Tabla de contenidos para December 11/18, 2023 en The Nation

ALL WAR IS HELL FOR THE CIVILIANS CAUGHT UP IN THE FIGHTING. BUT WHAT makes the decades-long war between Israel and the Palestinians so soul-destroying is that while the only plausible peaceful solution to this bloody conflict has long been obvious, the route to getting there recedes with every new round of killing. The goal, surely, must be—as I wrote in these pages more than 20 years ago—“a day when the Palestinians themselves can also be heard, and when the lives of Palestinian children count as much as those of Israeli children, or Americans.” Despite the best efforts of AIPAC, the ADL, and the local, state, and national officials who do their bidding, the voices of Palestinians are no longer absent. But progress toward a just peace remains maddeningly remote.…

AS THE PALESTINIAN DEATH TOLL CROSSED THE 10,000 mark in early November, two anonymous mid-level US diplomats marginalized by President Biden’s support for Israel warned that the US urgently needed to “publicly criticize Israel’s violations of international norms such as failure to limit offensive operations to legitimate military targets.” Israel’s war in Gaza, they wrote in a memo leaked to Politico, was sowing “doubt in the rules-based international order that we have long championed.” The diplomats are part of a growing chorus against the impunity that the US has long provided Israel for unambiguous violations of international law. Jordan’s King Abdullah II railed that “in another conflict”—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—the US condemned “attacking civilian infrastructure and deliberately starving an entire population of food, water, electricity, and basic necessities.” International law,…

290k Official declared attendance at the November 14 pro-Israel rally in Washington, D.C. 30k Estimated attendance according to other reports 300k Estimated attendance at the November 4 protest for Palestine in Washington, D.C. 300+ Number of people arrested at the Jewish Voice for Peace rally in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal in October 9k Estimated attendance at a November protest for Palestine in Berlin, where most such demonstrations were banned until recently…

HANNAH ARENDT’S LONG-AGO CHARACTERIZAtion of the Nazi desk murderer Adolf Eichmann as personifying the “banality of evil” has itself became banal, but a truism isn’t necessarily untrue. Everyday terror is everywhere manifest, perpetrated by dull functionaries unimaginative enough to regard themselves as exemplary in their devotion to their jobs. Eichmann’s colleague and collaborator Rudolf Höss demonstrated this pathology in his death-house memoir, posthumously published as Commandant of Auschwitz. A witness for the prosecution at Nuremberg, Höss apologized for the terrible actions conducted under his command but never accepted personal responsibility. Instead, like Eichmann, he insisted that he was merely fulfilling his duties. Reading Höss’s memoir, as Primo Levi noted, can be “oppressive.” Commandant of Auschwitz “is full of vileness recounted with a disturbing bureaucratic obtuseness,” Levi wrote, and yet it…

DEMOCRATS ARE FRETTING OVER DOOM-AND-GLOOM polling that suggests Joe Biden could lose a 2024 rematch against Donald Trump. But there’s not much point in looking to polls for signals about an election that is a year off. Instead, consider the choices—real choices, not theoretical ones—that millions of voters made in elections that occurred on November 7. Democrats held the governorship of Kentucky, took full control of the Virginia legislature, came remarkably close to winning the governorship of the deep-red state of Mississippi, solidified their majority on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, elected dynamic new officials such as incoming Allegheny County executive Sara Innamorato and Rhode Island US Representative Gabe Amo, and scored sweeping wins in school board races, upending the right-wing assault on honest education and LGBTQI+ rights. It doesn’t get…

THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IS LESS THAN A YEAR away, and polls continue to show President Joe Biden tied with or losing to future federal felon Donald Trump. While I don’t put much stock in polls taken a year before the election (at this point in 2011, Barack Obama would have lost the 2012 race to a plumber), Biden’s falling approval numbers with young voters and voters of color is frightening. In particular, Biden’s full-throated support of Israel in its war in Gaza, and the low value he and his administration seem to place on the lives of Palestinians, appear to be hurting him with Arab American voters and young voters of all backgrounds. Plenty of Americans think Biden is doing the right thing in the Middle East. If you…

After six weeks of strikes against General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, which owns Chrysler, the United Auto Workers announced in late October that it had reached tentative agreements with all three companies and that its members would return to work. The strike, which involved nearly 50,000 workers, resulted in some impressive wins. The workers secured a 25 percent pay increase and future cost-of-living adjustments. They eliminated wage tiers, in which new hires are paid less than long-term employees. They forced Stellantis to commit to reopening a plant in Illinois, something rarely achieved, and guaranteed their right to strike over future plant closures. They ensured that workers at the companies’ electric-vehicle joint ventures could vote to unionize through a card-check system. But one demand wasn’t met: to shrink workers’ schedules to…

THE ART OF THE 1930S OCCUPIES A UNIQUE PLACE IN American cultural history, for it was in the 1930s that art—so often a world apart from politics—became inseparable from the socialist, communist, and labor movements. When we think of the era, we think of the paintings, prints, murals, and photographs created under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and of the posters, propaganda, and other works created by artists affiliated with left causes in the 1930s—from members of the Communist and Socialist parties to those supporting the rank and file of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). These were the documents of Depression-era hardship: testimonies to the resilience of those who lived through it and indictments of the capitalist system that had caused it. They are also works…

OCTOBER 9: THE SUPERMARKET, THE BUREAU DE change, the falafel shop, the fruit stalls, the perfume parlor, the sweet shop, the toy shop… all burned. Burned and buried. Walking on the ruins is overwhelming. Blood covers everything. I have to be careful not to step in it. October 18: Since yesterday, we haven’t eaten. I passed by many bakeries trying to find one that was less overwhelmed. I got lucky. After only an hour and a half, I’m served, and they still had enough flour to make our bread. October 24: The happiest moment is when I wake up. Sometimes I’m still not convinced, so I’ve started to invent tests, to prove I’m alive. One of them is to wake up all the others in the house and start talking…

EVEN BY THE STANDARDS OF TODAY’S REPUBLICAN Party, ultra-MAGA Bible thumper Mike Johnson (R-La.) is pretty far out there. After the mass shooting in Lewiston, Me., in October, he blamed such murders on no-fault divorce, the sexual revolution, the teaching of evolution, “radical feminism,” and legal abortion. According to the Brennan Center, “Johnson was the congressional architect of the effort to overturn the 2020 election, advocating an interpretation of the Constitution so outlandish that not even the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority could swallow it.” This was the “independent state legislature” theory, which would grant state legislatures powers to control federal elections, so if they don’t like the way an election goes, they can just decertify it. So I was worried at first when Johnson was elected speaker of the House…

TODAY, I’M GOING TO BE TALKING TO YOU ABOUT PERFECT VICtims and the politics of appeal. The Palestinian people, on television screens or more largely in the public sphere, exist in a false dichotomy: We are either victims or terrorists. Those of us who are terrorists—or articulated to be terrorists—never get the opportunity to be commentators on those screens. They are almost mythical creatures, the stuff of scary stories: big bad wolves with furrowed eyebrows, sharp fangs, and terrifying political incorrectness. They roam the streets mumbling in aggressive Arabic, sometimes reading the Quran, wanting to loot and shoot everything in sight. They’re coming after you. Hide your wives, hide your planes, hide your human shields. Many in the audience have a mental image of who I’m talking about. On the…

At first there was more to eat, then suddenly less.—“Aubade Now of Earth” (2022) I WAS ON MY WAY TO VISIT JANE HIRSHFIELD—BUT FIRST I HAD TO get to Stinson Beach without driving off a cliff into the pitch-dark Pacific. The fog was thick along the high, snaking coastal road at the base of Mount Tamalpais, and the headlights of my rented Prius (a fraudulent signal of a personal virtue I’ve never possessed) weren’t cutting it. With each curve I hugged the mountain, keeping as far as possible from the abyss of mist, rock, and watery vastness. It was, I admit, a little scary. Somehow I managed to stay on the road. Soon enough, tiny Stinson emerged out of nowhere, its few streetlights making circles in the fog. Being late,…

YOU’VE PROBABLY HAD THE EXPERIENCE—PERHAPS while listening to music, seeing an old friend, or walking in nature—of feeling as though you’ve reconnected with some deep part of yourself. These moments might not be outwardly dramatic, but inwardly they feel significant, even profound. They remind you that, for some time, an important part of yourself had gone missing, and you’d forgotten that it even existed. “The greatest danger, that of losing one’s self, can occur so quietly that it is as if it were nothing at all,” wrote Søren Kierkegaard. “Every other loss—an arm, a leg, five rixdollars, a spouse, etc.—is noticed, however.” Kierkegaard called this loss of the self “despair”: a spiritual sickness that, he believed, afflicts us all. The way he describes it, despair sounds like bad news, and…