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213 Mass Shootings Later, What Has Biden Done on Guns? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51551"><span class="small">Scott Bixby, The Daily Beast</span></a>
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Thursday, 27 May 2021 12:14 |
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Bixby writes: "Joe Biden once had a term for politicians who were too cautious to push for meaningful gun reform legislation: cowards."
President Biden. (photo: Melina Mara/EPA)
213 Mass Shootings Later, What Has Biden Done on Guns?
By Scott Bixby, The Daily Beast
27 May 21
Gov. Newsom expressed his anger at both sides in Washington for enabling a cycle of grief and indifference over gun violence, asking, “What the hell is going on in this country?”
 oe Biden once had a term for politicians who were too cautious to push for meaningful gun reform legislation: cowards.
“Why in God’s name can we say that we can’t do anything about 150,000 people being shot dead in the United States of America? Why are guns different?” Biden said during a campaign stop in Las Vegas in February 2020. “Because of cowardness. Because of cowards. Cowards who are afraid to take on these special interests because they are so damn powerful.”
In that address, delivered a few miles from the site of the deadliest mass shooting in American history, Biden promised to send a bill to Congress that would close background check loopholes and end liability protections for firearms manufacturers—on his first day in office.
“I promise you I will not rest until we beat these guys, because it is immoral what’s happening,” Biden said at the time. “I promise you, if I’m your next president they’re going to be held accountable, because I am coming after them.”
But 127 days—and at least 213 mass shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive—into Biden’s presidency, his administration’s approach to firearm restrictions has not been nearly as expansive as he once promised. The long-promised legislation on background checks and liability reform still hasn’t been introduced, the national gun buyback program he once floated has been put on ice, and his first executive orders addressing guns weren’t issued until April, only coming after a series of high-profile mass shootings in South Carolina, Colorado, and Georgia.
On Wednesday, hours after a shooter at a rail yard in San Jose, California, killed eight people before taking his own life, White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the president was “calling on Congress to take action” on gun violence, reiterating similar remarks that press secretary Jen Psaki had delivered in the wake of previous mass shootings.
“What’s clear, as the president has said, is that we are suffering from an epidemic of gun violence in this country,” Jean-Pierre said, noting the smattering of executive actions issued by the president last month. Later on Wednesday, Biden issued a statement lamenting that, “yet again,” he was ordering the nation’s flag to be lowered to half-staff to mark a mass shooting.
And, “once again,” that he was calling on Congress to address the crisis.
“I urge Congress to take immediate action and heed the call of the American people, including the vast majority of gun owners, to help end this epidemic of gun violence in America,” Biden said. “Every life that is taken by a bullet pierces the soul of our nation. We can, and we must, do more.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, however, didn’t hold back his anger at both sides in Washington for perpetuating a cycle of grief and indifference over gun violence.
“There’s a sameness to this and I think a numbness that we’re all feeling," Newsom said at a press briefing with local officials. “It begs the question—what the hell is going on in this country?”
Biden’s piecemeal approach to the issue reflects the limits of his power to address a problem that he has grappled with since his days in the U.S. Senate, gun control advocates say.
“Voters and Americans, by overwhelming margins, support many of these proposals,” said Adam Skaggs, chief counsel and policy director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “It’s only divided in Congress.”
With a razor-thin Democratic majority and generally pro-gun Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) standing athwart any attempts at eliminating the filibuster, Biden’s ambitious agenda on gun control has, for now, been whittled down to the scale of his ability to enact it.
The most recent example is the Department of Justice’s proposed rule change that would update the definition of a firearm to include “unfinished” components sold in gun-making kits. Weapons built from those kits, which don’t have serial numbers and are increasingly popular among weapons traffickers, are known as “ghost guns” for the difficulty of tracing their ownership.
There are a smattering of gun-related bills that would accomplish much of Biden’s agenda on firearms. The Bipartisan Background Checks Act has passed the House of Representatives, and the Untraceable Firearms Act, introduced earlier this month by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) in the Senate and Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) in the House, would make proposed rule changes by the Department of Justice Department on “ghost guns” permanent.
But with Republicans largely hoping to block the nomination to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives of gun-control advocate David Chipman—who appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee only hours before the San Jose shooting—those legislative efforts are currently taking a backseat to Biden’s economic and pandemic-relief agenda. The result? Biden has been left with little more than executive orders and proposed regulatory changes at his immediate disposal.
That’s not to say that gun reform advocates are dissatisfied with what Biden has done so far.
“President Biden pledged last month to treat gun violence like an American epidemic,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, saying that the rule change was proof that Biden was keeping his word. “The Biden-Harris administration’s decision to regulate them like the deadly weapons they are will save countless lives.”
Gun-reform advocates are generally confident in Biden’s personal commitment to the cause, pointing to his successful passage of a federal ban on assault weapons in the 1990s and his close connections with the families of those killed by gun violence.
“We certainly don’t underestimate the challenges of moving legislation through the Senate, but we are pleased that the administration has been fairly clear in what it wants Congress to do,” Skaggs said, adding that the administration hasn’t “sat on their hands” while waiting for Congress to act. “They’ve sent a strong signal that they are going to do what they can, in terms of executive action.”
But whether Biden can navigate a divided Senate to pursue meaningful legislation on guns is another matter.
“We’ve not had anyone in the Oval Office who has spoken about gun violence as the public health epidemic it is, who has acknowledged the role of the executive in funding and in legislation, who has used the bully pulpit, and has had the emotional connection to survivors that he clearly has,” Kris Brown, president of Brady: United Against Gun Violence, told The Daily Beast. “But obviously, any executive action has a limited potential timeframe—another administration can come in and decide that they’re going to reverse the approach taken. It’s very important that whatever is done is then backed up with legislation.”
Biden knows better than most the risks of mishandling a high-visibility push for gun reform. In 2013, weeks after the murder of 20 young children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, then-Vice President Biden was tasked by President Barack Obama to draft an expansive package of gun control measures. But Biden’s deliberative pace and focus on consensus-driven legislation was seen as a drag to the process, and the long legislative result of the efforts—a bill that would have extended background checks to gun shows and Internet sales of firearms—was defeated by the filibuster.
“The United States Senate let down an awful lot of people today, including those Newtown families,” Biden said bitterly after presiding over the bill’s defeat. “I don’t know how anybody who looked them in the eye could have voted the way they did.”
The lesson learned from that failure, advocates said, is a simple one: Don’t weaken your own legislation before you’ve even begun the fight.
“You don’t bargain against yourself… You don’t wait for consensus to emerge on an issue where history teaches it’s difficult, or just about impossible, to reach consensus,” Skaggs said. “The president, I think, learned from the past that these are challenging and difficult issues, but they are also issues that are too important not to fight for.”
But while gun reform advocates are understanding to a point, there are only so many times that background check legislation backed by a large majority of the American people can fall victim to the filibuster before they call for even more fundamental reform.
“We will not accept a vote on a bill that does not get us to a substantially better place with the system than we are now,” said Brown, whose organization shares a name with the Brady Bill, which mandated federal background checks for many firearm purchases, that Biden championed while in the Senate. If that comes to pass, she continued, “we believe the filibuster has to end.”
“As goes our issue, so goes [the For the People Act], so goes the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, so goes his entire agenda, effectively,” Brown said.
If that comes to pass, Biden will be forced to confront his own words on the urgency of gun reform, made in response to a shooting at a grocery store in Colorado in March.
“I don’t need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take commonsense steps that’ll save lives in the future,” Biden said. “And to urge my colleagues in the House and Senate to act.”
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FOCUS | "This Will Change the World:" Dutch Court Orders Shell to Reduce CO2 by 45% by 2030 |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51519"><span class="small">Juan Cole, Informed Comment</span></a>
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Thursday, 27 May 2021 11:42 |
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Cole writes: "The ruling is harsh, since Shell's business model has for over a century been to produce carbon dioxide emissions."
Royal Dutch Shell gas station. (photo: iStock)
"This Will Change the World:" Dutch Court Orders Shell to Reduce CO2 by 45% by 2030
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
27 May 21
 n a historic ruling, a tribunal in the Netherlands has ruled that Royal Dutch Shell must reduce its and its customers’ carbon dioxide emissions by 45 percent by 2030 from its 2019 base, according to Le Soir. Shell had already committed to a 20 percent reduction by that date, but now must scramble to more than double the planned cut-back in only nine years. The ruling is harsh, since Shell’s business model has for over a century been to produce carbon dioxide emissions.
The Dutch branch of Friends of the Earth (Milieudefensie) launched the suit along with several other non-governmental organizations (NGOs), such as Greenpeace, with 17,000 Dutch citizens also signing on. Their case argued that the Netherlands had signed the Paris Climate Accord, which seeks to keep extra global heating to 2.7 degrees F. (1.5 degrees C.). These seem like small numbers, but during the last ice age temperatures were only 6 degrees below the current global average, which produced a mountain of ice over Manhattan and Detroit three miles high.
Milieudefensie’s lawyer, Roger Cox, said, “This is going to change the world.” Indeed.
The ruling only affects Shell’s emissions in the Netherlands. But the plaintiffs pointed out, according to EuroNews, “Shell is the biggest polluter in the Netherlands. The company emits nine times as much CO2 as the entire Netherlands combined. Shell has known since the sixties that the use of oil and gas are harmful to the climate.”
Shell’s attorneys unsuccessfully argued that governments, not private companies, should be responsible for ameliorating climate impacts.
Moreover, the likelihood is that the ruling will influence other judges in other countries. This could be like the moment when the first court in the U.S. imposed penalties on a tobacco company for killing its customers with lung cancer.
In the 1980s, Shell had its scientists assess the likely damage its carbon dioxide emissions would cause to the earth and its people, and they concluded it would be catastrophic. The Shell executives covered up the findings and ran disinformation campaigns against climate science. In other words, some people high up in that Anglo-Dutch company are psychopathic monsters beyond anything ever dreamed in the James Bond films.
Shell, like other big polluters, does a lot of greenwashing, so you may have heard it is turning to green energy.
Not so much. Only 4 percent of its expenditures are in the area of renewable energy.
Friends of the Earth and the other NGOs argued in court that the Netherlands could not hope to meet its treaty obligations under the Climate Accord unless a handful of giant corporations who were responsible for the lion’s share of emissions cut back their production of carbon dioxide substantially.
You see now why ExxonMobil had Trump take the US out of the Paris climate accord. As a treaty, it can produce legal obligations that can be adjudicated in the courts.
A Milieudefensie spokesperson told EuroNews Green,
“This is great news for all of us, ourselves and our children. Shell will adjust its policy so that it will also emit less CO2 in real-time. It is not up to the judge to say how Shell should do this, but the company will not be able to continue pumping as much oil and gas as they do now. Even if Shell decides to appeal, the ruling will lead to more cases worldwide and politicians and oil and gas companies will feel the pressure to change their course.”
Greenpeace reacted, according to Le Soir, “It is a historic victory for the climate and for all those affected by the climate crisis. Today, the judge confirmed that we are in the right. The multinationals can be held accountable for the climate crisis.”
The ruling had a precedent. In 2019, Steve Hanley at Cleantechnic wrote, the Netherlands Supreme Court ordered the government itself to reduce CO2 from natural gas emissions by 25 percent below 1990s levels by the end of 2020. The court in that case depended on the European Convention on Human rights, saying, “a reduction obligation of at least 25 percent by end-2020, as ordered by the district court, is in line with the State’s duty of care.”
When the Dutch government attempted to argue that its reductions would have only a small global impact, Hanley reported, Justice Streefkerk replied icily, “Every country is responsible for its share.”
Shell’s predecessor company was formed in 1890 to exploit the petroleum the Netherlands’ colonial conquest of Sumatra in what is now western Indonesia. So it not only helped wreck the world, but did that as part of the imperial brutalization of the people of island southeast Asia. Royal Dutch Shell was formed in 1908 in a merger with a British company, in an attempt to compete with Standard Oil. The two became part of what in the later twentieth century became known as the Seven Sisters, oil majors who sometimes dictated foreign policy to presidents and prime ministers. By 1970 they controlled 75 percent of the world’s petroleum, taking the profits for themselves even though the wells were in Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, etc.
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Report: Prosecutors Are Getting Closer to Charging Donald Trump |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=44994"><span class="small">Bess Levin, Vanity Fair</span></a>
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Thursday, 27 May 2021 08:57 |
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Levin writes: "Americans have trouble agreeing on most things, but one matter that's brought millions of people together of late is the shared fantasy of seeing Donald Trump actually suffer consequences for the first time in his life and live out his twilight years in prison, deprived of creature comforts like Diet Coke, bronzer, and a cell phone on which to call into Fox News - contraband Eric or Don Jr. would have to smuggle in on visiting day hidden in their ass cheeks."
Donald Trump. (photo:Jim Watson/Getty)
Report: Prosecutors Are Getting Closer to Charging Donald Trump
By Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
27 May 21
A grand jury has been convened to hear evidence against the ex-president.
 mericans have trouble agreeing on most things, but one matter that’s brought millions of people together of late is the shared fantasy of seeing Donald Trump actually suffer consequences for the first time in his life and live out his twilight years in prison, deprived of creature comforts like Diet Coke, bronzer, and a cell phone on which to call into Fox News—contraband Eric or Don Jr. would have to smuggle in on visiting day hidden in their ass cheeks. (And let’s be honest, they’d shove that flip phone up their orifices in a heartbeat, probably fighting over which one of them got to do with honors.) At this point, though, despite four (4!) separate criminal investigations into Trump senior, we don’t actually know if he will go to prison—but it‘s a prospect that just got more likely.
The Washington Post reports that the Manhattan district attorney’s office has assembled a grand jury that is expected to decide whether to indict Donald Trump, his company, or Trump Organization executives, a move experts say indicates that prosecutors believe they have evidence of a crime. The panel was recently convened and will hear evidence three days a week for six months. The development suggests District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.’s probe has “reached an advance stage” after more than two years. Per the Post:
Vance’s investigation is expansive, according to people familiar with the probe and public disclosures made during related litigation. His investigators are scrutinizing Trump’s business practices before he was president, including whether the value of specific properties in the Trump Organization’s real estate portfolio were manipulated in a way that defrauded banks and insurance companies, and if any tax benefits were obtained illegally through unscrupulous asset valuation. The district attorney also is examining the compensation provided to top Trump Organization executives, people familiar with the matter have said.... Vance’s criminal investigation began in 2018, after [former Trump attorney Michael] Cohen pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the hush-money payoffs, made in the last days of the 2016 campaign to women who said they had affairs with Trump years earlier—claims the former president denies. Vance’s investigation soon expanded, as the district attorney sought to examine millions of pages of Trump’s tax records.
Separately, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) began a civil investigation of the Trump Organization in 2019 prompted by Cohen’s testimony to Congress, where he said Trump had misled lenders and taxing authorities with manipulated valuations of his assets. Asset values were inflated at times when the company was seeking favorable loan interest rates and were deflated to reduce tax liability, Cohen has alleged. He has been interviewed extensively by Vance’s team, which has added a decorated former federal prosecutor, Mark F. Pomerantz, to help with the Trump case.
Rebecca Roiphe, a former assistant district attorney, told the Post that the recent step by Vance‘s office to convene a long-term grand jury shows the investigation has gotten to the point where prosecutors will show the jury evidence and witnesses and potentially ask them to consider charges. According to Roiphe, it is unlikely that the district attorney would have taken that step without believing they have evidence to show someone committed a crime. “The prosecutors are convinced they have a case. That’s at least how I read it,” Roiphe said.
A spokesman for Trump and an attorney for the Trump Organization did not respond to the Post’s requests for comment. Earlier this month, James’s office said its investigation into Trump was now criminal in nature, and that they are also criminally investigating longtime Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, upping the chances he may flip and testify against the ex-president.
Marjorie Taylor Greene thanks Twitter user for calling Kevin McCarthy a “moron” and a “feckless c**t”
On Tuesday, multiple days after Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene insisted—and then doubled down on the claim—that mask mandates are equivalent to the treatment of Jewish people during the Holocaust, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy put out a statement saying, “Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling.” Was the Georgia congresswoman chastened by the reprimand? Not exactly!
Of course, it’s difficult to feel sympathy for McCarthy, who seemingly decided some time ago that the future of the Republican Party lies with unhinged carnival barkers like Greene and Donald Trump, the former of whom he refused to strip of her committee assignments despite her promotion of QAnon, harassment of a school-shooting survivor, promotion of 9/11 conspiracy theories, and indicating support for leading Democrats to be executed, among other things. (Democrats did end up voting to boot Greene from her assignments, leaving her with plenty of time on her hands to equate mask mandates with gassing Jews and harass fellow lawmakers).
And speaking of the GOP mascot
She…seems to believe there are lot of statues of satan out there? Or something? Per the Hill:
Marjorie Taylor Greene said in a 2020 video that she would not take down a statue of Adolf Hitler or “Satan himself” because of their historical significance. The comment comes amid a flurry of backlash after Greene has repeatedly compared mask policies to the Holocaust. In a newly discovered video of the then candidate in 2020, Greene argues that she would disagree with removing a statue of Hitler, despite the Nazi leader and others representing “something I would fully disagree with.”
“We’re seeing situations where Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, all kinds of statues are being attacked, and it seems to be just an effort to take down history. And whether I see a statue that may be something that I would fully disagree with like Adolf Hitler, maybe a statue of Satan himself, I would not want to say take it down,” Greene said in the video first reported by Punchbowl News. She said she would want the statues to remain intact “so that I could tell my children and teach others about who these people are, what they did and what they may be about.”
Aside from everything else, let us please just take a moment to appreciate the idea of someone describing Hitler’s genocide against the Jews as something they “fully disagree with,” like they’re debating with their book club whether or not Carrie should’ve taken Big back at the end of the first Sex and the City movie.
Ted Cruz loves himself some Russian propaganda
That’s something he and his ex-president pal have in common. Per Insider:
A video shared by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz last week to attack the U.S. military for being “woke” and “emasculated” originated from pro-Russian, anti-American far-right social media networks, experts on extremist propaganda have told Insider. The video, which had been initially uploaded to TikTok, sought to unfavorably compare a U.S. military recruitment ad to a Russian army one. The U.S. Army clip featured an animation telling of a female corporal’s life, while the Russian ad used masculine tropes, featuring fighter jets and shirtless men doing pushups. “Holy crap,” Cruz wrote in his retweet of the video. “Perhaps a woke, emasculated army is not the best idea…”
Alexander Reid Ross, a fellow at the U.K.’s Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right who specializes in mapping the spread far-right propaganda, told Insider that he had monitored the meme as it spread from pro-Russian and far-right networks to Cruz’s Twitter feed over the course of a week.
Asked about Cruz’s sharing of a piece of Russian propaganda, a spokesman for Cruz said the controversy over a U.S. senator being duped by an adversarial foreign power was distracting from the supposedly more important issue of “wokeness” threatening the military. “Sen. Cruz shared a widely-circulated video that shows wokeness is undermining the seriousness and purpose of our military. But instead of discussing this very real problem, journalists are dusting off absurd Democrat talking points and claiming the real issue here is racism, Russian propaganda, or both. They’re so invested in this liberal narrative they will destroy innocent people’s lives to advance it,” said the spokesman.
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Do Not Mistake an Impasse in Gaza With Stability |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=56197"><span class="small">Steve Coll, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Thursday, 27 May 2021 08:57 |
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Coll writes: "In early May, Palestinians protesting the pending eviction of six families from their homes in East Jerusalem clashed with Israeli police."
A Palestinian boy in front of the ruins of his house in Gaza City on Friday after it was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike. (photo: Samar Abu Elf/The New York Times)
Do Not Mistake an Impasse in Gaza With Stability
By Steve Coll, The New Yorker
27 May 21
n early May, Palestinians protesting the pending eviction of six families from their homes in East Jerusalem clashed with Israeli police. For many Palestinians, the eviction cases evoked a long history of dispossession while presenting evidence of continued efforts to remove them from the city. These protests and others regarding Palestinian rights in Jerusalem devolved into street fights, and Hamas, from its redoubt in the Gaza Strip, warned that it might “not stand idly by.” On May 10th, its forces fired a fusillade of rockets and missiles at Israeli villages and cities, and the Israel Defense Forces responded with air strikes on Gaza, inaugurating a mini-war of depressingly familiar dimensions—the fourth in a dozen years between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Last Thursday, after eleven days of destruction and loss of life, and behind-the-scenes mediation by the Biden Administration and Egypt, the combatants declared a ceasefire. The conflict and its announced termination had a ritualized aspect: Israel and Hamas both knew from the start that international diplomacy would offer an exit ramp whenever both were ready, and although past ceasefires have not always held initially, neither side seemed to want a prolonged war. For the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu—who is facing corruption charges and has struggled to hold on to power after several indecisive elections—thumping Hamas, even briefly, offered a reprise of his self-mythologizing role as the unbowed protector of Israel. For Hamas, a limited battle in the name of Jerusalem allowed it to advance claims to Palestinian leadership at a time when the group’s main rival, the Fatah Party, appeared weak, after its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority President, recently postponed long-awaited elections.
It was, as usual, always clear who the losers would be: Gaza’s two million people, who were trapped in a humanitarian crisis even before the bombs fell. Israel and Egypt maintain a blockade on the enclave, where high rates of poverty have been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. In more than a thousand air and missile strikes, Israel said it targeted Hamas commanders and military “infrastructure,” but although Israeli forces adopted rules of attack designed to protect noncombatants, Palestinian civilian casualties mounted. Even the use of relatively precise aerial firepower against a region as densely populated as Gaza is all but guaranteed to kill innocents. Israeli attacks claimed more than two hundred and thirty fatalities, including more than sixty children, and destroyed or damaged hospitals, residences, sewer systems, and the electric grid.
Suhaila Tarazi, who has run Gaza City’s Ahli Arab Hospital for about twenty-five years, found herself once again admitting scores of patients, this time with “broken limbs—lots of them,” she said on Wednesday. Diesel supplies for generators, her facility’s only reliable source of electricity, were running low; Tarazi had to ration power to keep operating theatres and X-ray machines functioning. Her medical director couldn’t come in that day, because an Israeli attack had struck his neighborhood, and he needed to take care of his elderly sisters, who had evacuated their home. Not far from the hospital, a section of the busy thoroughfare Wahda Street lay in ruins, after an Israeli strike on May 16th brought down buildings and killed forty-two people, including sixteen women and ten children. Israel acknowledged these civilian casualties; a military spokesperson said that a strike had crumpled a tunnel used by Hamas, unintentionally causing the collapse of nearby houses. For its part, Hamas fired more than four thousand rockets and missiles in indiscriminate attacks, killing at least twelve people in Israel.
As images of the dead and the injured in Gaza coursed across the global media, President Joe Biden did not criticize Israel in public. Last week, a narrative emanating from Washington emphasized the contrast between the President’s back-channel diplomacy and the willingness of progressive Democrats in Congress, such as Representative Rashida Tlaib, to openly accuse Israel of committing war crimes. Biden was surely influenced by his experiences dealing with Israel as Vice-President during the Obama Administration, including during the last major conflict in Gaza, in 2014, when Israeli ministers directed scorn at then Secretary of State John Kerry for, in their view, pushing a ceasefire prematurely.
Netanyahu famously embarrassed and snubbed Barack Obama. Not incidentally, Obama and some of his advisers lost faith in the possibilities for peace in the Middle East. In his memoir, “A Promised Land,” he recounts how, in 2010, he hosted a dinner with Netanyahu, Abbas, then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and King Abdullah of Jordan, before reflecting, later that night, on “all the children, whether in Gaza or in Israeli settlements” who would know “mainly violence, coercion, fear, and the nursing of hatred because, deep down, none of the leaders I’d met with believed anything else was possible.” There is little reason to think that Biden’s view today is much sunnier, yet his traditional, art-of-the-possible diplomacy seems to have helped to halt devastating violence.
The latest crisis in Gaza cannot be set aside as just another passing episode in Hamas’s forever war against Israel’s existence. The fighting coincided with shocks inside Israel’s recognized borders, where mob violence and attempted lynchings sundered ties between Jewish and Arab citizens and neighbors. An Arab mob pulled a driver presumed to be Jewish from his car in Acre and severely beat him, while Jewish extremists organized vigilante squads in dozens of WhatsApp groups and attacked Arab citizens and businesses in Bat Yam and elsewhere. Israel imposed states of emergency in several towns and cities, quelling the violence, at least temporarily.
Israel is the longest-lived democracy in the Middle East, and by many measures the most successful nation in the region, yet its continued occupation of the West Bank and its harsh blockade of Gaza have undermined its constitutional ideals and worsened internal fault lines that threaten its future. Netanyahu has been in power continuously since 2009, but his accommodations of far-right political parties and millenarian settler movements, coupled with his rejection of reconciliation with Palestinians, have failed to deliver durable security. It is easy to mistake an impasse for stability. However long the announced ceasefire in Gaza holds, there will be even less reason than before to confuse that state of quiet with peace.
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