US health system ranks last compared with peer nations, report finds
Despite Americans paying nearly double that of other nations, the US fares poorly in list of 10 countries
The United States health system ranked dead last in an international comparison of 10 peer nations, according to a new report by the Commonwealth Fund.
In spite of Americans paying nearly double that of other countries, the system performed poorly on health equity, access to care and outcomes.
“I see the human toll of these shortcomings on a daily basis,” said Dr Joseph Betancourt, the president of the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation with a focus on healthcare research and policy.
“I see patients who cannot afford their medications … I see older patients arrive sicker than they should because they spent the majority of their lives uninsured,” said Betancourt. “It’s time we finally build a health system that delivers quality affordable healthcare for all Americans.”
However, even as high healthcare prices bite into workers’ paychecks, the economy and inflation dominate voters’ concerns. Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump has proposed major healthcare reforms.
The Democratic presidential nominee has largely reframed healthcare as an economic issue, promising medical debt relief while highlighting the Biden administration’s successes, such as Medicare drug price negotiations.
The Republican presidential nominee said he has “concepts of a plan” to improve healthcare, but has made no proposals. The conservative policy agenda Project 2025 has largely proposed gutting scientific and public health infrastructure.
However, when asked about healthcare issues, voters overwhelmingly ranked cost at the top. The cost of drugs, doctors and insurance are the top issue for Democrats (42%) and Republicans (45%), according to Kaiser Family Foundation health system polling. Americans spend $4.5tn per year on healthcare, or more than $13,000 per person per year on healthcare, according to federal government data.
The Commonwealth Fund’s report is the 20th in their “Mirror, Mirror” series, an international comparison of the US health system to nine wealthy democracies including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the UK, Sweden and Switzerland. The foundation calls this year’s report a “portrait of a failing US health system”.
The report uses 70 indicators from across five main sectors, including access to care, health equity, care process, administrative efficiency and outcomes. The measures are derived from a survey conducted by Commonwealth as well as publicly available measures from the World Health Organization, OECD and Our World in Data.
In all but “care process” – the domain that covers issues such as reconciling medications – the US ranked as the last or penultimate nation. Presenters for Commonwealth noted the US is often “in a class of its own” far below the nearest peer nation.
“Poverty, homelessness, hunger, discrimination, substance abuse – other countries don’t make their health systems work so hard,” said Reginald D Williams II, vice-president of the fund. He said most peer nations cover more of their citizens’ basic needs. “Too many individuals in the US face a lifetime of inequity, it doesn’t have to be this way.”
But recommendations to improve the US health system’s standing among peer nations will not be easy to implement.
The fund said the US would need to expand insurance coverage and make “meaningful” improvements on the amount of healthcare expenses patients pay themselves; minimize the complexity and variation in insurance plans to improve administrative efficiency; build a viable primary care and public health system; and invest in social wellbeing, rather than thrust problems of social inequity onto the health system.
“I don’t expect we will in one fell swoop rewrite the social contract,” said Dr David Blumenthal, the fund’s past president and an author of the report. “The American electorate makes choices about which direction to move in, and that is very much an issue in this election.”
Today, at a White House reception in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, President Joe Biden said: "We don't demonize immigrants. We don't single them out for attacks. We don't believe they're poisoning the blood of the country. We're a nation of immigrants, and that's why we're so damn strong."
Biden’s celebration of the country’s heritage might have doubled as a celebration of the success of his approach to piloting the economy out of the ravages of the pandemic. Today the Fed cut interest rates a half a point, a dramatic cut indicating that it considers inflation to be under control. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has maintained that it would be possible to slow inflation without causing a recession—a so-called soft landing—and she appears to have been vindicated.
Federal Reserve chief Jerome Powell said: “The labor market is in solid condition, and our intention with our policy move today is to keep it there. You can say that about the whole economy: The US economy is in good shape. It’s growing at a solid pace, inflation is coming down. The labor market is at a strong pace. We want to keep it there. That’s what we’re doing.”
Powell, whom Trump first appointed to his position, said, “We do our work to serve all Americans. We’re not serving any politician, any political figure, any cause, any issue, nothing. It’s just maximum employment and price stability on behalf of all Americans.”
Powell was anticipating accusations from Trump that his cutting of rates was an attempt to benefit Harris before the election. Indeed, Jeff Stein of the Washington Post reported that Trump advisor Steven Moore called the move “jaw-dropping. There's no reason they couldn't do 25 now and 25 right after the election. Why not wait till then?” Moore added, "I'm not saying [the] reduction isn't justified—it may well be and they have more data than I do. But i just think, 'why now?’” Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville called the cut “shamelessly political.”
The New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch noted that “Trump has been begging officials worldwide not to do the right thing for years to help rig the election for him—no deal in Gaza, no defense of Ukraine, no Kremlin hostages release, no border deal, no continuing resolution, no interest rate cuts etc—just sabotage & subterfuge.”
That impulse to focus on regaining power rather than serving the country was at least part of what was behind Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s lie about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. That story has gotten even darker as it turns out Vance and Trump received definitive assurances on September 9 that the rumor was false, but Trump ran with it in the presidential debate of September 10 anyway. Now, although it has been made very clear—including by Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine—that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield are there legally, Vance told a reporter today that he personally considers the programs under which they came illegal, so he is still “going to call [a Haitian migrant] an illegal alien.”
The lies about those immigrants have so derailed the Springfield community with bomb threats and public safety concerns that when the Trump campaign suggested Trump was planning a visit there, the city’s Republican mayor, Rob Rue, backed by DeWine, threw cold water on the idea. “It would be an extreme strain on our resources. So it’d be fine with me if they decided not to make that visit,” Rue said. Nonetheless, tonight, Trump told a crowd in Long Island, New York, that he will go to Springfield within the next two weeks.
The false allegation against Haitian immigrants has sparked outrage, but it has accomplished one thing for the campaign, anyway: it has gotten Trump at least to speak about immigration—which was the issue they planned to campaign on—rather than Hannibal Lecter, electric boats, and sharks, although he continues to insist that “everyone is agreeing that I won the Debate with Kamala.” Trump, Vance, and Republican lawmakers are now talking more about policies.
In the presidential debate of September 10, Trump admitted that after nine years of promising he would release a new and better healthcare plan than the Affordable Care Act in just a few weeks, all he really had were “concepts of a plan.” Vance has begun to explain to audiences that he intends to separate people into different insurance pools according to their health conditions and risk levels. That business model meant that insurers could refuse to insure people with pre-existing conditions, and overturning it was a key driver of the ACA.
Senate and House Republicans told Peter Sullivan of Axios that if they regain control of the government, they will work to get rid of the provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that permits the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices. Negotiations on the first ten drugs, completed in August, will lower the cost of those drugs enough to save taxpayers $6 billion a year, while those enrolled in Medicare will save $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket expenses.
Yesterday Trump promised New Yorkers that he would restore the state and local tax deduction (SALT) that he himself capped at $10,000 in his 2017 tax cuts. In part, the cap was designed to punish Democratic states that had high taxes and higher government services, but now he wants to appeal to voters in those same states. On CNBC, host Joe Kernan pointed out that this would blow up the deficit, but House speaker Mike Johnson said that the party would nonetheless consider such a measure because it would continue to stand behind less regulation and lower taxes.
In a conversation with Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his former press secretary, Trump delivered another stream of consciousness commentary in which he appeared to suggest that he would lower food prices by cutting imports. Economics professor Justin Wolfers noted: “I'm exhausted even saying it, but blocking supply won't reduce prices, and it's not even close.” Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark added, “Tell me more about why you have to vote for Trump because of his ‘policies.’”
Trump has said he supports in vitro fertilization, or IVF, as have a number of Republican lawmakers, but today, 44 Republican senators once again blocked the Senate from passing a measure protecting it. The procedure is in danger from state laws establishing “fetal personhood,” which give a fertilized egg all the rights of a human being as established by the Fourteenth Amendment. That concept is in the 2024 Republican Party platform.
Trump has also demanded that Republicans in Congress shut down the government unless a continuing resolution to fund the government contains the so-called SAVE Act requiring people to show proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Speaker Johnson continues to suggest that undocumented immigrants vote in elections, but it is illegal for even documented noncitizens to do so, and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the nonprofit American Immigration Council notes that even the right-wing Heritage Foundation has found only 12 cases of such illegal voting in the past 40 years.
Johnson brought the continuing resolution bill with the SAVE Act up for a vote today. It failed by a vote of 202 to 220. If the House and then the Senate don’t pass a funding bill, the government will shut down on October 1.
Republican endorsements of the Harris-Walz ticket continue to pile up. On Monday, six-term representative Bob Inglis (R-SC) told the Charleston City Paper that “Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to the republic” and said he would vote for Harris. “If Donald Trump loses, that would be a good thing for the Republican Party,” Inglis said. “Because then we could have a Republican rethink and get a correction.”
George W. Bush’s attorney general Alberto Gonzales, conservative columnist George Will, more than 230 former officials for presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and 17 former staff members for Ronald Reagan have all recently added their names to the list of those supporting Harris. Today more than 100 Republican former members of Congress and national security officials who served in Republican administrations endorsed Harris, saying they “firmly oppose the election of Donald Trump.” They cited his chaotic governance, his praising of enemies and undermining allies, his politicizing the military and disparaging veterans, his susceptibility to manipulation by Russian president Vladimir Putin, and his attempt to overthrow democracy. They praised Harris for her consistent championing of “the rule of law, democracy, and our constitutional principles.”
Yesterday, singer-songwriters Billie Eilish, who has 119 million followers on Instagram, and Finneas, who has 4.2 million, asked people to register and to vote for Harris and Walz. “Vote like your life depends on it,” Eilish said, “because it does.”
Yuval is popular and I've enjoyed his interviews lately. His scientific research has been criticized however – here's an example from Current Affairs:
The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari
Definitely not me.
In his latest book, “Nexus,” the historian examines the history of information networks and the challenges posed by the AI revolution.
Review by Justin Smith-Ruiu
September 11, 2024 at 9:00 a.m. EDT
A curious blind spot limits the persuasiveness of many recent books warning of the threats and challenges of our AI revolution: They consistently fail to acknowledge the extent to which they are themselves already reflective of the automation of so much of contemporary life. Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book is no exception, as indeed at several points it betrays what at least looks to be an assembly-line process behind its creation.
I do not know how many humans, machines or collectivities of both had a hand in bringing Harari’s “Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI” into the world in its final form. But it does not give the overall impression of having been produced by a singular mind, laboring away in seclusion to deliver to the world its original insights.
That said, the elevator pitch version of the book is a good one: It is a history of human information networks, broadly conceived to include communication forms from text messages to smoke signals, markings on cave walls, and indeed face-to-face speech or gesture. This history is related from a perspective sufficiently zoomed out to reveal both the real continuities and the surprising discontinuities between, say, cuneiform clay tablets and iPhones. Harari ultimately comes around to laying out his concerns about the rise of AI, but it’s never totally clear what worries him, even if he frets that whatever it is threatens to change the nature of human consciousness for the worse.
This latest book builds, of course, on Harari’s string of tremendous successes, and it surely is a reflection of this success that the latest offering has the air of a big-budget production with several hands contributing to its manufacture. Harari, a scholar of the Middle Ages by training, has largely cornered the market on popular explorations of “big history,” a trend within academic history that does not limit itself to expertise and close reading of archival sources from a narrow period, but rather considers all of human history within its vastly larger context, which includes not just the prehistory of Homo sapiens but also primate evolution, the origins of life and even the big bang. Harari’s previous work, especially “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” (2011), has excelled in delivering to a mass readership some idea of how much we share with human beings vastly removed from us in time. With “Nexus,” Harari’s purpose is to look at humanity’s future prospects, which are, he believes, significantly compromised by our most recent information technologies.
In the book’s opening section, Harari sets out to refute what he calls the “naive view of information.” This is the idea that when humans gather more information, they have a greater share of truth, which will in turn bring them greater wisdom and greater power. To the contrary, Harari argues, there is no correlation at all between information, truth and the ability to hold sway over other people. What binds human information networks together is not primarily the truth but stories. This is why religions have been so successful over the millennia, even if they seem ripe for disproving. Religions “work” not because they convey the truth but because they keep a large and often widely dispersed network of people connected, both to one another and to the story they all tell.
The history of information revolutions bears this thesis out. A naive information theorist might suppose that the Gutenberg revolution led to a sharp decrease in the circulation of misinformation. Yet it did no such thing, Harari writes. While it did enable the publication of scientific treatises, it also facilitated the spread of wild conspiracy theories, futile sectarian hairsplitting and such travesties as the early modern European witch hunts.
This attempt at a grand history of narrative begins to break down, however, when Harari insists on understanding narrative in biological terms. Harari has been much criticized, especially in academic circles, for repeating the great sin of E.O. Wilson, Jared Diamond and others: In their eagerness to portray human individuals and human society as part of a natural world that includes, for example, ants, they understand human morality as little more than a secondary consequence of strictly natural forces at work at a deeper level.
There is much in “Nexus” that seems to justify this association. In one particularly weak section, Harari cites animal precedents for many classic human myths and folk tales. It is true that the strongest of a batch of tiger shark fetuses will devour its siblings in utero — adelphophagy, it’s called. But Harari takes such scientific observations as a reason to conclude that stories such as the Ramayana that feature sibling rivalry may appropriately be described as “biological dramas.” One might just as easily look at the phenomenon of “loon fallout,” where migratory birds sometimes fall from the sky to their death as a result of challenging atmospheric conditions, and conclude that the Sandra Bullock film “Gravity” (2013), about a space vessel in orbit being pulled perilously down to Earth, is likewise a “biological” and a “physical” drama.
Indeed, pretty much anything that happens to, or is done by, a human being has analogues in the animal and broader natural world. But what a story is, and the reason we tell stories, cannot be captured by appeals to biology, or indeed to the physics of planetary gravitation. The difference between a tiger shark eating its siblings and a human committing fratricide is that the latter is inevitably followed by court proceedings, memoirs, conversations with kin. This is what makes human fratricide into “fratricide,” while using that word in reference to tiger sharks is only a façon de parler. This is also, though Harari does not seem to see it, what matters in the stories he calls “biological dramas,” and it is also the thing that matters in stories that have no obvious animal counterpart.
Harari’s view grows more muddled still when he takes up the question of artificial intelligence. For him, Assyrian clay tablets, Gutenberg’s presses and all the other information technologies that have brought us to the present moment could record and propagate only the information that humans wished to see recorded and propagated. By contrast, Harari maintains, AI itself “decides” what information circulates through our networks.
The notion of “decision” is central to his argument. In a key chapter opening Part II, “The New Members: How Computers Are Different From Printing Presses,” Harari uses “decision,” in its noun or verb form, upward of 13 times, by my count, to describe what machines now do, as well as related terms such as “choose” and “act.” This vocabulary implies that computers possess what philosophers call “intentionality” — the capability to follow courses of action that emerge from within themselves rather than from external mechanical pressures or from algorithmic “if-then’s.”
Eventually, seven pages into the chapter, Harari does acknowledge that some readers will have a problem with his decision to describe the way machines act as essentially identical to the way humans do. But he bites the bullet confidently — I suppose to his credit, in a perverse way — and simply insists that any purported difference here is an illusion. After all, he notes, “human soldiers are shaped by their genetic code and follow orders issued by executives, yet they can still make independent decisions.”
That’s a pretty quick and easy way to dispatch the enormous problem of the differences between human agency and machine intelligence. No matter what your theory of where morality comes from, it is a fact that we regularly put on trial soldiers who commit massacres, and the language used to describe what they have done is laden with moral notions such as culpability. If an AI were to cause a massacre, it would, by contrast — one hopes — simply be decommissioned. At worst, the humans who developed it might face prosecution.
Reading Harari, I sometimes thought of Henry Miller’s very different book titled “Nexus.” To a friend who had harshly criticized the trilogy of which “Nexus” is a part, Miller replied: “If it was not good, it was true.” Miller has in mind here the sort of “truth” that is experienced as an inner feeling and that attaches to the hard work of honestly exploring one’s own depths. This is work that no machine has yet given any evidence of being able to perform.
This great difference between human beings and machines — that we can look within while they cannot — is also what explains why soldiers who decide to commit massacres can be held legally and morally culpable, even if bloodthirstiness is written into our DNA. This is a difference that is of little interest to Harari, who leaves us uncertain as to what exactly he thinks is being threatened by the rise of the machines. If our consciousness really is ontologically on par with AI, if AI makes “decisions” just like we do, but better, then it is not really clear what is worth preserving about our particular sort of agency in the world.
Miller’s “Nexus,” by contrast, gives us a fairly compelling account of what makes us special: an understanding that interest in truth can be a moral project. Harari has nothing of the kind to offer. Nothing, that is, besides a fuzzy batch of misguided animal fables and often-unpersuasive reflections on technology. In the end, this is a book about AI that shares in the prevailing spirit of the era of ChatGPT. This is not an accusation that the author turned to that new resource to generate his book for him. It is only an acknowledgment that a lucid reader cannot help but see just how reflective this book is of the same worrisome trends that Harari, along with the entire team sustaining the Harari industry, proposes to expose and critique.
Justin Smith-Ruiu’s most recent book is “The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is.” He is the founding editor of the online magazine the Hinternet.
I suspect there might be a bit of jealousy – academia is known for that sort of thing.
"Science popularizer" or something like that would be more accurate. "Populist" would, to me, indicate that he was designing his work to appeal to public opinion and I don't think that's the case. At all. The Davids, Graeber and Wengrow, were also critical of his scientific claims. But speculating about prehistoric social arrangements isn't like mathematics or chemistry. "Almost right" or "hot on the trail of something" can be useful heuristics in the soft sciences. I suspect there might be a bit of jealousy – academia is known for that sort of thing.
I've recently read the book review of his latest book in the WP
Yuval Noah Harari takes on AI
[Harari believes] What binds human information networks together is not primarily the truth but stories.
On Sept. 30, Newsmax will head into a Deleware court to defend itself against a defamation lawsuit filed by Smartmatic, a London-based voting machine technology company. Smartmatic says its reputation was damaged by false statements made on the network regarding voter fraud allegations in the 2020 presidential election.
Smartmatic's suit says Newsmax provided a platform for its hosts, Donald Trump and the former president's attorneys and allies to falsely claim that the company's software was manipulated to deliver the election for President Biden.
Smartmatic's equipment was only used in Los Angeles County in 2020 and not in any of the swing states that helped decide the election.
The claims were given ample airtime on Newsmax despite a lack of credible evidence of fraud and a complete rejection of Trump's legal challenges in the courts. Smartmatic says it lost business because of the bogus statements.
"Newsmax’s own people repeatedly and intentionally lied to the public," said Smartmatic attorney Erik Connolly. "This trial will allow the American judicial process to finally hold Newsmax accountable for knowingly peddling lies about Smartmatic."
Newsmax countered that Trump's claims were newsworthy and its reporting on them was protected by the 1st Amendment. The company also issued an on-air clarification in December 2020 stating that it found no evidence that Smartmatic was involved in voting fraud.
Yesterday morning, NPR reported that U.S. public health data are showing a dramatic drop in deaths from drug overdoses for the first time in decades. Between April 2023 and April 2024, deaths from street drugs are down 10.6%, with some researchers saying that when federal surveys are updated, the decline will be even more pronounced. Such a decline would translate to 20,000 deaths averted.
With more than 70,000 Americans dying of opioid overdoses in 2020 and numbers rising, the Biden-Harris administration prioritized disrupting the supply of illicit fentanyl and other synthetic drugs. They worked to seize the drugs at ports of entry, sanctioned more than 300 foreign people and agencies engaged in the global trade in illicit drugs, and arrested and prosecuted dozens of high-level Mexican drug traffickers and money launderers.
In March 2023 the Biden-Harris administration made naloxone, a medicine that can prevent fatal opioid overdoses, available over the counter. The administration invested more than $82 billion in treatment, and the Department of Health and Human Services worked to get the treatment into the hands of first responders and family members.
Addressing the crisis of opioid deaths meant careful, coordinated policies.
Also today, markets all over the world climbed after the Fed yesterday cut interest rates for the first time in four years. In the U.S., the S&P 500, which tracks the stock performance of 500 of the biggest companies on U.S. stock exchanges, the Nasdaq Composite, which is weighted toward the information technology sector, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, an older index that tracks 30 prominent companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges, all hit new records. The rate cut indicated to traders that the U.S. has, in fact, managed to pull off the soft landing President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen worked to achieve. They have kept job growth steady, normalized economic growth and inflation, and avoided a recession.
As they have done so, the major U.S. stock indices have had what The Guardian's Callum Jones calls “an extraordinary year.” Jones notes that the S&P 500 is up more than 20% since the beginning of 2024, the Nasdaq Composite has risen 22%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gone up 11%.
Bringing the U.S. economy out of the pandemic more successfully than any other major economically developed country meant clear goals and principles, and careful, informed adjustments.
And yet the big story today is that Republican North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson frequented porn sites, where between 2008 and 2012 he wrote that he enjoyed watching transgender pornography; referred to himself as a “black NAZI!”; called for reinstating human enslavement and wrote, “I would certainly buy a few”; called the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a “f*cking commie bastard”; wrote that he preferred Adolf Hitler to former president Barack Obama; referred to Black, Jewish, Muslim, and gay people with slurs; said he doesn’t care about abortions (“I don’t care. I just wanna see the sex tape!” he wrote); and recounted that he had secretly watched women in the showers in a public gym as a 14-year-old. Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck of CNN, who broke the story, noted that “CNN is reporting only a small portion of Robinson’s comments on the website given their graphic nature.”
After the first story broke, Natalie Allison of Politico broke another: that Robinson was registered on the Ashley Madison website, which caters to married people seeking affairs.
Robinson is running for governor of North Carolina. He has attacked transgender rights, called for a six-week abortion ban without exceptions for rape or incest, mocked survivors of school shootings, and—after identifying a wide range of those he saw as enemies to America and to “conservatives”—told a church audience that “some folks need killing.”
That this scandal dropped on the last possible day Robinson could drop out of the race suggests it was pushed by Republicans themselves because they recognize that Robinson is dragging Trump and other Republican candidates down in North Carolina. But here’s the thing: Republican voters knew who Robinson was, and they chose him anyway.
Indeed, his behavior is not all that different from that of a number of the Republican candidates in this cycle, including former president Trump, the Republican nominee for president. Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC) embraced Robinson’s candidacy, and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) welcomed “NC’s outstanding Lt. Governor” to a Republican-led House Judiciary Committee meeting “on the importance of election integrity.” “He brought the truth with clarity and conviction—and everyone should hear what he had to say!” Johnson posted to social media. Robinson spoke at the Republican National Convention.
The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans in this election is stark, and it reflects a systemic problem that has been growing in the U.S. since the 1980s.
Democracy depends on at least two healthy political parties that can compete for voters on a level playing field. Although the men who wrote the Constitution hated the idea of political parties, they quickly figured out that parties tie voters to the mechanics of Congress and the presidency.
And they do far more than that. Before political thinkers legitimized the idea of political opposition to the king, disagreeing with the person in charge usually led to execution or banishment for treason. Parties allowed for the idea of loyal and legitimate opposition, which in turn allowed for the peaceful transition of power. That peaceful exchange enabled the people to choose their leaders and leaders to relinquish power safely. Parties also create a system for criticizing people in power, which helps to weed out corrupt or unfit leaders.
But those benefits of a party system depend on a level political playing field for everyone, so that a party must constantly compete for voters by testing which policies are most popular and getting rid of the corrupt or unstable leaders voters would reject.
In the 1980s, radical Republican leaders set out to dismantle the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. But that system was popular, and to overcome the majority who favored it, they began to tip the political playing field in their direction. They began to suppress voting by Democrats by insisting that Democrats were engaging in “voter fraud.” At the same time, they worked to delegitimize their opponents by calling them “socialists” or “communists” and claiming that they were trying to destroy the United States. By the 1990s, extremists in the party were taking power by purging traditional Republicans from it.
And yet, voters still elected Democrats, and after they put President Barack Obama into the White House in 2008, the Republican State Leadership Committee in 2010 launched Operation REDMAP, or Redistricting Majority Project. The plan was to take over state legislatures so Republicans would control the new district maps drawn after the 2010 census, especially in swing states like Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It worked, and Republican legislatures in those states and elsewhere carved up state maps into dramatically gerrymandered districts.
In those districts, the Republican candidates were virtually guaranteed election, so they focused not on attracting voters with popular policies but on amplifying increasingly extreme talking points to excite the party’s base. That drove the party farther and farther to the right. By 2012, political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein warned that the Republican Party had “become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
At the same time, the skewed playing field meant that candidates who were corrupt or bonkers did not get removed from the political mix after opponents pounced on their misdeeds and misstatements, as they would have been in a healthy system. Social media poster scary lawyerguy noted that the story about Robinson will divert attention from the lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets, which diverted attention from Trump’s abysmal debate performance, which diverted attention from Trump’s filming a campaign ad at Arlington National Cemetery.
When a political party has so thoroughly walled itself off from the majority, there are two options. One is to become full-on authoritarian and suppress the majority, often with violence. Such a plan is in Project 2025, which calls for a strong executive to take control of the military and the judicial system and to use that power to impose his will.
The other option is that enough people in the majority reject the extremists to create a backlash that not only replaces them, but also establishes a level playing field.
The Republican Party is facing the reality that it has become so extreme it is hemorrhaging former supporters and mobilizing a range of critics. Today the Catholic Conference of Ohio rebuked those who spread lies about Haitian immigrants—Republican presidential candidate Trump and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance were the leading culprits—and Teamsters councils have rejected the decision of the union’s board not to make an endorsement this year and have endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris. Some white evangelicals are also distancing themselves from Trump.
And then, tonight, Trump told a Jewish group that if he loses, it will be the fault of Jewish Americans. "I will put it to you very simply and gently: I really haven't been treated right, but you haven't been treated right because you're putting yourself in great danger."
Mark Robinson has said he will not step aside.
On September 16, CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten wrote that while it’s “[p]retty clear that [Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala] Harris is ahead nationally right now… [h]er advantage in the battlegrounds is basically nil. Average it all, Harris’[s] chance of winning the popular vote is 70%. Her chance of winning the electoral college is 50%.” Two days later, on September 18, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) skipped votes in the Senate to travel to Nebraska, where he tried to convince state legislators to switch the state’s system of allotting electoral votes by district to a winner-take-all system. That effort so far appears unsuccessful.
In a country of 50 states and Washington, D.C.—a country of more than 330 million people—presidential elections are decided in just a handful of states, and it is possible for someone who loses the popular vote to become president. We got to this place thanks to the Electoral College, and to two major changes made to it since the ratification of the Constitution.
The men who debated how to elect a president in 1787 worried terribly about making sure there were hedges around the strong executive they were creating so that he could not become a king.
Some of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention wanted Congress to choose the president, but this horrified others who believed that a leader and Congress would collude to take over the government permanently. Others liked the idea of direct election of the president, but this worried delegates from smaller states, who thought that big states would simply be able to name their own favorite sons. It also worried those who pointed out that most voters would have no idea which were the leading men in other states, leaving a national institution, like the organization of Revolutionary War officers called the Society of the Cincinnati, the power to get its members to support their own leader, thus finding a different way to create a dictator.
Ultimately, the framers came up with the election of a president by a group of men well known in their states but not currently office-holders, who would meet somewhere other than the seat of government and would disband as soon as the election was over. Each elector in this so-called Electoral College would cast two votes for president. The man with the most votes would be president, and the man with the second number of votes would be vice president (a system that the Twelfth Amendment ended in 1804). The number of electors would be equal to the number of senators and representatives allotted to each state in Congress. If no candidate earned a majority, the House of Representatives would choose the president, with each state delegation casting a single vote.
In the first two presidential elections—in 1788–1789 and 1792—none of this mattered very much, since the electors cast their ballots unanimously for George Washington. But when Washington stepped down, leaders of the newly formed political parties contended for the presidency. In the election of 1796, Federalist John Adams won, but Thomas Jefferson, who led the Democratic-Republicans (which were not the same as today’s Democrats or Republicans) was keenly aware that had Virginia given him all its electoral votes, rather than splitting them between him and Adams, he would have been president.
On January 12, 1800, Jefferson wrote to the governor of Virginia, James Monroe, urging him to back a winner-take-all system that awarded all Virginia’s electoral votes to the person who won the majority of the vote in the state. He admitted that dividing electoral votes by district “would be more likely to be an exact representation of [voters’] diversified sentiments” but, defending his belief that he was the true popular choice in the country in 1796, said voting by districts “would give a result very different from what would be the sentiment of the whole people of the US. were they assembled together.”
Virginia made the switch. Alarmed, the Federalists in Massachusetts followed suit to make sure Adams got all their votes, and by 1836, every state but South Carolina, where the legislature continued to choose electors until 1860, had switched to winner-take-all.
This change horrified the so-called Father of the Constitution, James Madison, who worried that the new system would divide the nation geographically and encourage sectional tensions. He wrote in 1823 that voting by district, rather than winner-take-all, “was mostly, if not exclusively in view when the Constitution was framed and adopted.” He proposed a constitutional amendment to end winner-take-all.
But almost immediately, the Electoral College caused a different crisis. In 1824, electors split their votes among four candidates—Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay and William Crawford—and none won a majority in the Electoral College. Although Jackson won the most popular votes and the most electoral votes, when the election went to the House, the state delegations chose Adams, the son of former president John Adams.
Furious Jackson supporters thought a developing elite had stolen the election, and after they elected Jackson outright in 1828, the new president on December 8, 1829, implored Congress to amend the Constitution to elect presidents by popular vote. “To the people belongs the right of electing their Chief Magistrate,” he wrote; “it was never designed that their choice should in any case be defeated, either by the intervention of electoral colleges or…the House of Representatives.”
Jackson warned that an election in the House could be corrupted by money or power or ignorance. He also warned that “under the present mode of election a minority may…elect a President,” and such a president could not claim legitimacy. He urged Congress “to amend our system that the office of Chief Magistrate may not be conferred upon any citizen but in pursuance of a fair expression of the will of the majority.”
But by the 1830s, the population of the North was exploding while the South’s was falling behind. The Constitution counted enslaved Americans as three fifths of a person for the purposes of representation, and direct election of the president would erase that advantage slave states had in the Electoral College. Their leaders were not about to throw that advantage away.
In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery (except as punishment for a crime) and scratched out the three-fifths clause, meaning that after the 1870 census the southern states would have more power in the Electoral College than they did before the war. In 1876, Republicans lost the popular vote by about 250,000 votes out of 8.3 million cast, but kept control of the White House through the Electoral College. As Jackson had warned, furious Democrats threatened rebellion. They never considered Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, whom they called “Rutherfraud,” a legitimate president.
In 1888 it happened again. Incumbent Democratic president Grover Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes out of 11 million cast, but Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison took the White House thanks to the 36 electoral votes from New York, a state Harrison won by fewer than 15,000 votes out of more than 1.3 million cast. Once in office, he and his team set out to skew the Electoral College permanently in their favor. Over twelve months in 1889–1890, they added six new, sparsely populated states to the Union, splitting the territory of Dakota in two and adding North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming while cutting out New Mexico and Arizona, whose inhabitants they expected would vote for Democrats.
The twentieth century brought another wrench to the Electoral College. The growth of cities, made possible thanks to modern industry—including the steel that supported skyscrapers—and transportation and sanitation, created increasing population differences among the different states.
The Constitution’s framers worried that individual states might try to grab too much power in the House by creating dozens and dozens of congressional districts, so they specified that a district could not be smaller than 30,000 people. But they put no upper limit on district sizes. After the 1920 census revealed that urban Americans outnumbered rural Americans, the House in 1929 capped its numbers at 435 to keep power away from those urban dwellers, including immigrants, that lawmakers considered dangerous, thus skewing the Electoral College in favor of rural America. Today the average congressional district includes 761,169 individuals—more than the entire population of Wyoming, Vermont, or Alaska—which weakens the power of larger states.
In the twenty-first century the earlier problems with the Electoral College have grown until they threaten to establish permanent minority rule. A Republican president hasn’t won the popular vote since voters reelected George W. Bush in 2004, when his popularity was high in the midst of a war. The last Republican who won the popular vote in a normal election cycle was Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, in 1988, 36 years and nine cycles ago. And yet, Republicans who lost the popular vote won in the Electoral College in 2000—George W. Bush over Democrat Al Gore, who won the popular vote by about a half a million votes—and in 2016, when Democrat Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by about 3 million votes but lost in the Electoral College to Donald Trump.
In our history, four presidents—all Republicans—have lost the popular vote and won the White House through the Electoral College. Trump’s 2024 campaign strategy appears to be to do it again (or to create such chaos that the election goes to the House of Representatives, where there will likely be more Republican-dominated delegations than Democratic ones).
In the 2024 election, Trump has shown little interest in courting voters. Instead, the campaign has thrown its efforts into legal challenges to voting and, apparently, into eking out a win in the Electoral College. The number of electoral votes equals the number of senators and representatives to which each state is entitled (100 + 435) plus three electoral votes for Washington, D.C., for a total of 538. A winning candidate must get a majority of those votes: 270.
Winner-take-all means that presidential elections are won in so-called swing or battleground states. Those are states with election margins of less than 3 points, so close they could be won by either party. The patterns of 2020 suggest that the states most likely to be in contention in 2024 are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, although the Harris-Walz campaign has opened up the map, suggesting its internal numbers show that states like Florida might also be in contention. Candidates and their political action committees focus on those few swing states—touring, giving speeches and rallies, and pouring money into advertising and ground operations.
But in 2024 there is a new wrinkle. The Constitution’s framers agreed on a census every ten years so that representation in Congress could be reapportioned according to demographic changes. As usual, the 2020 census shifted representation, and so the pathway to 270 electoral votes shifted slightly. Those shifts mean that it is possible the election will come down to one electoral vote. Awarding Trump the one electoral vote Nebraska is expected to deliver to Harris could be enough to keep her from becoming president.
Rather than trying to win a majority of voters, just 49 days before the presidential election, Trump supporters—including Senator Graham—are making a desperate effort to use the Electoral College to keep Harris from reaching the requisite 270 electoral votes to win. It is unusual for a senator from one state to interfere in the election processes in another state, but Graham similarly pressured officials in Georgia to swing the vote there toward Trump in 2020.
Did Reagan pave the way for Trump? ‘You can trace the linkages,’ says biographer
The 80s president known for sunny optimism also has a darker legacy on issues like race and Aids. ‘I don’t think you can just say, wow, Trump arrived from Mars,’ says Max Boot
“Understand this about immigration,” Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives and a staunch Democrat, said in an interview on HBO earlier this month. “The best speech on immigration was by President Ronald Reagan.”
Pelosi is not alone among Democrats heaping praise on the 40th president for his pro-immigration views, defiance of tyranny and politics of optimism – “It’s morning in America.” For many he has come to symbolise nostalgia for a more innocent, less partisan time. Visitors to America’s capital often land at Ronald Reagan Washington national airport. A newly released biopic starring Dennis Quaid is the latest burnishing of the myth.
But a critically praised biography of Reagan challenges these assumptions, balancing recognition of Reagan’s strengths with a close examination of his glaring weaknesses on inequality, race and the Aids pandemic. Its introduction poses a provocative question: “Did Reaganism contain the seeds of Trumpism?”
And the book comes not from a progressive Democrat but a former foreign policy adviser to the Republican presidential campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio. Max Boot is himself an immigrant: he was born in Moscow, grew up in Los Angeles, gained US citizenship and is now a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations thinktank.
“I guess my relationship with the Republican party is like the love affair that ended badly,” Boot, 55, says in a Zoom interview from his white-walled home in New York. “I was an ardent admirer of Reagan as a young man in the 1980s.
“He made conservatism cool for a lot of people including me growing up in that decade and all the more so in my case because I was born in the Soviet Union and my family came here and so tended to gravitate towards the right side of the political spectrum. I loved it when he called the Soviet Union ‘the evil empire’ and stood up for human rights behind the iron curtain. He made me a Republican.”
But a day after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Boot reregistered as an independent. He believes this has given him an objectivity and distance from his biographical subject. “That’s allowed me to write a much better book than I would have written in the past if I were writing from a pro-Reagan or pro-Republican standpoint. What I tried to do was to do a very balanced job that was neither hagiography nor hit job but trying to show Reagan both good and bad.”
In Reagan: His Life and Legend, Boot acknowledges the personal and political differences between Reagan, born in 1911, and Trump, born in 1946. Reagan, he argues, was both more ideological and more pragmatic than most people realise. He was pro-free trade, pro-immigration, pro-Nato and anti-Russian expansionism. Boot has no doubt that he would have supported Ukraine in its battle against Vladimir Putin. Reagan also had a sunny, optimistic vision of America, a sharp contrast from Trump’s “American carnage”.
But there are through lines, all the same. “Clearly the Republican party has evolved in ways that Reagan could have never anticipated and yet I don’t think you can just say, wow, Trump arrived from Mars and there was no relationship between what he’s saying and doing and previous decades in the Republican party,” Boot argues.
“Just as a historian, that seems to me very ahistorical because we know things don’t come out of nowhere. You can trace the linkages and see that despite the huge differences between Trump and Reagan, there are also various resemblances and similarities.”
The first and most obvious is that both men were television hosts – Reagan on General Electric Theater, one of the most popular shows of the late 1950s and early 1960, and Trump on The Apprentice, one of the most popular shows of the 2000s and 2010s.
Boot comments: “Both Reagan and Trump beamed into people’s homes so that people assumed that they knew them, that they were like a friend but, in many ways, they were falling for the image rather than the reality. In Trump’s case, the image was that he was this super-successful wheeler-dealer whereas we now know that so many of his companies went bankrupt and he had a very chequered business record.
“In Reagan’s case, it was this image as the man nextdoor, somebody who was like this friendly neighbour and warm friend, which was certainly the image that he projected. And yet it was striking to me, talking to people who knew him well, that actually Ronald Reagan had this glacial reserve. He would have made a pretty good hermit. That’s an indication of how TV can distort reality.”
Reagan also became a Hollywood film actor, which caused later critics to question his political and intellectual heft. In the 1985 time travel caper Back to the Future, Doc Brown says, “Tell me, Future Boy, who’s President of the United States in 1985?” When Marty McFly says Ronald Reagan, an incredulous Doc retorts: “Ronald Reagan! The actor? Then who’s vice-president, Jerry Lewis?”
But Reagan was in a different league from Trump, who once used a black Sharpie marker to alter an official hurricane map and suggested injecting bleach as a cure for Covid-19. Boot says: “It’s all relative because Reagan was certainly criticised for knowing so little about the government and paying so little attention to details, which was true compared to other presidents. But he was practically like a political science PhD compared to Trump because he was actually interested in ideas.
“It wasn’t all just about himself. It wasn’t all about boosting his own ego. You could argue about his ideas and you could say maybe that they were bad ideas, but he had ideas and he was devoted to them and he read and he wrote. I read all of his letters that are extant and he was a beautiful writer. There was a lot more intellectual substance with Reagan than with Trump, even though Reagan was also accused of being a lightweight.”
Reagan was hailed as “the great communicator”. When asked how relevant his acting career had been for the presidency, he replied: “There have been times, in this office when I’ve wondered how you could do this job if you hadn’t been an actor.”
Both Reagan and Trump were populists who reviled Washington, though the former did not refer to it as “the deep state”, and both used the campaign slogan “Make America great again”. Boot also points to more troubling resemblances, including Reagan’s poor record on civil rights and racial justice.
Reagan himself insisted that he was incapable of prejudice, pointing to the example of his father, Jack, who was of Irish Catholic ancestry and therefore the victim of discrimination, as giving Reagan some sensitivity about the experience of minorities. “But he was pretty oblivious to the African American experience,” Boot contends.
“He talked about his home town of Dixon, Illinois, as being a wonderful place where people loved each other and neighbours supported each other and – he wouldn’t have said it this way - it was like a kumbaya spirit prevailed. When I actually researched Dixon in the 1920s, what I discovered was it was a hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan.
“The Klan was having massive rallies right outside of town. They were marching through the downtown and in their white sheets. This is what Reagan’s neighbours were actually up to and the town actually even had segregation, even though it wasn’t in the south. The movie theatre was segregated; Black people had to sit in a separate area. It wasn’t all peace and love but he was kind of oblivious to it.”
Time and again in his early political career, Reagan was on the wrong side of history. He opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. In his race for governor of California in 1966, he opposed the Rumford Fair Housing Act, which prohibited discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.
In a 1971 phone call with President Richard Nixon, Reagan made racist remarks about African delegates to the United Nations, calling them “monkeys” and saying they were still “uncomfortable wearing shoes”. He did not attend Martin Luther King’s funeral, even though many Republicans did, and opposed the Martin Luther King Jr public holiday right up until the day he signed it into law.
Boot comments: “He certainly did not engage in the openly racist appeals of a George Wallace or Trump for that matter but he certainly used race-neutral, coded language that people understood, talking about law and order, talking about we can’t allow our streets to turn into a jungle, talking about welfare queens, that infamous episode in the 1980 election where he spoke at the Neshoba County Fair [in Mississippi] and talked about states’ rights a few miles from where three civil rights workers have been slain by the Klan.
“He had a double standard on human rights abroad, where he was very tough, and rightly so, on human rights violations in the Soviet Union but he was very weak on human rights violations in South Africa and in fact vetoed a tough sanctions bill on South Africa. I can’t judge what was in Reagan’s heart but I know his political record and it was one of catering to white backlash voters but doing it in seemingly neutral language which didn’t alarm moderates, didn’t turn off centrists.”
A generation later, Trump dispensed with Reagan’s dog whistle and replaced it with a bullhorn, deploying blatantly racist stereotypes in pursuit of the same goal. Boot adds: “He’s not nearly as deft. He does it with these crazy stories about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs or whatever. Reagan loved an apocryphal story himself but nothing quite that crude or crazy.”
The parallels do not stop there. Each was a Democrat before they were a Republican. Each was the oldest US president in history when he took office (a record since surpassed by Joe Biden). Each survived an attempted assassination by a loner with no apparent political motive. Just as Trump mishandled the coronavirus pandemic, Reagan had a devastating blind spot when it came to Aids, despite the efforts of scientists such as Anthony Fauci.
Boot comments: “When you look back at his presidency, the fact that he completely ignored Aids and it was killing tens of thousands of people, that’s a major blot on his record. He even speculated that Aids could be God’s punishment for gay people and so forth – things that were commonly said, I guess, in straight society in the 1980s.
“At the time reporters would joke with Reagan aides about Aids; the reporters thought it was a big joke, too. It wasn’t like they were holding him to account. But standards have greatly changed and now, from our vantage point, it seems shocking that Reagan and a lot of his senior aides were so callous about Aids.”
Ultimately, Boot argues, Reagan paved the way for Trump. “He was addicted to faux facts. He would often cite apocryphal quotes and anecdotes and statistics that weren’t really true but would keep citing them anyway, even when it was pointed out that he didn’t have any basis for doing so. You can argue that acclimated the Republican party to the fire hose of falsehoods that you see from Trump.
“Even more fundamentally, Reagan’s policies truly favoured the wealthy and increased income disparity in the United States. You can argue that those policies, whether it was the tax cuts, lack of anti-trust, anti-union activity, all the rest, by widening those income disparities opened the way for populism in America, both from the left and the rightwing populism that Trump exploits today.”
Reagan remains a convenient political prop for Republicans in 2024. Several candidates in this year’s party primary sought to position themselves as Reagan’s true heir, with former vice-president Mike Pence often recalling that he “joined the Reagan revolution and never looked back”. Even Trump regularly calls the former president as a defence witness on abortion, stating that “like President Ronald Reagan before me, I support the three exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother”.
Reagan died in 2004, aged 93, after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. If he were still alive today, it is impossible to imagine him delivering a Maga speech on Trump’s behalf at a campaign rally or convention. Boot reflects: “Every generation of Republicans has been more rightwing than the previous generation. Reagan was well to the right of Nixon and Ford. Trump is now well to the right of Reagan.
“I’m sure that if Reagan were still alive, he would be being denounced as a Rino [Republican in name only], just as George Bush and Dick Cheney and so many others are today. After all, in 1986 Reagan signed this immigration bill that legalised millions of undocumented immigrants - what Republicans today would denounce as an amnesty bill and so very different from what Maga Republicans would do.
“The ultimate irony here is that, in 1980, when Reagan was elected, Reaganism was pushing the Republican party in the country to the right. Today, if Reaganism were to prevail on the Republican party, it would be pushing the Republican party to the left, to the centre.”
Both Reagan and Trump demonstrated the power of personality to shape the Republican party in their own image. Where celebrity led, ideology followed. Boot wonders if the same thing could happen when the party finally enters the post-Trump era.
“It’s possible to imagine maybe there will be some charismatic, transcendent individual in the future who might have much more moderate views than Trump does and, if so, that person could easily gain ascendancy over the Republican party. It’s also possible that a rightwing demagogue who’s as crazy as Trump but even more effective could be the future of the Republican party.
“It’s up for grabs – too soon to know. But based on the Reagan and Trump precedent, maybe we should be looking for the next leader of the Republican party among people who host national TV shows.”
Senior Church of England bishops accuse Israel of acting above law in West Bank
Clergy call for UN to ‘move beyond strong words’ and say there is ‘little distinction’ between state and settler violence
Four of the most senior Church of England bishops have accused Israel of acting as if it is above the law in an excoriating letter about state and settler violence in the occupied West Bank.
The bishops, led by Rachel Treweek, the bishop of Gloucester, say there is now “little distinction between settler violence and state violence” as Palestinian communities experience escalating attacks, dispossession, house demolitions and arson.
In unusually forthright language, they say: “There has been a drastic acceleration and intensification of settlement construction, land confiscation and home demolition in the West Bank, exacerbating longstanding patterns of oppression, violence and discrimination against Palestinians.
“There has always been a close relationship between successive Israeli governments and the settler movement, but there now seems to be little distinction between settler violence and state violence.”
The bishops demand the Israeli government “stop acting as if it is uniquely above the law”.
They say the call by the UN general assembly last week for Israel to end its unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territories “can’t be another false dawn”. The UN must “move beyond strong words and agree a robust set of measures to ensure Israel’s compliance” with international law.
The letter’s signatories also include Guli Francis-Dehqani, bishop of Chelmsford, Graham Usher, bishop of Norwich and Christopher Chessun, bishop of Southwark. All four sit in the House of Lords, and at least two are expected to be in the running to be the next archbishop of Canterbury.
They cite the case of the Christian Kisiya family as among “numerous Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank, including Christians, [that] are in grave danger of losing everything precious to them”.
They were forcefully dispossessed of their ancestral land near Bethlehem, the letter says. “The Israeli authorities have demolished their home and restaurant multiple times over the last 12 years and allowed an illegal settlement to be established on their land, but until now the family have continued to find ways to farm the land.”
Alice Kisiya said they had been expelled despite having documents from the Civil Administration – the Israeli body that governs the occupied West Bank – confirming their ownership of the land.
The family was evicted on 31 July, after a standoff with settlers accompanied by Israeli troops.
Settlers took advantage of the war in Gaza to dispossess her family after two decades of harassment, Kisiya told the Church Times. “We’ve been suffering for more than 20 years with this, but we’re fighting back.”
Their case was a “human tragedy”, the bishops said. “We will continue to stand in prayer and solidarity with the Kisiya family, and thousands like them, as they resist the injustice of occupation.”
There has been an acceleration in settler violence and settlement growth in the occupied West Bank. In the 10 months following Hamas’s murderous attack on Israeli communities on 7 October, the UN documented about 1,270 attacks, compared with 856 in the whole of 2022.
The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, said Israeli settler violence and harassment forced Palestinians out of at least 18 villages in the same period.
Since 7 October, almost 600 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank – at least 570 by Israeli forces and at least 11 by settlers, according to the UN. Palestinians have killed five settlers and nine members of Israel’s security forces.
An international day of prayer and vigils for Palestinian Christians in the West Bank is to is taking place next Sunday.
