treated there — for a spinal cord injury that had paralyzed him in an October battle with Israeli troops.

The Times reported that Jenin’s top Palestinian health official, Wisam Sbeihat, said that Jalamneh, the member of Hamas, was visiting Ghazawi. It seems plausible that Mohammad Ghazawi was also visiting his brother.

The likelihood that the raid involved illegality is clear on its face. Certainly the U.S. would be perturbed if, during the Iraq War, Iraqis dressed as doctors and nurses snuck into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and killed several American soldiers. Israel would likewise object if Palestinians gained access to a Tel Aviv hospital by wearing medical costumes and then assassinated Israeli soldiers.

Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, says that first of all “there is an urgent need for an independent investigation” to establish the facts of the situation. Next, Roth contends, the fact “that Israeli forces disguised themselves as medical personnel not only endangers real medical personnel but also suggests the Israelis were guilty of the war crime of perfidy.”

Aurel Sari, an associate professor of public international law at the University of Exeter and a fellow at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, agrees.

“Perfidy involves the killing or injury of an adversary in a manner that first invites but then betrays their confidence in a protection offered by the law of armed conflict,” says Sari. “In the present case, feigning to be medical personnel or civilians, both of whom enjoy protections under the law [would be perfidious].”

Israel is one of the few countries (and the U.S. is another) that has not ratified Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, a 1977 amendment that specifically bans perfidy. However, perfidy is also illegal under customary international law. Sari points out that the Israeli Supreme Court has accepted that Israel is bound by customary international law.

Then there is the question of whether militants such as members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad are legitimate targets if they are in a hospital. Sari states that the general legal protection for medical facilities does not apply in this case, because “the Israeli operation was not directed against the Ibn Sina hospital,” just the three militants. He also said that enemy forces “remain targetable at all times, unless they enjoy special protections or clearly communicate an intention to surrender.”

The issue of special protection is significant because of reports that Basil Ghazawi was a paralyzed patient at the hospital. Sari noted that under such circumstances, Ghazawi would be “therefore immune from attack.” Roth concurs, saying Ghazawi “should at worst have been arrested.”

What happens now?

The International Criminal Court at The Hague opened an investigation in 2021 into potential crimes in the West Bank and Gaza that is still ongoing. (The ICC is separate from the International Court of Justice, which recently took up the complaint from South Africa about Israel’s actions in Gaza and which will likely be totally ignored by Israel.) The Rome Statute establishing the ICC entered into force in 2002, but as neither the U.S. or Israel has ratified it, the ICC can’t investigate crimes committed by American or Israeli nationals on their own soil.

However, Palestine is enough of a state that it did ratify the Rome Statute. This means the ICC has jurisdiction over potential crimes committed by Israelis or Palestinians or anyone on Palestinian soil, such as at the Jenin hospital. (The Palestinian ratification of the statute also means the ICC has jurisdiction over potential crimes by Palestinians anywhere — such as those of Hamas on October 7. On October 10, the court stated that its mandate “is ongoing and applies to crimes committed in the current context.”)

Where will the ICC’s investigation go now? When the court’s original investigation was announced three years ago, Secretary of State Antony Blinken proclaimed that “the United States firmly opposes and is deeply disappointed by this decision.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the ICC’s actions were “undiluted antisemitism and the height of hypocrisy.”

While the outcome is uncertain, it’s not that uncertain. Of the ICC’s total 31 cases, almost all have involved African defendants. The smattering of non-African defendants have been Arab.

The post Here Are the Laws Plausibly Broken by Israel in Its Raid on a West Bank Hospital appeared first on The Intercept.

On Friday, the International Court of Justice — part of the United Nations — issued an interim ruling in the case initiated by South Africa asserting that Israel “is committing genocide in manifest violation of the Genocide Convention.” What happens now?

The court did not make a determination on South Africa’s first request, which was to instruct Israel to “immediately suspend its military operation in and against Gaza” — i.e., engage in a ceasefire.

However, the ICJ did demand that Israel take actions that for all intents and purposes do require it to stop its assault on Gaza. “Israel must,” the ICJ stated, “take all measures in its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this [Genocide] Convention, in particular: (a) killing members of the group [i.e., Palestinians in Gaza].”

If history is anything to go by, the United States will now step in to prevent any enforcement of the ICJ’s ruling. While it’s totally forgotten today by Americans — and indeed was barely noticed at the time — the ICJ responded to a complaint from Nicaragua during the 1980s by ruling that the U.S. had violated international law in numerous ways by mining Nicaragua’s harbors and supporting the Contras in their attempt to overthrow the country’s Sandinista government.

This backstory tells us a great deal about how the U.S. views international law: meaning, the U.S. has complete contempt for it, and sees it purely as a tool that can sometimes be used against our enemies, but can never be permitted to apply to us or our allies like Israel.

The International Court of Justice was established in 1945 with the creation of the United Nations. It’s one of six organs of the U.N., including the most famous (the U.N. Security Council), the slightly less famous (the General Assembly), and the parts no one’s ever heard of (the Trusteeship Council).

Article 94 of the U.N. Charter explains clearly that if you’re part of the U.N., you have to obey rulings by the ICJ: “Each Member of the United Nations undertakes to comply with the decision of the International Court of Justice in any case to which it is a party.”

Article 94 continues that if a country does not comply with obligations created by an ICJ judgment, “the other party may have recourse to the Security Council, which may, if it deems necessary, make recommendations or decide upon measures to be taken to give effect to the judgment.”

Nicaragua filed a complaint against the U.S. at the ICJ — called an “application” in the court’s nomenclature — in April 1984. 

Over the 20th century, the U.S. had intervened repeatedly in Nicaraguan politics to make sure the country’s government did not damage the profits of American investors. Smedley Butler, a famed Marine general-turned anti-imperialist, once wrote that “I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912.”

The U.S. helped Anastasio Somoza, the son of a rich plantation owner, seize power in Nicaragua in 1937. When he was assassinated in 1956, his eldest son Luis took charge. A few years after Luis died of a heart attack in 1963, his younger brother became dictator.

All of this was super from the perspective of the U.S. But then in 1979, something horrible happened: The last Somoza was overthrown in a revolution led by the socialist Sandinista movement.

In 1981, the incoming Reagan administration saw destroying the Sandinistas as a top priority. Toward that end, it funded and organized the Contras, largely members of the former regime’s National Guard. The Contras fought the Sandinista army while also massacring copious numbers of Nicaraguan civilians.

Nicaragua’s application to the ICJ argued that the U.S. was violating the U.N. Charter, the Charter of the Organization of American States, and, from way back in 1933, the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States.

Within a month, the ICJ had issued provisional measures ordering the U.S. to stop mining Nicaraguan ports and to respect the country’s sovereignty. 

The U.S. responded by completely ignoring this. Soon it announced that it wasn’t even going to show up in court, stating that it “intends not to participate in any further proceedings in connection with this case.”

The ICJ issued a final ruling in 1986, finding that the U.S. was “in breach of its obligation under customary international law” in four separate ways. The U.S. was therefore “under a duty immediately to cease and to refrain from all such acts” and also “under an obligation to make reparation to the Republic of Nicaragua for all injury caused to Nicaragua.”

The U.S. again chuckled and ignored this.

Because the ICJ does not itself have any enforcement mechanism, this left Nicaragua with one recourse: Follow Article 94 of the U.N. Charter and ask the Security Council to take action.

But of course the U.S. is one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, and as such can veto anything. That’s exactly what it did with two resolutions introduced in 1986 that optimistically reminded everyone that “according to the Charter of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations and that each Member undertakes to comply with the decision of the Court.”

In both cases, there were several abstentions, but the U.S. was the only one of the 15 members of the Security Council to vote no. Then the General Assembly passed a nonbinding resolution calling on the U.S. to comply with the ICJ ruling. It passed 94-3, with the only countries voting against it being the U.S., El Salvador, and Israel. The U.S. ignored it.

An ICJ ruling on whether Israel is committing genocide will likely take years. But according to the U.N. Charter, Israel must obey its provisional demands immediately — just as the U.S. was required to obey the court’s provisional demands in 1984.

Whether this will happen can be judged by the words of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this month: “No one will stop us – not The Hague, not the Axis of Evil and no one else.”

Therefore South Africa, just like Nicaragua decades ago, will have no recourse except to request that the U.N. Security Council take action. And the U.S. will have to decide whether it will again make certain that it and its allies can safely ignore and reject international law.

The post Will the U.S. Block the ICJ on Gaza? It’s Thwarted the Court Before. appeared first on The Intercept.

Partisans of Israel have often asked: On a planet overflowing with war, famine, and cruelty, why does the world pay so much attention to what’s happening in Gaza (and the West Bank) in comparison with other horrors? The implied or explicit answer is that this must be due to antisemitism.

This question held more power during Israel’s past attacks on Gaza — e.g., Operation Cast Lead from 2008-2009, Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, and Operation Protective Edge in 2014, when Palestinian casualties measured in the thousands rather than the tens of thousands. The current war, Operation Swords of Iron, is in fact one of the grimmest things currently happening on Earth.

And that’s the key thing, of course — Israel is now before the International Court of Justice charged with genocide. Americans have an obvious reason to focus on its actions, given that they could not happen without our financial and diplomatic support. But what explains the intense interest of everyone else, not just at the present moment, but for the decades and military offensives before? The answer is both clear and important to understand: People across the globe are particularly appalled by Israel’s violence because it is a manifestation and symbol of European colonialism, plausibly the most terrifying and destructive ideology in human history.

This is a difficult concept for most Americans and Europeans, especially the white ones, to get their minds around. To start with, there’s been an effort in the higher-toned areas of the U.S. media to deny that Israel has much to do with European colonialism in the first place.

This is an extremely peculiar denial of reality and can be ignored. The founders of Zionism and Israel, from Theodor Herzl to Ze’ev Jabotinsky to David Ben-Gurion, stated clearly that they were engaged in settler colonialism. This is a specific form of colonialism in which settlers migrate to a territory and attempt to permanently take over the land from its present occupants. For instance: the United States of America. 

Everyone has to face this: The question of Israel is the question of whether European colonialism can make peace with the rest of the world without obliterating it.

To begin with, European colonialism is the most significant political fact of the past 500 years. Christopher Columbus arrived in the Western Hemisphere in 1492. By the start of World War I in 1914, Europe and the U.S. controlled 85 percent of the world’s land mass.

This required atrocities and barbarism across the planet on a mind-warping scale. Spain worked as many as 8 million Indigenous people and enslaved Africans to death mining silver from one mountain near the Bolivian city of Potosí. Belgium, which seems today like a tiny, inoffensive land of talented cyclists, conducted a campaign of murderous colonialism that killed perhaps 10 million people in Congo. During the 19^th century, the U.K. imposed conditions on India that murdered 30-60 million people via starvation. 

And this barely scratches the surface of this history of violence and blood, a history that was always combined with hilariously self-congratulatory justifications. For instance, the first seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony depicted an American Indian pleading “come over and help us.” 

The French writer Hilaire Belloc famously described the basic facts of Europe’s conquest of the world by putting them in the mouth of a character literally named Blood:

Blood understood the Native mind.
He said: “We must be firm but kind.” …
He stood upon a little mound,
Cast his lethargic eyes around,
And said beneath his breath:
“Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.”

The Maxim Gun was the first fully automatic machine gun.

The rest of the world remembers this, even if the descendants of the perpetrators do not. As Samuel Huntington, the late conservative Harvard University political scientist, once put it, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

To understand what colonialism means to the rest of the world, white Americans and Europeans should consider that 20^th century fascism, including the Holocaust, was in a profound sense the child of colonialism. If you like your horrifying history in entertainment form, this is examined at length in the 2021 HBO documentary series “Exterminate All the Brutes.”

This perspective is not the product of Harvard professors driven mad by wokeness; just ask Adolf Hitler. On the eve of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, he told a small group of companions, “We’ll take away its character of an Asiatic steppe, we’ll Europeanize it. … Our colonists will settle. … There’s only one duty … to look upon the natives as Redskins.” Hitler welcomed white people in general, not just Germans, to take part: “All those who have the feeling for Europe,” he said, “can join in our work.”

At the same moment in the U.S., my grandfather Lewis Hanke — a historian of the Spanish colonization of the Americas — also saw Germany’s project as comparable to European colonialism, except he thought that was a bad idea. One of his students later wrote, “As Hitler voiced the extremities of racism, Hanke encountered it in the records of the conquest, and he sensed the connection.”

European colonial movements came in different flavors, and Zionism was unique in that its members — certainly after World War II — were fleeing not just persecution, but also extermination. Still, it was of psychological necessity shot through with colonization’s standard ideological racism. Rudolf Sonneborn, an American who would go on to make a fortune in the oil business, was secretary of the Zionist Commission in Palestine following World War I. He reported that “the average [Arab] is inferior even to our average Negro … I believe there is very little to ever fear from them. Besides, they are a cowardly race.”

This was also true for Christian Zionists. George Biddle, a friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the ultra-WASPy descendant of the original settlers on the Mayflower, took this view in an article in The Atlantic after visiting Israel shortly after its 1948 founding. First, Biddle enthused about how Israel would serve Western interests. Then, he explained that Arabs were “foul, diseased, smelling, rotting, and pullulating with vermin and corruption.” Fortunately, they “were about as dangerous as so many North American Indians in modern mechanized war.”

The fact that European Jewry were the greatest victims of the racism that was central to this worldview, which Zionism adopted (in a less virulent form), is one of the most bizarre twists of human history.

In any case, Europe’s centurieslong reign of piracy and mass death should make it clear why people around the world — including such far-flung, surprising places as South Korea and Peru — look at Israel’s action in Gaza with particular concern. It is not a coincidence that the genocide case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague was brought by South Africa with the participation of Irish lawyers. 

But what happens now? No one knows. 

Israel was, in a sense, both too early and too late. If it had been founded earlier, it could have massacred the entire Arab population, just as the United States killed most Native Americans and Australia wiped out huge swaths of the country’s Aboriginals. Then there would be no Palestinians left for the world to be concerned about.

On the other hand, if it had come along later, Zionists might have believed that they should join forces with the decolonization movements across the Mideast and the world in the 1950s and 1960s. But in our timeline, an Arab nationalist approached Ben-Gurion about fighting the U.K.’s colonial forces together while Palestine was still under the British mandate — and Ben-Gurion reported him to the British.

In any case, despite the dreams of the Israeli right, the “expel and/or kill them all” solution is (probably) no longer available. But it’s also extremely difficult to imagine a South Africa outcome, in which Jewish Israelis accede to becoming a minority in a one-person, one-vote, one-state Palestine. 

Meanwhile, some parts of the Arab world fantasize about an Algeria analogy, in which (after massive bloodshed) the colonists go back to where they came from. Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, recently claimed every Jewish Israeli “has a second nationality and has his bag ready.” This is both factually false and extremely foolish. Israelis are not going anywhere any more than Americans or Australians are.

That leaves a two-state solution, one Israeli and one Palestinian. The problem here is that the Israeli government has, with rare exceptions, never been willing to accept this. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just reiterated that stance this week.

But if the October 7 attacks showed anything, it’s that it will be difficult for Israel to simply continue on its current path. If the brutalization of Gaza does not end with a future with hope for Palestinians, there will sooner or later be more October 7s, conducted by Palestinians or others, on greater scales. The Israeli revenge will be greater still. The country is therefore on a path to its own destruction, along with the destruction of a big chunk of the rest of the world. Given the momentum of European colonialism, that is plausibly inevitable, and therefore many of us are doomed. 

However, history is not foreordained. It is still possible to imagine a future in which the Israeli version of European colonialism reconciles itself to living with the rest of humanity. That in turn could show the path toward other badly needed reconciliations across the world. Such a future wouldn’t make any side happy; on the contrary. But it’s far preferable to the alternative. As the Israeli writer Amos Oz once perceptively explained:

Tragedies can be resolved in one of two ways: there is the Shakespearean resolution and there is the Chekhovian one. At the end of a Shakespearean tragedy, the stage is strewn with dead bodies and maybe there’s some justice hovering high above. A Chekhov tragedy, on the other hand, ends with everybody disillusioned, embittered, heartbroken, disappointed, absolutely shattered, but still alive. And I want a Chekhovian resolution, not a Shakespearean one, for the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy.

The post Why Israel’s Violence Gets So Much Notice (It’s Not Antisemitism) appeared first on The Intercept.

Should Claudine Gay have resigned as president of Harvard? Are conservatives right that a rabidly pro-Hamas left has captured Harvard? Are liberals correct that the fascistic right has launched an all-out assault on academic freedom, at Harvard? The New York Times has explored these questions (about Harvard) over the course of almost 17,000 articles.

These are indeed fascinating topics. However, they ignore a key issue: That for anyone with a progressive perspective, Harvard should neither be reformed (to eliminate its wokeness) nor protected (from the forces of reaction). Rather, it should be razed to the ground.

Then, after Harvard has been razed, we must salt the earth, Carthage-style, so a new Harvard does not grow in its place. Next we have to destroy the rest of the Ivy League. Finally, anyone with enough energy left over should sail an emissions-free ship through the Panama Canal to California and obliterate Stanford.

Let’s start with a story that explains why I’m so personally committed to this cause. Then we can move on to a more rational explanation of why you should be too.

On January 16, 1991, I was a senior at Yale. That night at 9 p.m., George H.W. Bush, president of the United States and Yale alumnus, announced the commencement of the first Gulf War.

This was a time of such barbarism that there was no internet. Almost no students had a television in their room. So the only way I could find out what was happening was to go to my dorm’s common room, which did have a big TV.

When I got there that night, there was a single person there. She was not a Yale student, and she was not a Yale professor. She was a woman who worked in the dining hall. Anyone familiar with Yale and New Haven, Connecticut, will know this means she was likely either Italian American or African American; she was African American.

She was watching CNN with fervent concentration. I soon learned this was because her son was in the Marines and was stationed in Saudi Arabia on the border with Kuwait, and she was (she did not say this) terrified that he was about to die. I had never before seen a human being whose every atom was vibrating with fear.

It was impossible for me not to think about the debate about the coming war I’d already had with Yale friends. Some supported it; some didn’t. But we all wanted to talk about whether we would be willing to fight in it if the draft was reinstated. I finally said: This is all moot. If things go so badly that they have to draft people out of Yale, the U.S. government will wrap it up. The people who run America don’t care about this so much that they’d risk their own children.

This sounds like a nice tale about how sensitive and wise I was as a young man. There’s more to it, though. As I watched Baghdad being bombed, and untold numbers of humans being converted into wet, red scraps of flesh, a tide of emotion swept over me unbidden. It was exultation.

I had no idea before that moment that this potential existed inside of me. I knew nothing at all of the history of the Middle East or the specifics of that war. So this didn’t emerge from my cerebrum, the part of our brains that thinks. It was from my amygdala, the part of our brains that probably hasn’t changed much since we were Homo erectus a million years ago. I had unknowingly absorbed a vague sense that there were these dusky foreigners out there, led by a two-bit dictator who’d gotten too big for his britches, who thought that they could defy us, and were being taught that they could not. 

The “us” part was key. Us didn’t mean America, but rather the small group of people in charge of America. And I had unconsciously come to believe that, as a Yale student, I was a member of this group’s junior varsity.

I find this excruciating to think about today. But I’m glad I experienced it, because it gave me a visceral sense of how the world feels to the people who ultimately run places like Harvard and Yale.

So that’s my personal animus. But it should be shared by everyone who’d like the U.S. to be a real democracy.

Here’s a measure of the stranglehold the Ivy League has over the commanding heights of the U.S. political system: From 1989 to 2021, a period covering 32 years, five presidents, and eight presidential terms, every U.S. president went to an Ivy League school as an undergraduate or graduate. Even more incredibly, for 28 straight years from 1989 to 2017, the president went to either Harvard or Yale — or, in the case of George W. Bush, both. Then the Harvard/Yale streak was broken by Donald Trump, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. Joe Biden went to the non-Ivy University of Delaware.

Over this time, Americans rarely had the option to vote against the Ivy League. It’s not just that all of the candidates who won the elections between 1988 and 2016 went to Ivy League schools: Six of the eight candidates who lost went to Harvard or Yale. The two exceptions were Bob Dole in 1996 (Washburn University) and John McCain in 2008 (U.S. Naval Academy).

Then look at the Supreme Court. Eight of the current nine justices went to law school at either Harvard or Yale. The one exception, Amy Coney Barrett, replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who went to Harvard Law.

On its face, our era of Ivy dominance is the sign of a society that’s calcified. You need access to America’s networks of money and power to rise to the tippy top, and going to an Ivy League school is now a requirement for that access.

This gatekeeping would be bad enough if these schools — or anyone — could reliably measure some type of “merit.” People change all their lives, and we shouldn’t have to rely on a cohort of 50-year-olds who fit through an incredibly narrow aperture when they were 18 or 22.

But of course Ivy League colleges don’t actually admit students based on anything recognizable as merit. Anyone who’s attended one knows they look for young people who are 1) extremely good at figuring out what the rules are and then faithfully following them, and 2) clubbable and ingenuous with their elders.

I don’t agree with Reihan Salam, the head of the conservative Manhattan Institute, about much. (Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist instrumental in bringing down Claudine Gay, is “senior fellow and director of the initiative on critical race” there.) But Salam — Harvard ’01 — once argued, “Kids who attend elite schools are a mixed bag, and the vast majority are crashing bores. The admissions process tends to select for crashing bores.” He was correct. 

This doesn’t mean progressives should join in the current conservative crusade against Harvard. The right opposes education in general, because they realize that people thinking for themselves is the only thing that could make their greatest fear — a democratization of the U.S. — come to pass. And they recognize that even at Ivy League schools there is a danger this kind of thinking can occasionally happen.

Progressives should not defend Harvard. We could defend the concept of academic insulation from donor pressure, but this is a concept much more than a reality. Harvard’s $50 billion-plus endowment makes it one of the 10 largest hedge funds in the U.S. Above all, we have to understand Harvard will never defend us; it will always be on the side of the money. 

However, our program of destroying Harvard and its brethren should be in service to a larger, positive agenda. What we want is a country of education for everyone: high-quality public universities open to people of all ages and incomes, beautiful public schools for everyone before that, and enormous libraries in every American neighborhood.

If you went to an Ivy League school, you know enough to nod knowingly when anyone mentions this famous James Madison quote: “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

But what’s not taught in class is that this was from a letter Madison wrote to a friend about the importance of public education of all forms everywhere, including in Kentucky specifically. “Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty & dangerous encroachments on the public liberty,” he wrote. “They multiply the educated individuals from among whom the people may elect a due portion of their public Agents of every description.”

What Madison didn’t say was, “Let’s just have a few colleges like the place I went, Princeton, and choose every president from them.” We can recover Madison’s vision, but first we need to bulldoze the institutions in its way.  

The post Let’s Seize This Opportunity to Destroy Harvard!  appeared first on The Intercept.

As 2023 ends, I’ve been asking myself: How much money am I, personally, contributing to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and its attack on Gaza?

The Israeli assault on Gaza launched after the October 7 attacks by Hamas has so far killed more than 20,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including thousands of children and over 100 journalists. Nearly 90 percent of the territory’s residents have been displaced, and it has been called “one of this century’s most destructive wars.”

So how much have I chipped in to create this hell on earth?

The best answer I’ve come up with is $150.

There are two ways of looking at this number.

One is that this is a relatively small amount of money. Another is that the U.S. is so astonishingly rich and powerful that we as a country can mete out overwhelming brutality to others and barely notice as individuals. This is, in part, what makes the dollar amount of my contribution especially horrifying.

What the U.S. Gives Israel

In any case, $150 is necessarily a guesstimate. It could be more or less. Let’s go through how I came up with the figure.

To start with, adherents of modern monetary theory would tell you the government doesn’t need to tax anyone to spend. I believe this is correct. It’s part of why the notion of “taxpayer money” is a dangerous misconception: What we’re talking about really is “public money” — it doesn’t belong only to taxpayers. For our purposes, however, these are distinctions without a difference.

Next, we have to look at how much money the federal government spent in 2023, and on what. The federal 2023 fiscal year ended on September 30, but I’m going to assume the FY2023 numbers are equal to calendar year 2023.

In 2023, the government spent about $6.3 trillion. About $1.4 trillion of that is the cost of Social Security, which has its own dedicated revenue sources, mostly payroll taxes. Then, $0.8 trillion was spent on Medicare, about half of which comes from general revenue. So let’s say the total federal spending that has to be funded from non-dedicated sources is $4.5 trillion ($6.3 trillion minus $1.4 trillion minus $0.4 trillion). This isn’t precisely right for various complicated reasons, but it’s close enough.

The total aid the U.S. will be giving to Israel in 2023 and early 2024 will be about $18 billion. (That’s the $3.8 billion in normal annual aid, plus $14.5 billion in supplemental aid that’s been passed by the House and will surely be passed soon by the Senate.)

If you want, you could argue that Israel uses this for things other than its attack on Gaza and its wider occupation of Palestinian lands. But let’s, in our thought experiment, apply the twisted logic of the U.S.’s laws against material support: All cash is fungible, which is to say that even if Israel doesn’t spend all the U.S. money killing Palestinians, those other expenditures free up money to put toward that purpose.

It’s also true that the U.S. is supporting Israel’s actions in ways other than direct aid that also cost money: shielding Israel at the United Nations, sending the Dwight D. Eisenhower and Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Groups to the Mediterranean, etc. So let’s call it a wash and just use the $18 billion number.

That $18 billion is 0.4 percent of $4.5 trillion.

What I Give Israel

The $4.5 trillion in outlays comes from various sources, mostly income taxes, corporate taxes, and borrowing.

I’ll pay about $27,000 in federal income taxes for 2023. I also purchased government bonds: the maximum-allowed $10,000 in inflation-protected I bonds.

My 401(k) and mutual funds probably bought some federal bonds too. And surely some of the burden of corporate taxes fell on me, also through my 401(k) and mutual funds. Then, I paid some tax costs that companies were able to pass along to consumers. But there’s no way to calculate all this, and it all was certainly a small amount in any case. So let’s just add the $27,000 together with the $10,000 and say I contributed a total of $37,000 out of that $4.5 trillion.

Four-tenths of a percent of $37,000 is about $150.

There you have it. That’s my monetary contribution to the extraordinary brutality of Israel’s occupation and its war on Gaza.

You can figure out your own contribution if you want: Add your income taxes to any federal bonds you bought this year and multiply that number by 0.004. It’s easy, but not very fun.

At that point, you may ask yourself: What can I do about this, beyond trying to stop this war?

There is a long history of tax resistance in America. However, technology has made it easier for the government to track where all your money is, and if you refuse to pay taxes, it will eventually seize what you owe out of your bank accounts. You will likely also go to prison.

You theoretically can also vote for anti-war candidates in 2024, but there often aren’t any. And even if they win, they won’t take office for more than a year, much too late to make any difference in the current war. Despite the unpopularity of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and cracks beginning to show in the Democratic coalition, the pro-Israel lobby and bipartisan support for Israel remain strong in Washington, where foreign policy is set.

So I don’t know what the answer is. If you figure it out, please let me know.

The post I Calculated How Much of My Money the U.S. Sent to Kill Palestinians. You Can Too. appeared first on The Intercept.

We hope that all The Intercept’s readers are enjoying peace and contentment with their families this holiday season. That’s because human joy is anathema to us, and it is our institutional policy to locate such emotions and destroy them.

We’ve previously tried to obliterate your Christmas happiness by bringing up the children living in fear of our killer drones and how capitalism is killing us all. This year we’d like to point out that in any just universe, everyone from the U.S. to the European Union would currently be imprisoned in the international prison at The Hague in the Netherlands. 

We’ve all committed many crimes, but the most salient today is our complicity in the ultraviolence of the past several months in Israel and Palestine. This includes complicity in the October 7 attacks by Hamas, in the same way that white Americans who failed to uproot slavery were complicit in the deaths of the five dozen men, women, and children killed by Nat Turner and his followers in 1831.

The Hague prison — officially the “United Nations Detention Unit” — currently has a capacity of 52. Since there are 750 million of us in America and the EU, they’d have to expand it a little. But it wouldn’t be that bad. The detention center includes access to “fresh air, exercise, medical care, occupational therapy [and] spiritual guidance.” That last part is especially important, because we’re going to need a being of infinite mercy to get us out of this one.

This isn’t advice for us to sit around feeling guilty. That does no one any good, least of all the people in Gaza and the West Bank. But we believe we must 1) recognize that we are guilty, 2) investigate how we committed these crimes, and 3) stop committing them as quickly as possible.

This all sounds awful. Merry Christmas, let’s get started.

Failure of Imagination

Our greatest crime is built into the glitchy operating system of human brains. People instinctively love to help other people, which is beautiful. The problem is we are cognitively incapable of perceiving more than about 150 others as fully human. The remaining 8 billion people on Earth are an undifferentiated mass of protoplasm that we can be easily convinced is trying to kill us.

Hillel the Elder tried to deal with this problem by explaining, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation.”

Just a few years later Jesus was craftier, informing his flock, “Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

In other words, Jesus was telling his audience: “You know me and you like me, right? I’m one of the 150 people you consider human? Well, hold onto your f*cking hat, because everyone else on Earth is also human like me.”

This Christmas, Jesus would be saying, “Several baby Jesuses have been massacred on a kibbutz. Plus a bunch of baby Jesuses are being bombed by Lockheed fighter jets with General Dynamics MK80 series bombs. Hundreds of baby Jesuses have been shredded and smashed. Then lots of these baby mes were brought to the hospital by donkey over rubble-strewn roads, but that was pointless because the hospital had run out of anesthetic and supplies long ago. Since October 7, the explosive equivalent of the nuclear bomb the U.S. used on Hiroshima has been dropped on Gaza’s 2.3 million baby Jesuses and former baby Jesuses.”

Paradoxically, people need powerful imaginations to perceive reality, including the reality that others are people too. We have failed to use our imaginations to truly understand what Hillel and Jesus were trying to tell us. So here we are.

Failure of Action

Our failure of imagination has led to a failure of action, especially on the part of the U.S. government. If we saw the world clearly, we would have understood that the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank has for 56 years been both an ongoing human emergency and a big problem for the U.S. empire.

In Secretary of State Colin Powell’s autobiography “My American Journey,” he described the USS New Jersey shelling Beirut in 1983 in support of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. “What we tend to overlook in such situations is that other people will react much as we would,” wrote Powell. “And since they could not reach the battleship, they found a more vulnerable target.” This was U.S. and French military barracks, which were simultaneously destroyed by truck bombs, killing 307 people.

We could have used the inflection point of September 11, 2001, to understand — these are difficult words to write — Powell’s wisdom. The 9/11 attacks were to a significant degree motivated by Al Qaeda’s desire to gain power in the Arab world by retaliating against the U.S. for our support for Israeli policy. And this was not a sign that Muslims are “inherently evil.” Rather, it shows they are people just like us, and hence some of them will inevitably be as appalling as some of us. 

If we’d seen this, we would have made certain that we immediately ended the Palestinian nightmare — both on the grounds of basic justice and our own self-interest. But instead we’ve closed our eyes even tighter. The Israeli government made themselves so blind with racism that they saw the members of Hamas as mentally impaired savages who could never pull off an attack like October 7. They could have stopped it if they’d understood that they’re exactly like them: intelligent, organized, and capable of spectacular cruelty.

Failure of Commitment and Creativity

If U.S. potentates have failed to act in their own self-interest, that hasn’t been a problem for everyone else. There’s been lots of action by the rest of us. The trouble has been that we haven’t created any institutional structure that can translate all this action into enduring power. And one core reason for that is our failure of creativity.

It’s not fair to criticize the American left, for the same reason it’s not fair to criticize Santa Claus: Neither one exists. By historical and comparative standards, America is a weird outlier — atomized, depoliticized, complexified.

In theory, presidential campaigns could be vehicles to generate an organized left. In practice, the Democratic Party fundamentally opposes this, so if you’re going to try it, you’d better know that going in. When George McGovern was the Democratic nominee in 1972, he cultivated a huge new generation of volunteers and small donors. After he lost, he handed over his database to the Democratic National Committee, which threw it away. After Barack Obama rode a similar tide to victory in 2008, he essentially told everyone to go home and that he would handle it from there.

Sadly, the same thing has largely been true of Bernie Sanders. We now know that building an enduring movement was not the focus of his campaigns. This is especially heartbreaking because the surge in U.S. protests against the Israeli attack on Gaza has largely grown out of his campaigns — just without his involvement or support. You can only imagine what would be possible with it. Some day there will be another left standard bearer running on that scale, and we’d better lock down their commitment to something beyond themselves to start with.

In any case, we need to face the fact that changing anything significant in U.S. politics will require the rest of our lives. And for that to be bearable, it needs to be something that everyone actually enjoys and wants to do more than anything else.

We’re not sure what the answer is here, especially in a country with so much good TV to watch. But we’re pretty sure it will require something that people can’t get anywhere else. Let’s start with some good songs for everyone to sing, plus maybe some non-Nazi torchlight marches, and happy viral dances like those in Iran that make the people in power afraid. 

Get Back to Work

Over the past few months, the Christmas Grinch has taken our hand and led us to the top of his little Grinch mountain. There we’ve stood with him, overlooking the desolate junkyard of the U.S. war on terror. First, the Grinch pointed to the gully with the bloody cesspool of 20 years in Afghanistan and Pakistan — almost a quarter of a million people dead. Then he pulled us in closer and read from the Costs of War website. “Over 940,000 people died in direct violence when you add Iraq, Syria and Yemen,” he whispered. “3.6 to 3.8 million people have died indirectly in post 9/11 war zones.”

Then he showed the area he’d designated for dead Palestinians. It was already quite full, but he’d reserved an adjacent area to be sure it had lots of room to grow.

All this is real, not a story for children. All we can do is look the truth in the face and learn from our past mistakes. Then we have to get back to work, and see if we can prevent ourselves from taking an involuntary trip to the Netherlands.

The post Merry Christmas! We All Belong in Prison at The Hague. appeared first on The Intercept.

Do the people who run the world know the most basic facts about the world? This urgent question is raised by a recent column on the Israeli attack on Gaza by the British politician Ben Wallace, who, until a few months ago, was the United Kingdom’s defense minister. Terrifyingly enough, the answer appears to be no.

The problem is that Wallace places great significance on Hamas’s original 1988 charter, which is explicitly antisemitic and rejects any coexistence with Israel. But he doesn’t appear to know Hamas issued a new charter in 2017. In it, Hamas affirms that its “conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion.” And, while the revised charter rejects the legitimacy of Zionism, it accepts “the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.” This reference to the lines of June 4, 1967 — before Israel captured the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War — is regarded as accepting the existence of Israel within the borders it had at that time.

This is not some arcane knowledge available to but a few. You could have learned about it by reading any newspaper at the time, such as, for instance, The Telegraph — the publication that ran Wallace’s column.

Wallace’s failure to cite Hamas’s prevailing charter is especially irksome because his overall point is completely reasonable. He references the aftermath of 1972’s Bloody Sunday, when British troops in Northern Ireland killed 14 demonstrators, and writes, “As sure as night follows day, history shows us that radicalisation follows oppression.” Now, Wallace says, Israel is on the same path, and its “tactics will fuel the conflict for another 50 years. … All the action will have achieved is the extinction, not of the extremists, but the voice of the moderate Palestinians who do want a two-state solution.” 

However, Wallace adds that “[Hamas’s] charter reads like the constitution of a jihadist Salafi organisation. It is anti-Semitic and anti-democratic. It isn’t interested in peaceful co-existence with Israel, or Egypt, for that matter.” Moreover, “You can’t have a ceasefire with Hamas unless they are prepared to declare one; even then they would have to pledge to modify their charter to do so.”

Given Wallace’s wording, it’s unlikely that he was being consciously deceptive in his failure to note the 2017 revision; he almost certainly does not know that it exists. (Wallace is still in the British Parliament, and his Westminster office passed along questions about this to him, but he did not respond.)

This is significant for two reasons.

First, Hamas’s prevailing charter — i.e., the 2017 one — does not pose some insurmountable barrier to a two-state solution and peace. Moreover, while it’s unpopular to point this out, Hamas leaders have signaled a willingness to accept a two-state solution on many occasions. In 2009, the United States Institute of Peace, a think tank funded by the federal government, concluded that “Hamas has been carefully and consciously adjusting its political program for years and has sent repeated signals that it may be ready to begin a process of coexisting with Israel.” It’s easy to point to the vicious October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas and say it was obviously never willing to accept a two-state solution. However, the harsh truth is that the attacks and the Israeli response have increased U.S. interest in the establishment of a Palestinian state. It’s possible that parts of Hamas do in fact want a two-state solution, and understand us better than we understand ourselves.

Second, we have to accept that many of the people at the top of the world’s power structures simply have no idea what they’re talking about. Jimmy Carter once wrote that he wished that he had learned the history of U.S. aggression in Central America before he became president; the people of Central America probably wish that too. 

Likewise, Palestinians would be happier if people like Wallace, whose tenure as the U.K.’s defense minister lasted four years, could achieve a Wikipedia-level knowledge of their history. For extra credit, Wallace could even learn the basics of the Likud party, currently chaired by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Its original 1977 party platform declares that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

But, of course, there is no pressure on Wallace and his ilk to become acquainted with facts. All the pressure pushes them in the other direction. For instance, for his banal observations of reality about oppression breeding radicalization, Wallace has been accused of potentially “stoking antisemitic hate.”

It’s distressing to have to point out these facts about Hamas, which is, from any secular, progressive perspective, unsavory in the extreme. But while no one has to defend Hamas, it’s important to defend reality. We desperately need the people in charge to understand what it is, so at least they won’t destroy the world by accident.

The post A Top U.K. Official Displayed the Terrifying Ignorance of the World’s Leaders on Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

A State Department official resigned on October 14, writing in a letter that the U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Gaza “will only lead to more and deeper suffering for both the Israeli and Palestinian people.” The director of the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights resigned on October 31, stating that “once again we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes and the organization we serve appears powerless to stop it.”

With over 20,000 now dead in Gaza, there’s one government official who you’d assume — at least if you take her own words seriously — would join them. That is Samantha Power, current head of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Before that, she was the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. during the Obama administration.

But Power first rose to prominence with her 2002 book “‘A Problem From Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide.” It won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, with the citation reading, “Samantha Power poses a question that haunts our nation’s past: Why do American leaders who vow ‘never again’ repeatedly fail to marshal the will and the might to stop genocide?”

In the book’s introduction, Power makes this observation: “This country’s consistent policy of nonintervention in the face of genocide offers sad testimony not to a broken American political system but to one that is ruthlessly effective. The system, as it stands now, is working.”

There is no sign of Power taking a principled stand on Gaza, however. Rather, she is spending her time proudly tweeting about all the good the U.S. is doing in the world, such as the arrival in Egypt of 147,000 pounds of humanitarian aid. This is approximately one ounce per person in Gaza. 

In her book, Power depicts a grim history of U.S. realpolitik — during the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and more — that is totally indifferent to human suffering. In her telling, the ranks of the government are filled with cowardly, faceless apparatchiks who consistently choose their careers over humanity. Power describes them as “those who sat before their computers or bumped into one another in the [State] department’s drab cafeteria … [bureaucrats] who were protective of turf and career and not at all in the habit of rocking the boat.”

The book would be unbearably bleak if it weren’t for various heroes that Power locates in the labyrinthian halls of government, individuals who are so sick at heart at U.S. policy that they can no longer carry it out and publicly resign.

First, Power celebrates George Kenney, the State Department’s acting Yugoslav desk officer, who stepped down in 1992. Kenney decried George H.W. Bush’s disinterest in various massacres during the dissolution of Yugoslavia, with his cri de coeur making the front page of the Washington Post. When Power later covered the Balkans as a journalist, she wore a camouflage vest and helmet given to her by Kenney.

Then, in August 1993, Marshall Freeman Harris, the State Department’s Bosnia desk officer, resigned. Power interviewed him and quotes him as saying, “When you are in a bureaucracy, you can either put your head down and become cynical, tired and inured, or you can stick your head up and try to do something.”

Then, two more State officials left. Power cites a letter from one of them, Steven Walker, in which Walker wrote, “I can no longer countenance U.S. support for a diplomatic process that legitimizes aggression and genocide.”

So you might believe that Power herself would obviously step down now in the face of Israel’s actions in Gaza. After all, what’s happening now is arguably a greater indictment of the U.S. than what she writes about in “‘A Problem From Hell,’” which covers examples in which the U.S. government took little or no action to intervene to halt mass death. Here the U.S. is directly and unyieldingly supporting mass death.

At the end of the book, Power considers the past century and asks some cogent questions: “How many of us do not believe that the presidents, senators, bureaucrats, journalists, and ordinary citizens who did nothing, choosing to look away rather than to face hard choices and wrenching moral dilemmas, were wrong? And how can something so clear in retrospect become so muddled at the time by rationalizations, institutional constraints, and a lack of imagination? How can it be that those who fight on behalf of these principles are the ones deemed unreasonable?”

How indeed. For now, however, Power shows no signs of asking herself any such questions about the present and her role in it. If she did, she might see herself in these lines from a poem by Joseph Brodsky that she tweeted out four years ago:

Time, whose sharp blood-thirsty quill
Parts the killed from those who kill,
Will pronounce the latter tribe
As your type.

The post Samantha Power Calls on Samantha Power to Resign Over Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

The Universal Declaration was a landmark in history. While it was only a statement of principles, and so did not have legal force in itself, it was broadly inspirational and has formed the basis for numerous subsequent treaties and laws. According to Guinness World Records, it’s been translated into more languages than any other document — over 550, from Abkhaz to Zulu.

After the December 7 meeting, the internet exploded in bitter laughter at Blinken, and it’s easy to understand why. At the start of the meeting at the State Department, Blinken informed the assemblage that “the universality of human rights is under severe challenge and rights are being violated in far too many places …  And of course we see atrocities in the midst of conflict.” Yes, of course. Just one day later, on December 8, the U.S. vetoed a resolution at the U.N. Security Council calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza.

Notably, the Universal Declaration states that “everyone has a right to a nationality.” The Universal Declaration was adopted on December 10, 1948, one day before U.N. Resolution 194 was passed. Resolution 194 famously stated that, in the wake of the establishment of Israel earlier that year, Palestinian refugees “wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” This anniversary has not been commemorated with an event at the State Department.

Indeed, the whole process with Blinken was as distastefully funny as the Russian government’s own recent celebration of the Universal Declaration’s anniversary, in which it spoke of its deep concern over “the human rights situation in Ukraine.” This is where the U.S. government’s stage management comes in.

There were four human rights organizations in attendance, all represented by their top officials: Amnesty International (Agnès Callamard), Human Rights Watch (Tirana Hassan), the Committee to Protect Journalists (Jodie Ginsberg), and Freedom House (Michael Abramowitz).

We know this because all four leaders appeared in the above photo happily tweeted out by Blinken himself. And all four groups confirmed their presence to The Intercept. But when asked, the State Department refused to name who was in attendance because, it explained, this meeting took place in a “private setting.” 

In addition to the photo provided by Blinken, you can watch a video of this private setting on the State Department’s publicly available website. At 0:59, as Blinken natters on, you can see one of his bored functionaries glancing at his watch.

What actually happened is that, as the Committee to Protect Journalists puts it, “the State Department made clear that Secretary Blinken wanted to make a statement on the record but the meeting was private.” 

In other words, the U.S. government insisted that there be a public section of the meeting at the start, in which Blinken spoke and the human rights leaders would be photographed listening to him. Then, these photographs and Blinken’s words were distributed to the world. But the human rights leaders’ words were not.

Asked about his own experiences in such situations, Kenneth Roth, Hassan’s predecessor as head of Human Rights Watch, says that “there is nothing inherently wrong with having an off-the-record meeting with government officials … but it is odd for the Biden administration to mark the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration with an off-the-record meeting.” Roth explains that the Universal Declaration had modest influence in the decade after its adoption because it was considered undiplomatic for governments to criticize others by name. However, that changed in the 1960s and 1970s. “A commemoration of the Declaration that embraced what has made the document so impactful,” Roth contends, “would have been an on-the-record meeting in which abusive governments were unabashedly singled out by name.”

Human Rights Watch and Freedom House both declined to provide any details about what their officials told Blinken, stating that the post-photo op section of the meeting was off the record.

However, Amanda Klasing, Amnesty International’s national director for government relations and advocacy, did comment. Callamard, she says, “urged Secretary Blinken to seize the current inflection point, be consistent in the US’s attention to human rights, and send the message that human rights apply equally to non-US allies and to its closest friends. She made clear that this is especially urgent today, as Amnesty International has documented that the government of Israel – one of the US’s closest allies – is flagrantly violating international humanitarian law in its attacks on Gaza. She urged him to see the need for an immediate ceasefire and a stop to the transfer and sale of arms to the government of Israel in the existing context.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists was also willing to describe its leader’s remarks. According to CPJ, Ginsberg “most certainly brought our full-range of deep and urgent concerns regarding journalists in Gaza. The ongoing disaster is a top priority for us. Ginsberg underscored that more than 60 journalists have been killed (the vast majority Palestinians in Gaza), the increasingly difficult conditions, and the broader clampdown on the press and arrests including the West Bank. Notably, we strongly reiterated our demand for accountability in the likely targeting of journalists in southern Lebanon. In doing so, we stated our deep concern that the pattern of journalists being killed with impunity by the Israel Defense Forces is a long one.”

Roth, for his part, adds that “we don’t need another symbol of the Biden administration’s commitment to human rights. … A more meaningful way to celebrate the Universal Declaration would have been to visibly enforce it in the human rights black hole that the Middle East has largely become for the Biden administration.”

In a nice touch by the State Department, the meeting was held in its Thomas Jefferson State Reception Room, so the participants were overseen by both a statue and a painting of Jefferson. Jefferson was America’s first secretary of state, as well as the author of the Declaration of Independence — in some ways the progenitor of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Jefferson also enslaved 600 people over his lifetime and raped his dead wife’s half-sister, whom he owned. He thus is perhaps America’s greatest exemplar of our history of soaring rhetoric combined with a much grimier reality.

The post How Biden’s State Department Conceals Its “Human Rights Black Hole” in the Middle East appeared first on The Intercept.

Should liberals — i.e., America’s jambalaya of FDR-heads, radicals in name only, organizers with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and even normcore Democrats — try to get Jon Stewart to run for president?

An affirmative response comes from Jeff Cohen, the founder of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and former director of Ithaca College’s Park Center for Independent Media. Stewart rose to stardom as host of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, and after stepping down in 2015, he returned to TV in 2021 in “The Problem With Jon Stewart” (which Apple TV recently canceled). Cohen makes the case here, in a column, and here, in an interview with Salon.

Whether or not Stewart will run for president, Cohen convincingly explains why he should. His arguments about this apply beyond the specifics of Stewart and suggest that what Democrats truly need is more funny celebrities running for office.

First of all, this kind of brainstorming should be the norm instead of the exception in progressive U.S. politics. For a society that comes up with a new, crucial form of social media every month, it’s notable how stultifying our politics are. It’s not just that there’s never any outside-of-the-box thinking, it’s that the box itself is a cube 2 inches on each side. You can still go to protest rallies and hear people chanting, “The people, united, will never be defeated.” This may be new and appealing for younger activists, but it’s 50 years old, from another country (Chile), and doesn’t rhyme in English — all a measure of how there hasn’t been a lot of recent new work in this area.

Second, let’s face it, America loves celebrities. Republicans understand this and utilize it. Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump could never have become president without first achieving their chintzy forms of fame. When Reagan was asked why being an actor was a suitable preparation for politics, he astutely observed that he didn’t understand how anyone could be an effective politician who wasn’t an actor.

Other GOP candidates who’ve ridden preexisting renown into office include George Murphy (senator from California), Arnold Schwarzenegger (governor of California), Tommy Tuberville (senator from Alabama), Sonny Bono (representative from California), and even Fred Grandy, star of “The Love Boat” (representative from Iowa). There almost certainly will be more soon, such as Tucker Carlson (TV’s representative from white grievance).

For whatever reason, the hearts of Democrats seem to cry out against this. Indeed, there are examples of Democrats taking this path in reverse, as with Jerry Springer: an extremely talented orator who parlayed the mayorship of Cincinnati into a lucrative career in trash television. Many regular Democrats seemingly would prefer that politics have no humans involved at all and simply be a battle of lengthy position papers available online in 10-point type. (One unusual Democrat here is Al Franken, who started off on “Saturday Night Live” before being elected to the Senate from Minnesota in 2008.)

The U.S. has barely any culture in which people can rise to prominence beyond the culture of corporate entertainment.

Nonetheless, it’s time to accept that we are the country that we are. The U.S. has barely any culture in which people can rise to prominence beyond the culture of corporate entertainment. While there’s been a minor upsurge recently in union culture, we generally don’t have a political culture. (When’s the next meeting of political parties in your neighborhood? You probably don’t know unless you live in Iowa or New Hampshire.) We have barely any noncorporate music culture. (Maybe in Austin?) We have a culture of regular people acting in one city. (Chicago.)

The filmmaker Michael Moore (whom I once worked for) has tried to make this case to Democrats for decades. As he said when he once beseeched Matt Damon to run for president, “If you want to win, the Republicans have certainly shown the way: that when you run someone who is popular, you win. Sometimes even when you run an actor, you win. … I’d like us to start thinking that way.” 

Third, being funny is an underrated superpower in politics. In Reagan’s first debate in 1984 with the Democratic nominee Walter Mondale, he appeared frighteningly confused. For the next debate, his writers gave him a perfect line, which he hit out of the park: “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” He remained noticeably confused, but the issue evaporated.

Both Trump and Barack Obama also thrived in the presidency thanks to their comedic effectiveness. Trump is essentially an insult comic, a Don Rickles who sincerely hates the objects of his cruel jibes. As Obama’s speechwriters noted, his understanding of comedic delivery — showcased every year at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — was impeccable, so perfect that if his life had taken another path, he could have hosted “The Daily Show” himself.

So why not just go for an actual host of “The Daily Show”? The rationale for why the 2024 Democratic candidate should be someone other than Joe Biden is obvious, so obvious that it’s boring to run through it. Biden is too old. He will be 82 on Election Day. For comparison, people used to call the Soviet Union a gerontocracy in the early 1980s when the average age of its members was 69.

Biden is unpopular, with an average approval rating of 38 percent, despite the U.S. economy being in good shape by normal standards. Trump is ahead of Biden in most swing state polling. Even last year, before Biden’s full-throated support for Israel’s actions in Gaza, which has probably cost him some votes, 94 percent of Democrats under 30 wanted another presidential nominee.

Why Cohen believes Stewart specifically — among the large crop of funny celebrities — would be an ideal replacement is more subtle and intriguing, and you should read it for yourself. The short version is that Stewart is not just famous and beloved, but also has a genuine passion for public life and viscerally understands why Americans are so angry about it — because he’s angry too. 

Whether there’s any chance of this happening is unknown. Eleven months before a presidential election is pretty late to launch a campaign, even with an enthusiastic candidate. Most importantly, Stewart has shown no signs of being interested in being an enthusiastic candidate, or any candidate at all. Cohen acknowledges that this idea is “a Hail Mary,” but “these are desperate times,” given that we are currently on track for a second Trump presidency.

That concept is horrifying, given that it could plausibly mean the collapse of U.S. democracy. The paradox of our current plight is that the people screeching most loudly — the corporate Democratic establishment — have demonstrated by their immovable support for Biden that they do not actually take this threat seriously. As Cohen puts it, they’d “rather lose with Biden, someone they can control and someone they’ve known and used for 30 years, than win with someone they can’t.” 

That is no joke. But maybe we should start taking famous people who tell jokes more seriously.

The post Jon Stewart for Celebrity President. This Is Not a Joke! appeared first on The Intercept.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.