Quote of the Month
There would have been a time for such a word. — Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing. - William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5, 17-28
What I’m Reading:
1. Listen to the Gazans opposed to Hamas
Why you should read it: Washington Post foreign policy columnist David Ignatius highlights the “Whispered In Gaza” project that aims to bring the voices of ordinary Gazans opposed to Hamas rule to a wider international audience.
“If you doubt there are Palestinians who oppose the terrorist regime that Hamas has created, visit a project called “Whispered in Gaza” online. You’ll hear 25 powerful narratives that were recorded over the past 18 months. The Gazans’ names are changed and their faces drawn by animators, but their message has the unmistakable power of truth… Listen to ‘Zainab,’ her voice barely audible, expressing what sounds like a plea to the world: ‘There is a false stereotype that Palestinians in Gaza love rockets and wars. Gazans don’t love wars. The wars that happen are waged by the Hamas government for political aims that serve them alone… We don’t want war. We want a decent life.’”
“I wouldn’t pretend that these dissident voices represent a majority, or that they aren’t angered by Israeli bombardment of civilian areas. But Joseph Braude, who heads the Center for Peace Communications, the New York-based group that organized ‘Whispered in Gaza,’ has been talking to Palestinians there every day since this war began Oct. 7. He says he has heard a consistent theme: ‘There are trained, skilled, professional people who would step up and participate in an effort to reconstruct Gaza. Israel should show them it understands that many Gazans do not want to be ruled by Hamas.’”
Why it matters: “As this war progresses, the political and economic reconstruction of Gaza can’t be an afterthought for Israel; it’s a strategic necessity. Hamas laid a trap, betting that Israeli retaliation would entrench extremism all the more. If Israel treats all Gazans as enemies, it will fall into that trap and guarantee the ultimate failure of its mission. Fighting Hamas is a just war, but it must be accompanied by a clear plan, framed by the United States and friendly Arab countries working with a new generation of Palestinian leaders, to rebuild Gaza and invest in the West Bank. Otherwise, the war will create nothing but more rage in a barren land.”
2. How the Palestinian Authority failed Palestinians
Why you should read it: In The Atlantic, former Palestinian negotiating advisor Ghaith al-Omari details the severe problems facing the Palestinian Authority, the governing body created by the 1990s peace process that stands as the main alternative to Hamas.
“Since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the Palestinian people have been presented with two competing, irreconcilable visions of their future. One, posited by the Palestine Liberation Organization—a secular, though by no means democratic, group and the parent of the Palestinian Authority—envisioned a diplomatic process leading to a Palestinian state side by side with Israel. The other, promoted by Hamas, a designated terrorist group and a member of the larger Muslim Brotherhood network, called for the establishment of a Palestinian state from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean—in other words, the destruction of Israel—to be achieved through violence. Diplomacy, terror, governance, charities, political organizing, messaging: The opponents used all tools at their disposal to advance their objectives both on the ground and in the hearts and minds of Palestinians… The peace process stalled and later collapsed. Its failure undermined the PA’s central message—that liberation could be achieved through diplomacy—and cast doubt on not only the wisdom of having signed on to Oslo but also the PA’s very raison d’être.”
“Today, a staggering 87 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza believe that the PA is corrupt, 78 percent want Abbas to resign, and 62 percent believe that the PA is a liability. This loss of popular legitimacy has had real-life implications. Even before the current war in Gaza, areas of the West Bank were practically ungoverned. The international community, appalled by the PA’s corruption and dealing with competing crises elsewhere, reduced aid. Diplomatically, outside powers continued to treat the PA as the legitimate representative of the Palestinians. But in reality, world leaders have largely given up on it… Under different circumstances—if the PA were a more effective, clean government, better trusted by its people—one might imagine it returning to Gaza when this war ends and leading the process of reconstruction and recovery. But Palestinians have no confidence that the PA has their interests at heart; the international community does not trust it to administer funds on the scale of those that will be needed for reconstruction; and the PA anyway lacks the institutional infrastructure to do the job.”
Why it matters: “In the absence of a PA that can be counted upon, the people of Gaza and the international community will be forced to choose from a menu of bad options. Israel may have to reoccupy Gaza—an outcome that neither the Gazan people nor Israel want, and which would be costly for both. Or Hamas might remain in power, injured logistically but empowered politically to resume its oppressive rule and prepare for the next round of devastating war. Or outside actors may stand up an international administration that sounds good on paper but will be extremely difficult in reality to sustain… Rehabilitating the PA will require Israel to reexamine its policies in the West Bank—addressing the growing problem of settler violence and making meaningful gestures to enhance the PA’s authority and improve Palestinian quality of life. It will also require a serious effort, using both incentives and pressure, to ensure that the PA cleans up its act and presents a government that both Palestinians and the international community can trust.”
3. Why Netanyahu must go
Why you should read it: Former Israeli officials Ami Ayalon, Gilead Sher, and tech entrepreneur Orni Petruschka make the case in Foreign Affairs that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must resign in the wake of the October 7 terrorist attacks if Israel.
“As it works to defeat Hamas militarily, Israel must also work to define its long-term strategy. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is unfit to direct any part of this process—neither the war to defeat Hamas nor efforts to secure a more lasting peace. Israel must prioritize a larger political vision, not just for the sake of reducing tensions with nearby countries and avoiding engulfing its region in violence but for its own sake: to secure its future as the democratic nation-state of the Jewish people and to preserve its core values of freedom and justice—values it shares with the United States.”
“After Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon disengaged from Gaza in 2005, his successor, Ehud Olmert—in office from 2006 to 2009—tried to work with the Palestinian Authority to strike a peace deal that included Gaza. But shortly after taking over from Olmert, Benjamin Netanyahu, a reckless and cynical leader, sought to strengthen Hamas’s position in Gaza. He espoused the ill-fated notion that Hamas’s rule in Gaza was fundamentally good for Israel: Israeli interests were better served by Palestinian disunity—with Gaza split from the West Bank, where the more moderate PA holds sway—than by political unity among Palestinians… Netanyahu believed that severing political ties between the West Bank and Gaza would impede any peace process that could lead to a two-state outcome. His wish to subvert this process was driven by an even higher ambition: to prevent the emergence of a sovereign Palestinian state and the partition of the Holy Land… Content that any threat to the status quo from the Palestinians had been managed, Netanyahu also knowingly weakened the Israeli military through his recent focus on judicial overhaul. He ignored strong warnings from veterans of Israel’s security establishment such as General Moshe Yaalon and General Amos Malka—as well as many other groups—that this regime change disguised as reform could damage Israel’s national security by eliminating its separation of powers, weakening its law enforcement bodies, undermining its economy, and assaulting the fundamental values that kept Israeli society cohesive.”
Why it matters: “The destruction of Hamas’s armed forces will create a political vacuum in Gaza. Israel will have no interest in resuming control over the Palestinian population there. It must, instead, help design a process in which an international force coordinated by Israel, the PA, and the United States—with the cooperation of neighboring Arab countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia—takes responsibility for a transitional period, restoring public order and repairing infrastructure. This transition could tee up the negotiations for a two-state plan modeled on the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, subject to modifications… Netanyahu cannot direct any part of this process—not the peace process, and not the war, either. He has completely lost the trust of not only his foes but now, also, many of his friends. And lately, he has lost the trust even of members of the top ranks of the Israeli security establishment. On October 29, he created chaos with a late-night tweet that shifted blame onto Israel’s intelligence agencies for missing the signs of Hamas’s attack. He later deleted the tweet and apologized, but this kind of impulsive, defensive episode that undermines hardworking officials and threatens his fragile unity government may well recur. Most important, he cannot lead Israel in a unique moment that requires the country to seize an opportunity to change the direction of its conflict with the Palestinians. He must resign immediately if Israel is to have any chance of rebounding from the destruction he has wreaked on its security, economy, and society.”
4. Why “decolonization” is a false and dangerous narrative
Why you should read it: Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore argues in The Atlantic that the faddish academic ideology of “decolonization” does little to help understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at best and invariably leads to cold-blooded justifications for mass murder.
“The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity. It holds that Israel is an ‘imperialist-colonialist’ force, that Israelis are ‘settler-colonialists,’ and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors. (On October 7, we all learned what that meant.)… This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the ‘oppressed’ to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an ‘oppressor’ to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as ‘white’ and ‘privileged’; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of ‘exploitative capitalism’ and in the Middle East through ‘colonialism…’” This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities—and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigor—has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians. When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts.”
“The toxicity of this ideology is now clear. Once-respectable intellectuals have shamelessly debated whether 40 babies were dismembered or some smaller number merely had their throats cut or were burned alive. Students now regularly tear down posters of children held as Hamas hostages. It is hard to understand such heartless inhumanity. Our definition of a hate crime is constantly expanding, but if this is not a hate crime, what is? What is happening in our societies? Something has gone wrong… The open world of liberal democracies—or the West, as it used to be called—is today polarized by paralyzed politics, petty but vicious cultural feuds about identity and gender, and guilt about historical successes and sins, a guilt that is bizarrely atoned for by showing sympathy for, even attraction to, enemies of our democratic values. In this scenario, Western democracies are always bad actors, hypocritical and neo-imperialist, while foreign autocracies or terror sects such as Hamas are enemies of imperialism and therefore sincere forces for good. In this topsy-turvy scenario, Israel is a living metaphor and penance for the sins of the West. The result is the intense scrutiny of Israel and the way it is judged, using standards rarely attained by any nation at war, including the United States.”
Why it matters: “Nothing is more patronizing and even Orientalist than the romanticization of Hamas’s butchers, whom many Arabs despise. The denial of their atrocities by so many in the West is an attempt to fashion acceptable heroes out of an organization that dismembers babies and defiles the bodies of murdered girls. This is an attempt to save Hamas from itself. Perhaps the West’s Hamas apologists should listen to moderate Arab voices instead of a fundamentalist terror sect… In the wider span of history, sometimes terrible events can shake fortified positions: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin made peace after the Yom Kippur War; Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat made peace after the Intifada. The diabolical crimes of October 7 will never be forgotten, but perhaps, in the years to come, after the scattering of Hamas, after Netanyahuism is just a catastrophic memory, Israelis and Palestinians will draw the borders of their states, tempered by 75 years of killing and stunned by one weekend’s Hamas butchery, into mutual recognition. There is no other way.”
5. How progressives condescend to Palestinians
Why you should read it: In The Free Press, linguist and commentator John McWhorter observes that self-proclaimed pro-Palestinian leftists actually view them as moral infants.
“Some leftists are framing Hamas’s killing of 1,400 Israelis and abduction of 222 more as ‘decolonization,’ believing they’re championing the cause of oppressed Palestinians. In reality, these leftists are condescending to them… Such a perspective is deeply insulting to Palestinian humanity. It implies that Palestinians are so controlled by circumstance that they lack agency. It implies that Palestinians cannot be expected to behave according to the same ethical standards of those who refrain from mass murder.”
“There is a kind of patronizing racism in the idea that slaughtering innocent people equates to noble freedom fighting, as if this were the only way to respond to oppression… Few of those who celebrate savagery in theory would do so when faced with its reality. How many of the people cheering on Hamas as noble freedom fighters could seriously imagine pumping their fists while watching the men on their way to murder Jewish teenagers at a music festival? The abstract, scholarly, Latinate air of the word decolonization is a kind of fig leaf, functioning to—in the parlance of the hard left—distract from actions that are inexcusable in any sane person’s mind.”
Why it matters: “…I’m not sure that those who cheer for Hamas are living in gray zones or see Palestinians as complex human beings. The Hamas cheerleaders are effectively saying: Men butchered legions of people in your name. Hooray for them and hooray for you! Classifying Palestinians as ‘brown’ people, purportedly enlightened souls applaud this savagery from their representatives—but from a position of unintended, but ugly, condescension.”
6. Why America needs to better coordinate its international economic policies
Why you should read it: Academics Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman write in Foreign Affairs that the Biden administration’s new international economic policy requires more and better coordination among various U.S. government agencies to be truly effective.
“This enormous task does not fall into the domain of either traditional national security or free-market economics. It is an effort to maintain economic security, one that looks to prevent economic shocks that could destabilize society and hopes to limit the growing use of interdependence as a tool of coercion. Protecting economic security means keeping an eye on the trajectories of growth and innovation while managing anticipated security threats and creating enough policy bandwidth to tackle unanticipated ones. It cannot be reduced to either missile systems or market regulations, and it involves messy tradeoffs and decisions over which economic restrictions will defuse threats without undermining growth and which measures might help tackle shared global problems, such as climate change, without substantially damaging American security and prosperity… To address the new problems of economic security and avoid a downward spiral that could threaten the global economy, U.S. officials must reckon with a major task: nothing less than a transformation of the U.S. government. The past offers the wrong guidance, and the current predicament calls for an exacting reassessment. Several U.S. allies, notably Japan and the European Union, have retained greater control over markets in the interest of economic security; the United States can learn from them. Only a considerably reformed economic security state will be suited to a world that is both highly interdependent and filled with security risks.”
“Drawing a detailed blueprint for the U.S. economic security state will require a lengthy and difficult debate… Most obviously, the United States needs to set out its own comprehensive economic security strategy. Turning de-risking from a catch phrase to a coherent approach will require a lot of work—work that should be guided by a formal policy document that will send an important signal to the government agencies that will fulfill its mission as well as to the broader public. Different parts of the U.S. government have begun to examine specific policy tools, such as sanctions, even if these investigations have not gone nearly as far as some would like. Integrating these separate elements into a coherent policy will require an all-of-government approach as well as input from concerned parties, including both industry and civil society.”
Why it matters: “Such suggestions are only a starting point for debate, but that debate must start now. The Biden administration rightly wants to avoid a world in which the United States and China get drawn into a dangerous process of decoupling. The risk is that existing U.S. institutions may pull the country relentlessly in the direction that it wants to avoid. To get economic security right in a highly interdependent world marked by serious great-power competition, the U.S. government must reinvent itself.”
7. How proceduralism defends itself
Why you should read it: The Breakthrough Institute’s Alex Trembath reads a new National Academies of Sciences report on decarbonization and finds it contains zombie justifications for excessive red-tape and regulation that are fundamentally antithetical to democracy.
“I would offer a different way of describing this dynamic, which is that private environmental NGOs insert themselves into public decision-making processes, on the basis of questionable claims to scientific authority and authentic community representation, weaponizing regulatory procedures and obstructing democratically accountable infrastructure decisions… Our democratically elected representatives have invested many trillions of dollars in low-carbon innovation and infrastructure over the coming decades. But in the wake of the [Infrastructure Innovation and Jobs Act] and the [Inflation Reduction Act], the implementation discourse has over-indexed on procedure: theories of community engagement, innovation in process, and conflicting claims to community representation. The obsession with process is more than evident within the aging institutions of the state itself, what Nicholas Bagley calls ‘the procedure fetish’ or what Jennifer Pahlka describes as ‘a culture that consistently prioritizes process over results.’”
“This obsessive proceduralism is the product of the structural nature of the modern American state, which has intentionally or tacitly outsourced much of its own capacity to the courts and, crucially, to the non-profit industrial complex. The U.S. tax code incentivizes philanthropic giving by making charitable donations tax deductible. This has led to the expansion of local and national nonprofits who claim to represent the public interest and perform functions otherwise assumed under ‘state capacity.’ That’s how we got here: American tax policy has produced a system of authority and decision-making in which NGOs do, in fact, attempt to ‘liaise’ between communities and the government. The NAS report reads as a full-throated endorsement of this status quo.”
Why it matters: “…the status quo strikes me as profoundly anti-democratic. Tax dollars are diverted from our publicly accountable government to an opaque constellation of institutions which—through public relations, ‘public interest’ litigation, and ‘citizen voice’ regulatory interventions—meaningfully determine the outcomes of governmental policies and investments. Not only is the state’s capacity underfunded in this arrangement, but its remaining function is further undermined and captured by the private beneficiaries of its largesse.
8. How private equity ate the economy
Why you should read it: The Atlantic staff writer Rogé Karma outlines the way private equity has risen to make up a fifth of the U.S. economy, creating an opaque private economy of its own.
“When a private-equity fund buys a publicly traded company, it takes the company private—hence the name. (If the company has not yet gone public, the acquisition keeps that from happening.) This gives the fund total control, which in theory allows it to find ways to boost profits so that it can sell the company for a big payday a few years later. In practice, going private can have more troubling consequences. The thing about public companies is that they’re, well, public. By law, they have to disclose information about their finances, operations, business risks, and legal liabilities. Taking a company private exempts it from those requirements… In 2000, private-equity firms managed about 4 percent of total U.S. corporate equity. By 2021, that number was closer to 20 percent. In other words, private equity has been growing nearly five times faster than the U.S. economy as a whole.”
“America learned the hard way what happens when corporations operate in the dark. Before the Great Depression, the whole U.S. economy functioned sort of like the crypto market in 2021. Companies could raise however much money they wanted from whomever they wanted. They could claim almost anything about their finances or business model. Investors often had no good way of knowing whether they were being defrauded, let alone whether to expect a good return… Not all private-equity deals end in calamity, of course, and not all public companies are paragons of civic virtue. But the secrecy in which private-equity firms operate emboldens them to act more recklessly—and makes it much harder to hold them accountable when they do. Private-equity investment in nursing homes, to take just one example, has grown from about $5 billion at the turn of the century to more than $100 billion today. The results have not been pretty. The industry seems to have recognized that it could improve profit margins by cutting back on staffing while relying more on psychoactive medication. Stories abound of patients being rushed to the hospital after being overprescribed opioids, of bedside call buttons so poorly attended that residents suffer in silence while waiting for help, of nurses being pressured to work while sick with COVID. A 2021 study concluded that private-equity ownership was associated with about 22,500 premature nursing-home deaths from 2005 to 2017—before the wave of death and misery wrought by the pandemic… Something similar could be said about any number of industries, including higher education, newspapers, retail, and grocery stores. Across the economy, private-equity firms are known for laying off workers, evading regulations, reducing the quality of services, and bankrupting companies while ensuring that their own partners are paid handsomely. The veil of secrecy makes all of this easier to execute and harder to stop… The problem, once again, is that no one knows how true that story is. Banks have to disclose information to regulators about how much they’re lending, how much capital they’re holding, and how their loans are performing. Private lenders sidestep all of that, meaning that regulators can’t know what risks exist in the system or how tied they are to the real economy.”
Why it matters: “The government appears to be at least somewhat aware of this problem. In August, the SEC proposed a new rule requiring private-equity fund advisers to give more information to their investors. That’s better than nothing, but it hardly addresses the bad behavior or systemic risk. Nearly a century ago, Congress concluded that the nation’s economic system could not survive as long as its most powerful companies were left to operate in the shadows. It took the worst economic cataclysm in American history to learn that lesson. The question now is what it will take to learn it again.”
9. How Taylor Swift serves as an antidote to Trump and all his works
Why you should read it: In The Bulwark, Jill Lawrence reviews Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour movie and contends that Swift herself is the antidote to the meanness and cruelty that characterizes so much of our public life today.
“Beyond all that, as meaningful as it is to second-wavers like me, Swift is a sorely needed role model for our times. Her triumph is not just her well documented business savvy, musical gifts, or the way she has worked for years with the nonpartisan voter-registration group Vote.org, urging her fans to participate in U.S. democracy. It’s even bigger than that, though it sounds so simple: Swift is a nice girl, not a mean girl. A sweet, considerate person who picks up the trash at a family gathering… Swift is nothing but nice throughout Eras, from her special moment mid-concert with the late Kobe Bryant’s young daughter to the many times she thanks her fans for buying tickets to a three-hour-plus live concert (twice as long as A Hard Day’s Night!) that spans all of her musical ‘eras,’ proving that it wasn’t a harebrained obsession. ‘It’s only because of you that I get to do that,’ she tells them. By the end, she’s asked them for just one more song’s worth of their time, as if she’s imposing on them for yet another favor. As TMZ reported, Swift is also kind to those working for her. She gave $100,000 bonuses to the fifty or so Eras Tour truckers who drove her equipment around the country, and unspecified but ‘very generous’ bonuses to others on the tour, including band members, dancers, lighting and sound technicians.’”
““No one will ever mistake Swift for Everywoman, but it’s a tribute to her talent and audience connection that nobody in the theater laughed when she referred to herself as ‘a lonely millennial covered in cat hair’ at the time she wrote Folklore, a surprise album released a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic. She’s an amalgam of glamorous, grounded, and professional. Closeups of her fingernails tell a story. Each is a different color, from black to pink to glittery, but they’re cut short—the mark of serious pianists and guitarists like Swift, who plays both.”
Why it matters: “I remember mean girls from junior high school, and I’m sure they’re still around. Swift is the antidote we need, especially now. She shows young girls, women, and her many male fans that you can be a rich celebrity while also treating others with kindness and respect. You can give away extra money to people who work for you, instead of stiffing them for what they’re owed. You can be strong without threats and intimidation. You can show that kindness is not weakness. In the age of Donald Trump, these are all lessons that bear repeating.”
Odds and Ends
How the fine dust kicked up by the asteroid that hit the Earth 65 million years ago—rather than the impact itself—may have truly doomed the dinosaurs…
The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum gives an online tour of the U.S. Navy’s first rigid airship, the USS Shenandoah, on the centennial of its first flight…
Meanwhile, in New Zealand: organized groups of young people known as “siren clubs” blasting music at 3AM, with Celine Dion a favorite artist…
How documentary filmmakers accidentally discovered a 128-year-old shipwreck at the bottom of Lake Huron…
Declassified Cold War-era satellite images have revealed scores of Roman-era forts in modern-day Syria…
What I’m Listening To
Norah Jones and Dave Grohl play the Foo Fighters’ 2005 song “Razor” live on her podcast Norah Jones is Playing Along.
“Peace Sells,” the title track from Megadeth’s 1986 album Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying?
“The News” from Paramore’s most recent album, This Is Why.
Image of the Month
