David K. Shipler's Blog, page 3

 

By David K. Shipler 

                TheShipler Report has obtained an early draft of the National DemocraticCommittee’s manual for the next presidential candidate. It is the result of thepost-election self-flagellation that only Democrats can perform with suchalacrity. Here it is: 

                “DearCandidate (insert name),

                DonaldJ. Trump has become a model of how to win elections in the new America.Following his successful campaign in 2024, we strongly recommend adopting his top ten techniques, as follows: 

1.     Begin to lie as soon as your lips start moving.

2.     Use only superlatives, as in, “We will have thebest hurricanes ever,” and, “We have the worst open sewers in history. Nobodyhas ever seen anything like it.”

3.     Read Mein Kampf – great tips

4.     Terrify the citizenry and badmouth the countryas swarming with swarthy, pet-eating ex-convicts and insane, blood-poisoninginvaders.

5.     Use these four words often, no matter what theproblem, imagined or real: “I will fix it.”

6.     Ramble for hours incoherently in front of large audiencesby “weaving” unrelated digressions into a tangled web that makes you seemcognitively impaired.

7.     Sell Bibles that include an extra New Testamentbook with your name, and a preface reading, “The Gospel According to_________.” Price it exorbitantly so people know it’s valuable.

8.     Sell bright blue MAGA hats, but don’t tellanyone that the initials stand for “Make America Gullible Again.”

9.     Pretend to perform a sex act with a microphone.

10.  Losemillions in lawsuits for sexual assault, and keep bragging about grabbingwomen’s pussies. Most men love that, and millions of women do, too.”

This is satire. It’s all made up (except for what isn't), adisclosure made necessary by the absurdity of current reality, which preventslots of people from telling the difference between truth and fiction.

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

                Imaginea democratic country where voters ended a political campaign knowing more aboutthe difficult issues than they did at the beginning. Imagine the learningexperience of hearing presidential candidates seriously discussing how to curbthe wars in Europe and the Middle East, compete sensibly with China, retard climatechange, address the coming revolution of AI, open economic opportunity for theimpoverished, reduce racial discrimination, and gain control over immigration. Nowflip that upside down and you have the world’s supposed model of democracy, theUnited States of America.

                On thetasks before us, we understand less and less. If we once believed we lived in afree-market economy with prices set mainly by supply and demand, the campaignhas taught us to think that a president has all the power and so should get allthe blame—or credit—for our struggles or our prosperity, whichever happens tooccur during an administration.

                If we everunderstood the limits of US control over global conflicts, we are now convincedthat an omnipotent president could stop Russia vs. Ukraine and Israel vs. Hamasand Hezbollah.

                If weever took the trouble to grasp the complex forces of desperation and hope thatdrive immigrants from their violent homelands to ours, we can no longer bebothered with anything but simplistic measures and instant cures.

                Electionsseem to dumb us down. Its practitioners filter out the nuance, contradictions,and history essential to forming smart policy. We retreat into our caves ofcertainty and disparage the “undecideds.”

The problem is not brand new, just worsewith Donald Trump, whose fabricated unreality flows effortlessly out to agullible electorate. It’s worse now with social media and biased journalismthat flatten the intricate contours of the country’s challenges. It’s worsewith Russia attacking democracy itself by aiming fake posts and videos at a pluralisticsystem that Moscow has long feared, from the communist era into the present.  

                You canget to some issues if you get your news from responsible sources—The NewYork Times, The Washington Post, NPR, PBS NewsHour, for example. Goodreporting has been done on   important challenges facing the country. But thecampaigns themselves have been negligent. If you look for detailed policypapers on the candidates’ websites, you’ll find that Trump’s are mostlypropaganda and Kamala Harris’s mostly platitudes.

Instead, campaigns bombard us withsymbols and slogans, smears and slanders designed to trigger more emotion thanthought. Trump advocates huge tariffs on imports, which he claims China andother foreign countries will pay, which they will not. Harris counters that Trump’stariffs are a “sales tax,” which they are not. Neither tries to educate thepublic about how tariffs work: taxes charged to the importer, who willprobably, but not definitely, pass at least some on to the consumer. Or, foreignmanufacturers could reduce prices in response. Neither candidate makes aneffort to discuss the pros and cons of tariffs as a tool to promote domesticbusiness alongside their risk of fueling inflation. Unless you take the troubleto read a BBC or Wall Street Journal analysis, you are left misinformedby both sides.

Even the BBC can get it wrong, asin a fact-checkingarticle that said, “The Biden administration has added 729,000manufacturing jobs.” As for Trump, “He added 419,000 manufacturing jobs duringhis first three years in office.” Sorry, folks, the jobs were added by the manufacturers,not the presidents.  

Yes, government influences theeconomy through spending and taxes legislated by Congress and interest ratesset by the Federal Reserve. But personifying in the presidency vast powers overbarely controllable developments, domestic or foreign, distorts discussion and evadesthe hard tasks of problem-solving.

Therefore, as election analystshave observed, many of us vote more with our guts than our heads. We are wooedor repelled by a candidate’s images, and the image of strength, candor, anddecisiveness holds sway over the studious, the reflective, and the instinctiveregard for the multiple sides of a question. That blanks out the chance to beeducated about policy during an election.

                Goodleadership contains a paradox. Presidents need to be both strong and yet studious,decisive and yet open to various viewpoints. They are also entitled to changetheir minds as, one hopes, they mature in their thinking. In the electoralprocess, however, ironclad consistency is celebrated as principled whileevolution is denounced as hypocrisy. Both can be true, but not always. No consideredpolicy discussion is possible when no space is given a candidate for a changeof mind, even for purely political expediency,

Harris, for example, has not been ableto delve into the virtues or pitfalls of fracking, because she once opposed itand now accepts it, the arguments on each side be damned. It’s a worthwhilediscussion, but we don’t hear it from her or, it goes without saying, fromTrump.

Trump, instead, projects an aura ofpower by being dogmatically closed-minded, insulting, and authoritarian, andtherefore worshipped from the gut by millions who are drawn to their sense thatthe country needs a strongman, with all the accompanying dangers to democracy.            

                A remarkablefeature of this campaign has been its lack of serious examination of the perilthe world faces of widespread warfare and of ways to avoid it. Trump has warnedof an imminent World War Three, and in this case it might not be hyperbole. Buthe doesn’t lead an intelligent conversation on parrying China’s expansioniststrategy, and he merely brushes away Ukraine as something that he’ll magicallysolve between his election and inauguration.

On the Middle East, Harris triesnot to antagonize pro-Israel voters while giving little nods of recognition tothe suffering of Palestinians, not enough to erase many Arab-Americans’distress at the Biden administration’s support for the Jewish state. Tryingthat balancing act is politically protective, but it wipes out any chance ofserious discussion of the confounding issues in that war and America’s longtermrole in addressing the conflict.

            In sum, neither Trump nor Harris has offeredcreative thinking for managing and defusing this most dangerous period sincethe end of World War Two. But if they had, would their ideas have penetratedthe miasma of puffery and propaganda intrinsic to American political campaigns?Would they have been heard through the noise and carefully considered by votersas they made their choices in this most consequential election? Don’t bet onit.

                                                         By David K. Shipler

                The decisions by the rich men who own the Los AngelesTimes and the Washington Post tokill their editorial boards’ endorsements of Kamala Harris are reminders ofhow an authoritarian culture works. It has official censors, of course, but thesystem’s everyday mechanism doesn’t always rely on edicts from on high. It can operateautomatically as private citizens police themselves and their peers, avoiding riskand informing on those who deviate or dissent.

                That ishow the surveillance state of the Soviet Union functioned. Editors and writersknew instinctively what content was permitted in their newspapers and broadcasts;they were Communist Party members themselves, so official censorship was internalized,embedded in their professional judgments. There wasn’t much the censors neededto delete.

                Inschools and workplaces, fellow students and colleagues were on guard againstpolitical irreverence and would report it. Pressure and punishment were oftenexacted there, at that level by those institutions. The same is happening todayin Russia, which has been dragged backward by Vladimir Putin. In other words,the authoritarian structure presses people horizontally as well as vertically,not only from the top down but also from within the lowly communities whereindividuals live their lives.

                Oh, please,some of you will say. The US is not Russia. We have a passionate tradition offree debate, suspicion of government, and fervent individualism. “It Can’tHappen Here,” you might insist, the ironic title of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novelabout a fascist who rises to power in America—and who holds a huge rally inMadison Square Garden, by the way, its adoring crowd described with prescience byLewis decades before Donald Trump’s ugly rally there this week.

Trump is trying to seed the groundfor that dynamic of self-policing. He has illuminated the most significantdivide in America, which is between those who see it coming and those who donot. You can call it the divide between the left and the right, or betweenDemocrats and Republicans, or between Blacks and whites, or women and men, orcollege and high-school graduates. Those lines exist. But more fundamentally,it is a divide between those who understand how pluralistic democracy can be underminedalong an insidious path toward autocracy, and those who do not. Apparently, Americansdon’t study this. Our schools have failed miserably.

Trump is not coy about the visceralaggressions that fuel his agenda. He threatens and curses like a Mafia boss, openlyadmires foreign dictators, uses the Stalinist term “enemies of the people” todescribe news organizations, and says broadcasters who fact-check him shouldlose their licenses. As demonstrated by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and biotech investorPatrick Soon-Shiong, who own the Washington Post and Los AngelesTimes respectively, there is plenty of cowardice in America beyond the ranksof Republicans who simultaneously detest and fear Trump. Bezos has federalcontracts, and Soon-Shiong’s interests could be subject to federal regulation. Theyobviously assume that Trump would abuse his office to take revenge on them, andso they shrink from endorsing his opponent. The chill begins.

                Inaddition, Trump’s demonization of Democrats as “enemies from within” wouldencourage grassroots vigilantism, which is already on the rise, and probablylead right-wing prosecutors to bring charges, as Trump has advocated, spreadingfear and corroding the pluralism of American politics.

His draconian pledge to mobilizethe military and police to deport some 12 million undocumented immigrants wouldalso mobilize ordinary citizens to report on people with “foreign” names andswarthy skin, exposing American citizens and legal immigrants to unjustified documentchecks and roundups. A spasm of racial profiling and harassment would sweep thecountry, activated in large measure by hateful and suspicious citizens with “American”names and white skin.

                We sawa preview against Muslims after 9/11 under the George W. Bush administration. Reportsto the FBI from the public were often motivated by personal vendettas, randomencounters, and domestic disputes, according to FBI agents I interviewed at thetime. One agent told me his colleagues felt guilty and embarrassed checking outevery tip, as they were ordered to do by the White House. The agent in chargeof the Washington, DC office acknowledged to me that the bureau’s resources tofight real crime were being dangerously diluted. Multiply those effects manyfoldunder Trump’s mass deportation scheme.

                Then,too, Trump and the extreme right Heritage Foundation are preparing to purge thefederal government of specialists who don’t fall in line politically, anotherfeature of authoritarian systems from Hungary, Venezuela, and other countriesthat have voted democratically to vote down democracy.

                Itmight be asking too much for folks to risk their jobs and their comfort, muchless their liberty, to stand up for their right to speak and act in violationof whatever limits the president and his collaborators set. Reporters like me,who have covered dissidents in dictatorships, ask ourselves whether we wouldhave such courage of defiance. If we’re honest, we don’t know.

                But whatAmericans have learned about themselves is not encouraging. That about half thepopulation is not alarmed by Trump’s authoritarian playbook is itself a causefor alarm, for you have to  be intensely alert to protect democratic liberty. Thathis crowds are excited into ecstasies of growly cheers by his rants ofvilification against his Democratic opponents suggests a broad acceptance ofpolitical oppression. The Trump phenomenon has exposed an American society notvery different from most other countries.

                Trump gotone of the loudest cheers at Madison Square Garden by proposing a bill with a one-year prison sentence for burning an American flag.Evidently, neither he nor his supporters knew that the Supreme Court, in the1989 case Texasv. Johnson, found a prohibition of flag burning unconstitutional, violatingthe First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. It was the latest in a longline of cases protecting symbolic expression. Trump might get hisway, though: That Court’s majority was only five to four. The current Court is much fartherto the right.

 Burning a flag surely disgusts most Americans,and it’s paradoxical to destroy the emblem of the freedom that permits theemblem’s destruction. And yet, to criminalize the act is to destroy the freedomitself.

 What the zealous American right does not getis this: Destroying your opponents’ freedom might feel good until the protectionsof liberty that you’ve torn down fail to protect you when your opponents are inpower, until the machinery of oppression you’ve constructed against them is turned against you. Intolerant impulses crossparty lines. So far, while the left has canceled professors and others fortheir offensive speech, inducing pockets of self-censorship, Democrats have no governmental agenda of authoritarianism.Not in 2024.   

                  

                                                        By David K. Shipler  

            Democracy thrives on shades of gray. Few public issues actuallydivide themselves starkly into black and white. And even when disagreements areunyielding, a government “of the people” needs to embrace a variety of views,accommodate differences, and include a supple give-and-take. That’s the ideal,essential to a pluralistic political system in an open society.

Yet that is not the ideal of the TrumpRepublican Party. Instead, in a corruption of yesterday’s refinedconservativism that preached smaller government, it plans to transformgovernment into a powerful monolith imposing ideological absolutism on manyareas of American life—private as well as public.

This can be seen most vividly inthe right-wing Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which Donald Trumphas disavowed, although the most extreme provisions were written by hisadministration’s former officials who are likely to serve with him again ifhe’s elected.

The agenda is invasive. Women wouldbe required to give their reasons for having legal abortions, and doctorswould have to report the information to their states, which would lose funds ifthey failed to collect and relay the answers to the federal government. Thedata wouldn’t have the women’s names, supposedly, but the very demand wouldtrespass into personal zones of intimacy.

States where abortion is legalwould have trouble making it accessible, because any clinic that providedabortions would be denied Medicaid funds for anything, including providingother health services, thereby putting most of them out of business. Whilefederal law prohibits payment for abortions by Medicaid, which coverslow-income Americans, clinics can be reimbursed for other health care. Thiswould be a back-door way of virtually banning abortion nationwide.

Immigration authorities couldreject a court’s jurisdiction and “not honor court decisions that seek toundermine regulatory and subregulatory efforts.” Undermining the independentjudiciary has been a tool in the playbook of authoritarian leaders abroad.

Head Start and other pre-schoolprograms would be eliminatedin favor of “home-based childcare,” and federal funding would prioritizetraditional families—a husband and wife—not single-parent households or gaycouples. Indeed, a Trump-led federal government would not invoke civil rightslaw to protect gay and transgender Americans against discrimination.

The Department of Education wouldbe abolished, but Washington would use its immense financial and legalauthority to censor secondary schools’ history courses by denying funds andlodging racial discrimination suits “against entities that adopt or imposeracially discriminatory policies such as those based on critical race theory.”

Trump Republicans would increasefederal oversight of local school curricula by administering a “Parents’ Billof Rights” effectively giving a few conservative (or liberal) parents leverageto police teachers. A new Trump administration would thereby adopt into federalpolicy the most extreme academic distortions imposed by Florida and some otherRepublican-led states.

 The education concepts are more “whiteChristian nationalism than traditional political conservatism,” according to a studyby the Brookings Institution. It cites scholars Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry,whose book The Flag and the Cross describes white Christian nationalism as being “aboutethno-traditionalism and protecting the freedoms of a very narrowly defined‘us’.”

 And so on, through nearly 900 pages of very detailed, mechanicallyspecific methods, in which former (and probably future) Trump agency officialsget down in the weeds, familiar as they are with how their departments work.Some provisions would need legislation by Congress, unlikely withoutRepublicans holding 60 Senate seats. But many could probably be implementedadministratively by highly politicized functionaries.

With few exceptions, the aim is toremake government in a right-wing president’s image, to snuff out debate anddiscussion, and to obliterate the nuances and contradictions of reality. Thatmethodology has even more significance than the specific policies, for itseffect can be durable, undermining the nonpartisan expertise required to governin a complex, highly technical and fast-moving era. What “conservatives” don’tseem to get is that someday the changes could also be turned against the rightby what Heritage calls “the Left” with a capital L, which is not always pure inits devotion to robust disagreement.

              To theextent possible, a Trump administration would convert large swaths of federalbureaucracy from an administrative entity to an ideological, highly-politicizedone. That requires finding, training, and placing extreme rightistfunctionaries to take key jobs immediately after the 2025 inauguration.

Heritage is already laying thegroundwork for this invasive politicization of agencies. In the first step, thefoundation seeks to create political dossiers on large numbers of federalemployees by filing thousands of Freedom-of-Information-Act requests to mine digitalfiles of memos, emails, and texts for key words such as “voting,” “climate change,”“transgender, “pronouns,” and “DEI” for diversity, equity, and inclusion, ProPublicareports. The demands have gone to more than two dozen agencies, including thedepartments of State, Homeland Security, Interior, and Defense, plus theDirector of National Intelligence, the Federal Trade Commission, and others.Where agencies have balked in turning over the files, Heritage has sued.

              Identifyingemployees who are supposedly on “the Left” is a prerequisite to dismissing themand substituting so-called “conservatives,” who are not conservatives withinthe usual meaning.

To that end, Heritage is recruitingand training people with right-wing beliefs as potential workers to fillpositions that Trump plans to vacate by removing civil service protection fromsome 50,000 career employees through an executive order known as Schedule F.Trump issued the order before leaving office; Biden rescinded it.

Former Trump officials are candidabout their objectives. Russ Vought, who headed Trump’s Office of Managementand Budget at the end of his term, writesin the Heritage plan that the National Security Council, for example, which istypically a collection of experienced military and intelligence specialists, bedriven by officials “who are selected and vetted politically.” Senior officialsshould “identify, recruit, clear, and hire staff who are aligned with andwilling to shepherd the President’s national security priorities.” In otherwords, no debate, no variety of perspectives. (This was very much the practicein the Soviet Union.)

The OMB, Vought says, should be runby political appointees, “not the careerists,” who work “in pursuit of thePresident’s actual priorities and not let them set their own agenda based onthe wishes of the sprawling ‘good government’ management community in andoutside of government.”

              Theresult would be to undermine the nonpartisan expertise of the agencies thatissue regulations implementing laws made by Congress, and that administerfederal funds granted by Congress in annual budgets.

              Trump’sonly saving grace during his first terms was that he didn’t know how to govern.He didn’t know how to pull the levers of power—indeed, he alienated themilitary, the intelligence community, and the FBI, the agencies of brute forcethat could be turned to oppression in the wrong hands. But now he has lined upa deep bench of potential officials who would be skilled at manipulatinggovernment to their liking. And Trump “is fascist to the core” and “the mostdangerous person to this country,” his former chief of the joint chiefs, Gen.Mark A. Milley toldBob Woodward for his new book.

This entire situation couldprobably be characterized as pre-totalitarian, because it envisions unanimityand political policing of government employees, the pervasive intrusion of anunquestioned ideology at many levels of society, and punishment for dissent—atleast in government—by the loss of your job. It doesn’t propose imprisoningthose who disagree, as a true totalitarian state would, although Milley toldWoodward he was afraid being called back into active duty and court-martialed.

When Trump Republicans underminethe people’s faith in elections, the touchstone of democracy, when theyfabricate horror stories about immigrants, when they admire foreign dictatorsand flirt with the idea of prosecuting their Democratic political opponents,they are taking a step toward a dark and dangerous place. The Heritage plan isa nuts-and-bolts blueprint for undermining the spirit of factual honesty andcivil debate that keeps democracy alive.

By peppering the public with somany wild lies and conspiracy theories, they disconnect people from truth soprofoundly that belief in obvious truth itself is eroded. This fits what thegreat thinker Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism,observed:

            “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is notthe convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom thedistinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and thedistinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longerexist.”

 

By David K. Shipler             

              The deepparadox in the Arab-Israeli conflict is the immorality of each side’s moralcertitude. Each is convinced of its righteousness.

But the high ground ofrighteousness has been completely flattened in the last year, beginning with theintimate atrocities of October 7 by the Palestinian movement Hamas, then withthe remotely inflicted atrocities by Israel. The only shred of morality left iswhatever attaches to victimhood.

              Not thatwars are moral enterprises. Not that this conflict has ever been ethical or conductedwithin Queensberry rules. Since modern Israel’s founding in 1948, the struggle hasbeen nasty, grinding, and brutalizing. Still, it respected certain boundaries.Forty years ago, the Palestinians had not yet adopted suicide bombers as astandard weapon against Israeli civilians, nor had they sexually assaulted andtormented young Israeli women. Israel had not sent tanks and fighter jetsagainst Palestinian residents of Gaza and the West Bank, nor had Jewishsettlers so systematically driven Palestinians from their West Bank villages.And non-Arab actors such as Iran had not directly attacked Israel.

              But now,as Tom Friedman hassaid, so many red lines have been crossed that “you kind of get used to it.And at the end of the day, there are no more red lines. And when that happens,watch out.”

              BothIsraeli and Palestinian societies are diverse and fluid. Neither is monolithic;both contain moderate citizens embracing coexistence. Yet the most radical andhateful among them have been propelled into power by decades of strife. Palestinianleaders see all Israelis, including children, as potential soldiers. Israelileaders in the current government—the most extreme in Israel’s history—conflateall Palestinians in Gaza with Hamas, one reason that Israel is willing to bombwhole buildings and kill many civilians to get one commander. On both sides, thoseat the top seem to have no moral brakes.

              Theirmilitary tactics have been devastating to non-combatants. Abhorrent methods ofwarfare have been normalized: sadistic killings and hostage-taking, food deprivationand massive bombings, indiscriminate rocketing, assassinations, explodingpagers designed to murder and maim even while innocent bystanders suffer. Hamashas embedded its fighters among civilians in their homes and schools andhospitals, using innocents as human shields. Undeterred, the Israelis have foughtthrough those so-called shields, mostly with air strikes and artillery, killingand wounding tens of thousands, impeding food supplies, and shattering medicalfacilities.

Everything is hurtling backwards.The slender areas of common ground have been eroded. More than thirty yearsafter Israel finally considered the possibility of a Palestinian state, currentIsraeli leaders are making every effort to slam that door and lock it—a hardlineposition popular among Israelis now that the Hamas attack has demonstrated whatPalestinians would do with statehood. More than thirty years after thePalestine Liberation Organization finally recognized the Jewish state’s rightto exist, Hamas in Gaza wants Israel obliterated.

So does Iran—or, at least, Iranianswith keys to the weapons—so it has armed Sunni Palestinian Muslims throughHamas, and Shia Muslims through Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthis in Yemen. And twicein the last six months, Iran has attacked with hundreds of missiles, nearly allsuccessfully intercepted by advanced defense systems but setting the stage for Israeliretaliation.

It’s hard to take seriously Iran’sclaims to be supporting the Palestinians. It has invented its   animosity toward Israel to drive an absolutistIslamic ideology, a religio-nationalist thrust to dominate the region.

By contrast, thePalestinian-Israeli conflict is real and largely secular, founded on an actualclash of claims to the same narrow strip of land between the Jordan River andthe Mediterranean. Religion is a thread in this tapestry, more prominent thandecades ago, but polls show no more than 10 to 12 percent of Palestiniansendorsing Hamas’s goal of rule by Muslim religious law.

Hamas nonetheless ran Gazafollowing Israel’s voluntary military withdrawal in 2006. Israel sealed it intothat small territory with high-tech fences and cameras and other monitoringequipment, then--despite occasional rocket attacks--grew complacent that thehostility was caged and contained. In an astonishing breakdown more than a yearago, Israel’s intelligence and military hierarchy ignored alarming reports byyoung women soldiers assigned as field observers that Hamas seemed to betraining and maneuvering for an assault. They were not taken seriously by malesuperiors. When fighters crossed into Israel, the army was almost nowhere to beseen as some 1200 people were killed and about 250 taken hostage, includingseven women from that intelligence unit. (The Washington Post reportsthe same disrespect currently for unarmed female observers on the border withLebanon.)

The failure traumatized Israeliswho thought their security apparatus kept them safe. It reactivated the senseof vulnerability in a Jewish population burdened by its history of persecution.

If there is any lesson here, it isfairly simple: Trauma does not usually encourage risk-taking. The key togetting Israel to compromise is getting Israel to feel safe. Insecurity willnever induce accommodation. So the Hamas attack and now Iran’s entry into theorder of battle have hardened the country and removed restraint. A fear hasinfected Israel that its very existence is at stake. The response has not beencompromise, but ruthlessness.

Last October 8, even before Israel beganits devastating destruction of Gaza following the Hamas attack, Hezbollah inLebanon began peppering northern Israel with rockets, driving 60,000 to 70,000Israelis from their homes, making them internal refugees. For a year, theborder area has been an array of ghost towns, according to a friend of mineliving about 80 kilometers away, with farmers venturing in and out hastily totend their orchards.

Consider this striking fact: If anequivalent percentage of the US population were run out of swaths of oursouthern border, the displaced would total nearly 2.5 million. Imagine theAmerican reaction if areas were depopulated so thoroughly for so long. Would wehave any moral brakes?

 We should, but we are hardly a model. Nor arethe Palestinians or the Lebanese or the Iranians. The whirlwind of Israel’sforever war spins on.

 

By David K. Shipler 

              If youspread out on a table all the categories of stereotyping inflicted upon Blacksand other people of color throughout the history of the United States, you’llsee how some of the ugliest are being chosen and brandished by Donald Trump andhis running mate, J.D. Vance. Like crude weapons of mass destruction, theseinstruments of bigotry cannot be precisely targeted. They wound both theirintended victims and mere bystanders—and perhaps, in the end, the perpetratorsthemselves.

              Thelatest example is the poisonous lie that Haitian immigrants, who came to thiscountry in the naïve belief that it would be a refuge of safety andopportunity, are stealing and eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. ThatTrump and Vance would repeat and inflate this toxic nonsense after the city’sofficials denied its truth exposes, first, their own hatred toward “others,” andsecond, their faith that the hatred is harbored by millions of American voters.

              Theconcocted story fits the longstanding American narrative of Blacks asprimitive, violent, immoral, and unclean. Those supposed traits helped feed therationalizations of slavery, persisted through the Jim Crow era of legalsegregation, and continue in the barely concealed warrens of today’s right-wingelectorate.

Trump has proved dangerouslyskillful in tapping this base bigotry. Whether by instinct or calculation, he locatesand gives voice to the worst characteristics of his society. He garners broadsupport by his vicious fabrication that immigrants are invading as hordes ofdisease-ridden criminals released from prisons and mental institutions abroad. Itdoesn’t matter that official statistics show lower crime rates among immigrantsthan native-born Americans. It doesn’t matter that most are fleeing persecutionand danger to the ideal that they imagine America to be. It doesn’t matter thatthe two would-be assassins who have targeted Trump were white Americans.

He doesn’t have to say explicitlythat the hordes are swarthy; the picture in his voters’ minds is clear enough.Evidently, he says what many people think. And what they think, about Blacks inparticular, has deep roots in American culture.

The stereotypes fall into fivebasic categories, as I saw during five years of research for my book ACountry of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America.Others may find different patterns, but in my interviewing across thecountry, negative images of Blacks seemed to organize themselves around thesethemes: Body, Mind, Morality, Violence, and Power.

The body is the firstencounter: the color of the skin, the shape of the nose and lips, the style ofthe hair—the most superficial attributes that are taken to suggest the most profoundqualities. Here is where bigotry begins in its likening of Black people to primates.In social media, President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama were widelyportrayed as apes, including by some local Republican officials. Theimplication of Blacks as subhuman is a longstanding caricature, which Trumpplays on in spreading the pet-eating claim. He seems to think it resonates withhis supporters.

Uncleanliness has also been along-term stereotype in the body category. It generated the Jim Crow laws in theSouth that kept swimming pools, lunch counters, and drinking fountainssegregated. Vance summoned it up recently in smearing immigrants asdisease-ridden. Trump has saidthat immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” an echo of Nazi antisemiticideology. The fanciful notion that some pure blood exists and the fear of its beingtainted underlay state laws banning racial intermarriage until 1967, when the prohibitionswere ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.  

The mind is the area whereBlacks are stereotyped as less intelligent and less capable, a beliefreinforced when Trump speaks of “Black jobs,” meaning those requiring lowerskills. The smear of mental inferiority is also intrinsic to Republican argumentsthat affirmative action has advanced unqualified Blacks. But affirmative actionif done properly does no such thing; it should actively recruit, accept, andpromote equally qualified Blacks and other minorities who have historically suffereddiscrimination. The goal is to broaden the pool of qualified people.  Until the Republican-dominated Supreme Courtstruck down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, for example, eliteuniversities insisted that Blacks they were accepting were highly capable, asmall segment of the outstanding applicants who number many more than thecolleges can admit. Yet polls show whites embracing that stereotype of Blacks’ mentalinferiority.

Negative assumptions about Blacks’ moralityhas fed Trump’s insistent repetition of the lie about Haitian immigrantsstealing and eating people’s pets. It’s his way of saying: They are primitive,subhuman, and criminal. He also labels them “illegal,” although most are herelegally under the Temporary Protected Status program, which allows them towork. The permission, with time limits, is offered to residents of certaincountries in crisis, including Ukraine.

Violence is a constant themeof Trump’s vitriole against immigrants—again, immigrants of color, not whitesfrom Norway. His portrait of the United States as awash in disorder and wallowingin crime—whose incidence has actually declined—contradicts what most Americanssee with their own eyes. Yet it strikes a chord when he links the specter ofviolence with nonwhite immigrants, who bear the burden of the violentstereotype.

Power relationships acrossracial lines can be emotionally fraught. As more and more Blacks gain authorityin workplaces, the military, and government, some whites chafe at the reversalof old, expected hierachies. Obama’s election as the first Black president wasboth inspirational and disorienting for whites, depending on their upbringing,assumptions, and expectations about where Black should fit in the country’s powerstructure. His very presence in the White House triggered a backlash amongright-wing whites, and Trump is capitaliziing on it.

Much of his support comes from thewhite working class experiencing alienation, marginalization, and economic insecurity—andanxiety about the nonwhite population gaining ground at their expense. Trump’s rantsagainst immigrants taking over the country doesn’t have to be taken literallyto be effective in animating many whites’ resentment over what they believe tobe the inversion of the racial power structure.

Kamala Harris, the daughter of aJamaican father and an Indian mother, can’t win those votes. Trump need only remindpeople of her race, albeit awkwardly, which he’s done by asserting falsely (“falsely”is the requisite adverb modifying verbs associated with Trump’s statements) thatshe only belatedly decided that she was Black. Whites who are worried about a Black/Indianwoman in power can see their worries on their TV screens every day. Trump justhas to keep their flame of fear alive.

Meanwhile, the Trump-Vance bigotry,their weapon of mass destruction, is causing collateral damage to the societyas a whole, demolishing the inhibitions to experessing racial prejudice.Perhaps enough voters will see this to deny them a victory in November. But evenso, rebuilding a civil society will be a long project.

 

By David K. Shipler 

              Thebullet just grazed Donald Trump, but it struck the heart of America.

At a moment of critical care for asuffering democracy, the assassination attempt last night in Pennsylvaniafurther weakens the stamina of an ailing culture of pluralistic politics. It addstoxins to the chemistry of the country. It has already provoked blame ratherthan introspection. Instead of strengthening Americans’ bonds of commoncitizenship, as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy did sixty yearsago, this near miss will only deepen the divisions. It will be taken to justifythe rage, hatred, and passion for revenge that Trump himself has fostered.

Moreover, it is hard to see howthat apostle of autocracy fails to get elected in November. This bolsters theimage of macho victimhood he has promoted, an ironic way of channeling thealienation and sense of helplessness felt by millions of white working-classvoters who adore him. He was a cult figure before and now, in near martyrdom,he perfects the performance. Before allowing Secret Service agents to move himto safety, he needs to play his part, so he tells them, “Wait,” is helped tohis feet, his bloody ear now visible as he raises his fist and apparentlyshouts, “Fight!”  And fight they will, inone way or another.

This Sunday morning, there haveundoubtedly been preachers crediting God, as Trump did in a post, for makingthe bullets narrowly miss. Some of his followers believe he has been divinelyassigned to lead the nation, and this will be taken to prove their case. Andthere have surely been preachers admonishing their congregations to seekreconciliation, to gaze inward, to love the other, to examine themselves forthe wrongs that they and the broader society must right.

The sermons on takingresponsibility and seeking healing and listening to the other side will notmake the front pages, sadly. They will not generate a lot of followers onsocial media or even find their way into most politicians’ stump speeches onthe campaign trail. Senator J. D. Vance, a possible vice-presidentialcandidate, instantly blamed President Biden’s harsh rhetoric against Trump fora shooting whose motives were still unknown. Vance didn’t mention Trump’s yearsof violent rhetoric, of course, or his vitriol loosening the restraints ofcivil order, culminating in the January 6, 2021 invasion of the Capitol by his violentsupporters.

That’s the nature of Americanpolitical leadership today. Some of the worst people rise to some of thehighest levels.

What Trump and his Republicanacolytes—including those on the Supreme Court—fail to realize is that whateverthey unleash in governmental power or private aggression can be used by theleft as well as the right. In other words, the authors themselves can someday bethe targets. In her dissent from the Court’s recent grant of broad presidentialimmunity against criminal prosecution, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that apresident could now “order the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a politicalrival” and avoid prosecution. Her hypothesis, signed by the three liberaljustices, drew no distinction between a Republican or a Democratic president.

At this writing, the public knowslittle about the alleged shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed by theSecret Service. He was white and apparently not an immigrant, so Trumpistswon’t be able to blame all people of color and all immigrants, as many (Trumpincluded) are wont to do for the ills of the country. He was not a member ofSeal Team 6, evidently, so Biden’s off the hook for using his newfound powersfrom the Supreme Court. Crooks was reportedly a registered Republican who gavea small contribution a Democratic cause, so take your choice about his reasonsfor wanting to take Trump out.

Unless his online posts, friends,and family offer insights, a vacuum of information on his disturbed thinkingwill allow room for fantastic conspiracy theories. Those will furtherdeteriorate the health of the society, and a society’s health depends on howself-corrective it is, especially in a moment of crisis.

It doesn’t look good for the UnitedStates. In this heated atmosphere, political violence begets more politicalviolence. It would not be amazing for some of Trump’s militant supporters totake up arms against any target they deem worthy of their attention. Trump hascalled for unity but not peace. He might be incapable of preaching nonviolenceto those who love him and value his raised fist. We’ll see.

What does appear reliablypredictable is that a weak-looking, impaired Joe Biden cannot win over Trump.If Biden remains the candidate, Trump will be inaugurated next January. And atthat moment, the world’s three most powerful countries will be led bycriminals. Granted, only one will have been convicted. But Xi Jinping of Chinafor his persecution of the Uighurs and Vladimir Putin of Russia for his war ofatrocities in Ukraine certainly deserve prosecution. If you think of Trump’scrimes as minor, just wait.

The bullet that Trump heardwhizzing past his ear? We all heard it as it found its mark.

 

By David K. Shipler 

              It’s toobad that Supreme Court justices and other government leaders aren’t required tolive for two or three years in some dictatorship before they take office in theUnited States. Better yet, in one of the countries that have used democracy toundermine democracy. Then perhaps they would recognize the signs of a gatheringstorm, when the friction of the air seems to change and the wind turns ominous.

              TheSupreme Court and the Republican Party are laying the ground for autocracy.They are corrupting the constitutional interplay among the three branches ofgovernment, among the shared and competing interests in a complex society, andtherefore among the rulers and the ruled.

              TheRepublicans have abdicated the key role that political parties must play inevery free society—filtering out extremist demagogues. And the radical right onthe Supreme Court has now granted broad immunity to presidents who commitcrimes with “official acts.” This junction of political and judicial mischiefcould not come at a more perilous time, with a Republican authoritarian poisedto return to the presidency carrying a coherent ideological blueprinthe did not have in hand his first time around. He would commit felonies againstdemocracy virtually unfettered. This is the perfect storm.

One has to assume (though perhapswrongly) that Chief Justice John Roberts and his right-wing followers on theCourt do not understand fully what they are doing. One would like to believethat if they and their comrades in the Republican Party had even a passingknowledge of other countries’ tragic descent into authoritarianism, they woulddesist. They would realize that when they strip away restraints on a president,a future left-wing leader could also use the new latitude to dictatorial ends.Indeed, President Biden could do so today. We are lucky that he is not soinclined.

In insular America, cautionarytales from abroad are rarely noticed, it seems. Donald Trump and hiscollaborators are following the authoritarian playbook used to convertpluralistic political systems to autocracies in Hungary, Venezuela, and elsewhereas described by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard in their book, HowDemocracies Die.

They note that while military coupswere responsible for establishing most despotic regimes  during the Cold War, “There is another way tobreak a democracy,” which has since grown more prevalent than militarytakeovers. “Democracies die at the hands not of generals but of electedleaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that broughtthem to power,” they write. Dismantling democracy can be rapid, as under Hitlerin 1933, but more often “democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps.”(Listen to an interview with Levitsky here.)

After winning free elections inVenezuela, for example, Hugo Chavez arrested opposition politicians and judges,closed a major TV station, and abolished presidential term limits so he couldrule indefinitely. But 51 percent of Venezuelans polled several years laterrated their democracy 8 or higher on a scale of 1 to 10.

Viktor Orban of Hungary began as aliberal democrat and morphed into a semi-autocrat. He packed the ConstitutionalCourt by expanding its members from 8 to 15 and changed the rules so his partycould appoint judges unilaterally. “After winning a two-thirds parliamentarymajority in 2010,” Levitsky and Ziblatt note, “the ruling Fidesz party used itssupermajority to rewrite the constitution and electoral laws to lock in itsadvantage” through gerrymandering and banning campaign ads in any but thegovernment-run TV station.

Trump loves Orban. Hosting him atMar-a-Lago, Trump indulged in a rhapsodyof praise: “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader thanViktor Orbán. He’s fantastic.”

Manipulating elections, suppressingthe media, and coopting the courts are elements in undermining the democraticprocess. The dynamics of democracy can suffer not only by strengthening theexecutive branch beyond accountability but also by concentrating authority inany one branch to the detriment of the others.

Judge David Tatel, recently retiredfrom the federal Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, sees the Supreme Courtexecuting a massive power shift to the judiciary from the elected branches—Congressand the presidency. The new restrictions on regulatory agencies are the mostdramatic examples, because government regulation of private industry isanathema to the Republican-appointed justices.

The decision on presidentialimmunity also reworks the lines of authority. Tatel told me in a recentconversation that he thought it would now be highly difficult for theexecutive’s Justice Department to prosecute former presidents. Even though theycan be charged with crimes involving “unofficial acts,” or some “official acts”that are not core constitutional powers, no evidence can be admitted that toucheson their official duties or motives. That unprecedented exclusion, an inventionof the Republican-dominated Court, would hobble the executive branch of itsnormal function to bring criminal charges.

In his opinion for a 6-3 majority,Roberts suggests that the immunity will protect presidents from politicalprosecutions by successors, which is exactly what Trump ridiculously claims ishappening to him in the four criminal cases he faces. Revenge trials of formerleaders are artifacts of crude autocracies, never seen in the U.S.—butapparently conceivable to a highly politicized Court.

Taken together, giving thepresident freedom to commit crimes but not to protect the public fromcorporate-created hazards might seem contradictory. But the right-wing justicesare only hypocritical, turning on their principle of enhancing the powerstructure at the expense of the little guy. It’s amazing that millions oflittle guys vote for this.   

In a seriesof rulings curtailing the regulatory powers of government agencies, the Courthas arrogated to itself the prerogative of micro-managing detailed, technicalrules across the entire scope of protections established by decades ofdeveloping expertise. Last month the Court threw out a 40-year-old precedentset in Chevron vs. Natural Resources Defense Council that requiredcourts to give deference to expert agencies where Congressional legislation wasambiguous. That respect for expertise in a highly technical world of rapidchange had allowed regulations to keep pace with evolving science andengineering.

Tatel sawthis coming, having closely watched the Court and having seen some of his keydecisions overruled by “conservative,” Republican-appointed justices.  “Anyone concerned with the environment—or withsafe medicines, unadulterated food, or cars that drive safely—has very goodreason to worry about where this Supreme Court is headed,” he writes in hisbook, Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice. (Listen tointerviews with him here.)

Both newregulations and old will come under the Court’s microscope. It has effectivelyassigned itself the power to review any existing regulation, even those long inforce, by revising the statute of limitations. The Court has ruled that the clockstarts running not with the regulation’s adoption but with the injury to theparticular party. So a business can be created to violate a rule and then sue,no matter that countless businesses before have been governed by the regulationfor many years.

This cannytwist illustrates that while the Republican-appointed justices on the SupremeCourt might be ignorant of many things—including the course of incipientdictatorship—they are not stupid. They went to the best law schools. Theirclerks are graduates of elite institutions. They know how to fashion an opinionby beginning where they want to end up and working backwards to concoct thejustifications. They are intellectually dishonest and, at the same time, smartin a narrow and self-interested way. Honest history will not judge the judgeskindly.

 

By David K. Shipler 

                OnMonday, October 9, two days after the assault by Hamas on innocent civilians inIsrael, Kalpana Shipler was asked by a fellow student at her public high schoolin Washington, D.C., “Whose side are you on?” That was the question beingtossed around by multiple teenagers to one another as Israel began bombing Gazain retaliation. And that seems to be the question dividing college campuses andmobilizing protests, corrupting the capacity to analyze complexity. If you areforced to pick sides, you miss the tangles of guilt that have bound IsraeliJews and Palestinian Arabs for decades.

                Kalpanadidn’t fall into the trap, I am proud to say as her grandfather. She was wiseenough at age 15 to resist an instant answer, to know that she didn’t know, arare skill in today’s America. She deferred to the cause of learning.

                Luckily,young people coming of age are not yet jaded. Shocked by the scenes ofdevastation and starvation in Gaza, students have acted on a purity of outrage,pushing the envelope of accepted rhetoric and calling to account their owncountry, Israel’s major supporter.

Yet the impulse to pick a side, asif war were a football game, has an unhealthy feature. It concentrates theblame, villainizing one adversary and idealizing the other. The dichotomy wasprevalent among some activists who justifiably protested the U.S. war inVietnam and decried our ally’s (South Vietnam’s) assaults on human rights, whileregarding North Vietnam and the Vietcong as the only authentic patriots, skippingover the North’s tighter dictatorship and the VC’s brutality.

                Asimilar intellectual and moral flaw runs through the current protests over theGaza war, in which Israel is supposedly “a monopoly of violence,” in the wordsof a Cornellprofessor. Palestinians through Hamas, which strives to replace the Jewishstate with an Islamic state, are portrayed as exercising their anti-colonialistrights to liberty. Sometimes—only sometimes—vilification of the Jewish statehas crossed into vilification of Jews, raising the stench of antisemitism in the“pro-Palestinian” encampments. They might be called “antiwar” encampments ifthey actually opposed war, if they protested not only against the atrocitiesIsrael has committed in an effort to stamp out Hamas—the vast bombing, the barriersto food and medical care—but also against the intimate atrocities by Hamas—therapes, torture, mutilation, and kidnappings—which unleashed this fighting.

It was astonishing to see 33Harvard student organizations sign onto a statementissued by the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee immediately afterOctober 7 holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfoldingviolence.” Seriously? “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” the statementdeclared. “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence hasstructured every aspect of Palestinians existence for 75 years. . . Palestinianshave been forced to live in a sate of death, both slow and sudden.”

                 So spoke some of the purportedly smartestpeople of the next generation. One can imagine them delighting in theirincisive brilliance as they looked past the Hamas violence into its roots. Fine.There is never a vacuum. There are causes of every effect. However, to turn backonly one page in a long history of mutual victimization demonstrates a lazinessof mind or, perhaps, a mind indoctrinated.

If you are pro-Israel, do you leaveout the thuggish gangs of Jewish settlers terrorizing and assaulting West BankPalestinians? If you are pro-Palestinian, do you omit Israel’s military withdrawalfrom Gaza in 2005, the Palestinian self-government under Hamas arming itselfand rocketing Israel? If you are pro-Israel, do you leave out the stifling bordercontrols that suffocated Gaza’s development and fostered poverty? If you rootonly for the Palestinians, do you ignore the Hamas suicide bombers sent againstJews two decades ago to torpedo the growing Israeli acceptance of Palestinianstatehood?

In your journey back in time, doyou stop before Arab armies attacked the fledgling Jewish state? Do you stopbefore the Israelis’ expulsion of Arabs from their home villages before andduring Israel’s 1948 war of independence? Do you stop before the earlier Arabassaults on religious Jewish communities in the Holy Land or, on the otherside, the Jewish assaults on Arab civilians there? Do you stop before theHolocaust? Before the pogroms of Europe, which so traumatized the Jewish peoplethat its reverberations still ring today?

If you are looking for the originalsin in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, keep going, and going, and going untilyou come to realize that both sides are victims. This is not moral equivalence.This is suffering that is particular to each people, not to be measured or weighed,but—if you want to campaign against war—to be acknowledged. As an Israeli saidto me long ago, putting two victims together is like mixing fire and kerosene.

Victimhood confers an illusion ofmoral immunity. “The sense of victimhood is functional for a nation that isinvolved in an ongoing bloody conflict,” wrote the Israeli thinkers DanielBar-Tal and Elkiva Eldar in the newspaper Haaretz. “It shapes the perception of the threateningsituation against the cruel enemy and provides moral justification for harmingit unrestrainedly and without mercy. Victimhood distinguishes between us andthe Palestinians and provides a sense of moral superiority and permission todehumanize them. . . . Victimhood severs the society from a sense ofguilt and leaves room only for feelings of anger and revenge.”

The same might be said of thePalestinian side.

So, how does complexity figure intothe student-led protests? It doesn’t. Demonstrations don’t do nuance. They are meantto be categorical and dogmatic. They are not dispassionate classroom exercisesin the ambiguities and contradictions of history, politics, and warfare. Theyare meant to galvanize, excite, force change, and call on the clarity ofconscience. They don’t even have to be practical, as in thinking that universitydivestments from companies doing business in Israel, one of their demands, willtip Israel’s policies. What could tip Israel’s policies, imposing a modicum ofrestraint, are the Biden Administration’s recent delay in certain weaponsshipments, steps that might have been propelled partly by those students on thequads and greens.

The campus protests have amplifiedthe growing American disaffection with Israel’s unvarnished brutality against Palestiniansin Gaza, Israeli excuses and rationalizations notwithstanding. Yes, Hamas usescivilians as shields and shelters fighters in networks of tunnels, some underhospitals. Does that justify attacking the civilian shields and devastatinghospitals? Yes, Hamas smuggles weaponry into Gaza. Does that justify restrictingtrucks of food and medical supplies destined for children, women, the elderly?The “pro-Palestinian” protesters would presumably say no. “Antiwar” protesterswould presumably hold both sides in contempt.

            In true antiwar demonstrations, the symbols, thepieces of colored cloth woven into specific patterns, might be carriedtogether. In true antiwar protests, wartime grief would be common ground. The Palestinianand Israeli flags might be intertwined, perhaps even tangled. Some demonstratorsmight want to burn them, as some Vietnam era antiwar protesters burned theAmerican flag. But then, some leaders of the that antiwar movement thoughtit would be a more poignant symbol to wash the flag. What if both Israeli andPalestinian flags were washed in the middle of a college green?

 

By David K.Shipler 

            In a grisly coincidence, the UNwithin 24 hours has documented two outrages of the Israel-Gaza war that willpermanently scar the lives of those who survive: Sexual crimes by Hamas, whichprobably continue against young Israeli women who are still hostages. And severemalnutrition among tens of thousands of Palestinian children, some at criticalstages of brain development.

A team headed by the UN SpecialRepresentative on Sexual Violence in Conflict confirmed most earlier reports ofsexual assaults by Hamas fighters who invaded Israel from Gaza on October 7.But in addition, the UN task force found “clear and convincing information thatsexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture, cruel, inhuman, anddegrading treatment occurred against some women and children during their timein captivity and has reasonable grounds to believe that this violence may beongoing.” The team did not say, but everyone knows, that the deep traumasuffered by such victims is likely to be ongoing as well, perhaps lifelong.

In what might aptly be called divineinjustice, the hostages taken October 7, and evidently still being held, includeseven young female soldiers from the Nahal Oz military base, an intelligencehub. Women agents there had picked up strong indicators of the coming Hamasattack and repeatedly urged their male superior officers—in vain—to takepreventive action.

Whether the hostages are the same womenwho sounded the alarm is not publicly known, but they are from the same unit. Thatthey should suffer such intimate brutality because they or their colleagueswere ignored ought to haunt the incompetent government of Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu and its somnolent security apparatus. Furthermore, Israeliofficials have reportedly worried that Hamas would rather kill the women thanrelease them to tell the world of their torment.

At the same time, the UN’s World HealthOrganization has warned that famine is “almost inevitable,” and reported thisweek that 10 children in northern Gaza had died of starvation. Israel’sretaliatory strategy of cutting off Gaza’s two million Palestinians from mostsupplies of food, water, electricity, and medical care has taken a severe tollon health, even as sporadic, inadequate aid shipments and air drops have beenpermitted. Eventually, famine and disease are expected to cause at least asmany casualties as the 30,000 deaths Hamas has reported from Israeli bombingand ground fighting.

Here, too, the unseen impacts areinevitable. Just as post-traumatic stress disorder is a lasting condition for survivorsof sexual torture, the cognitive damage to children suffering malnutrition islikely to be lifelong. (Why this is not a routine part of the mainstreammedia’s war reporting is surprising: Neuroscientists have researched itextensively.)

At critical periods of brain development—especiallyin last two trimesters of pregnancy and the first two to three years oflife—the inadequacy of certain nutrients can inhibit the creation of neuronsand synapses, of myelin sheaths and the neurological connections that areessential to reasoning, learning, memory, and behavior in adulthood.

For at least half a century, scientistshave been documenting how the developing brain suffers from insufficient iron,iodine, folate, zinc, calcium, magnesium, selenium, and various vitamins, allfound in balanced diets of fresh fruits and vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, anddairy products. The finding is made in study after study, including thesuccinct warning in the Journal of Developmental & BehavioralPediatrics that, after age two, “the effects of malnutrition on stuntingmay be irreversible, and some of the functional deficits may become permanent.”

Longitudinal studies have shown thelifelong effects. Seventy-seven infants in Barbados, for example, hospitalizedwith protein deficiency, then received nutritious food between the ages of oneand twelve. Nevertheless, in their thirties, they had compromised “verbal fluency,working memory, processing speed, and visuospatial integration” compared to ahealthy group from the same classrooms.

Iron deficiency during pregnancy can causeserious damage to the fetus, even if the child gets adequate iron later.Without enough meat, poultry, fish, spinach, or beans, the mother and child cansuffer from anemia, which decreases the formation of the myelin sheath, whosefatty matter insulates nerve cells and helps accelerate nerve conduction.Insufficient iron affects the metabolism in the hippocampus, critical formemory, and can lead to low birth rate, which is associated with cerebral palsyand other neurological problems.

Studies following children who were anemicas infants found that years later, in school, they scored lower in math,written expression, motor functioning, spatial memory, and selective recall.

Then, too, hunger—or even the fear ofhunger—creates an additional layer of anxiety on top of the terrors of war.Learning disabilities and mental health problems result. “Learning is adiscretionary activity, after you’re well-fed, warm, secure,” said Dr. DeborahA. Frank, who founded a malnutrition clinic at the Boston Medical Center.

Persistent, elevated stress hormones havean impact on the size and architecture of the developing brain, a group of scientists reported in 2016, “specifically theamygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex.” Mental health implicationsabound: people experiencing food insecurity alone, even without warfare,display depression, PTSD, hopelessness, and suicidality.

All this is happening to innocent Palestinian childrenin Gaza as a result of Israel’s draconian strategy. And that, in turn, is theresult of Hamas’s sadistic attacks on innocent Israelis, which struck the countrywith a novel, pervasive fear of insecurity. And that, in turn is the result of. . . You can spin back through the weary history of that tortured land and tryto find the original sin that caused it all. Or you can understand that everyeffect there has a cause and no untanglement of cause and effect is feasible.

Then, having been foiled by history, you can look tothe future and understand that what lies ahead, damaged by the present, will effectivelycontinue the war’s harm for a generation or more—even if a total cease firewere declared today.