Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Donald Trump was fined $15,000 for repeatedly violating a civil court's gag order regarding attacks on court staff, but the judge might not be willing to do more than meaningless financial penalties, former Watergate prosecutor and "Sisters in Law" co-host Jill Wine-Banks said.

Wine-Banks appeared on MSNBC's Ayman on Saturday, where she was asked about the likelihood that the judge will "make good on his threat of prison time against Trump if he keeps violating this order." Trump has violated the order twice and shows "no indication that he is going to stop," the host said.

That's a position "that no judge wants to be in," according to Wine-Banks.

That's because of "the political consequences of doing it, not a legal consequences," she added.

"If this was anyone not named Donald Trump, they would have already been jailed for contempt, and for violating the law," she said. "The procedure is very clear, that when you have a gag order, it is legitimate, and it must be obeyed."

As far as whether Trump will violate again, Wine-Banks said, "There is no chance that he will not violate it again."

"And $15,000 is not going to have an impact on him. $50,000, $500,000 -- he is getting the money from his political supporters. I don't think that will stop him. The only thing that will stop him is jailing him, but that ... will cause some really awful political consequences. So, it is something that the judge has to weigh. Do I go all the way to jail? Or do i just keep raising it?"

On October 29, 1929, the U.S. stock market crashed. It had been rocked five days before, when heavy trading early in the day drove it down, but leading bankers had seen the mounting crisis and moved in to stabilize the markets before the end of the day. October 24 left small investors broken but the system intact. On Monday, October 28, the market slid again, with a key industrial average dropping 49 points.

And then, on October 29, the crisis hit. When the gong in the great hall of the New York Stock Exchange hit at ten o’clock, the market opened with heavy trading, all of it downward. When the ticker tape finally showed the day’s transactions, two and a half hours later, it documented that more than 16 million shares had changed hands and the industrial average had dropped another 43 points.

Black Tuesday was the beginning of the end. The market continued to drop. By November the industrial average stood at half of what it had been two months before. By 1932, manufacturing output was less than it had been in 1913; foreign trade plummeted from $10 billion to $3 billion in the three years after 1929, and agricultural prices fell by more than half. By 1932 a million people in New York City were out of work; by 1933, thirteen million people—one person of every four in the labor force—were unemployed. Unable to pay rent or mortgages, people lived in shelters made of packing boxes.

While the administration of Republican president Herbert Hoover preached that Americans could combat the Depression with thrift, morality, and individualism, voters looked carefully at the businessmen who only years before had seemed to be pillars of society and saw they had plundered ordinary Americans. The business boom of the 1920s had increased worker productivity by about 43%, but wages did not rise. Those profits, along with tax cuts and stock market dividends, meant that wealth moved upward: in 1929, 5% of the population received one third of the nation’s income.

In 1932, nearly 58% of voters turned to Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised them a “New Deal”: a government that would work for everyone, not just for the wealthy and well connected.

As soon as Roosevelt was in office, Democrats began to pass laws protecting workers’ rights, providing government jobs, regulating business and banking, and beginning to chip away at the racial segregation of the American South. New Deal policies employed more than 8.5 million people, built more than 650,000 miles of highways, built or repaired more than 120,000 bridges, and put up more than 125,000 buildings. They regulated banking and the stock market and gave workers the right to bargain collectively. They established minimum wages and maximum hours for work. They provided a basic social safety net and regulated food and drug safety.

When he took office in 1953, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower built on this system, adding to the nation’s infrastructure with the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which provided $25 billion to build 41,000 miles of highway across the country; adding the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to the government and calling for a national healthcare system; and nominating former Republican governor of California Earl Warren as chief justice of the Supreme Court to protect civil rights. Eisenhower also insisted on the vital importance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to stop the Soviet Union from spreading communism throughout Europe.

Eisenhower called his vision “a middle way between untrammeled freedom of the individual and the demands of the welfare of the whole Nation.” The system worked: between 1945 and 1960 the nation’s gross national product (GNP) jumped by 250%, from $200 billion to $500 billion.

But while the vast majority of Americans of both parties liked the new system that had helped the nation to recover from the Depression and to equip the Allies to win World War II, a group of Republican businessmen and their libertarian allies at places like the National Association of Manufacturers insisted that the system proved both parties had been corrupted by communism. They inundated newspapers, radio, and magazines with the message that the government must stay out of the economy to return the nation to the policies of the 1920s.

Their position got little traction until the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional. That decision enabled them to divide the American people by insisting that the popular new government simply redistributed tax dollars from hardworking white taxpayers to undeserving minorities.

A promise to cut the taxes that funded social services and the business regulations they insisted hampered business growth fueled the election of Ronald Reagan for president in 1980. But by 1986 administration officials recognized that tax cuts that were driving the deficit up despite dramatic cuts to social services were so unpopular that they needed footsoldiers to back businessmen. So, Reagan backed the creation of an organization that brought together big businessmen, evangelical Christians, and social conservatives behind his agenda. “Traditional Republican business groups can provide the resources,” leader of Americans for Tax Reform Grover Norquist explained, “but these groups can provide the votes.”

By 1989, Norquist’s friend Ralph Reed turned evangelical Christians into a permanent political pressure group. The Christian Coalition rallied evangelicals behind the Republican Party, calling for the dismantling of the post–World War II government services and protections for civil rights—including abortion—they disliked.

As Republicans could reliably turn out religious voters over abortion, that evangelical base has become more and more important to the Republican Party. Now it has put one of its own in the House Speaker’s chair, just two places from the presidency. On October 25, after three weeks of being unable to unite behind a speaker after extremists tossed out Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), the Republican conference coalesced behind Representative Mike Johnson (R-LA) in part because he was obscure enough to have avoided scrutiny.

Since then, his past has been unearthed, showing interviews in which he asserted that we do not live in a democracy but in a “Biblical republic.” He told a Fox News Channel interviewer that to discover his worldview, one simply had to “go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.”

Johnson is staunchly against abortion rights and gay rights, including same-sex marriage, and says that immigration is “the true existential threat to the country.” In a 2016 sermon he warned that the 1960s and 1970s undermined “the foundations of religion and morality in the U.S.” and that attempts to address climate change, for example, are an attempt to destroy capitalism.

Like other adherents of Christian nationalism, Johnson appears to reject the central premise of democracy: that we have a right to be treated equally before the law. And while his wife, Kelly, noted last year on a podcast that only about 4% of Americans “still adhere to a Biblical worldview,” they appear to reject the idea we have the right to a say in our government. In 2021, Johnson was a key player in the congressional attempt to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election.

In his rejection of democracy, Johnson echoes authoritarian leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, both of whom have the loyal support of America’s far right. Such leaders claim that the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy ruins nations. The welcoming of various races and ethnicities through immigration or affirmative action undermines national purity, they say, while the equality of LGBTQ+ individuals and women undermines morality. Johnson has direct ties to these regimes: his 2018 campaign accepted money from a group of Russian nationals, and he has said he does not support additional funding for Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression.

The rejection of democracy in favor of Christian authoritarianism at the highest levels of our government is an astonishing outcome of the attempt to prevent another Great Depression by creating a government that worked for ordinary Americans rather than a few wealthy men.

But here we are.

After Johnson’s election as speaker, extremist Republican Matt Gaetz of Florida spelled out what it meant for the party…and for the country: “MAGA is ascendant,” Gaetz told former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, “and if you don’t think that moving from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this movement, and where the power of the Republican Party truly lies, then you’re not paying attention.”

Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official in the Trump administration and the author of the new book BLOWBACK: A Warning to Save Democracy From the Next Trump (Atria, 335 pp., $30), made his dramatic entrance in 2018 with an anonymous essay for The New York Times entitled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” In it, he heralded the “unsung heroes” who were “working diligently from within” to impede Trump’s “worst inclinations.” The following year, having resigned from the D.H.S., Taylor published “A Warning,” also under the moniker “Anonymous.” Finally, in 2020, Taylor criticized Trump under his own name, endorsed Joe Biden and identified himself as “Anonymous.”


Taylor now provides a more detailed accounting of the chaos inside the White House. Some of his allegations — that the Trump aide Stephen Miller wanted to blow up migrants with a predator drone; that the former White House chief of staff John Kelly described the president as a “very, very evil man” in response to Trump’s sexual comments about his daughter Ivanka — have made headlines and prompted some denials.

The reference to “the next Trump” in the subtitle is already moot (we’re still dealing with the original one), but “Blowback” is bedeviled by a bigger problem: The more we learn of the outrageous behavior behind closed doors, the more enraging it is that Taylor — and his allies among the “axis of adults” — failed to speak out sooner. In 2018, after a particularly deranged set of phone calls about the so-called migrant caravan, Taylor told Kelly that things were getting really messed up. I wanted to shake him. Yes, Miles, it was getting pretty messed up.

To Taylor’s credit, “Blowback” is full of regret. The 2018 opinion piece, while gutsy, was a sly justification for silence. By book’s end, Taylor has decided that anonymity itself, the mask he wore for years, “symbolizes the greatest threat to democracy.” The most moving passages in the book are those in which Taylor wrestles not with political monsters, but with his own demons. The mask of anonymity is entwined with his alcoholism; his recovery only arrived when he spoke truthfully in his own name. Taylor describes how falsity gnaws at the soul. Courage doesn’t always come on time, but as many an addict has ruefully remarked, it’s better late than never.

The former Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger — one of 10 Republicans to vote for Trump’s second impeachment and one of two to serve on the House’s Jan. 6 committee — is a late-breaking hero of the anti-Trump cause. RENEGADE: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country (The Open Field, 295 pp., $30) tracks Kinzinger’s childhood in the 1980s, his Air Force career, his six terms in Congress and his disillusionment with Trump’s Republican Party.

Alas, it has none of “Blowback”’s redeeming anguish. Even Kinzinger’s sporadic insights about the roots of Trumpism (e.g. in the Tea Party) serve less to implicate the pre-Trump G.O.P. than to flatter Adam Kinzinger, who always appears presciently distressed by the intransigent drift of his own party.


“Renegade” has applause lines for Kinzinger’s new liberal fans — he describes the senator and presidential aspirant Ted Cruz as an “oily, sneering manipulator” with a “punchable face” — and he adds some (unrevelatory) texture to the cowardice and bullying displayed by his colleagues. Kevin McCarthy, Kinzinger writes, behaved “like an attention-seeking high school senior who readily picked on anyone who didn’t fall in line” when he was minority leader. Twice after Kinzinger turned on Trump, he reports, McCarthy shoulder-checked him in the House chamber. (A spokesman for McCarthy has dismissed such criticism from Kinzinger as “unhinged tirades.”)

What “Renegade” resembles most of all — down to its professional co-authoring by the award-winning journalist Michael D’Antonio — is a campaign book in search of a campaign. When Kinzinger announced his retirement in 2021, he said, “This isn’t the end of my political future, but the beginning.” Still, it’s difficult to imagine what sort of future that might be — unless Kinzinger gets much better at persuading other Republicans to join him out in the cold. “Renegade,” a book primarily about how much nobler Kinzinger is than his former colleagues, is unlikely to do the trick.

Russell Moore’s LOSING OUR RELIGION: An Altar Call for Evangelical America (Sentinel, 256 pp., $29) is another book about a conservative suffering exile from his tribe for turning on Donald Trump.

It is far more interesting, however, because Moore — the editor in chief of Christianity Today and a former bigwig in the 13-million-member Southern Baptist Convention — remains a dedicated evangelical. His “altar call” is addressed to fellow believers; to leaders of congregations riven by conflict; to pastors, like himself, whose theology is orthodox but whose politics, by Trump-era standards, are liberal; to churchgoers who’ve lost faith in their church but not in Jesus Christ. It is a startlingly open, honest and humble book, a soulful, fraternal entreaty for integrity, repair and renewal.


Taylor and Kinzinger, putatively trying to convince readers to take the danger of Trump seriously, adopt a tone that is only tolerable if you already agree with them. Their books, in other words, are most likely to appeal to liberals eager for apostates from conservatism to flatter their anti-Trump indignation. By literally “preaching to the choir,” Moore, on the other hand, ironically avoids preaching to it figuratively.

He is better equipped to lovingly cajole, carefully critique and persuade his readers, because he speaks to his audience in their own idiom, relying on theological concepts that hold particular potency for his fellow congregants, especially those who find themselves called to decry an evil they fear they have abetted.

He is also sympathetic to the ways in which belligerent Trumpism can seduce Christian conservatives; it satisfies many of the same longings that religion does. “There is more than one way for you to secularize,” Moore writes. “All it takes is substituting adrenaline for the Holy Spirit, political ‘awakening’ for rebirth, quarrelsomeness for sanctification and a visible tribal identity for the kingdom of God.”

Most of all, Moore resists the impulse to try to beat Trump at his own game. So many prophets of Trumpian doom respond to the former president’s howling narcissism with a narcissism of their own, implicitly ratifying Trump’s most noxious conceit: that he alone can fix it. But our moment calls for less heroism than humility; fewer grand self-portraits and more intimate self-searching.

Andrew Desiderio @AndrewDesiderio
BREAKING — The Senate Judiciary Committee will vote as soon as next week to issue subpoenas as part of its Supreme Court ethics investigation, Chair Durbin announces.

Subpoena targets:
—Harlan Crow
—Leonard Leo
—Robin Arkley II

Significant escalation of Dem-led probe. More TK.
4:40 PM · Oct 30, 2023

Meet America’s new Speaker of the House. Mike Johnson, a died in the wool fanatic, crackpot, and full on theocrat. Or is the new Speaker of the House…Donald Trump? What does it mean to see democracy in these dire straits, and how narrow and turbulent are they, anyways?

Remember when America’s Republicans threatened to install Donald Trump as Speaker of the House, after failing to “overturn” the last election? Striding around any semblance of procedure, since he’s not a Member of Congress…just…installing him? It might be too much to say: “for all intents and purposes, Trump is now Speaker of the House.” But let’s think about it in percentage terms. Mike Johnson is to Donald Trump what a steering wheel is to a getaway driver. A tool. He was a chief architect of attempts to subvert the election. It’s fair to say that Johnson’s going to be taking marching orders from Trump. And in that respect, is Trump now…50% Speaker of the House? 65%? 75%?

What does this all mean? How bad is it to have a Speaker of the House like this, anyways? By this, of course, I mean the quotes that set the internet on fire with outrage, disgust, a kind of morbid glee (“Yes, the GOP really is this crazy”) recently. Here’s just a taste of some of the headlines.

New House speaker Mike Johnson praised ‘18th-century values’ in speech. “Johnson called homosexuality a “inherently unnatural” and “dangerous lifestyle” that would lead to legalized pedophilia and possibly even destroy “the entire democratic system.” “Experts project that homosexual marriage is the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.” Here he is blaming abortion for…school shootings: “Many women use abortion as a form of birth control, you know, in certain segments of society, and it’s just shocking and sad, but this is where we are. When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it’s expendable, then you do wind up with school shooters.”

Whew. Go ahead and hold your head in hands, because this is Defcon Level One Lunacy. How did Mike Johnson—a veritable nobody—ascend to one of the most powerful political positions in the world? Because there was nobody else left. After a month of chaos, the GOP was left unable to choose a Speaker of the House, fanatics pitted against extremists. Finally, wearily, options exhausted, Johnson was the last man standing.

So here we see something notable: a nobody ascending to the heights of power. But a nobody of a certain kind. A hardcore fanatic—asked about his worldview, he says: “read the Bible.” A true extremist—remember, overthrowing the election. And a full on lunatic, who appears to really believe stuff like “same sex marriage will doom civilization.” How bad is that for a democracy? For a country?

Really, really bad. Mike Johnson is Trumpism’s Revenge. Maybe even that’s not fully accurate: he’s Trump’s revenge, too.

Why is this so bad? The Speaker of the House has very real powers. It’s hardly just a ceremonial position. Here, let’s take it straight from the source:

💡 House Practice: A Guide to the Rules, Precedents and Procedures of the House

Chapter 34. Office of the Speaker

"The Speaker is the presiding officer of the House and is charged with numerous duties and responsibilities by law and by the House rules. As the presiding officer of the House, the Speaker maintains order, manages its proceedings, and governs the administration of its business. Manual Sec. 622; Deschler Ch 6 Sec. Sec. 2-8. The major functions of the Speaker with respect to the consideration of measures on the floor include recognizing Members who seek to address the House (Manual Sec. 949), construing and applying the House rules (Manual Sec. 627), and putting the question on matters arising on the floor to a vote (Manual Sec. 630).

The Speaker's role as presiding officer is an impartial one, and his rulings serve to protect the rights of the minority. 88-1, June 4, 1963, pp 10151-65. In seeking to protect the interests of the minority, he has even asked unanimous consent that an order of the House be vacated where the circumstances so required. 89-1, May 18, 1965, p 10871."

—From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov

So the Speaker sets the agenda for governing…the country, by ordering the House’s proceedings. That goes right down to swearing in Congress. Then he administers governance procedurally, recognizing who gets called, calling for votes, managing debates, and so forth. During all of that, the Speaker’s supposed to be impartial, and “protect the rights of the minority.”

Go ahead and laugh-cry into your beer, coffee, and or wine. Do you really think that a guy who attempted to overthrow the last election is going to…do you really think a guy that thinks minorities are literally the devil...is going “protect the rights” of any minority?

So what you’ve probably already thought—and then dismissed, and maybe even scolded yourself for thinking it—is eminently true. Here we have something like Donald Trump’s brain in a body called “Mike Johnson.” Johnson appears to be completely incapable, notably, of forming a single independent thought—it’s either God or Trump calling the shots, and to many Trumpists, they’re more or less the same thing.

I’m not just slinging mud—let’s put all that more formally.

Here we have the hardening of social collapse. Mike Johnson is an aspiring theocrat par excellence, a figure who appears not to believe in modern freedoms at all. Worse, he’s a lieutenant for a demagogue and helped launch the last coup, the first in American history, and which came within a hair’s breadth of succeeding.

Way back when, as America went from crumbling to collapsing, I used to warn, as many of you did, too, that what we didn’t want to see was the hardening of collapse. What does that mean? In the early phases of social collapse—let’s call it Phase One—various kinds of authoritarians jockey for power. Fascists, theocrats, fanatics, conspiracists, lunatics, militants. It’s at that stage that intervention is already desperately required, because what happens in Phase Two is that these different groups begin to form coalitions. And in Phase Three, having formed coalitions, they ascend to power, and use—abuse—power, over and over again, to gain absolute control over a society.

America’s now in Phase Three. In Johnson and Trump we see theocracy and fascism joining hands in the service of authoritarianism. Remember, Trump already has a plan, as in, a literal hundreds-of-pages-long one, to fundamentally reshape governance. That’s an anodyne way to put it. “Plan 2025” basically calls for the gutting of American governance, replacing civil servants with Trump loyalists, making people take loyalty tests, and reorienting government towards a model based on shadow institutions. That means that, for example, “don’t say gay” becomes the point of whatever’s left of a Department of Education, not…education. Orwell rises from the dead. Think Ministry of Truth, Justice, and Peace.

One of the worst things a society can see happen to itself is for admixtures of strains of collapse to emerge. Toxic cocktails and poisonous, surreal blends. Of fascism and theocracy. Theocracy and conspiracy. Fanaticism and militancy. Extremism and bigotry and zealotry. Here we see the rise of a particular admixture that’s one of the most fatal of all: fascism, theocracy, and militancy. All oriented towards a shared goal: authoritarianism, for which there’s already a literal plan, to…

Finish the job. What happens at the end of Phase Three of social collapse? Implosion does. The coalition of the crazy and the cruel seizes absolute power, after failed coup attempts (check), forming coalitions (check), drafting sophisticated plans (check), and learning from their mistakes the first few times around (check). Having joined together, the whole is stronger than the mere sum of the parts. Democratic collapse ensues.

That's how dire the straits are that America’s in. A fanatic like Johnson rising to power, from being a mere nobody, in the service of Trumpism, with a careful agenda behind it, to literally collapse democracy the day after the next election—this is the toxic admixture of theocracy, militancy, and fascism in plain sight. I’m sorry to have say it, and to put it so bluntly, but nobody should doubt the stakes. Yes, it’s really that bad.

And it’s easy to see, how a figure like a fanatical, militant, theocratic Speaker of the House can easily influence politics towards that outcome, too. It’s within his power to do anything from refusing to swear people in to refusing to call Congress to session to ignoring the opposition to more or less kind of interference, withholding, machination, and delaying tactic under the sun. What happens if the Speaker, for example…refuses to…begin the certification of the next set of Presidential votes? Of course, in that case, things head to the Supreme Court. Another institution packed with theocrats, lunatics, and crackpots, legitimacy shattered, precisely because nobody much trusts it to safeguard democracy or the people anymore.

The simplest way to think about all the above is through the lens of risk. It's not that the above is inevitably going to happen. But it is very much the case that risk just took quantum leap to a whole new level. The risk of democratic implosion, of social collapse going all the way, sovereign, country, political risk, if you're into the way that economists put it, which just means: yes, this is bad.

I think it's pretty amazing that the "big 3" settled with the autoworkers. I thought they might try to wait it out and weaken the union going forward. Of course, the agreement still must be ratified. Management was saying that they couldn't afford to pay the higher wages and still invest in new technology. Will auto prices climb even higher now? Lower priced, fuel efficient, smaller cars don't seem to be in the plan. Most of the electric vehicles are pretty high-end. And the stupid trucks just keep getting bigger.

This guy is a movement conservativism cartoon character.

Lower priced, fuel efficient, smaller cars don't seem to be in the plan.

And the stupid trucks just keep getting bigger.

No Endgame In Gaza

If war is supposed to be the continuation of politics by other means, Israel’s assault on Gaza seems to be the continuation by other means of the absence of politics. It does not seem that Israel understands what its endgame is. Without a clear sense of an ending, there can be no answer to the most crucial moral and strategic question: When is enough enough? Even in the crudely mathematical logic of vengeance, the blood price for Hamas’s appalling atrocities of October 7 has long since been paid. The body count—if that is to be the measure of retribution—has mounted far beyond the level required for an equality of suffering. Yet it appears to have no visible ceiling. What factor must Jewish deaths be multiplied by? When, as W.B. Yeats asked in a different conflict, may it suffice?

“Enough” is the word that Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel’s prime minister, stressed in his remarkable speech of September 1993 at the signing of the Oslo Accords:

Quote:

We who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today in a loud and a clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough… We are today giving peace a chance and saying to you and saying again to you: Enough.

Enough is a both a political goal and an ethical limit. Without the first, it is hard to set the second. To know how far you can go, you have to know where you want to get to. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government seems to know neither.

There has been much fine reporting on the dreadful intelligence failures that allowed the massacres of October 7 to happen. But they in turn arise from something much deeper: a cognitive failure. There has been a literal false sense of security. Rabin, in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1994, spelled out in the clearest terms the impossibility of security without peace: “There is only one radical means of sanctifying human lives. Not armored plating, or tanks, or planes, or concrete fortifications. The one radical solution is peace.”

Peacemaking is a political process. Wars may shape the circumstances in which it is done, but they do not make it happen. Rabin, one of Israel’s most accomplished warriors, understood that truth. With his assassination and Netanyahu’s rise, it was deliberately unlearned. Politics—the negotiation of a just settlement with the Palestinians—was abandoned and replaced by the illusion that security could indeed be created and maintained by planes, tanks, fortifications, and surveillance technology. That illusion has died a terrible death, but it retains a zombie existence. It persists because the first condition of a return to politics would be the admission that Netanyahu’s whole approach has been a disaster, not just for the Palestinians, but for Israel.

*

Israel has already tried two radically different strategies in Gaza. The first was a familiar military and political orthodoxy: conquest and colonization. Gaza, having belonged to the Ottoman empire and then to the British mandate in Palestine, was governed by Egypt after 1948, though neither its traditional residents nor the large refugee population were granted Egyptian citizenship. After its capture by Israel in 1956, Gaza was quickly returned to Egyptian control, but following its reconquest in the Six-Day War of 1967, the territory was ruled by an Israeli military governor for almost forty years. (Civil control of Gaza City was transferred to the Palestinian Authority in 1994.) In the late 1970s the right-wing government of Menachem Begin imagined that this rule could be made permanent and stable if enough Jews were settled in the territory. Eventually, 8,500 Jewish people did settle in Gaza—a number large enough to create a sense of existential threat for Palestinians but too small to be able to control the strip. Israel needed three thousand soldiers to protect these 8,500 Jews. In the second intifada it lost 230 of those soldiers.

Ariel Sharon’s decision in 2005 to end the military occupation and forcibly withdraw the settlements was not a wild caprice. It was a recognition of reality: the post-1967 attempt at colonization could not be sustained. By occupying Gaza, Israel had gained nothing and lost soldiers, money, and international goodwill. It’s worth recalling that Netanyahu supported the withdrawal for sound policy reasons before he opposed it for cynical political ones.

It was not for nothing that in 2014, when Hamas was firing rockets into Israel, Netanyahu did not support demands from his own foreign minister Avigdor Liberman for a military reconquest and reoccupation of Gaza. Netanyahu, when running for election, made aggressive noises about Hamas, claiming in 2008 that “We will finish the job. We will topple the terror regime of Hamas.” But this was utterly deceitful. Netanyahu never wanted to topple the Hamas regime. He wanted to retain the threat that he might do it as a rhetorical trope, a furious sound that signified nothing. It is this empty vessel that Netanyahu is now seeking to fill with meaning and purpose—and with blood.

*

For Israel’s real alternative to military occupation and colonization was Hamas itself. The religious fundamentalists—committed to extreme antisemitism and the extinction of Israel—could be used to undermine the Palestine Liberation Organization and, after 2005, to keep the Palestinian movement divided between Gaza and the West Bank. The strangeness of this approach lay not only in the illusion that a jihadist movement could ever be, in practical effect, an ally of Israel, but in the weird form of war it created. Since Hamas would continue to attack Israel, Israel would continue to retaliate. The retaliatory attacks would be bloody and often horrific in their toll of civilian casualties. But they would be calibrated so as to ensure that Hamas stayed in power in Gaza.

A review of Israel’s Gaza wars between 2009 and 2014, commissioned by the US military from the RAND Corporation and published in 2017, pointed out that this was warfare specifically designed not to defeat the enemy:

Quote:

Israel never strived for a decisive victory in Gaza. While it could militarily defeat Hamas, Israel could not overthrow Hamas without risking the possibility that a more radical organization would govern Gaza. Nor did Israel want to be responsible for governing Gaza in a postconflict power vacuum.

Implicit in this policy of repeatedly attacking a regime with overwhelming firepower while not wanting victory over it was the impossibility of an endgame. There would be no peace but also no decisive war. Even if thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of Israelis died in these sporadic eruptions of extreme violence, their purpose was to maintain this brutality at what RAND calls a “manageable” level.

The idea of controlled carnage ended in the unrestrained slaughter of October 7. Netanyahu was forced to abandon overnight the scheme that had been the touchstone of his whole approach to the Palestinian question: keeping Hamas strong enough to deny authority to the Palestinian Authority, but weak enough to pose no more than a sporadic and limited threat to Israeli citizens.

The failure of Israel’s Plan A was acknowledged with its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. The even more catastrophic collapse of Plan B has been conceded, as it had to be, after Hamas’s attacks destroyed the illusion of literal and political containment. But the only response of which Netanyahu seems capable is a completely incoherent mix of Plan A and Plan B. There will be, for an unknown period, a military occupation. But it will end in some kind of reversion to the situation that followed the 2005 withdrawal: power without responsibility. Israel will exert complete power over Gaza. But it will take no responsibility for Gaza. This is not a plan. It is a fusion of two failures.

Military occupation did not work when Gaza had a smaller Palestinian population, when its cities were not reduced to wreckage, and when there was one fewer generation raised on hopelessness and hatred. No one really seems to think it can work now. Likewise, the belief that Gaza could be controlled from the outside by an Israeli government that had no accountability to its people and no sense of obligation for their welfare, and that could insulate itself from the consequent suffering, has proved to be a calamity. The notion that the broken shards of these two collapsed strategies can be glued together to create what Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant calls “a new security regime” has no credibility.

Bombs and tanks do not answer questions. Who is to govern Gaza if not Hamas or Israel itself? Does Israel really think that somebody else—either an international consortium or a Palestinian puppet regime—will sail into a blood-soaked hellscape of rubble and dust, inhabited by traumatized survivors, and take responsibility for rebuilding, policing, and governing it? How is Israel going to make the kind of peace with its immediate neighbors without which the security of its citizens cannot be rebuilt?

While these political questions go unanswered, so do the moral ones. How many deaths are too many? How are obligations to international law and common decency going to be fulfilled in dense streets crowded with children, women, the elderly, and the sick? What is the “self” in Israel’s “self-defense”? Does it see its true image in this bloodletting? Can it imagine a life beyond revenge?