Using Terrorists as Poltical Pawns Might Not Be a Good Idea
Republicans and Netanyahu are just figuring this out
I have been reading voluminously this week. Keeping track of the truce in Gaza, searching out the lists of hostages, and checking off the few who have been released. And I watched the rare video like this one, which made me cry.
I’ve also been reading The Guardian’s Gaza Diaries, which give us amazing insight into what Gazans are going through. And about the Palestinians who have been released from Israeli prisons, but whose families are harassed prior to their release, and whose friends are tear-gassed when they celebrate in public. Many of these teenage prisoners were in jail because they were at a protest against far-right Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Maybe they threw stones, or posted something on social media. They were arrested under an Israeli policy that criminalizes protest.
Kinda what Trump keeps telling us he wants to do, with Project 2025, should he be reelected.
But there are a few pieces I found that complemented each other that weren’t meant to go together, and that intrigued me.
The first is this piece by New York Times’ long-time Congressional reporter Carl Hulse, who actually uses the term “far-right” to describe today’s Republican Party.
This is the second time in eight days I have written about the Times giving hints of abandoning both-sidesim, or pretending Trump supporters are anything like the conservatives whose party they have overtaken.
This is great news.
But… how unalike are the old-guard from the new far-right radicals, really?
Hulse marks the beginning of the Republican Party’s takeover to the Tea Party movement in 2010. OK. That is a marker, though I would argue that it didn’t start then. It was a culmination of anger by Christian conservatives who were tired of unkept promises, and working-class white people who had lost hope decades ago as the economic policies that started with Reagan created enormous inequality, decimating entire towns in some cases.
But in 2010, Hulse writes that then-Republican House leader Eric Cantor “saw a glimmer of hope in the energized far-right populist movement that emerged out of a backlash to Mr. Obama — the first Black president…” and “seized on the Tea Party and associated groups, with their nativist leanings and vehemently anti-establishment impulses, as their ticket back to power.”
Hulse mentions the obvious racism involved in these “anti-establishment” impulses, but notes that Cantor and his colleagues “said they saw the activists as mainly motivated by an anti-tax, anti-government fervor.”
Cantor, who lost his seat to a Tea Party candidate in 2012, told Hulse: “We decided the anger was going to be about fiscal discipline and transforming Medicare into a defined contribution program. But it turned out it was really just anger — anger toward Washington — and it wasn’t so policy-based.”
“We decided.”
This tells us everything we need to know about the arrogance that underscored the Republican Party’s view of their followers. “We decided what their anger would be about.”
That arrogance was exactly what the Tea Party was protesting. It’s exactly what led almost all of them to identify as MAGA just a few years later.
What I find unconscionable is that Cantor et al were perfectly fine harnessing the racism that was behind that Tea Party anger. They were perfectly fine harnessing that racism for purposes of creating fiscal and social policies that harmed Black people.
Bibi’s Bungle
The next day, I read this insightful piece by Washington Post Jerusalem Bureau Chief Steve Hendrix and contributor Hazem Balousha, about how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was elected in 2009 on a promise to get rid of Hamas, but instead settled on an “odd symbiosis” with Hamas that is now threatening to topple both the prime minister and the terrorist organization.
The strategy, experts told Hendrix and Balousha, was to take advantage of the split between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
“With no unified leadership, Bibi was able to say he couldn’t move forward with peace negotiations,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli pollster and political analyst, referring to Netanyahu by his nickname. “It allowed him to say, ‘There is no one to talk to.’”
Now, thousands of people have been killed over this “clever” political strategy.
I guess using people’s hopes, dreams, and desires in order to hold onto power isn’t as successful, ultimately, as solving the problems. But it is a whole lot easier. Until it comes crashing down.
Social Media and Disinformation
The other two pieces I found that had an odd connection with each other were this piece from The Forward and this week’s edition of the newsletter Friday Things, written by Stacy Lee Kong.
The Forward - a Jewish magazine and website with a decidedly un-neoconservative spin - has been doing some of the best contextual work on this war since the outset, and even before. Jodi Rudoren, the Editor in Chief, was the Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief for a few years, during the time Netanyahu was using the Palestinian schism to avoid hard decisions.
This weekend, The Forward quietly promoted a 2018 piece to their front page - replete with a new subhead and a disclaimer. The piece is about what Palestinians have meant and mean today when they say, “From the River to the Sea.”
I found it because it was the number one trending story on the site.
The voices we have heard most after the horrific attacks of October 7 are those on the extreme - Jewish people characterizing all Palestinians as terrorists, and supporters of oppressed people painting all Israelis - and, in some cases, all Jews - as oppressors.
For most of us, though, it’s not that simple. We can hold that innocent Israelis AND innocent Palestinians deserve to live full, happy lives. We can condemn the October 7 attacks that brutally took the lives of over 1,200 people, while also condemning the indiscriminate bombings that have killed more than 13,000 people in Gaza, to date.
We can call for the problem to be solved, not for revenge.
But many of those reasonable voices have been silenced for fear of being attacked. So the only voices we seem to hear are the hateful ones.
The Forward story is interesting in and of itself, but the most interesting part to me is that it is the number one trending story. That says volumes about the Jewish people who aren’t necessarily speaking, but who are reading.
Stacy Lee Kong - who is a brilliant interpreter of the power of pop culture - points out that there is a pattern to the angry pro-Israel voices we’re seeing on social media.
Of the people who have attacked her, she notes that none of them are Friday Things followers, and “there are hints that these commenters… know one another.”
Her theory is that Friday Things is a relatively small newsletter with few comments, and that coordinated efforts to swarm smaller outlets “gives the impression of more widespread support than they actually have.”
Larger accounts, she notes, often feature people debunking the comments of the conservative American Jews or Christian Fundamentalists who need Jews to occupy Jerusalem in order for the Rapture to happen. (Talk about using groups of people for your own twisted purposes!) But those people aren’t on her relatively small social media accounts to push back. So it looks like everybody agrees.
And who, on a smaller account, wants to be the lone voice in disagreement? Most of us - well, not me, clearly - would rather not comment, but they will go to the Forward and read a piece that gives us context rather than outrage.
The problem, of course, is that outrage is the emotion de jour around the world. It is fueling the rise of far-right extremists, and xenophobia seemingly everywhere. Just this week, The Netherlands elected a far-right leader, (the Netherlands - where pot has always been legal?), as did Argentina. Just for fun, extremists in Dublin had to burn things down because they thought a crazy man who stabbed children might have been from another country. There is no word on where the perpetrator was from. But the guy who brought him down was an immigrant from Brazil.
People are angry and, honestly, I don’t blame them. Too much of the world’s geopolitics have been games played by powerful men, leaving the rest of us to suffer. Men who have largely ignored - or created - the circumstances that have fueled refugee migration, including wars and climate change. For decades I have heard economists, political scientists and diplomats talk about their grand strategies. Very rarely have I seen an effort to understand how those strategies play out in people’s lives.
And now, it seems, we are all paying for the anger of being ignored.
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