…I’m all for helping Israelis and Palestinian civilians at this time — but not without some very visible strings attached. If Israel needs weapons to protect itself from Hamas and Hezbollah, by all means ship them. But in terms of broader economic aid for Israel, it should be provided only if Israel agrees not to build even one more settlement in the West Bank — zero, none, no more, not one more brick, not one more nail — outside the settlement blocs and the territory immediately around them, where most Jewish settlers are now clustered and which Israel is expected to retain in any two-state solution with the Palestinians. (Netanyahu’s coalition agreement actually vows to annex the whole of the West Bank.)

…For way too long U.S. economic and military aid has allowed Netanyahu to have his cake and eat it too — to fund the insane settlement project, and maintain an advanced military, while not having to raise taxes on the whole Israeli public to pay for it all. While Israel got U.S. aid in one hand, the budget of its Ministry of Defense paid to build roads for settlers with the other hand. Uncle Sam’s wallet, indirectly, was the slush fund for Netanyahu’s politics. So no, we’re not telling Netanyahu what to do in Gaza — Israel is a sovereign country. We’re just going to tell him what we’re not going to do anymore — because we happen to be a sovereign country too.

America has been indirectly funding Israel’s slow-motion suicide — and I am not just talking settlements. Look at what Netanyahu did last June. To buy off the ultra-Orthodox parties he needs in his coalition to keep himself out of jail on corruption charges, Netanyahu’s government gave the ultra-Orthodox and the settlers “an unprecedented increment in allocations … including full funding of schools to not teach English, science and math,” explained Dan Ben-David, a macroeconomist who has focused on the interaction between Israel’s demography and education at Tel Aviv University, where he heads the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research. “This budgetary increment alone is more than Israel invests each year in higher education altogether — or 14 years of complete funding for the Technion, Israel’s M.I.T.,” Mr. Ben-David said. “It is completely nuts.”

Bottom line: Netanyahu has a completely incoherent strategy right now — eliminate Hamas in Gaza while building more settlements in the West Bank that undermine the only decent long-term Palestinian alternative to Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, which Israel needs to safely leave Gaza.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/opinion/biden-speech-israel-gaza.html?unlocked_article_code=1.4Ew.GI1C.hTbyhC6EuRvg&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

…At the US behest, the Israelis came to the Red Sea port of Aqaba in Jordan on 26 February 2023 to meet Arab leaders and pledge a four-month moratorium (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/26/israeli-and-palestinian-security-chiefs-meet-in-jordan-for-talks) on settlements. It was the first negotiation between the two sides in 10 years.

But before the ink was dry on the communique, it was repudiated. Netanyahu simply denied that Israel had committed to halting new settlement projects during the summit. A second summit at Sharm el-Sheikh on 19 March repeated the same pledges, and this time spoke of developing “a mechanism” to curb and counter violence, incitement, and inflammatory statements and actions.

Regardless, Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, was openly denying the existence of the Palestinian ethnic group. “The Palestinian people are an invention of less than a hundred years. Do they have a history, a culture? No, they do not. There are no Palestinians, there are just Arabs.”Far from punishing Smotrich, Netanyahu in June rewarded him by handing all control over planning approval for construction in West Bank settlements to him. Could Biden have done more to constrain the actions of the Israeli government?

The Democratic left says Biden should have recognised the de facto annexation of the West Bank was under way, intervened, and imposed a bigger punishment than a withheld invitation to the White House. Bernie Sanders, for instance, in February had argued that Biden had to recognise this was a qualitatively different Israeli government to anything that preceded it. He said: “If a government is acting in a racist way and they want billions of dollars from [US taxpayers], I think you say: ‘Sorry but it’s not acceptable. You want our money? Fine. This is what you got to do to get it.’”

More at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/17/left-on-the-shelf-how-the-world-failed-miserably-in-the-middle-east?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

…After McCarthy dropped out the GOP caucus held a vote to decide who the caucus would back on the House floor. Scalise won that vote. But most of Jordan’s backers just said they wouldn’t abide by the results of the vote. Seeing no way to persuade them, Scalise dropped out of the race. That triggered another caucus election to decide who the caucus would back on the House floor. This time Jordan defeated a random back bencher who was likely there mainly as a placeholder for opposition to Jordan. But Jordan didn’t win by much more than Scalise won the first round. Jordan’s allies in turn went scorched earth against his opponents and got most of them to fold. This is ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ rules. The Jordan backers message is we’re the rule breakers and you’re the rule followers. So we get to break them and you have to follow them even when we break them. And that means that you have to back Jordan now both because those are the rules but also because there’s no choice since you know we won’t follow them if and when you win.

It’s another version of debt ceiling hostage taking. You’re going to fold because deep down you know we’re willing to wreck the country to get what we want. We both know that. And we both not you’re not wiling to do that. So we’ve already won. All we’re talking about is when you realize it.

This is obviously a fool’s game. Agreeing to play by those rules means you’ve already lost. I don’t particularly care about McCarthy or Scalise who thrived under this system before it consumed them. Who cares about them? But as we discussed a couple days ago, this is just is just a microcosm of the authoritarian pathogen looming over and threatening the whole American Republic. It’s the use of force over systems of rules. So in that sense it matters quite a lot.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/heads-i-win-tails-you-lose-scenes-in-the-annals-of-authoritarianism

The chaos of the 1960s and 1970s helped end the era of great American investment. Crime rose rapidly during those decades. The country fought a losing war in Vietnam. Political leaders were murdered. A president resigned in scandal. And the economy seemed to break down, with both unemployment and inflation soaring. The causes were complex — including wars in the Middle East that upended global energy markets — but Americans understandably came to question their own government’s competence.

In their frustration, many embraced a diagnosis that a group of conservative intellectuals had been offering for decades, mostly without winning converts. It held that the post-New Deal United States had put too much faith in government regulation and not enough in the power of the market to allocate resources efficiently. These intellectuals included Milton Friedman and Robert Bork, while the politician who successfully sold their vision was Reagan. The new consensus has become known as neoliberalism, a word that in recent years has turned into a catchall epithet to describe the views of moderate Democrats and conservatives. But the word is nonetheless meaningful. The neoliberal revolution in economic policy changed the country’s trajectory. After 1980, regulators allowed companies to grow much larger, often through mergers. The government became hostile to labor unions. Tax rates on the affluent plummeted. And Washington pulled back from the major investments it had been making.

Federal spending on research and development, which had already come down from its post-Eisenhower high, declined in the 1980s and 1990s. In recent years, it has accounted for less than half as large a share of G.D.P. as it did 60 years ago. The country’s roads, bridges, rail networks and air-traffic system have all atrophied — hence the lengthening of travel times. The share of national income devoted to government spending on education stopped rising in the 1970s and has remained stagnant since. Less selective colleges, which tend to educate working-class students, tend to be especially lacking in resources.

Other countries, meanwhile, have passed by the United States. Every American generation born between the late 1800s and mid-1900s was the most educated in the world. Americans under age 50 no longer hold this distinction. The lack of progress among American men has been especially stark. Men’s wages, not coincidentally, have risen extremely slowly in recent decades.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/magazine/us-public-investment.html?unlocked_article_code=b5q5gdbIBQJ44blmtt0kK9ZNSfbw3maBrAL898CSWtoZSWV7wQ_mwH8blyNCxqgkZHQZNsRaepLVA6djdcwM6isVNnuu_N_e8kRTod9MJK5Oi4HRbPesiOZHDchsC2SApOMsOSVI08BvZm0QSCwlcDadO3r6yrAU8EKNzAMMoAZ7Jl2a8xtso6uWFmIkVwTXClkDNp6XPlqIzi4IRgLEeMqZQ4EX8JGThWgySgQnI7wPZn_s8W9Vma1hweA-cuY1by4DAzZuqwydo154tdme1fEgGLlCdYUnRjWEPA1hFO4jAgUexMT1XmxX8Dv6W1f7sshfwU4PgkVUfG-KFmfH&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

…Now many in Israel are asking, understandably, how did one of the best intelligence operations in the world fail to see the signs? One answer is that we tend to ignore details according to our preconception — which in this case was a misconception about what Hamas is and what its intentions really are. But this is just part of the story.

In the past five years, as Israel dissolved government after government and held divided election after divided election, and even more so in the past year since Benjamin Netanyahu was re-elected prime minister, the nation has been busy tearing itself apart from within. The Jewish state seems to have forgotten its second role in the world, as a place that embodies the idea of Jewish solidarity. Israelis instead found themselves engaged in an all-out war — not against terrorists but against themselves.

Over the past nearly 40 weeks, as the battle over the judiciary overhaul surfaced, violently, old questions of identity and religious affiliation, as well as ethnicity, class and privilege, shook the populace. Is Israel more Jewish or more democratic? Many in Israel experienced real anxiety: The judiciary change, presented by the most right-wing government in the country’s history, seemed to threaten the liberal nature of their beloved country. They felt that they were fighting for the soul of the nation and that in this fight, all bets were off and nothing was sacred — including the once-untouchable idea of shirking reserve duty in the army. Despite the turmoil in the streets, the ruling coalition refused to accept the fact that with a slim majority, it could not enforce such big changes without consensus, plowing ahead with ever more anxiety-inducing policies day by day.

As a nation, Israelis acted as if we could afford the luxury of a vicious internal fight, the kind in which your political rival becomes your enemy. We let animosity, demagogy and the poisonous discourse of social media take over our society, rip apart the only Jewish army in the world. This is our tragedy. And it carries a lesson for other polarized democracies: There is someone out there waiting to gain from your self-made weakness. This someone is your enemy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/08/opinion/international-world/israel-hamas-attack.html?unlocked_article_code=4v6zGcgQLMdm-_rvwo6RxNdESvFfn0Y_JMcWp6AhEJ7LN3B5wzxlRu2LUxusUpGK0hHvKr2Bkyb_RiA_FWCWVmh4jt3YDs7o06u2XOXgtgmtdTERexwkBczuzI3apVGD5O5yaF3dUthwcYjd18koWfatgDiohN8-Ohs5AsRk0Vy4OpnH8lMyvzCViuW0vxiIkCtPPEGbSLkia6Ub9Ae5Eq-M5a1nA2rk5-1tHoSGLFwuqoAEsbr-dUrkWtcm6FJwoU5-xp5Nt80Yjl1gWiLiXNj552P3tcE2Gc_8gSCxdBRpfIINVrgz6XCmH2sobLzeB-uWjGkr2frUv6WK92KrDdj4lV_Cjpziqwci6sOkTanc&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

…the world is in the midst of a transition to a new order that experts describe with the word multipolar. The United States is no longer the dominant power it once was, and no replacement has emerged. As a result, political leaders in many places feel emboldened to assert their own interests, believing the benefits of aggressive action may outweigh the costs. These leaders believe that they have more sway over their own region than the U.S. does. “A fully multipolar world has emerged, and people are belatedly realizing that multipolarity involves quite a bit of chaos,” Noah Smith wrote in his Substack newsletter on Saturday.

…Perhaps the biggest damage to American prestige has come from Donald Trump, who has rejected the very idea that the U.S. should lead the world. Trump withdrew from international agreements and disdained successful alliances like NATO. He has signaled that, if he reclaims the presidency in 2025, he may abandon Ukraine. In the case of Israel, Trump encouraged Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, to show little concern for Palestinian interests and instead seek a maximal Israeli victory. Netanyahu, of course, did not start this new war. Hamas did, potentially with support from Iran, the group’s longtime backer, and Hamas committed shocking human rights violations this past weekend, captured on video. But Netanyahu’s extremism has contributed to the turmoil between Israel and Palestinian groups like Hamas…

…I understand that some readers may question whether the long era of American power that’s now fading was worth celebrating. Without question, it included some terrible injustices, be they in Vietnam, Iran, Guatemala or elsewhere. But it also made possible the most peaceful era in recorded history, with a sharp decline in deaths from violence, as Steven Pinker noted in his 2011 book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature.” And the number of people living in a democracy surged. Smith concluded his Substack newsletter on the new Middle Eastern war this way:

Over the past two decades it had become fashionable to lambast American hegemony, to speak derisively of “American exceptionalism,” to ridicule America’s self-arrogated function of “world police” and to yearn for a multipolar world. Well, congratulations, now we have that world. See if you like it better.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/briefing/hamas-israel-war.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

A White House official signaled administration support for the House bill, highlighting that the legislation averts deep cuts to domestic programs and includes disaster relief. The official also said the administration expects House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to soon bring another bill to the floor to support Ukraine. The official provided the statement on the condition of anonymity to describe a position not yet made public.

https://wapo.st/3ZE1jId