https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/02/27/bidens-middle-east-policies-place-a-premium-on-collaboration/

Partnerships with allies – even if to pursue different motives – plays a central role in US policy to the region.

In a speech at the Atlantic Council in Washington last week, White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Brett McGurk outlined an emerging “Biden doctrine” that “guides US engagement” in the Middle East. Any declaration which is that sweeping deserves to be carefully unpacked.

Mr McGurk outlined “five declaratory principles,” effectively restating much of what was already laid out in the National Security Strategy issued in October 2022. These five principles are partnerships, deterrence, diplomacy, integration and US values.

Both the McGurk speech and the NSS begin with partnerships, evidently to emphasise the centrality of collaboration for the Biden doctrine in the Middle East.

The Ukraine war has helped the Biden administration and most serious strategic thinkers in Washington to reconsider the strategic importance of Southwest Asia to US foreign policy. Energy exports from the Gulf region and the three key waterways, the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea and the Arabian Gulf, plus their three key chokepoints, the Suez Canal, Bab Al Mandab and the Strait of Hormuz, are unmistakably central to any global regime of stability, security and prosperity.

Washington’s role as the guarantor of maritime security and unimpeded international access to these arteries that carry so much of the lifeblood of the global economy is now viewed as a key asset for imperatives ranging from maintaining what is left of the beleaguered rules-based global order to great power competition with China.

The Biden administration deserves credit for recognising, particularly after the invasion of Ukraine, not only the centrality of this region to the US global posture but also the centrality of local partners in realising such security and stability. The equation drawing the US close to its Gulf Arab and other Middle Eastern partners is no longer anything resembling “oil for security” – if, indeed, it ever was that. Instead, on both sides, it is increasingly viewed as a partnership necessary to achieve mutual goals even if they are being pursued for different reasons. That is a lot more like the US relationship with its Nato partners, Japan or South Korea.

Therefore, while the 1980 Carter Doctrine held that the US would use all means to prevent any outside force to gain control of the Arabian Gulf region, the Biden doctrine pledges that the US will “make sure those countries can defend themselves against foreign threats,” and “will not allow foreign or regional powers to jeopardise freedom of navigation through the Middle East’s waterways.” The greater shift towards burden sharing and mutuality is evident, even though the Biden administration maintains it “will not tolerate efforts by any country to dominate another – or the region – through military buildups, incursions or threats.”

Co-operation such as the maritime surveillance and security projects being overseen by the US Navy’s Task Force 59, which are heavily reliant on regional partners, recognise that Gulf Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE have emerged as mid-level regional, and to some extent international, powers. This new emphasis on partnerships provides Washington’s Middle East allies ample scope to, for example, develop much greater ties with China without threatening the overarching strategic relationship with the US, as long as those measures don’t provide Beijing with an undue strategic foothold in the region.

Moreover, the emphasis on partnerships promotes closer bilateral and multilateral relations among traditional US partners, most obviously the Abraham Accords between a number of Arab countries and Israel.

Mr McGurk was quick to add deterrence to the list and left no doubt this primarily concerns Iran. With nuclear talks having broken down, Washington has been quietly developing a new regime of containment against Tehran that seeks to restrain its destructive regional activities and prepare for any Iranian sprint towards nuclear weapons construction.

Yet he emphasised the administration’s commitment to diplomacy, which is serious. However, Mr McGurk and many other key officials, including the president, participated in the two Obama administrations and appeared to have learnt key lessons about the limitations of how much American goodwill can achieve in the face of implacable opposition.

The fourth principle is integration, which may be the biggest innovation of Mr Biden’s Middle East approach. Mr McGurk claimed the US is at last developing “an integrated air and maritime defence architecture in the region.” Regarding air and missile defences, this crucial goal appears to remain largely aspirational, though some limited progress is being made. But the administration is right to believe that such a system is crucial to the national security of many of its regional partners, not least Gulf Arab countries. More integrated regional infrastructure is surely the best way to give the current climate of de-escalation in the Middle East more staying power by providing incentives to avoid conflict and confrontation.

The fifth principle of values rightly comes last. It is not that the US does not want, or even try, to promote its values. But major efforts to emphasise that, whether by force when the George W Bush administration invaded Iraq or maladroit efforts by the Barack Obama administration to create a new dynamic between the US and the Arab and Muslim worlds, ended up looking phony and misguided, respectively, and in both cases wholly ineffectual.

The Biden administration is wise not to over-promise on promoting values it cannot realise in practice, while reiterating that Washington does, in fact, believe what it preaches. Indeed, the Biden doctrine crucially recognises several key realities: the centrality of partnerships to achieving plausible and necessary goals in the region; traditional partners emerging as regional actors in their own right in the context of a developing multipolar reality; and that diplomacy and integration provide the greatest opportunity for advancing security and stability.

The emphasis on partnerships, integration, and diplomacy promote burden sharing and in time should allow the US to right-size its regional force posture and do more with less. Much of the current configuration is a legacy of the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. It doesn’t correspond to most present-day missions and threats and appears more of a relic of a bygone era.

The “Biden doctrine” may not be an innovation or even much of a doctrine. But it is serious and sound. That is probably as much as anyone can hope for. Given the fate of more ambitious Middle East policy agendas by recent administrations, less is decidedly more.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/02/21/how-the-us-right-got-trapped-in-lies-about-the-2020-election/

Republican politicians feared their voters in exactly the same way Fox feared its viewers with both ending up beholden to preposterous falsehoods.

Since the rise of Donald Trump, there has been a mystery about how and why so many otherwise respectable, seemingly intelligent and well-informed, Republicans could embrace his preposterous fabrications. A new trove of emails reflecting top-level behind-the-scenes conversations at Fox News Channel, the highest-rated US public affairs network, illustrates in vivid and deeply disturbing detail the process that produces a deliberate embrace of falsehood over basic and objectively verifiable truth. Now we know.

The lessons go far beyond Fox. It is an excellent roadmap of the process through which most Republican leaders refused to challenge the worst of these falsehoods, especially the “big lie” that the 2020 election was somehow “stolen” from Mr Trump. The cynicism and corrupted groupthink at Fox News has reflected in Congress and state houses around the country. It has left most of the US right detached from reality and beholden to a preposterous fairytale that is highly damaging to the country and corrosive to democracy.

The emails exposing the systematic dishonesty at Fox were obtained by Dominion Voting Systems, which makes the voting machines used in much of the country. Dominion is suing Fox for defamation because of the barrage of false accusations made by guests and hosts on the company’s flagship programmes. To this day, Fox’s most significant shows – Fox and Friends in the morning and the evening primetime troika of Sean Hannity, Laura Ingram and Tucker Carlson – routinely promote a wide range of conspiracy theories, often targeting Dominion, purporting to explain that Mr Trump won the election.

But what the company, which has probably become nonviable because of this crude defamation, has already achieved through its $1.6 billion lawsuit is: irrefutably establishing that the Fox hosts and officials knew perfectly well that such claims were ridiculous and privately disparaged many of the regular guests as lying. But at the same time, they insisted that the network must “respect” the audience by telling it what it wants to hear rather than what the organisation knows full well to be true. That is much closer to disdain than respect.

Hosts and guests on the network routinely claimed that Dominion was founded or controlled by Venezuela and Cuba, and that its machines could be “hacked” and “rigged” to “flip” vast numbers of votes from Mr Trump to US President Joe Biden. None of this is true, or even possible.

In the White House then-attorney general William Barr, among many other officials, strongly warned Mr Trump these claims are outlandish. He later testified that he worried that, because he seemed to take such interest in them, the former president was losing touch with reality.

Even more significant, though, are the insights into why a self-described “news” network would base so much of its programming on incendiary untruths. The emails demonstrate that the Fox News anchors and executives were fixated on ratings (and thus advertising revenue), and virtually panicked when large chunks of the Trump-adoring fan base began turning the channel after it correctly predicted Mr Biden’s victory in Arizona.

As Fox’s ratings dropped and its tiny but even more extreme and Trump-obsessed competitors, Newsmax and One American News, rose, emails between the network’s stars and executives show they quickly concluded that their all-important audience was not interested in verifiable truth, but was actively seeking comforting, reassuring and reinforcing falsehoods, especially denying or at least casting doubt on the fact that Mr Biden soundly defeated Mr Trump.

And they noted that the more they focused on conspiracy theories about the election, the more their audience returned to them. So, they decided to provide the audience what they crave, no matter how absurd. It is the antithesis of news and a quintessence of propaganda.

Moreover, the emails demonstrate that Fox News’s movers and shakers were actually afraid of their audience. And undoubtedly the same calculation was obvious to Republican officials and candidates in Congress and state houses around the country. A few may be fanatical, conspiratorial or just plain gullible to believe such absurdities. How could Mr Biden wrongly and so many Republicans rightly be elected on the same ballots if they were fraudulent? Why would Democrats cheat to secure the White House but not give themselves a majority in the Senate? In the main, they appear to have followed the same logic about their voters as Fox officials did about their viewers.

Some Republican voters believe the “stolen election” mythology because they heard it from Mr Trump, from Fox News and the others, and from their own elected officials (who, at the very least, did not try to disabuse them of this delusion). Mr Trump and his allies moved quickly to make election denial a litmus test to distinguish “real Republicans” from “Republicans in name only” (the detested “Rinos”). And they demonstrated during the midterm election that they can still decide most Republican primaries although, with a few scattered and rare exceptions, purveyors of the big lie lost in the general elections.

Now it has become a self-reinforcing mythology of totemic proportions. Over the weekend, Republican voters in Michigan – where Democrats secured complete control of the state for the first time in many decades in the midterms – doubled down on the outlandish by selecting Kristina Karamo, one of the US’s most vociferous election deniers to be their state party leader. She defeated a slightly less enthusiastic election denier who was endorsed by Mr Trump and the party leadership.

Allowing for scatterings of oddballs and conspiracy theorists, there is no doubt that Republican officials and leaders followed the same path into absolute dishonesty that the Dominion lawsuit email trove demonstrates Fox leaders did.

Most alarming is the spread and casual acceptance of a complete fabrication. It is one of the surest signs of the emergence of authoritarian political systems whether of the left or the right. But the Fox email trove demonstrates exactly how and why the US political right has become a solar system guided by one gigantic lie and orbited by countless smaller ones. That’s a catastrophe not just for the Republican Party, but for the whole country.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/02/14/how-to-honour-close-friends-after-their-death/

Interacting with Colin, Blake and Pratip illuminated the intersection of the personal and political registers.

Over the past 12 months, I lost three friends, each of whom had a profound impact on my life, thinking and career. But behind my grief and survivor’s guilt I think I can discern some valuable lessons about what one can learn from the most interesting people we meet and how crucial it is to look past superficial foibles. I owe each one of them a considerable debt of gratitude.

The first loss was hardly unexpected. On April 25, 2022, Colin Cavell passed away from complications of diabetes. He was a close friend in graduate school at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and proved especially loyal and warmhearted. I found Colin fascinating immediately because in the early 1990s he already seemed a figure from the mythic past, almost like seeing a pterodactyl swoop by, as he was a committed member of the Communist Party USA. Until I met him, I thought that organisation was long gone.

He appeared a walking contradiction. Here was an all-American guy oozing the Cajun charm and gentility of his native Baton Rouge, Louisiana. With his moustache, boots, overcoat and hat, he might’ve been a stagecoach driver out of another mythic past. Yet he was the proud owner of the collected works of Marx, Lenin, Engels, Mao and even Stalin.

No one worked harder to rename the UMass library after the great African-American scholar WEB Du Bois. My friends and I successfully nominated him for the UMass Chancellor’s Award for Multiculturalism in 1996. When accepting the award, however, he made the assembled dignitaries sit through an endless Leninist harangue worthy of Fidel Castro. It was simultaneously hilarious, excruciating and tedious.

Colin went on to teach at the University of Bahrain’s American Studies Center from 2002-2011. In October 2008, he arranged for me to be the keynote speaker at the Center’s 10th anniversary. Neither the end of the Cold War nor the many decades following the collapse of the USSR shook his baffling Marxist-Leninist convictions. He never budged an inch.

Since Colin’s health had been deteriorating for several years, his death was saddening but unsurprising. But I was utterly shocked when Blake Hounshell died by suicide by jumping off of the Taft Bridge in Washington DC on January 10. He was just 44, and among the most talented American journalists of his generation. He was editor of the New York Times‘ ‘On Politics’ newsletter, but I had gotten to know him earlier as managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine.

Blake spent several years in Egypt studying Arabic and working at the Ibn Khaldun Centre for Development Studies. As Blake and his mentor, Susan Glasser, were brilliantly reinventing Foreign Policy, I had numerous lunches with him. One of them gave rise to a short and provocative article in June 2012, asking whether the then-ongoing Arab uprisings were worth it – a question that eventually became far more widespread.

Blake was a rare American journalist with a deep understanding of the Arab world and a reliable voice of reason on the Middle East. His tragic death is a loss not just for his family and friends, colleagues and readers, but also for better understanding of the Arab world in the US.

On January 26 came the sudden and shocking passing of Pratip Dastidar. He was definitely the most intelligent person in my own age cohort I ever met (we were exactly the same age), and had a tremendous influence on my life and career. 

We became extremely close in 1990, during the buildup to the first Gulf War, in campus activism and journalism at UMass. We worked closely together at the Third World affairs page in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian newspaper and the “Voices of the Third World” programme on WMUA radio station originally hosted by another close friend, Madanmohan Rao, and later by me.

It wasn’t Pratip’s ideology or political orientation that struck me so deeply. Indeed, his specific views were somewhat ephemeral. He could flip from what seemed to be the far-left to what most would consider the ultra-right without batting an eyelid, although his Indian nationalism and pro-Palestinian commitment remained consistent. His pronouncements often seemed calculated to produce an effect more than stake out a passionately-held claim.

However, watching him analyze and almost clinically dissect another person, an event, or a development was a masterful seminar. He had an uncanny ability to size up his audience, and especially his opponent, no matter how small or large the group and the topic at hand, identify the weak spot and strike at the jugular with the sudden speed of a king cobra. He was a master of psychology, always probing for the emotional rather than the logical or factual vulnerability on the other side. I watched him regularly stun practiced and well-prepared interlocutors into dumbstruck silence and, on many occasions, obnoxious opponents into tears.

Yet, beneath the (sometimes sadistic) interpersonal ferocity and ideological malleability lay a wealth of invaluable insights for those who could withstand the tempest. Like another of my closest friends, the late, great contrarian Christopher Hitchens, Pratip wasn’t always right. Indeed, in my view both of them were often wrong. But their analytical prowess and rhetorical genius turned long, late-night conversations into methodological and stylistic master classes.

Pratip was unexpectedly diagnosed with stage four brain cancer and died just a few weeks later. With him goes a pile of books I am sure he was going to write, and that I am furious I will never get to read. We seriously discussed co-authoring a volume on the changing nature of work, productivity and human fulfilment.

Interacting with Colin, Blake and Pratip illuminated the intersection of the personal and political registers.

Colin’s ideological passion made his seeming contradictions all the more fascinating. Blake was the first editor to bring out the best in me as a writer and translate conversations into publications.

Many of my formative political experiences were shared with Pratip. Working with him trained me to analyse a political problem and act with effect, but also what to avoid. He often said our campus activism taught us almost everything we needed to know for our later life and careers. He was right, and working with him was a major part of that invaluable extracurricular training.

Losing friends who were also our teachers is exceedingly painful. The best I can do going forward is to honour their legacy through writing that faithfully reflects these lessons.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/02/01/the-us-is-right-to-show-concern-for-the-situation-in-palestine-israel-but-whos-listening/

Many Jewish and other Americans are increasingly unable to ignore the reality of permanent occupation.

In the occupied Palestinian territories – especially East Jerusalem and the West Bank – 2023 is shaping up to be a volatile year. As a consequence, the normally sacrosanct US-Israeli relationship is headed into unusually choppy waters. The current flare-up of deadly violence will be hard to contain and the real question is, how bad will things get?

Last year was the most violent one in the West Bank since 2005, when the UN began keeping records of Palestinians killed there by Israeli occupation forces. Among the victims was the noted American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who had been infuriating Israeli authorities for decades with her coverage of the occupation.

Despite a simmering insurgency among largely unaffiliated armed Palestinian youth gangs such as the “Lion’s Den”, which emerged in response to routine Israeli attacks, especially night raids into supposedly autonomous Palestinian towns, relations between the US and Israel remained largely unaffected. Both US President Joe Biden and the Israeli coalition government led by former prime minister Naftali Bennett had every interest in supporting each other by not making waves in the bilateral relationship.

Lurking in the background was the mutually feared and loathed right-wing Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu. In December, Mr Netanyahu pieced together the most extreme right-wing government in Israel’s history, bringing to power religious and nationalist extremists who have heretofore been considered anathema even by the Israeli far right.

Some of these figures, such as the new minister of national security,Itamar Ben-Gvir, appeared delighted by the sudden opportunity to throw petrol on the smouldering embers. Within days of his appointment, he made an official visit to the highly volatile Haram Al Sharif compound, which seemed modelled on Ariel Sharon’s similar intrusion in 2000 that sparked the second intifada.

That came just a few weeks after the Oslo peace process hit a dead end at the ill-fated and ill-conceived Camp David summit in July 2000. And since the equally ill-advised and quixotic quest for a meaningful Israeli settlement freeze during Barack Obama’s first term as US president, even the simulation of negotiations has been dropped.

Instead, for the past 23 years, the Israeli political scene has been moving relentlessly away from any pretence of a commitment to a two-state solution and instead towards annexation, possibly combined with some level of expulsion of Palestinians from parts of the West Bank to be officially merged with Israel.

Mr Netanyahu’s new government says that it is preparing to transfer key governance powers in the occupied territories from the occupation Civil Administration to new ultra-right-wing Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich. The Israeli government’s own senior legal advisers have warned that much of the rest of the world, including the International Court of Justice, would be likely to view such a step as de facto annexation – and rightly so.

While Israeli politics have been moving steadily towards annexation, Palestinian politics are just dead in the water. The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Palestinian Authority gambled everything on negotiating a two-state solution with the Israelis, who have apparently lost any inclination to move in that direction. They have yet to identify an alternative. And Hamas, which rules Gaza, has no answer other than the catastrophic and corrupt extremist misrule on full and horrifying display in the Palestinian enclave.

Yet a new generation of Palestinians that lacks any memory of how damaging and self-defeating the second intifada was and has grown up without any framework of hope for citizenship – in whatever country – and basic human rights, let alone self-determination, finally appears to be taking the initiative. Believing they have nothing to lose and unmoored from attachment to established and discredited political movements, both secular and extremist from the PLO to Hamas and even Palestinian Islamic Jihad, these angry and desperate young men are playing their gruesome roles in a tragedy of grim inevitability.

Human beings, no matter their ethnicity, culture or religion, simply will not accept a long-term and open-ended future of total subordination to another people, especially in their own land and in relatively equal numbers. The violent relationship between Israelis and Palestinians is hard-wired and structural. A reversal of this essential relationship of dominance and subordination between the two identity groups would produce roughly the same behaviours on both sides.

The deepest tragedy is that the Israeli extreme right seems to be counting on Palestinian rage and desperation to provide them with the opportunity to go as far as they can in their twin goals of annexation and expulsion. Not only will Israel impose the usual collective punishments of home demolitions and mass lockdowns following the recent violent Palestinian attacks (though never in response to Jewish ones), but extremist cabinet ministers have also demanded official recognition for a set of unauthorised settlement outposts “in retaliation” for attacks against Israelis.

Never mind that there is no logical connection whatsoever between any rational response to violence and recognising wildcat settlements. It is just an excuse. Unfortunately, the enraged Palestinian youths involved are not likely to reflect on what else they could provide the rationalisation for as reciprocal violence intensifies.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who visited the region this week, knows that he and Mr Biden have little leverage over Mr Netanyahu, especially since they seem to be oddly disinclined to so much as fortnightly acknowledge that Palestinians are suffering under a military occupation. The Israeli Prime Minister, in turn, has little leverage over his more radical cabinet colleagues. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has, if anything, even less leverage over the youths driving the Palestinian side of the cycle of violence that Israeli extremists are counting on.

The US is right to show concern, but neither side is really listening. The past 10 years suggest that, as things stand, Israel can be slowed, but not deterred, from creeping steadily towards annexation, and always intensifying the status quo of systematic, formalised inequality between Jews and Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Many Jewish and other Americans, especially Democrats, are increasingly unable to support or ignore this reality, especially since it is coupled with efforts by fundamentalists in Israel to exclude many Jewish Americans from the Israeli or even Jewish fold on denominational or ancestral grounds.

Republicans, driven by apocalyptic evangelical Christians, may not care, but as long as the US has a Democratic administration and Israel has a fundamentalist, racist and annexationist government, the traditionally inviolable “special relationship” will be imperilled.

Mr Netanyahu, Mr Biden and Mr Blinken will strive to paper over this growing schism, but it’s likely to grow considerably wider by the end of this dangerous year.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/01/24/kevin-mccarthy-and-the-telling-state-of-the-republicans/

The House Speaker has appointed three extreme members to its main investigative body while blocking two Democrats on spurious grounds.

The demeaning spectacle through which Kevin McCarthy, after 14 failed votes, finally convinced 21 radical holdouts to allow him to at last become Speaker of the US House of Representatives appears to be just the beginning of a period of misrule. His committee assignments leave little doubt the worst is yet to come.

During this fiasco, GOP members called each other, with as much plausibility as hyperbole, metaphorical “hostage takers”, “Taliban”, and “terrorists”. In front of a shocked live TV audience, incoming armed services committee chairman Mike Rogers lunged at holdout Matt Gaetz, but was physically restrained from attacking him.

Mr McCarthy gave into virtually every demand any Republican made of him, because he could afford to lose no votes, including agreeing to allow any member, alone, to make a “motion to vacate” which could remove him from his speakership at any moment. He thereby agreed to become the political prisoner of his “hostage taking” colleagues. The implications for governance are dire.

He reportedly made numerous concessions about committee posts, but nobody forced him to assign apparently compulsive fabulist George Santos to the small business and science committees, appointments so obnoxious they are essentially trolling the entire country.

Mr Santos is wanted in Brazil for stealing a cheque book from a man his mother worked for as a nurse in 2008 and purchasing $1,314 in clothing from… a small business. Brazilian police documents show Mr Santos confessed before disappearing and sending the case into limbo. Now he has suddenly reappeared on the floor of the US Congress, Brazilian authorities have reopened it.

He has yet to explain how, after a lifetime of modest income, he suddenly started reporting huge paydays in the past two years and lent his own campaign $700,000. The answer could well involve his work in 2020-2021 for Harbour City Capital Corp, which US financial authorities have described as “a classic Ponzi scheme” to defraud investors of up to $17.1 million. But at least it wasn’t a small business.

Mr Santos should also fit right into the Science Committee, since he claims to have played a significant role in developing carbon capture technology during a non-existent career in finance and boasted about numerous equally non-existent university degrees.

From the preposterous to the sinister, Mr McCarthy has appointed three of his most extreme members to the crucial Oversight committee, the House’s main investigative body.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is known for a litany of bizarre views, including that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were a hoax (she has since somehow been persuaded that they actually occurred), appearing to endorse killing prominent Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, and her recent boast that if she had orchestrated the January 6 insurrection, “we would have won” and “it would’ve been armed”. Mr McCarthy appears to think all this also made her an ideal addition to the House Homeland Security Committee.

Paul Gosar is another strong supporter of the insurgency, notorious for close ties to the white supremacist movement and strange conspiracy theories about the dangers of fluoridation of water (a paranoid fixation on the American extreme right since the late 1940s). Lauren Boebert was one of the anti-McCarthy holdouts and had been noted for her personal closeness to Ms Greene until they had a notorious shouting match over Mr McCarthy in a Capitol Hill ladies’ room that Ms Boebert called “ugly” and “nasty”.

All three have promoted farcical QAnon conspiracy theories. They also endorse false claims that the 2020 election was somehow “stolen” from Donald Trump and promote the racist “great replacement theory” which posits a conspiracy to overwhelm and displace white populations in the West through nonwhite immigration.

All three were also assigned to the house judiciary committee led by prominent firebrand Jim Jordan. Along with the Oversight Committee, it will likely spearhead a push by Republicans to spend most of their time and energy in the next two years investigating President Joe Biden on a range of issues, most notably the business activities of his son, Hunter.

A 2020 Republican-led Senate investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing by either Mr Biden or his son involving Hunter’s service on the board of the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings. It did confirm, as is obvious, that Hunter Biden inappropriately sought to “cash in” on his family name and thereby created “the appearance of a conflict of interest” given his father’s then-role as US vice president.

These committees are unlikely to reproduce such a level-headed, sober conclusion or evince the least interest in many highly suspect business activities of Mr Trump and his children during his presidency. But Mr Jordan has signalled his interest in interfering in ongoing federal criminal investigations into Mr Trump and his allies, already leading to a rebuke by the Department of Justice of a request for information into several sensitive probes.

Mr Jordan has created a subcommittee to study the purported “weaponisation” of the federal government, precisely including “ongoing criminal investigations”. It could involve efforts to disrupt investigations and potential prosecutions of Mr Trump and his allies, including subcommittee member Scott Perry, whose mobile phone was seized by the FBI in its inquiry into efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Mr Perry has dismissed observations of this obvious conflict of interest by saying he merely faces “an accusation”.

Instead, Mr McCarthy has vowed to block two key democrats – ranking member Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell – from the vital intelligence committee in a gesture of obvious and petty vengeance, largely on behalf of Mr Trump.

Yet all this is unlikely to go beyond political kabuki designed to get these politicians on television and raise money. The Department of Justice is not going to allow a subcommittee to acquire sensitive details of ongoing criminal probes. And it seems unlikely the House will discover any evidence of corruption by Mr Biden.

Mr Santos can provide slapstick comic relief as these committees indulge in film noir theatrics. Yet the dysfunctionality and extremism of the new House threatens all-to-real consequences regarding the “debt ceiling”.

The “hostage takers” are vowing to hold the “full faith and credit” of the US to ransom for major spending cuts. The White House correctly says it won’t negotiate over Congress refusing to pay its existing bills. But a default would probably precipitate a US and global financial meltdown. Even for Republicans, that would not be fun and games.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/01/20/bob-dylans-book-is-among-the-essential-and-diverse-political-writings-of-the-past-year/

Bob Dylan on modern song, two histories of America’s policies towards Israel, new biographies of John Donne and Led Zeppelin, and the rise of Iran’s national security state are standouts.

In two recent columns in these pages, I looked at some significant nonfiction books published last year, but several others should not be left unexamined.

Anyone interested in Middle East issues should eagerly seek out The Arc of a Covenant by Walter Russell Mead and We Are Not One by Eric Alterman. They provide very different perspectives on the history of the US-Israel relationship and can be read in harmony and/or counterpoint.

Prof Mead is the preeminent scholar of US foreign policy formation. His books, particularly Special Providence, are invaluable guides to how political, cultural, religious, economic, and other forces produced these national stances. His superb new book traces the development of the “special relationship,” including the unique US commitment to Israel’s “Qualitative Military Edge” over any regional rivals.

In his element, Prof Mead is peerless. The Arc of a Covenant is therefore indispensable to understanding how and why Washington developed its policies towards Zionism, Israel, and the Palestinians. Like many of his key subjects, he has a clear sympathy for, and preference towards, Israel over the Palestinians. And while he plainly makes every effort to be fair, his singular understanding of American policy and its context is not matched when it comes to Israel. Even more, at times he struggles to understand Palestinian experiences and perspectives.

In this book and his Wall Street Journal columns, Prof Mead somewhat anachronistically continues to treat the Palestinian cause as essentially a thwarted quest for independent statehood without recognising that this is only one solution to the core problem of mass statelessness and the quest for citizenship – in whatever country – that Palestinians are increasingly embracing. That all-to-common blind spot both arises from and facilitates a relatively non-problematised emotional support for Israel, but it misses what is now arguably the key problematic.

Prof Alterman’s task is slightly narrower, tracing the Jewish-American discourse on Israel. His engaging book is more openly, if not actually, polemical. He reads the evolution of Jewish American thinking regarding Zionism and Israel from an increasingly widespread centre-left perspective disturbed by the repression the occupation inflicts on Palestinians as a community and by statelessness as a human rights crisis for Palestinian individuals.

Prof Alterman charts a detailed historical, intellectual and, perhaps above all, emotional map of the deep rift between Jewish-American impulses to be supportive of Israel and, simultaneously, increasingly unwilling to deny the categorical indefensibility of the apartheid-like occupation. However, like Prof Mead, he is most comfortable with American and even Israeli topics, and sometimes seems drawn towards conventional wisdom or outdated ideas regarding Palestinians and other Arabs. This appears to be an occupational hazard for American historians, Jewish and Gentile alike, although Palestinians and other Arabs have typically failed to explain themselves adequately or effectively.

The most recent American Nobel Laureate in literature, Bob Dylan, has long occupied a fascinating intermediate zone between his Jewish heritage and his (apparently still quietly strong) Christian beliefs. Last year he produced his most remarkable book yet, The Philosophy of Modern Song, a splendid collection of 66 short essays on songs ranging from Steven Foster’s “Nelly Was a Lady” written in 1849 (though he discusses a 2004 rendition) to just two written in the 21st century. Most are from the 1940s and 50s, when Mr Dylan was a young sponge soaking up American culture as fast as humanly possible.

There is not much philosophy in the book, but plenty of poetic flourishes in his often-mesmerising commentaries. As befits the work of a recording artist, it’s best listened to as an audiobook. Mr Dylan’s own voice, eerily distant, tinny, and echoing, like the signal from a mysterious, far-off radio station, croaks out many of the best passages. Listeners will ideally switch between the audiobook and an easily created playlist of the songs, massively enriching the experience.

At 81, he still strikes the pose of a cynical outsider casting a jaundiced eye on everything: “You’re sitting in the shade, slumped out, anonymous, incognito, watching everything go by, unimpressed, hard-bitten – impenetrable.” One of the richest passages involves a meditation on the difference between the outlaw, a figure he celebrates and identifies with, versus common criminals, no matter how powerful, whom he detests and dismisses. Modern, basically rock, song is essentially by and about the outlaw, facing down the “real criminals” lurking behind various masks of authority.

Among the most notorious rock outlaws, at least in their own minds, Led Zeppelin, are finally the subject of a book that takes them seriously enough as cultural figures, even caricatures, yet not too seriously (none of their songs could conceivably make it into Mr Dylan’s book). Led Zeppelin: A Biography by Bob Spitz tells the story of Jimmy Page’s wildly successful yet critically reviled band and its colossal influence in a serious yet often hilarious narrative. The original “Spinaltap,” Led Zeppelin possessed little creative energy, apart from Mr Page’s extraordinary riffs and solos, and increasingly relied on the brilliant, thunderous drumming of John Bonham. Yet they left their mark on a vast array of performers that followed them, plus a trail of self-destructive mayhem few ever equaled, or dared to try.

From the ridiculous to the sublime, noted children’s author Katherine Rundell’s biography, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne cuts through centuries of erudite criticism by reading every facet of the Renaissance poetic genius’ complex, and often contradictory, life and work through the defining theme of transcendence into infinity. He fixated on the prefixes trans- and super- in words throughout his work. This excellent analysis helps explain why, for example, Donne embraced yet feared mortality even more than his contemporaries also working in the shadow of the Black Death.

Honourable mention must go to The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher that makes a devastating case against social media’s malign impact; Secret City, James Kirchick’s riveting and wildly entertaining account of the often unseen and typically unwelcome gay underbelly of Washington power; and Political Succession in the Islamic Republic of Iran by Ali Alforneh (my colleague at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, which published the book), that updates and elaborates his long-standing thesis that theocratic governance in Iran is giving way to a national security state dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

When you get through all those, you’ll be just in time for my suggestions about the best nonfiction from 2023.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-18/firing-professor-who-showed-muhammad-for-islamophobia-harms-islam?srnd=opinion&sref=tp95wk9l

Students who pushed for the firing of a Hamline University professor are trying to force their narrow definition of Islam on a diverse cultural kaleidoscope.

In the name of combating Islamophobia, Hamline University in Minnesota has committed a particularly egregious exercise in Islamophobia.

Last October, Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor teaching a global art history class, included a masterpiece of 14th-century Islamic art depicting the Prophet Mohammed receiving Koranic revelations from the archangel Gabriel. Recognizing that some Muslims regard depictions of the prophet (and in some extreme cases, anyone at all) as blasphemous, she provided repeated advance warnings to her students, both in the course syllabus and in class.

According to reports, no one appeared concerned before the online class, and she shared the work of art, along with many others. Afterward, a Muslim American student complained to the university, others not enrolled in the class piled on, and Hamline declared that exposing students to this significant masterwork of Islamic art was “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.” López Prater has now been told her contract will not be renewed and, as a disposable adjunct, has no defense other than the fact that she did nothing wrong.

The fundamental questions raised by this case are what is Islamophobia, what is Islam, and who speaks for Muslims? When I was earning my Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in the 1990s, I was involved in a lot of campus activism, and I recognized this dynamic at Hamline instantly. This student and her allies are using a phony complaint of discrimination as a power play.

Rationalizing their response, university officials noted that, “To look upon an image of the Prophet Muhammad, for many Muslims, is against their faith.” As someone raised and imbued with Islamic values, I know this is true. But no one compelled anyone to look at such an image, and why would one teach an art history course without showing one of the subject matter’s masterpieces?

What these students are saying is not that they shouldn’t have been required to look at the image, since most weren’t even in the class, but that this image should never be shown. Thus they are asserting the right to define what is and is not Islamic, and to speak on behalf of all Muslims. In its craven rush to placate an aggrieved minority, the university is endorsing a reactionary effort to police the meaning of Islam at Hamline and, potentially, US higher education in general.

The miniature comes from a 14th-century Persian classic called The Compendium of Chronicles, which was authored, illustrated, commissioned and enjoyed by Muslims. It occupies a noteworthy place in the artistic history of Islamic civilizations. To brand its display — with ample “trigger warnings” — as blasphemous is to shrink the history of Islam into a small and impoverished cage.

Nearly one in four persons in the world is Muslim; Islamic civilization has been one of the most diverse subset of human cultures since its birth in the 7th century. There isn’t much difference between the word “person” and the word “Muslim” in our community, because given this kaleidoscopic chronological and geographic diversity, virtually every human proclivity and experience is represented somewhere in Islamic cultures.

For example, even though most Muslims agree alcohol is religiously proscribed, the idea that Muslims don’t drink doesn’t survive contact with any diverse group of real-life Muslims, or even many of the greatest Islamic civilizations. As for the sexual prudery one sees in many Arab nations today, simply look at past literature, beginning with the 15th-century Arabic sex manual The Perfumed Garden, or, more edgy, the pederastic poetry of the revered and reviled 9th-century master Abu Nuwas.

Yet across the globe, religious conservatives want to exercise power and control to eliminate any diversity. Western progressives frequently side with them because they don’t recognize, or don’t care, that doing so constitutes an alliance with religious reactionaries who only appear “authentic” because of their stridency. Liberal institutions like Hamline are content with the lowest common denominator if it shuts up protesters, and adjunct professors are easy scapegoats.

American Muslim organizations are divided on this incident. The Muslim Public Affairs Council has supported López Prater, while the local chapter of the more conservative Council on American-Islamic Relations joined the blasphemy brigade of aggrieved students. (CAIR’s national organization took a more ambivalent stance.)

If American universities are serious about treating Islam and Muslims with respect, López Prater needs to be rehired, and no other college should fall into such infantilizing ploys. Fear of the full complexity of Islam as a social text and the dizzying variety among Muslims, their cultures and civilizations — today and throughout history — is a real, insidious and dangerous form of Islamophobia.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/01/09/new-books-shed-light-on-us-history-as-a-guide-to-the-present/

They examine White understandings of freedom, the strategies and tactics of the civil rights movement, and US history since WWII.

At their most instructive and useful, national histories function like tapestries that knit together many narrative strands, both consensus and contested. The increasingly bitter battles over historical narratives now exemplify the deepest divisions in a fracturing US. The weave is unravelling badly.

While liberals use the institutional power of universities and the entertainment industry to promote their preferred storylines, Republican state legislatures are using the coercive force of government to outlaw teaching about the most unflattering aspects of US history — slavery, segregation and racism — plus gender and sexuality.

Several new books shed important light on this intensifying struggle.

The Donald Trump movement that culminated in a failed coup and the January 6 insurrection, attacking the constitution and the state in the name of patriotism and “freedom”, was the culmination of a lengthy resurgence of white grievance and resentments. This return of the repressed had obvious way stations in Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” in 1968 that welcomed pro-segregation forces into the Republican Party, the rise of Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh and his talk radio imitators, and, especially, Alabama governor George Wallace until he was crippled by a would-be assassin in 1972.

Whether he knows it or not, Mr Trump’s most immediate precursor was Wallace, whose attitudes and agenda he often seems to channel in a kind of uncanny demagogic seance. Freedom’s Dominion by Jefferson Cowie is a breakthrough in situating the Trump movement in its broadest historical context, though briefly acknowledging that is left for the very end of the book.

Prof Cowie builds on the insight, best developed by the sociologist Orlando Patterson, that for many white Americans, and other some dominant communities around the world, “freedom” has meant the prerogative to oppress, dispossess, enslave or abuse others in the pursuit of the crudest individual and communal self-interest. The presumed loss of an assumed privilege of white Christian national pre-eminence is the primal fuel driving the Maga faction and its allies and antecedents.

Freedom’s Dominion begins and essentially ends with Wallace, an arch-segregationist (whose eventual repentance is another story). It is remarkably sweeping, tracing patterns of freedom as the right to dominate in Wallace’s homeland of Barbour County in south-eastern Alabama during four key historical periods: the brutal white invasion of Alabama and dispossession of the indigenous Creek Nation resulting in the infamous Trail of Tears ethnic cleansing; violent resistance to Reconstruction after the Civil War; the savage reimposition of white supremacy and segregation; and efforts to preserve that system despite the civil rights movement and anti-discrimination mandates from the federal government.

Prof Cowie reads this history as a continuous struggle between local control and independence from national authority as the key to the freedom to oppress versus fitful and often unsuccessful, although sometimes decisive, intervention by the federal government to enforce the law to protect minorities. This notion of freedom as the right to dominate, and at least scoff at restraints and requirements imposed by Washington, is central to the Trump movement, which, as I noted in these pages a year ago, is typified by its hatred and rejection of the national government and its agencies.

An important companion to Freedom’s Dominion, also published last year, is Waging a Good War by military historian Tom Ricks, which presents a major new gloss on the other side of the civil rights struggle. The book is subtitled A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968, though this analogy is not original to Mr Ricks. Especially during this classical phase, the civil rights movement often referred to itself as a righteous nonviolent army waging a war of successive campaigns, and frequently invoked military and paramilitary metaphors.

By subjecting this well-established history to a rigorous application of this analogy, Mr Ricks manages to shed important new light on the successes and failures of the most consequential grass roots movement in the US since the Civil War. At times, these comparisons seem strained, such as likening the first freedom rides to the Doolittle bombing raids over Tokyo in the early phases of the Pacific theatre of the Second World War, but for the most part the reading holds up very well and adds a great deal to what otherwise seemed a thoroughly explicated part of recent US history.

For a broader understanding of US history since the Second World War, the definitive volume is undoubtedly Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945 just penned by the Palestinian-American historian Salim Yaqub (full disclosure: Salim and I have been close friends since we were eight-year-old children in Beirut). But Prof Yaqub’s volume is unique in covering US history from the end of the Second World War until virtually the present day, past the January 6 insurrection.

In less than 600 pages, he manages to weave together virtually all crucial developments regarding the relationship between the government and economy; the US global role; demographic transformation; growing disagreements between Americans; and the impact of increasingly rapid and disruptive technological change. It is the ideal introduction for apt high schoolers, any college students and all general readers not thoroughly immersed in contemporary US history.

Prof Yaqub makes this potentially stultifying narrative compellingly readable. It zips along seamlessly, while making all the connections between the data points needed to form a beautifully integrated history. It should be translated into Arabic and widely distributed and read in the Middle East as soon as possible.

Prof Yaqub has been previously known for two masterful books on US-Arab diplomatic and political relations in the 1950s and 1970s. Unsurprisingly then, he begins with the captivating story of how two sons of the Turkish ambassador to the US in the 1930s and ’40s became fanatical fans of the black music scene in Washington and beyond, and went on to found Atlantic records, one of the premier blues, R&B and, ultimately, rock labels. Ahmet Ertegun became a central figure in US popular culture and the founding chairman of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

This story, which opens the book’s introduction, is the only real nod to Prof Yaqub’s previous scholarly work, and Salim’s personal Middle Eastern background. Then flows a comprehensive and impeccable contemporary history of America, which, like Freedom’s Dominion, is required reading for anyone who wants to understand why and how the US enters 2023 simultaneously so truly great yet so profoundly troubled.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/01/06/the-kevin-mccarthy-spectacle-bodes-ill-for-the-us/

His humiliation is unheard of and yet another blow to Trump. Could the GOP go the way of its Whig predecessors?

On Thursday, the US House of Representatives conducted a remarkable 11 inconclusive votes for Speaker. This means no representatives can be sworn in and no congressional business done. Republicans, who obtained a razor-thin majority in the November election, appear feckless, disunited, unfit and uninterested in governing. That bodes extremely ill for the country in general over the next two years.

California representative Kevin McCarthy, endorsed as “my Kevin” by former president Donald Trump, is being opposed by about 20 hardliners, leaving Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries consistently coming in first place, supported by all 212 of his Democratic colleagues.

Mr McCarthy has been offering ever-greater concessions, and Mr Trump ordered his followers to get in line, to no avail. The degrading spectacle is a predictable comeuppance for Mr McCarthy, who initially angrily blamed Mr Trump for the January 6 insurrection, only to recant, travel to Florida to bend the knee and kiss his ring, and bow to each and every demand in order to try to gain the speaker’s chair. His humiliation is unheard of. And it is another yet devastating defeat for Mr Trump.

But the inability of the razor-thin Republican majority in the House to even select a speaker raises deafening alarm bells. Congress at a minimum must approve the budget, appropriations bills, and, above all, recurring extensions of the debt ceiling. The last issue is most alarming. The US President, Joe Biden, may be compelled to take unprecedented unilateral action to prevent the US from defaulting on its financial obligations if this current spectacle is anything to judge by.

The anti-McCarthy holdouts are acting like hostage takers who don’t want a ransom. They just want to accumulate hostages. Like Seinfeld, it’s a show about nothing. Mr McCarthy has offered everything to the rebels, short of picking up their dry cleaning and babysitting their children. But concessions aren’t the point. Disruption, performative anger, chaos, and, especially, television hits are.

Nancy Pelosi, now arguably the greatest House speaker ever, had a comparably narrow margin, and managed to get a great deal done. And the two other protracted Speaker confrontations were about immensely substantial disputes.

The issue in 1923 was about farming versus manufacturing interests. And in 1855-56, the quarrel was the expansion of slavery into western territories, which both pro-and antislavery forces understood would determine the viability of the atrocious practice in the US into the foreseeable future. That was ultimately decided by the US Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in American history.

But there is nothing significant Mr McCarthy’s opponents claim to want that he does not also advocate. Politics for most of the Republican Party, has become practically devoid of content – the last party platform merely said it stood for whatever Mr Trump wanted at any given moment – and has instead degenerated into an exercise in theatrical preening and posturing, exactly what is happening on the House floor this week.

You could see it as a dangerous game or a fatal illness. The US has a two-party system, but, historically, parties come and go.

The 1855-56 House Speaker contest solidified the emergence of the Republican Party, displacing the dying Whig Party, which had no remaining core or vision. In 1849, the Whigs nominated and secured the election of Zachary Taylor, universally regarded as one of the worst ever US presidents. A dissident faction of “Conscience Whigs” emerged that eventually formed the basis of the Republican Party. That does not sound unfamiliar.

Given the spectacle in the House this week, all conjecture that the Republican Party may have become radicalised and polarised, even against itself, beyond redemption and political usefulness seems increasingly less far-fetched.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-05/netanyahu-s-new-partners-waste-no-time-undermining-him?srnd=opinion&sref=tp95wk9l

Itamar Ben-Gvir’s visit to the Temple Mount wasn’t just about Israeli politics, it was part of a threat to the Abraham Accords.

The religious extremists brought into the Israeli government by returning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week wasted no time in confirming fears they would gleefully play with fire. This isn’t simply about domestic politics: Provocations by right-wing leaders have already drawn the ire of Israel’s Arab neighbors and even President Joe Biden’s administration; they threaten to fan Palestinian violence and undermine the Abraham Accords that normalized diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates and other Arab states.

On Tuesday, the new minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, made a brief visit to a flashpoint of religious passions known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif. The site includes the iconic Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, whose golden dome dominates the Jerusalem skyline, and the Temple Mount, presumed to be the site of the Second Jewish Temple that was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.

The visit created an uproar of criticism, but so far, thankfully, no violence. Ben-Gvir is a proud Jewish supremacist who in 2007 was found guilty by a Jerusalem court of supporting a terrorist organization and inciting racism. He fully understands the symbolic resonance of a trip to the temple site by Israeli officials.

The Haram al-Sharif is controlled by an ancient Muslim religious trust called the Waqf. Jews, Christians and others are welcome to visit, but the Israeli rabbinate strongly discourages Jews from going there; prayer in the area is reserved to Muslims. Israel’s control of East Jerusalem, which it has occupied since 1967 and claimed to annex in 1980, has involved a commitment to maintain the “status quo” at religious sites, an arrangement that was formalized by the 1878 Treaty of Berlin. But a growing number of Israelis are determined to undo that status quo, either slowly or quickly.

Global Muslim sensitivities arise from fears that, ultimately, Israel will demolish the Haram al-Sharif and construct a Third Temple. This is definitely a minority view in Israel, but it’s growing and creeping into the cabinet.

Ben-Gvir’s visit was meant to communicate official Jewish power there. After the last such provocation, when newly installed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon conducted a heavily armed march on the holy site in 2000, a wave of violent confrontations degenerated into the calamitous second Palestinian intifada. About 3,500 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis, mostly civilians on both sides, were killed in the subsequent five years of fighting.

Ben-Gvir hasn’t merely set off Palestinian outrage. Jordan, which Israel recognizes as the custodian of Muslim and Christian holy places in occupied East Jerusalem, said it was willing to enter “a conflict” if Israel overturns the status quo. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre warned that “any unilateral action that jeopardizes the status quo is unacceptable.”

The UAE, which has entered into an unprecedented wide-ranging partnership with Israel since initiating the 2020 Abraham Accords — and even sought to build relations with Ben-Gvir by hosting him on a visit to its embassy in Tel Aviv in December — condemned his actions as “the storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque courtyard.” Netanyahu was forced to postpone a much-anticipated visit to the Gulf state scheduled for next week. The UAE joined China in arranging to bring the matter before the UN Security Council in coming days.

Netanyahu has said that normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia is one of his main goals. That was already a considerable long shot, but it took Ben-Gvir only a handful of days to make it even more difficult. The kingdom strongly condemned the action and is taking the matter to the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

Netanyahu has promised he can control his fundamentalist coalition partners, but all he was able to do in this case was to convince Ben-Gvir to keep the visit brief and the timing secret. It was likely just an early taste of the provocations that lie ahead. The goal of the US and Israel’s other partners, including the UAE, should be to convince Netanyahu to reconsider the price he paid to cobble together a government and try to forge a new coalition with less radical figures such as former Defense Minister Benny Gantz.

Netanyahu is obviously uncomfortable with new political allies so far to his right; last month he reportedly told Ben-Gvir to “calm down.” But such extremists cannot be controlled. They can only be coddled or removed. And removing them is what Netanyahu — and if not him, then the Israeli public — must do to avoid another eruption of violence in the occupied Palestinian territories and perhaps a fracturing of Israel’s nascent ties with the Arab world.