Jacobin Magazine: No, Israel Is Not a Democracy

In the eyes of many Israelis and their supporters worldwide — even those who might criticize some of its policies — Israel is, at the end of the day, a benign democratic state, seeking peace with its neighbors, and guaranteeing equality to all its citizens.

Those who do criticize Israel assume that if anything went wrong in this democracy then it was due to the 1967 war. In this view, the war corrupted an honest and hardworking society by offering easy money in the occupied territories, allowing messianic groups to enter Israeli politics, and above all else turning Israel into an occupying and oppressive entity in the new territories. [...]

Before 1967, Israel definitely could not have been depicted as a democracy. As we have seen in previous chapters, the state subjected one-fifth of its citizenship to military rule based on draconian British Mandatory emergency regulations that denied the Palestinians any basic human or civil rights. [...]

The litmus test of any democracy is the level of tolerance it is willing to extend towards the minorities living in it. In this respect, Israel falls far short of being a true democracy. [...]

Added to this was a further layering of denial of the rights of the Palestinian people. Almost every discrimination against the Palestinian citizens of Israel is justified by the fact that they do not serve in the army. The association between democratic rights and military duties is better understood if we revisit the formative years in which Israeli policy makers were trying to make up their minds about how to treat one-fifth of the population. [...]

Today more than 90 percent of the land is owned by the Jewish National Fund (JNF). Landowners are not allowed to engage in transactions with non-Jewish citizens, and public land is prioritized for the use of national projects, which means that new Jewish settlements are being built while there are hardly any new Palestinian settlements. Thus, the biggest Palestinian city, Nazareth, despite the tripling of its population since 1948, has not expanded one square kilometer, whereas the development town built above it, Upper Nazareth, has tripled in size, on land expropriated from Palestinian landowners.

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Slate: Discrimination Is Not De Facto

Do we know why racial segregation occurs? In 1973, the Supreme Court said no, and in doing so, dealt a crushing blow to the civil rights movement. In Milliken v. Bradley, the court ruled that the white suburbs of Detroit could not be included in Detroit’s school desegregation plan, because no real evidence existed to show that segregation in the region’s schools or neighborhoods was “in any significant measure caused by governmental activity.” The justices concluded black students were concentrated in Detroit because of “unknown and perhaps unknowable factors.”

De facto segregation, it came to be called, a name suggesting a natural racial geography, which policymakers discover rather than create. The question of segregation's origins, it was implied, extended far beyond the mundanities of government and into the collective psyche of Americans. Understanding those origins required parsing the individual choices and prejudices of millions of citizens. This was a question for philosophers and sociologists, not for government officials. [...]

Rothstein persuasively debunks many contemporary myths about racial discrimination. He goes after, for instance, the resilient misconception that racial separation was only government policy in the Jim Crow South, and that black entrants into neighborhoods cause white homeowners’ property values to fall. In one powerful section on zoning policies, Rothstein traces how hazardous waste sites were concentrated in segregated black neighborhoods. The episode mirrors the displacement of black families by urban renewal and interstate highway construction in mid-20th century. Even though it has long been recognized that these policies were immensely destructive and racially targeted, hardly any compensatory assistance has ever been provided. [...]

Rothstein concludes by talking about history; specifically, how it’s taught. Looking at some of the most popular U.S. history textbooks in public schools, he highlights what little they have to say about segregation, especially in the North. This failure to teach children about their country’s history of discrimination, of redlining, of blockbusting, of income suppression leaves people comfortable to assume present inequality is the result of individual decisions and “unknown” factors, not government policy.

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The New Yorker: Growing Up Poor and Queer in a French Village

Since it was published in France, in 2014, “The End of Eddy,” Édouard Louis’s slim début novel, has sold more than three hundred thousand copies. Much of the extraordinary interest in the book has centered on its depiction of Hallencourt, a village of about fourteen hundred people in Picardy, in the north of France, not far from the sea. Hallencourt’s occasional beauty—fruit trees in gardens, explosions of color in the autumn woods—does little, in Louis’s telling, to alleviate the human suffering that takes place there. A post-industrial decline has shuttered most of the region’s factories, and jobs are scarce and hard. Children in the village leave school early; women have children young; one in five adults has difficulty reading and writing. Alcoholism is rampant and violence casual.

The village overwhelmingly votes for Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front, and, as France has braced itself for the possibility of a Le Pen Presidency, Louis’s book has become the subject of political discussion in a way that novels rarely do. (In the first round of the current Presidential election, Le Pen received nearly twice as many votes in Hallencourt as any other candidate.) For Louis, the tide of populism sweeping Europe and the United States is a consequence of what he, citing the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, calls “the principle of the conservation of violence.” “When you’re subjected to endless violence, in every situation, every moment of your life,” Louis told an interviewer, referring to the indignities of poverty, “you end up reproducing it against others, in other situations, by other means.” [...]

Queerness is the key that springs Eddy from the various cycles—of poverty, of alcoholism, of violence—that he sees as determining life in the village. “Being attracted to boys transformed my whole relationship to the world,” he writes, “encouraging me to identify with values that were different from my family’s.” This doesn’t mean that queerness represents freedom; it’s an “unknown force that got hold of me at birth and that imprisoned me in my own body.” While his parents regard his mannerisms as a choice, “some personal aesthetic project that I was pursuing to annoy them,” Louis considers not only his desires but also elements of cultural style often coded as queer to be corporeal, determined in and by the body: “I had not chosen my way of walking, the pronounced, much too pronounced, way my hips swayed from side to side, or the shrill cries that escaped my body—not cries that I uttered but ones that literally escaped through my throat whenever I was surprised, delighted, or frightened.”

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Vox: This video shows what ancient Rome actually looked like

The video was created by Rome Reborn, an academic research project whose central mission is to create a full model of Rome at its greatest heights, working in conjunction with the Khan Academy and Smarthistory. The goal is to take historical depictions of the city and create a true-to-life model of every period of Roman development, ranging from 1000 BC to 552 AD. This isn't just a cool pastime; it's useful for everyone from historians to filmmakers looking to capture what the city actually looked like.

In the video, Indiana University professor Bernard Frischer (who leads the Rome Reborn project) explains that they chose to use 320 AD for this visualization because it was "the peak of Rome's urban development." Ten years later, the emperor, Constantine, moved the capital to Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), and the city of Rome began to decline. (The Roman Empire itself went on to survive, in various forms, until roughly 476.)

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Political Critique: Farcical Political Crisis Shakes Czech Republic

Social Democratic Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka was trying to save his face and the sinking support of his party when he announced the whole cabinet’s resignation on May 2. With only six months to go before regular parliamentary elections in October, the ruling Social Democrats know well that it won’t be them, but their coalition partner, the movement ANO [Yes], led by billionaire Andrej Babiš, who will be putting together the next government. The past three-and-a-half years have been marked by constant fighting between Sobotka and Babiš, his Finance Minister and deputy. Mired in one scandal after another, Babiš’s reputation seems immune to any of the accusations piling on him – his movement is currently polling at around 30%, leaving all other parties well behind. Now, however, Babiš faces accusations of large-scale tax evasion, as well clear indications he tried to influence media he formerly owned thanks to leaked recordings, circumstances the Prime Minister claims he could no longer igonore. Sobotka’s initial resignation can thus be seen as a final attack on his coalition partner and simultaneous foe. Providing an explanation on Wednesday of why he did not simply dismiss Babiš and keep the current government in place, Sobotka stated he did not wish to give the Finance Minister an opportunity to turn himself into a “martyr” and thus gain even more political sympathies from his electorate. [...]

The coalition of the Social Democrats, Babiš’s ANO, and its third, ineffectual member, the Christian Democrats, has ruled the country with stability, and apart from its stubborn refusal of refugee quotas, it has generally not given the rest of Europe a headache the way its neighbours have. [...]

And it is Zeman who’s the real culprit in turning the current political crisis into a farce that not even the screenwriters of The Thick of It could envision. Having announced the cabinet’s resignation on Wednesday, Sobotka made his way to Prague Castle, the President’s seat, on Thursday – not to tender his resignation, as he announced that morning, but to first discuss the serious governmental crisis with the President. Zeman however openly chose to pretend he had not received the most recent message and prepared a resignation ceremonial, together with a press conference, for Sobotka. In effect, Zeman accepted a resignation the PM had not yet tendered. The Prime Minister, taken aback, was momentarily lost for words. To make his humiliation complete, Zeman vulgarly used his walking stick to point Sobotka to his place behind the microphone, moreover addressing him with the informal Czech equivalent of the French tu as opposed to the standard vous in official situations. The PM bravely held his ground, but once he started to speak about the cause of the crisis – Minister Babiš’s dodgy dealings, President Zeman, in an act of unprecedented rudeness, walked out of the press conference.

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Motherboard: Millions of bats have died because of a fungal disease that no one knows how to stop

Millions of animals dead, a disease devastating entire populations in multiple states, and no cure or treatment in sight: That’s the reality of white nose syndrome, a disease that has killed over 5 million bats in the U.S. in the past decade. Still, scientists aren’t giving up. [...]

That’s not what kills bats, though. The real issue is that the disease alters the bats’ behaviors. Instead of spending the winter in hibernation, infected bats wake up and fly around. Because of this, they end up expending a lot more energy than they normally would, at a time when there’s no food available to sustain them. Infected bats become emaciated — and eventually die from starvation.

White nose syndrome isn’t just bad for bats; it’s also a huge problem for the U.S. economy. Bats eat a lot of insects, which means they’re crucial for pest control. Because of this, these small mammals save American farmers an estimated $3.7 billion in crop damages every year. Without them, farmers could stand to lose a ton of money. And given current bat declines, even if scientists find a solution now, populations will take a very long time to recover. “Right now we’re at about 10 years of white nose losses,” Carter said. “If we could wave a magic wand today and just get rid of white nose, it would be more than a thousand years before bats can get back to where they were just 10 years ago.”

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Vintage Everyday: 25 Impressive Black and White Photos That Capture Everyday Life in Portugal During the Late 1960s and Early '70s

Neal Slavin is a world-class photographer and film director. His well- known photographic books include PORTUGAL with an Afterword by Mary McCarthy, WHEN TWO OR MORE ARE GATHERED TOGETHER and BRITONS.

He has photographed for most of the major magazines around the world including The New York Times Magazine, The London Sunday Times Magazine, Esquire, Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, Oprah Magazine, Rolling Stone, Life, Geo, and New York Magazine to name just a few.

Slavin’s work encompasses a professional career of over 40 years, during which he has photographed a myriad of subjects including such celebrities as Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, Barbra Streisand and Phil Collins, among others. He has also pursued his own art which has led to the publication of the three aforementioned books.

These 25 impressive black and white photographs play with shadows and contrast of Portugal taken by Slavin during the late 1960s and early '70s.

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CityLab: Where America's Obese Live

One-third of adult Americans are obese. While it’s all too easy to dismiss obesity as a personal failure, doctors know it’s caused by a mix of biological and social factors. Poverty, race, access to healthy food, walkability, and access to public spaces have all been linked to the incidence of obesity—some more consistently than others. [...]

"Although obesity is a national problem, many of the policies and interventions that would be most valuable in reducing obesity occur at the community or neighborhood level," Bill Wheaton, director of RTI’s Geospatial Science and Technology Program, said in a press release.  

The RTI map contains three layers of data. The first shows the share of adult population that’s obese within each 250-meter grid cell in the nation. Take the New York-New Jersey metro area below. The warmer the colors, the greater the share of obese adults in that region:

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Al Jazeera: Tourists flock to Iran's 'image of the world'

Today, Isfahan remains one of Iran's biggest tourist draws: An inquiry to the reservations desk at its landmark Abbasi Hotel, recently lauded by CNN as "the Middle East's most beautiful hotel", revealed that it was fully booked for the next three months. [...]

"In the past two years, I can say the number of incoming tourists has been three times more than we had before the deal. More important are the investment figures. Investment has been exceptional, several times more, since the nuclear deal," Mohammad Izadkhasti, the city's tourism deputy and an adviser to Isfahan's mayor, told Al Jazeera from inside his bright, airy office, citing significant investments in the accommodation and recreation sectors. [...]

"Over the past two years, there have been around 10 times more incoming tourists than in previous years," Dorri told Al Jazeera, noting that his agency handled an influx of around 500 tourists last year."

The classic destinations we get the most requests for are Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, Kerman, Yazd; the more experienced tourists also ask to see Tibriz and the Caspian Sea region. Isfahan is always one of the most popular requests."

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