…while Americans have today given up the old dream of liberalizing China, they should maybe look a little closer. It’s true that China never remotely liberalized—if you consider liberalism to be all about democratic elections, a free press, and respect for human rights. But many political thinkers would argue there is more to a comprehensive definition of modern liberalism than that. Instead, they would identify liberalism’s essential telos as being the liberation of the individual from all limiting ties of place, tradition, religion, associations, and relationships, along with all the material limits of nature, in pursuit of the radical autonomy of the modern “consumer.”
It’s obscene because it perverts the definition of genocide, which is precise: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Notice two key features of this definition: It speaks of acts whereas part of the genocide case against Israel involves the misinterpretation of quotes from Israeli officials who have vowed Hamas’s elimination, not the elimination of Palestinians. And it uses the term as such — meaning the acts are genocidal only if they are directed at Palestinians as Palestinians, not as members of Hamas or, heartbreakingly, as collateral deaths in attempts to destroy Hamas.
If Israel were trying to commit genocide, it wouldn’t be putting its soldiers at risk or allowing humanitarian relief to arrive from Egypt or withdrawing many of its forces from Gaza. It would simply be killing Palestinians everywhere, in vastly greater numbers, as Germans killed Jews or Hutus killed Tutsis.
He has a point. Definitions — words — matter. I do not think Israel is attempting genocide in Gaza.
But what they are attempting is still egregious. Nine thousand dead children.
Barak remembers feeling deeply frustrated when Netanyahu won the tight 2022 election, “not because he won or there had been some change from the previous electoral cycles,” he said, “but because of the typical weakness of the left, unable to see the whole picture and failing to join forces.”
The ballistic missiles that arced from Yemen to Israel on October 31st set several records. They probably travelled farther than any other ballistic missile fired as an act of aggression, having crossed at least 1,600km. They were intercepted by Israel’s Arrow missile-defence system above the Negev desert. It was the first time that Arrow, deployed for 23 years, had taken out a surface-to-surface missile. It was also the first ever combat interception in space, according to two Israeli officials.
European Union policymakers agreed on Friday to a sweeping new law to regulate artificial intelligence, one of the world’s first comprehensive attempts to limit the use of a rapidly evolving technology that has wide-ranging societal and economic implications.
The law, called the A.I. Act, sets a new global benchmark for countries seeking to harness the potential benefits of the technology, while trying to protect against its possible risks, like automating jobs, spreading misinformation online and endangering national security. The law still needs to go through a few final steps for approval, but the political agreement means its key outlines have been set.
European policymakers focused on A.I.’s riskiest uses by companies and governments, including those for law enforcement and the operation of crucial services like water and energy. Makers of the largest general-purpose A.I. systems, like those powering the ChatGPT chatbot, would face new transparency requirements. Chatbots and software that creates manipulated images such as “deepfakes” would have to make clear that what people were seeing was generated by A.I., according to E.U. officials and earlier drafts of the law.
Very curious to see how this holds up.
Notable that any and all meaningful regulation over the tech industry is coming from Europe.
The audacity of the blueprint, officials said, made it easy to underestimate. All militaries write plans that they never use, and Israeli officials assessed that, even if Hamas invaded, it might muster a force of a few dozen, not the hundreds who ultimately attacked.
Israel had also misread Hamas’s actions. The group had negotiated for permits to allow Palestinians to work in Israel, which Israeli officials took as a sign that Hamas was not looking for a war.
But Hamas had been drafting attack plans for many years, and Israeli officials had gotten hold of previous iterations of them. What could have been an intelligence coup turned into one of the worst miscalculations in Israel’s 75-year history.
…Harris’s insistence on attributing Hamas’s violence entirely to apolitical motivations reflects a broader tendency to reduce the Israel-Palestine conflict into a simple, “good” versus “evil” binary. At one point in his monologue, Harris argues that “if the Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace; if the Israelis put down their weapons, there would be a genocide.” But this is only true in the most facile sense. In the West Bank, which is governed by a secular Palestinian Authority that cooperates with Israel, the Palestinians have largely abstained from terroristic resistance. Yet putting down their weapons has won them repression and dispossession by a Jewish supremacist settler movement, not peace. Of course, if Palestinians gamely submit to indefinite occupation, then there may be “peace” in some sense of the word. But it would not be the sort of peace that any Israeli would find tolerable were they put in the Palestinians’ position.
A counterpoint to my previous post about Sam Harris.
If it’s not obvious, this conflict has long been important to me. Many years ago, it motivated me to take college classes on the region, and not long after, to live in both Israel and Palestine for a lengthy stint.
My allegiance then was firmly pro-Palestinian. I saw this conflict, as many on the Left now do, as a simple binary: Israel has the power, and therefore they are not to be trusted. Palestinians have no power, and therefore I must sympathize with them. This speaks to something deep within me — a near-pathological desire to sympathize with people I perceive as overlooked, ignored, on the fringe, without power. Old dogs, small towns, mountain cabins… I’m not really all that complicated.
I haven’t had a strong opinion about the Middle East in many years. My attention and anxiety are now domestic, and while the events of October 7 changed that to some degree, I’m far more interested in how the effects of that day play in my own country than I am in hashing out the decades- and centuries-long grievances — and the very hard work to be done by all sides of this conflict — in the Levant itself. (In this way, I’m hopelessly American, perpetually gazing at my own navel.)
But since October 7th, I’m stunned by how powerful the Palestinians have become. No, obviously not militarily, but culturally, here on the American Left, support for the Palestinian people is de rigueur. In some ways, I find this thrilling — everything I felt so strongly all those years ago now seems to be in vogue.
Yet any time there’s a big social swing, I’m inherently skeptical. I do not trust the mechanisms of social media and how they magnify or perpetuate certain narratives, and more importantly, I’ve lost faith in the American Left over the last several years to rise above the fray. At risk of beating a dead horse, a political movement I once thought to be grounded in pluralism, liberalism, and equality has become something else entirely, something that feels like a naked grab for power. (And, though I resent having to, I feel obligated to say that my mistrust the Left does not mean I endorse the Right.)
So now that the Palestinian cause is front-and-center on social media, I’m not sure what to think. And I’m horrified by the corollary rise in anti-semitism. Young people on American college campuses calling for the eradication of Israel? Really? Much like Sam Harris, I’m morally opposed to any religious state, be it Jewish, Christian, Hindu or Muslim, and while I think far too many people willfully conflate anti-Zionism (which is legitimate) with anti-semitism (which is not) in order to blunt criticism of Israel’s policies, I cannot fathom how the eradication of the state of Israel seems at all like a legitimate outcome of this conflict.
And yet…
I was once twenty-one. I had strong opinions about this region, some of which were grounded in reality and others born of emotion. To my credit, I traveled to the Middle East and lived there, living in both Palestinian refugee camps and on Israeli kibbutzim. I saw things with my own eyes and came to some conclusions. If I didn’t have the restraint to admit that I didn’t know what I didn’t know, how can I expect anyone else to do the same?
I want so badly to trust my fellow humans. The young tend to be open and the old tend to be wise. In my middling age, I’m not sure where I fit anymore.
On Wednesday morning, his government released a document called “The Bletchley Declaration,” signed by representatives from the 28 countries attending the event, including the U.S. and China, which warned of the dangers posed by the most advanced “frontier” A.I. systems. “There is potential for serious, even catastrophic, harm, either deliberate or unintentional, stemming from the most significant capabilities of these A.I. models,” the declaration said.
“Many risks arising from A.I. are inherently international in nature, and so are best addressed through international cooperation. We resolve to work together in an inclusive manner to ensure human-centric, trustworthy and responsible A.I.”
The document fell short, however, of setting specific policy goals. A second meeting is scheduled to be held in six months in South Korea and a third in France in a year.
Governments have scrambled to address the risks posed by the fast-evolving technology since last year’s release of ChatGPT, a humanlike chatbot that demonstrated how the latest models are advancing in powerful and unpredictable ways.
The fact remains, though - and it is a fact, an objective fact, an empirical fact, no matter how mad it makes people - that Hamas has always been empowered by Israel’s violence and oppression. Forgive the cliché, but each side’s extremists are a gift to each other. I’m sorry if this is hard to accept, but Palestine is a Chinese finger trap; the more forcefully Israel acts, the more tightly the conflict will grip the country. The only way out is through de-escalation and the only permanent de-escalation is through formal legal recognition of Palestinians in the territories as full citizens in a democratic system. This might come from the establishment of a Palestinian state, or it might come with the absorption of the territories into a secular state of Israel-Palestine that extends perfectly equal legal and political rights to all people within it, as liberal values require. Permanent statelessness and dispossession for the Palestinians will ensure violence for generations. Only freedom for Palestinians can bring peace, and that’s the most hardheaded, ruthlessly pragmatic point anyone can make about this horrid crisis. And if Israel’s defenders feel put upon, othered, alone, it’s because Israel and Israel alone has the power to make Palestinians free. I’m sorry, but it’s not a moral principle that says that Israel must bear responsibility for achieving peace and freedom. It’s a purely pragmatic statement of the reality of Israel’s overwhelming power in the region. Choosing sides has nothing do with it.
Or, I suppose, they could go through with the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, as a disturbing number of people are calling for. I doubt the world would stop them; that’s the upside of being Goliath. But such an act would destroy whatever hope there is left for Israel as a democratic state, a symbol of human rights, however tarnished that symbol stands now. And I think that if you love Israel, the idea of Israel, you should fight like hell to stop that from happening. Because afterwards you’ll never be the same again.
A commitment to the principles of democracy, to human rights, is never easy. If we are to have them at all, they must exist for both you and the people that hate you.
This is a depressingly common, entirely predictable, completely relatable thing about human nature: we want, at all times, to feel secure, to preserve the illusion of control (and it is an illusion). Even if this security comes at the expense of others, and especially if those ‘others’ are nebulous and unseen.
In 2006, Israel essentially responded to Hezbollah: “You think you can just do crazy stuff like kidnap our people and we will treat this as a little border dispute. We may look Western, but the modern Jewish state has survived as ‘a villa in the jungle’” — which is how the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak described it — “because if push comes to shove, we are willing to play by the local rules. Have no illusions about that. You will not outcrazy us out of this neighborhood.”
Yes, if you think Israel is now crazy, it is because Hamas punched it in the face, humiliated it and then poked out one eye. So now Israel believes it must restore its deterrence by proving that it can outcrazy Hamas’s latest craziness.
Israel has suffered a staggering blow and is now forced into a morally impossible war to outcrazy Hamas and deter Iran and Hezbollah at the same time. I weep for the terrible deaths that now await so many good Israelis and Palestinians. And I also worry deeply about the Israeli war plan. It is one thing to deter Hezbollah and deter Hamas. It is quite another to replace Hamas and leave behind something more stable and decent.
Even though Israel gave up control of the Gaza Strip, it has kept a land, air and sea blockade on Gaza since 2007. The result has been damaging for Palestinians, with the United Nations saying in 2009 that the blockade from both Israel and Egypt had been “devastating livelihoods” and causing gradual “de-development” in Gaza. Israel has argued that the blockade has served to keep control of Gaza’s border, prevent Hamas from getting stronger and protect Israelis from Palestinian rocket attacks.
The blockade has faced criticism by human rights groups and the United Nations, which consider Gaza to still be under Israeli military occupation. The United Nations estimates that the blockade has cost the Palestinian territory’s economy nearly $17 billion over roughly a decade. The International Committee of the Red Cross has gone one step further in recent years to say the blockade violates the Geneva Conventions — a claim that Israeli officials have rejected.
The population in Gaza is extraordinarily young. UNICEF has estimated that there are roughly 1 million children living in the Gaza Strip, meaning that almost half the people in Gaza are children. Almost 40 percent of the population is under the age of 15, according to the CIA.
More than 1.4 million of the residents of the Gaza Strip are Palestinian refugees, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
As ever, I feel I must preface any conversation about Gaza or Palestine, as I have learned to do over the many years I’ve been involved with and interested in the people and places of the region, with a statement: the attacks on Israelis last weekend were unconscionable. I do not condone violence of any kind inflicted on civilian populations. There is never justification for civilian casualties.
I fear that Gaza is going to turn into a mass civilian casualty event in the very near future, as though it hasn’t been one for a very long time. Death has always happened asymmetrically in this region: Israelis kill far more Palestinians than Palestinians kill Israelis. It’s horrifying — and having lived there, having witnessed it first-hand, I promise you the horror is not understated.
Implicitly or not, the Israeli justification has always been the legacy of the Holocaust. “Never again” is Israel’s unofficial mantra. Understandably so, right? The Holocaust was horrific on a scale that’s nearly unimaginable. The generational trauma of the population of Israel (and of Jewish people around the globe) is both understandable (if unrelatable) and deserved.
But the Holocaust has become justification for the preservation of the State of Israel, and consequently for the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian population. Civilians have been indiscriminately killed in Palestine for generations, all in the name of Israeli sovereignty.
Israel is in an impossible position. Many Palestinians want Israel wiped off the map because Israel forced them out of their ancestral homeland, land they had lived on for hundreds or thousands of years. Much of this Palestinian anger has become entangled with some truly wretched antisemitism, yes, but I cannot in good faith say that Palestinians hate Jews for the same reasons the Nazis did. Yes, some Palestinians do, and certainly the government of Iran does, but many Palestinians just want to go home, in the same way so many Native Americans want their ancestral homeland back, a cause toward which I am sympathetic. (Though remember, Native Americans can travel freely off the reservations and throughout the United States, whereas almost all Palestinians are forbidden from traveling into Israel — or from leaving Palestine at all. They are confined, unable to leave.)
But if Israel uses the attack of last weekend to slaughter Palestinians indiscriminately, it will (if it hasn’t already, in the eyes of many) lose the moral high ground. It will lose, if it hasn’t already, the goodwill and support of so many people around the world.
Goodwill cannot be measured. It’s intangible, ineffable. And it is more valuable than the billions of dollars America sends to Israel each year.
Israel must proceed with the utmost caution as it prepares to invade Gaza. If that goodwill is lost, I fear not just for the future of Israel, but for the future of Jewish people everywhere.
“Free Palestine”—the slogan, the fantasy, and the policy—has always consciously implied the mass murder of Jews in their towns, streets, shops, and living rooms. Few are willing to say so openly, but in many intellectual, professional, and popular circles in the Middle East and the West, the idea of Palestinian national liberation has long been framed in terms that condone or necessitate the indiscriminate killing of Jews.
We are walking in the footsteps of previous generations of modernizing, secular, intellectual Arabs. They too wanted nothing to do with their native lands, which they saw as having none of the power, prestige, or respect they craved. In their egotism and intellectual narcissism, they didn’t want to belong to “backward” societies. So they sought in foreign, mostly Western ideologies a refuge and a hiding place from backwardness. They joined the progressive secular movements and trendy revolutions because they offered an escape hatch from the drudgery of slow, marginal, local change. They became revolutionaries because they were afraid and insecure. Like Edward Said, they were anti-Zionist and anti-American “humanists” because they did not want to be, or could not be, “Arabs.” Their obvious cultural chauvinism was simply an urge to self-annihilate, to disappear into universalism. Their lives were a hopeless quest to shed their own skin.
You are about to withstand a barrage of lies about the war that broke out today in Israel.
Some of those lies will be explicit. Some of them will be lies of omission. Others will be lies of obfuscation. Or lies of minimization. Lies told by people who are simply too afraid to look at such an ugly, barbarous reality. And lies told by people whose true beliefs are too ugly to quite say aloud. Turn on cable news and you can hear some of them right now.
I like Bari Weiss. I admire her integrity, her commitment to journalistic ethics, and the compassion and curiosity she shows interviewees and guests. (Strangely, nothing enrages my more liberal friends than saying I admire Bari Weiss - a fellow liberal.)
I was listening to the recent episode of her podcast with Michael Oren and I found some of their language to be…unsettling. One part in particular, when they mention a “clash of civilizations,” and Michael says no, this is not a clash of civilizations, this is a clash between civilization and barbarism.
This. This is precisely why I can’t get onboard with much of the rhetoric surrounding the conflict. Do I condone the attacks on Israel? Absolutely not. But how on earth can anyone refer to their own culture (in this case, Israel) as “civilized” when they let such suffering happen just over the border in Palestine?
While I can’t begin to feel it myself, I understand the anger Israelis must feel. Many Palestinians, including Hamas, the “government” of Gaza, want to wipe Israel off the map. That’s a bit different than “kill all the Jews,” but it’s not an arbitrary distinction. I have Palestinian friends that feel as though their homes were stolen from them when the State of Israel was formed in 1948. I feel for them. I also have Israeli friends that have profound and lasting generational trauma from the Holocaust and so many other despicable, horrific attacks on Jewish people over the last, well, if we’re honest, many thousands of years. I feel for them, too.
But a civilization as I define it is a relentless, dogged pursuit of peace, of justice, of fairness, of civility. The arrogance of throwing a rave on the border of the Gaza Strip? To literally throw a party just over the fence from Gaza? Sorry, but the optics of that are terrible. Talk about arrogance…
Civilization is the pursuit of justice for all, not just those that think or believe as we do. Trust me, I get how endlessly frustrating-bordering-on-enraging it is to always try to be fair to those that don’t themselves practice fairness. (I, a gay man, must accept the strangeness of both caring for the Palestinian people…and recognizing that many among them would want me dead.) But there is no other option.
This commitment to principle in the face of an irreconcilable reality? This is the bedrock foundation of a civilization.
Barbarism is not just the slaughter of innocents, but allowing innocent people to suffer because of your own cultural indifference. And I say this as an American. The suffering that takes place around the world because of my own culture’s indifference is staggering.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t point out that indifference wherever and whenever we see it. Israel is a bastion of many good things in the world. But like America, should they allow their neighbors to suffer, no matter how much those neighbors might hate Israel? If so, is Israel — are we — civilized?
I just finished, laying here in my bed, the dogs and cat asleep beside me. Crickets chirp out my window. In the distance a train’s whistle breaks and rolls over the valley.
More than anything, I prize seeing things clearly. Nothing fills me with that particular and precious joie de vivre — that electric sizzle — quite like close proximity to the truth. But most people don’t like the truth. We’ll do anything to avoid it, if we know it at all. So it’s a rare thrill to read something so transgressive in its honesty, so clear-eyed.
Credit to Brian T. Watson for his courage to accept the inevitable, and then to write it. May his acceptance be an inspiration.
The broadcast, which also claimed there was an ongoing Ukrainian incursion into Russia, was aired in Belgorod, Voronezh, and Rostov, cities in close proximity to Ukraine’s border.