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.

Vietnam, Israel, Ukraine, and the Fluidity of Global Politics

 

By David K. Shipler 

                We have entered a period of flux in international alignments. After decades of relative stability in the so-called “world order,” interests are being recalculated and affinities revised. It is a risky, promising, uncertain time.

Vietnam and the United States, once enemies, have just announced a comprehensive strategic partnership, whatever that might mean. Israel and Saudi Arabia are on the cusp of putting aside their longstanding antagonism in favor of diplomatic and commercial ties. The Saudis and Americans are exploring a mutual defense treaty. Russia seems poised to swap technology for artillery shells from its problematic neighbor, North Korea, once kept at arm’s length. Russia and China are making inroads in some mineral-rich African countries, at the West’s expense. A rising China has adopted a forward military posture, threatening Taiwan more acutely than in decades. Ukraine is lobbying anxiously for its survival against Russian conquest as doubts about continuing aid arise from a wing of Republicans in a party once hawkish on national security.

Upheavals such as these will require deft statesmanship. Both Beijing and Moscow are bent on denying Washington what they call the American “hegemony” that has mostly prevailed since World War Two. The Chinese and Russian leaders, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, proselytize for a multipolar world, which appeals to developing countries resentful of post-colonial hardships. (Don’t they realize that Russia is the more recent colonial power, fighting to reimpose its historic colonialism on Ukraine?)

The global turmoil has tossed up a key choice for Americans: How engaged or how withdrawn shall we be? How entangled? How aloof? This will be an unwritten question on next year’s ballots. Both Putin and Xi will be watching. They surely hope for victory by the American neo-isolationism represented by hard-right Republicans—including Donald Trump. No such administration would stand astride the shifting tectonics of the emerging globe.

Ukraine is a litmus test. No matter the obscenities committed by Russia against helpless civilians. No matter Russia’s martial expansionism in the heart of Europe. No matter the mantle of democracy and freedom proudly worn by the United States. The extreme Republican right is playing on the ethnocentrism of its base and a weariness of foreign involvements.

How Strong is Putin?

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

                We don’t know. That’s the honest answer.

In the bad old days of the Soviet Union, Kremlinologists could estimate the pecking order of the grisly men (almost always men) who made up the governing Politburo by observing how they lined up atop Red Square’s Lenin mausoleum for the parade on November 7, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Or their positions as they walked into a ceremonial hall. Or whose name adorned one or another declaration. Physical proximity to the General Secretary of the Communist Party was a clue to influence and a possible successor—and was watched closely by scholars, diplomats, and journalists.

                Inner politics was encrypted then. Kremlinology was like a puzzle with only a few visible pieces. But looking back, the Soviet Kremlin seems less opaque than Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin today. There are no puzzle pieces now, only misfits or blanks filled by deduction, guesswork, and wishful thinking.

                Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin’s political standing at home has been an obsession in the West, where conventional wisdom has ricocheted back and forth. At first, he was a formidable foe, a canny calculator of military and diplomatic maneuvers. Then, when his army stalled in the face of Ukrainian resistance, he became a monstrous blunderer whose humiliation would surely bring him down.

                But as he wielded his dictatorial powers to obliterate the remaining freedoms Russians had gained since the Soviet collapse in 1991, Putin was the ruthless strongman, unconquerable in the moment. As the war ground into a bloody stalemate, however, and criticisms of the military escalated from the right, his pedestal showed cracks.

Then, he was pronounced weakened and vulnerable when units of Wagner, the private militia, slipped from under his thumb and launched an abortive mutiny by marching toward Moscow. “How Revolt Undermines Putin’s Grip,” said the lead New York Times headline on June 25. The appraisal flipped two months later, after the (presumably non-accidental) plane crash that killed Wagner’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. The lead Times story declared: “Mutineer Dead, Putin Projects Image of Might.”

So, which is it? A Russian president in peril or in command?

Florida Bans Scary Trump Mug Shot from Schools

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The Florida Board of Education, citing a state law’s prohibition against student “discomfort,” has instructed public school teachers to refrain from “showing, displaying, distributing, discussing, mentioning, or making implicit gestures or facial expressions during class regarding” the mug shot that Donald Trump posed for during his booking in Atlanta last week.

A member of the Board, requesting anonymity, explained: “The fierce, angry, vengeful look that Trump carefully adopted would terrify small children and bring immense discomfort to teenagers. He looks as if he’s about to trash them on social media or sign them up as false electors.”

The decree is an expanded application of the statute on curriculum, Section 760.10 (3)(f), which Florida enacted last year to restrict how racial issues are taught. The code states: “An individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.”

Even where race is not explicitly involved, the Board member said, “Discomfort is not an emotion we want any of our children ever to experience until they’re old enough to go into a voting booth.”

Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, asked for comment by a reporter in Iowa, said nothing. He just gave his once-a-week smile.

 This is satire. It’s all made up (except for the text of the law), a disclosure made necessary by the absurdity of current reality, which prevents lots of people from telling the difference between truth and fiction.

Democracy: The Political Right's Alarming Lack of Alarm

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Right-wingers who tamper with democracies should be careful what they wish for. They might hold positions of power today, but as they undermine the checks and balances that stabilize and restrain, they hand formidable tools to their opponents who might take over tomorrow.

This is poorly understood in both Israel and the United States, two democracies now imperiled by extreme agendas that would weaken longstanding mechanisms designed to protect minority rights and moderate governmental authority.

The political right ought to take note: If Israel’s religio-nationalist government dismantles the separation of powers by emasculating the judiciary, what’s to prevent some centrist or more liberal government from driving unencumbered through the same gaping holes? After all, the right-wing governing coalition has only a four-seat majority in a 120-member parliament.

In the US, similarly, if Republican “conservatives” regain the White House and disempower independent agencies by transferring power to the president, as Trump’s team plans—and if they continue dismantling the non-partisan machinery of elections in swing states they control—what’s to prevent Democrats from doing the same where they hold or gain majorities? When you destroy the careful balances in a pluralistic system, the new structure is available to everyone, not just to you.

A case in point is Donald Trump’s anti-constitutional argument that Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, could have rejected slates of electors from some states that went for Joe Biden in 2020. But if Pence had that power, so would every vice president: Vice President Al Gore could have thrown out Florida’s Bush electors in 2000, where the popular vote was razor close and justifiably contested. And Vice President Kamala Harris could do it in 2024 if she doesn’t like certain states’ results.

Why don’t reporters interviewing avid Trump supporters ever point this out and ask for reactions?

It could be that Trump and his spellbound flock don’t grasp the universality of the powers they seek to acquire. Perhaps they think that only they will benefit by eroding the professional integrity of vote-counting, for example, not imagining that their opponents might use the same tactic. Perhaps they don’t see how a Democratic president could use the immense authority they seek for Trump should he be re-elected. In a society still largely subject to the rule of law, which carries with it a respect for precedent, consistency, and equal protection, systemic changes are just that: systemic. They flow through the entire system, no matter which faction is in charge, now or in the future.

It could also be that Republicans—privately—don’t really think Democrats are nefarious. Maybe right-wing politicians don’t believe what they say about liberals and progressives. Perhaps, in their heart of hearts, Republicans recognize that the “radical left” is not so devoid of civic and moral virtue that it would threaten democracy with the tools the Republicans are forging for themselves.

Indeed, that’s the flaw in this doomsday scenario: The Democrats are not the same, at least not now. Gore didn’t throw out Florida’s electors, and neither will Harris. Democratic state legislatures are not rushing to curtail voting rights or politicize vote-counting. There is no moral equivalency between Republicans and Democrats.

But will that be forever? Power is an aphrodisiac. The judicial system is growing more sharply partisan on both sides. Gerrymandering is a time-honored tradition by both parties. Imperious moves to stifle speech come from the left as well as the right. The danger of concentrating authority in too few hands, without sufficient checks, remains as acute today as when James Madison warned at the Constitutional Convention: “All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.”

So it also is in Israel, which has no constitution but a set of Basic Laws that are supposed to set the standards for governmental action. Without a constitutional text, the Supreme Court has overturned some statutes and practices as “unreasonable,” a squishy concept that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has just outlawed. (The Court itself will hear a case requesting that it overturn that new ban on its authority, setting up what Israelis loosely call a “constitutional crisis.”)

In addition, Netanyahu has proposed giving government officials a majority on the commission that appoints judges, and granting the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, the power to overturn any Supreme Court ruling with a simple majority vote. The specter of emasculating the courts—the only check on executive/legislative power—has ignited vast street demonstrations, disinvestment, protests by respected former intelligence and military officers, and refusals to serve by numerous military reservists. At least the center and left are alarmed, even if the right is not.

Ironically, Israel’s Supreme Court has moved somewhat to the right as new justices have been appointed during years of conservative government. So, if the judiciary is weakened and the rightist coalition loses its narrow majority in the future, a more centrist or left-tilting government could presumably overturn conservative Supreme Court decisions.

These might include rulings limiting the rights of Arab citizens, for example, or allowing more Jewish West Bank settlements on Palestinians’ land, or permitting gender discrimination by Haridim, the ultra-religious Jews who increasingly demand the separation of men and women in public transportation and elsewhere.

In fact, for many Israelis on both sides of the conflict over the judiciary, the very nature of the country is at stake—whether it remains a secular and pluralistic state or becomes increasingly theocratic, run by extensively by religious law. A centrist or slightly liberal government, empowered to overrule the Supreme Court, could conceivably sweep away judgments that uphold an expanded religious authority in domestic life, open the door to Israeli annexation of the West Bank, and other policies favored by the hard right. That is the risk that Netanyahu and his extremist partners run by changing the rules of the game.

Ultimately, citizens in both Israel and the United States will decide the momentous question, which is much larger than the personalities or slogans or temporal policies of the candidates. All democracies contain the built-in mechanism of their own destruction: the popular vote, which can elect those who will slice away the protections, usually little by little, until the citizens wake up one morning to find that their precious freedoms to choose how they are governed have disappeared. In a well-informed citizenry, the alarm sounds long before, across the entire political spectrum.

The Republicans' Ideology of Ignorance

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The Earth is on fire. And Republicans, led by Donald Trump, are poised to dismantle all the funding and regulations to combat global warming.

Racial bigotry runs rampant in plain view. And Republicans bar the topic from classrooms, emasculate the Voting Rights Act, and move to ban the military’s anti-discrimination programs.

The COVID pandemic triggers rapid, ground-breaking vaccine development. And Republican officials demonize scientists, fight protective measures, and hound numerous public health specialists out of their jobs.

And so on. The Republican Party has led the United States into a peculiar era of contempt for knowledge, disdain for the experts who have acquired it, and suspicion of fellow Americans who revere learning. “Expert” has become a dirty word.

From Republican-controlled state houses to public universities, secondary schools, so-called “news” organizations, and libraries, a concerted campaign is on to create deserts of ignorance where no fruits of accumulated understanding can grow. These blank landscapes are devoid of the conscientious research and reasoning gathered over decades. In the empty patches, weeds grow—the weeds of fabricated conspiracies and dogmatic thinking. They are producing a harvest of contempt for any truth that violates a predilection.

There is a class element to this, a bottom-up sense that the elites with all their schooling really know nothing about the real world and care nothing for those whose names are not followed by letters signifying advanced degrees. This phenomenon of disparagement is a symptom of powerlessness, marginalization, and alienation. It was accelerated by the Great Recession of 2007-08—triggered by elite wheeler-dealers in finance. Lower middle-class families lost equity in their homes, jobs that had seemed secure, and confidence in their futures—a logical sequel to the decline of manufacturing and the stability it had provided. People’s foundations were shaken.

One outcome has been fear, particularly among whites without a college education. Not just fear of personal economic vulnerability, but also anxiety about change in demography and society: rising  numbers of non-whites, shifting social attitudes on sexual orientation and other issues, declining trust in such big institutions as government. That perspective sees an America drifting from some idyllic essence. Make America Great Again—Again.

That idyl is a myth, of course, picturing a supposedly homogeneous United States—white, Christian, socially traditional, heterosexual, family-based—a comforting Norman-Rockwell culture with non-accented English and red-blooded “American” names. It’s no surprise that it is nurtured mostly in rural areas where the myth is closer to reality, and where the new Republican Party finds ready voters.

Fear is convenient to certain brands of politicians, especially those aspiring to autocracy. As we have seen, fear has been cynically stoked by Trump and his fellow co-conspirators in the great takeover of a once-responsible political party. Where Republicans once garnered more electoral support than Democrats from voters with college degrees, it’s now the opposite. Democrats have largely lost their appeal among the white working class, where Republican fear mongering has gained ground.

That is not to say that a thirst for knowledge—and its delightful ambiguities and contradictions—is monopolized by the college-educated. Smarts and curiosity are widely distributed up and down the socio-economic scale, blessing those without university diplomas and also skipping many of those who have them. But informing yourself these days takes more time and skill than long working hours and defective schooling usually allow, a handicap for those who lack leisure and luxury.

Republicans have profited from the deep inadequacies of the country’s education systems, which mostly neglect to teach students how to check facts, discern truth from propaganda, and filter through the internet maze of reports and claims. (The News Literacy Project has developed curricula and online tools to help teachers do just that.) Under the guise of awarding parents control over their kids’ schooling, Republican lawmakers in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere are moving aggressively to erase honest history and relevant contemporary discussion from classrooms, and to remove books on race and sexual orientation from courses and libraries. The objective, it seems, is to create pockets of abject ignorance in the rising generations.  

That will work to the advantage of a party that wants to manipulate instead of educate. Even more troubling than the Republican schemes to fool the public is the capacity of large parts of the public to be fooled.

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of the “willing suspension of disbelief” as an aesthetic component of readers’ acceptance of literature’s plausibility. But he meant it as a conscious, creative process. In American politics, the willing suspension of disbelief allows mendacious actors room for mischief.

Hence, the Republicans’ ideology of ignorance. It is easier to convince citizens to ignore racial bias if you obliterate its history from classrooms. It is easier to foster contempt for your political opponents if you impugn their support for transgender people as morally harmful to children. It is easier to frighten people that they are losing parental authority if you brand relevant books and classroom discussion on race and gender as self-blaming, pornographic, or perverted.

It is a cleverly constructed strategy at the heart of Trump’s spellbinding appeal and his intellectual corruption of the Republican Party, once a responsible bastion of tempered governance. Trump and his copycats create areas of ignorance with their perpetual tempests of lies. They conjure up a mirage of candor but obliterate knowledge.

I am reminded of a day off the coast of Maine, sailing through a heavy rainstorm. The radar, unable to penetrate the downpour, displayed a screen entirely lit up in vivid orange, blotting out all traces of nearby boats, buoys, and treacherous land—the reality that I needed to see. Thankfully, the storm soon passed.

The Mixed Human Rights Record of Israel's Judiciary

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The right-wing Israeli government’s plan to eviscerate the powers of the country’s courts has generated massive demonstrations in the streets, worries by foreign investors, and boycotts of military service by hundreds of reservists in elite special forces and air force units. But the “independent judiciary” the protesters are defending does not have a sterling record on civil rights, especially those of Palestinian Arabs.

                The Supreme Court has refused to rule against the government’s inflammatory strategy of settling Jews in the occupied West Bank, a practice barred by the Fourth Geneva Convention. It has generally permitted the army to demolish the family homes of Arabs accused of terrorism, a form of collective punishment that the Geneva Convention also forbids. (Demolition is never used against Jews charged with terrorism against Arabs.) Inside Israel, the court has upheld a form of segregation by allowing rural villages and kibbutzim to reject would-be residents for “incompatibility with the social-cultural fabric of the town.”

The justices have only tinkered around the edges of the government’s tough practices. They have occasionally ordered a small Jewish settlement dismantled for taking Palestinian land. For similar reasons, they have required minor changes in the route of Israel’s security wall built on the border of the West Bank. They have ruled against demolishing a house where the accused did not actually live, and where a family tried to prevent the terrorist act. But the justices have typically avoided sweeping judgments on major policies affecting Palestinians’ rights, deferring to security concerns and gradually reducing the influence of international law.

                “Over the years,” says B’Tselem, an Israeli civil liberties organization, “the Supreme Court has permitted nearly every kind of human rights violation that Israel has committed in the Occupied Territories.”

Why, then, is the extreme political right so intent on emasculating the judiciary? First, the Supreme Court has gone the other way in a few important areas. It struck down a law exempting the state from liability for damaging civilian property during security operations in the West Bank. It limited the length of time that “infiltrators,” namely illegal immigrants from Africa, could be held in a desert prison camp that was designed as a deterrent to further arrivals.

And, most politically charged, the court overturned, as discriminatory, the exemption of ultra-Orthodox men from the military service that all other Israeli men and women must perform. (Although, with ultra-Orthodox parties giving governing coalitions their parliamentary majorities, governments have repeatedly obtained the court’s permission to extend the exemption.)

                Second, if Israel annexes the West Bank as many on the political right desire, the military’s authority there would presumably end, along with the military courts that have tried Palestinians on both security and criminal charges since the territory was captured in the 1967 war. It is conceivable that the Supreme Court would grant Palestinian residents access to the same rights in the same criminal justice system as Israelis. That would not be welcomed by the virulent anti-Arab members of the current government.

                Last but certainly not least, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would like to stay out of prison if his endless trial on corruption charges, which began in May 2020, ever ends with a conviction. An independent judicial system is such an inconvenience to authoritarian-minded leaders, as former president Donald Trump might soon discover.   

Nevertheless, Israel’s Supreme Court seems less of a threat to some of the right-wing agenda than the protests in its favor might suggest. It has grown more restrained and more conservative in recent decades, especially since the retirement in 2006 of its president, Aharon Barak, a jurist revered both in Israel and abroad for his capacity to apply human rights to the exigencies of security interests.

In 2011, for example, the court essentially reversed a 1983 judgment by Barak against ten Israeli-owned quarries that were extracting building materials from the occupied West Bank. Citing the Geneva Convention and the Hague Regulations, Barak’s court had ruled, “An area held under belligerent occupation is not an open field for economic exploitation.” He reaffirmed the judgment in 2004. But in 2011, Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch found that the long period of occupation “requires the laws be conformed to meet reality on the ground,” which she said included “the right to utilize natural resources in a reasonable manner.”

  In retirement, former Justice Barak recently called the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul plan “a string of poison pills” that would be “the beginning of the end of the Third House,” meaning the third historical period of Jewish sovereignty after the eras of the ancient First and Second Temples.

Barak’s warning was airily dismissed by Justice Minister Yariv Levin, who declared that the former Supreme Court president “does not understand the essence of democracy,” endangered, in Levin’s view, because “all power rests with the judges, and they decide what’s proportionate and reasonable. That’s not democratic.”

But it is the Justice Minister who does not understand the essence of democracy, which relies on the separation of powers, a cardinal principle recognized by the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have taken to the streets. Israel’s Supreme Court is the only institution standing in the way of unfettered political diktat. With a parliamentary system whose majority always controls the executive branch, no other check or balance exists.

The country has no constitution; a failed constitutional assembly after Israel’s creation in 1948 led to the enactment by the Knesset, the parliament, of what’s called Basic Law, a dozen principles on “human dignity and liberty” derived from the Israeli Declaration of Independence. The Basic Law figures in the Supreme Court’s rulings on the “constitutionality” of statutes passed by the Knesset. Yet the court has been cautious, overturning only 22 laws since the power of judicial review was established in 1992, an annual rate lower than the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

It appears that even as the authority to annul laws has been rarely used, its existence has restrained the executive and legislative branches in the past. Not so much today, as the government has shifted to the right, and “elected officials have become less likely to accept legal advice to amend or withdraw bills that are constitutionally problematic,” according to Yuval Shany and Guy Lurie of the Israel Democracy Institute.

Ironically, given all the protests, the Supreme Court has suffered a decline in public trust, from 80 percent in 2000 to 49 percent in 2010 to 41 percent in 2021. “While the words ‘there are judges in Jerusalem’ used to put an end to public debate, today they provoke it,” wrote Yedidia Z. Stern, former dean of the law faculty at Bar-Ilan University, back in 2010. Dissatisfaction reigns on both the right and the left of the political and religious spectrums.

Yet for the sake of democracy, large numbers of Israelis seem to realize, the center has to hold. If Netanyahu and his justice minister looked around the world or into history, they would see how every dictatorship subverts and expropriates its judiciary. In the Soviet Union, pro-democracy dissidents used to speak of “telephone justice,” delivered by judges who first called Communist Party officials for instructions. In today’s Russia, supine courts mostly do the Kremlin’s bidding. Hungary’s semi-autocrat Victor Orban has emasculated the courts, which are also lapdogs of the regimes in Iran, China, and other authoritarian systems.

                Netanyahu and his extremist, anti-Arab cabinet are ramming through legislation that would require an 80 percent majority on the Supreme Court to invalidate a law, and would empower the Knesset to annul that ruling or any other with just a one-vote majority of legislators. Justices would be appointed mainly by governing politicians in a restructured Judicial Selection Committee, instead of the one currently dominated by nonpartisan judges and lawyers.

                That would set the stage for a kind of elected autocracy, placed in office by the voters but unchecked by the rule of law—or of any law other than the one enacted at the whim of the legislature, the executive, and their hand-picked judges, all three branches flowing into a single stream of authority.

                The sad question is whether Palestinians would notice much difference. Maybe not, since they haven’t had much success anyway, through Israel’s independent courts, fighting discriminatory laws and regulations.

World War II According to Tucker Carlson

 

By David K. Shipler 

                A reliably uninformed source has revealed that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s staffers, desperately bored without any significant national problems they’re allowed to address, have collected 41,000 hours of newsreel footage from 1939-45 and turned it over to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

                Reels of film are unreliably reported to be stacked in his reception area, in his office, and around his venerable desk. One pile, which swayed dangerously in a puff of Carlson’s bloviations, finally toppled over onto his favorite saying, etched into a plaque carved from a Mar a-Lago palm tree:

                “What you see with your own eyes is a rumor.”

                 According to inside misinformation, Our Boy Tucker is preparing a show of the most telling, iconoclastic clips hidden for decades. They will definitively rebut the assertions by elitist “historians” that certain “events” and “attacks” and “battles” occurred.

                Tucker’s show is to begin with a scene from Pearl Harbor at sunrise on Dec. 7, 1941. Contrary to the fabrication about a Japanese attack, the camera pans across the beautiful harbor, where U.S. Navy ships lie quietly in their berths, sailors lounging on deck or going about their peacetime chores of swabbing, painting, and wielding nothing more dangerous than an occasional screwdriver.

                An advance copy of Carlson’s narration for this bit has been smuggled out of the Fox digital files, which as we know are full of revealing texts and e-mails. Tucker is itching to declare: “The socialist President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s approval rating had tanked, so he mobilized his propaganda resources to invent a Japanese attack, just to boost his poll numbers. And it worked.”

                Film of London during the so-called “blitz” shows a pub-filled city of merry-makers. How come no V-1 “buzz bombs” are heard? Tucker plans to ask. How come there are no explosions? How come there’s nothing but the clinking sound of beer mugs and happy chatter? Carlson will tell us why, and you probably already know the answer.

                A particularly affecting scene will show a ship sailing placidly along in an open ocean. “Worried about U-boats?” Tucker will sneer. “Please. Look closely. We’ll freeze the frame here. See the passengers out on deck enjoying the sun and the sea? It’s a pleasure cruise, folks, right there in the middle of 1943. Gimme a break.”

Then, a startling new clip of the so-called D-Day landing is sure to galvanize audiences. It is a beach scene, all right, but instead of helmeted soldiers in camouflage and belts of grenades, we will see a bunch of obviously American guys with their obviously French girlfriends playing volleyball on the sand and frolicking in the surf.

This momentous report will surely bring relief to all of us who have worried about the danger of a new war, World War Three. We didn’t even have World War Two, so relax.

Many reels have yet to be examined, according to our misinformed source, so we will just have to wait and see what long-suppressed scenes of benign German concentration camps the great Tucker Carlson will discover.   

                 This is satire. It’s all made up, a disclosure made necessary by the absurdity of current reality, which prevents lots of people from telling the difference between truth and fiction.

Israel's Forever War

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

                Forty-three years ago this month, the United States voted for a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Jewish settlements in Arab territories captured by Israel in the 1967 war, and demanding that they be dismantled. After an immediate outcry by Israel and its American supporters, President Jimmy Carter backtracked, saying an affirmative vote had been authorized only if all references to Jerusalem were deleted, which they were not. He blamed miscommunication within his administration.

The Israeli cabinet didn’t buy the story, saying the vote “gives rise to deep resentment.” Vice President Walter Mondale was booed at a meeting of American Jewish leaders. And it didn’t help President Carter in his re-election bid that November, although his landslide loss to Ronald Reagan had numerous other causes, including the American diplomats being held hostage in Iran.

                Decades later, it’s clear that Carter was right about settlements being “obstacles to peace,” in the official phase that was used through several administrations. But the U.S. never took concrete action to stop their expansion. It pressed occasionally for construction freezes but never dared to use economic or military aid as leverage. President Trump even supported the settlements; his ambassador, David Friedman, endorsed their annexation by Israel.

The years of negligence have allowed a dangerous sore to fester. At the time of that U.N. vote in 1980, there were about 11,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank; today there are some 450,000. Then, a small and marginal assortment of zealous Jewish vigilantes harassed and attacked Palestinians; today, a widening crusade of armed Israeli thugs holds sway in many areas, as witnessed last week when hundreds of settlers, in retaliation for the murder of two young Israeli men, rampaged through four Palestinian villages, burning cars and houses, vandalizing homes, and terrorizing children—children, who will never forget.

The arsenal of memory is reinforced by the cycle of terrorism and revenge. Its weaponry is ready for deployment by both sides at any hint of compromise. So, as long as clashes on the ground occur between Israeli settlers and Palestinians, no high-level peace agreement can succeed, in the unlikely event that one should be negotiated. Furious hatreds have long been generated at the level of everyday life.

That doesn’t mean that Arabs and Jews have universally hostile relations on the West Bank. Palestinians work on construction crews building settlements, in Israeli-owned businesses, inside Israel itself if they have permission to commute through the border wall that now cuts off the West Bank. Some Arab-Jewish friendships exist.

Nor are the militant settlers the only cause of conflict, obviously. Palestinian leaders have a long history of missing opportunities to move toward reconciliation. Years ago, Israeli proposals were spurned or ignored. The Israeli left’s call of “land for peace” evaporated after Israel unilaterally withdrew its troops from Gaza in 2005 and—instead of peace—got rocket fire as Hamas, the radical Palestinian movement, took power.

And yet, settlements on the West Bank have played a poisonous role in the unending war. Combined with stepped-up Israeli army raids against terrorist cells, settler violence has embittered ordinary Palestinians, with growing numbers promoting armed resistance, polls show. Even though the West Bank is far from a functioning democracy, no Palestinian leader can negotiate fruitfully without the population’s support. It is too easy to strike the match that will light the tinder of outrage.

In a perfect world, anybody of any religion, race, or nationality would be free to live peacefully anywhere, of course, unmolested by those of a different identity. But the Holy Land is far from perfect. It is a place where land is idolized, dogmatism is prized, and history is corrupted. The settlements, then, become instruments of politics and conquest.

 Israelis who move to the West Bank generally go for the subsidized housing, the semi-rural setting, or the religio-nationalist belief that God gave the Jews the deed to that land. But some bent on violence are drawn there by the conflict itself. They have usually been allowed to act against Palestinians with virtual impunity.  

Mixing biblical certainty with anti-Arab bigotry has made some settlements incubators of extremism. It has not been countered by any Israeli government, and won’t be by the current coalition, which includes ideological settlers in the cabinet. As a result, Israeli settlers have become both targets of terrorism and perpetrators of vigilantism.

This isn’t brand new. In 1983, settlers planted bombs in cars owned by the Arab mayors of Nablus and Ramallah; one lost both legs, the other, part of his left foot. A third mayor escaped after the Israeli army got a tip and warned him.

Later that year, a yeshiva student was stabbed to death in the West Bank city of Hebron, sparking a rampage by settlers who trashed and burned stalls in the Arab market. Then six settlers, including three who had been involved in the mayors’ bombing, dressed as Arabs and sprayed automatic gunfire into groups of students at the Islamic College in Hebron, killing three. Three of those settlers were sentenced to life in prison but were released only seven years later.

In 1994, a settler named Baruch Goldstein stormed into Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs and killed 29 Muslim worshipers; survivors beat him to death. He was made a heroic martyr by the radical settler subculture and an inspiration to Prime Minister Yitzhak’s assassin, Yigal Amir, a frequent visitor to settlements. Though not a resident himself, Amir identified with the hard-core settlers’ movement.

Until recently, Goldstein’s picture hung on the wall of Israel’s new Public Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, an extremist settler who had distributed a flyer of Rabin in an SS uniform and declared, after stealing an ornament from Rabin’s car, “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him too.”

Aside from the misdeeds of settlers themselves, their communities have multiplied and fragmented West Bank territory into disjointed enclaves impossible to forge into contiguous areas under Palestinian rule. By explicit design over decades, Israel has essentially slammed the door on a two-state solution.

That was the goal, the former general Ariel Sharon told me back in 1979, when he was Agriculture Minister facilitating new settlements by building roads, pipelines, and electrical grids. “Security is not only guns and aircraft and tanks,” he said then, years before he became Defense Minister and later Prime Minister. “If people live in a place, they have the motivation to defend themselves, and the nation has the motivation to defend them. As long as these settlements are built, a Palestinian state will not be established in this area.”

Like the term “refugee camp,” “settlement” conveys a misleading sense of impermanence. Both have become perpetual. Refugee camps are now tightly-packed slums where generations have lived. Many Jewish settlements began as tents or mobile homes on Arab villages’ common agricultural land but are now established semi-suburbs of town houses and apartments, schools and synagogues—“facts on the ground,” Sharon used to call them.

Each side has radicalized the other. Whatever harmony some once imagined being possible between the two peoples in two neighboring states is being soured into discord every day. Nobody is trying any more to end the forever war.

In Ukraine, Both Sides Are Losing

 

By David K. Shipler 

                A year into Europe’s largest land war in nearly 80 years, the prospect of “winning” remains not only elusive but—more telling—defined by wishful thinking rather than military reality.

Neither Russia nor Ukraine seems capable of achieving its ambitious aims. Perhaps, looking far into the future, Russia will succeed in taking over all of Ukraine. Or perhaps Ukraine will manage to expel Russian forces from its entire territory, including Crimea and the eastern Donbas region that Moscow grabbed in 2014. Perhaps. But so far, neither scenario looks possible.

Instead, Russia and Ukraine are locked in a conflict of mutual loss. Russia is losing its soldiers and weapons, its global standing, its economic vitality, its modicum of cultural and political freedom, and hundreds of thousands of talented citizens who are fleeing abroad. Convicted prisoners, freed to fight, are coming home, along with traumatized troops bearing shame and emotional scars. Russian society is being wounded.

Ukraine is losing population to death and migration, its houses and bridges and factories and farms, its energy grid, its medical system, and its reliable independence. If it survives, it will be hobbled by neediness and severe militarization. The coming generation will not easily erase the terrors endured in childhood.

Yet there is talk of “victory.” What that means today is certainly not what will be claimed eventually in whatever compromise may be reached, for this war—unlike Vietnam and the two World Wars—is not susceptible to the categorical defeat of either side. Both portray it as a clash of virtues and values, a colossal contest over the entire international order.  

The Rise of Black Quarterbacks

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

            At Sunday’s Super Bowl, the United States will congratulate itself on another racial milestone, the first time two Black quarterbacks have played in the culminating game of the country’s most popular sport. “Jalen Hurts and Patrick Mahomes will make history on Sunday,” crowed CBS News.

But the history is a lesson in bigotry, illustrating how devious stereotypes can be.

The latest “first” is a cause for celebration, to be sure. It is no exoneration of American society, however, for the racial assumptions that have made this so long in coming still whirl around Blacks, whether professional athletes or ordinary mortals. Tangible barriers that are broken often leave a strong residue of bias—in this case, about the interactions of the mind, the body, and the power of Blacks on the field or off.   

Americans love to chart progress. We have had the first Black president, the first Black vice president, the first Black defense secretary, the first Black secretary of state, the first Black Supreme Court justice, the first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on. And now “the first Black House Minority Leader in history” as President Biden said in his State of the Union Address, congratulating Representative Hakeem Jeffries.

 Whether Jeffries was pleased or displeased by the label was hard to tell by the neutral expression on his face. Not every Black or Muslim or woman or gay person who gets past the obstacle loves being defined primarily that way. Jeffries and the rest of us might reasonably wonder if the day will ever come when the phrase “the first Black [fill in the blank]” can be relegated to a distant past.

            The first Black quarterback to start in the Superbowl was Doug Williams, who led the Washington Redskins to victory in 1988. He won the Lombardi Trophy and was named the game’s most valuable player. But he hadn’t been the team’s starter at the beginning of the season, when Black quarterbacks overall started fewer than 10 percent of NFL games. 

            Several years later, for my book A Country of Strangers, I looked into the patterns of prejudice that was keeping Black players out of the quarterback position. A system of tracking was putting high school athletes on career-changing detours, especially if they came from mostly Black schools, according to Richard L. Schaefer, former attorney for the National Football League Players Association. On college teams, he said then, talented Black quarterbacks were being bumped to other positions considered more physical than mental. “I think it’s a subtle, perhaps even subconscious, kind of bigotry.”

            The bigotry pairs two of the society’s longest-standing stereotypes of Blacks as both physically strong and mentally weak. Since at least the days of Thomas Jefferson, who codified those images in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, there has been a tendency in white America to see the body and the mind as opposite poles, perceptions that persisted and shaped college and NFL coaches’ decisions centuries later.

Policing in Black and Blue

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The murder of Tyre Nichols in Memphis has opened a window onto the complexity of race as a factor in policing. A conventional assumption has been disrupted—that racism alone drives police brutality against Black citizens. Yet it would be a mistake to use the tragedy as an excuse to discount racial bigotry’s role in police behavior nationwide, and perhaps even in this case.

Unlike many other police killings of unarmed Black men, there was no frightened, trigger-happy white cop. There was no white-dominated “law enforcement” apparatus structured to keep Blacks down. Nichols was a young Black man beaten to death after a traffic stop by five Black officers in a mostly-Black police department headed by a Black police chief in a Black-majority city.

It’s a rare lineup of elements, and it has forced questions that seem to have nothing to do with race: about how police recruits are screened, how they are trained, how they are socialized once they’re in uniform, and how rules governing the use of force are designed and enforced.

Yet none of those areas is impervious to insidious racial stereotyping. They are all vulnerable to subtle interactions between race and power. Even Blacks, in keeping with a pattern seen broadly in multiracial settings, may internalize the negative stereotypes of themselves that are taught by the larger, white society.

Therefore, when America’s longstanding images of the Black man as aggressive, violent, and dangerous are lodged in any officer’s expectations, high anxiety can provoke preemptive force—by Black cops as well as white. The nervousness is enhanced during traffic stops, which cops are trained to believe are more life-threatening than the data show.

The Curse of Classified Documents

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Many years ago, the Communications Officer on the US Navy destroyer where I was stationed went into a panic. He had misplaced a booklet, marked “SECRET” containing encryption keys. He scoured the radio shack where the document was usually kept, went through the officers’ wardroom where we ate, and ravaged his desk in the stateroom we shared. Nothing.

                He was a young ensign and was sure he was going to prison. I helped him look. We both had Top Secret clearances, so there was no risk of my seeing something I shouldn’t. We overturned our mattresses. We emptied drawers and lockers. Finally, on a whim, I fished around in the narrow slot between a desk and a bunk and—voila! There it was. My roommate was saved.

                Would that all officials were as terrified of classified documents going astray. But no, as Donald Trump and Joe Biden have demonstrated, and as countless lower functionaries have surely done out of sight, carelessness seems as ubiquitous as classification itself.

There are two main reasons for this. One is overclassification of material that needn’t be kept secret, or whose need for secrecy has expired. The other is a decentralization of authority over the reams of classified documents that flow across some government desks. Those in certain positions are so used to shuffling papers with one of the three basic classification levels—Confidential, Secret, or Top Secret—that they evidently get too casual.

“Misplacing classified documents is very common—happens all the time,” the BBC was told by Tom Blanton, head of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. He added that certain information, such as a president’s travel schedule, is classified beforehand but need not remain secret afterwards. Yet those documents are often never put through the declassification process.

In addition, virtually every communication sent by an embassy to the State Department in Washington is classified, at least at the low Confidential level, even including reports of news stories that everybody can read in the local media. It’s too bad that Ben Franklin didn’t come up with some proverb for this like, “Absurdity numbs the conscience.”

Nevertheless, mishandling classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way can be charged as a felony. And knowingly removing classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities is a misdemeanor.