u/Reddenbawker

An argument that social contagion explains why fertility is collapsing globally:

>When Susannah McIntyre, 37, hauls her three young sons through her Cambridgeshire village, pedestrians mutter, she says. Cafés seem relieved to see them depart. When she was growing up, it was families with five children that seemed big. But at the local primary school, only two other families have three kids. Now she says she feels like an “outlier”, one who is looked down on with suspicion by people “who regard parenting as a self-indulgent lifestyle choice”.

>Across the world, parenthood is on the wane. In Europe, the only child is becoming the norm, with half of families with dependent children having only one. In the UK, the figure is 45 per cent, with just 14 per cent of families having three or more. This is repeated in unexpected places. The United Arab Emirates and Tamil Nadu in India now have lower birth rates than Germany. Mexico’s rate has fallen behind the US, where one-child families now outnumber families with two.

>Birth rates in more than two-thirds of the world’s countries have fallen below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a stable population. The world population will soon start to decline, for the first time since the Black Death of the 14th century, with one estimate putting “peak human” as soon as 2064.

>There are many factors behind the baby bust. Young people are less likely to be in a relationship than previous generations were at the same age. It is harder for young couples to get on the housing ladder and to feel economically stable enough to contemplate adding a baby to the mix. And some worry whether it would be right to bring a child into a febrile world.

>But after five years of research, I have come to believe that there is something else at play too: a form of social contagion. In a world that appears to treat parents with hostility, where the advantages of raising children are obscured, remaining childless is easier if the same decision is made by everyone around you. As a phenomenon, it can become self-perpetuating.

>This extra factor — network effects — can explain the remarkable similarities between falling birth rates across very different places and cultures. It also offers humans a way to reverse the decline by making having children attractive again.

>Falling birth rates are often presented as a simple matter of choice. But in research of 10 low-fertility countries by Ester Lazzari and Eva Beaujouan, up to half of men and women end their reproductive years wishing they had more children. While passing peak human will ease the burden on natural resources, the drop in global population is projected to be rapid, ushering in legions of elderly who will strain welfare states and economies. In China, where a one-child policy introduced in 1980 distorted family planning for 35 years, there is now the “4-2-1 problem”, with an only child supporting two parents and four grandparents.

>There are other, subtle effects. As children become less visible, our tolerance for their noisy capriciousness dwindles. In Japan, crowdsourced Dorozoku maps show people how to avoid streets where “children play with balls”. In a smart Paris suburb, judges last year ordered a junior school to close its playground after neighbours complained about noise. At a clinic in Boston, Massachusetts, in 2022, I met Wanda Baker, who had been asked to stand outside because her sick baby and his two siblings were upsetting other patients. “I feel second class,” she said.

>“Families are society’s most basic unit and humanity’s most indispensable institution,” says Nicholas Eberstadt, demographer and Henry Wendt chair at the American Enterprise Institute. “But as families and their branches thin out, they will become ever less able to bear weight.” Policymakers, he adds, are “not ready for the age of depopulation which will recast societies, economies and power politics”.

>A low fertility trap

>Humans copy each other, a primal drive that goes all the way back to our early need to protect ourselves in tribes. Social norms developed as a way to outsource some of our decision-making. Co-operation with the group became instinctive. 

>Even in the modern world, the need to conform is powerful. In an early experiment demonstrating the power of social contagion from the 1950s, the psychologist Solomon Asch asked participants to do a simple task, matching lines on a card, where the correct answer was obvious. Unaware that other participants were actors instructed by Asch, more than a third of participants went along with the group’s choice, despite this being obviously wrong.

>The impact of network effects on birth rates was well documented by a study in Brazil. The gradual introduction of broadcast signal into different regions in the 1980s was accompanied by a cliff-like fall in birth rates. People with signal had become gripped by telenovelas – soap operas – showing urban female protagonists with few or no kids. In 1960, the average Brazilian woman had just over six children. Forty years later it was just over two: a drop almost as rapid as China’s. The impact was strongest on the female viewers who were closest in age to the female characters, with whom they identified most strongly.

>More recent studies have corroborated such findings. Research from Sweden in 2010 showed that women working in offices were more likely to have a baby if a colleague of similar seniority did so, with no effect from co-workers at other levels. A separate study of 6,500 German companies similarly found that female employees’ transition rates to first pregnancy roughly doubled after a colleague had a baby, with the effect lasting about two years.

>The German social scientists Daniel Lois and Oliver Arránz Becker have found that couples’ interest in having a child strengthens if friends become parents. They suggest three possible factors: couples with children demystify parenthood for the network, create a social pressure on others to join them, and create a feeling that not joining might disrupt social ties.

>“Peer group behaviour signals what people like me are expected to do, and at what point in the life course,” says Anna Rotkirch, research professor at Finland’s Population Research Institute. “We have evolved to be very conscious of reproductive cues in our environment,” she says, adding that she feels these have become increasingly negative.

>The acceleration of the birth rate fall since the advent of the smartphone may have less to do with time spent on screens distracting from romance and more to do with negative images of childbirth and positive ones about being single. “Fear of pregnancy and the discourse about motherhood as sacrifice have become more common in the past 15 years,” says Rotkirch, with “many childless women mentioning fear of what happens to your body in childbirth as a reason for not having had a child”. 

>Several studies have found that seeing and holding real babies makes women keener to have their own baby — although they may be self-selecting.

>Social media increases the extent to which young adults interact with peers or role models they do not know and are not related to. “I have talked to young mothers who are surprised that posting on Instagram about having a baby is creating fewer ‘likes’ than posting about a fancy holiday trip,” says Rotkirch. “Young adults are increasingly taking their reproductive cues from people or platforms with no real interest or stakes in their family formation goals.”

>The situation today in England and Wales is that women born in 1979 are having smaller families than their baby boomer parents and greatest generation grandparents, while their Gen Z daughters are projected to have even smaller families still.

>A big reason that people end up with fewer children than they wanted is that we are leaving it later to start a family. European first-time mothers are 31, and fathers 34, compared with 1975 when the average ages were 26 for mothers and 30 for fathers. This in itself makes it harder to have multiple children.

>But the overarching pattern fulfils the “low fertility trap” hypothesis proposed by the economists Vegard Skirbekk, Wolfgang Lutz and Maria Rita Testa in 2006. They contended that once fertility declines below replacement level, the subsequent shrinking of each generation may entrench childlessness as a norm which becomes harder to reverse. The downward spiral lessens social pressure to have a family.

>It is true that no country that has fallen well below two children per woman has yet rebounded to anything like that level. South Korea has ticked up a little, from 0.75 in 2024 to 0.8 in 2025, but it’s not yet clear whether that is a temporary phenomenon, a result of women having one child a little younger.

>As time goes on, a rebound could become less and less possible. In China, the writer Helen Gao has suggested that “none of China’s only children can imagine what raising multiple children could look like”. If you grew up without siblings, and your friends did too, why would you want something different? Add in the absurd demands of modern intensive parenting, and all the other things you can do with your time in the modern world, and it’s no surprise that so many couples now declare themselves “one and done”.

>Eberstadt, of the American Enterprise Institute, thinks that mimetic theory, the cultural influences on human behaviour, is playing an overlooked role in the baby bust. “The increasing rarity of large families could make it harder for humans to choose to return to having them — owing to what scholars call loss of social learning — and prolong low levels of fertility,” he says.

>Baby bonus

>Hopes of filling the demographic gap are often pinned on immigration. But newcomers to a country are also influenced by social norms. In a Norwegian survey, majorities of first-generation immigrants from Vietnam, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Turkey said that it was very important to have children in order to have a happy marriage. By the second generation, fewer than half expressed this view. Somali-heritage women have an average of seven children in Somalia, but two in Norway.

>One study has even found that Polish women moving to England and Wales ended up having more children than their peers back home, mirroring the household average of their new country, even though it often costs more to raise a child in London than in Warsaw.

>Groups that retain stronger ties to their countries of origin, and which have strong religious faith, are less immediately influenced. But the data suggests they still eventually produce smaller families. The fertility rate among Pakistani women in the UK dropped by 38 per cent between 2001 and 2021, according to the Migration Observatory.

>If immigration provides no solution, perhaps network effects themselves can be used. Making children seem desirable, possible and visible is a feature of two companies that are bucking the birth-rate trend in low-fertility countries.

>In Taiwan, chipmaker TSMC’s employees make up around 0.3 per cent of the population but were parents to 1.8 per cent of Taiwanese babies in 2023. Hsinchu County, where the company is based, has more children per 100 working-age adults than any other region. It has created an environment in which children are highly visible, with wraparound childcare on site and a pre-school on each of its campuses.

>Similarly LOTTE, the South Korean retail empire, has an internal birth rate which is more than double the national one, at 2.05 babies born per woman compared to 0.8. The company, which employs around 60,000 people, has strong parental leave policies. For example, it is compulsory for fathers to take at least one month of paternity leave on full pay. In recognition of its efforts, the company has been commended by South Korea’s Population Strategy Committee.

>The pattern can be transposed. In Nagi, a Japanese mountain town, population decline became an existential issue in 2002, when the dwindling number of residents created pressure to merge with other prefectures. The mayor instead worked hard to offer financial incentives including baby bonuses, generous daycare and free healthcare for children. Residents take a whole-community approach, with pensioners stepping in to help out, and children are seen as a positive. The result is that while half of Japanese families have only one child, in Nagi, 47 per cent of households have three or more. 

Welcome to the October edition! If you’re new here, read below for an introduction. If you’re old, it’s good to see you!

Here’s the place to share whatever you’re currently reading and anything notable that you’ve read recently. Whether it’s for class, work, or pleasure, it doesn’t matter. Books, articles, stories, poems, are all fair game! Anything that doesn’t have its own dedicated post already. 

Here is your chance to nerd out in friendly company. We hope you’ll find some good recommendations here.

Like many other Russian war crimes, this was clearly caught on camera.

>Drone footage allegedly shows Russian troops using civilians, including children and elderly people, as human shields to flee via a gas pipeline in northeastern Kharkiv Oblast amid the Ukrainian push in the Kupiansk sector, Khartiia Corps said on Sept. 29.

>Children, elderly people, and a person on crutches walked alongside draft-age men who were likely Russian soldiers wearing civilian clothes, according to Khartiia Corps' drone footage. The group was allegedly led from Kupiansk to the Ostrogozhsk-Shebelinka Gas Pipeline through the contested village of Holubivka near Kupiansk, the unit added.

>Khartiia Corps said the group of civilians would have to walk more than 10 kilometers (about six miles) through the pipeline before exiting into a forest, where they would likely be transported to Russian-occupied territory.

>The Kyiv Independent could not independently verify the claim.

>"The occupiers use this gas pipeline to secretly smuggle their assault troops into (Kupiansk)," Khartiia Corps, part of the National Guard, said in its statement on Facebook.

>"Now they are using that same pipeline to abduct civilians."

>Khartiia Corps said Ukrainian forces did not launch an attack because doing so would have put civilians at risk.

>Throughout the full-scale war, the Russian military has regularly breached international warfare conventions, especially through its indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas and the alleged abduction of civilians from occupied territories.

>The Russian military has previously been accused of using civilians as "human shields" in hot spots of the war. In November 2025, the Donetsk Oblast Prosecutors' Office said a Russian commander ordered his soldiers who had entered Pokrovsk to use civilians as "human shields" via radio communications.

>There are "several layers" to the Russian tactic, including using civilians as cover while moving through open areas without drone protection, abducting children and elderly people, and potentially using the tactic for propaganda purposes, according to a senior officer at the Corps' headquarters. Khartiia Corps said in its statement that Russian troops were filming the group as it walked.

>The source said that while the illegal tactic does not affect the broader picture of the Ukrainian defense in the area, "the overall effect of using pipelines for logistics and human travel is big."

>"Russia has been effectively using pipelines in Avdiivka, Sumy, and now in Kupiansk," the source told the Kyiv Independent.

>"This literally allows them to teleport close to the front lines)."

>Using civilians as cover in combat zones is a serious violation of international humanitarian law (IHL), while the forcible transfer of civilians is also prohibited under the Geneva Conventions. The laws of war also require combatants to distinguish themselves from the civilian population.

>Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha reacted to the video released by Khartiia Corps, calling for what he described as "grave violations of international humanitarian law" to be properly documented and investigated and for those responsible to be held accountable.

>"Russia is once again using Ukrainian civilians as instruments of war," Sybiha said in an X post on Sept. 28.

>"Civilians cannot be used as instruments of war or forcibly transferred."

>For Americans perpetually enraged about Israel, the ordeal of Mahmoud Khalil has become an obsession. On March 8, 2025, this Columbia graduate and Palestinian activist was snatched from his home by federal agents and whisked off to a series of detention centers. Since then he has fought his deportation tooth and nail. Khalil’s lawyers are asking the Supreme Court to reverse the deportation order from last year on constitutional grounds.

>Khalil first gained notoriety in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, massacre. In the campus turmoil that followed, he emerged as a spokesman—one of the few who was unmasked—for students at Columbia using the occasion of the Hamas-led slaughter to demand the university cut ties with and divest from the state Hamas attacked, Israel.

>Today, he has emerged as a secular saint for New York’s progressive literati. His legal battle to remain in the United States is being fought by a team of more than 20 lawyers representing the Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, and other progressive groups. New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, hosted Khalil for a Ramadan dinner in March, paying tribute to his “profound courage.” The New Yorker compared the appearance of his 6-month-old-son, Deen, to “a Rubens portrait of the infant Jesus, if the Flemish had been more realistic about a Nazarene’s complexion.” This month he spoke at a Yom Kippur rally with anti-Zionist Jews in Brooklyn at a podium draped in a sign reading, “For the sin of genocide, we atone.”

>Khalil’s journey from Syria to Lebanon to Columbia and through the federal government’s immigration and deportation system is the grist for his new memoir published this week, No Land to Stand On. As one might expect, the blurbs include high praise from the anti-Zionist left. Peter Beinart calls it “a defining document of our age.” Beinart is correct but for different reasons than he imagines.

>Khalil’s memoir is a case study in what the British writer Julie Burchill has called the age of the “crybully,” when the aggressor plays the vanquished. He asks the reader to sympathize with angry campus mobs that singled out Zionists and sided with terrorists. And at the same time the memoir also tells the tale of a crybully turned into a genuine victim. After his rabble-rousing on campus, Khalil was taken from his pregnant wife and plunged into a maze of detention centers and immigration hearings.

>All of that said, Khalil’s central claims about the movement he helped lead are hard to credit. He claims that the pro-Palestinian activists who were allowed to disrupt campus life were the real victims. The Zionist students on the other hand were crying wolf. “When this subset of pro-­Israel students said they felt unsafe, the university issued statements within hours, convened task forces, hired consultants, and reorganized its disciplinary apparatus,” he writes. “When Palestinian students said they felt unsafe, the university paid only lip service to our fears. Both made claims of safety. Only one claim moved the institution.” It’s not surprising that Khalil has joined other alumni and students in a lawsuit against Columbia for endangering students who tried to shut down its campus.

>There was an academic intifada in the months that led up to the encampments and building takeovers for Gaza. And Columbia’s administrators allowed this uprising to fester through most of the 2023-2024 academic year. It was not until April 2024, when masked students and outside agitators with zip ties and duct tape stormed Hamilton Hall and trapped a janitor in the building, that Columbia called in the New York police to clear the building and the quads.

>Throughout this period, Jewish students endured slurs, threats, and harassment. The university convened a special task force on antisemitism at Columbia which documented the environment. “Students have reported having necklaces ripped off their necks and being pinned against walls,” the report said. In dormitories, students found jokes about Hitler on communal whiteboards. Campus extracurricular clubs enacted new policies banning any Zionists. Popular slogans at the encampments included: “Al-Qassam, you make us proud, kill another soldier now”; “Yes, Hamas, we love you, we support your rockets too”; and “We say justice, you say how, burn Tel Aviv to the ground.” This side of the movement at Columbia was captured in the social media posts of undergraduate Khymani James, who said, “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” He initially apologized for his words but then revoked his apology.

>It’s true that some pro-Israel students had filmed the encampments and demonstrations. There was at one point a truck that drove by the campus displaying the names and photos of Columbia students that had joined the anti-Israel demonstrations. But the Zionists were severely outnumbered at Columbia. Many faculty were openly supporting the other side of the should-Israel-exist debate. Indeed, the task force report details how some professors would single out Columbia’s Jewish benefactors for giving the school “blood money,” or would teach the Israel-Palestine conflict as a binary contest between oppressor and oppressed.

>Khalil, though, would have his readers believe that this movement, which banned students who believed Israel had a right to exist, was a model community of tolerance and freedom. “Students who arrived often knowing little about Palestine sat in reading circles and learned,” he writes. “The movement built mutual aid networks for families in Gaza through bake sales, art sales, and fundraisers held in church basements and student housing.”

>Khalil’s memoir oozes with chutzpah, a combination of nerve and intended offense. Here is how he describes the first messages from the administration following October 7, 2023: “The emails began immediately. An unceasing cascade of communications from then-­president Minouche Shafik and the deans of every school. Most expressed grief on behalf of Israeli victims, condemned Hamas in unambiguous terms, named the dead only if they were Israeli, shallowly evoked the trauma of Jewish students, and pledged the university’s commitment to Jewish students’ safety.”

>Khalil is admitting he is offended that the president of his university “evoked the trauma of Jewish students” after 1,200 Jews were slaughtered by Palestinian terrorists.

>Khalil was also mortified that Keren Yarhi-Milo, the dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, issued a message to students that claimed the phrase “from the river to the sea” is a call for Jews living in Israel to be eliminated. “This was not the dean offering one possible interpretation,” Khalil writes. “This appeared as the dean asserting, as fact, a dishonest reading of a Palestinian slogan, one that scholars of the region have broadly rejected.”

>Khalil claims that the slogan is “a call for freedom, justice, and equality for every person living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.” And in English-speaking demonstrations, the full sentence may suggest that, because the following phrase is “Palestine will be free.” The Arabic version of the slogan, though, is quite different. In that one, the last words translate to “Palestine will be Arab,” exactly what Yarhi-Milo interpreted it to mean.

>Khalil’s problem is that he was the face of and negotiator for a nonviolent movement in support of hyper-violent fanatics. Remember that the disruptions on campus followed October 7, the worst mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust. Families were burned alive in their safe rooms. Women were violated and mutilated at a peace concert. And the raiders kept more than 200 people prisoner after the slaughter.

>Khalil never acknowledges the sheer barbarity of October 7 or, for that matter, of the other campaigns of so-called Palestinian resistance. Instead he bemoans that many outside journalists framed his movement as antisemitic. “The conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism was a strategy to stifle righteous criticism of Israel,” he writes. “Such weaponization of antisemitism was designed to place a state and its crimes beyond criticism by wrapping them in the protections owed to a faith and its people.”

>Khalil’s formulation in practice, though, posits a distinction without a difference. The anti-Zionism of the movement led the students to blame the Jewish victims of October 7 for the barbarity of Hamas. Whether motivated by enmity for Jews or the Jewish state, the result was a celebration of Jewish bloodshed. Both of Khalil’s organizations—Dar and the Palestine Working Group—signed onto a statement two days after the atrocities that said, “The weight of responsibility for the war and casualties undeniably lies with the Israeli extremist government and other Western governments, including the U.S. government, which fund and staunchly support Israeli aggression, apartheid, and settler-colonization.”

>When he was asked whether he supported Hamas, on New York Times columnist Ezra Klein’s podcast last year, Khalil bobbed and weaved. “If I condemn Hamas, then I am a Palestinian worthy of listening to. If I don’t, then I’m not,” he said. “And this is what gets Palestinians angry with this line of questioning. Because as I said, Palestinians are the ones now being starved and genocided. Because even if Hamas does not exist tomorrow, the Israeli occupation and supremacy would continue against the Palestinians. So it’s not about Hamas.”

>Khalil’s umbrage is a smoke screen. The reason Palestinian activists are asked about Hamas is because Hamas bears responsibility for the misery that followed the war it started. It fired rockets and missiles from mosques and schools and hid beneath and between the civilians the group was supposed to defend. Anyone who would justify the acts of these sadists should be pushed outside the margins of respectable discourse.

>Given all of that, one might expect that I would favor Khalil’s eventual deportation. But I cannot, for reasons that have nothing to do with his low character and foolish activism. Rather, Khalil should not be deported because the Donald Trump administration’s reasons for deporting him would set a dreadful precedent.

>The main justification, as put forth in a March 7, 2025, memorandum from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is that Khalil’s presence and activities in America undermine U.S. foreign policy and specifically the government’s policy to combat antisemitism. This derives from the rarely-used Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, a piece of Joseph McCarthy-era legislation that many scholars believe is unconstitutional.

>“With regards to the law, it’s extremely clear that noncitizens in the U.S. legally have First Amendment rights,” Greg Lukianoff, the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told me. “Even in the unlikely case the Supreme Court found the law facially constitutional, it would still find this use of it for people on student visas to violate the spirit of the original law.”

>In other words, the Trump administration effectively seeks to deport Khalil for a speech crime. As offensive, deceptive, and slippery as Khalil’s speech is, foreign students studying in America enjoy the same First Amendment rights as American citizens. This is how it has been for most of U.S. history. If the secretary of state can now pick and choose what foreign students to deport based on their speech, then what is to stop a Democratic administration from targeting foreign students protesting gender ideology?

>Later in the process, the U.S. government added the post hoc charge that Khalil failed to mention his internship with the United Nations and his membership in the Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition. These are more serious infractions, but they also appear pretextual in light of the initial justification for his deportation.

>Regardless, Khalil was treated as a criminal. He was never in physical danger, but the monotony of his life in detention was grueling. “Some mornings, I would wake up and lie in bed for hours before I could convince myself to move,” he writes. “What was the point? The day would be the same as yesterday. The same as tomorrow. The clock would tick. The meals would come. The names would be called. And I would still be here, waiting for something that might never arrive.”

>Detaining and deporting Khalil will not make a dent against the monoculture at Columbia. The university had already been captured by an ideology that inverts morality and basic decency when it comes to the Jewish state. The rot can be traced back more than a half-century, to the rise of Columbia’s own Professor Edward Said and his work to enlist the academic study of history and literature into a campaign to replace the State of Israel with Palestine.

>Revoking Khalil’s green card because his speech displeased Marco Rubio does nothing to address that problem. Instead, it makes America less free and turns a scoundrel into a martyr.

>In late August, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Masar Badil, an international revolutionary-minded Palestinian support organization, as a cover for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. The action followed the 2024 U.S. and Canadian designations of the closely aligned Samidoun network—which presented itself as a “Palestinian prisoner solidarity” organization—as a PFLP front. These acts were meant to strike a blow against the alleged terror-linked organizations.

>Yet recent events show how little the sanctions have disrupted the network on the ground. Last week, news broke that one of Masar Badil’s youth affiliates secured a generous plea deal following a campus occupation at the University of Washington that resulted in more than $1 million in damage. In November, Masar Badil is set to host a conference in Toronto titled “3 Years of Al-Aqsa Flood”—Hamas’s name for the October 7 massacre—despite the U.S. sanctions.

>Though the sanctions struck at the organizations’ formal structures and leadership, they have done little to blunt their influence. Across North America, a growing number of affiliate groups increasingly cast themselves as Samidoun’s successors, adopting a politics of “strategic risk” and “intentional sacrifice in pursuit of the liberatory struggle,” and normalizing “revolutionary violence.” More decisive action is needed to curb this growing threat.

>The Masar Badil network is extensive. One prominent affiliate, Al-Ahrar, operates as a prisoner-support organization in the mold of the now-sanctioned Samidoun. The organization’s purported mission is a euphemistic sleight of hand that ignores the fact that the prisoners in question are often terrorists and militants. The term “prisoners” also plays on the sympathies of many Western leftists, who have been conditioned to view such captives primarily as victims rather than as perpetrators of violence. Al-Ahrar identifies itself as part of Masar Badil and maintains chapters in Toronto, New York, and New Jersey. The group claims that it “emerged in January 2025 from the ashes of imperialist repression” following the designation of Samidoun in January 2025 and that it “fill[s] the gap“ left by Samidoun’s inability to continue operating as a public-facing organization.

>Other affiliates operate within the Tariq El-Tahrir Youth and Student Network, Masar Badil’s youth wing. These include groups like Alkarama, SUPER UW at the University of Washington, and Nidal. Together, these organizations have helped extend Masar Badil’s influence across North America despite repeated sanctions.

>Even this accounting likely understates the network’s reach. While the 2024 designation of Samidoun made many organizations reluctant to associate with it publicly, its influence did not disappear. Beyond its formal organizations lies a broader ecosystem of activists and advocacy groups across the West that, while not formally tied to Masar Badil or Samidoun, often look to their affiliates for guidance and political leadership.

>Just days before Masar Badil’s designation, the Workshops 4 Gaza collective hosted “One Day We Will All Be Terr*rists: On Designations, Counterinsurgency & the Path of Resistance,” providing a glimpse into how this network operates. During the event, representatives of Al-Ahrar Toronto argued at length that terrorist designations are intended to “criminalize resistance movements.”

>Al-Ahrar Toronto’s two presenters, Cat and Amira, hid their faces behind keffiyehs, but they were open books about their ideology and goals. Their core thesis was that the concept of “terrorism” should be rejected entirely because the term functions as a counterinsurgency tool. By labeling a group as connected to terrorism, they argued, governments isolate revolutionary movements from potential allies and pressure activists to moderate their politics.

>According to the presenters, Al-Ahrar is guided by the Palestinian “resistance leadership, not by Western legality.” Criminalization would not stop their work, they said. The first step for organizers, according to the presenters, is to provide unconditional political support to people and organizations facing “terror counterinsurgency” regardless of the allegations, convictions, or tactics involved. Organizers were even warned against distancing themselves from groups like Antifa or Atlanta’s Stop Cop City protesters—whose antics resulted in one activist’s death—in an effort to protect themselves or appear respectable.

>Unsurprisingly, the speakers also defended a “diversity of tactics” when it comes to attaining their goals. They played a video of a Stop Cop City activist refusing to condemn the destruction of property and arguing that Atlanta deserved worse, and that protesters should use “every means necessary.” Al-Ahrar’s organizers presented the video as a textbook example of rejecting the idea that activists need to condemn more controversial tactics.

>The Al-Ahrar workshop ended with a call for activists to embrace “strategic risk and intentional sacrifice.” The presenters argued that a “total rejection of risk” would reduce radical organizing to “state-sanctioned activism that doesn’t actually challenge or threaten the imperialist machine.” Instead, activists were encouraged to “nurture the spirit of sacrificing our comfort for the collective liberation.”

>The Q&A reinforced the point. One participant asked about publicly associating with Samidoun and even Al-Ahrar despite the terrorism designation. The presenters’ response was to “challenge the idea of safety” and refuse to abandon their comrades “that explore the more higher risk.”

>As the emergence of Al-Ahrar demonstrates, the PFLP-aligned movement is alive and well and extending its influence. During the workshop, Al-Ahrar also promoted the upcoming Masar Badil conference, which will serve as an opportunity for the network to plan, refine its strategy, and determine “the road ahead” for the Palestinian movement.

>Conventionally, sanctions dry up funding pipelines to smaller and lesser-known groups, allowing them to wither away. Yet today, many offshoots continue to receive support and remain active. Others conceal their affiliation with the broader network, as discussed during the workshop’s Q&A. Super UW’s recent plea deal suggests that the full extent of these affiliations and networks remains poorly understood, at least at the local level.

>A broader domestic investigation into the Masar Badil/PFLP-linked network is warranted. This is especially so given its links to organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America. Michelle Munjanattu, the partner of longtime DSA leader David Duhalde, is a member of Samidoun, while Charlotte Kates, a Samidoun international coordinator, has participated in DSA events. Kates also serves as the coordinator of the far-left U.S. National Lawyers Guild’s International Committee—another case where the Masar Badil network’s reach extends beyond Palestinian activism and into broader political and legal spheres.

>Masar Badil and the broader PFLP-linked network continue to exercise surprising influence. To counter it more effectively, the federal government should look beyond sanctions and focus on dismantling the support structures, affiliated organizations, and personnel that allow these groups to persist despite repeated enforcement actions. Failing to do so risks further radicalization and the continued spread of semiautonomous groups operating under their banner.

>Rob Weisskirch’s office at California State University, Monterey Bay, where he is chairman of the Department of Human Development and Family Science, has been decorated with union memorabilia ever since he began paying dues to the California Faculty Association (CFA) in 2001. He even went on strike in solidarity with Monterey Bay’s unionized faculty in 2024.

>That all changed earlier this month. On September 11, Weisskirch resigned from the CFA and cleared out every union hat, button, sign, and award from his office, including his “2019 Unionist of the Year” trophy. He couldn’t stand to look at them anymore.

>How Weisskirch reached this point is a story of persistent, entrenched antisemitism within the faculty ranks at colleges and universities—and a union’s apparent refusal to afford Jewish members the kind of representation granted to other groups.

>

>Rob Weisskirch removing his “Unionist of the Year Award“ from his shelf after resigning from the California Faculty Association. (Jacon Henry for The Free Press)

>The CFA says it represents 29,000 professors, lecturers, librarians, counselors, and coaches at the 22 campuses in the California State University (CSU) system. What those union members teach and say matters because CSU has more than 470,000 students and awards more than 123,000 degrees every year.

>While the number of reported antisemitic incidents on campuses appears to have fallen from its peak during the 2024–2025 school year, some Jewish faculty members in the CSU system like Weisskirch say their efforts to confront the surge that began after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, have been met with resistance and outright hostility.

>On September 10, the union’s Council for Racial and Social Justice (CRSJ) was supposed to vote on the creation of a mission statement for a new Jewish Caucus, led by Weisskirch and eight other colleagues. It was part of an agenda that included routine matters such as contracts and board membership, and the meeting was scheduled to last just half an hour.

>The CRSJ already had several caucuses focused on specific groups, including Asian American, African American, and female members. A Palestine, Arab, and Muslim Caucus formed around October 2023. According to the union, the CRSJ is “committed to dismantling oppression” that is based on religion, nationality, or nearly 20 other forms of identification listed on its website.

>The Jewish Caucus’s proposed mission statement laid out 12 goals, centered on fighting “antisemitism, white supremacy, and systemic racism and discrimination” in the CSU system, the union, “within our communities, and within the State of California.” It also proposed educating CFA members about Jewish history and antisemitic tropes, building coalitions with other union caucuses, and holding the CFA accountable “to take seriously” and “act when concerns about antisemitism are raised.”

>The mission statement defined antisemitism as “prejudice, hostility, and/or discrimination toward Jews as a racial, religious, and/or ethnic group.” The word Israel was mentioned only once, in a reference to members of the proposed Jewish Caucus engaging in “collaboration with colleagues from Israel.”

>Weisskirch told me he wasn’t all that optimistic about the vote, since two previous presentations of the proposed mission statement to the CRSJ resulted in objections from some members who opposed identifying Israel as the Jewish homeland. Nevertheless, Weisskirch and other Jewish Caucus organizers incorporated some of the feedback.

>The Zoom meeting included over 60 participants and began in typical fashion: with a land acknowledgement and a breathing exercise. Then Earl Aguilera, an associate professor in the teacher education department at CSU East Bay in Hayward, read the union’s “interruption guidelines,” according to a transcript of the meeting reviewed by The Free Press.

>“When we experience examples of racial narratives, racism, or white supremacy in our meetings, we can interrupt the meeting and draw the issue to one another’s attention,” Aguilera told the assembled union members. He added that “white supremacy and racism operate in tandem with interlocking systems of oppression, colonialism, racial capitalism, class, cis-heteropatriarchy, ableism, and neuroableism.” That meant members were free to interrupt one another during the meeting if they felt someone had crossed one of those lines.

>None of the other items on the agenda were discussed. First, the CRSJ’s associate vice president, sociology lecturer Christopher Cox of San José State University, brought up the planned vote on the Jewish Caucus, according to the transcript. Then, Teresa Velasquez, interim chair of ethnic studies at California State University, San Bernardino, and a member of the union’s Palestine, Arab, and Muslim Caucus, invoked the interruption guidelines and said there should be no vote at all.

>Even allowing the proposal to get this far showed that some members had “made themselves complicit with racism” against Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim communities, Velasquez claimed, adding that the Jewish Caucus’s central goal would be “to legitimize and promote racism, settler colonialism, and ongoing genocide against Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim communities,” the transcript said.

>Velasquez also objected to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, even though it wasn’t referred to in the proposed mission statement. Velasquez argued that “Zionist groups have used” the IHRA’s definition “to cover up the Israeli genocide and to force academic and other public institutions to adopt it.”

>An ethnic studies professor chimed in to say that he “would love a Jewish caucus, but I do not want a Zionist caucus,” according to the transcript. Another meeting participant said that “we have better things to do than to entertain what we need to do to basically cover up for people who pretend to be attacked like the Promise Keepers,” apparently a reference to the evangelical Christian men’s group that opposes same-sex marriage and says men should be the head of their households. And yet another person at the meeting called the proposal a “Zionist, right-wing, settler-colonialist project.”

>Participants often called each other “comrade” and sometimes “habibi,” an Arabic word that means “my love.” When one union member suggested delaying the vote, another responded: “We’re dealing with genocide, and we’re dealing with people who are advocating genocide, who are trying to make it okay. . . . So you cannot just do this.”

>In a Zoom message to the full group, Omar Zahzah, an assistant professor of Arab, Muslim, ethnicities, and diaspora studies in San Francisco State University’s (SFSU) Department of Race and Resistance Studies, wrote that the mission statement suggested collaboration with Israel, which must be boycotted because it is a “genocidal apartheid state.” (He also is the author of Terms of Servitude, which its publisher describes as a book about how American technology companies “support the Israeli settler-colonial project.”) During the meeting, Mark Allan Davis, an associate professor of Africana studies at SFSU, wrote in his own Zoom message: “Are we going to be considered ANTI Semitic? You bet.”

>Instead of lasting the scheduled 30 minutes, the meeting continued for nearly 90. It adjourned with no vote taken on the proposal. Instead, the CRSJ decided that the proposed mission statement “does not meet the criteria set forward by CRSJ.”

>

>The Free Press sought comment from each meeting participant who criticized the proposed statement and is identified by name in this article. None of them responded. After The Free Press sought comment from the CFA, the union told members in an email that a transcript of the meeting and its Zoom messages had been leaked. “We understand that this breach invokes fear and concern, for faculty, and especially faculty of color, who face unique barriers to keeping employment and advancing in the tenure process,” the email said.

>What happened on September 10 was a bitter defeat for Weisskirch and the other colleagues who had spent nearly two years trying to respond to antisemitism in the CSU system. In April 2024, pro-Palestinian protesters occupied two buildings at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, for more than a week, leading to a campus-wide shutdown, dozens of arrests, and a federal investigation into alleged campus antisemitism.

>Monterey Bay cinematic arts and technology professor Enid Baxter Ryce told me that she decided to leave the CFA last year after a student intern event commemorated October 7. She wasn’t surprised at all by the hostility shown toward the creation of the Jewish Caucus.

>“What you’re talking about is the ideological capture of a union that represents professors who teach K-12 teachers, child psychologists, social workers, and people who interact with children,” Baxter Ryce said.

>Weisskirch told me that the Jewish Caucus’s organizers have never been told exactly what the criteria are for approval of the mission statement.

>“I think they’re really the worst kind of antisemites because they will say out of one side of their mouths that ‘We condemn antisemitism,’ but on the other side, they just stand silent for any kind of action,” he said. “It’s academic antisemitism, in that it’s all very cerebral. It’s couched in this intellectual movement. And it’s couched in social justice in a way that appeals to our students.”

>Weisskirch said about Jewish faculty, “We are in support of social justice. We’re in the fight, but we can’t do it with CFA.”

This title made me leery, but I implore you to read the whole thing if you have the time. It's one of the most thoughtful articles about Israel I've read recently, and seems fairly balanced. There were no inaccuracies that leapt out at me (of course, if I missed any, shame me!) Wood goes out of his way to interview figures across the ideological spectrum in an effort to take the temperature of Israel today. Can Israel strike a balance between its secular and its religious side, or will internecine fighting only worsen?

>On October 13 of last year, Hamas released its last living Israeli hostages—20 Jews in various states of disrepair. And Israel, along with a remarkably small fraction of the rest of the world, allowed itself a brief moment to celebrate. Among the Israelis paid to contain his relief was Zohar Palti, who served as Mossad’s head of intelligence from 2011 to 2016. He joined me for dinner in a northern suburb of Tel Aviv two days later. Looking on the bright side, he told me, was “a waste of time” for someone whose job was to think about all that could go catastrophically wrong. Palti said he was happy to see the hostages freed, but Israel’s future would probably look like its past. And that meant more war. “My dad is 92 years old,” he said. “He fought in Gaza in ’56, in ’67, and in ’73. I myself was there in the ’90s, in 2000, and in 2010. My son is there right now.” Then he smiled. “Trust me: My grandson will be there as well.”

>“I know what you are thinking: typical cynical Israeli,” he said, but added that he was not a pessimist; he was reasonably sure that Israel would be able to manage, if not solve, its conflict with the Palestinians. He was also confident about his country’s preparation to handle Iran, whose government has committed itself to Israel’s physical elimination. “If you speak with the generals, the security people who invest their lives in this issue: What is the essential threat to Israel? No one will say, Something from the outside.”

>They do not fret about Iran or Gaza or Syria, he said. The real problems lie within—negotiating the divide between the secular and the religious; incorporating into the state the one-fifth of the Israeli population that is non-Jewish and Arab; and figuring out how Israel will govern itself. Dismantling Hamas, Palti said, is a leisurely errand by comparison.

>“We know how to control all the bad guys,” Palti said. “Forget about terror. Forget about ballistic missiles.” The real issues are domestic. “Think whether we will know how to live with each other.”

>The dominant view outside Israel is that the country’s problems are just the opposite: The issues that matter include the hard rain of Iranian missiles, and the tattered umbrella of interceptors that provides shelter; the failure to destroy Hamas; and, finally, Israel’s pariah status. Israeli officials have estimated roughly 70,000 deaths in the Gaza war that followed the October 7, 2023, attack. (That figure includes Hamas fighters as well as civilians.) The magnitude of the carnage has shredded Israel’s reputation. In the United States, progressives aiming to take over the Democratic Party have made Israel’s alleged genocide their singular foreign-policy issue. The Gaza war has roiled British and European politics as well.

>Historically, Israel has depended on the good graces of larger and richer powers. Without the help of the Soviet bloc, it might have failed to achieve independence. Without weapons from France and money from Germany in the 1950s, it would have faced military defeat and insolvency. And since 1967, it has relied on the United States as a patron, friend, and armorer. A friendless Israel would be a dead Israel.

>When I first visited the country, nearly a quarter century ago, during the Second Intifada, these sensitivities were heightened, and world opinion was a source of concern and even dread. That is less true today. Although Israelis discuss the effects of international arrest warrants and bans on arms sales, these issues do not dominate public debate. In some circles, the cost of cottage cheese is more pressing. The reason for this blitheness toward international public opinion is simple: Israel has become its own armorer, indeed an exporter of arms, and is far richer than it was just 20 years ago. Moral disapproval of its conduct during the war in Gaza is easy to ignore, when so many of those disapproving had excused the October 7 attack. Meanwhile, the price of cottage cheese (and most everything else) is going up, though the economy is growing quickly.

>It is just like Israel to have worked out survival in a region where almost every other country has, at some point, tried to annihilate it—but neglected something as predictably bedeviling as how to manage demographic shifts and the challenges of coexisting in a diverse society. That society includes Tel Aviv tech bros, half a million settlers living in the West Bank (which is to say, outside the territory that Israel claims as its own sovereign land), 1.7 million Arab citizens, and hundreds of thousands of ultra-Orthodox men whose main activity is medieval study.

>Polite disagreement about the role of religion in particular ceased to be polite after Benjamin Netanyahu’s election as prime minister in 2022. Netanyahu invited religious, right-wing politicians into his coalition, and many Israelis came to the conclusion that he had sold out to fanatics who would replace democracy with theocratic rule. Netanyahu’s supporters took the opposite view, that the prime minister was finally empowering a religious base hitherto ignored by disdainful secular elites. Forcing those elites to watch their enemies govern was not the end of democracy. It was democracy.

>By the summer of 2023, the fight had become so acrimonious that many doubted that Israel was one coherent country capable of resolving its differences through voting. “The wheels were coming off,” Eylon Levy, who served as a foreign-media adviser for the government that year, told me. “We were in a death spiral of political argument.” Only a swift kick in the face from Hamas or Iran managed to distract Israelis from their own internal hatreds.

>Today, Israel is no closer to working out any of the big questions about its identity and destiny. On October 27, Israelis will vote again, in an election likely to postpone the reckoning further.

>One indication that this election will fail to deliver a new, uniting vision for Israel is that it has failed to deliver even one new individual to the political scene. The major candidates are all products of the 1990s, a period that most Israelis are too young to remember. Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister started 30 years ago, when he was 46; his leading challenger this year, the 66-year-old Gadi Eisenkot, was a military adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Barak from 1999 to 2001. Naftali Bennett, a relative spring chicken at 54, is also associated with this older generation: He was Netanyahu’s chief of staff from 2006 to 2008. Yair Lapid is a former prime minister who also belongs to the older generation.

>An Israeli political observer with strong connections to establishment figures in both pro- and anti-Netanyahu camps said he regretted how few fresh ideas and new candidates have arisen in this election cycle. “They have all been in the game for a very, very long time,” he told me. (He requested anonymity, to preserve comity with those connections.) “What we hear is the same pre–October 7 conversation,” in which every major politician defines himself by whether he is anti-Netanyahu, pro-Netanyahu, or, well, Netanyahu. The result, he said, is a conspicuous lack of a “positive alternative vision for the country.” The election that is likely to determine Israel’s future is therefore not this one but the next one, which Netanyahu would have to be a gerontological marvel to contest.

>Netanyahu (whose father, Benzion, lived to be 102) might still survive politically to lead another right-wing government. He is extremely good at not losing elections, sometimes by duct-taping together factions that are not his natural allies but are happy to use his political skills to their advantage. Right now, those factions are all to his right, and he is the left-most figure in his own government. Even if he loses this election, he will have defined its terms, as he has every election since his second turn in office, in 2009. The political observer described him to me as “the pole in the political tent”—the figure whose presence keeps the whole Israeli political circus going in its current form.

>His domination of politics has coincided with a general shift toward the right. In this election, Netanyahu’s plausible rivals differ from him less in policy than in cynicism and governing style. All of them are center or center-right and agree with a version of Netanyahu’s peace-through-strength doctrine—a focus on making Israel strong and independent enough that reconciliation with its enemies is optional. “One might have thought October 7 would have caused a substantive debate about Israel’s broadest strategy,” Dov Waxman, an expert on Israeli politics at UCLA, told me. But the election won’t be about the future of Israel, let alone its relations with its external enemies. “It’s about which parties are willing to work with which.”

>Bennett, the former prime minister, has an outside chance of returning to office with an anti-Netanyahu coalition. But the most likely successor is Eisenkot, a former chief of the Israel Defense Forces and the latest in a long line of generals who have entered politics, usually with underwhelming results. Eisenkot served in a post–October 7 unity government headed by Netanyahu but has opposed the prime minister on a range of issues, such as Israel’s lack of postwar plans and the relative urgency of rescuing hostages versus defeating Hamas. These are differences of means rather than ends. Eisenkot’s biography provides some political leeway that others do not have. His son Gal was killed while serving in Gaza in December 2023. As a general after the 2006 Lebanon War, Eisenkot formulated what has become known as the “Dahiya doctrine”: When the enemy thoroughly embeds itself in villages or neighborhoods, Israel classifies those places as military targets, and attacks them with disproportionate force. Being associated with the plan, or promise, to obliterate what would otherwise be regarded as civilian areas does much to inoculate Eisenkot against the usual accusation from the right that its opponents are soft on national security.

>The result is an election where remarkably little is at stake. Netanyahu, Bennett, and Eisenkot are all running on “security” platforms and view Hamas and Iran as their top priority. The first two candidates wish to thwart Palestinian statehood in general, but even Eisenkot has said that, after October 7, restarting the peace process and providing a path to statehood is “delusional.” In the West Bank, Jewish settlers have harassed and attacked Palestinians to pressure them to give up land where they live and graze animals. Netanyahu’s government has overseen the expansion of this reprehensible activity. The contrast with Bennett is again mild: He supports settlements and wishes to restrain only the most aggressive settlers. Eisenkot, the furthest left among the candidates who have a real shot at becoming prime minister, considers many of the settlers a diplomatic embarrassment or impediment to peace, but he has only a vague plan to stop them.

>Of the major issues in the election—recriminations over the government’s failures on October 7, how best to continue the Gaza war, the rising cost of living, and whether ultra-Orthodox Jewish citizens must serve in the military—only the last touches on the deepest rifts in Israeli society. The debate seems to be mostly about which hawk will fly point. Palestinians, including Arab citizens of Israel, are understandably dismayed by this short menu of politicians who differ only on how quickly and by what means they will be alienated from land they consider their own. The Israeli left is by now so far outside the country’s mainstream that its chief party, the Democrats, can hope to win no more than 10 or 11 seats, and its leader, Yair Golan, is more likely to win the Israeli lottery than serve as prime minister.

>So Israel, plagued by factionalism, in some sense consists of only one faction when it comes to the issues that the outside world identifies as the most difficult and urgent. What splits the country instead are the questions Zohar Palti listed: religiosity, ethnicity, and political philosophy. Most have been around for a long time.

>The State of Israel was born 78 years ago. The Book of Psalms allots men 70 years, 80 for those hungry for an extra helping of labor and sorrow. Even secular Israelis often invoke the turmoil and self-destruction of the Jews during the days of the First and Second Temples, when decades of internal strife corroded the state and made their ancestors ripe targets for the Babylonians and Romans. The sense of an impending round of internecine squabbling, with potentially disastrous results, is universal.

>Doomsaying about outside threats is a chronic national neurosis, natural to a state that was nearly strangled at birth and that has survived regular attempts on its life. In Israel’s early days, however, certain internal arrangements seemed settled. The first big waves of Jewish immigrants to Palestine came from Europe, and they brought with them ideas and political knowledge that were current in the countries they were fleeing. After the First World War, Jews began arriving in Palestine in large numbers, especially after America and other sites of refuge from anti-Semitism closed their doors to them. The Holocaust provided a final surge of Jewish immigration. A pragmatic spirit animated the Jewish state from its declaration in 1948, and in its victory over the combined Arab armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. The war and subsequent expulsions displaced about 750,000 Palestinians, few of whom returned to the homes they left behind.

>Survival is not an ideology, and few of these immigrants arrived with ideology in mind. But in the early years, the elites who led Israel infused the new project with their hopes and ideas about how to govern. Some followed a model heavily influenced by the nationalisms of 19th-century Europe. Others, who came to dominate the next generations of Israeli politics, brought European-style labor leftism, and saw Israel as a state for Jews just as Sweden was a state for Swedes and Poland was for Poles.

>David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister, expounded on the concept of the “new Jew,” a muscular and independent pioneer, whose identity was not defined by religion. The founding generation tended to be secular, educated, and leftist. This was no accident: If you were visibly Jewish and spoke only Yiddish, you were less likely to have survived when the Nazis showed up. The Holocaust was a great filter. When Israel was founded, these secular elites recognized that their more religious and insular brethren had been nearly annihilated, and they were happy to create a new habitat where the religious could survive as a pitied minority in a state ruled by secular Jews. Soon Arab countries expelled their Jewish populations, and a new wave of Jews arrived, this time without the deadly filter of 1940s Mitteleuropa. Baghdad, a city that was roughly one-third Jewish in the early 20th century, expelled virtually all of its Jews by the early ’50s. Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia forced the departure of theirs at a more relaxed pace. Collectively, these Jews are known as Mizrahim—literally, “eastern” Jews, as opposed to the European-descended Ashkenazim—and they, too, were welcomed, with the expectation that their numbers would not swamp the demography of the nascent state, or pry power from the country’s founding leaders.

>That was Israel in its early decades: a big, rowdy Jewish bus, which any Jew could board, but whose route and rules of carriage were dictated by secular, leftist Ashkenazim. Israel would be as Jewish as Belgium was Christian, and in many ways it would follow the path of postwar Europe—toward benevolent democratic socialism. The naivete of this expectation is startling in historical hindsight. Neither the Mizrahim nor many of the religious Ashkenazim felt attached to European traditions of modernity, liberalism, and nationalism. They were poorer than their secular Ashkenazi counterparts, and less educated. And they had more kids.

>The initial social pact lasted into the ’70s. Menachem Begin, the prime minister from 1977 to 1983, was the first prime minister to break with the elite consensus and present Israel as a country that was neither European nor Middle Eastern but a blend of both. He led a political realignment, spoke for the poorer and darker classes, and was bellicose. Europe had given up on wars, except of the cold variety, but Begin defied the liberal democratic consensus against firing guns except in self-defense. He oversaw the entry of Israel into the Lebanese civil war, and Israel’s long occupation of southern Lebanon, beginning in 1982.

>Israel’s religious shift has been subtle but unmistakable. In 1948, the ultra-Orthodox (the Haredim, or “those who tremble” before God), comprised a tiny fraction of the Israeli population. The Haredim followed what one modern Haredi rabbi and activist, Yehoshua Pfeffer, called a “Noah’s Ark model,” with the surviving members “riding the storm” so they could maintain a way of life and proliferate after the storm passed. They were fruitful beyond expectation. Within three decades, about one in 20 Jewish Israelis were Haredi. By 2024, they were  one in eight, and by mid-century, they could be one in three. The proliferation of this population would be inconsequential if it meant only that more Israelis observed Shabbat. The Haredim, however, insist that their contribution to Judaism is prayer and observance, and that civic demands placed on other Israelis are, at best, distractions. Some even consider the modern Israeli state a secular abomination. Their population is poor and lives largely off public assistance, and the men (instantly identifiable by their black suits, prodigious beards, and forelocks grown long) almost all take exceptions from military service. What the early secular elites assumed would remain a niche interest—lifelong religious study—has become the full-time occupation of an unsustainable number of Israeli citizens. Taxpaying, war-fighting Israelis express irritation at a community that reproduces at an astonishing rate, takes public money, and lives behind a shield that others die to uphold. But it is also awkward for anyone, even a fellow Jew, to describe a group of Jews as parasitic, especially a group of Jews that recently faced extermination by an enemy that spoke in those same terms.

>To the secular Israelis who have watched this shift, their religious fellow citizens who refuse to work and serve are only slightly more alarming than the religious Israelis who do work and serve. For much of Israel’s history, religious Zionists were content to live under the protection of the state, without insisting that they control the state. The shift away from that passivity is the most significant political change of the past 20 years. In 2005, the government of Ariel Sharon forced thousands of Israeli settlers, many of them religious Zionists, to leave Gaza. These uprooted settlers vowed not to trust the state again until they had senior positions in the military, the government, and other institutions of power. They have since stormed such former bastions of pragmatic atheism, while retaining their sense of fury over 2005. “There’s something in it that’s almost vengeful,” the Hebrew University political scientist Avishay Ben Sasson-Gordis told me. “It says to the left: You took what was most important to us. We will take what is most important to you.”

>Often, the observers of this trend invoke a useful demographic shorthand: the hat. Much can be inferred about Israeli culture just by looking at the prevalence of kippahs, the Jewish headgear whose style indicates the wearer’s sect: black felt for Haredim; knit for religious Zionists; none at all for secular. “When I was young, there were maybe five people in my battalion who were religious,” one retired military officer, himself a religious Jew, told me. “Now probably half the command staff wears the kippah.”

>The result is a country whose people are more religious, illiberal, and warlike than its founders had intended. The social shifts are clear. But Israel still needed an individual to translate that long-term shift into political reality. The mathematical historian Peter Turchin has noted that such shifts away from elite-led consensus rarely take place because the non-elites seize power directly. Instead, they find a defector from the old elite, who then uses popular discontent to rise to power and create a counter-elite. Begin was the first version of this, a European Jew who embodied the changes in the 1970s. The current version is the most consequential leader in Israel’s history, Benjamin Netanyahu.

>When I visited Israel in the summer of 2023, it seemed like all of Tel Aviv was decorated with anti-Bibi propaganda. Posters featured high-contrast imagery of Netanyahu, combined with denunciatory slogans and promises to throw the bastard out. Blue-state “resistance” rhetoric against Donald Trump reads like a dignified, sternly worded letter to the editor compared with the bilious invective of the anti-Netanyahu protest movement.

>Protests in Tel Aviv that summer attracted as many as 200,000 people at a time. The protesters, sincere and urgent in their anger, believed that Netanyahu was turning Israel into an illiberal state for his personal benefit and to advance a fascistic and theocratic agenda. Their loathing for Netanyahu multiplied because, they said, he knew what he was doing. Netanyahu is not religious. He is worldly, educated, and familiar with the blessings of liberalism—and despite these characteristics, the protesters said, he was transmogrifying Israel into a fanatical country. He was overseeing this change, they argued, because he wanted to stay in power, and he preferred to pilot the country into the ground rather than surrender the controls to someone else.

>The immediate cause of the protests was not religious in nature at all. Netanyahu’s government had finally taken up a cause that right-wing Israelis had championed for years: curtailing the extraordinary power of the Israeli judiciary. Starting in the 1990s, Israel’s supreme court assumed for itself the power to review, and sometimes stop, government policy and even political appointments. Israel has no constitution to authorize this power, but the supreme court, under the court’s president, Aharon Barak, effectively said that there wasn’t any point in having a supreme court in a liberal democracy if it didn’t have this final say over how the country is run. (If this judicial arrangement sounds peculiar, that is because no other country is run this way.) The court has tended to rule in a liberal direction since then. Many of the uprooted Gaza settlers of 2005 thought that it would save them from removal. It did not, and many of those same settlers have hated the court ever since, because they say it always finds rights for Arabs but never for settlers.

>In 2023, Netanyahu proposed limiting the court’s power of review and changing how its judges are appointed. The net effect of these changes would free future Israeli governments from judicial restrictions. The protesters said that their ancestors did not survive fascism in Europe only to live in a state that would flush away its own liberal democracy. They would not pay taxes to such a state, and would not fight in its military.

>They also made much of the corruption charges against Netanyahu. Starting in 2019, the prime minister was charged with abusing his office for personal gain—pushing through laws in exchange for expensive gifts and positive press coverage. These charges have been stalled while he has remained in office. But the protesters were, I found, frustratingly silent on the dynamics that had brought Netanyahu to the controls in the first place. Not all were attributable to demographics. The Israeli right, of which he is the most prominent figure, had provided security to the country and support for settlement expansion—even in defiance of Israel’s own laws—into the West Bank. The attack on October 7 had not yet happened, so in the summer of 2023, Netanyahu could credibly say that the policies he championed had brought about a happy and uneventful decade for most Israelis.

>For a country that had recently endured suicide bombings, that achievement was hard for voters not to reward. The Israeli left had contended that the country’s security depended on making a deal with the Palestinians, a handshake that would lead first to more handshakes and finally to a multitude of embraces between Arabs and Jews across an agreed-on national border. Such confidence in the power of diplomacy was a throwback to the early ’90s, when the Oslo Accords promised peace through Israeli land concessions, mutual recognition, and ongoing dialogue between the most reasonable Israelis and the most reasonable members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The result of those efforts: In 1995, the most reasonable Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was shot dead by one of the least reasonable Israelis; settlement activity in the West Bank and Gaza accelerated; and the Second Intifada, launched with the blessing of the supposedly reasonable PLO president, Yasir Arafat, killed thousands of Israeli and Palestinian civilians. The Israeli right has flourished simply by observing that conceding land for peace left Israel less secure than before the concessions started.

>Their preferred approach was to harden Israel’s borders, prepare advanced defense systems to pluck missiles out of the sky, and relentlessly kill Israel’s enemies. The Israeli right won this debate. Ignoring handshakes produced a pleasing result: For two decades, no foreign power dared attack Israel, and terrorist attacks declined until they were rare rather than constant. It is difficult to appreciate, if you are under the age of about 40, how aberrant this period in Israeli history was—and how hapless the Israeli left was, when trying to explain to voters that they should prefer the left’s moral superiority to the security that the right had delivered by ignoring the left. Israel is one of the few places where even the young have moved consistently rightward. Some of this drift is demographic (right-leaning segments of society, such as the religiously observant, tend to have more children than left-leaning segments), but some is attributable to the view that by pursuing peace naively, the left nearly got everyone killed.

>Even at the protests in the summer of 2023, I detected a tacit acceptance of the right’s victory, both over the Palestinians and over the Israeli left. In fact, the protesters treated the issue of Palestine with an almost Freudian avoidance: Precisely because the issue silently dominated the protests, it could not be mentioned. Jacob Abolafia, an American Israeli political philosopher who has criticized Israeli policy in the West Bank, urged me to see that Netanyahu’s whole reason for attempting to neuter the supreme court was because it represented the last hope for Palestinians who objected to their abuse by Israeli settlers. But few protesters saw it that way. They considered themselves—the liberal democrats—to be the victims of the proposed reforms. “I would say, generously, that maybe a thousand protesters out of 200,000 would mention Palestinians at all,” Abolafia said. “If you tried to bring up Palestinians, you would get shouted down.”

>The protesters had another problem. The crowds in Tel Aviv were huge, and if one knew nothing about Israel except the sight of a sea of T-shirt-clad, sign-waving liberals on Kaplan Street, one would assume that Netanyahu would soon fall and his country would be restored. To leave Tel Aviv was to learn that Israel was not united in this view, and that the remaining outposts of liberalism were being overrun.

>In the summer of 2023, I went to a rally in Jerusalem outside Netanyahu’s official residence. I accompanied my friends Peter Cole, an American-born poet, and his partner, the writer Adina Hoffman. We walked together from their home near the Old City, past neighborhoods filled with very religious families—many of them recent arrivals from America or North Africa—who had taken over former slums, and to Rehavia, a neighborhood whose residents include intellectuals and professionals, and the prime minister himself.

>The atmosphere was at times euphoric, in the way of effective political rallies: reminders that like-minded people exist and care about the same things you do. But the crowd was older than me, and I am no longer young. Jerusalem is an old city with a young population. The rally against Netanyahu felt at times like a Class of ’74 high-school reunion, and after my friends recognized their third or fourth gray-haired or bald friend in the crowd, sometimes shaking hands or hugging after years apart, it became impossible to ignore how these old-school liberals were also just plain old, and had failed in some way to reproduce their politics in future generations. Back in Cole and Hoffman’s neighborhood, the families had so many children that I could sit on the writers’ balcony, watch the alley’s comings and goings for hours, and still not know the total head count in neighboring houses. Religious youngsters in black suits or snoods passed by, but few people dressed like me or my hosts did. Many at the rally had children and grandchildren, but they were not present. Those other Jerusalemites, the young and the native-born, skewed either indifferent to the protests or possibly in opposition to them.

>I had come to Israel hoping to speak with Israelis on the left and on the right. I was chastened by a joke I heard, more than once, upon describing my mission to Israelis in those terms. “What left?” they asked. There was none remaining. I would need a time machine. It was like coming to Rome and trying to meet Italians and also Etruscans. Too late! In the ’90s, secret meetings in Oslo and in the Rose Garden had given peaceniks a good name, or at least led Israelis to give them a chance. The Second Intifada, which killed thousands of Israeli and Palestinian civilians, ended that indulgence for a generation. Some of those peaceniks moved to kibbutzes on the Gaza border, which were established with the intention of fostering peace. On October 7, when these kibbutzes were raided and their populations massacred, many of the surviving peaceniks turned in their beads and decided that there was a time for peace and a time for war, and the time for war was now.

>No figure is more illustrative of this flitting-away of Israeli doves than Yair Golan, the leader of Israel’s Democratic Party. He exists to answer this question: What is the probability that the perfect Israeli politician will become prime minister, if he is also a leftist and a peacenik? I believe that Israeli nanoscale engineers are using precision equipment to quantify the exact number, and distinguish it from zero.

>Golan is a genuine Israeli hero. I met him twice, once last year in a bare room in his party’s Tel Aviv office, and once several months ago in the Knesset. Now 64 years old, he grew up in what he remembers as “the most glorious period” in Israel’s history, when the country had “a very cohesive, egalitarian, optimistic society” run by “practical” people interested in doing what worked, rather than fulfilling a rigid ideology. He spent 38 years in the IDF, was nearly appointed its chief of staff by Netanyahu, and retired from active service as a major general in 2018. In bearing, he is stoic and serious, with the credibility that comes from having devoted his life to war and having determined that peace is better.

>On the morning of October 7, 2023, Golan was at home, near Tel Aviv, and first learned about the attacks because his phone began having little seizures, alerting him to missile attacks. He retrieved his boots from his garage and drove to the military headquarters in Ramle.

>“When I saw the security assessment, I was shocked,” he told me. About 40 incursions along the Gaza border had already been detected. The commanding officer had been a cadet when Golan commanded the IDF officer course. “We had known each other for many years,” Golan said. “I asked to be his personal envoy to the front.” With the general’s blessing, Golan took a rifle and drove south in his white Toyota Yaris.

>At the IDF’s base in the southern district, he found a barracks in disarray, attacked by Hamas and littered with wounded. The colonel in charge had been shot in the shoulder, and he briefed Golan while waiting for an ambulance. When the ambulance finally left, Golan was the senior officer in the field, though he had no orders or command.

>Without guidance from the military, he took orders instead from his sister. She called to report that music fans from the Nova festival were being massacred, and a few had run about a mile and half away and were hiding in the desert scrub, waiting to be saved or slaughtered. “They sent a video, and you could hear the shooting around them,” he said. “I drove on the road until I was close, and then I felt much safer driving off-road.” He found the group and brought them to safety. Soon word spread among parents that a one-man taxi service was operating in the desert, and that if the IDF would not respond, maybe he could. A journalist from Haaretz asked Golan to save his son. “So I went back in. And then I got another phone call, from a woman who asked me to save her son.” He was in the center of the killing zone. “That was the first time I truly entered the Nova-festival location,” Golan said. “And it was a massacre. The worst I saw in my life.” By sunset, his impromptu rescue service had become too dangerous to operate, and he returned to headquarters.

>Battlefield heroics much less dramatic than these have launched Israeli political careers. But those other politicians have not shared Golan’s views. He enthusiastically welcomes cooperation with Arab Israeli parties, and he says Israel’s “internal cohesiveness” depends on treating minorities with dignity and equality. He believes that the settlement of the West Bank by Israelis will result in the “destruction of Israel” because permanent occupation is undemocratic, and an undemocratic Israel will crumble. Even if the mission were to succeed, it would leave Israel no longer Jewish, due to the absorption of more than 3 million unwilling Arabs into Israeli territory. He advocates instead for a “civil separation”: a withdrawal of illegal settlers from the West Bank, and a security presence that operates indefinitely, while the physical separation of citizens proceeds. Under some future, more enlightened leadership, he says, a Palestinian state could eventually manage its security on its own. In foreign relations, he urges close relations with Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and eventually Saudi Arabia—a “moderate axis” of countries committed to keeping their extremists under control. Domestically, he favors cutting off state funding for Haredi schools that fail to teach Israel’s core curriculum of science, math and English, and integrating Haredim by compelling national service. He favors European-style social programs, including wealth redistribution.

>These do not exactly sound like the rantings of a slavering madman. In fact, they sound like an American Democrat’s fantasy of an Israeli politician, which perhaps accounts for Golan’s poor expected showing in the coming election. Golan spent two hours telling me that the Israel he grew up in had been a “flourishing democracy for many, many years,” and that he looked forward to restoring the practical, sensible government that had made his country great. I asked him to tell me when he thought Israel had stopped being a democracy. He thought for a long time, then answered: “2013.” That was the year, he said, that Netanyahu established a new government that included “moderate elements.” He had not yet sold his future to the ultra-Orthodox and “the extreme right.” So his objection was not really to democracy’s end, but to democracy’s results.

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>The writer is a former president of the European Central Bank and was prime minister of Italy

>Europe faces a difficult set of choices. It needs to grow, so that it can keep financing its social model and the new demands of a changed world, from defence to energy. It wants to remain sovereign, so that it can order its economy according to its own values. And it wants growth without the costs in terms of wealth inequality and environmental damage that have accompanied it elsewhere. Artificial intelligence bears on all three at once. 

>Despite a solid start to the year, the trend in European growth has slowed materially since the pandemic. This is true relative both to its own pre-pandemic trajectory and to the US. By one estimate, the euro area-US productivity gap widened from $9 per hour in 2018 to $21 in 2025. Views differ on how productivity levels should be compared across countries, but the gap in growth rates is clear.

>Europe has different routes to raise growth, such as removing the high barriers in its internal market. But widely adopting AI is perhaps the most promising one today. According to ECB scenarios, fast adoption of AI would add 0.3 to 0.4 percentage points a year to total factor productivity growth — the gains that come from working more efficiently rather than adding labour or capital — which has been roughly zero since 2022. 

>AI-led growth, however, creates a tension with Europe’s bid for sovereignty, because Europe controls little of the AI value chain. The technology is set to become completely pervasive: in the economy, in health systems, in education, in energy, in defence, to name just a few areas. This is no ordinary dependency. Being cut off from AI, once the economy runs on it, would be more like being cut off from the US financial system. The effects would be catastrophic.

>That changes the terms of Europe’s relationship with partners it can no longer always rely on. Europe is not to the United States as Texas is to California. It is possible to imagine a future US administration making access to frontier AI models conditional on changes to Europe’s digital rules or digital taxes, or China using the licences on its open-weight models as leverage in a tariff dispute. Unless Europe controls some part of the value chain, growth through AI and sovereignty will pull against each other.

>Europe’s potential zone of AI sovereignty is narrow. Its frontier labs cannot at present compete financially with their American and Chinese competitors, and leading-edge chip production is far behind. But data is the one area where Europe can still be sovereign, and it is also the area with the greatest potential to generate growth.

>The continent sits on a wealth of public-sector data, such as decades of health records and data collection by statistical offices. Its highly automated manufacturing sector generates a deep well of machine-readable industrial information. European Commission estimates put Europe’s data economy at over €800bn, or more than 5 per cent of GDP, by 2030.

>But this creates the next tension. To exploit these assets, Europe needs to have control over their storage and processing. This means it needs large-scale AI data centres.

>Data centres, however, are fiercely contested. Local communities worry about their environmental costs and rising energy bills. It does not help that much of the capacity now being built in Europe is for the American tech giants.

>Yet Europe also has to be realistic. The debate about overbuilding data centres is a US one. Europe’s problem is the opposite. The EU hosts under 5 per cent of the world’s AI compute versus 75 per cent for the US. Even for ordinary data centre capacity, the gap between demand and installed supply in Europe is estimated at around 3GW, roughly a quarter of what Europe currently has, and is expected to widen to 14GW by 2030.

>As sovereignty comes to matter more, this lack of domestic capacity will start to bite. Compute could stop being fully fungible, and a large part of the infrastructure that processes and stores European data will have to sit on European soil. American operators can provide much of that capacity through what they market as sovereign cloud services, run from Europe but still under American ownership. The most sensitive uses, however, will have to run under European control, which is the tiered approach the Commission has proposed in its Cloud and AI Development Act. 

>If the gap is not filled, two risks follow. Either European companies will not adopt AI because they cannot keep their data in Europe, a risk the Commission’s own impact assessment for the Act identifies. Or compute will stay expensive, slowing broad adoption for lower-value tasks. Amazon already charges 15 per cent more for its sovereign cloud in Germany than for its standard service.

>The concerns about data centres can be met. Clean energy can be required to power them and waste heat reused where feasible. The facilities can be kept away from areas where energy and water are scarce. Data centres can be required to pay a fair share of the grid costs they create, and to share the benefits with local communities, whether through contributions to local budgets or lower energy bills.

>So why is Europe not building more? Part of the answer lies in supply-side constraints. A data centre takes 24 months to build in the US but 42 months in Germany, owing to longer delays for permits and grid connections. More expensive electricity makes building and powering a facility in parts of Europe twice as costly as in China. But Europe does have regions where it is cheap to build: an AI data centre in Sweden, for example, costs only about a tenth more than one in China.

>The main obstacle for Europe is the fragmentation of demand. Data centres require massive financial commitments, which investors will only make against bankable offtake contracts. In the US, hyperscalers and frontier labs provide them. In Europe, demand is spread across millions of companies, and even the largest companies tend to buy compute a year at a time due to uncertainty about how fast they will adopt AI. That is why companies operating neoclouds — data centres for AI workloads — in Europe, such as Nscale, sell most of their capacity to US buyers.

>Europe must therefore create large, concentrated buyers by design. What is needed is for its largest companies to pool their midsized commitments into contracts large enough for investors to lend against.

>A model already exists. A group of European companies, including ASML, Capgemini and Amadeus, have committed to multiyear purchases of Mistral’s European Compute Units, which are intended to underwrite 1GW of capacity by 2030. The challenge now is to scale up this model with more neoclouds and larger consortiums, each committing to multiyear purchases of standardised capacity. 

>The goal is a virtuous circle. Companies accelerate their AI transitions, providing the demand that finances European capacity. That capacity lets Europe exploit its own data on infrastructure it can control. Cheaper, sovereign compute then makes adoption faster and the next commitments larger, paid for out of the productivity gains the technology delivers. And with capacity of its own, Europe is better placed to build its own AI models.

>That leaves the deepest fear: that AI hands wealth and power to a new tech oligarchy. But the approach set out here leans against it. Demand pooled by many consortiums lets more providers into the market, and competition among them keeps the rewards from concentrating in a few hands. Progressive taxation would ensure that the rest of society shares in them too. In this way Europe does not have to choose between growth, sovereignty and its values. It can have AI without oligarchs.

>VIENNA (AP) — The U.N. atomic watchdog’s board on Wednesday reported Iran to the U.N. Security Council for the first time in 20 years, citing it for failure to cooperate in a long-running investigation into uranium traces detected by inspectors at undeclared sites.

>Western officials suspect that the traces could provide evidence that Iran had a secret nuclear weapons program until 2003. Iran says that it’s not pursuing nuclear weapons, and that its program is entirely peaceful.

>Reporting Iran to the Security Council opens the country to possible sanctions and asset freezes, though such punitive measures are unlikely because Iran’s allies Russia and China hold veto power on the panel.

>Twenty-three countries on the International Atomic Energy Agency ’s 35-member board of governors voted for Wednesday’s resolution at IAEA headquarters in Vienna.

>China, Russia and Niger opposed it, while eight countries abstained and one didn’t vote as it was in arrears, according to diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the outcome of the closed-door vote.

>The resolution was put forward by the United States, Britain, France and Germany.

>The diplomatic move has been under consideration since June 2025, when the IAEA board found Iran officially in noncompliance with its nonproliferation obligations because of Tehran’s lack of cooperation in the investigation.

>Iran’s ambassador to the U.N. in Vienna, Reza Najafi, rejected the resolution, describing it as a “political tool” and saying that it ruined confidence in the IAEA’s “independence, impartiality and credibility.”

>He suggested that compliance with any obligation to allow U.N. inspections of nuclear sites inside Iran was, in any case, impossible at the moment because of the country’s continuing war with the U.S. and Israel.

>The U.S. this week destroyed five Iranian oil tankers and Tehran hit back at American targets in Jordan, the latest burst of back-and-forth strikes that have lurched the sides back toward open hostilities in a more than 6-month-old war.

>The draft resolution, which was seen by The Associated Press, requested IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi to report the agency’s concerns “to the Security Council and the General Assembly of the United Nations, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the IAEA Statute.”

>The resolution also reiterated its call upon Iran “to urgently remedy its non-compliance” with previous agreements and to take steps deemed necessary by the IAEA to assure “the non-diversion of nuclear material.”

>Since Israel and the U.S. struck Iran’s nuclear sites during the 12-day war in June 2025, Iran hasn’t given IAEA inspectors access to nuclear sites that were affected by the strikes. The IAEA also has been unable to verify the status of Iran’s stockpile of near weapons-grade uranium since the June bombing.

>Najafi said that airstrikes by the U.S. and Israel made safe access for inspectors to Iran’s nuclear sites “materially impossible.” He said that Iran has “neither stopped nor suspended its safeguards obligations,” adding that “performance is currently impossible under continuing military operations and persistent threats.”

>Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi echoed that sentiment in an post on X.

>“They attack Iran’s safeguarded nuclear facilities, disrupt the normal verification process, and then use that very disruption as a pretext to pass a resolution at the IAEA Board of Governors,” he said.

>According to the IAEA, Iran maintains a stockpile of 440.9 kilograms (972 pounds) of uranium enriched up to 60% purity — a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%.

>That stockpile could allow Iran to build as many as 10 nuclear bombs, should it decide to weaponize its program, IAEA chief Grossi warned in an interview last year with the AP. He said that it doesn’t mean that Iran has such a weapon.

>Children learn a great deal about race and gender in schools these days, but not nearly enough about reading and math. A big reason is the colleges that teach the teachers, and a new report forthcoming Wednesday brings more insight into how they promote politics instead of the basics of instruction.

>The evidence comes from Daniel Buck of the American Enterprise Institute, who examined syllabi for programs at eight public graduate schools of education across five states. For each school he analyzed one master’s or certification program that “aligned most closely with an elementary teaching degree,” he writes, not programs that are “overtly political.”

>Yet even these programs advance “dogmas largely grounded in progressive and critical frameworks,” he writes. Mr. Buck analyzed more than 400 readings from 75 course syllabi and categorized them as “traditional,” “progressive,” “therapeutic,” or “critical,” meaning critical race and other social justice theories. His evaluation isn’t exhaustive, since he couldn’t access some syllabi, and some didn’t include all readings.

>But in only one program, at Florida International University, did he classify more readings as “traditional”—on such basics as phonics or classroom management, for example, or classic books—than in any other category. “Where traditional approaches appeared, they were mostly ancillary,” he writes. “Notably lacking” were “educational philosophies predating the 20th century, or much focus on the elements and principles of classical liberal arts education.”

>Consider the University of Wisconsin-Madison, whose education graduate school was ranked No. 1 by U.S. News and World Report in 2025. Of the 95 readings Mr. Buck looked at, 45% fell into his “critical” category. That includes a report claiming that “attacks on CRT [critical race theory]” are “part of a larger ideological effort to delegitimize historically accurate presentations of race and racism.”

>At California State University, Northridge, a class on “reflective teaching” assigns students an article titled “Queering Elementary Education: A Queer Curriculum for 4th Grade.” At University of Texas-Austin, another top-ranked school, “the syllabus for the required course on young adult literature opens with a land acknowledgment,” suggesting that whites stole the land from Native Americans, Mr. Buck reports. He classified 90% of the readings he reviewed at UT Austin as “critical,” including one on “Anti-Racist Linguistic Anthropology.”

>Dubious teaching methods abound. At Texas Tech, Mr. Buck reports, “even the courses focused on more practical classroom skills” emphasize “individual autonomy over learning through direct instruction.” At FIU, a training on classroom management “largely discourages” teachers from issuing consequences to misbehaving students.

>Mr. Buck notes that he can’t say how the readings are taught in class, and these are a small sample of 1,600 education schools in the U.S. But other analyses have found teacher colleges left-leaning or not useful for basic classroom instruction.

>More than half of teachers earn master’s degrees of some kind, and many states or districts offer higher pay for teachers who do. Mr. Buck suggests ending this “master’s premium” and expanding other teacher certification pathways. Another idea: “governors could establish centers for classical or liberal arts education” at public universities to bring ideological diversity into the system, as some have done for civics.

>Republican efforts to limit federal loans for these programs are sound. Children and teachers are poorly served when progressive politics and fads replace the practical, traditional transmission of knowledge.

I'm well aware that Haaretz has issues, but I hope we can recognize that and still discuss this intelligently. Do we have reason to think any of its claims are totally false? Show that.

What's more likely is that the framing here may be misleading, even if the facts are true. Could Netanyahu (or his staff) have known that the conflagration Sinwar threatened would be in Gaza, not the West Bank? Was a deal really that close, or was Sinwar lying at points? I'm sure there are other parts of this article you guys may point out.

And of course, this could all be factual information. The authors here have talked to more officials than any of us ever have. There's strong reasons to trust them, and I personally think that this is probably more truthful than not. To me, it's the framing where the most issues would arise.

Of course, if there had been a real commission of inquiry, we wouldn't need to rely on Haaretz articles to figure out the truth. As it is, this is what we've got to work with. Hope you guys enjoy.

The highlighting comes from the source, and I don't know how to undo it. Apologies for that annoyance.

>These were the final days of September 2023. Terrorist attacks inflamed the West Bank, masses of Gazans regularly protested at the border fence, and the country was reeling from internal conflict over the judicial coup laws. Anyone watching the events with clear eyes could sense that an escalation was lurking around every corner.

>UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed – known as MBZ – was particularly concerned. "He spoke with me about this often in the months leading up to the war," recounts President Isaac Herzog, who maintains friendly relations with bin Zayed. "He constantly conveyed messages that the situation needed to be defused. He even sent a special envoy to Israel who met with the prime minister. The emir seemed to sense that the area was on the verge of explosion."

>Bin Zayed would also speak directly with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. These conversations followed a standard procedure: A representative from the Emirati embassy would come to the prime minister's bureau, bringing a special phone device that ensured the confidentiality of the call.

>

>But this time, the call initiated by bin Zayed was unusual. A week and a half before October 7, 2023 the Emirati ruler called Netanyahu from the Presidential Palace in Abu Dhabi and spoke with him for 45 minutes.

>In that conversation, bin Zayed warned that Hamas' leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was planning a major operation against Israel. Bin Zayed expressed concern that the event in question would not only lead to bloodshed but also destabilize the entire region and undermine the Abraham Accords.

>Three foreign senior sources are familiar with the contents of the conversation, the existence of which is revealed here for the first time. Its disclosure is the result of extensive research based on dozens of sources in Israel and worldwide, including very senior officials, as well as recordings, internal documents and correspondence. The research was conducted for the new book "Hostages: 843 Days of Abandonment" (Kinneret Zmora Publishing, in Hebrew) by the authors of this article.

>Also present during the call was a close adviser to bin Zayed, a Palestinian who had emigrated years ago from Gaza to Abu Dhabi and maintained strong ties in the Strip. According to the adviser, the Emirati ruler impressed upon Netanyahu the need to prepare for the threat.

>"The emir explained that, in his assessment, Sinwar was preparing for a major event," the adviser says. "He told Netanyahu that Israel should be ready. Concurrently, he recommended trying to find an economic solution for the Strip and calming the West Bank to prevent escalation."

>Bin Zayed urged Netanyahu to take the situation seriously. To his surprise, however, the prime minister reacted with relative calm. Netanyahu said that, in his assessment, Hamas intended to operate in the West Bank area, and he reassured bin Zayed that Israel was prepared for any scenario.

>The Emirati ruler would later recount the conversation he had with Netanyahu and the warning he also relayed to CIA Director William J. Burns. Bin Zayed shared with Burns the sense he tried to convey to Netanyahu that "something there is about to explode," and told him that the Israeli prime minister believed the volatile area was, in fact, the West Bank.

>"The emir hoped that despite his reserved response, Netanyahu would take the message seriously and take action," the adviser says. None of them imagined that the prime minister would hear the message but wouldn't brief the heads of the defense establishment. The head of the Shin Bet, the head of the Mossad, the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff – none of them knew about bin Zayed's warning.

>To understand where the unusual warning came from, and why specifically through the UAE president, one must go back to what transpired behind the scenes in the preceding months. In those months, with Netanyahu's knowledge and approval, Israel held talks with Hamas on a "hudna," a temporary truce aimed at promoting a long-term arrangement in the Strip.

>The contacts began secretly in early 2023, coinciding with the rise of Netanyahu's far-right government. Sinwar appointed Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas' political bureau, for the mission. Hamad is fluent in Hebrew and was involved in the secret contacts for the release of abducted soldier Gilad Shalit. At the same time, a senior Fatah official, also fluent in Hebrew, was recruited. The official, who will be referred to here as "Coal Eyes" (a pseudonym, for reasons of caution), is known for his reputation as a reliable figure, acceptable to both Hamas and the Shin Bet. His role was to convey messages between the parties, so it would not appear as if there was direct contact between Hamas and Israel.

>In practice, these conversations were virtually direct. Ghazi Hamad and Coal Eyes would sit at the Gaza home of Nasser Sarraj, who previously served as deputy director of the Palestinian Authority's Civil Affairs Ministry. On the Israeli side of the line was Adi Rotem, the Shin Bet official responsible for hostages and missing persons. Since unrest in Gaza could also harm Egypt, a large part of the discussions was based on agreements reached in advance between Jerusalem and Cairo. Nevertheless, "this entire direct channel was concealed from the Egyptians, for fear they would be offended by being excluded," says one of the Shin Bet team members involved in preparing the talks, "and therefore it became a personal channel cultivated by Netanyahu."

>The talks initially focused on a gradual lifting of the blockade on Gaza and increasing the shipments of food and raw materials entering the Strip. A new idea was also raised: establishing trade zones along the Strip's borders with Israel and Egypt, which would offer thousands of jobs to unemployed Gazans. The Egyptians were also willing to allow "safe passage" for residents of the Strip on their way to the airport in Sharm el-Sheikh – which would provide them with an opening to the world. The proposal to supply natural gas to the Strip from the Gaza Marine natural gas field, discovered in 2000 off the enclave's coast, was also put forward. The proposal was called "G 4 G," Gas for Gaza.

>By summer 2023, it seemed that all economic matters had been resolved, and only the most sensitive issue remained on the agenda – the release of Israeli prisoners and the bodies of soldiers held in the Strip. In exchange for the return of Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, and the bodies of Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, Sinwar demanded that 500 Hamas prisoners be freed. He later agreed to reduce the number to 250 prisoners, and after tough negotiations, consented to the release of only 50 prisoners. The Shin Bet was inclined to accept the release of 30 prisoners, including 20 serving life sentences, from a list deemed "palatable" for Israel, in exchange for the return of the four Israelis.

>The atmosphere was so optimistic that Coal Eyes repeatedly reported that an agreement with Israel was closer than ever and that both sides viewed the proposals as "feasible options." One of the Hamas officials involved in the arrangement initiatives testifies that "he would come out enthusiastic every time and report to his colleagues, 'It's happening.'"

>An Israeli security source involved in preparing the talks confirms that "by the end of August 2023, Netanyahu approved the release of 30 prisoners, including 20 serving life sentences, to be chosen by the Shin Bet." According to him, "all that was required at this stage was the approval of the ministerial committee for hostages and missing persons, whose consent is needed for the release of prisoners, especially those serving life sentences."

>However, Netanyahu repeatedly postponed convening the committee. Perhaps he did so out of fear of reaching an agreement with Hamas, or perhaps out of fear of the reaction from his extremist partners in his new government. To the Shin Bet representatives, who managed the channel with Hamas, he used to say he feared the story leaking to the media. "And so it got stuck week after week," the source describes.

>When Sinwar began to show signs of displeasure with the lack of progress, Ghazi Hamad and Coal Eyes tried to reassure him that the reason for the delay was Netanyahu's preoccupation with the major turmoil then unfolding in Israel – the advancement of the judicial overhaul and the massive public protest that erupted in its wake.

>Amid the ongoing internal upheaval in Israel, the perception grew within the Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah axis of resistance that Israel had become much more vulnerable, and that they could unite fronts and launch a coordinated campaign to defeat it. Internal documents show that senior Hamas officials at that time began to accelerate their appeals to Iran, requesting assistance in funding the attack.

>Then, in early September 2023, Sinwar suddenly cut off all contact with the negotiating team. "He simply vanished from our radar, evaporated," says a senior Shin Bet official. A Hamas source explains that Sinwar lost patience with the Israelis' pace.

>Thus, the direct channel established between Shin Bet official Adi Rotem and Hamas official Ghazi Hamad, which was managed under Netanyahu's approval, was severed. This channel, incidentally, would resume full activity a year after the October 7 massacre, in September 2024, when an urgent need emerged to extract the stalled hostage deal from the mire.

>In September 2023, just before the die was cast, Sinwar arranged a private meeting with Fatah official Coal Eyes. "Tell the Israelis that if they don't make progress, I'm preparing a huge surprise for them," he declared emphatically. Here, he dropped a key word for the first time, one that should have triggered red flags: "Tell them to expect a 'zilzal,' an earthquake."

>Coal Eyes left the conversation shaken. He decided to consult a close friend, the same Palestinian who had emigrated from Gaza to Abu Dhabi and served as a close adviser to bin Zayed.

>"Coal Eyes was agitated," the adviser recounts. "It was clear to him that the operation Sinwar was talking about could affect the entire Middle East, but he was afraid to report the information directly to the Shin Bet. On the other hand, he was even more afraid that if he didn't update the Shin Bet, the Israelis might accuse him of collaborating with Sinwar. He genuinely feared for his life. Therefore, he decided to convey the message to bin Zayed."

>"What is the meaning of this?" bin Zayed asked the adviser, who conveyed Sinwar's warning.

>"If he says 'zilzal,' he means war," the adviser replied.

>"Are you sure?" the emir asked.

>"No, that's my interpretation," the adviser responded, "and that's also how Coal Eyes understood it."

>The Emirati ruler thought it over, uncertain. He was troubled by the possibility that, amid the regional tensions, the mere warning about Hamas' intentions to start a war could ignite the flames, perhaps with a preemptive strike by Israel. He finally decided: "If we are not sure, we will not convey any warning to the Israelis for now. We will investigate the matter thoroughly until we are certain."

>To understand the seriousness of Sinwar's threat, Coal Eyes was asked to hold another meeting with him in Gaza. The meeting took place in mid-September 2023.

>"Well?" Sinwar asked. "Did you convey the message to the Israelis?"

>"No," the mediator replied.

>Sinwar took a deep breath, and in a chillingly quiet voice told him: "Convey a message to them that I am preparing the mother of all surprises. A terrifying operation. Something extraordinary." Again, he rolled the word "zilzal," earthquake, on his tongue. "Please convey to the Israelis what I am saying word for word," he demanded.

>Coal Eyes called bin Zayed's adviser from Gaza to relay Sinwar's words. "I asked him for all the details," the adviser recalls, "including Sinwar's body language, his precise tone of voice, and the context in which the words were spoken, especially regarding the 'zilzal' warning.

>"I suggested he leave the Gaza Strip quickly and meet me at my home for a private conversation. By the end of the meeting, I understood that neither Coal Eyes nor I had erred in understanding the message: Sinwar intended to go to war."

>The adviser briefed bin Zayed on his impression of the conversation with Coal Eyes. The Emirati ruler understood the magnitude of the threat and decided that "Sinwar's message must be conveyed to the Israelis, to the highest ranks there, as soon as possible."

>Netanyahu and then Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar.

>Indeed, on September 15, Coal Eyes and the adviser conveyed the warning to the Shin Bet. The head of the Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, requested an immediate phone call with the prime minister, which was arranged by Netanyahu's military secretary, Avi Gil. During the call, Bar briefed Netanyahu about Sinwar's "earthquake" threats, and it was decided to hold a security meeting involving all relevant security agencies.

>"Why did Sinwar send us a warning?" a senior intelligence official rhetorically asks now. "Either it was because he grew tired of Israel's foot-dragging, wanting to pressure us into an arrangement and not so eager to start a war. Or, as we prefer to think, it was part of his 'Great Deception' plan, and he wanted to test the IDF's readiness."

>Either way, the defense establishment took no unnecessary risks. The security meeting took place two days later, on September 17, with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Military Intelligence representatives participating. At the end of the discussion, it was decided to hold a working meeting at the prime minister's bureau later that same day. Representatives from the Mossad and the National Security Council were also invited. Shin Bet representatives at the meeting estimated, based on cross-referencing with new intelligence materials, that Sinwar might be planning to get his hands on Elizabeth Tsurkov, the Israeli researcher who was abducted and held in Iraq at the time, so he could raise the number of Palestinian prisoners he would receive in an exchange deal.

>The head of the Shin Bet qualified that this was only an initial assessment, and that the warning should be taken seriously, as it indicated a lack of deterrence on Israel's part and that "we are on a collision course." Bar recommended an operational method of "a fire-extinguishing bomb" – a code name for a powerful and sudden attack designed to quickly neutralize a major threat – or at least implementing "strong defensive efforts" in Gaza and the West Bank, if only as preparation for the approaching Jewish holidays. No decisions were made at the end of the meeting.

>Seeing that Israel was not responding to the clear warning conveyed to the Shin Bet, the Emirati ruler decided to hold a conversation with Israel's prime minister himself. Thus, that 45-minute conversation took place at the end of September, in which he conveyed an explicit warning to Netanyahu about Sinwar's intentions.

>A similar call reached the prime minister's bureau in those days from the Egyptian intelligence chief, Gen. Abbas Kamel, who warned Netanyahu of "something unusual, a terrifying operation," about to be launched by Hamas. Journalist Smadar Perry, who published the details of the conversation in the Yedioth Ahronoth daily, recounts that Netanyahu also told Kamel: "In Gaza, we are in the picture, we are in control. Our problem is with the West Bank, and that's where we are also diverting forces."

>On October 1, in a discussion about the Gaza border riots and the identification of Hamas' intentions to carry out a terrorist attack in the West Bank, the head of the Shin Bet again recommended targeting senior Hamas officials, including Sinwar, who "was showing signs of arrogance."

>As in previous instances when the proposal was brought before him, Netanyahu replied: "Prepare plans for me and I will consider them."

>"He never said 'no'," explains a senior defense official. "That was always his way of postponing dealing with the problem." Another senior official present at the discussion recalls that in summing up the meeting, the prime minister said: "Continue to work on the capability, but for now, calm the situation."

>Throughout the entire meeting, the prime minister did not mention the warning calls he had received.

>"If we had known about the warnings, there's a chance it would have given more weight to the first message we received from Sinwar," says a senior Shin Bet official. "Perhaps it would also have clarified what was behind his sudden withdrawal from the talks in early September. It's possible we would have put two and two together and reached a completely different conclusion from the one we did, one that would have changed our entire assessment picture."

>Netanyahu and Sinwar.

>The roots of the complex relationship between Netanyahu and Sinwar can be traced back many years, to Sinwar's release from Israeli prison in the 2011 Shalit deal. After ruthlessly seizing all power centers in the Strip, Sinwar began to formulate a new, two-pronged strategy designed to extricate Gaza from its predicament.

>"From an early stage, perhaps even in prison, Sinwar had two alternatives in mind," says a senior intelligence official who was closely familiar with Sinwar at the time. "On the one hand, he accelerated the development of Hamas' military capabilities, turning it into a powerful terrorist army that repeatedly clashed with Israel. On the other hand, he let the realization sink in that in all rounds of fighting, Gaza has been decisively defeated. Therefore, despite all his hatred for Israel, a chance should be given to an attempt to reach an arrangement that would allow for normal life in Gaza, even before putting the Hamas army into action if the arrangement did not materialize."

>In 2017, Sinwar decided to take a surprising step. He contacted his sworn rival, former Fatah official and current businessman, Mohammed Dahlan. The two peers from Khan Yunis knew each other from their university days in Gaza, and even then, intense animosity existed between them. The tension escalated when Dahlan, head of preventive security in the Palestinian Authority during its rule in the Gaza Strip, waged an all-out war against Hamas leaders. When Hamas forcibly seized power in Gaza, Dahlan was placed at the top of the assassination list.

>But now Sinwar believed he could use Dahlan and the connections he had established with both the Egyptian government and Israeli security services. In summer 2017, after almost 40 years of estrangement and animosity, Sinwar met with Dahlan at his home in Cairo, along with several other senior Hamas officials, including Mohammed Deif, head of the military wing, and Moussa Abu Marzouk, a member of Hamas' political bureau.

>Senior Israeli intelligence official

>Sinwar described to Dahlan the severe suffering in Gaza and asked him to convey messages to Netanyahu about his desire for a satisfactory arrangement. Its core elements were easing the blockade and boosting the Gazan economy, primarily by creating jobs.

>Dahlan brought the Egyptians into the picture to help mediate between Sinwar and Netanyahu. The initiative created a network of indirect working relations between Israel and Hamas. A glimpse of these contacts would be revealed retrospectively in 2022, when then-National Security Council head Meir Ben-Shabbat disclosed in an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth the negotiations conducted with Sinwar. Ben-Shabbat presented a note that Sinwar had written in Hebrew and sent to Netanyahu in 2018: "Calculated risk."

>"That was one of the beautiful moments in the process," Ben-Shabbat said. "I understand from this that Sinwar is very attentive to what is happening on the Israeli side, analyzes every utterance from politicians, understands the dilemmas and introduces his own input into them."

>In August 2018, the contacts matured into a meeting of senior Israeli officials on the matter, in the presence of the prime minister. During the meeting, a structured plan was presented for formulating a deal in which the four prisoners would be returned in exchange for a mutual cease-fire and an Israeli agreement to an arrangement and significant easing of the blockade on Gaza.

>The next stage concerned the exchange deal itself. In exchange for Hamas releasing the four Israelis, Israel agreed to release Hamas prisoners, including those arrested in the 2014 Gaza war (Operation Protective Edge), with the exception of those involved in significant terrorist activity. The meeting's summary document stated that "postponing a captive and missing persons exchange deal, and separating it from the arrangement process, could lead to delaying the solution for the return of captives and missing persons for years to come."

>Senior defense officials concluded that the conditions were the most conducive for Israel to reach a prisoner exchange deal at reasonable costs. Netanyahu summed up the discussion and committed to making a decision. However, time passed, and Netanyahu began to hesitate and delayed approving the arrangement process.

>On the other hand, when security agencies identified excessive operational activity by Hamas, Netanyahu repeatedly refused to authorize initiating a powerful operation against them. "It was already routine," a senior officer recounts. "They fire rockets, we respond, there's a round of fighting, residents of [Israel's] Gaza border area are exhausted, and it costs a lot of money. The army wanted to launch a broad and thorough military operation in Gaza several times, but the very government of the person who promised before his election 'to be strong against Hamas' insisted on not escalating and diligently preserving the 'asset' named Hamas. 'Calm down,' they would tell us, 'let us focus on the north and Iran.'"

>A former IDF major general testifies that he heard "more than once the chief of staff, Herzl Halevi, criticizing Netanyahu's containment policy." He would describe it in vivid terms in meetings: "It's like having a nail sticking out of the wall at home, and instead of pulling it out, you gather all the family members, including the children, and tell them: 'Every time you pass here, beware of the nail.' When we agreed to live with the nail, we didn't understand that what would happen in the end is that instead of removing it from the wall – we would be impaled on it."

>Then the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, and contacts between Hamas and Israel were severed. Israel focused on addressing the new problems brought by the pandemic and, at the same time, was swept into five consecutive election rounds. Within the axis of resistance, a new strategic idea began to take hold: that the day was near when a decisive blow could be dealt to Israel in its weakness. Sinwar, for his part, continued to invest much effort and money in developing the tunnel project in Gaza and in training and arming the Hamas army for the day of reckoning.

>Almost three more years would pass before the day of reckoning arrived. "When you read these words of ours, thousands of jihad fighters from the Iz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades will emerge to attack targets of the criminal Zionist occupation, and will bomb enemy outposts, its concentrations [towns] and its junctions in the southern area of occupied Palestine," Sinwar and his associates Mohammed Deif and Marwan Issa announced in a letter they sent to Hezbollah on the morning of October 7, in an attempt to persuade the organization's leader at the time, Hassan Nasrallah, to join the operation. "They will breach the separation fence to confront and fight against the occupation forces and seize military and civilian positions in the area and capture many occupation soldiers."

>At 6:29 A.M. on October 7, the "zilzal" arrived. By noon, social media in Israel and worldwide were already flooded with horrific footage of the massacre – live-streamed killings, arson and destruction. Dozens of videos showed civilians being abducted into the Gaza Strip.

>When the Israeli security cabinet convened with some delay, at 2:45 P.M., there was still no clear idea of the number of people abducted. "Currently there are 14 soldiers and 28 civilian hostages, and dozens more with whom there has been no contact," the head of the Shin Bet said. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich demanded that the captives be ignored, stating that "it's impossible to operate with such a mindset."

>"I instructed the IDF: No negotiations whatsoever," Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared. "They will only talk to us when they are on the ground, with their heads underwater."

>Qatar's Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani and Mossad Director David Barnea.

>By evening, the world was flooded with horrifying information about the abduction of hundreds of men and women, children and elderly. At 7 P.M., Qatar's Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani called Mossad Director David Barnea, with whom he had a friendly relationship. "Dedi Boy," the Qatari ruler used to affectionately call the Israeli intelligence official. The two had met just a week earlier, at the end of Yom Kippur. Barnea had traveled to Doha then on Netanyahu's behalf to ask the Qataris to increase financial aid to the Strip.

>Al-Thani was agitated. "I just finished a conversation with Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh and his deputy Khalil al-Hayya, who had only recently arrived in Doha," he briefed Barnea. "I explicitly threatened them that if all civilian hostages are not released immediately, I will personally order their expulsion from Qatar. I would like to inform you that Hamas is ready to release all civilians now, and we are prepared to mediate."

>The Israeli Mossad director's response left al-Thani confused. "If they want to release the civilians, let them release them," Barnea replied. "We are not prepared to speak with Hamas." "These are not the Israelis I know," the Qatari leader told his associates. "This is not the Dedi Barnea I know."

>Samir Mashharawi

>Barnea, his associates admit, did hear from Qatar's prime minister in their first conversation that Hamas was willing to release the civilians, but that the terrorist organization set unacceptable conditions, such as halting the IDF's incursion into Gaza and new rights for worshippers on the Temple Mount. Qatar's prime minister denies the claim. "On the first day, Hamas leaders did not set any draconian conditions," his adviser says, "because our threat to them was real, and they were not in a position to impose conditions at all."

>Al-Thani did not give up. He called U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. "Listen," he told him, "there are hundreds of hostages in Gaza, and among them, in my estimation, dozens of civilians. They need to be released now. I offered the Israelis to mediate a quick deal for their release, but they are not interested."

>Blinken informed al-Thani that he planned to fly to Israel within three days. "Let's wait," he reassured him. "I will speak with Netanyahu personally." Al-Thani pressed on. "You know that time is an important factor. We need to act now." Blinken stopped him: "Right now, the situation is complex. Israel is still under attack, and there's no one to talk to. We will wait three days."

>Haaretz Podcast | Behind the scenes at the Republican Jewish Coalition confab

>The next morning, far from the diplomatic talks between Israel and Doha, Rawhi Mushtaha, Sinwar's right-hand man, called Dahlan's associate, Samir Mashharawi. In a phone call from Gaza, Mushtaha, on behalf of Sinwar, asked Dahlan to help them quickly find a mediator to advance a cease-fire deal. To lend weight to his request, Mushtaha added: "Our friend is listening," referring to Sinwar, who was tuned in to the conversation.

>Mashharawi reported the call to Dahlan. According to him, Dahlan told him that "'first and foremost, they need to release all the civilians, the children, the elderly and the babies.' Without that, there's nothing to talk about. What they did was madness. They didn't cross a red line; they crossed a black line. If the civilians are released, there will be a feeling in the Israeli public that there is something to talk about. If not, let them eat what they cooked."

>Mashharawi conveyed Dahlan's message to Hamas. "Give me 24 hours and I'll get back to you," Mushtaha replied. Surprisingly, he returned just one hour later. He had a message: Sinwar was ready to release all civilians. It should be noted that when Sinwar refers to civilians, he means only those up to 18 years old and over 50 years old.

>"He told me that in the first stage, they had no problem releasing all civilians without anything in return," Mashharawi recounts. "I swear, those were his exact words: all civilians, without anything in return. They had only one condition: They wanted us to bring in an agreed-upon mediator as quickly as possible, so that negotiations could immediately begin over everything else – the release of soldiers and officers in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, and then the issue of the blockade on Gaza."

>Dahlan activated his contacts with the Shin Bet and conveyed the information to them. According to Mashharawi, "the unofficial response Dahlan received from them was: 'Netanyahu doesn't want to talk about anything. He only wants war and the elimination of Hamas.'" The Israelis' perception was: First, we eliminate Hamas, and then we'll retrieve the hostages by force."

>A senior defense official admits that at least some of the proposals for the release of civilian hostages reached the Mossad, the Shin Bet and the prime minister. But according to him, even if they were concrete, the military establishment, which needed 24 hours to gain control of the situation, and even more so the stunned political leadership, were unable to discuss the matter in the first few days.

>"To be honest," the senior official says, "the issue of the hostages was not seriously on the agenda at this stage, and no one at the military or political level was open to discussing the proposal. The release of the hostages did not even enter the list of war objectives formulated by the government on the night of October 7. Could the proposal have been properly discussed and a decision reached? In substantive terms, the answer is yes. But the prevailing mood was like after Pearl Harbor: We had just suffered a brutal blow, we were in the midst of war, who had the bandwidth to talk about stopping the fighting and starting negotiations now, even if it was to save the lives of dozens of people, whose final number was still unknown?"

>Mashharawi recounts that on October 10, Mushtaha called him again, on behalf of Sinwar, to find out if an Israeli response to Hamas' proposal had been received. "I told him: I am still waiting for a response from Israel," Mashharawi says. "I waited a few more days for a response, and I approached the Israelis again, but they were not in a state to talk at all. Meanwhile, within a few days, the bombing of Gaza intensified, and contact with Mushtaha and Sinwar became impossible."

>Blinken eventually arrived in Israel after six days. Immediately upon his arrival on Thursday, October 12, he met with Netanyahu, and the next day he continued to Doha for a meeting with Qatar's prime minister. "I raised the issue of the hostages' release with Netanyahu, but I did not receive a clear answer from him," the U.S. secretary of state told al-Thani. "Netanyahu is not there yet!"

>Al-Thani reiterated his assessment that as days passed and Israeli attacks in Gaza intensified, claiming many lives, especially among civilians, Hamas' agreement to release hostages might expire. Blinken promised to try and speak with Netanyahu again. On October 14, shortly after his plane departed Doha for Washington, Blinken sent al-Thani a text message: "Netanyahu is ready for you to mediate. The Mossad director will arrive soon." The next day, eight days after al-Thani offered his services to the Israeli Mossad director, Barnea arrived in Doha.

>Meanwhile, as could be expected, Hamas raised its price. A senior Shin Bet official who understood where things were headed recalls that as early as October 18, after the deadly barrage Israel unleashed on Gaza in those first days, he expressed his view that they should stop. "We should have taken a breath, bitten our lips, steeled ourselves and taken the blow of releasing all the prisoners Hamas demanded. Then, we should have found the first opportunity to re-enter the war."

>According to him, "the first hours and days after the abduction are the most critical. As the days pass and the military response intensifies, both sides tend to entrench themselves in their positions, and the price of the hostages rises. 'We also need to act with stratagems,' I said. But when the idea reached the prime minister, he said: 'The moment a stratagem comes to light, it is no longer a stratagem,' and that was the end of it."

>Hints of Hamas' willingness to engage in flexible talks also reached Col. (res.) Doron Hadar, who for many years commanded the IDF's General Staff negotiation unit. "I started receiving messages, collecting intelligence and other data, and the picture began to clarify: Given the situation, with the other side also stunned, with Hamas alarmed by the international public relations damage created by the images of hundreds of hostages, elderly, frightened women, and crying children, we could create an agreement framework within which, if we wished, it wouldn't be difficult to later argue that Hamas violated it, and launch an attack.

>"It is clear to me, of course, that our side is in complete shock, and no less than that, raging with anger. But ultimately, you expect the leadership to know how to separate emotional processes from rational ones, and take a moment to consider what is actually the right thing to do at this point. Like making a deal with this devil, and then killing him."

>In mid-October, Hadar attended a meeting held in the office of Ophir Falk, Netanyahu's foreign policy adviser, which dealt with the emerging order of war objectives. Hadar asked to present his perspective to the forum. "I asked Falk: 'Tell me, do you understand what's happening here?' Hadar recounts. 'We can bring back the women, the children, now. This is a one-for-one exchange. We can initiate a move.'"

>Falk stopped the discussion and asked the other attendees to leave the room. "I continued," Hadar recalls, "and I told him: 'Let's advance a deal. We'll offer them a thousand prisoners, even two thousand if we have to. The world is with us now, let's exert international pressure and advance a deal.'"

>But Falk stopped Hadar. "There will be no deal here," he told him. "This is ISIS. They are murderers. They will get nothing. Change your mindset, Doron."

>"The basic problem was that Hamas was looking for a 'permanent end to the conflict,' as they called it," concludes William J. Burns, the former CIA director, in his characteristically measured manner, summing up the labyrinth into which the hostage issue would become entangled. "Netanyahu was only willing to consider a 'first phase' deal, but claimed he had to constantly reserve the option 'to continue destroying Hamas later,' as he defined it. And that, for us, was always the challenge: How do we square this circle and manage to bring everyone back?"

>The result was that, when it came to dealing with its citizens and soldiers held captive by the enemy, the State of Israel did indeed change its mindset. And so, another two years of war would pass before an agreement was signed that would bring back the last of the hostages from Gaza, alive or dead, with Hamas still standing.

>The prime minister's bureau called the investigation an "absolute lie."

>"Prime Minister Netanyahu didn't speak to the president of the UAE during the period in question and received no warning from him," the response said.

>Former Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar and former IDF Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi said that they had not been informed of the warning delivered by the president of the UAE.

>Haaretz reached out to President bin Zayed for comment, but didn't receive one.

>The geopolitics of the Middle East are shifting, and Saudi Arabia is the prize up for grabs. There are two possible paths forward. One involves the Saudis moving closer to the United States and Israel. The other would align them with Pakistan and Turkey. It’s fair to say the future of the region may depend on which path the Saudis choose.

>The Kingdom of Saud has always been a land of contradictions—an immensely wealthy country flush with oil but deliberately backward because its leaders opposed modernity. That changed in 2017 with the rise of Mohammed bin Salman, the brash crown prince who vowed to drag his country into the modern age by the year 2030. MBS’s Saudi Arabia changed course so dramatically that it was on the cusp of normalization with Israel in 2020. When Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, however, the Saudi appetite for stronger ties with Israel and the United States waned. The Biden administration chose to shun MBS due to his involvement in the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, and it made a public show of distancing the United States from the Saudi effort to quell the threat from the Houthi terrorist group in neighboring Yemen.

>Nonetheless, Saudi–Israeli normalization suddenly reemerged as a possibility due to the surprising response of the Kingdom to the Hamas attacks of October 7. In an astonishing development, Saudi Arabia quietly supported Israel’s war in Gaza, and the Biden administration believed a diplomatic breakthrough was a real possibility. But its populace was swayed by blood libels and doctored photos, as well as erroneous news stories accusing the Israelis of “genocide” and other horrible crimes against the people of Gaza. The hopes for a revival of the Abraham Accords dimmed.

>The momentum shifted again when the Israelis took the war to its source: the Islamic Republic of Iran. Saudi Arabia and Iran are sworn enemies, as they represent different strains of Islamic belief and compete for regional power. Israel’s determination to remove Iran’s offensive military capabilities made it a natural ally of convenience for Saudi Arabia, and in 2024, Israel and Iran entered into a series of hostile exchanges that showed both Israeli technological aptitude and Iranian battlefield weakness. The advantages of siding with Israel only became clearer in 2025, with Israel’s successes in the 12-day war that concluded with the American military strike on Iran’s nuclear program. That was followed in turn by the dazzling opening weeks of the 2026 war, featuring joint U.S.-Israeli operations against the Iranian regime.

>If MBS wanted to side with a winner, it seemed in the spring of 2026 that the side he would choose was obvious. And it wasn’t just about Israel. Normalization with the Jewish state might now fit neatly in a larger and more attractive package called the India Middle East Energy Corridor, or IMEC.

>IMEC is an energy alliance with a defensive component. It includes India, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Greece, and Cyprus. If fully implemented, IMEC would connect Indian ports to the Persian Gulf by sea, move cargo and energy across the Arabian Peninsula on the ground, and then ship it from Israel to Europe. All the players here are American allies. IMEC would thus be an innovative expression of a U.S.-aligned regional order.

>The Pakistanis, Egyptians, and Turks have another vision. They too want the Saudis on their side, and the failure of the United States to secure a quick victory in the war has provided them with an opportunity to divert Saudi Arabia from the IMEC course. The Pakistan-Egypt-Turkish axis that arose during the war is an effort to coordinate responses, mediate between the United States and Iran, and develop what Turkish officials call “regional ownership.” This relatively modest working group has grown more ambitious and widened its scope as the world grapples with Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz and the transshipment of oil.

>Together, these three nations are designing proposals to route energy through Syria and Turkey to Europe (rather than through Israel and Greece). Their vision is an alliance of Sunni nations (the Sunnis make up 80 percent of the planet’s Muslims, compared with Shia, who make up 20 percent).

>In early August, Saudi Arabia entered into a mutual-defense pact with Turkey and Pakistan. This appeared to signal that Riyadh had made its choice and is moving toward a prospective alliance that some analysts have dubbed STEP (Saudi, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan). But does that mean that Saudi Arabia has rejected IMEC? This remains unclear.

>So which will it be? IMEC or STEP?

>_____________

>In July 2021, the Middle East expert Mohammed Soliman wrote of “an Indo-Abrahamic alliance on the rise.” This alliance was marked by the Abraham Accords as well as a growing harmonization of interests between India, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates—spurred in part by dissonance between the UAE and Pakistan and a sense that Turkey’s ambitions to become a leading power in the region had to be countered. The result, Soliman noted, was “an unlikely and unprecedented…transregional order.” 

>That idea gained traction through a grouping known as I2U2 made up of India, Israel, the UAE, and the United States. Officials from the four governments first met virtually (during the pandemic) in October 2021 but then held a summit in July 2022. It began as a diplomatic framework, and, over the course of the following year, other nations came to see the wisdom of joining. At the time, the issue was how to counter China’s so-called Belt and Road Initiative, the ambitious program undertaken by Beijing to interweave itself into the economies of Third World nations across the globe. At the G-20 summit in New Delhi in 2023, the United States, India, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the European Union, France, Germany, and Italy signed a memorandum of understanding described as “a clear alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.”

>These nations (and the EU) had been brought into alignment for different reasons. India’s historic hostility toward China was distinct from America’s desire to compete with Beijing for great-power status. But that mattered little. The vision for global trade was the same: Cargo would leave Indian ports, cross the Arabian Sea, and unload in the UAE. From there, freight would be transferred to rail and moved through Saudi Arabia and Jordan to Israel. In Israel, cargo would reach the port of Haifa and then continue by ship to European ports in Cyprus, Greece, and beyond. 

>This was only the beginning. The nations that make up IMEC further envisioned that data cables, electricity, and hydrogen would travel along this route.

>This is no small undertaking. An Atlantic Council report estimated that it would cost roughly $5 billion to make the concept “minimally operational.” Much more work and spending are necessary. But money and logistics may be the least of the challenges.

>The war spurred by the Hamas slaughter on October 7, 2023, froze the political process. The viability of the corridor depends on cooperation among Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, the UAE, India, and Europe. The Saudis are not ready to take the plunge without a path toward a Palestinian state, while the Israelis are simply not ready to recognize a Palestinian state at this stage of the game.

>Meanwhile, the 2026 war has created a paradox. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the disruption at Gulf ports, and the rise in insurance and shipping costs have put a dent in IMEC’s prospects. And yet, the crisis has undeniably made the case for IMEC’s importance.

>_____________

>Saudi Arabia’s leaders understand this paradox. And they understand that IMEC is their best bet for a better Middle East. But their reticence to move forward opened the door for alternative alliance structures with nonaligned players. Here is where STEP comes into play.

>Pakistan’s unlikely ascension as a regional power during this war remains inexplicable, but ascend it has. One minute it was a basket case without a regional identity. The next, it emerged as one of the Trump administration’s top partners to end the Iran war. Never mind that Pakistan was a key enabler of al-Qaeda and the Taliban during America’s yearslong effort to bring stability to Afghanistan. Never mind that the country has a long history of illicit proliferation of nuclear know-how. Pakistan’s relationships with Iran, China, and other malign actors provided Washington with an interlocutor in the effort to reopen the Strait of Hormuz after the Iranian regime imposed its blockade.

>But the Pakistanis are not supporters of U.S. policies in the Middle East. The country’s leaders suddenly see an opportunity to shape the region. The weakening and potential collapse of the Iranian regime have created opportunities that are impossible to ignore. And for Sunni powers like Pakistan, the idea of claiming regional dominance at the expense of Iran, a Shiite power, is particularly enticing.

>In pursuit of its regional vision, Islamabad enlisted other Sunni powers: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt. Pakistan already enjoyed bilateral ties with these states. But the October 7 wars nudged these countries closer together—both out of fear of a regional vacuum that rivals might leverage, and the desire to empower the Sunni bloc while Israel took on the Shia regime in Tehran and its proxies throughout the region.

>STEP foreign ministers met for the first time on March 19, 2026, in Riyadh on the sidelines of a gathering of Arab and Islamic diplomats that condemned Iran’s attacks on the Arab Gulf states. Less than two weeks later, they convened in Islamabad “to discuss regional de-escalation, amid the U.S.–Israel conflict with Iran.” The ministers gathered for a third time in Antalya, Turkey, the following month. Egypt hosted a fourth meeting in June. By then, this grouping was being described as the “Quadrilateral” or “R4.”

>These four Sunni powers have undeniably forged an important alliance. But they lack a coherent strategy. Interests diverge on many key areas. But it remains a means to coordinate diplomacy and promote Sunni interests in the Muslim world.

>_____________

>If Pakistan’s involvement in STEP is problematic, Turkey’s involvement is alarming, pure and simple. The government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been a malign actor in the Middle East for more than two decades. A patron of Hamas, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Muslim Brotherhood, the Erdogan regime has grown increasingly dangerous. Today, its neo-Ottoman aspirations put the country at odds with Israel, Greece, and Cyprus. But its illiberal and anti-democratic policies at home also put it at odds with the West. With the weakening of Iran, Turkey sees opportunities to expand its power in the Middle East at the expense of its regional competitors: the Greeks, the Israelis, and even the Emiratis.

>For the other STEP countries, Ankara’s “regional ownership” doctrine offers an alternative to IMEC, and an alternative to the American-led vision for the region. Remarkably, this fact has not put any of the participating countries on the wrong side of Donald Trump. Erdogan, in particular, has found a way to maintain not just cordial ties with Donald Trump but a flourishing relationship. This is particularly difficult to fathom, given Erdogan’s repeated harsh critiques of Trump’s war against Iran.

>The Turkish government was, of course, responsible in part for the war that it condemns. The Erdogan government remains a top patron of Hamas, the group that sparked this war. And between 2012 and 2016, the Turkish leadership laundered $20 billion on behalf of the Iranian regime. Undeniably, some of those funds went on to fund the regime’s missile and drone programs, not to mention terror proxies.

>Ankara’s nonaligned foreign policy is precisely what the Erdogan government seeks to pursue alongside the other Sunni powers that remain ambivalent about the American-led world order—even as all four remain in it. For now, STEP affords them a diplomatic construct to pose as American allies while collectively challenging other U.S. allies and systems that do not align with their interests.

>_____________

>For Saudi Arabia, the combined funding, military might, geographic reach, and diplomatic alliances of STEP are tantalizing. But it is arguably the deepening of ties with Pakistan that is perhaps the most attractive to this weak Gulf power. A strategic mutual-defense agreement signed at Al-Yamamah Palace in September 2025 declared that “any aggression against either country shall be considered an aggression against both.” This is, in effect, a Pakistani nuclear umbrella for a country that has barely been able to muster a response to Iranian aggression.

>Improved Saudi–Turkish relations are also attractive. The Turks boast the second-largest army in NATO, equipped with arms produced by an indigenous defense industry that is rapidly expanding. The two Sunni powers were on opposite sides during the tumult of the Arab Spring; Turkey wanted to boost the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise while Riyadh sought to constrain it. Ties hit a low point after the 2018 murder of Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. That all now appears to be in the past. Recent rapprochement between the two countries produced major defense cooperation, including the roughly $3 billion drone deal.

>But Turkey is dangling more than that. With the war threatening Persian Gulf shipping lanes and Red Sea traffic alike, Turkey is aggressively promoting itself as an energy hub and a way for Saudi Arabia (and others) to bypass the vulnerable maritime chokepoints of the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. This includes the “Iraq Development Road,” a rail-and-highway link running from the Persian Gulf to Turkish ports via Iraq; and a revived Hejaz Railway, an Ottoman-era line that would carry Gulf cargo to Europe through Syria and Jordan (conspicuously circumventing Israel). Both projects are still notional. But the Hejaz memorandum that Ankara and Riyadh inked in June 2026 suggests that Saudi Arabia is ready to move ahead.

>The real value in STEP for Saudi Arabia, however, is the hedge it provides against American inconsistency in the Middle East and beyond. American inaction after Iran’s 2018 attack on the Abqaiq oil facility in Saudi Arabia was a wake-up call. Despite long-standing American vows to defend Saudi Arabia in the face of such aggression, the Trump administration did not mount a response. Shaky U.S. ties with the Europeans amid the Russian assault on Ukraine similarly fail to inspire confidence.

>The wars since October 7, 2023, have also revealed the limits of American power. Not only has the United States been unable to force an Iranian surrender, but the regime also continues to hammer American bases across the Persian Gulf. Moreover, the regime in Iran has shown a consistent ability to strike Saudi Arabia, not to mention Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, and other states. Even when America defends the skies of the Middle East against Iranian drones and missiles, American stocks of defensive weapons dwindle.

>Finally, the Saudis are fearful of America’s political trajectory. The possibility of an isolationist Republican or a spineless Democrat ascending to the presidency in 2028 is real. There is simply no guarantee that the Saudis will remain in the good graces of American foreign policy in the post-Trump era.

>The Trump administration understands the Saudi conundrum. And it is actively wooing Saudi Arabia on multiple fronts. During Mohammed bin Salman’s White House visit on November 18, 2025, Trump announced his intent to designate Saudi Arabia a Major Non-NATO Ally and signed a strategic defense agreement. The administration approved a path toward the purchase of advanced American F-35 aircraft, U.S. tanks, and chips for the advancement of Saudi artificial intelligence.

>Then, on July 22, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman signed a nuclear-cooperation agreement. The Trump administration called the agreement the legal foundation for “a decades-long, multi-billion-dollar partnership.” The deal requires congressional review, and lawmakers warned that it could contribute to a regional arms race. Notably, the agreement does not prohibit Saudi enrichment, a central concern because enrichment capability can have both civilian and military implications. One day after signing the agreement, Trump posted that the deal “is totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords.” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the agreement was “off” unless Riyadh normalized relations with Israel.

>Days later, the Greeks shot down two Iranian missiles over Saudi Arabia. Amid reports of dwindling American missile defense, Athens stepped into the breach. Greek Patriot missile-defense batteries have been stationed in Saudi Arabia since 2021, protecting the Aramco oil company’s infrastructure from Houthi threats, but there is now talk of extending what is already one of Greece’s longest overseas military commitments.

>The Greeks are taking their ties with Riyadh even further. The East-to-Med Data Corridor, a Greek telecom/Saudi joint venture, will link Gulf data hubs to Europe via undersea cable designed to carry more than 180 terabits per second. A parallel three-gigawatt Saudi-Greek electricity interconnection is also planned. The two governments also inked 23 joint initiatives spanning trade, investment, infrastructure, and shipbuilding. 

>But for every positive step forward, the Saudis continue to step back. The multifront war in the Middle East continues, with false charges of Israeli war crimes leveled almost daily. American resolve continues to waver. And India, a key player in IMEC, has been notably absent from any meaningful effort to curb Iranian aggression. To complicate matters further, a serious rift has emerged between the Saudis and the Emiratis. Once close allies, these two Gulf Arab neighbors now adopt opposing positions on nearly every major issue in the region. With the Emiratis squarely in the U.S.-Israeli alliance, Saudi Arabia is tempted to bolt in the other direction—towards STEP.

>The Saudis are key to the success of IMEC. But more important, between their vast financial resources and religious influence in the wider Muslim world, they are the key to regional stability. Should Riyadh align with Israel, India, Greece, and the UAE, it would not only ensure the facilitation of energy and goods across a crucial geopolitical region. It would solidify a U.S.-led alliance, yield more normalization agreements, boost prosperity, and fortify the defense structures needed to prevent the kinds of wars now playing out across the Middle East.

>But the problems raised by the current war loom large. The inability of the United States to secure a victory, let alone defend the skies over Saudi Arabia, has left Riyadh in a perpetual state of doubt. The Turks, Egyptians, and Pakistanis continue to offer an alternative. Only a decisive American victory and an Iranian defeat can put IMEC back on track and pave the way for a new regional order.

>From 1987 to 1990, an African millionaire set out on a personal mission advocating reparations to African countries as a form of Western atonement for the transatlantic slave trade. M.K.O. Abiola was a Nigerian businessman who traveled extensively in the United States and elsewhere to convince audiences of what he saw as a moral imperative to compensate Africa and its vast diaspora for the evils committed against them. His effort foundered, but it did serve as a valuable test run for the African reparations initiative that is now underway.

>Abiola’s spirited transnational campaign culminated in two major high-level and widely publicized conferences on reparations, the first in Lagos (1990) and the second, billed as the “First Pan-African Conference on Reparations,” in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja (1993). These successes—along with Abiola’s relentlessness—caught the attention of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), an intergovernmental organization made up of 52 countries. The OAU went ahead and installed him as the chairman of a 12-member Group of Eminent Persons to “pursue reparations for slavery and (perhaps) other wrongs perpetrated on Africa.” This was the high-water mark of Abiola’s work. He died mysteriously in government custody in July 1998 after leading a campaign to reverse the military’s annulment of his legitimate election to the Nigerian presidency in 1993. Lacking Abiola’s intensity and financial backing, the reparations campaign petered out.

>Today, an elite group from Ghana has decided to pick up where the Nigerian philanthropist left off. Addressing the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September 2023, then–Ghanaian President John Akufo-Addo agonized about what he called “the historical injustices that have fashioned the structures of the world,” including that “much of Europe and the United States” was built using “the vast wealth harvested from the sweat, tears, blood, and horrors” accruing from the transatlantic slave trade and colonization. Akufo-Addo used this observation to make a case for “bring[ing] the subject of reparations firmly to the fore,” even though he acknowledged that “no amount of money will ever make up for the horrors.”

>Akufo-Addo’s successor, John Dramani Mahama (this is his second presidency; he previously served from 2012 to 2017), has shown similar gusto in his pursuit of reparations for Africa and its diaspora. With support from the African Union (the successor organization to the OAU) and some Caribbean nations, Mahama spearheaded a March 2026 United Nations General Assembly resolution “dedicated exclusively to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade.” Citing “the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity,” the resolution noted that “in various historical contexts, reparations and other forms of redress have been provided in respect of other grave crimes committed against particular groups, reflecting the principle under international law that international wrongful acts entail a duty of reparation.” The resolution called on member states to “engage in inclusive, good-faith dialogue on reparatory justice, including a full and formal apology, measures of restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, guarantees of non-repetition and changes to laws, programs and services to address racism and systemic discrimination.” It passed with 123 votes in favor, although the United States, Israel, and 52 other countries—including European Union members and Britain—either opposed or ​abstained.

>Britain’s abstention is interesting when you consider that, back in 1993, 63 members of the UK Parliament had supported a motion that “welcomed” the Abuja Proclamation issued that year. Along with others, Britain had also called on “the international community to recognize that the unprecedented moral debt owed to African people has yet to be paid” and pledged support to the OAU “as it intensifies its efforts to pursue the cause of reparations.”

>In any case, President Mahama followed up the March resolution with a high-level consultative conference on “the next steps.” Held in Accra in June, the event was attended by heads of state from Namibia, Liberia, Senegal, Barbados, and São Tomé and Príncipe. It ended with “a 19-point global framework” that demands “full, formal and unconditional apologies” from “states and non-state institutions” that played a “role in the trafficking of enslaved Africans and African Descendants and the racialized chattel enslavement of Africans.” Attendees also “resolved to ensure fair and adequate compensation for the people of Africa and People of African Descent, including those affected by the legacies of enslavement, colonialism genocide [sic] and apartheid.”

>Before we consider the merits of the case for “reparatory justice,” it is important to understand why Ghana is leading the contemporary campaign. In 1957, Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African nation to gain formal independence, and it has always seen itself as a “beacon” for the complete liberation and unification of Africa. Its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, set this conviction in stone with his statement that Ghana’s independence “is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa.” If, for Nkrumah, Ghana’s independence meant nothing without freedom for all of Africa, similarly, African independence meant little unless understood as an aspect of liberation for black people everywhere, especially in the United States. That’s where Nkrumah, who had attended the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1940s, had gotten a taste of what life was like for the average Negro of that era.

>There was an ideological affinity between Nkrumah and major African-American civil rights figures of his time. This is evidenced by the fact that Ghana’s historic independence celebration in 1957 was attended by Martin Luther King Jr. This came after Louis Armstrong had visited the soon-to-be-free country and met with Nkrumah in May 1956. W.E.B. Du Bois first visited in 1960 before relocating there permanently the following year at the age of 93. Malcolm X visited in 1964, where he encountered another relocated American, Maya Angelou, and spoke to the Ghanaian Parliament. Subsequently, generations of civil rights activists and political malcontents of various stripes have embraced the country as a kind of political home-cum–spiritual retreat.

>Because there is arguably nothing dearer to a Ghanaian leader’s heart than being viewed as extending the legacy of Nkrumah, successive Ghanaian leaders have continued to toe the line, touting the country as the birthplace of Africans in the diaspora. There was President John Kufuor’s 2001 “right of abode” law allowing Africans in the diaspora to settle in Ghana; the Joseph Project, launched on the occasion of the country’s 50th anniversary, in 2007; and the declaration of 2019 as the “Year of Return” to mark “400 years of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Jamestown, Virginia.” All of these were intended to advance the idea of Ghana as the spiritual motherland of a putative “Global African Family.”

>One indication of the success of this outreach is that, since 2014, more than 1,000 Americans and Afro-Caribbeans have obtained Ghanaian citizenship—Stevie Wonder became a Ghanaian citizen on his 74th birthday, in 2024—joining an estimated 5,000 African Americans who currently call the country home. Ghana has also opened its doors to third-country deportees from the United States on condition that they are citizens of other West African countries.

>All things considered, Ghana’s leadership of the reparations campaign is an extension of its heritage diplomacy.

>_____________

>Nonetheless, neither the goodness of its advocates’ intentions and their seemingly illustrious pedigree, nor the favorability of the international political environment suffices to alter the basic fact that the demand for “reparatory justice” is both intellectually implausible and morally dubious. The Accra “global framework for reparatory justice” portrays “the trafficking of enslaved Africans and the racialized chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity” in “its unparalleled scale, duration, systemic brutality, and enduring consequences that continue to structure the lives of all people through racialized regimes of labour, property, and capital.”

>The kernel of this claim is that Africa deserves reparations because of (a) the unprecedented nature of the transatlantic slave trade, and (b) the fact that, even today, its consequences continue to reverberate, mainly through the operations of capital, which is what the reference to “racialized regimes of labour, property, and capital” is meant to capture. From this perspective, not only is capitalism the contemporary version of “chattel enslavement,” hence continuous with it morally and materially, but “reparatory justice” for Africans is impossible unless capital, “racialized” or not, is totally abolished.

>While the elemental inhumanity of the transatlantic slave trade goes without saying, and while the Accra document is right to underscore it, the point remains that the framework gets nearly every other thing about it—especially its fundamental character—wrong. Take the charge of the trafficking and enslavement of Africans being “the gravest crime against humanity.” History being “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind,” as Gibbon puts it, it is necessarily replete with victims and perpetrators. Accordingly, every victimized group in a specific historic context could reasonably conceive of itself as being on the receiving end of “the gravest crime against humanity.” My point is not to deny that enslavement was hideous; rather, I am arguing that a crime (against Africans or any group of people for that matter) need not be “the gravest” before it arouses our moral revulsion. If everything hinges on a particular crime being “the gravest,” and given that there is no objective criterion to measure such, the argument is lost and the moral high ground surrendered the moment some other victim of a historical injustice comes forward to advance a similar plea.

>While it is not a straightforward matter whether the transatlantic slave trade was “the gravest crime against humanity,” surely it was a crime. It was a crime and a monumental tragedy from the perspective of tens of millions of black human lives that were sacrificed on the twin altars of greed and human stupidity. That said—and this is a crucial point—there is scant historical support for the tacit assumption that it was an organized and systematic assault against hapless Africans who, but for lack of military wherewithal, would have risen up against and repelled their enslavers. The historical evidence is more sobering. As John Thornton wrote in Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (1998): “African participation in the slave trade was voluntary and under the control of African decision makers. This was not just at the surface level of daily exchange but even at deeper levels. Europeans possessed no means, either economic or military, to compel African leaders to sell slaves.” This conclusion is not controversial among serious historians of the transatlantic slave trade. It also helps explain the historical absurdity of those newfangled European abolitionists who, as it were, had suddenly started seeing the trade through a different moral lens and began struggling to convince African traffickers, until a minute ago their trading partners, of the wrongfulness of the enterprise.

>If European abolitionists did not become saints overnight, African chiefs who insisted on business as usual were hardly Satanic. They were instead agents following a brutal social logic: So integral was enslavement to the internal workings and moral order of most African communities in that period that it is difficult to conceive of their functioning without it. Historically, a pre-colonial African kingdom that did not extract slaves from a vanquished vassal was as rare as one that did not regularly engage in slave raids. In the 1840s, Gezo, king of the West African state of Dahomey, told the importuning British, “The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth.… The mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.” In this, he echoed a sentiment that was not uncommon for the time.

>Indeed, not only was trade in human beings par for the course, many believed that it was God’s will. After Britain declared all slave trading illegal in 1807, the King of Bonny (now part of Nigeria) doubled down in a tone not all that different from that of King Gezo: “We think this trade must go on. That is the verdict of our oracle and the priests. They say that your country, however great, can never stop a trade ordained by God himself.” Nigerian historian P.A. Igbafe observed about the pre-colonial Benin Kingdom that the institution of slavery was “one of its main props.” This could well have been said about every single pre-colonial African kingdom. The Asante Empire, with its capital in Kumasi—located in present-day Ghana—was a slave-owning one.

>Rather than a “definitive break in world history,” therefore, the transatlantic slave trade was coextensive with it. That it was egregious in its brutality is without question, but it was a trade involving two sides and, crucially, seems to have unfolded within a moral and social calculus in which you were either traded or trader. It is one thing to recognize its sheer ugliness and another thing entirely to misrepresent it, which the campaigners for reparatory justice flagrantly do.

>The transatlantic slave trade, moreover, is just one of three momentous episodes of human trafficking in African history, the other two being the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades. Consider this: The transatlantic slave trade lasted roughly 400 years. The trans-Saharan lasted for 1,300 years, and it preceded, overlapped with, and continued long after the transatlantic slave trade had ceased. Focusing solely on the transatlantic trade leads one to think that those behind the ongoing campaign are less interested in historical accuracy and more interested in exploiting the supposed “lingering trauma” of the transatlantic slave trade for purposes of political flagellation.

>_____________

>Following the March UN General Assembly resolution, analysts were quick to point out that, although the resolution was adopted by a majority, the United States, Israel, and 52 other countries either opposed or ​abstained. But the stance of these dissenting countries is less significant than the fact that Arab countries overwhelmingly endorsed the resolution. Several, including Qatar, were among the resolution’s 58 co-sponsors.

>The naked hypocrisy of Arab countries passing judgment on a matter on which they should be standing trial is duly noted, but it raises another matter: Why did the countries that voted in support of the resolution do so? My intuition is that many simply wanted to avoid unnecessary controversy. After all, why vote no when you can blend with the furniture by voting yes? If I am correct, it means that the broad support that the reparatory-justice campaign takes for granted may not be there. Perhaps the large number of those who are apparently on board with the resolution understand, deep down, that the campaign is heading nowhere. They therefore have nothing to lose and everything to gain from identifying with a cause that has the added advantage of being regarded as just.

>Beyond questions of historical accuracy, the campaign betrays a staggering lack of imagination on the part of its proponents. While in recent decades conversations about Africa have been dominated by a need to take African agency more seriously, the advocacy for reparatory justice reveals a nagging moral extraversion whereby many African leaders continue to obsess about the role of the outside world in their affairs. Wittingly or not, the campaigners are sending a misleading signal that Africa cannot develop until it is reimbursed for an injury that Europeans once ganged up to inflict on it. This is the flip side of the abject idea that other regions of the world, Europe and North America especially, have succeeded at the expense of Africa and Africans. To say that this is the last attitude Africa needs is an understatement. The campaign is an exercise in futility that can only divert from the region’s real problems. In the meantime, it is allowing corrupt and ineffective leaders to disguise their incompetence behind the facade of “historical reckoning.”

>Europe’s “wealth won’t last” unless it can salvage its auto industry and establish a beneficial relationship with Chinese carmakers opening factories in the region, said the head of one of the world’s top parts makers.

>Francisco Riberas, chair and founder of Gestamp, told the FT the European car industry faced an existential crisis having been “asleep” while China stole a march in electric vehicles and the US threw up import barriers against Chinese cars.

>“What Europe should really be worried about is losing the automotive industry,” said Riberas, speaking at the Madrid headquarters of Gestamp, whose 42,000 employees supply most of the world’s top carmakers from factories in 24 countries.

>“The automotive industry is the anchor for many other industries — steel, aluminium, glass, the chemical industry and so on. So, losing the automotive industry could mean losing industry itself in Europe, and that would have far-reaching consequences.”

>Welding robots at a Gestamp plant. The company sees itself as a global leader in the production of metal components including car bodies, chassis and door hinges

>Loading the machine at the plant. Europe’s production of vehicles has plunged by 20-25% since 2017 © Cristina Núñez Baquedano/FT

>The European auto industry is in a fight for survival as competition from more technologically advanced and cost-efficient China rivals such as BYD and SAIC Motor undercuts sales and forces thousands of job losses.

>“Europe has to return to its original model from many years ago — the model that gave us the standard of living we enjoy today, which is the result of technology applied to the industrial revolution,” Riberas said. “That’s the model. Otherwise, we are just 5 per cent of the world’s population. We are wealthy, but our wealth won’t last.”

>Since 2017, when global auto output peaked, Europe’s production of vehicles — including those exported beyond the continent — has plunged by a dramatic 20-25 per cent, Riberas noted. The industry’s woes are particularly marked in Germany, the continent’s biggest car producer ahead of Spain.

>As Chinese manufacturers erode the businesses of European rivals, the continent is locked in a debate over whether investments from those same companies — which are seeking to manufacture in Europe — represent salvation or a road to self-destruction.

>Riberas said Chinese companies should be welcomed, albeit with caveats. “Ultimately, who makes the cars isn’t the most important thing. What’s important is that they’re made here and that they create jobs here. I think that’s something people sometimes forget.”

>European automotive manufacturing accounts for about 7 per cent of the continent’s GDP and supports nearly 14mn jobs.

>But Riberas said it was vital for Europe’s industrial future that Chinese makers turn to local suppliers for components rather than importing them from China and simply bolting them together on European soil.

>For every job in a European car plant, there have traditionally been three jobs in European component manufacturing, he said.

>Gestamp, which he founded in 1997, bills itself as a global leader in the production of metal components including car bodies, chassis and door hinges, some made via a hot stamping process that makes them ultra-resilient.

>But he noted that Gestamp had “very few” contracts with Chinese carmakers in Europe.

>“Among the cars being produced in Europe [by Chinese carmakers], most of the components are essentially being imported from China,” the Gestamp chair said. “What is still missing is the second phase, where they actually manufacture them here.

>“If it turns out that all we’re doing is getting the cars assembled here while all the components come from China, we’ve destroyed the entire value chain.”

>European automotive manufacturing accounts for about 7% of the continent’s GDP . . . 

>. . . and supports nearly 14mn jobs © Cristina Núñez Baquedano/FT

>China’s Chery assembles vehicles in Barcelona while Xpeng builds vehicles at contract manufacturer Magna Steyr’s plant in Austria. Leapmotor is planning to start production in Spain later this year. BYD plans to start mass producing its vehicles in Hungary by the end of this year.

>Riberas also complained about the lack of a “level playing field” on financing with Chinese competitors. While the European auto sector is “not considered attractive to the financial world”, he said Chinese companies have access to abundant funding that means “they are often investing with a zero cost of capital in effect”. He called that “an advantage that cannot be tolerated”.

>In response to worries about Chinese investments not generating local benefits, the European Union is creating a landmark law called the Industrial Accelerator Act. It will give member states the power to veto any Chinese FDI exceeding €100mn in certain strategic sectors. The act, which is yet to become law, also includes a proposed 70 per cent local content threshold for car components if investments are to qualify for subsidies or public contracts.

>Beijing has lashed out at the act, accusing the EU of “engaging in protectionism”. The IAA does not, however, contain any stringent requirements for Chinese manufacturers to share their world-beating battery or EV technology with European partners — an area where critics of Chinese investment fear Europe is being left in the dark.

>Chinese carmakers from BYD to Chery have all pledged to increase the use of European-made car parts as they expand sales across the continent and face pressure to meet the IAA’s proposed “Made in Europe” requirements.

>Western carmakers that have partnered with Chinese rivals to fill idle capacity at their European plants are also designing their joint ventures to encourage more use of European supply chains. They include a Stellantis tie-up with Dongfeng and a Ford partnership in Spain with Geely.

>Still, the transition away from Chinese suppliers is expected to take time because they are significantly cheaper.

>Gestamp has 13 factories in China, a number second only to its 22 in Spain, and supplies many Chinese producers, including Li Auto, Xiaomi Auto and Beijing Benz Automotive, a Mercedes-Benz joint venture.

>Riberas was supportive of the IAA, which he described as “defensive” but necessary for Europe. “It’s not just about taking a protectionist approach. We also need to shield ourselves, to some extent, from situations that may not be fair, and buy ourselves some time,” he said.

>“With each passing day, more companies are going under . . . And once that industrial base is lost, it won’t come back.”

>Gestamp recorded revenues of €12.4bn in 2023 but has posted two years of declines since then due to the struggles of many of its customers. Its revenue for 2025 came in at €11.5bn.

>Beyond defensive measures, Riberas said that Europe, including its policymakers, needed a plan for its car industry — the kind of plan that China has had “for many years” and has been implementing single mindedly.

>“That plan requires everyone to pull together and work hard — something we sometimes seem to forget,” Riberas said.

>“It also requires investing heavily in technology and making the most of the wave of digitalisation and artificial intelligence to improve our competitiveness. We must also recognise that some of what we have today will no longer be competitive.”

>PERHAPS AI WILL eventually make many humans unemployable—but there is no sign of it yet. On September 4th the Bureau of Labour Statistics reported that the American economy added 162,000 jobs in August, far above expectations. The unemployment rate is just 4.1%, lower than in almost 90% of months over the past half-century. Young workers, often cast as AI’s first victims, are holding up remarkably well: the gap between unemployment among 20-24-year-olds and the overall rate is close to a multi-decade low.

>Some companies and workers are being severely disrupted by AI. Hiring in professional and business services is running about 10% below the average in 2015-19.Tech giants like Microsoft and Meta are trimming headcounts as they reorganise their businesses around the technology. Smaller firms such as Block, the owner of Square and Cash App, and Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, are replacing people with bots. American companies have announced some 16,000 AI-related job cuts a month on average so far this year, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an employment consultancy.

>But AI-related lay-offs gets lost in the churning jobs market where employers shed roughly 1.7m workers in a typical month. And the evidence so far is that AI is already creating a lot of jobs to replace those it has destroyed. The vast sums pouring into data centres and power generation have set off a race for construction and infrastructure workers. AI startups are hiring like there is no tomorrow. Incumbents racing to keep up are creating new AI roles. And by making some workers more productive, AI may be increasing demand for their services.

>Add it all up, and The Economist estimates that AI has so far created around 1m new jobs in America. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 lay-offs attributed to AI since mid-2023, and appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles. America’s AI infrastructure splurge has created many of them. The spending on the kit needed to make AI run—from chips and servers to data centres, cooling systems and power—is roughly $500bn a year above what it was in 2022, when the world got to know ChatGPT, calculates Goldman Sachs, a bank. Data-centre construction alone is proceeding at an annual rate of more than $75bn, nearly 60% higher than a year ago, according to Census Bureau data. That building spree requires armies of workers: electricians to wire them, HVAC specialists to stop racks from overheating, grid engineers to hook them up to the power supply and technicians to install and maintain the machines.

>The hiring boom is visible in the numbers. The Economist tracked five industries at the heart of the data-centre build-out, from electrical contracting to equipment manufacturing. Since 2023 employment in them has risen by roughly 320,000 more than broader construction and manufacturing trends would suggest (see chart 1). The Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) expects utilities to be the fastest-growing big sector between now and 2035.

>Not all of those jobs owe their existence to AI—grid upgrades and other factory building matters too. But lots of them do. Indeed, a jobs website, finds that data-centre vacancies have more than doubled in two years even as job postings overall have fallen. LinkedIn, a social network for strivers, estimates that nearly half a million data-centre jobs were created between 2023 and 2025 in America, with data-centre technicians and engineers among the most common recent hires.

>The scramble for workers is showing up in pay cheques, too. Indeed finds that installation and maintenance jobs at data centres advertise wages about 40% higher than comparable work elsewhere. Official wage data tell a similar story. In the year to June, average hourly earnings rose more than 13% in electrical-equipment manufacturing and nearly 8% among electrical contractors.

>Even with the pay gains, workers are still not easy to find. On a recent visit to a transformer factory, Donald Leavens of the National Electrical Manufacturers Association asked the company’s chief executive what help she needed most. “Can you come up here and run one of our lines for me?” she replied.

>It is not just hard hats that are proliferating. AI is also creating a new class of white-collar jobs. Engineers build the models, data annotators label their inputs and judge their answers, “forward-deployed” engineers adapt them for customers, and newly minted “heads of AI” decide what companies should do with the technology. Some of these roles barely existed until recently. Many are quickly growing in number. Postings for heads of AI, AI engineers and directors of AI have roughly doubled since 2023-24, according to LinkedIn.

>The numbers are starting to add up. Preliminary research by Gad Levanon, chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute, uses the research outfit’s career history database (which mostly relies on LinkedIn career histories) to identify jobs that would not exist without AI, whether at AI-native firms or because they are AI-specific roles at other companies. He reckons roughly 1% of professional jobs are now “AI jobs”—on the order of 1m positions in America. In computer occupations and life sciences—including researchers using AI to discover new drugs—the share is 4-5%. LinkedIn’s own analysis points to roughly 640,000 new AI-specific jobs between 2023 and 2025. “To date, the evidence suggests that AI has been a net job creator,” says Kory Kantenga, head of economics for the Americas at LinkedIn.

>The Economist tracked employment in professional occupations closest to the AI boom—engineers, software developers, mathematicians and data scientists—and compared their growth since 2022 with professional employment overall. These roles have added roughly 730,000 jobs above trend in recent years (see chart 2). AI will not have created every single one of them. But it has almost certainly created quite a few.

>A third source of jobs comes from productivity gains. AI allows lawyers to draft contracts faster and analysts to comb through financial filings in minutes. If higher productivity lowers the cost of professional services, it is possible that demand for them can rise enough to create more work overall.

>Some of the occupations once believed to be most vulnerable to AI seem to be benefiting from this effect. Between 2023 and 2025 employment among paralegals rose by about 11% and among market-research analysts by 6%, compared to a national average of around 2.5% (see chart 3). Despite dire warnings of imminent lay-offs, professional services are projected to keep growing rapidly thanks to demand for AI systems and consulting, according to BLS forecasts.

>Some professions are suffering. Since January 2023 employment has fallen by about 10% among customer-service workers, and by roughly 15% among secretaries and administrative assistants. All three are heavy on routine tasks at which AI agents increasingly excel. The BLS expects office and administrative-support occupations to shed 752,000 jobs by 2035.

>But as AI capabilities expand, it is likely to keep creating new jobs. More than 6m Americans now work in computer-related occupations that did not exist in the pre-computer era. Another 8m work in new industries like the gig economy, e-commerce and content creation. Tomorrow’s workers may supervise teams of autonomous agents or settle disputes between them. Fanciful? Maybe. But so was being an influencer a decade or two ago. ■

>On a flight from Queenstown, New Zealand, to Sydney in July, I sat next to Niall, an Irishman who had lived in Australia for 15 years and was considering moving home. I’ve never met an Irish person I didn’t connect with, and Niall was no exception. Somewhere over the Tasman Sea, our conversation turned to Ireland’s relationship with the Jewish people.

>Niall was shocked when I blurted out: “I love Ireland, but I doubt I will ever visit the Emerald Isle again. Your government hates people like me.”

>Growing up, my Israeli mother’s best friend, Anita Leeman, was Irish, and from age 5, I considered her my best friend, too. Our families were so connected that her family connected with ours in Israel to meet my grandparents. She would invite us for Christmas in Valley Stream, N.Y., where I can still remember the scent of the tree and the dancing flames that lit up the fireplace. Years later, in 2010, the Irish government invited me to visit as a travel writer. I was excited, knowing I would receive a warm welcome.

>Dublin has since drifted away from Israel, in both antagonistic speeches and the law. Ireland recognized a Palestinian state in May 2024. In July 2026, the Dáil, Irish parliament’s lower house, passed the Occupied Territories Bill to ban trade tied to Israeli settlements, making Ireland the first European Union nation to enact a commercial blockade on Israeli goods. The Jewish state no longer even has an embassy in Dublin.

>Ireland is moving in the wrong direction, and in doing so it seems to have forgotten how deeply Jewish people helped shape the modern Irish state.

>Robert Briscoe, an Orthodox Jew, procured arms for Irish Republican Army leader Michael Collins during the War of Independence. Briscoe served in the Dáil for 38 years. In 1956 he became Dublin’s Lord Mayor.

>Rabbi Isaac Herzog, the first chief rabbi of Ireland and the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, learned fluent Irish. He supported independence so strongly that people called him the “Sinn Féin rabbi.” His son Chaim grew up in Dublin, boxed as the country’s youth bantamweight champion, then became Israel’s sixth president. Chaim’s son Isaac is Israel’s current president. I wonder if the Dublin city councillors trying to strip Chaim’s name off a local park know their own history.

>Ireland has a history of antisemitism, too. A boycott started in Limerick in 1904 drove out most of the Jewish families there. In the 1930s, Dublin largely turned away Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis. Days after Hitler’s suicide, in May 1945, Ireland’s head of government, Éamon de Valera, visited the German envoy in Dublin, Eduard Hempel, to offer his condolences.

>This legacy continues in the form of the baseless hatred flowing toward Ireland’s 2,200 Jewish residents. The Jewish Representative Council recorded 143 antisemitic incidents from July 2025 to January 2026, ranging from “Jew Rat” graffiti to direct harassment of students on university campuses and Holocaust denial.

>I told Niall I’d faced hostility for speaking out against antisemitism and anti-Zionism. He listened, then said that he’d seen many antisemitic conspiracy theories spreading on Irish social media.

>“If Jewish people controlled the world,” I said, “why would we allow everyone to hate us? It makes no sense. And I clearly didn’t get the memo, because my hometown of Phoenix wouldn’t be 115 degrees every July if I had any say in the matter.”

>He burst out laughing. A difficult conversation didn’t end a connection; it forged a friendship. If only Ireland’s leaders would reflect on their history and remember who helped build their nation in the first place.

>When I was 11, Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, arrived unannounced at the mosque next to my family’s home in Gaza City. It was 2001 and the Islamist terrorist group, which had not yet taken control of Gaza, had turned the el-Yarmouk mosque into a base for proselytizing and propaganda.

>My friends and I gathered around as Sheikh Yassin chatted with us about our neighborhood, families and studies, almost as if he were the village elder. Once he went into the mosque, his guards showed off their weapons and boasted to us that Hamas was akin to an exclusive club for the valiant “resistance.” It required obedience to one’s family, religious piety, academic excellence, a spotless reputation and useful skills and talents.

>It was a message I heard many times from leaders and members of Hamas: It wanted the best of the Palestinian people to build the foundations for a Palestinian resistance motivated by fundamentalist Islam, with Israel’s annihilation leading to a single nation from the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea.

>Hamas was driving us to bloodshed as even the Palestinian leadership, under the Palestine Liberation Organization, had decided that armed resistance was futile and had begun building the foundations of a Palestinian state that I saw as a child.

>Our family flew on the newly established Palestinian Airlines into the newly created Gaza International Airport, using bright new Palestinian passports. There were Palestinian telecommunication companies, an industrial zone, a newly discovered gas field, the start of a seaport, new infrastructure and a growing financial sector, all hallmarks of a march toward statehood that the Oslo Peace Process, however flawed, had ushered in. Gaza, despite its complicated history, was a beautiful place that meant so much to my family — and it seemed that it was about to get even more promising.

>But it was not to be. Four years after I met Sheikh Yassin, Israel pulled all its troops and settlements from the Gaza Strip. Two years later, in 2007, Hamas seized power after winning the first and last free and competitive Palestinian legislative elections the prior year.

>Despite its posturing as an elite club, Hamas, from its inception, behaved like a mob of gangsters, brutalizing Palestinian women who violated its fanatic sense of morality, torturing and killing those who were suspected of opposing them and carrying out grisly suicide attacks against Israeli civilians, which weakened the Palestinian Authority and empowered the extremist right in Israel, which seized the opportunity to destroy hopes of a new Palestinian horizon or future.

>Now, in the ruins of my once beautiful homeland, we are witnessing the coda of the group’s two decades of horrific rule. By agreeing in principle to a disarmament plan after its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and slaughter of hundreds of civilians led to over two years of Israeli bombardment that killed tens of thousands of Gazans, including much of my family, Hamas is acknowledging what Palestinian leadership knew 30 years ago: that only peace could lead to freedom and armed struggle was a disastrous strategy.

>Hamas should have no role in Gaza’s future but, appallingly, so many in the West who consider themselves allies of the Palestinian people still see the group as honorable resistance fighters. Their support for, or failure to denounce, the group only helps perpetuate the degradation of Gaza.

>I left the Gaza Strip one month before the Israeli withdrawal in 2005 for a State Department-sponsored high school exchange program in California. Yet as I was about to return in June 2006, Hamas attacked Israel and abducted an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, causing Israel to tighten its restrictions on the movement of people and cargo in and out of Gaza, which have intensified ever since. The closing of Gaza’s borders after the abduction forced me to return to the United States. With Hamas having expressed suspicion of my participation in a U.S. government program, I pursued political asylum.

>U.S. officials interviewed me on June 14, 2007, the very day that Hamas violently took over the Gaza Strip and ejected the Palestinian Authority, beginning a bloody tenure that set the stage for the Oct. 7 massacre and the destruction of Gaza.

>Hamas created a secret police and implemented a terrifying Stasi-style regime of torture and brutality in the strip. Hamas severed Gaza from the West Bank and built a rogue territory sustained by illicit activity, Iranian smuggling, predatory taxation and the theft of humanitarian and development aid that ballooned after its takeover, because it had no interest in governing responsibly or providing for its people.

>Hamas turned Gaza into a cautionary tale for Israel of what might happen under Palestinian self-governance. Revulsion at the group’s rockets, tunnels, smuggling and violence empowered Israel’s far right, which used Hamas’s actions to excuse their attack on the two-state solution.

>Repeated wars killed thousands of Palestinians and wounded or displaced hundreds of thousands, locking Gaza into a cycle of destruction, reconstruction, resource theft and deeper Hamas entrenchment. Billions of dollars were wasted and the development that I saw emerging as a child was arrested.

>This alone should have delegitimized Hamas among Western activists, academics, students, journalists, protesters, politicians and those who claim to be pro-Palestinian. Yet after Hamas carried out the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust on Oct. 7, triggering the worst catastrophe in modern Palestinian history, I watched with dismay and anger as activists, students, academics, politicians and writers expressed a chilling appreciation for the massacre.

>At a rally the day after the Hamas attack, organized and attended by people who became key supporters of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the “resistance” and “Intifada” were cheered. A day later, student groups announced that they stood “in full solidarity with Palestinian resistance” and that they hold “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Activists began referring to the Oct. 7 massacre by what Hamas called it, the Al-Aqsa Flood. The influential leftist streamer Hasan Piker, who campaigned for Mayor Mamdani, the Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and other Democrats, has normalized Hamas and praised other terrorist groups, even while he coyly denied supporting terror.

>The resistance narrative became a matter of solidarity with social justice groups and marginalized communities, with Hamas as a symbol of liberation. As a result, a poll in April found that 40 percent or more of Americans between 18 and 34 said they supported Hamas over Israel.

>When, in conversations, I urged activists, protesters and university students to pair cease-fire demands with calls for Hamas to release Israeli hostages, I was told this centered Zionist narratives. When I would beg them to pressure Hamas to surrender for Gaza’s sake, I was insulted and told resistance would continue indefinitely regardless of the cost.

>While many play verbal gymnastics to mask support for Hamas, or resist calls to denounce them, the rhetoric makes that support clear. Efforts by university administrators, the media or members of the public to push back against this devolution by pro-Palestinian activists were met with cries of censorship. Despite this obfuscation, the boundary between solidarity with the Palestinian people and endorsement of their Palestinian oppressors dissolved.

>As the horrors continued, the people of Gaza made it clearer, despite repression from Hamas, that they were disgusted with the group and wanted it out. There were several rounds of anti-Hamas protests during the war calling for the group to stop the disaster it began, to leave Gaza and release the hostages. Opposition to Hamas’s torture, extremism and failed governance has been strong and present for years. There were mass protests against the group in 2023 before Oct. 7, and in 2019 and 2017, sometimes under the banner of “We want to live.” Hamas brutally suppressed those demonstrations.

>The people of Gaza clearly did not matter to those claiming to champion Palestinian lives. Two months ago, 44 percent of American Muslims surveyed by Pew Research said they had a favorable view of Hamas, a number I believe understates the true level of support among Arab and Muslim diaspora communities. I cannot enter a mainstream Arab, Muslim or Palestinian American space and critique Hamas meaningfully without facing backlash or outright hostility.

>Hamas is now facing a humiliating defeat. Despite Israeli rejection of the initial phased disarmament framework, Hamas acquiesced to the Board of Peace’s demands. All the devastation was for nothing. Large segments of the pro-Palestinian community and Western left bet on a losing horse and embraced a rotten resistance narrative now invalidated by Hamas itself.

>The last thing Palestinians need is more denial from the left. The Palestinian national project has a rare chance to evolve toward nation-building, peace and coexistence alongside a Jewish Israel that is not about to be exterminated. Chants of “from the river to sea” and the like are destructive conceits.

>Gaza has no future as long as Hamas holds two million Palestinians hostage to its nihilistic agenda.

>The sentiments of those who resist the group are consistent: Hamas plunged Gaza and its people into an abyss that will require generations to rise from.

>Gaza is propped up by an unsustainable mix of U.N. agencies, sprawling nongovernmental organizations, a merchant-run private sector and the remnants of Hamas’s administrative and security networks. A transition can begin only if Hamas implements the disarmament plan it has already accepted in principle, without waiting for Israel to accede, and signals genuine willingness to relinquish control of the strip. Dismantling the terror infrastructure Hamas built over two decades, with billions of dollars, will be difficult, but this war must be Gaza’s last.

>Unfortunately, nearly a year has passed without the necessary training of a new Gaza police force that, paired with an international security mission, would be essential to implementing disarmament and maintaining order. The technocratic committee of Palestinian professionals and nonpartisans that the Board of Peace set up after last October’s cease-fire to guide the transition to permanent governance — an excellent idea — has not been empowered to assume responsibilities.

>In the next decade, Gaza should become the pride of the Palestinian people and the crown jewel of Palestinian national identity. Gaza must become a model of effective Palestinian self-governance, strengthening confidence among allies and Israel that Palestinian aspirations center on freedom and prosperity, rather than Israel’s destruction.

>To achieve this, Gaza needs to be reimagined so it is no longer sustained by an NGO complex or a refugee framework. Gaza will need deep deradicalization across schools, mosques, media and public language to cultivate and produce builders and creators.

>Once security issues are credibly addressed and Gaza is placed on a new path, Israel would no longer have the justification it has used for decades to restrict the free movement of people and trade and to treat Gaza as an occupied nation. U.S. and international pressure could push Israel to change its approach to Gaza.

>A Palestinian miracle on the Mediterranean is within reach if Gaza rejects Islamism, Jihadism, Hamas and stale nationalist notions, all of which have left it devastated.

>Will those in the West who express support for Palestinians finally abandon their sloganeering about “resistance”? Effective pro-Palestinian advocacy can speak out against Israeli actions without the futile pursuit of Israel’s destruction.

>Some people want to make a point; others want to make a difference. The path forward demands the latter.

>Many European defence officials are pushing back against Brussels’ attempts to cut reliance on American tech giants, warning the move could leave Europe with inferior systems, greater cyber risks and problems in co-ordinating with Nato allies.

>As the continent races to re-arm in the face of Russian threats and Washington’s retrenchment, security officials acknowledge their dependence on the likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft is a geopolitical vulnerability. In response, the European Commission has proposed a new law that would bar the use of foreign technology in the most sensitive European systems.

>But two senior EU defence officials and several European defence contractors say using inferior European technology would leave the continent at greater risk, estimating that the US had an eight- to 10-year lead in cloud and AI defence platforms.

>“We’re still buying lots of American kit, frankly because we’d be less safe if we didn’t,” one of the officials told the FT.

>The Commission’s proposed Cloud and AI Development Act, presented in June, would force member states to evaluate the sensitivity of each public sector service, with the highest level requiring solely domestic tech. It estimates only 1 per cent of Europe’s public services would clear that bar.

>“The framework puts member states in the driving seat. They will determine, based on how critical a public sector activity is, the level of sovereignty assurance required,” the Commission said.

>But defence officials and executives said they fear the rules could prevent militaries from using American hyperscalers for some of their most sensitive operations before European alternatives are capable of replacing them.

>“Europe has already bought and installed the spinal cord from” US tech companies, said one European defence executive. “It’s impossible to do a transplant without killing the patient.”

>“Of course, we all want homegrown alternatives right now . . . [but] so many of the weapons we need every day just won’t work without US back end,” the executive added.

>One European diplomat said they are concerned that the strictest level is “not realistic” and that “currently no company — US or European — is able to meet this level”.

>Google, Amazon and Microsoft declined to comment. 

>Some US tech companies have already discussed the proposed legislation with defence ministers and Nato officials, according to people briefed on the discussions.

>Supporters of the Commission’s approach argue that European providers will struggle to scale unless governments create demand, and that sovereignty requirements can help establish a domestic market for critical cloud and AI providers.

>European aerospace and defence group Airbus announced in July it will move some of its most critical applications from US cloud provider AWS to French provider Scaleway.

>Finland’s foreign minister Elina Valtonen told the FT Helsinki was preparing for the risk that foreign suppliers could use a “kill switch” to cut off critical computing capabilities.

>Without mentioning the US, Valtonen added at a Chatham House think-tank event: “A country that cannot run essential systems under its own authority, or that of trusted partners, may discover at precisely the wrong moment whether the access that was promised was conditional or not.”

>“Our objective should be more practical: not to own every piece of the AI stack, but to ensure that no critical piece can simply be switched off,” she said.

>Commission officials also say it would take time to negotiate, pass and implement the legislation, giving the continent’s defence and cloud industry an opportunity to catch up before the strictest requirements bite.

>But defence officials and executives note that US cloud services are at the heart of cutting-edge hardware, such as US-made F-35 fighter jets.

>“While there is a clear appetite to seek more control over the digital environment of the programme, no country is going to throw away their F-35 just because it runs on a US digital cloud that they can’t replace easily or fast enough,” said Camille Grand, secretary-general of the European Aerospace, Security and Defence Industries Association.

>Grand said there was an understanding among European governments that moving away from non-EU cloud and technology providers was a difficult process. “Especially for defence products, there’s a timing issue,” he said. “It all depends on the scale of the shift and how fast you’re expected to do it.”

Restrictions on US cloud providers could also complicate co-ordination between allied militaries, which increasingly need to share huge quantities of battlefield data.

>“The battlefield is now digitised,” said James Appathurai, Nato deputy assistant secretary-general for innovation, hybrid and cyber. “For Nato countries to be able to fight together and win, they all need to be able to exchange data seamlessly and at speed.”

>Opposition to the strict sovereignty requirements is the strongest in eastern and Nordic countries, according to people familiar with the discussions.

>Several capitals are expected to push for changes when EU countries discuss the legislation in the upcoming months, with European diplomats currently preparing their exact suggestions.

>One morning in June, three paralyzed military veterans in wheelchairs from rural Pennsylvania arrived at the office of Sen. John Fetterman for a long-awaited meeting to discuss legislation that would improve their care. 

>Fetterman’s staff greeted them with bad news: The Pennsylvania Democrat had to cancel. He’d told his staff he may have eaten something bad and wasn’t feeling well, according to people familiar with the matter.

>Less than an hour after his staffers met with the veterans in his place, Fetterman walked into his office, showing no signs of illness. He had an appointment he didn’t want to miss, he told staff: an interview on Fox News to discuss Israel and the war in Iran. 

>With his hoodie-and-shorts wardrobe and working-class appeal, Fetterman occupies a unique place in a Democratic Party increasingly populated by leftist insurgents. Fetterman often portrays himself as a “regular Democrat” calling out aspects of his party’s progressive fringe—just the profile that past centrists have leveraged in a divided Senate to cut bipartisan deals and score big wins. 

>But behind closed doors, the first-term senator shows little interest in doing the job beyond cultivating relationships with conservative media figures and advocating for Israel, according to interviews with more than a dozen former staffers and lawmakers, as well as text messages and other internal records.  

>Fetterman appears with host Jesse Watters on Fox News. Shannon Finney/Getty Images

>With a pivotal election looming in November that could yield a split Senate and give Fetterman outsize influence, his office is staffed with a revolving door of aides who are constantly scrambling to keep up the face of a functional operation, the interviews and text messages show. 

>Fetterman keeps a light daily schedule, often refusing to meet with constituents and fellow lawmakers, or canceling at the last minute, records and interviews show.

>Last September, when an aide told Fetterman that officials with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, known as CHOP, wanted to meet because they were worried about Medicaid cuts, he was dismissive.  

>Fetterman

>Why do I have to keep having to meet with chop

>Aide

>Because they are worried about vaccines and Medicaid cuts.

>Fetterman

>Well I’m not

>[...]

>I’m convinced they just want free trips to DC

>Source: messages reviewed by WSJ

>It marks a contrast to his 2022 campaign, when Fetterman spent long hours traveling to small rural communities, embracing people who felt left behind. “He won because he worked his heart out,” said Judy Hines, chair of the Democratic Party in Mercer County, in rural northwest Pennsylvania. Hines said she was worried about what she sees as a transformation in Fetterman in the years since the campaign. 

>In the background are concerns about Fetterman’s longstanding struggle with depression, which flared up after a near-fatal 2022 stroke that left him with lingering speech issues. Last year, Fetterman’s former chief of staff publicly aired concerns that Fetterman had stopped following his recovery plan, was damaging personal relationships, exhibiting paranoia, and addicted to his smartphone.

>At the time, Fetterman dismissed his former staffer as “disgruntled” in a statement and asserted “ my ACTUAL doctors and my family affirmed that I’m very well.” 

>Fetterman didn’t reply to multiple requests for an interview for this story. The senator walked away from a Wall Street Journal reporter at a public event in Erie, Pa., late last month, declining to answer questions. His office also didn’t reply to multiple emails summarizing the reporting for this story. 

>At the Erie event, he broadly defended his record as an effort to deliver bipartisan legislative victories for Pennsylvania. “We have to work together,” Fetterman said. “We have better solutions working together rather than just fighting.”

>In Pennsylvania, Fetterman’s shifting politics and public stances have led to a once-unthinkable outcome in recent polling by the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena University : He is more popular among Republican voters than the state’s Republican senator, Dave McCormick. Combined with his growing unfavorability with Democrats, this has sparked speculation Fetterman could switch parties before he is up for re-election in 2028.

>Fetterman, shown with his Republican counterpart from Pennsylvania, Sen. Dave McCormick, has been the subject of speculation that he might change parties. Tom Williams/Zuma Press

>In May, Fetterman publicly denied he’s considering a party switch, but recent news events have done nothing to stifle the speculation. In July, campaign filings showed he received money from a prominent conservative donor. In recent interviews, Fetterman has left open the possibility he could feel the need to leave the Democratic Party, if it adopts language in its platform on the one issue that has come to dominate his time in the Senate. 

>That month, he said: “If our party ever becomes…the anti-Israel party, you know, that’s when I would leave.” 

>Famous mayor

>When Fetterman first ran for Senate in 2016, he defined himself as a Bernie Sanders disciple and progressive populist. After losing in the primaries that year, Fetterman tacked slightly to the center when he ran again in 2022. Still, his campaign focused on fighting for places like Braddock, a hollowed-out steel town near Pittsburgh where he once served as mayor, with a platform that emphasized protecting union and manufacturing jobs. 

>Fetterman first drew national attention as mayor of Braddock, Pa., a steel town that fell on hard times. Andrew Rush/AP

>In 2022, Senate candidate Fetterman and his wife, Gisele Barreto Fetterman, cast their ballots at New Hope Baptist Church in Braddock. angela weiss/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

>After rarely speaking about foreign-policy issues, Fetterman emerged during this campaign as a strong supporter of Israel. It didn’t generate much attention at the time because this wasn’t a controversial position in 2022. 

>Then came the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, and the war in Gaza. 

>Fetterman came out as an early proponent of the war, and dug in, even as the civilian death toll among Palestinians rose. His stance drew attacks from the progressive left, leading Fetterman to spar with critics on social media, while earning praise from Israel advocates and Republicans. 

>Among Democrats, Fetterman grew increasingly isolated, and nursed what former staffers viewed as an unreasonable degree of anger toward party leadership, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. 

>Since then, Fetterman has become a fixture on conservative media, beamed into the homes of tens of millions of Americans to voice his fierce support for Israel, sometimes displaying a relentless focus on the issue in ways that have alarmed senior staff, according to people familiar with the matter.   

>Sen. Fetterman holds a small Israel flag as he heads to the chamber for a vote in 2024. J. Scott Applewhite/AP

>Late last summer, Fetterman told his advisers and senior staff he wanted to introduce a resolution forcing every senator to take a public stance on whether the war in Gaza constituted a genocide. His senior staff tried to talk him out of this idea, according to people familiar with the matter, but he was undeterred.

>Last September, Israel Ambassador Yechiel Leiter met with Fetterman in his office, and suggested an alternative: Fetterman could write an op-ed explaining why he continued to support Israel, according to people familiar with the matter. 

>Fetterman agreed, and told Leiter he would write the submission based on any points the ambassador sent over, according to these people. A few days later, embassy staff sent over drafted points for Fetterman to consider. 

>Fetterman staffers decided not to tell him about it, out of concern that drafting an op-ed based on suggestions from the Israeli embassy, under the senator’s name, risked violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. A spokeswoman for Israel’s embassy declined to comment. 

>Fetterman dropped the issue, according to former staffers.

>In late 2024, Fetterman expressed interest in being appointed to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to several former staffers, which they viewed as an unreasonable ask of party leadership, including Schumer. Foreign Relations is among the most prestigious appointments, and Fetterman was just a second-year senator.  

>When committee appointments were announced, Fetterman got the first choice on his list, Homeland Security, but he was passed over for Foreign Relations. He was furious, former aides said, and blamed Schumer. By early 2025, Fetterman had almost completely isolated himself from fellow Democrats, according to people familiar with the matter, refusing to participate in regular caucus lunches and meetings.  

>In March 2025, when aides texted Fetterman that Schumer’s staff was arranging a special call for Senate Democrats one evening, he responded: “I truly don’t care.”

>In a statement, Schumer called Fetterman “an important member of our caucus” and said he was proud that Senate Democrats represented a broad range of views. Schumer and Fetterman had dinner together last month, a person familiar with the matter said.

>Fetterman listens as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) holds a press conference in 2025. jonathan ernst/Reuters

>‘He just chose not to meet with us.’

>Since Fetterman got out of the hospital in 2023, he has repeatedly expressed disdain for several core day-to-day aspects of life as a senator, according to multiple former staffers: meetings with constituents, attending hearings and making public in-state appearances, like town halls. 

>In April 2025, veteran Pennsylvania state lawmaker Anthony Hardy Williams brought a busload of constituents to Washington from Eastwick, a poorer, flood-prone neighborhood in Philadelphia, to meet with their representatives in Congress and discuss Trump administration cuts to a grant program that had helped the area. 

>Fetterman was the only one who refused to meet with them, Williams said in an interview. At one point, they saw Fetterman walking the halls and yelled, but he didn’t acknowledge them, according to Williams.

>Fetterman walks to the U.S. Capitol building on the inauguration day of Donald Trump's second presidential term. elizabeth frantz/Reuters

>“He was available. He just chose not to meet with us,” Williams said. 

>Even when Fetterman does agree to meetings, he often cancels, according to former staffers. 

>Also last April, Fetterman agreed to take a meeting with another state lawmaker, Liz Hanbidge, who drove down from Pennsylvania to introduce herself, and to discuss programs that help the homeless and working poor in her county. But when Hanbidge arrived, according to staffers who were present, Fetterman claimed he hadn’t agreed to the meeting. The aides spent more than an hour pleading with him to talk to her; staffers eventually met with Hanbidge in his place. 

>Fetterman did take another meeting that day—with Bruce Pearl, the former college basketball coach and Israel advocate. The pair discussed legislation that would affect college sports, and Pearl thanked Fetterman for his stance on Israel, Pearl said in an interview. 

>Last May, several media reports highlighted Fetterman’s paltry attendance record at Senate hearings. The next month, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial board called on Fetterman to consider stepping down. At that point, records transcripts show, Fetterman had skipped 11 of the 12 full hearings that year of his assigned committees—Homeland Security, Commerce and Agriculture.  

>In this time frame, Fetterman got a helpful phone call from one of his few friends in the Senate—Katie Britt, an Alabama Republican who had visited him in the hospital in 2023, and brought him cookies. 

>Fetterman attends a hearing of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation on Dec. 3, 2025. Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg News

>In the phone call, which Fetterman recounted later, former staffers recalled, Britt told him he could get marked as “present” at hearings by getting the attention of clerks, and then leave and go about his day. 

>Britt, through a spokeswoman, said she merely explained to Fetterman that “most members typically check in and then go about their days with meetings, speeches, votes, and other engagements while they wait for their turn to actively participate.”

>Soon after, Fetterman implemented the strategy with his aides, including deploying an advance staffer to catch the clerk’s eye, so Fetterman could get credit for attending even though he only drifted into the room for a minute or less. Since last June, Fetterman was marked present at 26 out of 31 full hearings of his assigned committees, transcripts show, even though in 20 of them he didn’t say a word. 

>In Pennsylvania, Fetterman has receded from the public eye, rarely interacting in person with voters during his three-plus years in office. 

>When three police officers were killed near Fetterman’s hometown of York last September, he backed out of attending the funeral because it was too long. 

>Aide

>Update on the event:
No one will be allowed to staff you due to number restrictions. The organizers are requiring everyone to be seated by 11:00 am and the funeral will begin at noon and last at least 3 hours. The dress code is formal.[…]

>Fetterman

>3 hours??

>Aide

>Yes it’s a very formal ceremony and the equivalent of 3 separate funerals.

>Fetterman

>This may be a nonstarter

>Source: messages reviewed by WSJ

>This summer, after going nearly a year without a public event in Pennsylvania, Fetterman agreed to do two, organized by his Republican counterpart, Sen. McCormick. In June, the two senators appeared in Philadelphia together to promote President Trump’s child investment accounts. 

>Then last Friday, Fetterman and McCormick made an appearance in a blighted neighborhood in Erie, in northwest Pennsylvania, to meet with elected officials and community leaders to discuss housing affordability, homelessness and poverty in the region.

>In a brief question-and-answer session after, a local reporter asked the senators about what they were doing to address cost-of-living issues like high gas prices. 

>“In terms of affordability, you know, what does that really mean?” Fetterman responded, pivoting to defending the war in Iran. “Why is gas more expensive than some people would like? Well, because we have a crisis over Iran,” he said. “So, in terms of affordability, and I do believe that will be, will resolve, and I do think it’s important to understand that Iran is the bad guy.”