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Section of James Turrell's "Leading" 2023, in New York City.
Colors, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the use of your eyes
A few days ago, I went to see a James Turrell installation on a rooftop in lower Manhattan. If you don’t know his work, Turrell is an American artist whose primary medium is colored light.
This particular installation is an immaculate white room with a perfect, knife-edge square cut through the ceiling, open to the elements. As the color of the room lighting changes, so does the color of the sky above, which appears as a perfect, depthless square of steadily shifting hue. The contrasting effect is hypnotic.
As a small group of us sat on simple wooden benches around the perimeter looking upward, the architect who worked with Turrell on the installation said, “the great thing about this is that you don’t need to know anything beforehand for this to work. You just need to use your eyes.”
You just need to use your eyes.
What our eyes are sufficient for has been on my mind lately, particularly as I’ve been reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book “The Message.”
In it, Coates – known for his lyrical, polemical writing about race, power, and racism – travels to South Carolina, where he meets a teacher fighting a local ban of one of Coates’ earlier books; to Senegal, where he explores his relationship to Africa as a descendant of African slaves; and to Israel, where he spends 10 days chronicling both Palestinian dispossession and Israeli narratives of history.
All three sections explore the dangers of mythmaking and utopian thinking – for everyone, white, Black, Jewish – and the ways in which the powerful everywhere weave elaborate stories to justify the oppression of the powerless.
But the section on Palestine has drawn the most attention and the most ferocious criticism, as many people learned from the controversy surrounding CBS morning anchor Tony Dokoupil's spicy on-air exchange with Coates about it.
It begins at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and traces a tragic arc from the near extermination of the Jews to the redemptive foundation of an Israel that has inflicted its own violence and dispossession on the Palestinians. Coates alleges controversial parallels between the West Bank and the Jim Crow South and Apartheid South Africa.
There is a lot to grapple with in the book, and there have been many critiques – Coates’ decision to recount Jewish massacres of Palestinians without telling any stories of Arab violence or terrorism against Jews; the relative absence of Palestinian voices in a book that itself (rightly) calls for more Palestinian representation in media; the grafting of an American-style racial paradigm of race and power onto Israel’s ethnic and sectarian hierarchies in a way that doesn’t quite fit.
But one particular charge against Coates bothers me: that he leaves out too much context or that he doesn’t have the authority to speak on this issue as a non-expert.
No, Coates is not a historian or a scholar of the Middle East. And no, he doesn’t speak the local languages: In the audio version of the book, his repeated butchering of the words knafeh and Al-Aqsa will drive Arabic speakers up the wall.
But he does have eyes.
When you go to the West Bank – I have been there just once, alone, for a few weeks in 2008 – you are immediately confronted with a striking degree of systemic inequality, a world that does not often make the air in US media: the effectively segregated highways, the shrinking access to land and water that is left to the Palestinians, the checkpoints that may or may not let Palestinians through on any given day.
“Even our mental geography has been shattered,” I remember a photojournalist from Nablus telling me. “If I want to visit my mother in Khalil [the Arabic name for Hebron], I don’t know if it will take me two hours, two days, or if I’ll be able to get there at all.”
It is, very clearly and observably, as Coates writes, “a place where no Palestinian person is ever the equal of any Jewish person, ever.”
There is context, of course. And context is important for many reasons. If we want to solve problems, we have to know how they came to be. If we want to change people’s minds or policies, we have to understand the chain of experiences and decisions that brought them to where they are.
But there are ways in which “context,” or the constant demand for more of it, can become a kind of deliberate diversion, a way of obscuring things rather than clarifying them. What Coates calls “the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality.”
If a terrorist group goes on a rampage killing innocent people, you cannot appeal to context to excuse the immorality of their crimes. If one people systematically discriminates against another group of people, dispossessing and destroying them, you cannot simply take refuge in the idea that “it’s complicated.”
Whenever the dignity and security of actual human beings are at stake, the purpose of context should be to illuminate responsibility rather than to obscure it.
There are times when you should just use your eyes.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Israel, Monday, August 19, 2024.
Blinken urges Netanyahu to ‘capitalize’ on Hamas leader’s death
The FBI on Tuesday announced it’s investigating a leak of US intelligence documents that offer details on Israel’s potential plans for retaliation against Iran over its missile attack earlier this month. The highly classified documents were shared on an Iran-linked Telegram account.
The leak puts the US in an awkward position as the intelligence pertains to spying on an ally. It’s not uncommon for governments to gather intel on allies, but such activities can still be embarrassing when revealed.
As the Biden administration scrambles to discover how the documents were leaked, it’s also pushing for a cease-fire in the Middle East amid Israel’s ongoing conflicts with Hezbollah and Hamas. Israel is reportedly considering an Egyptian plan for a two-week cease-fire with Hamas, which would see half a dozen hostages exchanged in the process. It’s possible a smaller agreement like this could gain momentum after months of failed international efforts to secure a lasting peace.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel on Tuesday and urged him to capitalize on the recent death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar “by securing the release of all hostages and ending the conflict in Gaza in a way that provides lasting security for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”
We’ll be watching to see if the US reveals more about the source of the leak and whether Israel shows any signs of accepting a cease-fire proposal.
What Sinwar's death means for the war in Gaza
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60.
BRICS Summit: A "new world order" or already a relic of the past?
Neither. It's in Kazan in Russia. So, I mean, the big issue is that the fact that Putin is hosting it hasn't stopped people from showing up, and that says a lot about the state of the non-West. If you're not in the G7, you're still finding ways to work with the Russians, and that's not going to change anytime soon. But it is not an alternative to the G7. It's a large grouping, and they have different political, different economic systems. They want to work with everybody. So we're not heading towards a new Cold War, at least not in terms of the big global architecture.
Is Sinwar's death the beginning of the end of the war in Gaza?
I think it is in terms of Israel's military fighting, because they've killed the leadership, they've blown up the tunnels, they've found the arms caches. I mean, there's not much else for them to do. But I mean, the war from the Palestinian perspective is just beginning. They are utterly devastated. They have no ability to have a future for themselves or their kids, and they are going to be fighting for generations. So right now, it doesn't matter much to Israel because they're massively asymmetrically powerful from a military perspective, but long-term this is not something that we're going to be able to forget about.
Yankees versus Shohei Ohtani, I mean Dodgers. Who's winning?
Well, I mean, that is funny of course, because here in Japan everyone has Ohtani fever. You cannot avoid it everywhere you walk. It is pretty exciting. They are the two teams that I wanted to see in the World Series, and I think it's going to be a fascinating week and a half or whatever it is. And I wish... I mean, I tend to root for the Red Sox, which means not rooting for the Yankees. That means I kind of want the Dodgers to win. But at the end of the day, I love sports because a minute after the game is over, I am no longer super excited. And I wish that could be the way that politics work.
Anyway, be good and I'll talk to you all real soon.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken boards a plane, en route to the Middle East, as he departs Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., October 21, 2024.
US pushes for Middle East cease-fire ahead of Election Day
With exactly two weeks before Election Day in the US, the Biden administration is pushing for cease-fires in Israel’s wars with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
US envoy Amos Hochstein visited Beirut on Monday as part of this effort. Hochstein said that both sides “simply committing” to UN resolution 1701, a peace agreement that followed the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, “is not enough” and called for a formula “that brings an end to this conflict once and for all.”
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken is en route to Israel, where he is expected to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog on Tuesday as part of a renewed push for a Gaza cease-fire.
While achieving a cease-fire on either front could potentially boost Kamala Harris’s campaign, the likelihood of this happening before Nov. 5 appears slim. The US and other international negotiators have pushed for a cease-fire for months, without luck.
Israeli airstrikes continued to pound Lebanon and Gaza over the weekend, and the region is still bracing for Israel’s response to Iran’s Oct. 1 missile attack.
We’ll be watching to see if the US can make any progress, but recent history suggests it will be an uphill battle.
A global leadership void and ongoing wars
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody, Ian Bremmer here, and a Quick Take to kick off your week. I am here in Tokyo, Japan. Just got back from Beijing. Being in this part of the world has me thinking a little bit about the state of our world and leadership, or should I say, the lack thereof. Those of you following me know I talk about a G-zero world, not a G-7, not a G-20, a place where we lack global leadership, and that has been so clear, thinking about the wars that continue, between Israel and Palestine, and now Lebanon, and more broadly in the Middle East, and between Russia and Ukraine, and increasingly NATO in Europe.
I think about the fact that all over the world, everyone wants these wars to be over. They're causing enormous amounts of suffering, displacement of human beings, massive war crimes, but they persist. It's worth thinking about what that means in terms of leadership because when we talk about the Middle East, and Israel-Palestine in particular, the United States is the most powerful ally of Israel, overwhelmingly in terms of its political and diplomatic support, its economic support, technological support, its military aid and training and intelligence. And yet, over the last year, the United States has had virtually no influence in the ability to contain, constrain, or end this war, irrespective of all the suffering.
You can complain about the United States on that with good reason, but then you look at Russia-Ukraine, and you see that over the last three years, China's been, by far, the most powerful friend and supporter of Russia, massive amounts of trade only expanding and dual-use technologies and diplomatic support. Yet, despite that, China has been unwilling to use any influence on Russia to try to bring the war to the end.
Now, to be clear, both the United States and China say all the right things. In Beijing, I was hearing from the leaders that they're friends with the Ukrainians and they maintain stable relations, and of course they want the war over, and they respect Ukrainian territorial integrity. And of course, the Americans support a two-state solution for the Palestinians and want to ensure that they get humanitarian aid and want to see a ceasefire happen, but I mean, the revealed preferences of both of these countries is their willingness to do anything about it is virtually zero. The Chinese don't care about the Ukrainians ultimately. That's what we're learning over the last few years. The Americans don't care about the Palestinians ultimately. That's what we've learned over the last year.
Absent leadership from the two most powerful countries in the world, where do you think we're going to get geopolitically? The answer is, to a much more dangerous place. That's the concern. I don't see that changing, particularly whether we have a Harris or a Trump presidency. I don't see that changing whether we have a Xi or a Xi presidency in China. It's not like they're making any real choices going forward. But look, maybe I'll be surprised. And certainly, it would be nice if no matter who wins, this was a topic of conversation between the Americans and the Chinese. That, "Hey, China. If you'd be willing to do a little bit more with Russia, we'd be willing to do a little bit more with Israel." I mean, frankly, at the end of the day, that's the kind of horse-trading I think we could really use diplomatically. Right now, that's a conversation that hasn't happened yet, but maybe it will.
That's it for me, and I'll talk to y'all real soon.
Israeli soldiers stand guard as they deny access to Palestinian farmers to harvest olives, in Burqa near Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank October 20, 2024.
US probes intel leak, drones hit Bibi’s house
Washingtonis investigating a leak of highly classified intelligence about Israel’s preparations for a strike on Iran. Two reports, marked “top secret” and intended only for the US and its Five Eyes allies (Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand), began circulating last week on Telegram, a messaging app. They appear to have beenprepared by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and detail Israeli air force exercises and movements of munitions in retaliation for Iran’s Oct. 1 missile attack on Israel.
House Speaker Mike Johnson described the leak as“very concerning” with the potential to damage relations between the US and Israel. They were posted to Telegram around the same time Washington gave Israel 30 days to increase aid to Gaza or risk cuts to its military aid.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah intensified its attacks on Israel’s northern border while one of its dronesstruck the home of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday morning. Netanyahu, who was not home at the time, declared that nothing could deter Israel from winning the war and that “The attempt by Iran’s proxy Hezbollah to assassinate me and my wife today was a grave mistake.” Iran denied responsibility for the attack, trying to distance itself from Hezbollah.
We’re watching how it affects US-Israeli relations ahead of the US election, and whether Washington will follow through on its threats over Gaza.FILE PHOTO: Yahya Sinwar, Gaza Strip chief of the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement, waves to Palestinians during a rally to mark the annual al-Quds Day (Jerusalem Day), in Gaza, April 14, 2023.
Israel kills Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Gaza
Ever since 1,200 Israelis were brutally murdered by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, the Jewish state has been on the hunt for the mastermind of the attack — the terrorist group’s leader, Yahya Sinwar.On Thursday,Israel confirmed that it had killed Sinwar in Gaza, reportedly with Israeli tank fire on a building where soldiers had picked up suspicious movement. His dental and fingerprint impressions match Israeli records.
Sinwar, one of Israel’s top targets, was previously believed to be deep underground surrounded by hostage human shields, so it came as a surprise that he had been killed practically in the open.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed Sinwar’s death but stopped short of declaring total victory, saying, “Today, evil took a heavy blow — the mission ahead of us is still unfinished.”
He and US President Joe Biden spoke Thursday, and Biden urged Netanyahu to use the moment to bring hostages home and “bring the war to a close." Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris both praised the successful killing of Sinwar, as did leaders from France, Germany, Italy, and the UK.
Will the war in Gaza wind down? Unlikely, though Netanyahu did offer to allow the terrorists holding the remaining Israeli hostages from Oct. 7 to leave if they laid down their arms and returned the prisoners. Netanyahu on Thursday told Israelis, "The war, my dear ones, is not yet over." Meanwhile, Israel’s operation in Lebanon against Hezbollah, which Netanyahu has promised to continue until Israeli civilians can safely return to areas near the northern border, remains ongoing.
Who will replace Sinwar? Hamas’ succession plans are opaque, but a few key figures stand out. Khaled Mashaal was Hamas’ political leader between 1996 and 2017 and remains influential, but his opposition to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has stressed his relationship with sponsors in Tehran. Probably the best option from Washington’s perspective is Khalil al-Hayya, who has led cease-fire negotiations for Hamas and is seen as more pliable than Sinwar. On the other hand, if Sinwar’s brother Mohammed Sinwar wins the power struggle, his hardline tendencies would likely undermine progress at the negotiating table.
FILE PHOTO: Police officers stand at the entrance to a building during a raid in Berlin-Friedrichshain. Security forces have searched several properties in Berlin, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein in connection with the ban on the terrorist organization Hamas and the international network Samidoun in Germany.
US and Canada list Samidoun as a terrorist group
The United States and Canada both moved Tuesday to designate Samidoun as a terrorist entity, following Germany, which banned the group last year, and the Netherlands, which banned it last week. Samidoun, which is also known as the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, is headquartered in Vancouver and is accused of having links to and advancing the agenda of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is already listed as a terrorist group.
The listing means that governments in both countries can freeze assets belonging to the group and prevent them from banking, for instance.
Calls for Samidoun to be listed increased after a rally in Vancouver on Oct. 7, the anniversary of the terrorist attack on Israel, where a masked woman led a crowd in chants of “death to Canada, death to the United States, and death to Israel,” and Canadian flags were burned.
Prosecutors are weighing whether to file hate speech charges against one of the group’s leaders over an earlier rally.
In Canada and the United States, rallies against the war in Gaza have inflamed tensions, and antisemitic incidents have increased dramatically.
On Tuesday, Israel released a report warning that antisemitism in Canada is on the rise and that Jewish places of worship, community centers, and day schools have been targeted. On Saturday morning, a Toronto Jewish girls’ day school was shot at for the second time. Nobody was hurt, and students have returned to class, but the community is fearful.