The Fragile World

 

By David K. Shipler                 

                As of January 20, when Donald Trump is inaugurated, the world’s three strongest nuclear powers will all be led by criminals. Only Trump has been convicted, but Vladimir Putin faces an outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court—for his war crime of abducting children from Ukraine to Russia—and Xi Jinping should face one for his genocide against the Muslim Uighurs in China. Trump has obviously been found guilty of much less—mere business fraud—although he was justifiably charged with mishandling classified documents; obstruction of justice; and attempting, in effect, to overturn the linchpin of electoral democracy.

                The world is in the throes of criminality. Where government is weak—or complicit—organized crime or terrorism often fills the vacuum. In Mexico, cartels manufacture drugs freely and now control the conduits of illegal immigration into the United States. In areas of Myanmar ravaged by internal combat, narcotics producers are in open collusion with Chinese traffickers, and kidnap victims are forced onto the internet to scam the unsuspecting out of their life savings. And so on, amid a sprawling disintegration of order.

    Moreover, warfare has widened far beyond the familiar headlines. Not only in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Sudan, but in 42 countries total, wars are raging: invasions, insurgencies, ethnic conflicts, and militias fighting over precious resources. Combined with drought and storms fueled by the earth’s unprecedented warming, the wars are uprooting millions in the most massive human displacement of modern history. As of last June, an estimated 122.6 million people were living as refugees worldwide after having been driven from their homes by violent conflict, persecution, and human rights violations, according to the UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency. Another 21.5 million people each year, on average, are forced out by droughts, floods, wildfires, and stifling temperatures.

                  Into this maelstrom come Trump and his eccentric minions with their wrecking balls and decrees, soon to be taught the inevitable Lesson of Uncertainties: The outside world can be neither controlled nor ignored by Washington. It intrudes in unexpected ways, defies prediction, and resists domination. It pushes presidents around.

    Therefore, while some sure things are probably in store, it’s more useful to examine questions, not answers, regarding what the new year might bring.

    First, will Trump’s bluster and impulsive promises to end wars with his social media rants bear fruit? He likes to think of himself as a dealmaker, as we’ve been told endlessly by  people who know him. But he is a bully, not a chess player, and he seems less canny than his opponents in Beijing and Moscow. Most of the ideologues and acolytes he’s naming to his administration look ill-equipped to deal with this fragile, threatening world.  

    A modestly hopeful scenario rests in two wars most susceptible to resolution: Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas, which are both approaching a turning point toward diplomacy.

    If Trump proves skilled enough to navigate through the various parties’ maximalist demands, both Russia and Ukraine might be ready for a halt. After nearly three years, the fighting is practically a stalemate, even as Russia gains some ground and exhausts the Ukrainians.

    On the one hand, Russia has paid dearly in lives, military hardware, economic security, and its own domestic freedoms. It has revealed its weaknesses as Putin has damaged its global standing by his humiliating dependence on Iranian drones, North Korean ammunition, Chinese technology, and  even North Korean troops. Far from dividing NATO, his invasion added to its ranks by scaring Finland and Sweden into joining. A rational, non-messianic leadership would look at the debit side of the balance sheet and see Putin’s war as a deterrent to future adventures.

    On the other hand, Putin is, in fact, a messianic leader devoted to reestablishing the Soviet empire, which broke apart into 15 countries in 1991. He is also patient. He plays the long game. And his vision might pay off if Trump makes good on his anti-Ukraine posture and curtails aid. Europeans see the risk of an emboldened Russia and a wider war, which Trump may not recognize.

    In diplomacy as in warfare, timing is key. Back in November 2022, General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, urged Ukraine and Russia to negotiate, because he thought that total military victory was unlikely for either side. Obviously, he was absolutely right. “You want to negotiate from a position of strength,” he declared. “Russia right now is on its back.”  He might have been channeling Carl von Clausewitz, who noted that war is diplomacy by other means. Flipping that aphorism around, it’s clear that negotiating strength at the bargaining table reflects the reality on the battlefield.

               The Gaza war, after 15 months of atrocities, might also be close to a pause, although certainly not a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Unless Trump undergoes a conversion, he is likely to be the worst possible president to help Israel and the Palestinians toward a lasting settlement. At best, he might get a temporary truce. The remnants of Hamas are trying for a ceasefire that will keep alive the embers of their presence in Gaza, which Israel is determined to extinguish permanently, even by bombing massively, killing and maiming innocents, disrupting food and medical supplies, and obliterating hospitals and schools.

President Biden and his staff have worked hard on a ceasefire, have come close, but have not been able to get Hamas to release all the Israeli hostages it seized on October 7, 2023, or to get Israel to withdraw its troops. Biden hasn’t put the screws to Israel for its devastating military onslaught, and Trump is poised to give Israel carte blanche to “do what you have to do,” as he reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump’s prospective ambassador to Isdrael, Mike Huckabee, supports Israeli annexation of the West Bank, which would finally close off the option of a Palestinian state as a means of resolving the conflict. Ending wars is the first of Trump’s challenges.

Second, Iran is a question mark. Since its two failed missile attacks on Israel and Israel’s near demolition of Iran’s air defenses and proxies—Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon—the Tehran government appears vulnerable both internationally and domestically. But militant authorities that are backed into a corner can go in different directions. Iran’s complex society, with pro-Western yearnings, might produce more conciliatory leadership. Or, the government, temporarily debilitated, might race to build an arsenal of nuclear weaponry.

One of Trump’s most thoroughly stupid acts as president was withdrawing from the intricately negotiated agreement that halted for a time Iran’s progress toward nuclearization. The country is now on the cusp of becoming as untouchable as North Korea.

The short-term military answer would be an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, with the help of US aircraft and bunker-busting bombs that are beyond Israel’s capability. Israel appears to have laid the groundwork for such an attack. Would Trump give the green light? Would he commit US forces? He’s made a point of wanting out of wars abroad. But perhaps he knows that a nuclear Iran would generate a region-wide nuclear arms race to include Saudi Arabia and other Arab petro-states.

In summary, the developments arise in an era of remarkable instability. Syria, a keystone in the Middle East, teeters on the brink of failed statehood after the fall of the house of Assad. Yemen collapses into civil war. A traumatized Israel lashes out violently at widespread targets of opportunity with no conceptual framework achieving a future without warfare.

Third, China’s economic and military expansionism raises critical questions of how to manage a relationship that ought to include cooperation as well as competition. Symbolism and language, always woven into international affairs, are not Trump’s strong suit. He likes insults and threats, which might work with allies but rarely with adversaries. He and the militant China hawks he’s appointing, such as Senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state, seem ready for confrontation through tariffs and forward military deployments.

But China doesn’t have to retaliate in kind. It can counter American interests in asymmetrical ways, perhaps by blockading or even attacking Taiwan, the world’s dominant chip manufacturer. How would Trump respond? What military posture would he adopt? Is he ready to send the Seventh Fleet to Taiwan’s rescue? If not, and if he really wants to avoid tripping into a war, he needs some advisers who know China and can think clearly.

Fourth, what is to become of pluralistic political systems in the US and abroad? How much stress can they take with wannabe authoritarians at their helms?

The question is especially acute for the United States, but Italy, France, and Germany also face this challenge. For their part, Americans have entered a Faustian bargain by selling the soul of their democracy for lower grocery and gas prices. The test will be critical. Trump pledges to round up undocumented immigrants in massive sweeps that would chill many communities nationwide.  He promises to pardon white supremacists who were duly tried, convicted, and imprisoned for attacking Congress in its most sacred duty of certifying the election results of 2020. That would unleash on ordinary Americans an extraordinary onslaught of armed militants beholden to Trump and hostile to the basis of a legal and democratic order. He has nominated as secretary of defense Pete Hegseth, a “Christian nationalist” who promises to purge the officer corps. He is likely to be a gateway for white supremacists to enter the upper ranks.

Trump plans to turn his Justice Department and the FBI into tools of revenge against his legitimate political opponents—an assault on more than two centuries of democratic values. And he might be able to do it, because he is surrounding himself this time with sycophants who seem ready to display fealty to him, as if to a dictator, and to ride with his passion to amass personal authority in a vacuum of moral and ethical restraint.

Trump has inflicted terror on members of the Republican Party, who don’t dare oppose him and purge those who do. He operates very much like a mafia boss and so will strain the ligaments of the constitutional order. He has managed already, just in his first term, to pack the Supreme Court with compliant justices who have taken the dangerous step of granting him immunity from criminal prosecution for so-called “official” acts.

In his first term, some observers predicted that the weight of presidential responsibilities would make Trump responsible. It did not happen. Yet some are grasping at straws again, hoping that Trump cares about a more dignified legacy, that his draconian campaign promises will prove as empty as most politicians’ electoral flamboyance, or that the checks and balances woven so ingeniously into America’s governing fabric will somehow foil the coming autocratic agenda.

As Trump likes to say, we’ll see what happens.

Putin Advises Trump on Oligarchs

 

By David K. Shipler 

                “Donnie, do you know the difference between you and me?” Vladimir Putin asked Donald J. Trump in a brief phone call yesterday. “It’s a riddle.”

                “Don’t call me Donnie,” Trump said. “Or I’ll call you Vladdie.”

                “Hey, don’t get so upset, comrade,” said Putin. “I’m just trying to make you think you’re my friend.”

                “And don’t call me comrade till Tulsi Gabbard gets confirmed. She’ll be thrilled, but she’s got to get past some leftover ‘experts’ in the party who don’t admire you.”

                “Don’t admire me?” Putin replied. “That’s impossible. Everybody I know admires me.”

                “Me too,” said Trump. “Oh, shit, I said, ‘Me too.’ I take it back. I’ve banned that expression. Nobody who works for me can say ‘me too.’ But they all love me, Vlad, they really do. I’m loved from the minute I get up—well, after I leave Melania behind in the bedroom—until the minute I go to bed. Well, if I go to bed before her.”

                “Come on, Donnie, guess the riddle.”

                “Stop with the Donnie.”

                “OK, MISTER PRESIDENT, what’s the difference between you and me?”

                “You don’t have my hair,” said Trump.

                “Slava Bogu!” Putin replied. “That means glory of God. You’d say thank God. But you don’t believe in God, do you, Donnie?”

                “Absolutely not. Don’t tell the evangelicals. What’s he ever done for me? I’ve done it all myself. He’s a hoax, like climate change.”

                “Climate change isn’t a hoax, Donnie. Now come on, the riddle.”

                “I give up,” said Trump.

                “You give up easily, comrade. Kamala was right, you know. You’re weak. You wouldn’t last two minutes in the Kremlin. The knees on your million-dollar suits would wear out from groveling. But in the White House? I’m going to love it when you’re there.”

                “OK, so that’s the difference? You’re a strongman and I’m a weakman?”

                “You’re getting close,” said Putin. “The difference is that my oligarchs do what I tell them or I take their billions and throw them in jail or out a hotel window. But you—you do what your oligarchs tell you. They run you. You worship them and fear them. You’re afraid that their contributions to your slush funds will dry up and they’ll say mean things on X and won’t keep Republicans in line. You’re afraid of that little twerp Elon Musk. Here in Moscow, I create Elon Musks and obliterate them when they get uppity. That’s the difference, Donnie Boy.”

                The recording of the call goes silent for a few seconds. It seems to be ended until a faint sigh is heard, then the voice of Trump: “I gotta hang up and go play golf with Elon, but I hate it. He always wins, even when I cheat. See you next year in Kyiv.” 

This is satire. It’s all made up (except for what isn't), a disclosure made necessary by the absurdity of current reality, which prevents lots of people from telling the difference between truth and fiction.

                 

From Democracy to Kakistocracy

 

By David K. Shipler 

Kakistocracy, n: government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state 

[Note: Bowing to the influence of The Shipler Report, Gaetz withdrew only hours after this was posted.]

            When President Richard Nixon nominated Judge G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court in 1970, his lack of intellectual heft was defended by Republican Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska, who famously declared: “Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance? We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters, and Cardozos.”

            The Senate rejected Carswell, with 13 Republicans joining Democrats in voting no.

            Ah, for the good old days. This time around, it is not just mediocrity that is ascending to power but wild incompetence seasoned with wackiness. From Donald Trump on down, the federal government is about to be converted into a cesspool of financial and moral corruption, and into a juggernaut of fact-free autocratic decrees, political arrests, and military roundups. At least that’s Trump’s goal, which his key nominees are poised to pursue.

If Hruska were still with us, he would have to update his argument by noting that the country’s sexual assailants also deserve “a little representation.” Since most voters just elected a court-proven sexual assailant president, he would surely find sympathy in the supine Senate. And remember, Republicans in years past confirmed Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court despite credible accusations, respectively, of sexual harassment and assault. Today, Trump seems partial to men who do that kind of thing, since the accused (but not proven) assailants he’s picked for his Cabinet include Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services.

The Democratic Party's New Playbook

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The Shipler Report has obtained an early draft of the National Democratic Committee’s manual for the next presidential candidate. It is the result of the post-election self-flagellation that only Democrats can perform with such alacrity. Here it is: 

                “Dear Candidate (insert name),

                Donald J. Trump has become a model of how to win elections in the new America. Following his successful campaign in 2024, we strongly recommend adopting his top ten techniques, as follows: 

1.      Begin to lie as soon as your lips start moving.

2.      Use only superlatives, as in, “We will have the best hurricanes ever,” and, “We have the worst open sewers in history. Nobody has ever seen anything like it.”

3.      Read Mein Kampf – great tips

4.      Terrify the citizenry and badmouth the country as swarming with swarthy, pet-eating ex-convicts and insane, blood-poisoning invaders.

5.      Use these four words often, no matter what the problem, imagined or real: “I will fix it.”

6.      Ramble for hours incoherently in front of large audiences by “weaving” unrelated digressions into a tangled web that makes you seem cognitively impaired.

7.      Sell Bibles that include an extra New Testament book with your name, and a preface reading, “The Gospel According to _________.” Price it exorbitantly so people know it’s valuable.

8.      Sell bright blue MAGA hats, but don’t tell anyone that the initials stand for “Make America Gullible Again.”

9.      Pretend to perform a sex act with a microphone.

10.  Lose millions in lawsuits for sexual assault, and keep bragging about grabbing women’s pussies. Most men love that, and millions of women do, too.”

This is satire. It’s all made up (except for what isn't), a disclosure made necessary by the absurdity of current reality, which prevents lots of people from telling the difference between truth and fiction.

Uneducating America

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

                Imagine a democratic country where voters ended a political campaign knowing more about the difficult issues than they did at the beginning. Imagine the learning experience of hearing presidential candidates seriously discussing how to curb the wars in Europe and the Middle East, compete sensibly with China, retard climate change, address the coming revolution of AI, open economic opportunity for the impoverished, reduce racial discrimination, and gain control over immigration. Now flip that upside down and you have the world’s supposed model of democracy, the United States of America.

                On the tasks before us, we understand less and less. If we once believed we lived in a free-market economy with prices set mainly by supply and demand, the campaign has taught us to think that a president has all the power and so should get all the blame—or credit—for our struggles or our prosperity, whichever happens to occur during an administration.

                If we ever understood the limits of US control over global conflicts, we are now convinced that an omnipotent president could stop Russia vs. Ukraine and Israel vs. Hamas and Hezbollah.

                If we ever took the trouble to grasp the complex forces of desperation and hope that drive immigrants from their violent homelands to ours, we can no longer be bothered with anything but simplistic measures and instant cures.

                Elections seem to dumb us down. Its practitioners filter out the nuance, contradictions, and history essential to forming smart policy. We retreat into our caves of certainty and disparage the “undecideds.”

The First Chill of Self-Censorship

                                                         By David K. Shipler

                The decisions by the rich men who own the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post to kill their editorial boards’ endorsements of Kamala Harris are reminders of how an authoritarian culture works. It has official censors, of course, but the system’s everyday mechanism doesn’t always rely on edicts from on high. It can operate automatically as private citizens police themselves and their peers, avoiding risk and informing on those who deviate or dissent.

                That is how the surveillance state of the Soviet Union functioned. Editors and writers knew instinctively what content was permitted in their newspapers and broadcasts; they were Communist Party members themselves, so official censorship was internalized, embedded in their professional judgments. There wasn’t much the censors needed to delete.

                In schools and workplaces, fellow students and colleagues were on guard against political irreverence and would report it. Pressure and punishment were often exacted there, at that level by those institutions. The same is happening today in Russia, which has been dragged backward by Vladimir Putin. In other words, the authoritarian structure presses people horizontally as well as vertically, not only from the top down but also from within the lowly communities where individuals live their lives.

                Oh, please, some of you will say. The US is not Russia. We have a passionate tradition of free debate, suspicion of government, and fervent individualism. “It Can’t Happen Here,” you might insist, the ironic title of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel about a fascist who rises to power in America—and who holds a huge rally in Madison Square Garden, by the way, its adoring crowd described with prescience by Lewis decades before Donald Trump’s ugly rally there this week.

Trump is trying to seed the ground for that dynamic of self-policing. He has illuminated the most significant divide in America, which is between those who see it coming and those who do not. You can call it the divide between the left and the right, or between Democrats and Republicans, or between Blacks and whites, or women and men, or college and high-school graduates. Those lines exist. But more fundamentally, it is a divide between those who understand how pluralistic democracy can be undermined along an insidious path toward autocracy, and those who do not. Apparently, Americans don’t study this. Our schools have failed miserably.

The Absolutism of Trump Republicans

                                                        By David K. Shipler  

            Democracy thrives on shades of gray. Few public issues actually divide themselves starkly into black and white. And even when disagreements are unyielding, a government “of the people” needs to embrace a variety of views, accommodate differences, and include a supple give-and-take. That’s the ideal, essential to a pluralistic political system in an open society.

Yet that is not the ideal of the Trump Republican Party. Instead, in a corruption of yesterday’s refined conservativism that preached smaller government, it plans to transform government into a powerful monolith imposing ideological absolutism on many areas of American life—private as well as public.

This can be seen most vividly in the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which Donald Trump has disavowed, although the most extreme provisions were written by his administration’s former officials who are likely to serve with him again if he’s elected.

The agenda is invasive. Women would be required to give their reasons for having legal abortions, and doctors would have to report the information to their states, which would lose funds if they failed to collect and relay the answers to the federal government. The data wouldn’t have the women’s names, supposedly, but the very demand would trespass into personal zones of intimacy.

States where abortion is legal would have trouble making it accessible, because any clinic that provided abortions would be denied Medicaid funds for anything, including providing other health services, thereby putting most of them out of business. While federal law prohibits payment for abortions by Medicaid, which covers low-income Americans, clinics can be reimbursed for other health care. This would be a back-door way of virtually banning abortion nationwide.

The Year of Moral Loss

 

By David K. Shipler             

              The deep paradox in the Arab-Israeli conflict is the immorality of each side’s moral certitude. Each is convinced of its righteousness.

But the high ground of righteousness has been completely flattened in the last year, beginning with the intimate atrocities of October 7 by the Palestinian movement Hamas, then with the remotely inflicted atrocities by Israel. The only shred of morality left is whatever attaches to victimhood.

              Not that wars are moral enterprises. Not that this conflict has ever been ethical or conducted within Queensberry rules. Since modern Israel’s founding in 1948, the struggle has been nasty, grinding, and brutalizing. Still, it respected certain boundaries. Forty years ago, the Palestinians had not yet adopted suicide bombers as a standard weapon against Israeli civilians, nor had they sexually assaulted and tormented young Israeli women. Israel had not sent tanks and fighter jets against Palestinian residents of Gaza and the West Bank, nor had Jewish settlers so systematically driven Palestinians from their West Bank villages. And non-Arab actors such as Iran had not directly attacked Israel.

              But now, as Tom Friedman has said, so many red lines have been crossed that “you kind of get used to it. And at the end of the day, there are no more red lines. And when that happens, watch out.”

              Both Israeli and Palestinian societies are diverse and fluid. Neither is monolithic; both contain moderate citizens embracing coexistence. Yet the most radical and hateful among them have been propelled into power by decades of strife. Palestinian leaders see all Israelis, including children, as potential soldiers. Israeli leaders in the current government—the most extreme in Israel’s history—conflate all Palestinians in Gaza with Hamas, one reason that Israel is willing to bomb whole buildings and kill many civilians to get one commander. On both sides, those at the top seem to have no moral brakes.

              Their military tactics have been devastating to non-combatants. Abhorrent methods of warfare have been normalized: sadistic killings and hostage-taking, food deprivation and massive bombings, indiscriminate rocketing, assassinations, exploding pagers designed to murder and maim even while innocent bystanders suffer. Hamas has embedded its fighters among civilians in their homes and schools and hospitals, using innocents as human shields. Undeterred, the Israelis have fought through those so-called shields, mostly with air strikes and artillery, killing and wounding tens of thousands, impeding food supplies, and shattering medical facilities.

Trump Channels America's Deepest Racism

 

By David K. Shipler 

              If you spread out on a table all the categories of stereotyping inflicted upon Blacks and other people of color throughout the history of the United States, you’ll see how some of the ugliest are being chosen and brandished by Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance. Like crude weapons of mass destruction, these instruments of bigotry cannot be precisely targeted. They wound both their intended victims and mere bystanders—and perhaps, in the end, the perpetrators themselves.

              The latest example is the poisonous lie that Haitian immigrants, who came to this country in the naïve belief that it would be a refuge of safety and opportunity, are stealing and eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. That Trump and Vance would repeat and inflate this toxic nonsense after the city’s officials denied its truth exposes, first, their own hatred toward “others,” and second, their faith that the hatred is harbored by millions of American voters.

              The concocted story fits the longstanding American narrative of Blacks as primitive, violent, immoral, and unclean. Those supposed traits helped feed the rationalizations of slavery, persisted through the Jim Crow era of legal segregation, and continue in the barely concealed warrens of today’s right-wing electorate.

Trump has proved dangerously skillful in tapping this base bigotry. Whether by instinct or calculation, he locates and gives voice to the worst characteristics of his society. He garners broad support by his vicious fabrication that immigrants are invading as hordes of disease-ridden criminals released from prisons and mental institutions abroad. It doesn’t matter that official statistics show lower crime rates among immigrants than native-born Americans. It doesn’t matter that most are fleeing persecution and danger to the ideal that they imagine America to be. It doesn’t matter that the two would-be assassins who have targeted Trump were white Americans.

He doesn’t have to say explicitly that the hordes are swarthy; the picture in his voters’ minds is clear enough. Evidently, he says what many people think. And what they think, about Blacks in particular, has deep roots in American culture.

The stereotypes fall into five basic categories, as I saw during five years of research for my book A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America. Others may find different patterns, but in my interviewing across the country, negative images of Blacks seemed to organize themselves around these themes: Body, Mind, Morality, Violence, and Power.

Targeting America

 

By David K. Shipler 

              The bullet just grazed Donald Trump, but it struck the heart of America.

At a moment of critical care for a suffering democracy, the assassination attempt last night in Pennsylvania further weakens the stamina of an ailing culture of pluralistic politics. It adds toxins to the chemistry of the country. It has already provoked blame rather than introspection. Instead of strengthening Americans’ bonds of common citizenship, as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy did sixty years ago, this near miss will only deepen the divisions. It will be taken to justify the rage, hatred, and passion for revenge that Trump himself has fostered.

Moreover, it is hard to see how that apostle of autocracy fails to get elected in November. This bolsters the image of macho victimhood he has promoted, an ironic way of channeling the alienation and sense of helplessness felt by millions of white working-class voters who adore him. He was a cult figure before and now, in near martyrdom, he perfects the performance. Before allowing Secret Service agents to move him to safety, he needs to play his part, so he tells them, “Wait,” is helped to his feet, his bloody ear now visible as he raises his fist and apparently shouts, “Fight!”  And fight they will, in one way or another.

This Sunday morning, there have undoubtedly been preachers crediting God, as Trump did in a post, for making the bullets narrowly miss. Some of his followers believe he has been divinely assigned to lead the nation, and this will be taken to prove their case. And there have surely been preachers admonishing their congregations to seek reconciliation, to gaze inward, to love the other, to examine themselves for the wrongs that they and the broader society must right.

The sermons on taking responsibility and seeking healing and listening to the other side will not make the front pages, sadly. They will not generate a lot of followers on social media or even find their way into most politicians’ stump speeches on the campaign trail. Senator J. D. Vance, a possible vice-presidential candidate, instantly blamed President Biden’s harsh rhetoric against Trump for a shooting whose motives were still unknown. Vance didn’t mention Trump’s years of violent rhetoric, of course, or his vitriol loosening the restraints of civil order, culminating in the January 6, 2021 invasion of the Capitol by his violent supporters.

That’s the nature of American political leadership today. Some of the worst people rise to some of the highest levels.

What Trump and his Republican acolytes—including those on the Supreme Court—fail to realize is that whatever they unleash in governmental power or private aggression can be used by the left as well as the right. In other words, the authors themselves can someday be the targets. In her dissent from the Court’s recent grant of broad presidential immunity against criminal prosecution, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that a president could now “order the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival” and avoid prosecution. Her hypothesis, signed by the three liberal justices, drew no distinction between a Republican or a Democratic president.

At this writing, the public knows little about the alleged shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed by the Secret Service. He was white and apparently not an immigrant, so Trumpists won’t be able to blame all people of color and all immigrants, as many (Trump included) are wont to do for the ills of the country. He was not a member of Seal Team 6, evidently, so Biden’s off the hook for using his newfound powers from the Supreme Court. Crooks was reportedly a registered Republican who gave a small contribution a Democratic cause, so take your choice about his reasons for wanting to take Trump out.

Unless his online posts, friends, and family offer insights, a vacuum of information on his disturbed thinking will allow room for fantastic conspiracy theories. Those will further deteriorate the health of the society, and a society’s health depends on how self-corrective it is, especially in a moment of crisis.

It doesn’t look good for the United States. In this heated atmosphere, political violence begets more political violence. It would not be amazing for some of Trump’s militant supporters to take up arms against any target they deem worthy of their attention. Trump has called for unity but not peace. He might be incapable of preaching nonviolence to those who love him and value his raised fist. We’ll see.

What does appear reliably predictable is that a weak-looking, impaired Joe Biden cannot win over Trump. If Biden remains the candidate, Trump will be inaugurated next January. And at that moment, the world’s three most powerful countries will be led by criminals. Granted, only one will have been convicted. But Xi Jinping of China for his persecution of the Uighurs and Vladimir Putin of Russia for his war of atrocities in Ukraine certainly deserve prosecution. If you think of Trump’s crimes as minor, just wait.

The bullet that Trump heard whizzing past his ear? We all heard it as it found its mark.

America's Gathering Storm

 

By David K. Shipler 

              It’s too bad that Supreme Court justices and other government leaders aren’t required to live for two or three years in some dictatorship before they take office in the United States. Better yet, in one of the countries that have used democracy to undermine democracy. Then perhaps they would recognize the signs of a gathering storm, when the friction of the air seems to change and the wind turns ominous.

              The Supreme Court and the Republican Party are laying the ground for autocracy. They are corrupting the constitutional interplay among the three branches of government, among the shared and competing interests in a complex society, and therefore among the rulers and the ruled.

              The Republicans have abdicated the key role that political parties must play in every free society—filtering out extremist demagogues. And the radical right on the Supreme Court has now granted broad immunity to presidents who commit crimes with “official acts.” This junction of political and judicial mischief could not come at a more perilous time, with a Republican authoritarian poised to return to the presidency carrying a coherent ideological blueprint he did not have in hand his first time around. He would commit felonies against democracy virtually unfettered. This is the perfect storm.

Israel vs. Hamas: "Whose Side Are You On?"

 

By David K. Shipler 

                On Monday, October 9, two days after the assault by Hamas on innocent civilians in Israel, Kalpana Shipler was asked by a fellow student at her public high school in Washington, D.C., “Whose side are you on?” That was the question being tossed around by multiple teenagers to one another as Israel began bombing Gaza in retaliation. And that seems to be the question dividing college campuses and mobilizing protests, corrupting the capacity to analyze complexity. If you are forced to pick sides, you miss the tangles of guilt that have bound Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs for decades.

                Kalpana didn’t fall into the trap, I am proud to say as her grandfather. She was wise enough at age 15 to resist an instant answer, to know that she didn’t know, a rare skill in today’s America. She deferred to the cause of learning.

                Luckily, young people coming of age are not yet jaded. Shocked by the scenes of devastation and starvation in Gaza, students have acted on a purity of outrage, pushing the envelope of accepted rhetoric and calling to account their own country, Israel’s major supporter.

Yet the impulse to pick a side, as if war were a football game, has an unhealthy feature. It concentrates the blame, villainizing one adversary and idealizing the other. The dichotomy was prevalent among some activists who justifiably protested the U.S. war in Vietnam and decried our ally’s (South Vietnam’s) assaults on human rights, while regarding North Vietnam and the Vietcong as the only authentic patriots, skipping over the North’s tighter dictatorship and the VC’s brutality.

                A similar intellectual and moral flaw runs through the current protests over the Gaza war, in which Israel is supposedly “a monopoly of violence,” in the words of a Cornell professor. Palestinians through Hamas, which strives to replace the Jewish state with an Islamic state, are portrayed as exercising their anti-colonialist rights to liberty. Sometimes—only sometimes—vilification of the Jewish state has crossed into vilification of Jews, raising the stench of antisemitism in the “pro-Palestinian” encampments. They might be called “antiwar” encampments if they actually opposed war, if they protested not only against the atrocities Israel has committed in an effort to stamp out Hamas—the vast bombing, the barriers to food and medical care—but also against the intimate atrocities by Hamas—the rapes, torture, mutilation, and kidnappings—which unleashed this fighting.

It was astonishing to see 33 Harvard student organizations sign onto a statement issued by the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee immediately after October 7 holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Seriously? “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” the statement declared. “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinians existence for 75 years. . . Palestinians have been forced to live in a sate of death, both slow and sudden.”

                 So spoke some of the purportedly smartest people of the next generation. One can imagine them delighting in their incisive brilliance as they looked past the Hamas violence into its roots. Fine. There is never a vacuum. There are causes of every effect. However, to turn back only one page in a long history of mutual victimization demonstrates a laziness of mind or, perhaps, a mind indoctrinated.

If you are pro-Israel, do you leave out the thuggish gangs of Jewish settlers terrorizing and assaulting West Bank Palestinians? If you are pro-Palestinian, do you omit Israel’s military withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the Palestinian self-government under Hamas arming itself and rocketing Israel? If you are pro-Israel, do you leave out the stifling border controls that suffocated Gaza’s development and fostered poverty? If you root only for the Palestinians, do you ignore the Hamas suicide bombers sent against Jews two decades ago to torpedo the growing Israeli acceptance of Palestinian statehood?

In your journey back in time, do you stop before Arab armies attacked the fledgling Jewish state? Do you stop before the Israelis’ expulsion of Arabs from their home villages before and during Israel’s 1948 war of independence? Do you stop before the earlier Arab assaults on religious Jewish communities in the Holy Land or, on the other side, the Jewish assaults on Arab civilians there? Do you stop before the Holocaust? Before the pogroms of Europe, which so traumatized the Jewish people that its reverberations still ring today?

If you are looking for the original sin in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, keep going, and going, and going until you come to realize that both sides are victims. This is not moral equivalence. This is suffering that is particular to each people, not to be measured or weighed, but—if you want to campaign against war—to be acknowledged. As an Israeli said to me long ago, putting two victims together is like mixing fire and kerosene.

Victimhood confers an illusion of moral immunity. “The sense of victimhood is functional for a nation that is involved in an ongoing bloody conflict,” wrote the Israeli thinkers Daniel Bar-Tal and Elkiva Eldar in the newspaper Haaretz. “It shapes the perception of the threatening situation against the cruel enemy and provides moral justification for harming it unrestrainedly and without mercy. Victimhood distinguishes between us and the Palestinians and provides a sense of moral superiority and permission to dehumanize them. . . . Victimhood severs the society from a sense of guilt and leaves room only for feelings of anger and revenge.”

The same might be said of the Palestinian side.

So, how does complexity figure into the student-led protests? It doesn’t. Demonstrations don’t do nuance. They are meant to be categorical and dogmatic. They are not dispassionate classroom exercises in the ambiguities and contradictions of history, politics, and warfare. They are meant to galvanize, excite, force change, and call on the clarity of conscience. They don’t even have to be practical, as in thinking that university divestments from companies doing business in Israel, one of their demands, will tip Israel’s policies. What could tip Israel’s policies, imposing a modicum of restraint, are the Biden Administration’s recent delay in certain weapons shipments, steps that might have been propelled partly by those students on the quads and greens.

The campus protests have amplified the growing American disaffection with Israel’s unvarnished brutality against Palestinians in Gaza, Israeli excuses and rationalizations notwithstanding. Yes, Hamas uses civilians as shields and shelters fighters in networks of tunnels, some under hospitals. Does that justify attacking the civilian shields and devastating hospitals? Yes, Hamas smuggles weaponry into Gaza. Does that justify restricting trucks of food and medical supplies destined for children, women, the elderly? The “pro-Palestinian” protesters would presumably say no. “Antiwar” protesters would presumably hold both sides in contempt.

            In true antiwar demonstrations, the symbols, the pieces of colored cloth woven into specific patterns, might be carried together. In true antiwar protests, wartime grief would be common ground. The Palestinian and Israeli flags might be intertwined, perhaps even tangled. Some demonstrators might want to burn them, as some Vietnam era antiwar protesters burned the American flag. But then, some leaders of the that antiwar movement thought it would be a more poignant symbol to wash the flag. What if both Israeli and Palestinian flags were washed in the middle of a college green?

The War of Atrocities

 

By David K. Shipler 

            In a grisly coincidence, the UN within 24 hours has documented two outrages of the Israel-Gaza war that will permanently scar the lives of those who survive: Sexual crimes by Hamas, which probably continue against young Israeli women who are still hostages. And severe malnutrition among tens of thousands of Palestinian children, some at critical stages of brain development.

A team headed by the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict confirmed most earlier reports of sexual assaults by Hamas fighters who invaded Israel from Gaza on October 7. But in addition, the UN task force found “clear and convincing information that sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment occurred against some women and children during their time in captivity and has reasonable grounds to believe that this violence may be ongoing.” The team did not say, but everyone knows, that the deep trauma suffered by such victims is likely to be ongoing as well, perhaps lifelong.

In what might aptly be called divine injustice, the hostages taken October 7, and evidently still being held, include seven young female soldiers from the Nahal Oz military base, an intelligence hub. Women agents there had picked up strong indicators of the coming Hamas attack and repeatedly urged their male superior officers—in vain—to take preventive action.

Whether the hostages are the same women who sounded the alarm is not publicly known, but they are from the same unit. That they should suffer such intimate brutality because they or their colleagues were ignored ought to haunt the incompetent government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and its somnolent security apparatus. Furthermore, Israeli officials have reportedly worried that Hamas would rather kill the women than release them to tell the world of their torment.

At the same time, the UN’s World Health Organization has warned that famine is “almost inevitable,” and reported this week that 10 children in northern Gaza had died of starvation. Israel’s retaliatory strategy of cutting off Gaza’s two million Palestinians from most supplies of food, water, electricity, and medical care has taken a severe toll on health, even as sporadic, inadequate aid shipments and air drops have been permitted. Eventually, famine and disease are expected to cause at least as many casualties as the 30,000 deaths Hamas has reported from Israeli bombing and ground fighting.

Here, too, the unseen impacts are inevitable. Just as post-traumatic stress disorder is a lasting condition for survivors of sexual torture, the cognitive damage to children suffering malnutrition is likely to be lifelong. (Why this is not a routine part of the mainstream media’s war reporting is surprising: Neuroscientists have researched it extensively.)

At critical periods of brain development—especially in last two trimesters of pregnancy and the first two to three years of life—the inadequacy of certain nutrients can inhibit the creation of neurons and synapses, of myelin sheaths and the neurological connections that are essential to reasoning, learning, memory, and behavior in adulthood.

For at least half a century, scientists have been documenting how the developing brain suffers from insufficient iron, iodine, folate, zinc, calcium, magnesium, selenium, and various vitamins, all found in balanced diets of fresh fruits and vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, and dairy products. The finding is made in study after study, including the succinct warning in the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics that, after age two, “the effects of malnutrition on stunting may be irreversible, and some of the functional deficits may become permanent.”

Longitudinal studies have shown the lifelong effects. Seventy-seven infants in Barbados, for example, hospitalized with protein deficiency, then received nutritious food between the ages of one and twelve. Nevertheless, in their thirties, they had compromised “verbal fluency, working memory, processing speed, and visuospatial integration” compared to a healthy group from the same classrooms.

Iron deficiency during pregnancy can cause serious damage to the fetus, even if the child gets adequate iron later. Without enough meat, poultry, fish, spinach, or beans, the mother and child can suffer from anemia, which decreases the formation of the myelin sheath, whose fatty matter insulates nerve cells and helps accelerate nerve conduction. Insufficient iron affects the metabolism in the hippocampus, critical for memory, and can lead to low birth rate, which is associated with cerebral palsy and other neurological problems.

Studies following children who were anemic as infants found that years later, in school, they scored lower in math, written expression, motor functioning, spatial memory, and selective recall.

Then, too, hunger—or even the fear of hunger—creates an additional layer of anxiety on top of the terrors of war. Learning disabilities and mental health problems result. “Learning is a discretionary activity, after you’re well-fed, warm, secure,” said Dr. Deborah A. Frank, who founded a malnutrition clinic at the Boston Medical Center.

Persistent, elevated stress hormones have an impact on the size and architecture of the developing brain, a group of scientists reported in 2016, “specifically the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex.” Mental health implications abound: people experiencing food insecurity alone, even without warfare, display depression, PTSD, hopelessness, and suicidality.

All this is happening to innocent Palestinian children in Gaza as a result of Israel’s draconian strategy. And that, in turn, is the result of Hamas’s sadistic attacks on innocent Israelis, which struck the country with a novel, pervasive fear of insecurity. And that, in turn is the result of . . . You can spin back through the weary history of that tortured land and try to find the original sin that caused it all. Or you can understand that every effect there has a cause and no untanglement of cause and effect is feasible.

Then, having been foiled by history, you can look to the future and understand that what lies ahead, damaged by the present, will effectively continue the war’s harm for a generation or more—even if a total cease fire were declared today.

Religious Absolutism: Isaac and Ishmael

 

By David K. Shipler 

Also published by Moment Magazine  

If you list the elements of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you'll see that while most are subject to compromise, one is virtually non-negotiable: religion at its most dogmatic. It has grown more prominent over the decades as devout militants have gained power among both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims.

Measuring its ultimate influence is difficult, for the dispute is largely secular, and is seen that way by most Israelis and Palestinians, polls show. In theory, the two sides’ overlapping territorial claims, driven by the clash of two nationalisms, could be resolved by drawing reasonable borders between Israel and a Palestinian state. West Bank Jewish settlements could be dismantled and consolidated. Security concerns could be addressed by humane, mutual protections. Jerusalem could be shared. Palestinians could bargain away their “right of return” to former villages inside Israel. The dueling historical narratives of grievance, so central to the conflict’s psychology, might gradually fade as uneasy neighbors learn to coexist. 

                That is all eventually possible, but less likely when each of the issues is salted with the absolutism of divine mission, as certain Israeli and Palestinian leaders are doing. They merge the sacred and the temporal, combine faith with tribal identity, and infuse piety into their peoples’ past grievances and present longings.

 The current example is the war in Gaza. At dawn on October 7, a voice on the Hamas military frequency announced to the fighters: “Rocket barrages are being fired right now at the occupied cities! May God empower and grace the holy warriors!” The man spoke in a pitch of ecstasy, echoed by another’s exultant answer through the static: “The resistance is now inside the occupied territories!”

“Allahu Akbar!” (God is most great!) the young Palestinians shouted as they streamed from Gaza through breaches blown in Israel’s border fence, their body cameras recording their fervent chants as they whooped in celebration over Israeli corpses. Each terrorist who died for his faith would earn the honor of being called shaheed (martyr).

Thus began the worst day for Israel in its 75-year existence, inflamed by religious slogans and symbols. Hamas wants to replace the Jewish state with an Islamic state. It named its sadistic attack “Al-Aqsa Flood,” after the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam, now in Israel’s capital.

In turn, after the Hamas slaughters that day, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu embraced a biblical analogy by likening the Palestinians to Amalek, the ancient nomads whose complete extermination was ordered by God. This seemed to consider the massive assaults on Gaza that followed as divinely blessed. Other religious terms were tossed around. Israeli officials named the artificial intelligence that picked its targets in Gaza “the Gospel.” Netanyahu reportedly proposed naming this “the Genesis War.”

Lessons From the College Presidents

 

By David K. Shipler 

                During a presidential debate in 1988, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis sank his presidential campaign with a clinical, legalistic answer to a question about his wife from reporter Bernard Shaw: “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”

                Instead of reacting from his gut, Dukakis responded from his head. Instead of exploding first with a vengeful desire to tear the man limb from limb himself, he jumped right to the substantive answer on capital punishment:  “No, I don’t, Bernard, and I think you know that I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don’t see any evidence that it’s a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime. We’ve done so in my own state. It’s one of the reasons why we have had the biggest drop in crime of any industrial state in America . . .” By that point, if not sooner, millions of voters were incensed by his lack of passion, no matter how legitimate his policy.

                It’s not an exact parallel, but it’s instructive nonetheless in how the three presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania made fools of themselves in last week’s congressional hearing. Excessively prepared by the prominent law firm of WilmerHale, according to The New York Times, they slipped catastrophically into procedural answers during a sequence of prosecutorial questions on whether calls by students for the genocide of Jews would constitute punishable harassment.

                Again, instead of the raw gut reaction of “Yes!” two of them in particular, Elizabeth Magill of Penn (who has since been forced to resign) and Claudine Gay of Harvard, tried to draw a line between speech and conduct. The first is usually protected, the second, often not. They failed to recognize that verbal calls to exterminate Jews, who make up part of their student populations, would at least blur that line and probably erase it entirely.

They may have been complacent about antisemitism on their campuses, as some Jewish students have complained. Or they may have been more sensitive than last week’s blundering made them seem. In any event, cautionary lawyering apparently made them gun-shy about potential free-speech lawsuits from students. The presidents acted as if they were in a courtroom instead of a hearing room. And therein lie some lessons.

1.       Never testify before Congress voluntarily. If you’re not under subpoena, obligated as a government official to appear, or seeking Senate confirmation for a position. Don’t naively imagine that the legislators are inviting you because they are actually seeking information. The Republicans especially want you as a foil to posture, perform, and promote themselves into political orbit.

For Israel: A Blank Check or Tangled Strings?

 

By David K. Shipler 

First published by Moment Magazine 

           This is an awkward time to attach conditions to the generous military aid that the United States provides to Israel. But it should be considered, not only to curb civilian casualties in Gaza, as some Democratic senators wish, but also to curb Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which have long poisoned prospects for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation.

           With the exception of the Trump White House, which supported settlements, Republican and Democratic administrations have declared Israel’s settlement policy an obstacle to peace. Yet the U.S. has never used the leverage of the purse to restrain the practice. Since the Oslo accords of 1993, the number of Israeli residents on the West Bank has soared from 110,000 to more than 500,000, the number of settlements from 128 to about 300, now scattered throughout Palestinian areas.

American officials have done little more than complain and wring their hands as Israelis have populated territory that might have formed a Palestinian state, constructing government-subsidized developments whose town houses, schools, synagogues, orchards, factories, and swimming pools have an aura of permanence that belies the term “settlements.” They are satellite cities and sweeping suburbs. They have created such a crazy-quilt of jurisdictions that piecing together territory for Palestinian sovereignty would now require the departure of tens of thousands of Israeli Jews.

Moreover, a thuggish minority of Israeli settlers have tormented their Palestinian neighbors through home invasions and vandalism, destruction of olive groves, and even murder with impunity. They are religio-nationalist zealots operating in a free-wheeling environment of self-righteous extremism. This is not new, just more widespread and unrestrained. It has been going on for at least 40 years, recently escalating to a level attracting international attention as settlers try to terrify Palestinians into fleeing—with some success. At least 11 Arab communities have been emptied so far this year, according to the West Bank Protection Consortium, a monitoring group of non-governmental organizations funded by ten European countries.

The problem may seem purely political and humanitarian, but it has military consequences for Israel. What happens on the West Bank resonates in Gaza, where Hamas ruled and armed itself for the gruesome slaughters and kidnappings of October 7. The Palestinian prisoners whose release Hamas is obtaining in exchange for hostages are virtually all West Bank residents, arrested by Israeli forces there and often held without charge or trial. By remote control, Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank seem to have contributed to radicalization in Gaza, at least to some degree.

Israel's Mission Impossible

 

By David K. Shipler 

                In October 1953, two days after infiltrators from Jordan threw a grenade into an Israeli home and killed a mother and her two small children, Israeli Unit 101, led by Col. Ariel Sharon, took revenge in a deliberately disproportionate manner.

Crossing into Jordan, the Israeli commandos destroyed some 50 houses and killed 69 civilians in Qibya, a town 5 kilometers south of where the infiltrators’ tracks had led. Sharon claimed that he didn’t know any people were in the houses he blew up, but property damage was hardly the point. “The orders were utterly clear,” Sharon wrote in his autobiography. “Qibya was to be an example for everyone.”

                That was, and remains, Israel’s basic strategy of deterrence: hold the neighbors responsible for the misuse of their territory by hitting back exponentially.  

                The practice has worked, to an extent, as long as the neighbor has been in control. Jordan eventually patrolled its side of the border closely, and the frontier was fairly quiet for decades before the two countries signed a peace treaty in 1994. The same with Egypt for several years before its formal peace with Israel in 1979. And even without a treaty, Syria has kept its heavily fortified border mostly closed to attacks on Israelis until exchanges of fire recently, during the Gaza war.

                But where the state has been weak or virtually non-existent, as in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, only powerless civilians have a stake in preserving calm or stability. Non-state forces have prevailed—first the Palestine Liberation Organization, then Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza—and Israel’s strategy of fierce retaliation has little effect except to radicalize residents and fuel extremism.

                So it is in Gaza today. Israel’s military withdrawal in 2005 opened a vacuum for Hamas to govern, but its armed passion to obliterate the Jewish state provoked a partial Israeli and Egyptian blockade, deepening poverty and leaving the territory well short of autonomous statehood. Hamas used outside aid to construct tunnels and build an arsenal of weaponry, not to foster prosperous independence that it would want to preserve.

The Arsenal of Memory

 

By David K. Shipler 

First published by Moment Magazine 

                No fabrication or suppression of history is needed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Truths are enough to arm both sides. We are now witnessing additions to the stockpile of weapons in an arsenal of memory that never gets depleted.

                Victims do not forget. Nor do their descendants. When the Palestinian movement Hamas invaded Israel from Gaza to execute its monstrously planned slaughters and kidnappings, the date, October 7, was marked indelibly. Going forward, probably for generations, it will remind Israeli Jews of the grievance and rage that scar their long road. And for Palestinian Arabs, Israel’s coming onslaught on Gaza will reload the batteries of hatred--and what they call “resistance.”

                The two peoples are imprisoned by history. When they argue for themselves and against the other, the past looms. The pogroms in eastern Europe. The Holocaust. The scattered violence by local Arabs against Jews who fled to Palestine. The Arab states’ rejection of a Jewish state, and the 1948 war that Jews had to fight to secure Israel’s existence. The Arab-led wars that followed. The Palestinian terrorist attacks and suicide bombings into the heart of daily life.

Predicting the Mideast: Prophets and Fools

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The most obvious prediction this week, after Hamas fighters rolled easily from Gaza into the stunned villages and kibbutzim of Israel, would be this: The sputtering hope for a Palestinian state has been finally extinguished.

Having seen their children, women, and elderly bathed in blood and taken to Gaza as hostages, Israelis will never countenance Palestinian statehood anywhere nearby, not in Gaza and least of all on the West Bank, which is even closer to the heart of the country--literally just down the street from the capital, Jerusalem, and many other towns.

                 Since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from its military occupation of Gaza in 2005, and the subsequent election of Hamas to rule the densely populated territory, the sporadic rockets and infiltrations have undermined Israel’s peace movement’s central concept. That’s been “land for peace,” a belief that once Palestinians had their own territory, they would accept Israel as a neighbor. Well, Gaza residents got their land, but Israel got no peace. That’s been the simplistic equation.

                Of course it can be argued—and usually is, on the political left around the world—that Palestinians didn’t really possess their land, that they were suffocated and radicalized by Israel’s imposition of tight border controls that restricted imports and hemmed people into what some call an open-air prison. Wages are low in Gaza, and better-paying jobs in Israel are inaccessible without a permit to cross the border. Even after Israel increased the number of permits in recent years, the Gaza unemployment rate stood at nearly 50 percent: a prescription for smoldering desperation and explosive fury.

                But the partial blockade was itself a reaction--supported by Egypt along its border with Gaza—aimed at impeding Hamas from building an arsenal whose disastrous scope was displayed to Israel this week. In turn, that militarization of Gaza was a reaction to Israel’s “colonial” oppression, as many Palestinians see it. And Israel’s tough posture was itself a reaction to radical Palestinians’ ideology of obliteration, which dreams of a final end to the Jewish state.

                And so on, one reaction to another to another ad infinitum. Untangling the causal relationship depends on how far back in history you’re willing to go before stopping and deciding that you have found the original sin.

                It’s not so hard to look backward. It’s harder to look forward. In that part of the world, only prophets and fools are inclined to use the future tense. Prophets have been scarce for quite a while. Fools have been in plentiful supply.

                Unexpected consequences seem to be the rule. Israel’s lightning victory in the six-day war of 1967, celebrated tearfully by Jews able at last to pray at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, saddled the country with the unending dangers of containing hostile Palestinian populations in the captured West Bank and Gaza. Israel’s near defeat in the 1973 Yom Kippur war gave President Anwar Sadat of Egypt the stature, he thought, to make peace with Israel. Some have speculated that Hamas’s monstrous assault will give Palestinians the swagger to make eventual compromises. I wouldn’t put money on it, but you never know.

You never know, that should be the motto. And you need to be careful what you wish for. In 1981, it came to my attention that the Israeli government, confident in its ability to manipulate Arab politics, was funneling money to the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, a precursor of today’s Hamas. That startling miscalculation was confirmed by Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, Israel’s military governor of Gaza, who explained that he was under instructions from the authorities to build up the Brotherhood as a counterpoint to the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Communists, whose goal of Palestinian statehood was seen as more threatening than Muslim fundamentalism.

                The Brotherhood was doctrinaire religiously but also deep into social welfare services for the impoverished Gaza population. I suppose the movement seemed benign to Israeli officials whose hubris led them to think they understood the Byzantium of Gaza’s politics. A year later, Israelis made the same mistake in Lebanon, where they went to war to succeed in expelling the PLO but fail dramatically at realigning Lebanese politics in a pro-Israel direction.

                Significantly, an architect of both the Gaza and Lebanon schemes was former general Ariel Sharon, then defense minister. Later, as prime minister, he ordered the army’s unconditional withdrawal from Gaza, with no agreement or international structure to keep some modicum of peace. Hamas rockets followed.

Palestinians have a rich history of miscalculation as well, and this Hamas attack seems destined to mark history with an indelible turning point. Israelis, it has been said, became complacent in their material comforts and relative security in recent years. True, masses took to the streets against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to emasculate the judiciary, but Jewish-Arab violence precipitated by Palestinians and vigilante Jewish settlers, was mostly confined to the West Bank, with little terrorism inside Israel proper. The “situation,” in the anodyne euphemism, did not occupy everyday worries.

In Gaza, Hamas lobbed occasional rockets, which were mostly intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system. As radical as the group’s objectives were—Israel’s annihilation—it seemed contained, the two sides standing off in a hostile equilibrium. The Arabs’ conventional order of battle had been practically dismantled by peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, internal disarray in Syria, and the aftermath of the US war in Iraq.

The remaining threats came from non-state actors—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza—but they seemed manageable. Then came the latest day of infamy.

What shift will this bring? “Hamas was once a tolerable threat,” wrote Haviv Rettig Gur in the Times of Israel. “It just made itself an intolerable one, all while convincing Israelis they are too vulnerable and weak to respond with the old restraint. . . . These heirs of a collective memory forged in the fires of the 20th century cannot handle the experience of defenselessness Hamas has imposed on them. Hamas seemed to do everything possible to shift Israeli psychology from a comfortable faith in their own strength to a sense of dire vulnerability.

“And it will soon learn the scale of that miscalculation. A strong Israel may tolerate a belligerent Hamas on its border; a weaker one cannot. A safe Israel can spend much time and resources worrying about the humanitarian fallout from a Gaza ground war; a more vulnerable Israel cannot. A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer Israel.”

It seems a reasonable prediction. The page will be turned from heart-rending pictures of Israelis massacred and kidnapped to heart-rending pictures of Palestinians bombed and mangled in Gaza. Woe to the fools who see only one page.