Ahmed Moor:

Hello, and welcome to Occupied Thoughts, a podcast brought to you by the Foundation for Middle East Peace. My name is Ahmed Moor and I’m a fellow at the foundation.

Today is July 20th, 2026, and I’m delighted to be here with Seth Ackerman, editor at Jacobin magazine. Welcome, Seth.

Seth Ackerman:

Thank you.

Ahmed Moor:

We’re talking because of a piece that you published in Jacobin, using the recent Rahm Emanuel speech as a foil, to make the argument that, as the title says: “We Have the Chance to Reel in Israel Right Now.”

I want to get into that, but first, what is Jacobin? I mean, I know what it is, but a lot of our listeners live abroad. How would you describe the political context for a magazine like Jacobin today in the United States?

Seth Ackerman:

Well, we’re a socialist magazine, and we like to think we’ve played a role in reviving the position of the socialist left in mainstream political dialogue in America.

So, on this issue, where the left has been galvanized by the horrors of Gaza, where we’re on the verge of having this big 2028 debate within the progressive coalition, if you want to call it that, this is the kind of debate we’d like to intervene in. And that’s what I was trying to do with this piece.

Ahmed Moor:

And it is an intervention. You go directly to sanctions. That’s at the heart of the piece here. But let’s stay on the context for a bit.

Rahm Emanuel’s father was a member of the Irgun, the pre-state militia that engaged in lots of terrorist activity in Palestine in the Mandate period. He was born and raised in the United States, became a very successful political operative here, formerly mayor of Chicago.

But notably, he volunteered for the Israeli army in 1991 when US troops were fighting in Iraq, in Desert Storm. That hasn’t come up much, and I haven’t seen it come up in any of the reporting. Do you think the salience of that biographical fact about Rahm Emanuel will grow over time, as we approach 2028?

Seth Ackerman:

It might. On the other hand, if you look at the prediction markets, right now he’s generally seen as such a long-shot candidate that these kinds of biographical details might not matter very much. I think he’s at, like, 3%.

What concerns me is that, as a result, people are underestimating the significance of this speech and the policy orientation he’s presenting. It’s being seen mainly as a sort of sign of the times, that Rahm Emanuel of all people, who has this staunch pro-Israel background, is taking such an admonishing tone with Israel. It’s being taken as an indication of how far the politics have shifted against Israel.

I think that’s a big mistake. Because even if Emanuel is not going to be the Democratic nominee, I think you’re going see the 2028 candidates basically sorting themselves into two lanes on this issue, one of which is going to be the Rahm Emanuel lane.

And I think it’s going to be a very crowded lane. On this issue, I think a lot of the top-tier candidates are going to end up sounding just like Rahm Emanuel. If I had to guess, that would include people like Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg.

So, even if it’s unlikely that Emanuel will be the next Democratic presidential nominee, it’s not at all unlikely that he’d be the next secretary of state, or the next national security advisor, if a Democrat is in the White House. His last job, under Biden, was ambassador to Japan. He obviously has a strong interest in foreign policy. I think that’s the job he wants. I think he’s not just running for president, he’s running to be the guy who shapes the next generation of Democratic foreign policy.

So I’m surprised there’s been so little attention paid to what he actually said in this speech, as opposed to just the few bullet points that were pulled out of it. Clearly Emanuel saw this as a major policy statement. He went to Israel to deliver the speech. He leaked drafts of it to reporters beforehand. He gave interviews to Israeli media afterwards.

And it’s a pretty well thought out approach. I say this, obviously, as someone who’s not a fan. But I do think it can “work” — politically, and, in a sense, as policy — unless an alternative is presented.

Ahmed Moor:

What are the attributes of that approach?

Seth Ackerman:

If you look at the speech, although the intended audience is presumably American, in the text he addresses Israelis directly. And his stance is: “You, Israel, need to get your head out of the sand. You’re heading towards pariah status. There will come a point where even friends of Israel, like me, won’t be able to help you.”

So, if Israel won’t change on its own, Rahm Emanuel, as president, will force it to change. That’s the headline most people took from the speech.

But for Emanuel, the top priority is to remove all the pressure that has piled up on Israel over the past few years, as the world has watched the horrors in Gaza. And the way he’s proposing to do that is — quite audaciously — by shifting the pressure onto the Palestinians.

This is the centerpiece of his policy. He’s proposing to go to the Arab states and tell them that the US now expects them to be, as he puts it, “the adult in the room with the Palestinian leadership.” Remember, the Arab League has had a formal position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a long time now…

Ahmed Moor:

Since 2002.

Seth Ackerman:

Since 2002, called the Arab Peace Initiative. It was originally a Saudi initiative but it’s been unanimously endorsed, again and again, by all 22 Arab states. By now, it’s a well-established consensus position.

And the essence of the position is the Arabs saying: “We’re willing to make peace; we’re willing to recognize Israel; we’re willing to normalize relations with Israel; all of us, unanimously. All Israel has to do is comply with its obligations under international law.”

So that means: withdraw from the occupied territories, dismantle the settlements, allow the creation of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, negotiate a resolution of the refugee issue with the Palestinian leadership.

And in exchange, the Arabs promise full peace and normalization for Israel. Which is supposedly what Israel has always wanted. Since 1948, Israel has been saying that all it wants is to be accepted in the region, to have normal, peaceful relations with its neighbors. Well, for almost 25 years now it’s refused to even talk about the Arab Peace Initiative.

So, Emanuel is proposing a new approach. The US will go to the Arabs and basically tell them: change your position. The position you have now isn’t going to work. You should offer Israel full peace and recognition and normalization, but not demand that it withdraw from the territories or dismantle settlements. Instead, the only demand should be that Israel commit not to further expand the settlements, beyond their existing boundaries.

And if the Arabs agree to that, and if Israel agrees to make that commitment, then at that point — he doesn’t say this explicitly, but I think it’s implicit in the logic — the US would recognize the “Palestinian state.” Israel itself wouldn’t. But the US would recognize it, and it would be granted UN membership by the UN Security Council and recognized by countries around the world.

And then, from Rahm Emanuel’s point of view, the conflict is over. All the Arab states have now recognized Israel and you have, in theory, “two states.”

Now, somebody listening to this will say, wait a minute, isn’t there a step missing here? What about Israel’s withdrawal from the territories and the settlements? Well no, that doesn’t happen here. Instead, what happens is that the Arab states are supposed to — this is how Emanuel phrases it — “stand up a Palestinian governing authority” in the territories.

So, essentially, this would be a kind of Palestinian South Vietnam. That’s how I would put it. You know, South Vietnam in the Vietnam War was a kind of diplomatic fiction. It had little domestic legitimacy, a very narrow base of support, it could not have survived on its own. Its main purpose was to serve as a diplomatic fig leaf, so that there’d be an “independent, sovereign state” to invite the Americans in, so that they could fight the communists.

Well, here the Arab states would be like the US in Vietnam. They would be assigned this nation-building task of propping up this artificial Palestinian state that has no domestic legitimacy. And the Arabs and the Israelis would then collaborate in waging a counterinsurgency campaign against whatever Palestinian opposition emerged.

Ahmed Moor:

What’s surprising, or notable, to me, is the desperation that seems to underpin this entire vision: this hope that somebody like Emanuel, by articulating this vision, can turn time back to October 6, 2023, where Israel was not a pariah, where Israel’s bad behavior was accepted as a matter of course.

Is that basically what Pete Buttigieg, Rahm Emanuel, Josh Shapiro, whoever else, are hoping? That we can put this issue to the side and run on the kinds of things that mainstream Democrats typically run on?

Seth Ackerman:

Yes, that’s exactly what it is. Lately, there’s been a sort of meme on Twitter among people who are in more or less the same space as Rahm Emanuel, people like Dan Shapiro, who was Obama’s ambassador to Israel. They’ve been saying that the goal needs to be getting back to a situation where, if, say, Israel’s prime minister makes a state visit to the United States, it’s barely mentioned in the newspapers. It might as well be Finland.

In other words, to anesthetize, or euthanize, the Palestinian issue in American politics, so they can get back to business as usual.

Ahmed Moor:

So then, what’s the other lane?

Seth Ackerman:

Well, the other lane will be all the candidates who want to demarcate themselves from the Rahm Emanuel lane in a more progressive direction. And clearly some will want to do that. But so far I haven’t seen much evidence that a lot of strategic thinking has been done about what an alternative to the Rahm Emanuel line would look like. That’s why I wrote this piece.

I’ve seen attempts by some of the likely candidates, or people around them, to appeal to the progressive base with what you might call policy slogans. Often these are things that play well on social media but don’t necessarily advance the ball when it comes to building an alternative policy framework.

Now, to be clear, most of these things are, in and of themselves, very valuable. For example, people will demand that politicians recognize the genocide in Gaza as a genocide. People will demand a recognition that apartheid in the West Bank is apartheid. That’s great.

Or they’ll demand that politicians promise not to take money from AIPAC. The other day I listened to your show where you had on the duo behind Track AIPAC. They’ve done incredible work. They’ve really transformed the landscape of this issue.

But I think they’d be the first to acknowledge that just having candidates pledge not to take money from AIPAC is not, in itself, going to change the reality on the ground for the Palestinians or anyone else. So, this is why I wrote the piece. Because the time to start thinking about this is now.

Ahmed Moor:

I appreciate that, going from a kind of concave policy lens to convex, where we’re proposing a positive vision and a platform.

So, I’ll read to you from your own piece: “Emanuel’s speech does register a bona fide political shift, and that shift represents a genuine opportunity. But right now that opportunity is going to waste because critics of Israel have failed to advance a policy agenda commensurate with the scale of the problem.”

Before we get to the policy prescriptions here, you use the words, “the scale of the problem.” What is the problem here, from your perspective, when we talk about Israel?

Seth Ackerman:

If I had to put it in one word, it would be impunity. You know, Israel has systematically violated international law in ways that have been recognized by international institutions, whether it’s the United Nations Security Council or international courts, but without any action taken by those who have the power to take action.

So, you don’t have to start from square one. A lot of what needs to be done has already been laid out by international institutions that have simply noted what Israel must do to be in line with its obligations under international law. It’s just that nobody’s done anything about it.

Ahmed Moor:

But then, why international law? Why pull international law into the conversation when we’re talking about American politicians and American policy in this country?

Seth Ackerman:

Well, I bring up international law not to be legalistic or to say we should all be sticklers about international law. In a presidential election, people are going to be talking about what kind of foreign policy the United States should have based on an understanding of American interests.

But this is not a particularly new or original idea: for years, administration after administration in Washington has talked about the instability generated by Israel’s occupation, which creates violence that often spirals outward in many directions — for example, to Lebanon, which can then cause further problems with, say, Iran.

That’s why all administrations — Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, every administration since 1967, except Trump — have called the settlements an obstacle to peace. And if peace and stability in the Middle East are considered important American interests, and you’re running for president, then there’s an obvious case for enforcing international law here.

The point is not to say that our mission in the world should be enforcing every provision of international law. It’s to say that the lawlessness that has spiraled out from this conflict represents a problem for America, and when it comes to resolving that conflict, the obvious arbiter — the obvious source of the terms of settlement — would be law. I mean, that’s how we arbitrate disputes in a “rules-based international order,” right?

So, that’s why I talk about international law. Not because international law is an end in itself.

Ahmed Moor:

In the piece, you put forward two proposals. You write:

First, the United Nations Security Council must finally vote to enshrine and enforce the 2024 decision of the International Court of Justice, a court to which Israel is a party by treaty, which ruled, inter alia, that,

• “The continued presence of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is illegal”;

• “This illegality relates to the entirety of the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel in 1967”;

• “The Gaza Strip is an integral part of the territory that was occupied by Israel in 1967”;

• “Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the régime associated with them, have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law”;

• “Consequently, Israel has an obligation to bring an end to its presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible.”

Seth Ackerman:

Yes. And I’d add that, ideally, it should be a resolution framed under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which deals with threats to international peace and security. That’s how resolutions are usually framed to make it clear that something needs to be enforced.

But in a way, what’s even more important is simply the fact that this would now be the declaratory policy of the United States. I think it’s important to have the highest body of international governance saying this. But in a sense, I’d almost say the Security Council resolution is secondary.

It’s important, in and of itself, for the United States to be saying: “This is our policy now. These are Israel’s obligations.” This would be a way of resetting the framework of US-Israel relations. To say: Israel is not in compliance with its obligations and as long as it remains non-compliant, that is going to affect the entirety of the US-Israel relationship.

Now, that doesn’t mean Israel is America’s enemy. It doesn’t mean we’re going to start a war with Israel. If there are areas where we have overlapping interests, we can cooperate with Israel in those areas.

But as long as Israel flouts its international obligations in ways that undermine American interests, it cannot have the kind of partnership with the United States that it wants, and that it’s had in past decades. And that will remain the case as long as Israel remains non-compliant.

By the way, before we get to the other proposal, let me say that if I were to redo the article, there’s a third point I would add. And this ought to be a very low bar for candidates in a Democratic presidential primary: a demand that Israel permit free and fair Palestinian elections if the Palestinians want to hold them, including in East Jerusalem.

This would probably require international monitors, because Israel has shown that it’s not able or willing to provide the kind of security in Palestinian areas that would be necessary to hold free elections. And if Marwan Barghouti chooses to submit his candidacy, if there’s a presidential election, Democratic candidates should certainly be calling for Israel to release Barghouti, who is apparently being tortured to death in one of Ben-Gvir’s prisons.

Palestinian elections are important, in this context, in part because they contrast with Rahm Emanuel’s vision, in which the territories are a Palestinian South Vietnam where the wishes of the population are treated as irrelevant. This is a clear alternative based on respecting the democratic rights of Palestinians. So, if they want to have elections, Israel must permit that, and the US must do what’s necessary to facilitate it.

Ahmed Moor:

So, what do you propose to do to bring Israel into conformity with international law? This is fairly radical.

Seth Ackerman:

Just to preface this, I have to say: I’ve always been a bit mystified at the way people on all sides of this issue talk about the settlements, as if they’re irreversible “facts on the ground.”

People say, “Oh, at this point, there may not be any solution; we may need to stop thinking about a two-state solution at all.” What I’m saying is: whatever your opinion about a one-state solution, two-state solution, it’s a myth that the settlements are irreversible. They’re reversible.

As I wrote in the article, the US president can issue an order that says anybody who takes possession of property, whether by purchasing title or entering into a lease or a rental agreement, on illegally occupied land in the Palestinian territories, will be subject to Treasury Department sanctions. Whether it’s an individual or a company, they would be put on the Specially Designated Nationals list, which is administered by the Treasury, and cut off from the international financial system.

Now, I can promise you, the minute that happens, you’re not going to see anybody, or hardly anybody, moving into those settlements anymore. In any town there are always some people moving in and some moving out. Well, now people will be moving out but nobody will be moving in. If a supermarket closes, it’s not going to be replaced by another supermarket. So — you can do the math.

For decades, the United States has been warning Israel that it regards the settlements as an obstacle to peace. For decades, the UN has been warning Israel that the settlements are illegal. Israel chose to build them anyway. That was Israel’s choice.

And by the way, if you go to the Treasury Department’s website and look at the list of entities and individuals it already sanctions, it’s a long list and, like, 80% of them are Israel’s enemies.

Ahmed Moor:

Let me ask a hard question. Why stop at the settlements? We know that the settlements are an extension of the state. We know that the armed settlers are functionally paramilitaries. They’re armed by the police, the border police, whomever.

It’s all the state. Why not say we’re going to sanction the banks which are domiciled in Israel, whose headquarters are in Tel Aviv, at the outset? Why play this gradualist game, trying to arrive at a more just outcome?

Seth Ackerman:

Well, the question I’m trying to address is: what is the best thing for people who might have some influence over the course of this presidential contest, to be demanding from the candidates?

I have no problem with sanctions on Israeli banks or other institutions. In fact, that would have to be on the table if an agenda like the one I’m proposing were actually implemented, because history shows that when the Israelis find themselves in such situations, they often escalate.

They’ll often say, “Oh, you want to take us on? Well, we can create a lot of havoc in this region. Do you, the US administration — which presumably prefers peace and quiet — do you really want to deal with the kind of mess we can create?”

And at that point, the threat of counter-escalation may be necessary. Sanctions on entities like Israel’s biggest insurance companies and banks and the Tel Aviv stock exchange — those would be a powerful deterrent to dissuade Israel from engaging in that kind of destructive behavior.

So, if we’re asking, “what is the best thing to demand from the candidates,” it seems to me that this is the most promising option, given its clear grounding in pre-existing rules and laws and policies. Sanctioning illegal settlements because they’re illegal, I think, makes a lot of sense. But I’m open to alternative ideas.

Remember, in the real world, any administration will have a lot of other things it cares about. Any president wants to have a successful presidency. The number one priority is domestic policy. The Israeli-Palestinian issue is just one issue on their plate. So, whatever Mideast initiatives they undertake, they’ll want them to be, number one, as successful as possible, and number two, to present as little of a problem, or risk — as little of a mess for them to clean up — as possible.

So, from a statecraft perspective, I think there’s an advantage, with sanctions, in leaving room for escalation, so that you can escalate in both directions, as a means of exerting coercive leverage over the Israelis, to get them to do what you want them to do, and to dissuade them from doing what you don’t want them to do.

Ahmed Moor:

Thomas Massey and Ro Khanna recently went on a show together. They’ve been doing a lot of work on accountability together. What do you make of that coalition? Is it a hopeful coalition for you, or do you watch this a little bit warily?

Seth Ackerman:

I think it’s great. You know, we recently had this vote on the Massey Amendment. In practice it was largely symbolic because it had no chance of passing. But it gave an opportunity for Democrats in the House to vote, in theory, for ending US military aid to Israel. And you ended up seeing more than 100 Democrats voting for it.

But I’m trying to send out a warning here. A lot of people are looking at these roll-call votes and thinking: “Wow, a hundred Democrats voting to end military aid to Israel! The political landscape is changing so fast!” Well, I regret to inform you that, right now, the emerging policy of the Democratic Party is the Rahm Emanuel policy. It’s not the Massey Amendment.

Right now, the policy Emanuel is outlining — a policy for teaming up with Israel to try to bring about some final, historic defeat of the Palestinians — is the emerging Democratic policy, simply by default, because no real alternative has been proposed. And yet it seems like a lot of people are under this impression that, “Gee, we’re on a glide path towards real change in US policy.” I’m saying that’s not the case.

This speech, in which Emanuel outlined this audaciously pro-Israel policy, was not perceived as such by most commentators. It was understood as marking a shift against Israel, admonishing Israel, reframing the relationship with Israel. And that’s probably how the average Democratic primary voter heard it. Because Emanuel is trying to make it sound like he’s getting tough with Israel.

People need to realize that they’re hearing one thing but the reality is something different.

Ahmed Moor:

That’s a really sobering note. Because I looked at the chorus of approbation on Twitter, the op-eds and so forth — calling this a come-to-Jesus moment or however you want to describe it — as a manufactured reaction by people who’d like to see the status quo persist. People in media, people in policy.

It didn’t occur to me that that may be how the lay Democrat, the primary voter, may react. But you’re saying that that is, possibly, how they’d react.

Seth Ackerman:

Absolutely. Here’s the thing: When Emanuel says “we need to get tough with Israel,” you don’t have to see that as, like, dishonesty or subterfuge, necessarily. It’s not purely a facade. There’s an important sense in which “getting tough” works very well for both sides, both the Israelis and the Americans.

As you know, Israel is going to have an election in October. And right now the frontrunner is Gadi Eisenkot, who represents a sort of pragmatic, centrist politics in Israel…

Ahmed Moor:

He’s known for the Dahiya Doctrine.

Seth Ackerman:

Yes, and the Dahiya Doctrine is very much a part of the mainstream national security consensus in Israel. Eisenkot was a top general, he spent his career in the IDF. He’s like a pragmatic national security centrist.

Now, if you imagine Rahm Emanuel as president or secretary of state or whatever, the things he’s proposing in this speech just wouldn’t fly with the current Netanyahu government. The current government couldn’t survive if it cooperated with that program.

But suppose there’s an alternative government led by someone like Eisenkot. My sense is that if Eisenkot reads Emanuel’s speech, he’s thinking: wow, this is an incredible deal for Israel. This is offering Israel basically a historic knockout victory against the Palestinians in exchange for very little.

The problem is, it would still be extremely controversial in Israeli public opinion, because it means the Israelis would have to negotiate with the Palestinians. It means there would be talk of Palestinian sovereignty at some point in the future. These things are no-no’s in Israeli politics.

So, while someone like Eisenkot might see this as a fantastic opportunity for Israel, the problem is, it would be very difficult, or at least a challenge, to get it through a government, given the opposition from parts of Israeli public opinion.

What better way to solve that problem than to have an American administration, led by Secretary of State Rahm Emanuel or whoever, coming over and saying: “Israel, we’ve had it with you. If you don’t change, we’re going to force you to change, we’re going to apply pressure.”

In the speech, Emanuel talked about things like imposing sanctions on “violent settlers,” or imposing sanctions on construction companies involved in “illegal settlements” (which clearly refers only to unauthorized, or future, settlements).

In that kind of situation, you can see how it could be very advantageous for, say, a Prime Minister Gadi Eisenkot to be able to tell his own public: “What can I do? My hands are tied, we have no choice. We can’t fight the American superpower. We have to accept this thing the Americans are proposing.”

You can see how that could work out very nicely for both sides. On one side, you have a Democratic administration that gets to pose as “getting tough” with Israel, which is what Democratic voters want to see.

And on the other side, you have an Israeli government that gets this fantastic deal, but it’s a deal that’s challenging in domestic political terms. And Emanuel can come over and help them deal with that political challenge by saying: “I’m the American superpower and I’m forcing you to do it.”

Ahmed Moor:

To be clear, this is not a just outcome, but it’s also a fundamentally destabilizing outcome. So, even if you don’t like the Palestinians, this is not going to resolve anything.

Seth Ackerman:

Exactly. I mean, think of it this way. The Israelis had to deal with the First Intifada, and then the Second Intifada. They crushed the Second Intifada by, like, the middle of the 2000s…

Ahmed Moor:

2005, I think, is when people think it ended.

Seth Ackerman:

Right, so 20 years ago. Then Israel had almost 20 years of relative peace and quiet. Not much trouble from the Palestinians. And during those years, they felt triumphant. Their attitude was like, this is fine; this shows we don’t have to worry about the Palestinians.

And the US went along with that. So, just days before October 7th, infamously, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, published an article in Foreign Affairs about the administration’s Middle East policy, in which he bragged about how the region was the quietest it had been in years. What a triumph, what an achievement. That was, like, October 6.

But they managed to buy themselves almost 20 years. I think Rahm Emanuel surely knows that the policy agenda he’s proposing is a long shot, in practice, even in the short term. I mean, I still don’t see how he would get the Arab states to agree to what would seem like the really unappealing prospect of being the Americans in South Vietnam, having to nation-build this state with no legitimacy, having to be in a permanent counterinsurgency campaign against the Palestinians. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

But he might manage to get back to something like the Oslo negotiations treadmill, where you have negotiations for the sake of negotiations, where the main subject of negotiations is the next round of negotiations. You could keep that going for a while. That might buy the Israelis some time. I think Emmanuel would see that as a big success. It would remove all the pressure. Maybe he could get try to get a few more Arab states to normalize relations with Israel during that time.

And I have to warn people: As long as a Democratic administration can get some Palestinian with a pulse, who’s been labeled a Palestinian leader, shaking hands every few months with some Israeli official for the cameras — with lots of activity by US officials shuttling back and forth between Ramallah and Jerusalem and so on — I promise you: you’ll see all those progressive members of Congress who in the last few years have been really frustrated with the Biden administration and with the congressional Democratic leadership, now turning around and telling their constituents: “This administration is working tirelessly for peace in the Middle East.”

And you almost couldn’t blame them. Like, if some hand-picked Palestinian “leader” is choosing to engage in these negotiations, who am I, as a member of Congress from Seattle or St. Louis or Chicago, to say this Democratic White House is wrong to pursue this policy. And the White House, meanwhile, would be saying, “don’t upset the apple cart, these negotiations are very important.” That could certainly buy Israel some time and remove the pressure.

Ahmed Moor:

And you use the word “tirelessly,” which I think is going to dog AOC for a long time, from when she described Kamala Harris as “working tirelessly for a ceasefire.”

Seth, I’m so grateful to you for your time. Thank you for presenting these ideas. I think it’s a very sharp analysis and you identify the points of risk for people who are working for justice, and ultimately stability. Because I think you get peace and stability through justice, and not by any other means.

Thanks to everyone for listening to this episode of Occupied Thoughts. Thank you, Seth.

Seth Ackerman:

Thank you.

First, let’s get one thing straight. Rahm Emanuel’s much-heralded speech on US-Israel relations portends no shift at all in Democratic Party policy toward Israel.

In fact, if leaked media accounts are accurate, it doesn’t contain a single proposal that wasn’t already adopted in the waning days of the Biden administration (but quietly rendered toothless by the policy fine-print).

What Emanuel’s speech does signal is an understanding that major changes in the optics of US policy will be needed if the status quo is to be maintained.

Thus, Emanuel wants to replace direct financial aid to Israel’s military with hidden subsidies buried in the bowels of the defense-procurement budget. Threats of sanctions against “violent settlers” are meant to give political cover to ongoing US acquiescence to the annexation of the West Bank (with the “violence” outsourced to the IDF).

Above all, Emanuel and company are hoping the Netanyahu government will soon be replaced by a coalition that presents a less truculent face to world opinion, even as its policies are unlikely to change very much. Then, it’s hoped, the issue will quietly fade from US politics, and business as usual can resume.

However, Emanuel’s speech does register a bona fide political shift, and that shift represents a genuine opportunity. But right now that opportunity is going to waste, because critics of Israel have failed to advance a policy agenda commensurate with the scale of the problem.

Thus far, advocates of accountability for Israel have floated policy proposals that suffer from two major flaws: they fail to spell out the extent of Israel’s international obligations, and they lack real teeth.

Bills like the Ceasefire Compliance Act, supported by J Street, or Rep. Delia Ramirez’s Block the Bombs Act, at most require (on paper, at least) Israel’s compliance with generic human rights standards or with Donald Trump’s one-sided October 2025 Gaza ceasefire. That amounts, at best, to little more than a restoration of the pre-October 7 status quo.

Meanwhile, the measures that are proposed to force Israeli compliance are far too weak to be credible. Block the Bombs, for example, bars the transfer to Israel of a handful of categories of battlefield munitions, all of which Israel could find substitutes for on the international arms market. That isn’t remotely sufficient to force the necessary changes in Israel’s behavior.

These shortcomings stem from a strange contradiction that plagues discussions of US-Israel relations.

On the one hand, there’s a vastly exaggerated sense of fatalism about the ability of the United States to force fundamental change in Israeli policy. On the other hand — paradoxically — there’s an implicit expectation that any coercive measures must generate quick, painless results.

Both of these assumptions get the problem exactly backwards. Israel is a small country that simply cannot withstand concerted international pressure to force its compliance with international law. The notion that a superpower like the US is somehow powerless to stop Israel is absurd.

At the same time, the application of such pressure would represent a profound shock to Israel’s domestic politics, and it would require wrenching changes in both its domestic and foreign policies. That means pressure would take time to produce its intended effect. A decades-old problem won’t be solved in the space of a few months.

Thus, for any 2028 Democratic presidential hopeful to be taken seriously on this issue, they must, as a minimal prerequisite, support two key steps, both of which could be implemented on Day 1 of a new administration.

First, the United Nations Security Council must finally vote to enshrine and enforce the 2024 decision of the International Court of Justice — a court to which Israel is a party by treaty — which ruled, inter alia, that:

• “The continued presence of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is illegal”;

• “This illegality relates to the entirety of the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel in 1967”;

• “The Gaza Strip is an integral part of the territory that was occupied by Israel in 1967”;

• “Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the régime associated with them, have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law”;

• “Consequently, Israel has an obligation to bring an end to its presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible.”

Second, all Israeli settlements must be subject to immediate and comprehensive sanctions.

The settlements are illegal. They undermine US foreign policy objectives. Every president from LBJ to Biden has warned Israel that the settlements constitute an “obstacle to peace” and thereby threaten core US interests. The charade of Democratic politicians publicly wringing their hands, lamenting that “the window for a two-state solution is closing,” while continuing to wink at the spread of settlements must finally be brought to an end.

What this means in practice is that any company or individual who signs a lease or purchases title to property on occupied land in East Jerusalem or the West Bank (or Gaza) is to be placed on the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list and barred from access to the US financial system, along with any bank or company that does business with them.

Initially, Israel’s response to such a policy would be one of hysterical defiance. Resolutions would be passed in the Knesset declaring that Israel will never surrender an inch of occupied territory. Leaders across the political spectrum would denounce the US and hurl accusations of antisemitism at the White House. Allusions to Masada would proliferate.

All of this is to be expected and should be accepted with equanimity.

What must not be accepted are attempts by Israel to evade sanctions or vent its fury on the Palestinians by intensifying its campaign of killing and destruction. Escalation of this kind must be met by counter-escalation: the extension of sanctions to target the largest Israeli banks, insurers, and energy firms, and ultimately, if necessary, the Israeli central bank. Clear warnings to this effect must be communicated from the outset.

Once the initial burst of fury in Jerusalem subsides, Israeli leaders should be given time and space to finally open the painful and long-delayed national discussion about how the country can begin to extricate itself from the mess it’s gotten itself into.

Politically, any Israeli government would likely have no choice but to indemnify the country’s 750,000 settlers for the economic damage caused by sanctions, including large-scale mortgage defaults, business bankruptcies, and lost property values. The enormous costs to the public treasury this would entail, along with the likely acceleration of high-skilled emigration, would weigh heavily on Israel’s exchange rate, credit rating, and investment climate, and this economic burden would only grow and compound with the passage of time.

Eventually, a much needed sense of realism would begin to dawn in Israeli politics. Ultimately, the country would have little choice but to take the necessary steps to rejoin the international community.

That, of course, won’t happen overnight. But it won’t happen at all unless advocates of change in US Mideast policy get serious about the issue and do so starting today.

Chait wasn’t the first to suggest this. Benjamin Netanyahu first injected the idea in the public debate in an interview with the Economist in January. Since then it’s been touted by Matt Yglesias, taken up by J Street, the liberal pro-Israel lobby group, and embraced by presidential hopeful Rahm Emanuel.

It’s not uncommon, in times of rapid historical change, to see normally level-headed people lunge for illusory solutions based on weird leaps of logic. The current aid-to-Israel discourse seems like one of those cases. By making Israel pay for its weapons, many Israel supporters seem to think they’ll defuse opposition to arming Netanyahu.

Their reasoning is hard to follow. For example, Matt Yglesias argued recently: “Eliminating American subsidization of Israel allows us to back away from the sense that we are uniquely implicated in anything bad that Israel does.” Really? How? Surely it’s the weapons, not how much Israel pays for them, that create this “sense” that we’re implicated in what Israel does with our weapons?

Chait and Yglesias seem to think that if Israel paid for its weapons, the US could simply ignore the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Chait believes we should keep arming Israel while “pulling up stakes from the Middle East and letting Israelis and Palestinians figure it out for themselves.” Yglesias claims the US could then “disavow responsibility for forcing the parties to [make peace], by simply being less involved.”

There is a real flight from reality in these arguments. Unleashing a heavily-armed, totally unconstrained Israel to confront a largely defenseless Palestinian population, as Chait recommends, is something the US could already do if it wanted to. It’s just not really a recipe for regional stability. Its most likely result would be the forced expulsion of the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, a scenario that Jordan and Egypt already see as a real threat.

In fact, the Biden administration successfully managed to ignore the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for almost three years — without charging Israel a cent — until it was abruptly reminded of the consequences of doing so. How would dunning Israel for weapons have made any difference?

Fresh from his resignation as counter-terrorism chief Tuesday, Joe Kent went on Tucker Carlson to air his case against Trump’s war on Iran. His charge was two-fold: The war had been launched on Israel’s behalf, “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” And Israel’s case for war was based on lies.

“I know how this works,” Kent explained, according to an account of his comments in the Guardian:

I know the Israeli officials — some in intelligence, some in government — will come to US government officials and they will say all kinds of things that we know from our intelligence just simply isn’t true. They’ll say, hey, I’m giving you a preview, it’s not in intelligence channels yet, but here’s what’s gonna happen. And that doesn’t usually come to fruition.

Kent’s remarks drew “swift condemnation,” the Guardian reported, “with critics arguing that references to an ‘Israeli lobby’ veer into offensive tropes.” Indeed, that very day, Michael J. Koplow, chief policy officer of the (liberal) Israel Policy Forum, issued a public warning to Democrats: They were not to amplify Kent’s message, even if they shared his doubts about the war.

Koplow conceded that Iran likely posed no imminent threat to the US. He acknowledged that the “resilience” of the Iranian regime had been underestimated. But he put Democrats on notice that they’ll be expected to watch their language: conceding the two points above is fine. Saying “this is all Israel’s fault” is a no-no.

It is the jump from point A to point B where the dark antisemitic conspiracy theory comes in. It takes it as a given that Trump could not have possibly wanted to tackle Iran’s nuclear program, its ballistic missiles, or its leaders who attempted to assassinate him and officials from his first term, and that he was beguiled by Netanyahu and a group of perfidious Jews who took control of his actions.

Koplow is right to suggest that the public is confused about the Israel Lobby and that where confusion reigns, conspiracy theories tend to follow. That’s why it’s so important to grasp how Israel is able to bend US foreign policy to its will, even when those who make policy are pursuing their own home-grown objectives.

Naturally Israel’s sympathizers will be inclined to discount the testimony of Joe Kent, whom the Guardian refers to as “a staunch Trump ally and conspiracy theorist.” They’ll also be inclined to dismiss the testimony of Col. Larry Wilkerson, longtime aide-de-camp to the late Gen. Colin Powell, who is not a conspiracy theorist, but who expresses himself in the unvarnished language of a man who’s been burned by Israel one too many times.

“I never, never, ever believe Israeli figures,” Wilkerson told Middle East Monitor in 2024. “I’ve been in the government too long to know that the Israelis are patent liars, in their intelligence community, in their propaganda community, certainly, and in their leadership. They are inveterate liars.”

But what about Brett McGurk?

McGurk, the now-infamous former Biden aide who green-lit Israel’s bloodbath in Gaza, is a man with unassailable pro-Israel credentials. Yet his testimony resonates unmistakably with Wilkerson’s and Kent’s.

“The Israelis always do this,” he vented to journalist Bob Woodward. “They claim, ‘We got the intel! You’ll see it. You’ll see it.’ But like 50 percent of the time the so-called intel doesn’t actually show up.”

McGurk made this outburst in the course of recounting the hair-raising story of a now-forgotten war scare that took place just days after the October 7 attack. In this particular story, which appears in Woodward’s 2024 book War, Israel didn’t get its way. But that makes the tale all the more instructive for understanding how the Lobby really works when the national-security rubber meets the road.

The story begins with an urgent morning phone call from Netanyahu to Biden on October 11. Israel was about to invade Lebanon and Bibi wanted US support.

Biden, a decades-long friend of Israel and self-declared “Zionist,” turned him down. His military and intelligence advisers were of the unanimous opinion that conditions weren’t in place for an attack to succeed without massive risks to the US, especially given the likelihood that it would escalate into a regional war.

“What you guys are contemplating here is not going to work,” Biden told the Israeli leader. “I have skin in the game here.” There were 45,000 US personnel stationed in the region. “I don’t want you doing something that’s going to put our people at risk without you and me really coming to an understanding about what this is all about.”

As his aides listened in on speakerphone, Biden sought to dispel any ambiguity about his position:

“We are not on board,” Biden added. If there were any doubt, the president repeated his point: “We, the United States, are not on board for that conflict, so you should not count on our support if you preemptively launch a war against Hezbollah.”

Of course, Israel was America’s ally, so Biden made sure to add a crucial proviso: “If they attack you, if they attack Israel, the United States will always stand up for Israel’s security.” Then he pivoted back to his message. “But if you launch a preemptive war like this, we do not support it.”

Netanyahu’s reply was firm but gracious. He respected and understood Biden’s position. Of course the president had to think of America’s interests first. But Israel’s leaders had to do the same for their own country. And Netanyahu now had to tell the president, in all frankness, that his cabinet was leaning toward a preemptive attack.

Biden ended the call and convened a crisis meeting with his top national security officials. In an atmosphere of mounting tension, they watched and waited to see if Israel would go it alone, launching a war that could quickly escalate into a region-wide inferno.

Five minutes later, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, was summoned to take a call from Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s right-hand-man and closest confidante in the cabinet.

Dermer “expressed extreme displeasure that President Biden had pushed Netanyahu not to attack.” He further informed Sullivan, in no uncertain terms, that Israel’s cabinet was “shifting in the direction of a preemptive strike.”

Sullivan stood his ground. He even raised his voice: “What you are thinking about doing is dangerous. It’s irrational. We do not believe this is good for Israel and we fundamentally know it is not good for us… do not go ahead with it.” He added: “The president was deadly serious about that.”

The call ended without satisfaction for Dermer.

But looming in the background was Biden’s pledge to Bibi: he had promised to give Israel his blessing if the other side attacked first. He had spoken the magic words: “The United States will always stand up for Israel’s security.” That’s the essential context for understanding what happened three minutes later.

Three minutes later, at 11:16 a.m., Dermer called Sullivan again about Hezbollah.

Sullivan hit the speakerphone so McGurk could listen. It was now almost an open line with Israel.

“Hey, we’re just being transparent with you guys,” Dermer said. “They’ve launched the attack. There are paragliders coming from the north. One of them just landed and shot up a funeral for someone who was killed in the October 7 attack. We are going to launch the attack. And I’m telling you, you’ve got to batten down the hatches.”

Dermer said they were also getting reports of Hezbollah drones coming across the northern border, air raid sirens going off.

“I’m just telling you we have no choice,” Dermer said. “We’re going to launch the attack.” Israel had aircraft with munitions ready to strike.

He said they were going to go in 30 minutes.

They were inches away from a major Middle East war.

“Shit,” McGurk thought, “maybe Hezbollah did launch a paraglider attack.” Hamas had used paragliders on October 7.

But they had no corroborating intelligence.

McGurk left Sullivan and ran to his desk in Room 326 in the Executive Office Building next to the White House. It was the same office he was in during the Republican Bush administration. He called Centcom commander Erik Kurilla.

“Hey, my J2 says there are no paragliders,” Kurilla said, referring to the military’s intelligence portfolio. “There is no sign of any of this. It’s a phantom”...

McGurk ran back to the Oval Office, borrowing a spare tie from Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer on the way.

While McGurk was on the phone to Kurilla, Sullivan and Blinken made a secure call from the national security adviser’s office to DNI Haines, CIA director Burns, Secretary of Defense Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs CQ Brown.

“Are we seeing any of this?” Sullivan asked them.

No we are not, the intelligence and military leaders said. Sullivan re-checked this assessment with Burns at 11:31 a.m. Still nothing, Burns said emphatically.

But they could see social media and mainstream media were filled with reports of drones and sirens. Millions of Israelis were scrambling for shelter.

Sullivan called Dermer, pulling him out of Israel’s cabinet meeting.

U.S. intelligence agencies are not seeing any of this, Sullivan said. “In fact, it’s just not there”....

At the same time, McGurk received a message from Iran, strong backers of Hezbollah, through a back channel the U.S. has with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The communication came through a trusted Norwegian intermediary.

Iran’s message was: “We’re not looking for a conflict. Whatever is going on we are not looking for a conflict.”

McGurk said they obviously couldn’t know for sure if the Iranians were being honest, but it was a message consistent with the U.S. intel assessment.

“Let’s deflate this thing,” McGurk said.

The time frame for action was shrinking.

At 1:00 p.m. Dermer called Sullivan, who was in the Oval Office.

The Israeli cabinet has voted against taking military action in Lebanon, Dermer said.

With relief, Sullivan briefed the president. No preemptive strike.

The Israel Defense Forces came out publicly and said the information about drones, paragliders and other attacks on the northern border was false. None of it had actually happened.

“There was an error, and we are investigating it,” IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said.

“It was such a close call,” Antony Blinken told his colleagues. According to Woodward, Blinken was “shaken” by the incident.

And for good reason: he and the rest of the Biden team had been extremely lucky. By a stroke of good fortune, on that particular day, US intelligence was able to reach a rapid, dispositive assessment that Dermer’s fictional Hezbollah funeral massacre was, in fact, a fiction.

But what if they hadn’t been so lucky?

What if there’d been no immediate way to prove one way or another what had happened at the border? Then Israel would have done exactly what Dermer said it would do: It would have gone on the offensive in the north, claiming Hezbollah had attacked first, triggering a massive barrage of rockets toward Israel’s towns and cities as rumors of a shocking massacre at a Jewish funeral filled the world’s airwaves.

What would Biden have done then? Call a press conference to say he didn’t think the attack was real? That Israel, therefore, would be left to face the rockets alone?

This is where the Lobby comes in.

Some context:

• Just eight months earlier, the administration had withdrawn its own nominee to an international human rights post because a Lobby-aligned website had dug up an old post in which he’d called Israel an “apartheid state.”

• A month before that, Biden’s nominee to a State Department human rights job had been forced to withdraw her candidacy because the Zionist Organization of America objected to an old tweet of hers in which she’d called for disinvestment from Israel’s illegal West Bank settlements, leading a Republican senator to block her candidacy.

• And Biden surely hadn’t forgotten the bruising fight during his vice-presidency over Obama’s nomination of Chas Freeman, a widely respected career foreign service officer and Israel Lobby critic, to chair the National Intelligence Council. Chuck Schumer, echoing pro-Israel groups, had accused Freeman of harboring an “irrational hatred of Israel.” And that was the end of the Freeman nomination.

The tale of the fake Hezbollah attack of October 2023 is instructive precisely because in this particular case, the Biden team, staring down the barrel of a potentially catastrophic outcome for the administration, didn’t behave like the improbably pliable stooges of conspiracist sloganeering. They stood up for US interests. And thanks to a lucky break, they succeeded in shutting down Israel’s maneuver.

But the Lobby and its organizations had created a political reality in which, absent that stroke of luck, the Biden team would have felt compelled to act like pliable stooges, lest they be accused, as the Israel Policy Forum put it Wednesday, of casting blame on “perfidious Jews.”

Diplomacy is a devious game and trust between allies is a perennial issue in international politics. But under normal circumstances, countries have strong incentives not to deceive their closest allies. One country will only pledge to come to another’s defense if it has confidence its partner tells it the truth. If a country repeatedly lies, it loses its allies’ trust. At least, that’s how things usually work.

But what if a domestic lobby has convinced a country’s leadership class that questioning the integrity of a particular ally is a grave, potentially career-ending moral transgression? Then the incentive structure breaks down and the alliance becomes dysfunctional. In the US-Israel relationship, that’s been the reality for decades. And you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to see it.

This morning, the Guardian’s Amy Hawkins offers a delightful split-screen portrait of global consciousness, highlighting two trends playing out in parallel on US and Chinese social media.

• On US platforms like TikTok and Instagram, “young people are diving into the joys of Chinese culture – from drinking hot water to playing mahjong – all under the banner of ‘Chinamaxxing,’” she writes.

• On the Chinese internet, meanwhile, “the US is losing its decades-long grip on soft power, and is instead being replaced by a darker trend: the kill line.”

Hawkins explains that Chinese social media, blogs, and academic journals have lately taken to depicting “a vision of the US as a dystopian capitalist hell,” governed by what a Chinese news presenter called “a ‘kill line’ in American society where the middle class plummets into the underclass.”

The kill line “exposes America’s dual nature: the winners achieve ultimate success, while the losers fall into an abyss from which there is no return.”

The backstory:

The latest trend started in November, when a Chinese student living in Seattle posted a five-hour stream to the Chinese video-sharing website BiliBili. In the video, which has since attracted more than 3m views, he describes seeing hungry children at Halloween and the harsh realities of life for disadvantaged people in the world’s biggest economy. Soon, the term “kill line” took on a life of its own.

The meme has so captured the Chinese imagination that at a press conference at Davos in January, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was repeatedly asked to comment on the kill line by a Chinese state media journalist.

“I don’t understand the question,” he replied. (No kidding.)

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Bernie Sanders never tires of pointing out that 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, which infuriates a certain type of online wonk for some reason. When I posted about the phenomenon last year, I illustrated the point with the chart below, which shows that while the rich in the US have been stockpiling ever-larger cash buffers as a percentage of income, the rest of the population has been unable to follow suit:

As it turns out, Americans are uniquely incapable of building savings buffers from their incomes.

You can see this in the chart below, which plots disposable income1 against non-retirement financial assets2 for households at each decile threshold of the income and asset distributions, from the 10th to the 90th percentiles, in nine countries. (The data are taken from the Luxembourg Wealth Study, which harmonizes the numbers to make them comparable across countries. For data mavens, “non-retirement financial assets” corresponds to “financial assets” (FIN) minus “quasi-liquid retirement accounts” (RETQLIQ) in the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances.)

All data are from 2018 or 2019 (except for France which is from 2014).

So, for example, while the median Australian household has 12% less disposable income than its American counterpart, it has 60% more in financial assets. In Canada the numbers are 5% less income and 43% more assets. In Denmark it’s 19% less income and 74% more assets. In France it’s 28% less income and 41% more assets.

One clue as to why this may be the case is supplied by the OECD’s technical manual for disposable income statistics, which I quoted from in my last post:

As the manual puts it, disposable income excludes “goods and services provided by government that benefit individuals but which are provided free or at subsidized prices,” which “generally include education, health, social welfare, transport and cultural services”...

This omission “presents difficulties when the provision of such services differs greatly” between countries because in countries where such public expenditures “are relatively sparse, a higher income will be required to support a particular standard of living than in a country where a wide range of benefits are provided, all other things being equal.”

But statistical exegesis is of little comfort to America’s destitute and house-bound TikTok teens, who can only gaze longingly at Chinese savoir-vivre through their tiny internet portals:

While internet users in China are gawking at the idea of a US riven by poverty and chaos, for their American counterparts it is quite the opposite.

With “Chinamaxxing”, American teenagers are reveling in traditional Chinese lifestyle hacks such as drinking hot water or wearing slippers indoors. The trend’s slogan? “You’ve met me at a very Chinese time in my life”.

The other day I posted the chart below, along with an observation: “This type of ‘US state vs. European country’ comparison is now a flourishing genre on Twitter, I’ve noticed, where MAGA chuds chortle at the Europoors.”

Unfortunately my playfully affectionate reference to MAGA chuds was taken invidiously. A kind of bat signal went out and platoons of crypto enthusiasts went rushmaxxing onto Twitter to man the breaches. Fortunately, the damage was limited to minor confusion about income statistics.

To clear things up, here’s a Q&A about the chart.

What exactly is “pre-tax income“?

“Pre-tax income” is total national income. That is, if you add up all households’ “pre-tax” income, it sums to 100% of national income.

Is national income the same thing as GDP?

No, but they’re closely related.

GDP is the value of the goods and services produced by labor and capital physically located within the borders of (say) the USA.

If you add in the income households and companies earn from overseas production (either because they own overseas capital or do overseas work), and then subtract the mirror-image version of that (the income foreigners extract from domestic production), you get GNP.

If you subtract depreciation — the using-up of productive assets, like trucks and machines — from GNP, you get national income.

If pre-tax income is just national income, why do they call it pre-tax income? Is there a post-tax income?

Yes, there’s also a post-tax income series. It, too, adds up exactly to 100% of national income.

The point of these series is to allocate 100% of national income to the whole population and to show how government spending and taxes affect the distribution.

Pre-tax income is the sum of a person’s labor income, capital income, and income from pensions and unemployment insurance. It doesn’t matter whether the pension is part of a compulsory national system, like Social Security, or a voluntary private pension. Contributions to pensions and unemployment insurance are, correspondingly, subtracted from pre-tax income, even if they technically take the form of a tax.

Post-tax income then deducts all remaining taxes1 and adds in the value of all other government benefits and services, like Medicare and public schools. Again, the point is to account for 100% of national income.

It turns out it doesn’t matter very much whether you use pre-tax or post-tax income when making comparisons like those featured in the chart, because the share of national income that gets redistributed from the top 5% to the bottom 95% via taxes and government spending doesn’t differ greatly across countries. In the US it’s 5.8%; in Sweden it’s 6.2%. It ranges from from a low of 4% (the Netherlands) to a high of 10% (Denmark) in Western Europe.

Q: What about household size? Single-parent families and so forth?

First, I should explain that the numbers in the original chart showed income per adult, with the income of joint-filing couples equally split. I should have made that clear in the original post.

You can divide this by the number of adults in each country and then multiply by the total population to get plain old per capita income. Or you can look at the WID database again and realize that those numbers were there all along and you just didn’t notice (which happens to be the case here).

In any event, using true capita income makes the US look slightly poorer, since children make up a somewhat larger share of the population in the US than in Europe. Here’s a chart showing average pre- and post-tax incomes for the bottom 95% of the population, per person (total population).

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Q: And single-earner households?

Contrary to what some people assume, the US doesn’t appear to have an unusually large share of single-earner households. So that wouldn’t make a difference to the numbers in these charts.

In fact, the distribution of employed and non-employed prime-age adults (25-54) among different household types looks remarkably similar in the US and Europe. The main difference seems to be a somewhat larger share of employed adults in extended-family households in the US, balanced by a somewhat smaller share in two-adult households. Here’s a table:

Q: But what about * disposable * income?

On Twitter, someone posted a chart showing the OECD’s measure of “median disposable income,” a metric where the US truly shines:

Unfortunately, disposable income captures only about a third of US national income. It deducts almost all taxes from household incomes, yet most of the stuff those taxes pay for never shows up in the income total (things like highways, or Medicare).

As the OECD’s technical manual puts it, disposable income excludes “goods and services provided by government that benefit individuals but which are provided free or at subsidized prices,” which “generally include education, health, social welfare, transport and cultural services.”

The manual further notes that this omission “presents difficulties when the provision of such services differs greatly” between countries being compared. In those countries where such public expenditures “are relatively sparse, a higher income will be required to support a particular standard of living than in a country where a wide range of benefits are provided, all other things being equal.”

Or think of it this way: if the US closed all public schools tomorrow and sent every parent a voucher worth their share of school spending, America’s “median disposable income” would instantly skyrocket. Would we be richer? Not obviously so.

[COMING SOON — A LONG POST ABOUT ISRAEL! UNSUBSCRIBE NOW IF YOU’RE NOT READY FOR THAT CONVERSATION!]

While writing my last post, I stumbled on a Krugman piece that reminded me about the time Trump’s ambassador to the EU claimed (quoting Krugman) “that Europe is as poor as Mississippi and Germany as poor as West Virginia.” (“To which the immediate answer should be that if that’s what your numbers say, your numbers are wrong,” quoth Krugman.)

This type of US state vs. European country comparison is now a flourishing genre on Twitter, I’ve noticed, where MAGA chuds chortle at the Europoors. Their favored metric for such exercises seems to be per capita GDP — never mind that 15-25% of GDP is typically depreciation, or that the Republic of Guyana, a country with a life expectancy lower than Cambodia’s, has a per capita GDP higher than Pennsylvania’s.

I thought it would be worth seeing what more plausible numbers might look like. Here’s per capita income for the bottom 95% of the population, as measured by the World Inequality Database’s pre-tax national income series.1 And while we’re at it, why not also look at per capita hours worked, which are taken here from the Conference Board’s Total Economy Database via the Penn World Table2. All data are from 2023.

For those keeping score at home:

• Massachusettsians are 7% poorer than the Dutch but work 19% more hours

• Californians are 6% poorer than Swedes while working 21% more hours

• Belgians are 6% richer than New Yorkers while working 24% fewer hours

• The French are 2% richer than Floridians while working 27% less.

  
  

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In his Substack post mentioning my recent article, Paul Krugman makes a point that, as he says, is different from mine, but doesn’t contradict it: just because productivity grows faster in Country A than in Country B, that doesn’t mean Country A will necessarily get any richer relative to Country B.

This claim will surely strike many people as counterintuitive, if not incredible, which probably explains why Krugman takes the trouble to work through a detailed numerical example to demonstrate his point.

In Krugman’s example, the US tech sector experiences a productivity boom. But the boom leaves US GDP no higher relative to Europe — which lacks a tech sector of its own, in his stylized scenario — because with competitive markets, the increased productivity simply lowers US tech prices, which benefits Europe, too (or at least does it no harm.)

Krugman here is channeling the argument — or rather, half of the argument — made by John Hicks in his 1953 Oxford inaugural lecture, “The Long-Run Dollar Problem,” which, as it happens, was also about a US-Europe productivity gap.

What’s telling is that when Hicks made this argument — which today sounds surprising, if not heretical — he considered it to be nothing more than conventional wisdom. At the time, most English-speaking economists still lived in a mental world defined by the irenic liberalism of their Victorian forebears. If “classical economics,” as they called it then, had one big idea, it was that when one country (or individual, or class) progresses economically, everybody benefits; the economy isn’t a zero-sum game.

What prompted Hicks to revisit the question was the grim economic situation then prevailing in Europe, which seemed to discredit those comforting nostrums. Though we now remember the “postwar era” as a long, undifferentiated period of prosperity, that’s not how things looked in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Europe was still struggling with intractable macroeconomic instability. The most visible manifestation of that instability, a malady we would now call a chronic balance-of-payments deficit, was then commonly referred to as Europe’s “dollar problem.”

The dollar problem seemed to pose an intellectual challenge to liberal economics because, in the judgment of most observers, its root cause was the enormous economic lead the United States had opened up vis-a-vis the Old World thanks to decades of breakneck productivity growth. Given how much more cheaply American firms could supply the market across a broad swath of industries, Europe appeared unable to sell enough exports to earn the dollars it needed to buy the very things (such as American machinery) it would need to catch up.

Some were now suggesting that Smith and Ricardo had been proven wrong after all. Maybe national economies could be harmed by other countries’ economic progress. Maybe the economy was, in some sense, a zero-sum game. In his lecture, Hicks set out to show that the tools of “classical” economics could both explain the dollar problem and define the exact conditions under which the old optimistic view would — and would not — hold.

The key distinction he drew was between what textbooks now call export-biased and import-biased growth. In the former, Country A’s productivity growth is beneficial to other countries because it’s concentrated in industries in which they do not compete. In the latter case, Country A’s progress can actually reduce the incomes of its trading partners, because it’s concentrated in sectors in which they formerly held a comparative advantage. Whether the irenic conclusions of classical theory hold or not is thus an empirical question that hinges on the actual pattern of trade and production:

I do think that we see the shadows of such patterns across the face of history. Western Europe is not the first metropolis of trade and industry which has suffered from the competition of the new lands which it has itself developed; there was, I fancy, an element of this same process in the decline of ancient Greece; we ourselves in this island grew great in the fifteenth century and later at the expense of the Flemish and Italian centres on which we had formerly depended. But though such historical examples warn us that the process under discussion is not at all uncommon, they also indicate that there is nothing inevitable about its denouement.

Since the 1980s, the default conventional wisdom has switched completely. You no longer have to convince educated people, as Hicks felt the need to do, that one country’s economic gain might be an another’s loss. “We live in a competitive world” is now the lowest common denominator cliché of economic discourse. This helps to explain why the business press has lately been full of charts like those below. The numbers just seem so perfectly in tune with the narrative: America’s world-beating tech industry is surging ahead. Surely Europe must be suffering the consequences.

(Sorry to pick on the Financial Times, which has been no worse than others.)

What I set out to show in my own article, on the statistics of US-Europe productivity comparisons, is that these numbers are almost certainly wrong.

UPDATE: Paul Krugman comments in a post on his Substack: “This post was inspired in large part by an extremely informative post by Seth Ackerman that has generated a lot of discussion in the circle of economists who worry about such matters.”

Since COVID, a narrative about economic stagnation in Europe alongside booming productivity in America — “Eurosclerosis,” to use an old but newly fashionable term — has attained the status of accepted fact in discussions of global politics. Though analysts may differ about what conclusions to draw or what steps should be taken, the “fact” itself is seldom questioned.

Since all of the relevant numbers on this subject come from a handful of marquee statistical series produced by leading international organizations — and since they’re all constantly scrutinized and litigated by legions of economists and policy experts — you might think the raw facts contained in them would be a settled question. But there’s a serious problem lurking in these data, one that seems to have gone entirely unnoticed in the discourse.

To compare GDP levels between countries, raw monetary figures — like the UK’s 2.9 trillion pounds of 2024 GDP or the US’s 29.2 trillion dollars — have to be converted to a common unit of measure. This is typically done using purchasing power parities (PPPs), which are like ordinary exchange rates, but adjusted for differences in national price levels.

For example, in 2024 the UK’s market exchange rate was 0.782 pounds to the dollar, meaning 100 US dollars could buy 78.2 pounds on the currency market. But according to the PPP data, a basket of goods that cost $100 in America only cost 66.4 pounds in the UK, because the UK price level, after converting from dollars to pounds, was about 15% lower than America’s. At the PPP ratio of 0.664, therefore, UK GDP was about 15% higher than at market exchange rates: $4.2 trillion vs. $3.7 trillion.

The national price levels that go into these calculations are measured just as you might expect: armies of clipboard-wielding field economists in countries around the world collect prices on thousands of products, which are then carefully matched with comparable products in other countries. This global effort is coordinated by the International Comparison Program (ICP), an official UN body housed at the World Bank, which releases a fresh set of global estimates every few years, most recently for 2021.

According to these data, which are available at the World Bank’s website, the 17 countries of Western Europe1 had a combined PPP-converted GDP of $28.8 trillion in 2024 — almost identical to the US’s $29.2 trillion. If you go back a decade, to 2014, the numbers are, again, almost identical: $17.2 trillion versus $17.6 trillion. Go back another decade, to 2004, and the numbers are once again essentially the same: $11.9 trillion versus $12.2 trillion.

Judging from these figures, Europe’s GDP would seem to be keeping pace with America’s just fine, pace conventional wisdom. Why, then, do we constantly hear the opposite?

The answer is that there are two PPP-converted GDP data series, and they tell completely different stories about Europe’s relative performance.

In addition to the series from which the numbers above are drawn, which is labeled “GDP, PPP (current international $)” in the World Bank dataset, there’s another series called “GDP, PPP (constant 2021 international $)” Nearly identical twinned series are published by other institutions, such as the OECD’s ”PPP-converted GDP, current prices” and “PPP-converted GDP, chain-linked volume.“ For brevity, I’ll refer to these two types of data generically as current-price and constant-price GDP.

Although the two metrics give similar numbers for the most recent year (2024), the constant-price series diverges further and further from the current-price series the deeper you go back in time, with Europe appearing to get richer and richer relative to America, and thus poorer and poorer as you approach the present.

According to the constant-price GDP metric, US output exceeded Europe’s by 4.3% in 2024. But go back a decade earlier, to 2014, and the positions are reversed, with Europe’s GDP exceeding the US’s by 5.5%. Go back another decade, to 2004, and Europe’s advantage grows to 13.7%.

Go all the way back to 1990, the start of the World Bank series, and Europe’s GDP is reported to be 30% larger than America’s. Those who claim that Europe’s economy is lagging rest their case on the credibility of these numbers.

The organizations that publish these series typically explain the difference between them by saying that current-price PPPs are appropriate for comparing GDP between countries at a single point in time while constant-price PPPs are designed for comparisons across different years.

But clearly something is missing from this explanation because, logically speaking, it can’t both be the case that the US and Europe had the same GDP in 2014 and the same GDP again in 2024 (per the current-price series), and also that America’s GDP grew dramatically faster than Europe’s between those years (per the constant-price series).

To understand what’s really going on with these numbers, consider the following example: suppose in a given year the US produces 1 million watches and 500,000 clocks while Europe produces 1 million clocks and 500,000 watches. If the price of both products, in both countries, is equal to 1, the level of GDP is the same in both places (1.5 million).

Then suppose the following year the numbers remain unchanged, except that the price of watches falls to 0.9. Since the US is more specialized in watch production while Europe is more specialized in clocks, America’s GDP in “current prices” will have fallen relative to Europe’s (by 3.4%), even though the physical volume of production in both places remains exactly the same as before2.

This is why, to get a purely real (”physical”) measure of internationally comparable GDP growth over time, you have to adjust not only for differences in overall national price levels (as the current-price series does) but also for changes in relative product prices over time, so that countries’ production volumes don't appear to be rising or falling just because they happen to produce goods whose prices are moving up or down. This adjustment for changing product prices is the raison d’être of constant-price GDP.

But while, conceptually, such adjustments make sense, there is a huge problem with the way the statisticians go about it. Unlike the current-price series, which converts each year’s GDP into internationally comparable dollars using the PPP ratios derived from the ICP’s global price comparisons, the constant-price series does this only for the current year’s GDP. For all prior years, the numbers are simply extrapolated backwards using the annual GDP growth rates published by the various national statistical agencies. Thus, the higher a country’s official growth rate, the poorer it appears to have been in the past (and vice versa).

Of course, each national statistical agency duly adjusts for changing product prices within its own economy, using methods that presumably ensure internal consistency over time. But in adopting these growth rates for purposes of international comparison, the constant-price GDP series simply assumes that different countries’ growth statistics are, in fact, comparable: that when countries measure their own GDP — including, crucially, the price indexes used to convert nominal into real GDP — they use mutually consistent concepts and methods.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. This becomes painfully obvious when you look at prices for tradable manufactured goods. Although the actual prices of such goods, in a globalized economy, march practically in lockstep across countries, there is no such uniformity in the official price statistics, which reflect the idiosyncratic measurement methods employed by different national statistical agencies — in particular the highly subjective techniques they use to adjust for changes in product quality over time.

Those methods are all over the map. For example, a 2019 article by a Federal Reserve economist highlights the “mysterious” and “wildly different” rates of decline in official price indexes for mobile phones over the years 2008-2018. These ranged from -18% in Australia, to -52% in the US and Canada, to more than -90% in the UK and New Zealand. “The magnitude of this variation is highly implausible,” the author notes drily, stressing “the need for international harmonization.”

A 2023 paper by a former Japanese Ministry of Finance economist reports that while television-set prices declined by 85% in the US (BLS) price index over 2005-2015, they increased by 8% in Japan’s official statistics.

Even within the European Union, where statistical procedures are subject to a strong dose of harmonization, thanks to Eurostat, Bundesbank economists noted recently that in 2017-2021, measured price declines for mobile phones ranged from -16% in Germany to -50% in Italy, even though, according to barcode-scanner data, the actual rate of price change in those countries was identical. “Our findings emphasize the need for greater harmonization and transparency,” the authors conclude.

To be sure, the official statistics have some points in their favor. National statistical agencies are uniquely able to measure prices at very fine levels of product detail and to aggregate them with precisely measured weights. For many products, especially non-tradable services, it may be hard to find exact equivalents across countries, as required for accurate PPP comparisons. There are also, perhaps, less lofty reasons why Big Stat might prefer to simply copy-and-paste official growth rates into the PPP numbers (a question I’ll return to below).

Whatever the reasons, the end result is a serious problem of inconsistency in the data: each time the ICP carries out a new round of global price comparisons, it finds trends in cross-country relative price levels that conflict dramatically with those implied by the various national price indexes. Instead of taking that information on board, the organizations effectively sweep it under the rug, plucking out a single year’s PPP-adjusted GDP to “anchor” the data, then filling in the growth rates with numbers from the national accounts.

Over time, such inconsistencies accumulate, yielding historical absurdities like the notion that the US economy was 30% smaller than Western Europe’s in 1990 — or that productivity in Italy was 20% higher than in the US. (Yes, that’s what the OECD data say.)

I’m not, of course, the first person to notice this problem. It’s been discussed in the technical literature for years. As far back as 1998, the Ryten Report, a high-level independent review of the PPP program solicited by the IMF and World Bank, warned that the problem of “incoherence over time” was “most damaging to the credibility of the PPP exercise” and that this “damaging criticism” would haunt the program “until there is a plausible answer.”

It was in response to such criticism that, more than a decade ago, economists at the University of Groningen’s Growth and Development Center (GDC), stewards of the venerable Penn World Table (PWT) dataset, began developing an alternative set of PPP metrics that don’t simply copy-and-paste official growth rates. And since the GDC serves as a kind of R&D lab for the global PPP project3, its judgments carry more than usual weight.

The key GDP metric that emerged from this work, labeled rgdpo in the PWT dataset (r for “real”; o for “output”), is designed to address the shortcomings of both current-price and constant-price PPPs.

Unlike current-price GDP, rgdpo adjusts for changing product prices over time, avoiding the watch/clock problem described above. Unlike constant-price GDP, it accepts the reality of the price-level trends found in successive ICP waves, using data from the national accounts only to “interpolate” for years between ICP rounds and “extrapolate” for years since the latest round. This eliminates the inconsistency problem. (By necessity, this means rgdpo only gives distinctive results for years up to 2021, the last ICP comparison year, which is why the charts below stop at 2021.)

The newest PWT results, just released last October, are unequivocal: Europe’s performance as measured by rgdpo looks a lot like the current-price GDP series — with its steady trend relative to the US — but nothing like the downward-sloping constant-price series4.

And if we use the data to calculate productivity growth (GDP her hour worked), it turns out that, far from lagging the US, Europe is gaining on it: its productivity was 92%, 94%, and 94% of the US level in the early 2010s, late 2010s, and 2020s, respectively — figures that rise to 96%, 97%, and 98% if we use ILO hours data, which are likely more comparable5.

It’s certainly possible that at some point in the future international statistical bodies could end up adopting the PWT approach. But even setting technical obstacles aside, it’s easy to see why they might be reluctant.

The growth rate of GDP, like a papal bull, is a solemn pronouncement of truth, handed down from on high, on a question of profound temporal (and to some devotees of the GDP cult, spiritual) importance. If organizations like the World Bank and OECD were to opt for the PWT method, there would henceforth be “two GDP growth rates,” akin to the two popes of the Middle Ages.

Heretical questions would be sure to follow.

• Bernie Sanders says it over and over again: 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. But Matt Darling of the Niskanen Center swears it’s not true and Dylan Matthews of Vox.com calls it a damned lie. Even Matt Yglesias is apparently on the case, but I’m blocked from seeing his posts.
  
  
  Who’s right and who’s wrong? Who should we listen to? Bernie Sanders — a model citizen of our community? Or the infamous Vox-Niskanen syndicate?
  
  

  

• The answer is that Bernie is right. In the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), conducted triennially by the Federal Reserve, the median working-age (25-64) household, excluding active business owners, stated its "normal income" to be $73,175 per annum and reported $4,521 in transaction balances, such as checking or savings accounts. (All amounts are in 2022 dollars.)
  
  

• That’s about 3.2 weeks’ worth of income in cash. If "living paycheck to paycheck" means having less than a month’s worth of income saved in cash, then, calculated in this way, the "60%" factoid gets it exactly right: the share of working-age, non-business-owning households living paycheck to paycheck was:
  
  
  63% in 1998
  63% in 2001
  64% in 2004
  64% in 2007
  67% in 2010
  64% in 2013
  61% in 2016
  59% in 2019
  
  

• In other words, Bernie nailed it.
  

  What, then, led the pundits to the erroneous conclusion that it was Bernie who had erred?
  

• The most important factor, quantitatively speaking, is slightly technical and takes a bit of explanation. If you want to use household wealth data to determine what share of Americans “live paycheck to paycheck,” you have to exclude business owners from the analysis. One reason for this is that business owners literally can’t live paycheck to paycheck since they don’t receive a paycheck. But that isn’t the main reason.
  
  

• The more important point is that business owners distort the data — they typically report extraordinarily large holdings of cash assets, far out of line with their incomes or net worth. And while there’s no way to prove this, it’s pretty clear the reason is that a significant proportion of the cash balances they report as household wealth is actually, in functional terms, working capital for their businesses.
  
  

• Although the SCF tries to strictly measure household finances and asks respondents to exclude any accounts "used solely for business purposes," in practice it’s extremely common for business owners to mingle business and personal accounts. (Almost half have been found to use personal credit cards for business expenses, for example.) More fundamentally, money is fungible: as long as the same person controls both the business and the household accounts, it’s impossible to determine how much of those funds should be considered "household savings" and how much "working capital," short of reading the account-holder’s mind.
  
  

• Failing to exclude working capital when assessing household financial security isn’t a debatable methodological choice. It’s just plain wrong — an accounting mistake, akin to confusing revenue with profit on an income statement.
  
  

• Here’s an illustration by way of analogy. A financially strapped teacher or office worker, facing a money emergency, could theoretically come up with the needed cash by selling their car and taking the bus to work instead. But an Uber driver facing the same problem couldn’t do that, because the car is how they make money. The teacher’s car is thus a form of household wealth, which can potentially be “dipped into.” The Uber driver’s car isn’t. If you include business owners and their un-disentangleable working capital in your household wealth calculations, you’re taking billions of dollars of cash assets that serve the same function as the Uber driver’s car and treating them as if they were a rainy day fund available to be tapped by households.
  

  
  

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• And when you do exclude business owners from the calculations, the difference it makes is huge. The median business-owning household has liquid assets equivalent to eight weeks' worth of income, versus barely more than three weeks for non-business owners. Business-owning households with incomes under $30,000, believe it or not, have a higher median level of liquid assets ($4,057) than non-business-owning households with incomes under $300,000 ($3,941).
  
  

• Another factor that led the pundits astray was the famous "excess savings" bubble of the COVID era. Matt Darling uses data from the 2022 edition of the SCF to claim that “The median American household holds $8k in transaction accounts (checking/savings).” That’s understandable, since 2022 is the survey’s most recent wave. But 2022 was also near the peak of the savings boom — the product of a temporary spurt of cash injections from the government coinciding with a temporary dearth of things to buy.
  
  
  In 2022, the liquid balances reported by SCF respondents were unprecedentedly high: the share of working-age households with less than one month’s income in cash (again, excluding business owners) plummeted from 59% in 2019 to an all-time low of 52% in 2022. But pretty soon those "excess savings" got spent down, as the San Francisco Fed noted last year in a report entitled “Pandemic Savings Are Gone: What’s Next for US Consumers?”, which included the following chart:
  

  

  While we won’t have fresh data from the SCF until 2026, it’s pretty clear that if the survey were fielded today, the ratios would look a lot less like the 2022 numbers cited by Darling, and a lot more like those of 2019.
  
  

• Putting it all together — excluding business owners, focusing on working-age households (the ones who rely on paychecks), and ignoring the temporary COVID-related circumstances of 2022 — it turns out (as shown above) that year after year, in survey after survey, close to 60% of households report holding less than one month’s income in cash reserves.

  
  

• There’s one more data point to quibble with before moving on to bigger things: if Bernie is right that 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, what should we make of the survey Darling cites in which 54% of households say they have three months’ income saved for emergencies?
  
  
  Darling’s source is the Fed’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED). Unlike the SCF, which is an exhaustive, all-day, in-person affair where respondents are literally asked to name every financial institution they do business with and list every financial account they hold, the SHED is a breezy twenty-minute online survey that asks questions about everything from cryptocurrency to natural disasters.
  
  

• The specific question at issue reads: "Have you set aside emergency or rainy day funds that would cover your expenses for 3 months in case of sickness, job loss, economic downturn, or other emergencies?" Here’s the problem. Exactly the same question, with identical wording, was asked by a different survey the previous year (FINRA’s 2022 National Financial Capability Study), and got almost exactly the same result (53% of respondents saying yes) — and yet, in that very same survey, when respondents were subsequently asked, "How confident are you that you could come up with $2,000 if an unexpected need arose within the next month?" only 43% answered "I am certain I could come up with $2,000."

  
  

  How is that possible? If 53% of respondents have a rainy day fund covering three months’ worth of expenses, how could only 43% of them be certain they could come up with $2000? It’s not mathematically possible.
  
  

• The problem with the SHED question, I suspect, stems from its wording. "Have you set aside emergency or rainy day funds…?" is a framing that seems almost calculated to inject social desirability bias into the responses. Rather than an accurate accounting of their personal finances, the respondents’ answers seem to be more a kind of internal psychological housekeeping. When abruptly summoned to confess their personal finance sins to an anonymous survey bot, many people, evidently, demur.

  ---

• Now, it could be argued — and not without reason — that any attempt to quantify the phenomenon of "living paycheck to paycheck" must inevitably be arbitrary. Why restrict our focus to checking and savings accounts when households have other resources they can draw on in a financial emergency?
  
  
  If you don’t have liquid savings, you can take cash out of retirement accounts. If you don’t have retirement accounts, you can run up a credit card. If you’ve maxed out your credit card, you can borrow from friends or family, use a payday lender, or pawn your belongings. If you own a home, you could sell your house and move into a rental. Or you could liquidate a portion of your human capital by selling your plasma, or organs.
  
  

• But for the people facing these choices, the options aren’t equal or interchangeable. Being forced to sell savings bonds to meet an unexpected financial shock is not the same as being forced to sell your house (let alone a kidney). To wave away the difference on the grounds that, either way it’s just "selling a household asset" to meet a given expense, is not only clueless — it’s a denial of economics.
  
  
  There’s a reason financial commentators refer to market turmoil as a "flight to liquidity." Liquidity means safety. And safety is a luxury good: only the rich can afford it. That’s why Bernie says "paycheck to paycheck" over and over again: because it resonates. Not as much as "permitting reform," maybe, but still it resonates.

  
  

• Some pundits are now digging in their heels and denying that 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. But some of them also seem to be saying that, even if the number is true, it doesn’t evidence any real hardship. Isn’t it financially imprudent to keep too much of your savings in cash anyway? Maybe three week’s worth is plenty.
  
  
  For them, I have a sincere question. Why is it that the rich, who have a choice, never choose to keep less than a month’s worth of their income in cash — even though in their case a month’s worth of income is a lot of money?
  
  Nowadays the top 10% of income earners, on median, consistently hold more than eight weeks’ worth of their incomes in cash — more than three times the proportion of the bottom 90%. Why is that?
  

  

  
  To be clear, the question isn’t why the rich have so much more money or wealth (that’s not a mystery). Nor is it why they have so much wealth in proportion to their incomes. It’s why they choose to keep nine weeks’ worth of their (very large) incomes in cash, when they could be indulging in the purported pleasures of proletarian illiquidity.
  
  I think the answer is obvious: Bernie was right. Liquidity is intensely desirable — but it’s expensive. And most Americans are too poor to afford it.

  
  
  

Yes, politics is and should be about more than consumer choices in a marketplace; people can and should use "voice," not just "exit," to affect the political world; they can and should become active in politics directly. But since most people can’t spend most of their time on politics, the consumer-type mode of political action will always determine a large, usually decisive, block of votes in every election, so it can’t be ignored. (Even I have to rely on labels/branding to make judgments about, say, local politics, which I don’t follow much — and I spend a lot of time on politics.)

But as any economist will tell you, branding only exists because it confers market power: it makes the customer captive to the brand to a greater or lesser degree. There may be many other products out there, but the consumer only knows anything about a small handful of them. If the price goes up a bit or the quality declines a bit, the customer will still stick with "their" brand because learning about all the competing products is impossible, or at least costly — just as it would be impossible for a voter to learn about every individual politician’s views on every subject — and nobody wants to take the risk of spending their money on a product that might turn out to be worthless or worse. The very existence of branding always limits competition at least to some extent. But the *degree* to which brands can exploit their customers in this way depends on how easy it is for competing brands to enter the market.

The US political system is unique in the obstacles it places in the way of competition to the two major parties. There’s a popular myth that says this is just the result of our winner-take-all election system (as opposed to, say, a proportional representation system). No, the barriers are much greater — *much, much greater* — in the US than in any other first-past the post system. You can see this by adding up the "third party" (i.e. non-top-two) share of the vote in the 435 US House districts and comparing the numbers with, say, the 338 ridings in the Canadian House of Commons or the 650 constituencies in the UK House of Commons. 

Here’s a chart that does that for the three countries’ most recent elections:

For third parties to win less than 5% of the vote in *any* district in *any* election is almost unheard of in Canada and the UK; in the US it happens in 90% of districts in every election year. Clearly "something" other than winner-take-all rules is squelching potential competition to the two major parties. I talked about some of institutional aspects in this in an article I wrote a few years ago.

But any social phenomenon of this magnitude is bound to have a "cultural" expression as well, and in this case it’s the maniacally emotional degree of personal identification politically engaged Americans (a group that obviously includes professional pundits) have with their party — in other words, brand loyalty. I don’t have any academic references for you, sorry, this is based on general observation; but I suspect many comparative political scientists would agree with me that Americans have a degree of emotional identification with their party *as a party* that is rarely encountered in other countries.

This has become harder to see as US parties have become more ideological: loyalty to "party" and loyalty to "worldview" are becoming harder to separate. But in the days when US parties were "non-ideological," Americans’ mania for party attachments was if anything even more glaring: in the 19thC you were a Democrat/Republican because the people around you, the people you grew up with, were Democrats/Republicans, and it was often hard for people to put into words why they voted the way they did. (Nobody thought Irish slumdwellers, genteel southern professionals, free-trading Wall Street bankers, and communicants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints all voted the same way because they shared a common worldview. But nobody could explain why they *did* in fact vote the same way, least of all the Irish slumdwellers.)

The conventional wisdom is that the recent ideologization of the US parties has strengthened their hold on their voters: now that the "other" party really does stand for everything you hate, the specter of the terrible consequences to come if the election is thrown to the other side keeps the disaffected in line. But, for one thing, it’s not obvious that electoral defeat was any less personally distressing to the "non-ideological" loyal Democrats of 1880 than it is to the ideologically loyal Democrats of today.

And secondly, in the long run, by teaching voters to see politics as contest of worldviews, not just of competing logos, it will probably undermine their ability to maintain the duopoly. Ideology creates the mass basis for an alternative object of identification that can come into conflict, in voters’ minds, with loyalty to the party-as-mere-logo. Nowadays, more and more voters judge their party against a more exalted standard — navigating by the stars in the sky rather than the other ships in the sea, as it were.

But if the parties nowadays are just as monopolistic as they’ve always been; and if, on top of that, it’s now counterproductive for disgruntled rank-and-file voters not just to threaten them with staying home, but even to disparage them on social media — what *does* influence the behavior of party politicians?

This is kind of like the old economist’s question about competitive consumer markets: if every seller has to charge the "going market price," who decides what the going price is? If nobody is able to influence the parties, what influences the parties? What explains the big decisions they make, the choices on crucial issues that we see them make in front of us?

I admit, I don’t have the answer to this question, only guesses.

I.

Israel’s blood-soaked debacle in Gaza now lumbers through its tenth month. Dwarfing the Bosnian (1992-95), Syrian (2011-2018), or Salvadoran (1979-1990) wars, it is killing Palestinians at a rate that, by conservative estimates, more closely approximates the Cambodian genocide of 1975-79. Any day now, Israel’s prime minister and defense minister are due to be summoned to the Hague to answer charges of crimes against humanity and numerous authorities, such as Human Rights Watch co-founder Aryeh Neier, are on record saying Israel’s actions have crossed the legal threshold of genocide. 

In global opinion the country is increasingly viewed as a pariah. By all accounts, the war is eating away at the long-run foundations of its alliance with the United States. 

Weighed against all this, Israel has achieved none of the objectives it announced at the war’s outset: neither the return of most hostages nor the elimination of Hamas. Netanyahu has rejected all proposals to release the Israeli captives in exchange for an end to the fighting, ruling out any agreement that would leave Hamas in place in Gaza. Yet his preferred approach of "military pressure" has clearly killed more hostages than it’s freed.

And though true believers might once have been able to persuade themselves that Israel was "making progress" toward its goal of destroying Hamas — taking solace in the IDF’s dubious litany of Vietnam-style body-count statistics — those hopes were dashed last spring by a quietly momentous bit of news.

On May 12, Israel announced it was sending IDF units back to areas of Gaza that had previously been declared clear of Hamas forces. "Entire brigades of Israeli troops are back," Haaretz military correspondent Anshel Pfeffer reported from North Gaza, even though the IDF "announced it had 'dismantled' the Hamas battalions" more than four months earlier. The soldiers Pfeffer spoke to "all use the same word to describe [the fighting] – 'Sisyphean.'" 

Hamas has adapted to the "dismantling" of its battalions by reverting to guerrilla tactics familiar from anticolonial wars in Vietnam or Algeria: its fighters have dispersed into autonomous cells that can harass the occupier from unseen positions, periodically taking patches of territory, then disappearing from sight when enemy troops arrive. 

This is the scenario US intelligence agencies warned of back in early February — a time when naive observers were still insisting an Israeli victory was in the cards. "Israel probably will face lingering armed resistance from Hamas for years to come," the intelligence community stated in its annual threat-assessment report to Congress, "and the military will struggle to neutralize Hamas’s underground infrastructure, which allows insurgents to hide, regain strength, and surprise Israeli forces." 

II.

All of this spells the end of an illusion — one that Israel’s leadership class cultivated, propagated, and ultimately fell victim to over the course of twenty years: the illusion that Israel could continue indefinitely to thwart Palestinian aspirations for national independence, without fear of resistance from Hamas, because if push came to shove there was — somehow, somewhere — a viable military option that could sweep the whole problem away at the point of a bayonet.

"The next time something happens here," centrist opposition leader and former IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz boasted in a 2019 campaign event at the Gaza border, "we will make sure that it's the final round." Israel would "fully defeat Hamas." Translated into Netanyahu-ese, in other words: "total victory."

The past nine months have come as a rude awakening to Gantz and his colleagues. Rather than destroy Hamas, Israel has managed only to land itself in a deepening quagmire. The scenario it now faces, a protracted counterinsurgency against Palestinian guerrillas in Gaza, is not only a nightmare for Israel but a strategic windfall for Hamas: an incomparably more advantageous form of confrontation than that which prevailed in the years prior to October 7, when the movement was held responsible for governing two million Gazans under impossible conditions while Israel remained free to wage lethal economic warfare against it (via the "closure") without exposing a single Israeli soldier to danger. 

And thanks to the time-honored logic of political warfare, this equation holds no matter how much damage Hamas sustains in the process. As the group’s Gaza chief, Yahya Sinwar, told an interviewer in 2018: if Israel were ever to re-occupy Gaza to win a war against Hamas, "victory would be even worse than a defeat."

Defense minister Yoav Gallant was forced to acknowledge this reality in his May 15 address calling on Netanyahu to cede authority in Gaza to some as-yet-unknown "Palestinian governing entity." Israel has only "a [finite] set of resources" with which to confront a "multi-front threat," he noted, including Hezbollah to the north and Iran further afield. If it were to undertake a military occupation of Gaza, that project "would become the main security and military effort of the State of Israel over the coming years" — something the country can scarcely afford. 

There’s a reason Israel’s hot wars have all, historically, been brief: it’s a small country that can only keep so many of its prime-age workers on active duty at one time. In leaked comments to a Likud party meeting the same week, Gallant said that "the army doesn't have enough soldiers to fulfill such a mission” and would consequently be “forced to extend the mandatory service of fighters to four years," according to an account by Haaretz military analyst Amos Harel. 

"Anyone who knows the mood among soldiers and their parents," Harel added, "knows that it would be very difficult to implement such a move."

Though phrased in the leaden prose of a securicrat, Gallant’s acknowledgment of Israel’s urgent need to find "Palestinian entities" to take control of Gaza was, in reality, a desperate confession of Israel’s strategic helplessness in its current situation. For, as Haaretz’s Jack Khoury reported around the same time: 

Prominent figures in Gaza who are unaffiliated with [Hamas] are clear in their opinion that under the circumstances, no [Palestinian] would agree to govern Gaza under Israeli patronage, or be able to establish order, or get any cooperation from Gazans.

III.

The current fiasco thus marks a fitting coda to two decades of Israel’s dealings with Gaza and Hamas in which the Jewish state has — to coin a phrase — never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. 

Recall how Hamas came to rule Gaza in the first place. After the group’s surprise victory in the 2006 Palestinian Authority elections, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and US president George W. Bush waved aside pleas from Mahmoud Abbas, UN diplomats, and numerous European policymakers, urging that they seek a modus vivendi with the new government. Instead, Washington and Jerusalem opted for a doomed policy of regime change. 

First came a diplomatic and financial embargo, which the European Union was muscled into joining; within weeks the Palestinian Authority administrative machinery collapsed and the economy of the occupied territories was shattered. 

Then came a covert plot to foment a violent insurrection against the newly elected government, using a special force of US-trained Palestinian fighters loyal to elements of Fatah. The attempted putsch, launched in early 2007, promptly and spectacularly backfired: Fatah-aligned gunmen went on a bloody offensive in Gaza but were routed by Hamas, fleeing the Strip in terror and leaving the Islamists in full control. 

The next month, David Wurmser, a neoconservative Mideast policy official in Dick Cheney’s office, resigned in disgust. Bush and Olmert, he lamented, had waged "a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship with victory," a scheme that failed only because it was "pre-empted before it could happen." 

Israel thus managed the considerable feat of installing its arch-enemy — a rag-tag militia now equipped with gleaming stockpiles of American-supplied weapons, left behind in Fatah’s hastily abandoned armories — as the unchallenged ruler of the territory.

IV.

The US and Israel quickly settled on a diplomatic pretext to justify their subversion of Palestinian democracy: the so-called "Quartet principles," named after the four-party consortium (comprising the US, EU, Russia, and the UN) that functions, in practice, as a US-run Mideast policy cartel. 

Under the terms of the "principles" — which remain solemnly chiseled into the tablets of Western diplomacy almost twenty years later — the US, EU, and Israel declared that any Palestinian government in which Hamas participated would be deemed illegitimate and subject to a blanket boycott until Hamas agreed to three conditions: a commitment to (1) "non-violence," (2) "recognition of Israel," and (3) "acceptance of previous agreements," meaning the moribund 1993 Oslo agreement and all its sequelae. 

Anyone tempted to indulge the pretense that these demands have anything to do with promoting peace or countering terrorism, should recall that Israel never insisted on such preconditions before negotiating peace agreements with Egypt (concluded in 1979), Jordan (concluded in 1994), or Syria (inconclusive talks throughout the 1990s and 2000s). In each case Israel embarked on talks with an interlocutor that did not recognize its "right to exist." 

Nor has the European Union ever enforced such "no-contact" rules against Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Taliban in Afghanistan — armed militias designated as terrorist organizations, whose political representatives nevertheless talk to EU officials without preconditions. Indeed, in Brussels, "everyone agrees that the no-contact policy [with Hamas] has been a total failure, but we can't get out of it," senior European officials told the International Crisis Group in 2022. All proposals to loosen its strictures had been blocked by East European member states, "due mainly to Israeli pressure."

But the truly defining feature of the Quartet principles, the feature that fully encapsulates their essential nature and purpose, is the fact that they apply only to the Palestinians. Israel is exempt. In Ramallah, all government ministers must accept the Oslo accords or face a foreign aid cutoff and diplomatic boycott; not so in Jerusalem. Israeli ministers remain free to repudiate Oslo, to reject any form of Palestinian sovereignty from the river to the sea, to advocate torture and mass expulsion of "the Arabs," the dropping of nuclear weapons on Gaza, to aver that "all the Gazans need to be destroyed," and on and on — all without endangering a penny of American military aid or a single bear hug from Joe Biden.

"It is not for us to pass judgment on who ought to be in the government of Israel," State Department spokesman Matt Miller explained recently. "That's just not a decision for the United States to make."

V.

On March 29, 2006, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas was sworn in as the new Palestinian prime minister. Officially, he represented an organization dedicated to the dismantling of the Jewish state and the restoration of Arab Palestine on every inch of its historic territory, an objective Hamas’s spokesmen never tired of proclaiming. 

In reality — as those same spokesmen readily admitted, in their more sober moods — such an outcome lay far beyond the scope of what the movement was capable of achieving, rendering compromise with Israel unavoidable. 

The late Ismail Abu Shanab, a co-founder of Hamas and second-in-command to its spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, was, in his day, the most prominent exponent of this trend of thought. "What is the point in speaking rhetoric," he asked at a 2003 press conference in Gaza. "Let’s be frank, we cannot destroy Israel. The practical solution is for us to have a state alongside Israel….When we build a Palestinian state, we will not need these militias; all the needs for attack will stop. Everything will change into a civil life." 

Commenting on this remark in his 2022 study of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy (Prophets Without Honor: The 2000 Camp David Summit and the End of the Two-State Solution), former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote: "No Hamas leader has [expressed] in a more outspoken and courageous way Hamas’s quest for a way out of the unsustainable dogma about the liberation of 'all' Palestine." 

Unfortunately, he had to add, Abu Shanab — "a staunch opponent of suicide terrorism" — made the statement "not long before his assassination by Israel," which "sealed the end of the 2003 ceasefire."

Almost since its founding, Hamas’s leaders had advertised their willingness to conclude a generation-long armistice with Israel, for a term of anywhere from twenty to fifty years, if Israel would consent to withdraw from the occupied territories and permit the creation of a Palestinian state. The term the movement uses to refer to such an arrangement, hudna, is drawn from classical Islamic jurisprudence and denotes a formal, contractually binding cessation of hostilities with a non-Muslim power. It should not, therefore, be confused with the ad hoc battlefield truces that both Israel and Hamas have repeatedly declared — and repeatedly ruptured — in their recurrent rounds of fighting since 2006. (Hamas typically refers to these pauses — essentially unilateral ceasefires loosely coordinated with the enemy — using the word tahdiya, meaning "lull" or "calm," rather than hudna.) 

Nor should anyone credit the contention — a cherished article of faith in the liturgy of Israeli hasbara — that a hudna is by its nature a tactical ploy, a purely temporary expedient to which the forces of the Ummah might resort only as a prelude to the inevitable resumption of martial jihad. That thesis is plainly contradicted by historical facts. 

"Muslims reached the gates of Vienna and declared a hudna that has now lasted over 350 years," observes former Mossad director Efraim Halevy, a gray eminence of Israel’s security establishment and a longtime advocate of diplomacy with Hamas. (As head of Hebrew University’s strategic studies center, Halevy sponsored research on the history of Islamic rulings and debates about peace agreements with non-Muslim powers, including with Israel in the years since the 1978 Camp David Accords.)

Hamas’s first formal proposal for a long-term armistice was drafted in 1994 by Ismail Haniyeh and transmitted to Israel via Shlomi Eldar, the Arab affairs correspondent for what was then Israel’s Channel 10 TV news. Eldar, a fluent Arabic speaker who would go on to cover Hamas and its leaders for more than two decades, becoming one of Israel’s foremost experts on the subject — first as a reporter and later as a documentary filmmaker and fellow at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson Center — recalled the episode in his prize-winning 2012 book Getting to Know Hamas.

In those days [1994] I was a journalist at the start of my career and [Haniyeh] was an ambitious budding politician trying to find a way to prove to the senior members of Hamas that the movement should be redirected onto different paths …

To the question I repeatedly asked Haniyeh — "What happens after 20 years when the hudna period expires?" he answered: "That would be up to future generations to decide; they would be able to make a better decision after the cycle of hatred, bitterness and revenge between us was gone." 

"In contrast to Hamas’s extreme and uncompromising image," Eldar reflected, "its pattern of behavior from its founding was to seek compromise paths that would allow it to adapt to the major changes taking place in the region." Thus, on the one hand it declared all of Palestine to be waqf land (land held in trust), a designation that, according to Islamic doctrine, would seem to rule out recognition of Israel. But on the other hand, it made it clear that this applied only to "recognition" of Israel by the Hamas movement, not diplomatic recognition by a future Palestinian state — a step to which the group has never objected in principle, provided it is ratified by Palestinians in a popular referendum.

Eldar, like many other students of Hamas, noted the group’s habitual tendency to resort to such formulas, which allow it to bypass its own ideological red lines and avoid the strategic cul-de-sacs they might otherwise force it into. He termed the practice "walking between the raindrops." 

Still, in his judgment Haniyeh’s 1994 proposal, however pragmatic and well-intentioned, wasn’t pragmatic enough. 

"I had to admit it sounded nice," he wrote, "perhaps not much different from the objectives that the PLO envisioned at the end of the Oslo process; but it was impractical. An Israeli withdrawal from all the territories in exchange for just a ceasefire, however long it might be, and without an end-of-conflict declaration, couldn’t win the support of any significant political figure in Israel."

VI. 

In the late 1990s and early 2000s — as Israel’s unending policy of settlement expansion and Hamas’s disastrously misjudged campaign of suicide bombings combined to bring about Oslo’s collapse — Hamas continued trying to interest Israel in its hudna concept, without success. But two major policy shifts in 2005 portended a willingness to go further: the group ended its use of suicide bombings against targets in Israel and decided to participate in elections for the first time.

The head of Israeli military intelligence, Gen. Aharon Ze’evi-Farkash, told a Knesset committee that Hamas’s leadership was showing interest in emulating what the general called "the Irish model" — a reference to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and its political wing Sinn Féin, which transformed itself from a terrorist organization into a peaceful political party over the course of the Northern Ireland peace process in the 1990s and 2000s. 

And, sure enough, amid the economic and political crisis triggered by its unexpected election victory the following year, Hamas’s leadership did just that: it secretly mounted an ambitious Sinn Féin-style diplomatic démarche. 

In May 2006, a high-level emissary — a senior former European official whose identity still remains undisclosed — traveled discretely to Jerusalem for an audience with Yuval Diskin, Israel’s intelligence chief for the Palestinian territories. He carried with him a document from the Hamas leadership, drafted by its Damascus-based leader, Khaled Meshaal, laying out a detailed proposal for a program of talks intended to lead to a permanent peace. 

Over the following year, the emissary would shuttle back and forth between Jerusalem and Syria, meeting with Diskin and Meshaal several times — a sequence recounted in detail in Getting to Know Hamas, which publicly revealed the existence of the talks, as well as the contents of the Meshaal proposal, for the first time. (An English translation of the Meshaal document was published three years later as an appendix to a book by the Irish conflict resolution expert Padraig O’Malley; its text can be accessed here.)

Bearing the title "Hamas and Israel: Peaceful Coexistence Document" and dated September 8, 2006, the text displays none of the bombast typical of Hamas’s public statements. Its tone is businesslike and sober. It admits that Hamas, not just Israel, would need to make politically difficult decisions for the sake of peace. And it takes pains to stress that Israel would not be asked to blindly trust Hamas; rather, a "step-by-step" process, with the help of a mediator, would aim to "build up trust in advance of longer-term processes." 

Meshaal proposed starting the dialogue with discussions on a sequence of steps to stabilize Gaza’s economy and establish a durable cessation of hostilities: a ceasefire would be announced, initially in Gaza; it would then be extended to the West Bank and finally culminate in a declaration by Hamas of "a comprehensive ceasefire by all its armed forces." 

The two sides would then advance to "negotiations through a third party" focused on formalizing "a framework for coexistence" based on "a period of twenty-five years marked by nonviolence" (i.e. a hudna) and a "commitment from the start of the process that it would lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state." The borders of the state would be based on those of 1967 and established through an "incremental process of implementation through negotiations." 

Two details of the proposal merit special note. First, it declares Hamas’s willingness to defer resolution of the knottiest final-status issues, those concerning Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees. Negotiations on borders (excluding Jerusalem) would come first, while agreement on the two most neuralgic subjects would be "left to a later date." 

Here is inserted a pregnant hint of further flexibility: "Hamas is prepared to make the difficult decisions derived from this on condition that Israel is similarly prepared to do so." 

Second, and most importantly, the proposal states that once all issues had been settled through negotiations, "the end of the armed conflict would be declared." (It adds, almost apologetically, that Hamas could "only extend the offer to armed conflict not the end of conflict because [of] issues relating to waqf land etc.")

Thus the premonition of Israel’s military intelligence chief was borne out: Hamas’s proposal to embrace "the end of the armed conflict" as the projected destination of peace talks — provided that Israel reciprocated by accepting the principle of a Palestinian state with borders based on those of 1967 — distinctly, and most likely deliberately, echoed the experience of Northern Ireland. 

In Northern Ireland, the British and Irish co-managers of the peace process never demanded as a precondition for dialogue that the IRA or Sinn Féin renounce their maximalist stance calling for a "united Ireland," even though that scenario, implying the "destruction of Northern Ireland," inspired visceral fear among the enclave’s Protestants. 

The sole condition imposed for the IRA’s participation in peace talks was that it desist from violence, which it did, at first, only provisionally: by means of a unilaterally declared ceasefire in 1994 which it later ruptured with a series of bombing attacks, before finally returning to negotiations. 

It was only in 1998, when the IRA signed up to the Good Friday Agreement, that the armed conflict in Northern Ireland was brought to a definitive end. The core principle of that agreement, the so-called "principle of consent" — which holds that Northern Ireland’s sovereign status may only be altered via peaceful agreement by concurrent majorities in the two parts of the island — represented a major ideological concession by the IRA, striking at the heart of traditional republican doctrine dating back to the 1920s, which had stressed the legitimacy, indeed the imperative, of armed struggle — "physical force" — in pursuit of Irish unification. 

The IRA agreed to this historic concession because it received key concessions in exchange: from the Protestant community, agreement on power-sharing measures within Northern Ireland; and from Britain a solemn commitment to relinquish its sovereignty over the enclave if formally requested to do so by future majorities in both parts of the island. 

To this day, Sinn Féin continues to agitate for a "united Ireland" — only, now, as a goal to be achieved by peaceful constitutional means rather than victory in war.

The leaders of the Protestant unionist community at first stridently condemned this gradualist approach to peace, denouncing the British and Irish governments for their "appeasement of terrorists" and legitimization of "IRA murderers." But it hardly needs saying that if Irish republicans had been required to abandon the core tenets of Irish republicanism as a precondition for entry into the peace process, there never would have been a peace process, and Northern Ireland would still be embroiled in terrorism and war to this day. 

Or, as a Hamas leader put it in a 2006 interview with researchers from a Pentagon-sponsored terrorism study: "You can’t expect us to take off all of our clothes at once."

VII.

On June 26, 2006, Israel’s domestic spy chief and Hamas’s European emissary were scheduled to have another meeting in Jerusalem. But by the time the appointed hour arrived, everything had changed: the night before, a nineteen-year-old Israeli soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit, had been abducted near the Gaza border in an operation carried out by a group of Palestinian militants that included Ahmed Jabari, the head of the Izzedeen al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing.

Jabari’s involvement in the Shalit kidnapping, as Eldar relates in Getting to Know Hamas, was an act of insubordination, reflecting the commander’s conviction that "the pragmatist Ismail Haniyeh's path of 'tanazul' (surrender) was wrong." It was, in other words, an internal "putsch" against the Hamas leadership by the head of the group’s armed cadres. Hamas’s political leaders, fresh from their shock election victory, had been fully absorbed with figuring out how to govern 3.6 million Palestinians, and "an attack against Israel was the last thing they were thinking about." Now they were impatient to hand back Shalit and resume the secret dialogue with Israel. 

But after the kidnappers cannily announced their demand for a large-scale release of Palestinian prisoners as the price of Shalit’s freedom, Meshaal and his colleagues realized they could hardly insist on giving Shalit back "for free." Seeking a way out, Meshaal drafted a new version of his proposal for the European mediator to present to Diskin at their next scheduled meeting in September — an attempt to tie the two sets of issues together: the immediate issue of Gilad Shalit’s release and the "strategic vision" of an overall settlement. 

This updated version of the Meshaal document (from which the quotes above are drawn) offered Israel a choice. If it was willing to go ahead with the proposed dialogue on "peaceful coexistence," Hamas would be prepared to hand over Shalit in exchange for a mere token release of Palestinian prisoners, numbering "not in the hundreds." 

If Israel declined the offer of dialogue, Hamas’s leaders would align themselves with Jabari’s demand for the release of thousands of prisoners, including high-level figures with — to use the Israeli jargon — "blood on their hands."

Prime Minister Olmert received these proposals but never replied to them. In fact, he concealed them from his own cabinet. No one in the government, apart from Diskin, was informed, not even Olmert’s top security ministers. 

Instead, the prime minister responded to the Hamas overture by publicly declaring that Israel would never negotiate with terrorists, would not release a single Palestinian prisoner, and would shortly launch an attack on Gaza.

That attack, known as Operation Summer Rains, was the first of what would be a series of IDF operations for which Israel would cite Gilad Shalit as a casus belli, culminating in the murderous Operation Cast Lead of 2008-2009, which left behind a civilian death toll in Gaza (759) almost identical to that of the October 7 attack in Israel (796) — and for exactly the same reason:

The IDF, which planned to attack buildings and sites populated by hundreds of people, did not warn them in advance to leave, but intended to kill a great many of them, and succeeded (Reuven Pedatzur, senior Haaretz military affairs analyst.)

Israel had once again squandered a historic opportunity. For, predictably, the IDF failed to free Shalit by force and Olmert did end up negotiating with Hamas to win his release. Those talks dragged on for years, yielding an agreement in 2011 whose terms were no better for Israel than either of the options it had been offered by Meshaal in 2006. 

And at the top of the list of Palestinian prisoners whose release Israel had to agree to stood the name of Yahya Sinwar — the chief architect of the October 7 attacks. 

VIII. 

Sinwar, who had been one of the founders of the al-Qassam Brigades in the 1980s, returned to Gaza in 2011 after more than twenty years in an Israeli prison and rapidly re-ascended through the ranks. With his base of support concentrated in Hamas’s military wing, he won election to the top leadership of the Gaza branch in 2017 and quickly established himself, de facto, as the dominant figure in the movement.

That Sinwar’s ascendancy wrought some fundamental change in the nature of Hamas as a movement — transforming it into a distinctly darker version of itself, the final fruits of which became visible in the carnage of October 7 — is a popular thesis in parts of Israel’s security establishment. It’s also a view now advanced by Shlomi Eldar, who recently released an updated re-edition of his 2012 book on Hamas, now bearing the subtitle, From Social Movement to War Crimes. 

There is surely some kernel of truth to this idea. By all accounts, Sinwar was one of the hard men of Hamas, an enforcer, whose specialty in the organization’s early days had been detecting and punishing enemy collaborators — a task he attended to, at times, with his bare hands. 

As leader in Gaza, Sinwar’s autocratic tendencies left an unmistakeable imprint on the internal workings of the organization: whereas Hamas had once prided itself on its ethos of collective leadership and consensus decision making, officials of the movement now complained that Sinwar was "able to impose his choices on the rest of the movement by means that sometimes include threats," the French-Lebanese political scientist Leila Seurat reported in a 2019 book. In his 2021 bid for reelection, Sinwar defeated his chief opponent by only the narrowest of margins, in a process that required several run-offs and was clouded by allegations of irregularities. 

However, when it came to Sinwar’s relations with the world outside Hamas, it’s a different story. 

Almost immediately after he assumed leadership in Gaza in March 2017, the "hardliner" label that had previously stuck to him began to be supplanted, in the lexicon of the Israeli and Western media, by the phrase "ruthless pragmatist.” And for good reason. During Sinwar’s first years in power, the dominant theme of his policy was the close strategic relationship he cemented with Egypt, and a concomitant downgrading of relations with Iran. 

A 2019 report from Commanders for Israel’s Security (CIS), a think tank run by retired IDF generals and intelligence officials, praised Cairo for "strengthening ties with the powerful Yahya Sinwar who proved to share much of the Egyptian strategic objectives," while a 2020 memo addressed to Sinwar by his chief of staff and subsequently captured by the IDF in Gaza, recorded that Iranian funding for Hamas had been halted during Sinwar’s first two years in power — "at our request." 

In those years, Sinwar’s brutal leadership style was primarily directed to "moderate" ends — above all the Egyptian-sponsored reconciliation process that aimed to end the division between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank. “I will break the neck of anyone who is against the reconciliation, be he from Hamas or from any other group,” Sinwar declared in late 2017. “The decision to end the split is a strategic one. There is no way back from it. Hamas will make painful concessions, each more difficult than the one before it, in order to achieve reconciliation.” 

Most immediately, these moves were aimed at halting the spiraling social and economic crisis in Gaza caused by Israel’s unending "closure" regime — the blockade of people and goods that, according to Israeli officials, was designed to keep Gaza’s economy "on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge," ensuring that it functioned "at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis." 

But Sinwar’s moves were also meant to keep alive the prospect of a future political process that might lead to the Palestinians’ long-deferred national objective of statehood — with Hamas seizing, or at least sharing with Fatah, the heroic mantle of victorious national liberation movement. 

It was thus in the Sinwar era that Hamas adopted its updated 2017 charter — a project spearheaded by Khaled Meshaal but fully supported by the Gaza leader — which clarified that the movement’s "conflict is with the Zionist project, not with the Jews because of their religion," and advertised Hamas’s readiness to negotiate the creation of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders. 

It was, as Leila Seurat described it, "an overture to the Arab states and the West aiming to position Hamas as an interlocutor alongside, or even preferable to, Fatah."

IX.

But in the era of Naftali Bennett and Benjamin Netanyahu, territorial compromise was the last thing Israel was ready to countenance. Israeli policy toward the Palestinians was premised on support for the organized land-theft of the Jewish settlement movement in the West Bank, and the pogroms and apartheid that sustained it. No significant faction in Israeli politics supported withdrawal to the 1967 borders or an agreement based on two sovereign states. 

Instead, the Israeli political and security leaderships in those years developed a new strategic formula whose objective was to coerce Hamas into becoming a Gaza-based facsimile of what the Palestinian Authority was in the West Bank: an agency that would offer Israel "security cooperation" — to provide it with "calm" and "quiet" by cracking down on more militant resistance groups — in exchange for a partial and conditional easing of Gaza’s otherwise catastrophic economic conditions. 

This was the strategy that Bennett referred to as "shrinking the conflict" and that Netanyahu called "economic peace." It meant replacing the post-1967 "land for peace" formula — in which recognition of Israel was to be traded for Israel’s return of occupied territory — with a formula in which peace and quiet would be traded for Israel’s approval of carefully rationed doses of economic reconstruction in Gaza, to repair the damage that Israel itself had inflicted. 

Israel thus made clear its opposition to any Hamas-Fatah reconciliation. Indeed, it set out deliberately and systematically to extinguish all strategic options available to Hamas except two: either giving up the century-long struggle for Palestinian national independence, or opting for violent escalation. As a prominent Israeli think tank put it just as Sinwar was preparing to take the reins, the goal was "to sharpen Hamas’s choice between [either embracing] political pragmatism in exchange for economic reconstruction or adherence to the violent struggle that will deepen its isolation." (The report was careful to stress, however, that any economic benefits for Gaza should be kept at a modest level lest they "lead to an uncontrolled strengthening of Hamas’ standing.")

Within Israeli policy circles, Efraim Halevy, the former Mossad chief, remained a lonely voice speaking out against this strategy, which he called “a fantastical formula” that would sooner or later lead to renewed violence. “There is no such thing as a society that is in a state of combat with another country accepting demilitarization in return for” such inducements. “The army in Ireland laid down its arms in return for independence; the Irish received a large measure of self-government in the north.”

Already in 2008 Halevy had warned that "as long as the door to dialogue is closed, there is no doubt as to who will prevail" in Hamas’s internal debate between "the pragmatists, the die-hard ideologues, the politicians, and the commanders in the field." 

Now, almost a decade later, he lamented the fact that "the political level in Israel is still refusing to allow attempts to begin a dialogue…because, it is said, [Hamas] has blood on its hands and continues to advocate the destruction of Israel." Halevy had little patience for that tired refrain:

Officially this is true. On the other hand, Hamas leaders have expressed themselves in private to high-level former political figures and former diplomats in very different terms. I know this for a fact. 

There remains no good case for Israel to shun Hamas. Israel rightly prides itself as one of the strongest powers in the Middle East, but it will gain nothing from yet another round of fighting. 

During those pre-October 7 years, when the Palestinian national movement seemed to reach a historic nadir of helplessness and division — when the Gulf states appeared poised to abandon the Palestinians in their quest to normalize relations with Israel and the Trump administration openly repudiated even rhetorical support for Palestinian statehood — the Israeli leadership began sounding a distinctly triumphalist note vis-a-vis Hamas. 

Military intelligence chief Tamir Hayman exulted at how Hamas had "just sat there and watched" as Israel attacked militants from the smaller resistance faction Islamic Jihad, during a brief 2019 Israeli operation. "From now on, that's how we can understand Gaza," he boasted. "In Gaza, we are attacking Hamas targets twice a week, very painfully for them, and they are not reacting," marveled IDF chief of staff Aviv Kochavi in comments the same year.

With the Gaza economy in ruins, Hamas was "in dire straits, both internally and externally," wrote former Shin Bet analyst Michael Milshtein in early 2020. As a result, "Hamas's leadership finds itself at a strategic crossroad," he explained, and would soon have to decide whether it would knuckle under to Netanyahu’s "economic peace" concept, trading a long-term ceasefire, not for a path to statehood, but merely for economic relief.

There was one last long-shot option remaining to Hamas. In late 2020 the movement reached agreement with Mahmoud Abbas to hold national elections for the first time in fifteen years. Hoping the step might lead to an easing of its international isolation and a renewed political process, Hamas granted Abbas the following concessions to win his agreement: (1) Hamas would refrain from running a candidate against Abbas in the presidential election; (2) it would let Fatah have all the ministries no matter how many votes Hamas ended up winning; and (3) it would give its blessing for any resulting government to recognize Israel and accept the Oslo agreements (though Hamas itself would not do so). 

The elections were scheduled for the spring and summer 2021. But when splits within Fatah began raising the specter of a Hamas victory in legislative races, Abbas came under heavy pressure from Israel to call off the vote. He didn’t need much coaxing. He announced the elections’ cancelation in April 2021. 

It was shortly afterward, according to Israeli intelligence assessments, that Yahya Sinwar decided on the large-scale attack against Israel that would be launched two years later.

In a major speech that June, broadcast live by the Arabic news networks, he explained his thinking. Referring to a recent skirmish with Israeli forces (an eleven-day operation in May that the IDF dubbed “Guardian of the Walls”), Sinwar declared that Hamas had engaged in the fight “to show Israel a miniature picture of what war might be like…if the battle with the occupation resumes.”

Since “Israel will not tolerate any real attack on it,” he explained, the next war, if it came, would have dramatic consequences; “the image of the Middle East will change.” This, according to Sinwar, would create

a real opportunity to mobilize world public opinion and detonate the popular resistance of the Palestinians in all places where they are present, in a way that forces the occupation to respect international law….

Achieving this goal would either allow the establishment of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital, or put the occupation in a state of conflict with the [international community], isolate it, and end its integration into the region and the world.

X.

The most dangerous fomentor of Israeli-Palestinian violence, however, is neither Benjamin Netanyahu nor Yahya Sinwar. It’s the organized pyromania of bipartisan US support for Greater Israel and the apparatus of lies, fantasy, mythology, and delusion that underpins it. 

Of all these myths, the most potent and destructive is the idea that the conflict is extremely complicated, an enduring riddle, so intricate that its solution has eluded the ken of the wisest men for generations.

The truth is exactly the opposite. There has never been an international conflict that has dragged on for so many years and taken so many lives despite the existence of a long-established framework for a settlement, based on widely understood compromise terms that command substantial (though, as always with compromises, ambivalent) acceptance among the warring parties, as well as in world opinion at large.

Just consider events from the past four months. On July 19, in a landmark decision, the International Court of Justice — whose authority is recognized by all UN members states — ruled that Israel’s presence in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, including all settlements, is illegal and should be terminated immediately, "so that the State of Palestine…can exercise full sovereignty over its territory and achieve full independence."

Israel protested. In a statement to the court it insisted that "any resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must effectively address Israel's legitimate security concerns," above all the security threat posed to Israel by the "Hamas terrorist organization." 

However,  just three months earlier the "Hamas terrorist organization” had declared its readiness to dissolve its military wing and disarm the moment Israel terminates its occupation and a Palestinian state is established. 

"All the experiences of people who fought against occupiers, when they became independent and obtained their rights and their state, what have these forces done?” said Yahya Sinwar’s deputy Khalil al-Hayya, a Hamas politburo member, in an interview with the Associated Press: “They have turned into political parties and their [armed] forces have turned into the national army."

To recap: Israel insists its occupation is needed to deal with the threat of Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades even as Hamas offers to voluntarily disband the al-Qassam Brigades once Israel ends the occupation. 

It should not require the cunning of a Metternich to see that both sides of this dispute could be held to their word: that the steps posited — Israel’s withdrawal and Hamas’s disarmament — could be made into binding obligations; that compliance with these obligations could be overseen by a third party; that the third party could be given a mandate to define benchmarks, set timetables, and monitor implementation; that this mandate could be backed by penalties and sanctions for non-compliance — and so on. 

Indeed, all of this is implied by the ICJ decision itself, which includes an operative clause urging the UN Security Council to "consider the precise modalities and further action required to bring to an end as rapidly as possible the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory" — a clause affirmed by judges from Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, India, Japan, and even one of the judges from the United States. 

In other words, this is not only what should happen. It’s what would happen — were it not for that single, looming, abiding obstacle whose names and faces may change but whose sanguinary destructiveness is an unchanging constant: the United States government.

This is not just my opinion. Shuki Friedman, the (moderately) pro-settler vice-president of the influential Jerusalem-based Jewish People's Policy Institute, said this just the other day in an interview in Haaretz:

What has been saving the settlements from tough decisions and sanctions for years is the U.S. veto at the United Nations Security Council. There have been many anti-Israel decisions to date, but they were all…recommendations without sanctions. 

Otherwise, the Americans always cast a veto. And if they aren't there to cast a veto, we're toast.

It would be nice to think that Kamala Harris might abandon all the positions she’s taken on Israel over the course of her career; that she could ignore the demands of her donors and the preferences of party leaders and the baying of the pro-Israel media. It would be comforting to imagine that she might jettison two decades of US policy insisting on ludicrous preconditions for negotiations that are calculated to sabotage diplomacy and are rejected by the rest of the world; that she would stop unconditionally subsidizing Israeli settlements and apartheid, and act to stop genocide in Gaza.

Unfortunately, none of those things is likely to happen — and time is running short. 

Anyone familiar with the work of such historians as Raul Hilberg or Hans Mommsen will understand that genocide, even in the absence of a premeditated master-plan, emerges and metastasizes from a sequence of steps that may start with "mere" ghettoization and mass displacement, but that quickly generates a momentum of its own, as reactions from the victims and other unforeseen consequences force ever more radical "solutions" to protect the perpetrators from the consequences of their initial crimes.

One has only to look to Israel and Gaza right now — where epidemics are becoming rampant, law and order is being deliberately dismantled in order to bring about what some Israeli commentators are calling "Mogadishuization," hospitals, schools, and homes have been systematically destroyed, and roving mobs of young Jews chanting "death to the Arabs" are not only increasingly common but increasingly legitimized by the voices of authority — to understand the danger.

And while this danger might threaten Palestinians first and foremost, it would also behoove Jews around the world to contemplate the implications of a genocide that is gleefully perpetrated live, on TikTok, by a Jewish state, in the name of the Jewish people. 

XI.

Unfortunately there is no one to save the situation but "us" — that is, civil society: religious and educational institutions, trade unions and professional societies, sporting federations, political parties, municipal governments, and so on. 

Everyone should begin now, if they haven’t already, to work within the organizations they’re part of — from little leagues and PTAs, to state parties and labor unions internationals — and win their commitment to the following principle: 

the suspension of all association with Israeli institutions, public and private, commercial or otherwise, until the State of Israel extends the rights of Israeli citizenship, irrespective of race or ethnicity, to all of the inhabitants of the territory over which it exercises sovereignty. 

Such a course has three advantages to recommend it. 

• It is democratic — meaning almost anyone can participate at whatever level they happen to be at.
  
  

• It is disruptive — because Israel’s supporters, having little tolerance for organized dissent, tend to suppress it using heavy-handed tactics that intensify conflict and alienate the undecided.
  
  

•  And it is educational — because it forces conversations that spread awareness of the facts of Israel and Palestine: the fact that three million Arabs are subjected to a separate legal regime in which they are denied citizenship and the right to vote; are forced to use separate roads and kept under arbitrary curfew; can be arrested and detained indefinitely without trial; are subject to beatings and torture —

— and that none of this could go on without our complicity.

Although "Israel does not have to hold elections until 2026," write the Financial Times’s James Shotter and Neri Zilber, "the country's political class is positioning itself for a vote much sooner — as the veneer of unity that has covered Israeli politics since the outbreak of the war begins to fade." 

With polls seeming to show them benefiting from Netanyahu’s state of disgrace, centrist figures like Gadi Eisenkot and Yair Lapid are calling on Netanyahu to set a date for elections now. No one believes he will.

But in the current situation, horserace polling is almost worthless as a guide to the future. The outcome of the next election will be decided by whatever momentous developments end up triggering a vote; but no one today knows what those developments will be.

For a taste of how volatile the atmosphere is, consider the following quote, attributed by the Financial Times to "a person familiar with Netanyahu's thinking": 

Either Netanyahu secures an achievement on the battlefield and himself initiates snap elections, or elections will be forced in the coming months, including because of mass demonstrations and the fact that many of the security chiefs will have resigned by then.

In a similar vein, a recent edition of Haaretz carried an article by one of its senior political columnists headlined: “Israel is heading towards street battles between the far right and families of hostages.” 

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A countdown has begun. It was triggered last week by murmurings from the multinational consortium of spooks that has been negotiating with Hamas over the release of the Israeli hostages. The spy leaders put Netanyahu on notice that he would soon find himself facing an offer — his last, best offer — to free the captives. 

The price will be steep. There will need to be a ceasefire agreement substantial enough to at least grind the war’s momentum to a halt. Israel will need to release hundreds or even thousands of Palestinian prisoners, many of whom will be Hamas militants, some of whom will be suspected of armed attacks against Israelis, and a few of whom might even have participated in the October 7 attacks.

The leaders of the centrist parties will support the deal as the only way to bring the hostages home. Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners will condemn it in the wildest terms. Netanyahu himself will have to give an answer, yes or no. Everything will depend on what he does then. 

The reason the situation is so flammable is that, to put it bluntly, the whole Israeli leadership class took the country to war on the basis of a lie. And that lie is now being exposed.

They assured their public that "destroying Hamas" by military means was a feasible war objective. Not just feasible, but indispensable — the condition for all further progress. They saw to it that the lie was parroted by the leaders of all the other nations of the Rules-Based International Order — the Axis of Rules, for lack of a better term — starting with the Head Ruler in Charge, Joe Biden. 

And when Israel’s leaders said it, their public believed them. Worse, many Israelis — enclosed as they are in a suffocating bubble of wartime jingoism — likely still believe it. But they’re about to be rudely disabused, and no one can predict how they’ll react once they find out they’ve been misled.

Under different circumstances, the Israeli political class might have been able to let the public down gently. There could have been a slow, controlled leak of the early inflated expectations, a gradual shifting of the "victory" goalposts; a decent interval could have elapsed before, eventually, "peace with honor" could be declared and the reservists could go back to their jobs.

What made that path impassable were the hostages. Since October, their plight has been the focal point around which all public life in Israel has revolved. Their family dramas have become entangled in the country’s poisonous ideological polarization between left and right, or, more accurately, nationalist/religious versus cosmopolitan/secular.

The hostages’ families, with their daily protests and vigils, have become the nucleus of a reborn anti-Netanyahu protest movement — generally "left"-coded but thoroughly patriotic and Zionist — whose main demand, besides Netanyahu’s resignation and the calling of elections, is for the government to prioritize the freeing of the hostages over the war’s other great objective, the "destruction" of Hamas.

This dilemma of war policy — "free the hostages" or "destroy Hamas" — has marked the cleavage line between Israel’s clashing sociopolitical blocs.

When the war began, Netanyahu and the Right had a stock reply to the families’ pleas: "Military pressure is what will free the hostages." In other words, there was no conflict between the two war objectives. And at first, most Israelis seemed satisfied with that answer. 

But then reality set in. Like a drug suddenly wearing off, a remarkably swift tonal change in the public mood has taken place over the past several weeks. 

Two disquieting episodes seem to have played a role in the sea-change. The first was the shocking mid-December incident in which, as if in some too-neatly-plotted play, three Israeli hostages managed to escape their captors in Gaza only to be shot by IDF snipers — despite waving a white flag on a stick, shouting for help in Hebrew, and going shirtless to show they weren’t carrying explosives. 

Besides making it clear how the IDF treats Gaza civilians — which is, of course, what the snipers mistakenly assumed the escaped hostages to be — the episode drove home to Israelis that "military pressure" was more likely to kill the hostages than to save them.

The second incident was possibly even more disturbing. Two weeks after Maayan Sherman, the mother of a nineteen-year-old captive, was notified by the government that her son, Ron, had been murdered by Hamas in captivity, she received a visit from a pathologist. He informed her that an extensive battery of CAT scans had been performed on her son’s body — which the government hadn’t told her about — and that no injuries, broken bones, or evidence of strangulation had been found. As a result, the official report listed the cause of death as unknown. But Sherman says an "IDF source" admitted to her that it was likely her son had died from poison gas used by the army itself, in an attempt to kill Ron’s captors. 

Sherman at first "was surprised that the IDF had approached her at its initiative," Haaretz reports: 

As to whether that was in fact the army's idea or that of the pathologist, Dr. Alon Krispin, director of the National Center of Forensic Medicine, who signed off on the report the family received, replies, "It was an agreement between me and the IDF." 

He explains to Haaretz that, "I approached the Sherman family because I thought that, as citizens, they deserved to know in a direct way what happened to their son, and not by means of documents and bureaucracy. 

He declined to say any more.

Realizing she’d been lied to by her government, Sherman decided not to mince words: "Ron was indeed murdered," she wrote on social media. "Not by Hamas … not by stray bullets and not in an exchange of fire. This was deliberate murder. Bombing with poison gas." 

An accumulation of testimonies from former captives released during the late-November truce added to the picture. "We were in tunnels, terrified that it would not be Hamas, but Israel, that would kill us, and then they would say Hamas killed you." The situation they described was unfathomable: amid two months of relentless and terrifying IDF bombing, the only thing that prevented their deaths at the hands of the State of Israel was the determination of Hamas terrorists to keep them alive.

Finally, on January 20, the New York Times reported that IDF generals had reached the inevitable conclusion: Hamas could not be defeated militarily in a timeframe compatible with the rescue of the hostages:

Israel has established control over a smaller part of Gaza at this point in the war than it originally envisaged in battle plans from the start of the invasion, which were reviewed by The New York Times. That slower than expected pace has led some commanders to privately express their frustrations over the civilian government’s strategy for Gaza, and led them to conclude that the freedom of more than 100 Israeli hostages still in Gaza can be secured only through diplomatic rather than military means.

The dual objectives of freeing the hostages and destroying Hamas are now mutually incompatible, according to interviews with four senior military leaders, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not permitted to speak publicly about their personal opinions.

These generals spoke to the Times behind a cloak of anonymity. But Netanyahu will have no such luxury. Soon he’ll be presented with a choice: accept a hostage release deal that amounts to a public confession that "destroying Hamas" was never achievable — or sacrifice the lives of the hostages. 

A preview of this moment of truth was recently sketched by Haaretz political columnist Yossi Verter:

Such a deal would spark a political debate inside the coalition and in the public. Those opposed to it will be led by [far-right ministers] Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. Israel's sensible public and leaders will be its supporters. We might wind up with extreme right-wingers confronting family members of hostages on the streets. Of course, Netanyahu will watch from the gallery, rubbing his hands with delight.

In 2011, Israel agreed to trade more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners — including high-level Hamas militants — to get back a single captured Israeli soldier, a shy, frail nineteen-year-old named Gilad Shalit, whose plight had become a national cause célèbre. (One of the released prisoners was Yahya Sinwar, who went on to become one of the main plotters of the October 7 attack.) 

Just after Shalit’s release, in the first interview ever granted by a Hamas leader to an Israeli media outlet, Salah al-Arouri — known as a veteran planner of cloak-and-dagger operations — spoke with unconcealed admiration for what the Zionist enemy had done.

"To do what Israel did shows the value Israeli society places on human life," he told Israel Army Radio via phone from Damascus, on October 2, 2011, in what reporters described as "perfect Hebrew."

"This is a pillar of Israel's strength — to wage a war to free one man, to free a thousand prisoners for him. This is the strength of a society and an army. As someone from the outside, as an enemy, I would prefer that Israel abandon that value, even at the cost of not freeing our prisoners." 

Four weeks ago, al-Arouri was assassinated in Beirut on Netanyahu’s orders. But there’s a good chance that in the coming weeks, Netanyahu will make it up to al-Arouri by posthumously granting his wish.

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Lately the fight has become a war of movement. The center of gravity of left opinion has shifted rapidly and unambiguously: away from what used to be a widespread, rather unreflective antidevelopment position (driven partly, as Barkan put it, by a desire to “keep bucolic, low-lying neighborhoods as they are”) to a much more intellectually considered support for pro-density public policy.

In the process, the Left has become more receptive to certain ideas once primarily associated with economists and policy writers, like Ed Glaeser or Matt Yglesias, who could — accurately and nonpejoratively — be classed as “neoliberals.” According to their line of thinking, the main obstacle to plentiful and affordable big-city housing is the restrictiveness of metro-area land-use policies. These policies, which favor single-family, low-rise homes, severely curtail the construction of apartment buildings and other density-friendly types of development. Eliminate the restrictions, these voices insist, and more affordable housing will proliferate.

[Read the rest at Jacobin.]

In Brenner’s account, for a half century the world economy has stagnated under the weight of a long crisis of profitability caused by chronic overcapacity in global manufacturing — a problem that first made itself felt with the postwar reentry of German and Japanese firms into already-saturated export markets, but which has only gotten worse with time.

For Brenner, chronic overcapacity is the symptom of a flaw in the economic mechanism of capitalism, arising from the unplanned anarchy of market production: firms in overcrowded industries, saddled with sunk costs in the form of fixed capital, lack the incentive to withdraw from unprofitable lines of business, resulting in intractable pileups of excess capacity that breed cutthroat competition, sinking profit rates, and, ultimately, stagnation.

The politics of the Brenner thesis might not be obvious to the naked eye, but we got a glimpse of it earlier this year via a commentary by the Berkeley sociologist Dylan Riley, a sometime coauthor of Brenner’s, criticizing certain socialists for what Riley thought were their overly indulgent evaluations of the Biden administration’s industrial policies.

Whatever the merits of his case, what was notable about Riley’s article was the use he was able to make of Brenner’s economic framework in service of a political argument: Bidenomics, he believes, will result in “a massive exacerbation of the problems of overcapacity on a world scale,” and this fact, in his judgment, exposes “neo- Kautskyite” socialists as lacking a “credible answer to the structural logic of capital.”

Crisis in Theory

Some readers might still be puzzled about what the connection is, exactly. Why should the prospect of, say, overcapacity in the global solar panel industry exert any influence one way or the other on how socialists judge something like the Inflation Reduction Act? As Eric Levitz of New York Magazine pointed out, a “global glut of low-carbon technology” is hard to see as a nightmare scenario, to put it mildly.

But what might seem like a non sequitur becomes less mysterious once you’ve grasped the political subtext underlying Brenner’s theory of the long downturn.

[Read the rest at Jacobin.]

[Read the rest at Jacobin]

Milton Friedman revolutionized macroeconomics with his 1967 presidential speech to the American Economics Association (AEA), which presented a theory of the so-called natural rate of unemployment for the first time. That speech, which played a major role in discrediting the brand of Keynesianism that prevailed in postwar liberal economic policy thinking, remains one of the most frequently cited papers in all of economics.

Much less well remembered is the rebuttal to Friedman’s ideas issued by another future Nobel Laureate economist in another AEA presidential address, four years later: Yale University’s James Tobin. Tobin’s dueling theory of inflation held out the possibility of an alternative path for economics and macroeconomic policy, but it has seldom received the same recognition, or the same scholarly interest.

Jacobin’s Seth Ackerman spoke with Thomas Palley, coeditor of the Review of Keynesian Economics and former AFL-CIO assistant director of public policy, about why Tobin’s inflation theory matters today, and why the issue of inflation continues to perplex both the economics mainstream and the Left.

Seth Ackerman

You have always been a critic of economics orthodoxy. A few weeks ago I interviewed James Forder, who wrote a book I’m a big fan of — I’m sure you know it — called Macroeconomics and the Phillips Curve Myth.

In that book, Forder exposes as a myth the story everyone is told about inflation in the 1960s and 1970s: about how a blinkered, Keynesian-dominated economics profession had this very naïve view of inflation and didn’t understand the importance of inflation expectations in determining inflation, and as a result they let inflation get out of control.

What’s interesting to me is that the supposedly “naive” view that is alleged to have been so widespread in the ’60s is actually not so different — in its conclusions — from your own view.

Over the years you have developed a theoretical basis for the view that there is a potentially stable trade-off between unemployment and inflation that policy makers can exploit. In other words, policy makers can choose to have somewhat higher inflation and somewhat lower unemployment, or they can choose the opposite sort of policy, and either one can potentially be a stable policy choice.

I want to ask you about those ideas, but first I’d like to hear your take on what the economics establishment currently says about inflation, and why you disagree with it.

Thomas Palley

Well, the first thing to note about inflation is that there are many different kinds of inflation. They all have different logics and different effects, and that’s something that is not taught in textbooks but ought to be. It’s also something that the economics profession doesn’t really get, or at least does not emphasize sufficiently.

I distinguish between six major kinds of inflation. One is demand-pull inflation, which is the story of “too much money chasing too few goods” — that’s the nutshell way of talking about it.

A second form of inflation is conflict inflation, which is conflict between capital and labor over the distribution of income.

A third form of inflation is supply-side inflation, which concerns global commodity price shocks. Here, the classic example is the OPEC oil price shocks of the 1970s.

A fourth form of inflation is imported inflation, when inflation is caused by exchange-rate depreciation and a rise in the price of imports — and I suppose to the extent that our current inflation is supply-chain inflation, it could be interpreted as fitting in this category.

The fifth form of inflation is what I call high inflation. This is often associated with large budget deficits and dysfunctional politics where a government needs funding, but it can’t get it together to fund itself with appropriate taxation, so budget deficits are the way they do it, which produces inflation.

Lastly, the sixth form of inflation is hyperinflation, which is a rare event. It’s usually associated with wars in which the supply side of the economy has been destroyed, or with failed states or kleptocratic governments that have destroyed the conditions for doing business.

The Phillips curve is about demand-pull inflation. The controversies raised by Milton Friedman were about the Phillips curve, which means that they are about demand-pull inflation.

The orthodox story that is told today is that there’s a temporary, short-run, negative trade-off between unemployment and inflation — or at least that the economy generates a pattern of outcomes in the short run that looks like such a trade-off. But if policy makers try and exploit that trade-off, it will crumble, and they will be forced to go back to what is called the natural rate of unemployment — only now with a higher inflation rate than before and no reduction in unemployment.

Basically, that view is the legacy of Milton Friedman. Though I am critical of the Friedman view, I still think he made an important contribution. He focused on the issues that were at stake, which are: how are wages set, what is the role of inflation expectations, and is there a systematic trade-off between inflation and unemployment that can inform policy, especially monetary policy. He did a service by framing the argument. The problem is that I think Friedman came out on the wrong side of that argument.

Thomas Palley

Well, I think there is such a thing as a systematic Phillips curve. And if James Forder thinks there isn’t, I would disagree with him. Now, I am aware of Forder’s argument that Friedman engaged in some strawman rhetoric. But Friedman’s challenge was basically reasonable. Why do I say that? Well, if you go back to the early 1960s, there was a widespread belief that there was a systematic trade-off between inflation and unemployment that policy could use. People believed in the “structural Phillips curve.” Friedman questioned the long-run existence of that trade-off using very conventional economic theory.

Now, he also said that economists had forgotten about inflation expectations. And that’s where the strawman argument creeps in, because economists certainly were aware of inflation expectations, and they were also aware that expectations could shift the Phillips curve. That’s very clear in the famous 1960 article by Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow. If you read it, they do talk about inflation expectations being important, and how changing inflation expectations would eventually affect the position of the Phillips curve.

That said, economists had not fully worked through the logic and implications of that, and that’s what Friedman did. So, to repeat, Friedman showed that when you used conventional theory and you added inflation expectations and took them seriously, the Phillips curve would slowly dissolve if policy makers tried to take advantage of it. Instead of getting lower unemployment with higher inflation, in the end you would just get higher inflation and unemployment would return to its so-called natural rate regardless.

Seth Ackerman

It sounds like what you’re saying is that if you believe in a stable long-run unemployment-inflation trade-off, it doesn’t necessarily imply that you don’t understand the role of inflation expectations. Whereas Forder perhaps too easily leaves an impression that one automatically implies the other.

Thomas Palley

Yes. Friedman’s work clearly did shake things up: economists did believe that there was a policy-exploitable trade-off, and that’s why what he said was so controversial. So my read on Friedman is that he overstated the claim that economists were unaware of inflation expectations, but on the other hand — and this is what’s important — he showed that if you used conventional economic theory about how wages are set, you didn’t get the Phillips curve that economists were working with.

So he showed that their macroeconomics was inconsistent with their own theory. And the logic is very simple. Conventional theory says that wages are set to balance the labor market and ensure full employment. If you follow that logic through, if policy tries to overstimulate the economy beyond the point of full employment, then wages will just rise faster to restore the balance, and you just end up at the natural rate of unemployment again, but now with persistent higher inflation. I don’t think economists had really pieced that all together.

Now, this is where Friedman gets lucky. In 1967 he makes this argument about the Phillips curve dissolving. And then lo and behold, it suddenly starts to dissolve. The Phillips curve that people had been watching in the early 1960s, which was a very nice curve that seemed to offer some very palatable policy trade-offs, suddenly began to dissolve — it started to become steeper and to move.

And one reason was surely because of inflation expectations kicking in. But there were also other reasons. And that’s why I made those comments about different kinds of inflation. So, for example, income-distribution conflict kicked in. The 1960s and early 1970s were increasingly a period of conflict between capital and labor over the profit share.

And then in the late 1960s and early 1970s, you had a commodity price boom, which was followed by the huge OPEC oil price shocks. Those supply shocks also had the effect of amplifying the conflict inflation.

Under those circumstances, the Phillips curve essentially dissolved, because inflation was being determined by so many factors. And that dissolution was taken as proof that Friedman was right.

Now, here’s the twist. As I interpret it, the economics profession willingly went along with the story that Friedman was right. And there’s a reason for that. Friedman had based his case on conventional theory. And the economics profession is not in the business of challenging conventional theory. In fact, the exact opposite is true. It’s in the business of defending conventional theory.

The Phillips curve was always an observed empirical relationship, a statistically fitted relationship. The challenge was always going to be to provide a theoretical explanation of that observed relationship. Friedman showed that economic theory didn’t have an explanation that supported a policy trade-off and that, therefore, there was need for new theory. The Left didn’t have a theory either, even though it wanted to believe that the trade-off existed. All the Left had was a conflict theory of inflation. And that’s where James Tobin comes in.

Seth Ackerman

Right. So what was Tobin’s intervention in the inflation debate?

Thomas Palley

Tobin was the one economist who tackled the problem and really looked for a new theoretical explanation. And I have to say, I was a graduate student at Yale and took his macroeconomics class, and his work has deeply informed my own thinking.

Tobin’s basic idea is that we need to think of the economy as consisting of many sectors, or what you might think of as many small economies that are aggregated together into a national economy. Each sector is being hit by random disturbances. Demand and spending are shifting between these sectors. And this is going on all the time. At any moment, some sectors are at full employment, and others are below full employment.

Tobin realized that inflation might be a way of helping the economy rebalance faster. This is the vision he lays out very clearly in his AEA presidential address in 1971.

The problem is that sectors below full employment have a hard time rebalancing, because there’s resistance to wage cuts — and for very good reasons. I’ve written about this. First, employers are always looking to cut wages no matter what the conditions are. That’s a fundamental piece of the structure of capitalism. So how can you trust an employer who says, “I need to cut wages because business conditions are bad?” How is a worker going to be able to trust that? Employment is a very conflicted relationship, and as a result it’s hard to push wage cuts through, even if they are needed. Second, workers are debtors. For instance, most of us have mortgages, so wage cuts increase the burden of debts, and they’re going to be resisted for that reason.

The secret sauce is to increase demand everywhere. That restores full employment in sectors that have unemployment, but it causes inflation in sectors already at full employment. And that’s where you begin to get the possibility of a trade-off. The more demand you throw in, the more sectors will be at full employment, the faster inflation will be — but also fewer sectors will have unemployment because they’ve adjusted faster back to full employment.

Seth Ackerman

But then the obvious question is, why wouldn’t Friedman’s story about inflation expectations kick in at that point? People see higher prices, that gets incorporated into wage bargains, and inflation just keeps accelerating.

Thomas Palley

Well, that’s exactly right. Tobin never quite figured out how to answer that. And I would say I regard that as being my small contribution here. What you can say is that in sectors with unemployment, workers know full well what the inflation rate is. They’re not fooled. They can open a newspaper, they watch TV, and they’ll get the inflation rate. But if you’re in a depressed sector, you may decide to settle for slightly less of a wage increase. You won’t be fully compensated for inflation, and thereby you’ll effectively take a small wage cut relative to the rest of the economy. Meanwhile, the sectors at full employment will fully incorporate inflation expectations.

The key is recognizing that the degree to which sectors incorporate expected inflation in their wage settlement will depend on local conditions. You get less feed-through of inflation expectations in depressed sectors, and you get full feed-through of inflation expectations in sectors at full employment.

One way you might illustrate this is the metaphor of elevators and escalators. Mainstream economists think of labor markets as being like elevators. You have a shock to the local labor market. The next period, the local labor market resets wages, and it quickly goes back to full employment. So the labor market is like an elevator. An elevator shoots back up to full employment — quick adjustment.

The implicit Tobin view is that labor markets are like escalators. You have a shock; the local labor market then slowly adjusts back to full employment. Faster demand growth is a way of speeding up the escalator so that you get to full employment sooner. But the cost is inflation in those labor markets elsewhere that are already at full employment.

Of course, for economic theory the issue is to precisely identify that argument and show how it works, which is where technical modeling enters and gets tricky. That took time, and that’s part of the tragedy. Tobin was very quick out of the gate in 1971 with a counter to Friedman’s argument in his presidential address. But the precise argument and formal modeling of it took a lot longer. And by then, the economics profession had sort of moved on and was not in a mood for listening.

Seth Ackerman

So far have you managed to interest other economists in this kind of research program?

Thomas Palley

No, they’re not interested in my particular argument, but they have picked up on a related argument by George Akerlof and his coauthors.

One thing I will say on this point is that one of the great pities is that progressives never really embraced Tobin and his view of the economy. Because if you take the approach that I do, where there have to be different theories of inflation to describe different types of inflation, his thinking fills a gap in their thinking. It provides an explanation of the Phillips curve trade-off, which most progressives believe in but lack an explanation of.

However, progressives in the 1970s and 1980s did not join with Tobin. In my view there are two reasons for that. One reason is that Tobin was quite mainstream in his thinking on some aspects of economic theory, especially income distribution. He believed in the neoclassical marginal productivity theory of income distribution — which I don’t believe in, by the way — which contributed to suspicion and rejection of Tobin by the Left. A second reason is that the Left insists on seeing all inflation in developed economies as conflict inflation. The Left tends not to appreciate different types of inflation, and that’s also been a cause of difference between me and my progressive colleagues.

Seth Ackerman

How do you see the current inflation situation?

Thomas Palley

If I had been at the Fed in 2022, I would also have been voting for raising interest rates. In my view, it’s not just inflation that warranted higher interest rates. An even more important reason was asset-price bubbles and house-price inflation. Asset-price bubbles end in busts, and asset-price inflation is a very unfair way to distribute the fruits of economic activity. It’s not a good way to run an economy, and it’s not good for working families.

I’ve worked in Washington for over twenty-five years, and I’ve never yet come across a progressive who has argued for raising interest rates. I think that may be because progressives always view inflation as conflict inflation, which makes them against raising interest rates. In conflict inflation raising rates is tacitly siding with employers. In contrast, I carry in the back of my mind many theories of inflation, and one of them is Tobin’s Phillips curve theory. Given that, I’m much more open to the possibility that an increase in interest rates can be needed to tame excess demand. I think that is relevant to current conditions, along with the asset-price bubble problem.

Seth Ackerman

Yet you also advocate a higher inflation target.

Thomas Palley

Yes. We may need to tame inflation and we may also need a higher inflation target. That is not inconsistent. In my own work, I talk of the “backward bending Phillips curve,” which generates an optimal rate of inflation that I call the minimum-unemployment rate of inflation or MURI — the rate of inflation that will deliver the minimum unemployment rate. I think that is what policy should aim for. And I would say it’s somewhere between 3 percent and 6 percent. That’s quite a wide range, but we can take a midpoint, say around 4 to 5 percent.

If you push inflation above 5 percent, it’s quite likely that your Phillips curve is going to start bending backward, and you’re going to lose some of the benefits of inflation. The precise level is something that you’d only find out by experimentation. But a long time ago I did a short empirical paper that basically tried to make the argument. What I found was that the duration of spells of unemployment declined with higher inflation, which is proof of the escalator at work. If inflation is speeding up the escalator, unemployment spells will be shorter because you get to the top faster.

One of the ironies of the moment is that, in my view, we’re in the inflation sweet spot but we’re trying to push it below the sweet spot.

Seth Ackerman

So your views may have coincided with Larry Summers’s views at some earlier point, but at this point, where he really wants to see the labor market get a lot more slack, that’s where you depart from him.

Thomas Palley

Yes, exactly. Unfortunately, I often find myself caught between sides on these issues. I think Larry Summers was right on the need to get going and raise interest rates — though also for additional reasons than those that he gave. But now he’s in danger of being wrong by pushing too far.

Conversely, progressives were wrong in opposing interest rate increases in 2022. But at some stage they will be right if the Fed persists with raising rates — and I have to say, at 5 percent I begin to get a bit anxious. Right now, there’s good reason for an interest-rate pause.

Over the past two years, we’ve gotten used to hearing about record-breaking inflation readings; last June, for example, the Consumer Price Index rose at its fastest twelve-month rate — 8.9 percent — since the peak of the 1970s–early 1980s inflation wave that was finally brought to an end by former Fed chair Paul Volcker’s brutal reign of tight money.

But this month’s record is a little different.

Traditionally. the Fed has paid closest attention to so-called “core PCE,” a version of the index that strips out food and energy prices, because those volatile categories tend to inject a big dose of noise into the numbers.

But over the past year, another category has also gained notice as a distorting factor: housing. That’s because the methodology used by government statisticians to measure residential rents — which counts existing leases on a par with new leases —only picks up shifts in the trend of rent inflation with a lag due to the lengthy duration of fixed-rent contracts, typically twelve months.

According to recent research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, if the trend of rents is measured using only newly signed leases (a more timely indicator of price pressures), rental inflation turns out to have fallen dramatically in the third quarter of last year, the most recent period for which the Cleveland researchers have calculated the numbers — but because of the aforementioned lag, the shift has not yet fully appeared in the housing component of official price indexes like PCE. This obviously distorts the inflation data, and the unusually large gap between actual and measured rent that currently prevails is expected to continue for the rest of this year.

To get a more reliable gauge of the underlying pace of inflation, it therefore makes sense to remove housing from the Fed’s preferred core PCE index, leaving us with a measure I’ll call nonhousing core PCE.

When we look at that metric, we see that February’s numbers indeed set a record: the twelve-month period that ended in February saw the biggest decline in inflation, relative to the preceding twelve months, of any period since the Volcker disinflation of the early 1980s. In other words, if we take the nearly five hundred months since the 1982 trough of the Volcker disinflation and rank them by the decline (or increase) of twelve-month inflation, February 2023 literally comes in at number one.

And lest there be any suspicion that this is just a quirk of the data, note that exactly the same record was set in February’s Consumer Price Index, which was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics a little over two week ago: the drop in nonshelter core inflation was also the biggest since the early ’80s.

Meanwhile, the rate of deceleration in wage growth — as measured by average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers — has been flirting with a similar record: the January and February declines in twelve-month wage growth were the fourth and sixth largest since the Volcker disinflation (and three of the other top months were associated with the COVID-19 shutdowns of spring 2020).

Looking at the breakneck disinflation pictured in the chart above, it’s worth recalling Larry Summers’s long-standing prediction that post-COVID inflation would never come down without a large increase in the unemployment rate engineered by aggressive Fed rate hikes. Those rate hikes eventually arrived, and higher unemployment is likely to follow — but neither it, nor Summers, should get the credit for inflation’s retreat.

For all its destructive magnitude and historical significance, the US invasion of Iraq has prompted remarkably little commemoration in advance of its twentieth anniversary. It’s as if the world just wants to forget an episode whose senselessness makes it difficult to extract any meaning at all.

But for anyone who does want to understand the war and its consequences, there are few more knowledgable guides than Glen Rangwala, associate professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Trinity College, Cambridge.

A specialist in Arab politics and international relations, Rangwala was a founder of the Campaign Against Sanctions in Iraq in the 1990s and gained perhaps his greatest notoriety during the run-up to the war, when he exposed what became known as the “dodgy dossier” — Tony Blair’s publicly released compendium of alleged evidence concerning Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which was supposed to justify an invasion — as a largely plagiarized fraud.

In 2006, he published, with Eric Herring, Iraq in Fragments, a scholarly study of the disintegration of Iraqi society under the yoke of US occupation.

Rangwala spoke with Jacobin’s Seth Ackerman about the causes of the war, the logic of the postwar occupation, and the legacies it has left behind in Iraq, the Middle East, and the wider world. It is a disconsoling story with few silver linings.

Seth Ackerman

Give us a picture of Iraq on the eve of the 2003 invasion, after twelve years of United Nations sanctions.

Glen Rangwala

Over the course of the 1990s, Iraq moves from being a relatively highly educated, highly literate, politically engaged, and economically fast-developing society, with generally quite good infrastructure, to being one of the most notable instances of de-development: public infrastructure falling to pieces, all trade essentially being curtailed or being converted into illicit trade (smuggling) or UN humanitarian programs (the Oil-for-Food Program).

It was a situation in which people had no realistic economic opportunities for advancement other than emigration. So the extent to which Iraqis from across all parts of society left the country if they could, is significant for understanding Iraq over that period.

The government retained a fairly high level of control — coercively — over most of the country and over large parts of Iraqi society, apart from the Kurdish region in the North. But there was a degree of desperation for many Iraqis over the course of the 1990s. This was beginning to turn a corner a bit by the end of the decade, though — so by 2001, 2002, more money is coming into the country, largely through the new oil deals that Iraq had made with Syria.

In a sense, the appearance of opportunity was back in Iraq, but it was still far less cohesive as a society, far less hopeful, and far less structured in how people went about their social and economic lives. Their educational opportunities were still quite limited, even though the country was, at least on the face of it, wealthier than it had been. And it’s reflected in the stories that Iraqis have of that period, which was one of desperation, a period in which the country went backward. Their children, their siblings, their relatives, left the country to seek a better life abroad.

Seth Ackerman

Of course, from the point of view of the the key players on the UN Security Council who were most responsible for maintaining the sanctions, officially their intention was to force compliance with UN resolutions, chiefly disarmament, though they didn’t make much effort to disguise the fact that they also — at least the United States and Britain — hoped that the desperation you’re talking about could somehow result in a change of regime.

The way the sanctions debate was set up in the West, there was a kind of shadow question: If the Iraqis were free to speak their minds would they say that the regime is to blame for (allegedly) refusing to do what was needed to lift the sanctions, or was the West to blame for imposing sanctions? Or would they even say, we’re grateful for the sanctions for weakening the regime?

Glen Rangwala

Yes of course. I mean, Iraqis blamed everybody for having no concern about their humanitarian welfare, either their government or the international community. There’s a sense of abandonment that I think was the general experience of most Iraqis through the country through that period, where nobody was really that concerned about whether they lived or died. So there is no gratitude to the Americans for invading. There is no gratitude for the US and UK for maintaining sanctions.

In 2003, they enter Iraq as powers that, from an Iraqi perspective, have a proven track record of having no concern for their well-being. These are the countries that put them through that process of material deprivation, of limited opportunities, of air strikes. (Of course the British and American governments maintained a policy of air strikes in the northern and southern no-fly zones, as they were called, so Iraqi casualties were a regular part of how they understood the effects of those policies.)

So right from the start, to most Iraqis there is a sense that these are hostile powers — which they nevertheless have the opportunity to align with if they want to. But most Iraqis, of course, don’t want to align with hostile powers, even for the most cynical of reasons. And so the key issue that comes in right away — and I was there immediately after the invasion in 2003, in Baghdad and in parts of Western Iraq — was the sense of Iraq being a divided country.

There were a few people who were with the Americans, who were operating with the Americans in the Green Zone. There were parts of the population that were affiliated to political parties that had signed up to the “transition,” as it was called at that time. But there were many Iraqis who saw them as traitors, who saw them as having sold out their country, and who often resorted, especially over the course of 2003, to violent struggle, to oust the Americans from Iraq, thinking that was the only way in which the Americans would ever leave from the country.

And of course, they were branded by those parts of the population as terrorists. And so what you have, all the way through from the invasion onward, is the creation of a very divided population, a sense of division within the country that will take generations to overcome, where different parts of the population blame each other for the long war that followed in which tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed by their fellow Iraqis. So it is that lasting division which becomes, I think, the most obvious, most destructive legacy.

Seth Ackerman

In the Western discourse, this is always filtered through the idea of ethnic or religious divisions, with the implication that these are ancient and permanent.

Glen Rangwala

There are, and there always have been, lots of different identities that Iraqis have inhabited at one moment or other. They affiliate with their towns, their cities, and often they affiliate with their neighborhoods. They affiliate with their ethnicity, their language, their cultural traditions, their religious identity. They affiliate with their class: sometimes those have been significant markers of political orientation, to talk about oneself as upper-class or middle-class or working-class. These are all divisions that exist in any modern society.

There are multiple identities at work and most Iraqis, throughout most of the twentieth century, have inhabited those multiple identities, in which religion has not been a particularly prevalent one. Sunni and Shi’a were categories that largely disappeared from Iraqi public discourse over the course of the middle part of the twentieth century. There are ways in which in the 1990s, the Iraqi government started using that language back against its own population. And there are ways within which political activists who sought to oust the Iraqi government also started using those terms.

So they’re not unknown to Iraqis in 2003. It’s not that people don’t know what the difference between a Sunni and a Shi’a is, but they’re not particularly politicized at that point. There’s no real political implication that comes from identifying oneself as Sunni or Shi’a. But what the US does is engage in a process of trying to build alliances around those divisions. So, Shi’a will identify with us, they will support us, we will fund them, we will support their political parties. We will arm their militia, which is what they did, because they are the groups, it was thought, who will support us in the long term, will carry the majority of the population with us.

And of course, that fails in lots of different ways. But what I think has been the most destructive form of failure is in creating that long-term sense of division within the country along those sectarian lines, in which those who supported the Americans, who joined the militias that fought with the Americans, are seen by a significant proportion of Iraqis today as having sold out their country to the invader.

Seth Ackerman

Organizationally, what were the units that were affiliated with the Americans?

Glen Rangwala

The US created a number of different brigades essentially made up of Shi’a militia members who came from what was then called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, which recognized within five or six years that it had lost a lot of its support by having such an overt policy of aligning with the US and having its militia essentially funded through the Americans. They set up a number of different brigades, with names like the Wolf Brigade, which were basically American top-down organized institutions that worked essentially as agents of ethnic cleansing within parts of Iraq.

So they would target Sunni Muslims whom they suspected of being allied with the Americans, often driving families, groups, whole populations out of areas of Baghdad. And so over the course of that period, from 2003 to 2006, you get what is a very multiethnic, multicultural city becoming essentially cantons, with different people from one religious group or one ethnic group, solely resident in one area of the city, rather than it being a mixed population as it was before.

Seth Ackerman

And it remains like that.

Glen Rangwala

It does. Iraq remains a country in which those divisions are significant in people’s minds, in people’s forms of life, in ways that haven’t really been repaired over the past twenty years.

Seth Ackerman

The movement led by Muqtada al-Sadr was supposed to represent a challenge to those alignments.

Glen Rangwala

So the one militia that remained was the so-called Sadr movement, which never aligned with the Americans. The movement was based essentially around the large eastern slum of Baghdad, which was largely Shi’a Muslim, with significant numbers of Kurdish and other ethnic minorities there as well. But they acted as a mobilizer. They were the movement that spoke up for the disenfranchised of Iraq. This is a population that has been served well by no government since the 1950s. Largely manual laborers and other low-paid occupations, with long periods of unemployment for many members of that community. And they were mobilized most actively within a militia and a political organization that has never substantially aligned itself with the US occupation, and which retains a significant role in Iraqi politics today.

So there are ways in which those affiliations that developed over the course of that early period after the invasion have continued to be significant, but without building any sense of a cohesive national community. Parties speak on behalf of a particular population and often claim that other parts of the country, other communities within the country, somehow act as their oppressors or have what’s rightfully theirs. So there’s that discourse of internal opposition within the country, which comes out in the inability of Iraqi parties to work together, and which remains significant today. You don’t get cohesive political factions formed across the country. What you get is highly localized groups who fight against each other still.

Seth Ackerman

This is said to be the major factor that has allowed Iran to gain influence in the country.

Glen Rangwala

That’s true, though many Iraqis also have come to realize the extent to which their large neighbors, both Saudi Arabia and Iran, don’t have their interests in their calculations — that they’re doing this for their own reasons. So you do get many Iraqis who reject foreign interference in their country. You get many Iraqis who see political parties that have their origins in alliances with Iran or with Saudi Arabia as being illegitimate.

But still you get governments that come to power in Iraq that have very low levels of real authority over or support from many Iraqis. They have very limited levels of responsiveness to popular need. They have very limited capacities to do anything about Iraq’s problems. So things like the provision of electricity, the provision of schooling, basic government responsibilities, are still at a very low level — worse than Iraq in the 1960s or 1970s. There’s still a significant inability of the government to undertake projects that will benefit Iraqis. And there is a lack of confidence in any organized political group to achieve these objectives.

Seth Ackerman

During the war — say, during the 2004 US presidential election campaign, when the Democrats were trying to formulate something resembling a critique of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy without actually being antiwar, the line they would use was that “Bush took us to war without a plan.” So the critique was about incompetence.

Glen Rangwala

A lot of attention is focused on policy mistakes, commonly on the disbandment, essentially, of the Iraqi civil service — the limitation that those within senior ministries could no longer stay in those roles — essentially sacking large parts of the senior civil service, who were mostly members of the Ba’ath Party. They had to be members if they wanted to retain those roles.

Seth Ackerman

And the army.

Glen Rangwala

And the army, yes. Those are the two main criticisms: the effective sacking of large parts of the civil service and the disbandment of the military forces of the country. And in some sense I think that’s right, that these were significant mistakes. They were significant flaws in the US policy especially in the case of the civil service, which did not pose a challenge to the Americans. It wasn’t going to seek the restoration of the old government. These were largely professional people who had worked all their lives in the institutions and had generally done the best job that they could in very difficult circumstances. And to sack them all of course posed really severe difficulties for the Iraqi state to go back to providing for its population in any meaningful way.

That said, I think to focus on policy errors makes the mistake of not seeing the bigger problem, which was just that the invasion itself was almost inevitably going to turn Iraqis against each other. There was no way that was not going to happen. Setting up a foreign power as, essentially, the authority in the country was not going to bring Iraqis onside.

Iraqis generally understood the invasion for what it was, an attempt by an outside country to dominate them. And inevitably, many Iraqis fought back, creating the long term context of violence that’s been seen in the country since then. So it’s not just that there were policy mistakes, but that the invasion itself had certain more or less inevitable consequences, which were going to lead to long-term violence.

Seth Ackerman

What’s ironic is that in the internal policy debate within the Bush administration, the critique you’re articulating now was actually made by the most extreme elements of the Bush administration. Before the war, and during its earliest stages, they said, if we do a prolonged occupation of the country, we will get entangled in internal Iraqi politics and become the object of resentment. So let’s just invade and then immediately leave, and the result will be good for us somehow.

Glen Rangwala

Yes, and of course, all American governments have a wide coalition with different interests represented in the cabinet at any one point. So the oil barons were represented alongside the highly ideological people who were motivated by a sense that radical Islam was the threat to America and that somehow an invasion would demonstrate American power to the rest of the world. These combined with defense companies that want to build up the US military and show it off to the world as a force of intimidation, coupled with those whose interests were more focused on American security and combating the effects of 9/11 and all of that.

So you had a range of different groups there. And what you got was a shift in policy from one faction, the invade-punish-and-run group, to the prolonged occupation group. And so over the course of 2003, you get those in power who say, we should be here for five, ten, fifteen years in Iraq as the governing authority. And that view finds itself winning out in mid-2003 — but then losing out in late 2003 as the costs of what it would mean to engage in a long-term occupation of the country, to have exclusive political power, became clear. So you get a move back to, not quite the invade-and-run view, but those who say “light touch,” “scale down,” “handover,” “train the Iraqi Army.”

Seth Ackerman

Indirect rule.

Glen Rangwala

Yes, indirect rule. But obviously, that perspective came a cropper when the idea that you could build an army from scratch that would effectively control a highly disordered country — which is what Iraq became over the course of the first year — fell apart. When challenged, the Iraqi army since 2003 has never been a viable mechanism of national control. And so, none of these policy options — the cut-and-run option, the long-term occupation, the indirect rule method — had a realistic chance of success. Again, it’s not really any individual policy mistake that’s the issue.

Seth Ackerman

In the US, this episode — in fact the whole sequence of interventions going back to 1991, ultimately leading to the invasion — was mainly justified by this idea that Iraq had failed to disarm and therefore it posed aa serious threat.

Glen Rangwala

It was an issue that was easy to explain to populations around the world, to argue that Iraq should be an issue of concern. The idea that it was developing chemical, biological, nuclear weapons was a way to present Iraq as having the potential to challenge regional and global security. To some extent, of course, that rhetoric could draw upon Iraq’s attempts over the course of the previous decade to experiment with each of these three different forms of weaponry. There was an attempt in Iraq to develop chemical and biological weapons — the first much more so than the second. There was the use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War. And there was the beginnings of the nuclear program in the 1980s.

None of these programs continued after 1991. We know now for sure that these programs were all terminated by 1991. But the fact that the US and UK could show that Iraq could not prove that — could not prove a negative — gave it a consistent linchpin to say there is still a danger from Iraq. There was still a reason why we should sanction Iraq, why we should blockade Iraq, why we should prevent Iraq’s reintegration into the international community, ultimately leading to the invasion, of course. So this remained an issue for concerted global attention over the course of the whole twelve-year period between the Gulf War and the 2003 invasion.

So the threat of Iraq was consistently exaggerated. It was consistently portrayed as something that had to be challenged by outside actors. And to go from that to saying the only way to deal with this threat is to invade was, at least rhetorically, not that much of a leap. The problem of course was that there were no weapons. And it was obvious this story could not end well because all the intelligence estimates were quite clear that, while there was a possibility that Iraq retained weapons, realistically there was no chance for them to use any of these weapons if they existed. And even if they did try and use them, it would be on a very small scale and it wouldn’t be a threat to global and regional security.

Seth Ackerman

Presumably those in the Bush administration and elsewhere who made these accusations must have hoped that they could just show off some vestige of a splinter of an ongoing weapons program and that that would be accepted as vindicating them.

Glen Rangwala

Yeah, I think that’s the best they could have hoped for. I think generally there was a sense that the story would just move on, and of course it didn’t move on. So much attention had been placed on those weapons claims. They were made in such a high-profile way, and when leaders from the US and UK were challenged on their Iraq policy before the invasion, they reiterated those claims in an ever more exaggerated way.

With those claims, they trapped themselves in forms of justification that they had not anticipated. Just tracing out the ways in which those claims became more and more exaggerated in the lead-up to the war — that was also part of their way of dealing with a skeptical public. I mean, there was no concerted support for the invasion across Europe. In the US it was thin. And so the attempt to get around that was by making these seemingly highly technical claims about the threats of particular weapons types. And those who didn’t have the time or knowledge to critically explore those claims had to take those claims on the basis of trust.

Seth Ackerman

Twenty years later, what consequences, if any, have there been for the United States’ standing as a great power?

Glen Rangwala

There were very few countries that stayed out of the invasion that later assisted with the occupation. There was that process whereby those countries that had supported the US at the start — some of them left, like the Spanish government, which took its troops out of Iraq. But there were very few governments that had not initially endorsed the invasion, which later came to participate in supporting the American occupation of Iraq after 2003. It did show the limited willingness of many countries to support military action of a sort that they could not win their populations over to. And it also showed the limited extent to which the US could be trusted in international politics as an actor that worked on behalf of common goals on the international stage.

You see this in the European context where there is still a very high level of skepticism that didn’t exist before 2003 about US military policy around the world. There remains a high level of skepticism of claims that are made by the United States about its objectives, which are increasingly seen as self-interested rather than serving shared goals.

Seth Ackerman

And yet the drive among Europeans to have any kind of an autonomous foreign and defense policy seems much less today than it did twenty years ago.

Glen Rangwala

Perhaps the bigger issue is that Iraq was a significant moment for populations in finding a level of mistrust in the claims made by political leaders — especially those that concern matters of international peace and security. There remains a very high level of mistrust in claims made by British and American governments about things they claim are essential for security, which I think comes out of the Iraq episode and persist today.

Seth Ackerman

There’s that famous story about the Cuban Missile Crisis, when [John F.] Kennedy offered to show [Charles] de Gaulle the satellite imagery evidence of the Soviet missiles and [Charles] de Gaulle saying essentially, I don’t need to see it, if the American president says it, then I accept that. It seems like nowadays any world leader — even if they were personally inclined to take that attitude —  would be mercilessly ridiculed at home for such naivety in dealing with the US.

Glen Rangwala

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen evidence presented by one government or other described as “the new dodgy dossier.”

Seth Ackerman

This heightened suspicion you mention, about US’s commitment to work for “common goals” — that strikes me as significant because that is the basis on which a hegemonic power is opposed to maintain its authority.

Glen Rangwala

Yes, that’s the point exactly. There is no confidence that the US is willing to pursue goals beyond just the narrowly self-interested. That is a legacy of Iraq that has persisted since 2003.