The New York Review of Books: Israel’s War on Culture

The climate in Israel was tense and bellicose. As Hamas fighters fired rockets from Gaza at central Tel Aviv, right-wing Israeli nationalists assaulted antiwar protesters while chanting “Death to Arabs!” and “Death to leftists!” Veteran artists and public figures were labeled as traitors and received threats for even expressing regret at the loss of Palestinian children’s lives. One of Israel’s best-known poets, Natan Zach, now eighty-seven, told the Israeli website Walla! at the time: “The reason I no longer write in the papers is that I’m afraid someone will grab me on the street and beat me.” A month after a cease-fire was agreed, Israel’s then foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, decided it was time for his ministry to cut off all future support for the Israeli dancer and choreographer Arkadi Zaides for a work that allegedly vilified Israel’s military. 

Zaides’s Archive is a solo dance piece set against a backdrop of video footage of Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank. The footage was provided by B’Tselem, an Israeli group that documents human rights abuses in the Occupied Territories and has become anathema to the Israeli political establishment. Last year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled a meeting with the German foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, after Gabriel met with representatives of B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation organization of former Israeli soldiers who publish testimonies about their service in the West Bank and Gaza. (Israel’s cabinet is currently promoting one bill that would ban members of Breaking the Silence from speaking in high schools, and another that would effectively outlaw them.) [...]

In her position as the country’s leading cultural watchdog, Regev has taken every opportunity to cut funds, or threaten to do so, to artists or institutions she deems harmful or offensive to the state. One of her first acts as culture minister was to levy financial penalties on theaters, dance troupes, or orchestras that do not perform in the settlements—and provide bonus payments to those that do. She has also said that she wanted to pull funding from several established national arts festivals because of performances involving nudity and from fringe theaters presenting subversive content. Although successive attorney generals have told her that her interference infringes on freedom of expression, that has not stopped her from crusading on the motto “freedom of expression, not freedom of funding.” [...]

While few in Israel have heard of Tatour, Israel’s war on culture has recently found a much more high-profile target. On March 13, Israel’s ambassador to France, Aliza Bin-Noun, boycotted the opening night of the Israeli Film Festival in Paris because the program was headlined by Foxtrot, a feature film about the trauma two parents suffer after losing their son during his military service. The film—directed by acclaimed Israeli filmmaker Samuel Maoz, an IDF veteran of the 1982 Lebanon war—has won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, swept the Ophir Awards (Israel’s equivalent of the Oscars), and was shortlisted by the Academy Awards (though it fell short of a best foreign film nomination). The story includes a scene in which Israeli soldiers cover up the murder of Palestinians. Although, by her own admission, Regev has not seen the film, she said it “harms the good name of the IDF” and that its selection for leading film festivals is “a disgrace.” And she used the occasion to repeat her threats about funding: “Whoever wants to make a movie like this can do so with their own private money.”

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The Atlantic: The Kurds Keep Remaking the Middle East

That moment was believed to mark the first time a modern Iraqi leader has spoken in Kurdish, which, along with Arabic, is an official language of Iraq. And he accompanied that with a more substantive overture, agreeing to transfer more than $250 million to the Kurdish Regional Government to help pay the salaries Kurdish government workers and security forces. [...]

Although the Iraqi Kurds made some progress this week, their brethren across the border in Syria aren’t having a good week. Here, too, the Kurds were a long neglected and long oppressed minority. Here, too, they were among the most effective fighting forces against ISIS. Here, too, they carved out their own enclave—this time in northern Syria. But last weekend, Turkish forces succeeded in retaking Afrin, the Kurdish-controlled Syrian town near the border with Turkey. The Turks, who have their own restive Kurdish population, want the Syrian Kurds to withdraw to the east of the Euphrates River—and are now threatening the town of Manbij, also west of the Euphrates and under Kurdish control. Some Syrian Kurds have links to the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, a separatist Kurdish group that operates inside Turkey, and which Ankara (as well as Washington) regards as a terrorist organization. Some are also supported by the U.S. (For more on the many overlapping alliances and conflicts inside Syria, go here.) [...]

“The red line is independence—or even having a referendum on independence,” said Joost Hiltermann, an expert on the Kurds who directs the Middle East and North Africa program at the International Crisis Group. Referring to the situation in Iraq, he said the regional powers such as Turkey, not to mention Iran and Iraq itself, had made their peace with Kurdish self-governance within the Iraqi state. But Masoud Barzani, the Kurdish president at the time (who remains influential in Kurdish politics), wanted more.  

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The Atlantic: The Millions Left Marooned by Brexit

The referendum result set in motion a complex array of political machinations that can feel hopelessly abstract, but one very simple outcome is this: Nearly 5 million people living in democracies across Europe were suddenly unsure of their rights. Most of these are people from elsewhere in Europe, legally residing in the U.K. for now but unsure whether they’ll get to stay. The same is true of a smaller number of British citizens who have made their homes across the Channel. And while a draft withdrawal agreement presented by U.K. and EU negotiators on Monday set out to clarify what some of these rights would look like after the U.K. fully transitions out of the EU at the end of 2020, plenty of unknowns remain. The3million, an advocacy group for citizens’ rights, said in a leaked letter to European Council President Donald Tusk that the draft agreement “makes for a bleak, uncertain future.” [...]

This uncertainty set Remigi on a fact-finding mission, which culminated in the June 2017 publication of In Limbo, a collection of testimonies of more than 100 EU nationals living in the U.K. between March and April 2017. The book includes the story of a Danish citizen who was denied permanent residency after living in the U.K. for 18 years due to an insurance requirement that many were unaware existed; an Italian couple who, despite being permanent residents in Oxford, are considering leaving the country due to a spike in hate crimes in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum; and a British national who is using her status as the granddaughter of German Jewish Holocaust refugees to apply for German citizenship in case her French partner’s permanent residency application is rejected. “The book has been written to show the human side of the Brexit story—the human cost,” Remigi said. “When you read these stories you realize the pain, the suffering … that our rights should have been guaranteed from the start.” [...]

Apart from negotiators in London and Brussels, there is one other body that could have a say: the European Court of Justice. Last month, an Amsterdam district court asked the EU high court to consider a case brought by five British nationals living in the Netherlands seeking to retain their EU citizenship after Brexit. Michaela Benson, a researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London and the leader of BrExpats, a U.K. in a Changing Europe-funded research project focusing on the rights of British residents in EU, said that if the high court deems EU citizenship irremovable, it could have major implications for Britons everywhere. “If it’s successful, it won’t just be about U.K. nationals living in the EU,” she said. “It would be about all U.K. citizens who were, up until the point of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, considered EU nationals. … That could change the game.”

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Social Europe: Nothing’s Left

Things simply got worse with the financial crisis and its aftermath. The latent dissatisfaction with the establishment exploded in a full-blown revolt already in 2013, when the centre-left and centre-right combined attracted less than half the total votes. The PD’s disappointing result led to the demise of the post-communist-turned-moderate leadership in favour of Matteo Renzi, a reckless maverick that, freely borrowing from Five Star rhetoric, had attacked the old political caste governing the party. It was a change for the worse: Renzi’s political project anticipated – albeit less successfully – Macron’s rise: extreme centrism to re-unify the establishment in opposition to the populist threat. His ultra-liberal reforms – in particular of the labour market – pushed the social-democratic component out of the Party. [...]

Their new electoral base is the mirror of their political culture. They speak of financial markets and “responsible” economic policy – and never of exploitation, wages and inequality. They have taken the working class vote for granted, and tried to conquer the vote of the moderates by embracing a pro-market ideology. Yet, that very own ideology has dramatically modified the social and economic landscape: rampant inequality and poverty are eroding the middle class – making the race to the centre a suicidal option. Furthermore, as shown by Branko Milanovic, both the working class and that very same Western middle class are the real losers of globalisation, and have often become resentful and much less moderate than they used to be. Recent electoral and political trends show that elections are now also fought on the extremes, by winning the votes of the people left behind by the neo-liberal globalisation that the pro-establishment Left so blindly supported. Trump won the presidency by stealing the rust-belt states, while in England both Labour and the Tories moved away from centrism, adopting more populist platforms – from Brexit to nationalisations. In Italy, the anti-establishment parties gained more than 50% of the votes.

Unlike other countries such as the US, UK, France, Spain, Portugal, the protest vote in Italy does not have any significant leftist representation. Free and Equal – the new Party created by former PD leaders – failed miserably, managing to collect barely 3% of the votes. More worryingly, they are just a better copy of the PD, faring relatively well among higher degree holders and almost absent in the poorest urban areas. This is no surprise: after having embraced all kinds of liberal policy, formed administrations with Berlusconi and supported technocratic government, they quite simply do not have the credibility to talk to the working class. Even the leader of Free and Equal, former Senate speaker Pietro Grasso, has the profile of a moderate leader: a former anti-mafia magistrate, with impeccable credentials as a civil servant and no direct political experience. Free and Equal correctly identified the disillusionment with Renzi amongst the progressive electorate, but failed to understand that Italians just want a clean break with the past and not an ameliorated and more presentable version of the establishment.

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Quartz: On the Westminster and Brussels attacks anniversary, the EU spotlights three catalysts for radicalization

“When it comes to children, it’s a lot more difficult,” said King. “They may have grown up in the medieval barbarity of the caliphate and have may be become accustomed and brutalized by war and horrific practices and were involved in killing and torture. They may have left the EU when they were very young and come back very differently. We need to think of how to integrate them and their welfare but balance the risk they may pose.” [...]

“The internet features heavily in all the terrorist attacks last year—from preparing for attacks to gloating [over the outcome]. It used by terrorists to groom, recruit, and celebrate their violence,” he King. “While removing [terrorist propaganda] is vital on its own, it’s still too late.” The EU has been working with internet companies to ensure that terror-related content is taken down within an hour of notification from law enforcement. [...]

A core motivation of terror attacks, jihadist or otherwise, is the perpetuation of extremist ideology, Roberta Bonazzi, president of the European Foundation for Democracy, told Quartz. “If we look at the phenomenon overall, the common thread through whether activity has been conducted online, by groups, or so-called lone actors, the role of ideology is what provides them with the moral reason for their violence,” she said from the Brussels event. “This includes everyone from Islamist jihadists, white supremacists, and extreme left-wing anarchist groups. This is no longer a police matter, there are many layers we need to understand, even at the grassroots level, on how they operate and brainwash people.”

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Quartz: Omnisexual, gynosexual, demisexual: What’s behind the surge in sexual identities?

Labels might seem reductive, but they’re useful. Creating a label allows people to find those with similar sexual interests to them; it’s also a way of acknowledging that such interests exist. “In order to be recognized, to even exist, you need a name,” says Jeanne Proust, philosophy professor at City University of New York. “That’s a very powerful function of language: the performative function. It makes something exist, it creates a reality.”

The newly created identities, many of which originated in the past decade, reduce the focus on gender—for either the subject or object of desire—in establishing sexual attraction. “Demisexual,” for example, is entirely unrelated to gender, while other terms emphasize the gender of the object of attraction, but not the gender of the subject. “Saying that you’re gay or straight doesn’t mean that you’re attracted to everyone of a certain gender,” says Dembroff. The proliferation of sexual identities means that, rather than emphasizing gender as the primary factor of who someone finds attractive, people are able to identify other features that attract them, and, in part or in full, de-couple gender from sexual attraction.

Dembroff believes the recent proliferation of sexual identities reflects a contemporary rejection of the morally prescriptive attitudes towards sex that were founded on the Christian belief that sex should be linked to reproduction. “We live in a culture where, increasingly, sex is being seen as something that has less to do with kinship and reproduction, and more about individual expression and forming intimate bonds with more than one partner,” Dembroff says. “I think as there’s more of an individual focus it makes sense that we have these hyper-personalized categories.”

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FiveThirtyEight: Who Should Pay For Climate Change?

That very sea wall is at the heart of the court case — The People of the State of California v. BP P.L.C. et al. — that was the reason for Wednesday’s spectacle. The cities of Oakland and San Francisco are suing the five biggest fossil fuel companies on the planet — BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell — for billions of dollars for past damages and to prevent future flooding from sea level rise. Since the companies extracted fuel that altered the planet, the argument goes, they should pay for the consequences. It’s a modern version of “you break it, you buy it.” The oil companies have filed to dismiss the lawsuit on many grounds, including that it’s the government’s job to set and enforce carbon dioxide levels — not theirs. [...]

But in this polarized moment, a public tussling over the basics of climate science, however cursory, is anything but boring. And as each side in the case presented a history of climate change science, it was striking just how much the two sides agreed on: Climate change is happening, and humans are in large part responsible. But that’s not really what this court case is about. Rather, it’s about who knew what and when, how much uncertainty there is around future predictions and who should be held responsible (and liable) for a future with higher seas and more extreme weather events. That’s where the cities’ and corporations’ use of evidence diverged. [...]

The year after the most recent IPCC report was published was the hottest on record, Wuebbles told the court. Then 2015 topped 2014, and 2016 topped 2015. Temperatures are going up, precipitation is increasing, extreme events are more frequent. Looking at a broader set of years, sea level has risen around the San Francisco Bay. Alsup asked Wuebbles whether he disagreed with Boutrous’s recounting of the science.

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The Spectator: Britain has lost control of the Brexit talks

Perhaps most worryingly, the idea that Northern Ireland could remain permanently in the customs union — which Theresa May once said ‘no British prime minister could ever concede’ — remains on the table. This brings about the prospect of an internal border within the UK in the Irish Sea — a situation which ministers know will prove unacceptable to a very large proportion of Northern Irish residents, not least among them the DUP, on whose votes the government relies for support. If the government does fall on a confidence vote before the projected date of the next election, in 2022, its demise may well be traceable to this week. [...]

Michel Barnier has been criticised for his obstinacy and his lack of imagination in solving issues such as the Irish border. It is true that his constant stonewalling of suggestions put forward by Britain shows the EU in bad light and is a reminder of the freedoms we might enjoy outside the bloc. His tone has been needlessly caustic, and he has seemed to take the Brexit talks as an audition for succeeding Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the European Commission. But his stubbornness is working: putting Britain on the back foot, forever struggling to defend itself. The government’s failure to come up with proposals has left a vacuum in which the EU is suggesting them for us. [...]

Also, the member states’ power over the European Commission is waning. In Britain, the EU is often thought about as a single entity — and one that in the end will do whatever Germany says. But Angela Merkel is struggling to exert control over her own government, let alone the continent. Juncker and Barnier see an EU that does not take its orders from member states, but draws (or claims to draw) its own democratic legitimacy from the European Parliament. The EU member states have an interest in a good deal with Britain. But the European Commission — the apparatus in Brussels — has an interest in Britain being seen to be worse off after leaving the EU. The Commission would also receive 80 per cent of the tariff revenue from UK exports to the EU, making ‘no deal’ more appealing to Brussels than to member states.

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Politico: Kelly furious over Putin 'DO NOT CONGRATULATE' leak

Trump was instructed in briefing materials “DO NOT CONGRATULATE” before his call with the recently re-elected Putin, but congratulated him anyway, according to the Washington Post’s report on Tuesday night. He also ignored a recommendation to condemn the recent poisoning of a former Russian spy in the United Kingdom, which the Kremlin has been accused of orchestrating, according to the report. [...]

In a statement, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Tuesday dismissed the election as a “sham” and said Trump “insulted every Russian citizen who was denied the right to vote in a free and fair election to determine their country's future, including the countless Russian patriots who have risked so much to protest and resist Putin's regime.” [...]

The episode also raised the broader issue of leaks, a subject that has animated Trump since he took office. Trump insisted early last year that senior White House officials sign non-disclosure agreements, according to two former senior administration officials, and after some resistance officials agreed, concluding the agreements would not be enforceable anyway.  

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