Chris Hedges's Blog, page 274

Comedian Headed for Landslide Victory in Ukraine Election

KIEV, Ukraine—A comedian whose only political experience consists of playing a president on TV cruised toward a huge landslide victory in Ukraine’s presidential election Sunday in what was seen as a reaction against the country’s entrenched corruption and low standard of living.

Results from 25% of polling stations showed sitcom star Volodymyr Zelenskiy receiving three times as many votes as President Petro Poroshenko — 73% to 24% — a crushing rebuke to Poroshenko’s five years in office.

Even before results started trickling in, Poroshenko accepted defeat based on exit polls, saying: “I am leaving office, but I want to firmly underline that I am not leaving politics.”

Zelenskiy, for his part, promised wide changes at the top echelons of government and said his No. 1 task would be securing the release of about 170 Ukrainian military members taken prisoner in the east or in Russia.

Ukraine has been plagued by rampant graft, a sickly economy and a grinding, five-year war with Russian-backed separatists in the eastern part of the country that has killed over 13,000 people.

After his apparent election, Zelenskiy said he would engage Russia to try to end the conflict. He also said, without giving details, that “we will make a very powerful information war” in order to stop the fighting.

He also suggested, in a remark that could grate on Russia, that his victory could be a model for other former Soviet states that want to move forward from ossified politics: “To all the countries of the former Soviet Union — look at us, everything is possible.”

Although the early results were a small fraction of the vote, the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine congratulated Zelenskiy, as did NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg.

Zelenskiy, 41, became famous nationwide for his comic portrayal in a Ukrainian TV series of a high school teacher who becomes president after a video rant against corruption goes viral. In a case of life imitating television, Zelenskiy denounced graft as a real candidate.

Although Zelenskiy was criticized for a vague campaign platform and never holding public office, voters appeared to cast aside those concerns in favor of a thorough sweep of Ukraine’s political leadership.

“I have grown up under the old politicians and only have seen empty promises, lies and corruption,” said Lyudmila Potrebko, a 22-year-old computer programmer who voted for Zelenskiy. “It’s time to change that.”

Poroshenko was a billionaire candy magnate and former foreign minister before he took office in 2014 after huge street protests drove his Russia-friendly predecessor to flee the country. Although he instituted some reforms, critics said he had not done nearly enough to curb corruption.

Poroshenko positioned himself as a president who could stand up to Russia and said Zelenskiy would be easy prey for Moscow.

Although the Kremlin despises Poroshenko, Zelenskiy’s apparent victory was greeted noncommittally in Russia.

“We do not yet associate hopes with the winner,” Konstantin Kosachev, head of the foreign affairs committee in the upper house of the Russian Parliament, was quoted as saying by state news agency Tass.

Millions of people living in the rebel-controlled east and in Russia-annexed Crimea were unable to vote. Russia seized Crimea in 2014, and fighting in the east erupted that same year.

Poroshenko campaigned on the same promise he made when he was elected in 2014: to lead the nation of 42 million into the European Union and NATO. Zelenskiy pledged likewise to keep Ukraine on a Westward course but said the country should only join NATO if voters give their approval in a referendum.

Poroshenko’s five years in office saw the creation of a new Ukrainian Orthodox Church independent of Moscow’s church, a schism he championed. Also, Ukraine reached a visa-free deal with the EU that led to the exodus of millions of skilled workers for better living conditions elsewhere in Europe.

“Poroshenko has done a lot of good things for the country — creating its own church, getting the visa-free deal and taking Ukraine away from the empire,” said 44-year-old businessman Volodymyr Andreichenko, who voted for him.

But Poroshenko’s message fell flat with many voters struggling to survive on meager wages and pay soaring utility bills.

“We have grown poor under Poroshenko and have to save to buy food and clothing,” said 55-year-old sales clerk Irina Fakhova. “We have had enough of them getting mired in corruption and filling their pockets and treating us as fools.”

Zelenskiy’s image has been shadowed by his admission that he had commercial interests in Russia through a holding company, and by his business ties to self-exiled Ukrainian billionaire businessman Ihor Kolomoyskyi. Kolomoyskyi owns the TV station that aired the actor’s sitcom, “Servant of the People,” and his other comedy shows.

Accuracy at Heart of Census Question Before Supreme Court

WASHINGTON—Justice Elena Kagan’s father was 3 years old when the census taker came to the family’s apartment on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, New York, on April 10, 1930.

Robert Kagan was initially wrongly listed as an “alien,” though he was a native-born New Yorker. The entry about his citizenship status appears to have been crossed out on the census form.

Vast changes in America and technology have dramatically altered the way the census is conducted. But the accuracy of the once-a-decade population count is at the heart of the Supreme Court case over the Trump administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

The justices are hearing arguments in the case on Tuesday, with a decision due by late June that will allow for printing forms in time for the count in April 2020.

The fight over the census question is the latest over immigration-related issues between Democratic-led states and advocates for immigrants, on one side, and the administration, on the other. The Supreme Court last year upheld President Donald Trump’s ban on visitors to the U.S. from several mostly Muslim countries. The court also has temporarily blocked administration plans to make it harder for people to claim asylum and is considering an administration appeal that would allow Trump to end protections for immigrants who were brought to this country as children.

The citizenship question has not been asked on the census form sent to every American household since 1950, and the administration’s desire to add it is now rife with political implications and partisan division.

Federal judges in California , Maryland and New York have blocked the administration from going forward with a citizenship question after crediting the analysis of Census Bureau experts who found that a question would damage the overall accuracy of the census and cause millions of Hispanics and immigrants to go uncounted. That in turn would cost several states seats in the U.S. House and billions of dollars in federal dollars that are determined by census results.

The three judges have rejected the administration’s arguments that asking about citizenship won’t harm accuracy and that the information is needed to help enforce provisions of the federal Voting Rights Act.

The Census Bureau’s consistent view since the 1960 census has been that asking everyone about citizenship “would produce a less accurate population count,” five former agency directors who served in Democratic and Republic administrations wrote in a Supreme Court brief.

No population count is perfect, and census designers strive to create a questionnaire that is clear and easy to answer.

In older censuses, a government worker known as an enumerator would visit households and record information. In modern times, people fill in their own forms on paper or electronically.

But the potential for errant answers is ever-present, said Debbie Soren, the treasurer of the Illinois chapter of the Jewish Genealogical Society.

“Sometimes people didn’t always want to be forthcoming, including in their ages, for whatever reason. Sometimes there might be a language barrier. Or the person reporting the information might not be the best one to report it,” Soren said.

It seems likely that the census taker himself was responsible for the confusion in Robert Kagan’s citizenship status. Dozens of families who lived near the Kagans have similar crossed-out entries in the citizenship column.

While Kagan’s father was born in the United States, her grandfather, Irving Kagan, was a Russian immigrant who had submitted his paperwork to become an American citizen, the 1930 census shows. By 1940, Irving Kagan was a citizen. The old census forms, through 1940, can be searched on ancestry.com. The 1950 census will become public in 2022.

If past census reports leave a wide berth for error, they still hold a wealth of information, said Sharon DeBartolo Carmack of Salt Lake City, the author of “You Can Write Your Family History.”

Before 1960, the census often asked where people were born and, if abroad, whether they were U.S. citizens. “It’s wonderful to us as researchers, even though we don’t like the politics, don’t like the motivation,” Carmack said.

Kagan is among seven of the nine justices whose ancestors told census takers they were immigrants who had become American citizens. They came from England, Germany, Ireland, Italy and Russia, like so many others seeking a better life.

The fathers of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Samuel Alito were immigrants from Russia and Italy, respectively.

In the 1910 census, Patrick Kavanaugh, the great-grandfather of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, was living in New Haven, Connecticut, an iron worker who had become a citizen after leaving Ireland in the 1870s.

By 1900, the English-born great-grandmother of Chief Justice John Roberts and the German-born great-grandfather of Justice Stephen Breyer also were U.S. citizens.

Two of Justice Neil Gorsuch’s great-great grandfathers, Alex Tiehen and Hugh O’Grady, lived in Nebraska, according to the 1900 census. Tiehen came from Germany in 1845 and O’Grady emigrated from Ireland two years later. By the turn of the last century, both reported they were U.S. citizens.

There are two justices with very different paths to American citizenship. Justice Clarence Thomas is the descendant of slaves and Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s Puerto Rican ancestors became American citizens under a 1917 federal law. Spain ceded the territory to the United States after the Spanish-American War.

The case is Department of Commerce v. New York, 18-966.

More Than 200 Die in Sri Lanka Hotel, Church Bombings

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka—More than 200 people were killed and hundreds more wounded in eight bomb blasts that rocked churches and luxury hotels in or near Sri Lanka’s capital on Easter Sunday — the deadliest violence the South Asian island country has seen since a bloody civil war ended a decade ago.

Defense Minister Ruwan Wijewardena described the bombings as a terrorist attack by religious extremists and said seven suspects had been arrested, though there was no immediate claim of responsibility. Wijewardena said most of the blasts were believed to have been suicide attacks.

The explosions collapsed ceilings and blew out windows, killing worshippers and hotel guests. People were seen carrying the wounded out of blood-spattered pews. Witnesses described powerful explosions, followed by scenes of smoke, blood, broken glass, alarms going off and victims screaming in terror.

“People were being dragged out,” Bhanuka Harischandra of Colombo, a 24-year-old founder of a tech marketing company who was going to the city’s Shangri-La Hotel for a meeting when it was bombed. “People didn’t know what was going on. It was panic mode.”

He added: “There was blood everywhere.”

The three bombed hotels and one of the churches, St. Anthony’s Shrine, are frequented by foreign tourists. Sri Lanka’s Foreign Ministry said the bodies of at least 27 foreigners were recovered, and the dead included people from Britain, the U.S., India, Portugal and Turkey. China’s Communist Party newspaper said two Chinese were killed.

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said he feared the violence could trigger instability in Sri Lanka, a country of about 21 million people, and he vowed the government will “vest all necessary powers with the defense forces” to take action against those responsible for the massacre. The government imposed a nationwide curfew from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.

The Archbishop of Colombo, Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, called on Sri Lanka’s government to “mercilessly” punish those responsible “because only animals can behave like that.”

Police spokesman Ruwan Gunasekara said 207 people were killed and 450 wounded.

The scale of the bloodshed recalled the worst days of the nation’s 26-year civil war, in which the Tamil Tigers, a rebel group from the ethnic Tamil minority, sought independence from Sri Lanka, a Buddhist-majority country. During the war, the Tigers and other rebels carried out a multitude of bombings. The Tamils are Hindu, Muslim and Christian.

Sri Lanka is about 70 percent Buddhist, with the rest of the population Muslim, Hindu or Christian. While there have been scattered incidents of anti-Christian harassment in recent years, there has been nothing on the scale of what happened Sunday.

There is also no history of violent Muslim militants in Sri Lanka. However, tensions have been running high more recently between hard-line Buddhist monks and Muslims.

Two Muslim groups in Sri Lanka condemned the church attacks, as did countries around the world, and Pope Francis expressed condolences at the end of his traditional Easter Sunday blessing in Rome.

“I want to express my loving closeness to the Christian community, targeted while they were gathered in prayer, and all the victims of such cruel violence,” Francis said.

The first six blasts took place nearly simultaneously in the morning at St. Anthony’s Shrine, a Catholic church in Colombo, and three hotels in the city. The two other explosions occurred after a lull of a few hours at St. Sebastian Catholic church in Negombo, a majority Catholic town north of Colombo, and at the Protestant Zion church in the eastern town of Batticaloa.

Three police officers were killed while conducting a search at a suspected safe house in Dematagoda, on the outskirts of Colombo. The occupants of the safe house apparently detonated explosives to prevent arrest, Wijewardena said.

Local TV showed damage at the Cinnamon Grand, Shangri-La and Kingsbury hotels. The Shangri-La’s second-floor restaurant was gutted, with the ceiling and windows blown out. Loose wires hung and tables were overturned in the blackened space. From outside the police cordon, three bodies could be seen covered in white sheets.

Foreign tourists hurriedly took to their cellphones to text family and loved ones around the world that they were OK.

One group was on a 15-day tour of the tropical island nation, seeing such sites as huge Buddhist monuments, tea plantations, jungle eco-lodges and sandy beaches. The tour was supposed to end in Colombo, but tour operators said the group may skip the capital in light of the attacks. The tour started last week in Negombo, where one of the blasts struck.

“Having experienced the open and welcoming Sri Lanka during my last week traveling through the country, I had a sense that the country was turning the corner, and in particular those in the tourism industry were hopeful for the future,” said Peter Kelson, a technology manager from Sydney.

“Apart from the tragedy of the immediate victims of the bombings, I worry that these terrible events will set the country back significantly.”

Sri Lankan security forces defeated the Tamil Tiger rebels in 2009. The United Nations initially estimated the death toll from the civil war at 100,000, but a U.N. expert panel later said some 45,000 ethnic Tamils may have been killed in the last months of the fighting alone. Both sides were accused of grave human rights violations.

Sri Lanka, a small island nation at the southern tip of India, has a long history with Christianity. Christian tradition holds that St. Thomas the Apostle visited Sri Lanka and southern India in the decades after the death of Christ. The majority of the island’s Christians are Roman Catholic.

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Associated Press writers Sheila Norman-Culp and Gregory Katz in London; Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow; Nicole Winfield at the Vatican; Adam Schreck in Bangkok; and Emily Schmall in New Delhi contributed to this report.

Hopes for Two-State Solution Dim in Wake of Israeli Election

JERUSALEM—Is the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict dead?

After Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu coasted to another victory in this month’s Israeli election, it sure seems that way.

On the campaign trail, Netanyahu ruled out Palestinian statehood and for the first time, pledged to begin annexing Jewish settlements in the West Bank. His expected coalition partners, a collection of religious and nationalist parties, also reject Palestinian independence.

Even his chief rivals, led by a trio of respected former military chiefs and a charismatic former TV anchorman, barely mentioned the Palestinian issue on the campaign trail and presented a vision of “separation” that falls far short of Palestinian territorial demands.

The two Jewish parties that dared to talk openly about peace with the Palestinians captured just 10 seats in the 120-seat parliament, and opinion polls indicate dwindling support for a two-state solution among Jewish Israelis.

“The majority of the people in the state of Israel no longer see a two-state solution as an option,” said Oded Revivi, the chief foreign envoy for the Yesha settler council, himself an opponent of Palestinian independence. “If we are looking for peace in this region, we will have to look for a different plan from the two-state solution.”

For the past 25 years, the international community has supported the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip — lands captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war — as the best way to ensure peace in the region.

The logic is clear. With the number of Arabs living on lands controlled by Israel roughly equal to Jews, and the Arab population growing faster, two-state proponents say a partition of the land is the only way to guarantee Israel’s future as a democracy with a strong Jewish majority. The alternative, they say, is either a binational state in which a democratic Israel loses its Jewish character or an apartheid-like entity in which Jews have more rights than Arabs.

After decades of fruitless negotiations, each side blames the other for failure.

Israel says the Palestinians have rejected generous peace offers and promoted violence and incitement. The Palestinians say the Israeli offers have not been serious and point to Israel’s ever-expanding settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, now home to nearly 700,000 Israelis.

The ground further shifted after the Hamas militant group took over the Gaza Strip in 2007 and left the Palestinians divided between two governments, with one side — Hamas — opposed to peace with Israel. This ongoing rift is a major obstacle to negotiations with Israel, and has also left many Palestinians disillusioned with their leaders.

Since taking office a decade ago, Netanyahu has largely ignored the Palestinian issue, managing the conflict without offering a solution for how two peoples will live together in the future.

After clashing with the international community for most of that time, he has found a welcome friend in President Donald Trump, whose Mideast team has shown no indication of supporting Palestinian independence.

Tamar Hermann, an expert on Israeli public opinion at the Israel Democracy Institute, said the election results do not necessarily mean that Israelis have given up on peace. Instead, she said the issue just isn’t on people’s minds.

“Most Israelis would say the status quo is preferable to all other options, because Israelis do not pay any price for it,” she said. “They don’t feel the outcome of the occupation. … Why change it?”

While the two-state prospects seem dim, its proponents still cling to the belief that the sides will ultimately come around, simply because there is no better choice.

“Either Israel decides to be an apartheid state with a minority that is governing a majority of Palestinians, or Israel has to realize that there is no other solution but two states,” Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh told The Associated Press. “Unfortunately the Israeli prime minister is politically blind about these two facts.”

Shtayyeh noted the two-state solution continues to enjoy wide international backing. Peace, he insisted, is just a matter of “will” by Israel’s leaders.

Dan Shapiro, who served as President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Israel, said the two-state solution “is certainly getting harder” after the Israeli election but is not dead.

Getting there would require leadership changes on both sides, he said, pointing to the historic peace agreement between Israel and Egypt 40 years ago, reached by two leaders who were sworn enemies just two years earlier.

“We know what’s possible when the right leadership is in place,” he said. “So that puts us supporters of it in a mode of trying to keep it alive and viable for the future.”

That may be a tall task as the Israeli election results appear to reflect a deeper shift in public opinion.

According to the Israel Democracy Institute, which conducts monthly surveys of public opinion, support for the two-state solution among Jewish Israelis has plummeted from 69% in 2008, the year before Netanyahu took office, to 47% last year. Just 32% of Israelis between the ages of 18-34 supported a two-state solution in 2018. The institute typically surveys 600 people, with a margin of error of just over 4 percentage points.

Attitudes are changing on the Palestinian side as well. Khalil Shikaki, a prominent Palestinian pollster, said 31% of Palestinians seek a single binational state with full equality, a slight increase from a decade ago. His poll surveyed 1,200 people and had a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

Although there was no breakdown by age group, Shikaki said the young are “clinging less to the two-state solution because they lost faith in the Palestinian Authority’s ability to provide a democratic state” and because the expanding settlements have created a new reality on the ground.

Amr Marouf, a 27-year-old restaurant manager in the city of Ramallah, said he maintains his official residence in a village located in the 60% of the West Bank that Israel controls, just in case Israel annexes the territory. That way, he believes, he can gain Israeli citizenship.

“I think the one state solution is the only viable solution,” he said. “We can be in Israel and ask for equal rights. Otherwise, we will live under military occupation forever.”

Netanyahu is expected to form his new coalition government by the end of May, and he will come under heavy pressure from his partners to keep his promise to annex Israel’s West Bank settlements.

Such a step could extinguish any hopes of establishing a viable Palestinian state, particularly if the U.S. supports it. American officials, who have repeatedly sided with Israel, have said nothing against Netanyahu’s plan.

There is also the Trump administration’s long-delayed peace plan, which officials have signaled could finally be released this summer. U.S. officials have said little about the plan, but have indicated it will go heavy on economic assistance to the Palestinians while falling far short of an independent state along the 1967 lines.

Shtayyeh said such a plan would be a nonstarter.

“This is a financial blackmail, which we reject,” he said.

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Associated Press writer Mohammed Daraghmeh in Ramallah, West Bank, contributed to this report.

Police: ‘New Breed’ of Terrorists in Northern Ireland

LONDON — Police in Northern Ireland arrested two teenagers Saturday in connection with the fatal shooting of a young journalist during rioting in the city of Londonderry and warned of a “new breed” of terrorists threatening the peace.

The men, aged 18 and 19, were detained under anti-terrorism legislation and taken to Belfast for questioning, the Police Service of Northern Ireland said. The men have not been identified or charged.

Authorities believe one man pulled the trigger during the chaotic rioting that began Thursday night but had organizational support.

Lyra McKee, 29, a rising star of investigative journalism, was shot and killed, police say probably by a stray bullet aimed at police, during the rioting. Police said the New IRA dissident group was most likely responsible and called it a “terrorist act.”

The use of a firearm apparently aimed at police marks a dangerous escalation in sporadic violence that continues to plague Northern Ireland 21 years after the Good Friday peace agreement was signed. The New IRA group rejects the peace agreement.

Chief detective Jason Murphy warned Saturday that the situation on the ground has become more dangerous, even though community attitudes have changed since the peace agreement and the use of violence is viewed as abhorrent by the vast majority.

“What we are seeing is a new breed of terrorist coming through the ranks and that for me is a very worrying situation,” he said.

The riot followed a pattern familiar to those who lived through the worst years of violence in Northern Ireland. Police arrived in the city’s Creggan neighborhood to search for weapons and dissidents. They were barraged with gasoline bombs and other flying objects, then someone wearing a black mask appeared, fired some shots and fled.

No police were struck by the bullets, but McKee — who had been trying to film the riot on her phone — was hit. The journalist was rushed to a nearby hospital in a police car but still died.

Police on Friday night released closed-circuit TV footage showing the man suspected of firing the shots that killed McKee and appealed for help from the public in identifying him.

The killing was condemned by all the major political parties as well as the prime ministers of Britain and Ireland.

The European Union’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, said the killing was “a reminder of how fragile peace still is in Northern Ireland” and called for work to preserve the Good Friday peace agreement.

Some politicians believe uncertainty over Britain’s impending departure from the EU and the possible re-introduction of a “hard border” between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland are stoking tensions in the region.

The victim was mourned by friends and the wider community. She rose to prominence in 2014 with a moving blog post — “Letter to my 14 year old self” — describing the struggle of growing up gay in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland. She also had recently signed a contract to write two books.

Shortly before her death, McKee tweeted a photo of the rioting with the words: “Derry tonight. Absolute madness.”

Her partner, Sara Canning, told a vigil Friday that McKee’s amazing potential had been snuffed out. Canning said the senseless murder “has left me without the love of my life, the woman I was planning to grow old with.”

Catholic priest Joseph Gormley, who administered the last rites to McKee, told the BBC that the rioting was “clearly orchestrated” by a “small group of people who want to play political games with our lives.”

He said he and other community leaders had tried to talk to the dissidents without success.

The New IRA is a small group that rejects the 1998 Good Friday agreement that marked the Irish Republican Army’s embrace of a political solution to the long-running violence known as “The Troubles” that had claimed more than 3,700 lives.

The group is also blamed for a Londonderry car bombing in January and has been linked to several other killings in the past decade.

United Methodists Edge Toward Breakup Over LGBT Policies

NEW YORK — There’s at least one area of agreement among conservative, centrist and liberal leaders in the United Methodist Church: America’s largest mainline Protestant denomination is on a path toward likely breakup over differences on same-sex marriage and ordination of LGBT pastors.

The differences have simmered for years, and came to a head in February at a conference in St. Louis where delegates voted 438-384 for a proposal called the Traditional Plan, which strengthens bans on LGBT-inclusive practices. A majority of U.S.-based delegates opposed that plan and favored LGBT-friendly options, but they were outvoted by U.S. conservatives teamed with most of the delegates from Methodist strongholds in Africa and the Philippines.

Many believe the vote will prompt an exodus from the church by liberal congregations that are already expressing their dissatisfaction over the move.

Some churches have raised rainbow flags in a show of LGBT solidarity. Some pastors have vowed to defy the strict rules and continue to allow gay weddings in Methodist churches. Churches are withholding dues payments to the main office in protest, and the UMC’s receipts were down 20 percent in March, according to financial reports posted online.

“It’s time for some kind of separation, some kind of amicable divorce,” said James Howell, pastor of Myers Park United Methodist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, who posted a video assailing the proposal for its “real meanness.”

The UMC’s nine-member Judicial Council convenes a four-day meeting in Evanston, Ill., on Tuesday to consider legal challenges to the Traditional Plan. If the plan is upheld, it would take effect for U.S. churches on Jan. 1. If parts of it are struck down, that would likely trigger new debate at the UMC’s next general conference in May 2020.

The UMC’s largest church — the 22,000-member Church of the Resurrection with four locations in the Kansas City area — is among those applying financial pressure. Its lead pastor, Adam Hamilton, says his church is temporarily withholding half of the $2.5 million that it normally would have paid to the UMC’s head office at this stage of the year.

“We’ll ultimately pay it,” Hamilton said. “But we want to show that this is the impact if our churches leave.”

Hamilton is among the opponents of the Traditional Plan leading an initiative dubbed UMC-Next that seeks the best path forward for those who share their views. Clergy and activists in the alliance have met in Texas and Georgia, and a bigger meeting is planned for May 20-22 at Hamilton’s megachurch.

Hamilton, in a telephone interview, said two main options are under consideration.

Under one scenario, many centrists and liberals would leave en masse to form a new denomination — a potentially complex endeavor given likely disputes over the dissolution process.

Under the other option, opponents of the Traditional Plan would stay in the UMC and resist from within, insisting on LGBT-inclusive policies and eventually convincing the conservatives that they should be the faction that leaves under what’s envisioned as a financially smooth “gracious exit.”

“There’s a sense that some conservatives have been wanting to leave for a long time,” Hamilton said. “They’re tired of fighting about it.”

Formed in a merger in 1968, the United Methodist Church claims about 12.6 million members worldwide, including nearly 7 million in the United States.

While other mainline Protestant denominations have embraced gay-friendly practices, the UMC still bans them, though acts of defiance by pro-LGBT clergy have multiplied. Many have performed same-sex weddings; others have come out as gay or lesbian from the pulpit.

Enforcement of the bans has been inconsistent; the Traditional Plan aspires to beef up discipline against those engaged in defiance.

Traditional Plan supporter Mark Tooley, who heads a conservative Christian think tank, predicts that the UMC will split into three denominations — one for centrists, another oriented toward liberal activists and a third representing the global alliance of U.S. conservatives and their allies overseas.

“It’s a question of how long it takes for that to unfold — and of who and how many go into each denomination,” Tooley said. “A lot of churches will be irreparably harmed as they divide.”

Scott Jones, bishop of the UMC’s Houston-based Texas conference, says churchgoers in his region are divided in their views, but a majority supports the Traditional Plan’s concepts.

“I have urged all of us to love each other, listen to each other and respect each other, even if we disagree,” said Jones, who holds out hope that the UMC’s disparate factions can preserve some form of unity.

Ann Craig of Newburgh, New York — a lesbian activist who has advocated for greater LGBT inclusion in the UMC — thinks a breakup can be avoided, though she’s unsure what lies ahead.

“We expect something new to happen, but what that change should be or will be has not jelled yet,” she said. “I don’t think we’re going to break up — it’s so cumbersome to figure out a way to divorce.”

The crisis is being followed closely at Methodist-affiliated theology schools based at universities with LGBT-inclusive policies. There are 13 UMC-connected theology schools around the country.

“There’s a lot of turmoil and distress,” said Mary Elizabeth Moore, dean of Boston University School of Theology. “We’re trying to find a future that will be less destructive than where we are now.”

Egypt Votes on Referendum Extending El-Sissi’s Rule to 2030

CAIRO — Egyptians voted Saturday on constitutional amendments that would allow President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi to stay in power until 2030 and broaden the military’s role — changes blasted by critics as another major step toward authoritarian rule.

The referendum came amid an unprecedented crackdown on dissent in recent years. El-Sissi’s government has arrested thousands of people, most of them Islamists but also prominent secular activists, and rolled back freedoms won in a 2011 pro-democracy uprising.

Polls opened at 9 a.m. (0700 GMT). Voting will stretch over a period of three days to allow maximum turnout.

Outside a polling center near the Giza Pyramids, around two dozen people, mostly elderly women, lined up waiting to cast their votes. Heavy police and army security was reported at polling stations throughout the capital city.

Haja Khadija, a 63-year-old housewife, said she came for the “security and stability” of the country. “We love el-Sissi. He did lots of things. He raised our pensions.”

Casting his ballot on Saturday, Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly urged voters to turn out in high numbers. He said that voting will reflect “the atmosphere of stability and democracy that we are witnessing now.”

State-run TV said el-Sissi voted in Cairo’s Heliopolis district, near the presidential palace. El-Sissi, who has repeatedly said he won’t stay in office any longer than the people want him to, hasn’t commented on the amendments.

Opposition voices have largely been shut out amid the rush to hold the referendum. Pro-government media have led a campaign for weeks calling a “Yes” vote a patriotic duty.

Since early April, the Egyptian capital has been awash with large posters and banners encouraging people to vote in favor of the changes. Most of the posters were apparently funded by pro-government parties, businessmen and lawmakers.

Parliament, packed with el-Sissi supporters, overwhelmingly approved the amendments on Tuesday, with only 22 no votes and one abstention from 554 lawmakers in attendance. The national electoral commission announced the following day that voting would begin on Saturday.

The proposed changes are seen by critics as another step toward authoritarianism. The referendum comes eight years after a pro-democracy uprising ended autocrat Hosni Mubarak’s three-decade rule, and nearly six years after el-Sissi led a popular military overthrow of the country’s first freely elected but divisive Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi.

Two international advocacy groups — Human Rights Watch and the International Commission of Jurists — on Saturday urged the Egyptian government to withdraw the amendments.

“Egypt’s autocracy is shifting into overdrive to re-establish the ‘President-for-Life’ model, beloved by dictators in the region and despised by their citizens,” said Michael Page, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “But it’s a model that recent experience in Egypt and neighboring countries has demonstrated is not built to last.”

The Civil Democratic Movement, a coalition of liberal and left-leaning parties, urged people to participate in the referendum by voting “No.”

The coalition said it used social media to spread its message, noting that it was banned from hanging banners in the streets to call on voters to reject the amendments.

The amendments extend a president’s term in office from four to six years and allow for a maximum of two terms. But they also include an article specific to el-Sissi that extends his current second four-year term to six years and allows him to run for another six-year term in 2024 — potentially extending his rule until 2030.

Novelist Omar Knawy voted “No” in the referendum. He said he is opposes most of the changes, especially those that would enable el-Sissi to stay in power beyond his current second four-year term. He also opposes articles that declare the military the “guardian and protector” of the Egyptian state, democracy and the constitution.

“The article related to the military gives it the right to interfere (in politics) at any time, and I am against such article,” he told The Associated Press.

El-Sissi was elected president in 2014, and re-elected last year after all potentially serious challengers were either jailed or pressured to exit the race.

The amendments also allow the president to appoint top judges and bypass judiciary oversight in vetting draft legislation, while also granting military courts wider jurisdiction in trying civilians.

In the last three years, over 15,000 civilians, including children, have been referred to military prosecution in Egypt, according to Human Rights Watch.

The amendments also introduce one or more vice presidents, revive the senate and enshrine a 25% quota for women in parliament’s lower, legislative chamber. All three had been dropped from Egypt’s constitution after the 2011 revolution.

Yellow Vest Anger Burns in France, Fueled by Notre Dame Fire

PARIS — French yellow vest protesters set fires along a march route through Paris on Saturday to drive home their message to a government they see as out of touch with the problems of the poor: that rebuilding the fire-ravaged Notre Dame Cathedral isn’t the only problem France needs to solve.

Like the high-visibility vests the protesters wear, the scattered small fires in Paris appeared to be a collective plea to the government to “look at me — I need help too!”

Police fired water cannon and sprayed tear gas to try to control radical elements on the margins of the largely peaceful march, one of several actions around Paris and other French cities.

The protesters were marking the 23rd straight weekend of yellow vest actions against economic inequality and President Emmanuel Macron’s government, which they see as favoring the wealthy and big business at the expense of ordinary workers. Protesters see themselves as standing up for beleaguered French workers, students and retirees who have been battered by high unemployment, high taxes and shrinking purchasing power.

Associated Press reporters saw a car, motorbikes and barricades set ablaze around the Place de la Republique plaza in eastern Paris. The smell of tear gas fired by police mixed with the smoke, choking the air.

Paris firefighters — who struggled earlier this week to prevent the 12th-century Notre Dame from collapsing — quickly responded to extinguish the flames at Saturday’s protest.

One masked protester dressed in black jumped on a Mercedes parked along the march route, smashing its front and back windshields.

Paris police headquarters said authorities detained 137 people by early afternoon and carried out spot checks on more than 14,000 people trying to enter the capital for Saturday’s protests.

The tensions focused on a march of several thousand people that started at the Finance Ministry in eastern Paris to demand lower taxes on workers and retirees and higher taxes on the rich.

Another group of about 200 people tried to march to the president’s Elysee Palace in central Paris, but riot police blocked them at the neo-classical Madeleine Church.

Yet another group tried to demonstrate yellow vest mourning over the Notre Dame blaze while also keeping up the pressure on Macron. They wanted to march to Notre Dame itself, but were banned by police, who set up a large security perimeter around the area.

One protester carried a huge wooden cross resembling those carried in Good Friday processions as he walked on a nearby Paris embankment.

Many protesters were deeply saddened by the fire at a national monument . But at the same time they are angry at the $1 billion in donations for Notre Dame renovations that poured in from French tycoons while their own economic demands remain largely unmet and they struggle to make ends meet.

“I think what happened at Notre Dame is a great tragedy but humans should be more important than stones. And if humans had a little bit more money, they too could help finance the reconstruction work at Notre Dame. I find this disgusting,” said protester Jose Fraile.

Some 60,000 police officers were mobilized for Saturday’s protests across France. The movement is largely peaceful but extremists have attacked treasured monuments, shops and banks and clashed with police.

The heavy police presence meant subway stations and roads around Paris were closed Saturday, thwarting tourists trying to enjoy the French capital on a warm spring day.

“Paris is very difficult right now,” said Paul Harlow, of Kansas City, Missouri, as he looked sadly at the damaged Notre Dame.

He and his wife Susan were in Paris only for a few days and didn’t make it in time to see the cathedral. On Saturday, their efforts to visit museums were derailed by closed subways and barricaded roads.

“I don’t think we’ll be back,” he said.

Other visitors showed solidarity with the yellow vest cause.

“I am not interested in joining them, but I can understand what they’re angry about,” said Antonio Costes, a retiree from the Paris suburb of Montreuil who came Saturday to see the damage to Notre Dame. “There is a lot of injustice.”

Macron had been scheduled to lay out his responses to yellow vest concerns on Monday night — but canceled the speech because the Notre Dame fire broke out. He’s now expected to do so next Thursday.

Some yellow vest critics accuse Macron of trying to exploit the fire for political gain. One protester carried a sign targeting Macron that read: “Pyromaniac – we are going to carbonize you.”

Another huge sign read: “Victor Hugo thanks all the generous donors ready to save Notre Dame and proposes that they do the same thing with Les Miserables,” referring to the famed author’s novels about the cathedral and the struggles of France’s poor.

Some prominent yellow vest figures who had stopped protesting said they were returning to the streets Saturday out of an even greater sense of being overlooked since the Notre Dame tragedy.

Anti-rich messages have flourished on social media in recent days as yellow vest protesters exhorted wealthy donors to be more generous with France’s working class.

___

Chris den Hond, Francisco Seco and Deborah Gouffran in Paris contributed to this report.

The Trickster King and the Erudite Literalist

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“The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship from Pantheon”
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“The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship”

A book by Alex Beam

A tribunal of the literary gods could not have selected two more mismatched friends than Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov.

Born in 1895 in Red Bank, N.J., Wilson—called Bunny by his friends, a nickname he did not care for, given to him by his mother—was the most celebrated critic and literary journalist of his time. A dyed-in-the-wool lefty who “scolded himself for his bourgeois lifestyle,” he was an editor and writer for The New Republic and later a writer for The New Yorker.

Nabokov, born in 1895 in St. Petersburg, Russia, was the greatest of post-World War II American novelists—in Gore Vidal’s lovely phrase, “the black swan of American letters.” His family fled St. Petersburg after the Bolsheviks seized power. He despised the Russian Revolution.

They met in 1940. Wilson, charmed by the émigré, helped Nabokov find teaching jobs and championed his work with editors. For years, their friendship was deep and harmonious. “Edmund was always in a state of joy when Vladimir appeared,” recalled Wilson’s third wife, novelist Mary McCarthy. “They had a ball together.”

But, “In many ways,” writes Alex Beam in “The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship,” his rich and delightful account of the friendship and falling-out of the two literary giants, they “proved to be two entirely different and contradictory people, Wilson the erudite literalist and Nabokov … the fantasist, the trickster king. The opposites attracted, and then they didn’t.”

Click here to read long excerpts from “The Feud” at Google Books.

Beam, a columnist for The Boston Globe and author of “A Great Idea at the Time,” about the Great Books phenomenon of the 1960s, takes the right attitude toward the feud of “The Feud”: “… Wilson and Nabokov had ended a quarter-century-long friendship because of a disagreement over how to translate [Alexander] Pushkin’s novel and verse Eugene Onegin.” Upon the reason for their break: “It was the silliest thing I had ever heard.”

The relationship began swimmingly when Wilson procured a Guggenheim fellowship for Nabokov. Nabokov wrote him, “Thanks, dear friend. … I have noticed that whenever you are involved in any of my affairs, they are always successful.” Their love for Russian literature inspired a collaboration on a translation of Pushkin’s story, “Mozart and Salieri,” published in 1941. A beaming Nabokov, with uncharacteristic modesty, told Wilson, “You have played Mozart to my Salieri.”

The seeds of their disruption, though, lay in their politics. Wilson “never fully surrendered his admiration for Lenin, for which Nabokov attacked him on first acquaintance.” Nabokov approved of parts of Wilson’s epic, “To the Finland Station,” “but could not stomach Wilson’s treacly depiction of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.”

“Not even the magic of your style,” he wrote, “has made me like him.”

A more personal problem might have been Wilson’s envy of his friend’s fabulous facility with his adopted language (though Nabokov claimed that the first language he ever heard was English, “read to him from children’s books in early childhood”). When “Bend Sinister,” Nabokov’s novel about life in a totalitarian regime, was published in 1947, Wilson wrote to him with eye-opening condescension: “You aren’t good at this kind of subject, which involves questions of politics and social change, because you are totally uninterested in these matters and have never taken the trouble to understand them.” (There was something to this criticism—“My books,” Nabokov once boasted, “are blessed by a total lack of social significance.”)

But Wilson’s aversion to Nabokov’s fiction ran deeper as “… Wilson never reviewed a book by Nabokov during the first quarter century of their friendship.”

Things came to a boil in 1955 with the publication of “Lolita,” the novel Nabokov would become world famous for. He “was eager for Wilson to like it. ‘I consider this novel to be my best thing in English,’ he wrote to Wilson, ‘and though the theme and situation are decidedly sensuous, its art is pure and it’s fun riotous.” But Wilson was appalled. “Nasty subjects may make fine books, but I don’t feel you have got away with this,” he wrote of the story of the European émigré Humbert Humbert’s love of the 12-year-old American nymphet. “It isn’t merely that the characters and the situation are repulsive in themselves, but that, presented on this scale, they seem quite unreal.”

An English critic, like many, found “Lolita” to be“sheer unrestrained pornography.” Nabokov certainly expected a judgment more sophisticated from his friend, America’s leading arbiter of taste.

This was just a warmup compared with the brawl that was coming when Nabokov attempted a translation and commentary of “Eugene Onegin.” The translation was just over 250 pages; the commentary 930 plus 107 pages of index. Wilson’s negative reaction was far from isolated. Doubleday editor Jason Epstein recalled it as “… the work of a mad man. … It’s an impossible book, you can’t read it.”

Wilson’s review in July 1965—more than a year after publication—was, writes Beam with admirable flourish, “a classic of its genre, the genre being an over long, spiteful, stochastically accurate, generally useless but unfailingly amusing hatchet job. …”

Nabokov’s book—or more accurately, books, as it was published in four volumes—and Wilson’s attack spurred a lively commentary in the literary world, joined by a slew of poets, critics and translators. To paraphrase Churchill, never in the course of literary history has so much been written about a work read by so few.

Oddly enough, the nasty back-and-forth did not completely end their relationship, though they would never be close friends again. And the feud would continue from the grave. Three months after his death in June 1972, Wilson’s final book, “A Window on Russia,” was published. In it, he found even more things to quibble about regarding his former friend’s translation. “My own attempts to tease Nabokov,” Wilson wrote, a tad disingenuously, “were not recognized as such but received in a virulent spirit.”

Nabokov died five years later, making no attempt to have the final word.

Beam writes with a mischievous and sometimes malicious wit worthy of his subjects, and a sound literary judgment. I take issue, however, with one of his opinions: “Told from such a distance in time, this becomes a story of unequal combat. Nabokov is very much alive in his work, perhaps less on the night table than on college syllabus, but nonetheless he remains known to millions.”

“Not so Wilson. … Once hailed as ‘dean of American letters,’ possessed with what biographer Leon Edel called ‘a certain Johnsonian celebrity,’ Wilson is largely unknown today.”

I disagree. Regarding “Johnsonian celebrity,” one might ask whether Dr. Johnson’s fame, such as it is today, derives from his actual works, which few have read, or from those who read about him through Boswell. Wilson’s influence, like Johnson’s, was probably always far greater than his actual readership; in any event, I’ll bet that students boning up on literary modernism still start with “Axel’s Castle,” or “To the Finland Station” for the origins of communism, or “Patriotic Gore” for Civil War-era literature.

More than 40 years after his death, what English language critic has come along to take his place? Possibly his closest equal today would be Clive James, the Australian-born writer who, in “The Metropolitan Critic,” paid Wilson this homage: “It is this feeling of watching a man proving himself equal to an incontestably important task—explaining the world to America and explaining America to itself—which provides the constant excitement of Wilson’s work.”

The vision expressed in “Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930” (1934) is very much with us today—we still see Dickens, James, Yeats, Proust, Eliot, Joyce, Fitzgerald and Hemingway largely through his lens. As Clive James put it, Wilson’s essays on late 19th and early 20th century writers “stand as permanent criticism.”

He did have some gaps as a critic—huge, baffling, yawning gaps. By drawing a blank on Kafka, he shut himself off from one of the most important currents in literature after 1930. He could never connect emotionally or intellectually with anything Spanish, which meant he had nothing to say about Miguel de Unamuno, Federico Garcia Lorca or José Ortega y Gasset. It was another great English language critic, V.S. Pritchett, who wrote the book, “A Spanish Temper” (1954), that Wilson should have written.

Wilson never even finished reading “Don Quixote.“The most important wave in literature in the second half of the 20th century, the one from South America that gave us, among many others, Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, missed Wilson altogether.

Still, “The Feud” points out Wilson’s greatest failing as a critic and the most bitter irony of his career. Whether because of a flaw in his critical eye or a failing of temperament, he was blind to the greatness of a novelist he not only knew intimately but helped establish, his friend Vladimir Nabokov.

The Destruction of the Palestinians Will Be Israel’s Undoing

The Israel-Palestine conflict is at the heart of politics not only in the Middle East, but in the United States. As the Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu moves further toward the hard right with the support of U.S. President Donald Trump, the plight of Palestinians is reaching a new level of urgency. Journalist and filmmaker Mariam Shahin, the daughter of Palestinians, has dedicated much of her life’s work to documenting Palestinians’ stories through film as well as in her book “Palestine: A Guide” (Interlink Books, 2006). Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer describes Shahin’s films as poignant portrayals of “the forgotten people of every intrusion, every war.”

“What I loved about your work,” Scheer tells Shahin in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” “is you capture … the ordinary person living in a place like Gaza. How they eat, how they survive. Male, female, children. These are not people who invented the situation. These are not people who have agency of any significance.”

While the situation in the Palestinian territories looks increasingly dire, Shahin has found reasons for hope. “I think as the world increasingly becomes more polarized, there’s more people willing to listen to Palestinians,” the journalist tells the Truthdig editor in chief.

“We have an enormous number of, for example, film festivals, which also show documentaries like the ones I make and many others across Europe, across Asia, across South America, in Africa and in the United States—in the land where some of the biggest opponents of a Palestinian identity and entity govern,” she continues.

Shahin believes that the future of the two peoples will depend on complex peace work, work in which, according to her, the onus should be placed on Israelis as they hold more power. The journalist, however, concedes that the only solution left going forward given current socio-political conditions is what’s known as the “One State Solution.” She insists that the work she carries out is in the interest of Israelis and Palestinians alike, given that establishing lasting peace between the two would solve the great majority of Israel’s current troubles.

“Because when the world around [Israel], those who are hostile to [them], recognize that [Israel is] actually a democracy and a state which treats citizens and neighbors as equals, then half [the] problem is over,” asserts Shahin.

Listen to the full discussion about Israelis’ and Palestinians’ potential future and how it affects American politics. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player and find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.

Robert Scheer: Hi. This is Robert Scheer with another edition of “Sheer Intelligence,” where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, journalist and author Mariam Shahin, who is, I say, a Palestinian, yet you were born in Berlin, I guess. Your father, as with many Palestinians and many Jewish people, lived in the diaspora because of events in their home country. A highly educated man, a cancer researcher and so forth. Yet you visited Palestine and what you have managed to do in your work, I should say you’re a very famous journalist. Your work has appeared in everything from CBS to Al Jazeera. You’ve made, I don’t know what, some huge amount of documentaries, I think 80 or something. You’ve studied at Harvard and all sorts of places. But what I loved about your work in preparation for this and as I was familiar with some of it before, is you capture, dare I say it, the ordinary person living in a place like Gaza. How they eat, how they survive. Male, female, children. These are not people who invented the situation. These are not people who have agency of any significance.

These are the forgotten people of every intrusion, every war. The reason I find your work so powerful is that this is the third rail issue. It’s very difficult to have a rational discussion about Israel, Palestine and so forth. Stereotypes dominate. The group that is lost are the Palestinians and the people in Gaza. First of all, there are plenty of people denying they are even a people or if they’ve got problems, it’s the result of something else. It has nothing to do and somehow, particularly for people who are very sympathetic to Israel, they are an inconvenience. Right? This new state was going to be created, I’m not going to visit the whole history. Somehow … Oh, it wasn’t a vacant land. There were these people. They had a rich, long history and somehow that always gets in the way.

But one point I want to begin with because I had some experience, I actually was in Gaza at the end of the Six-Day War. What has always bothered me that the Palestinians are somehow the only group that are held accountable in the Six-Day War. Not the Egyptians, not the Jordanians, not really the Syrians; all of whom have had their separate peace, not only with Israel but in the eyes of the world powers and so forth. The Palestinians, who are actually even then an occupied people or had the Egyptians controlled Gaza, Syria controlled the Golan Heights, Jordan controlled the West Bank.

When I was there reporting on it, I kept thinking, “Wait a minute. The Palestinians didn’t have an air force, they didn’t have guns, they didn’t have anything. Why …”, and I’ve felt this to this day, “Why are they the ones who’ve paid the price?” Quite apart from anything else you think about the situation. So let me begin there with you.

You have captured the forgotten people, the people in Gaza, the people in the West Bank and so forth. Tell us about that and the difficulty of doing that kind of journalism, getting that out there.

Mariam Shahin: Well, I think Palestinians, specifically those living under occupation and those who live in the diaspora, have frequently been or mostly been objectified by the Western media. Not so much by the third world media, but certainly by the Western media and turned into either poor victims or terrorists. That’s very, very problematic because in my experience, granted that I’m a Palestinian, but my many, many visits to both the West Bank and Gaza and the Palestinian communities within Israel, it’s very clear to me that they’re actually victims of war who have, over generations now, found survival mechanisms. Despite efforts to create conditions of de-development, meaning where there were roads in Gaza, today there are none. Where there were hospitals, they are largely dysfunctional because of the lack of electricity. Where there were schools, there are largely functioning on threads because of a lack of electricity, a lack of water and because of constant bombardment over the last 12 years at least.

We can see that the tenacity of both the individuals and the communities, led by very tenacious men and women, are not just surviving, they are even thriving because I think it is safe to say that before 1948, the Palestinians in historic Palestine were communities of merchants, of farmers, of traders, of a certain degree of intellectual class. But they were not fighters. They were not people who had to fight up to then for their own existence, either in existence of daily survival or their existence as a people, as an entity, as a nation. As people who have the same rights as everybody else.

I think war and pressure and prejudice came both from the state of Israel and frequently also from Arab states and from the west. Created a character which was very vibrant with the spirit of survival and resistance. Resistance to this enormous effort to negate them, both as individuals and as a people. That I find the most interesting.

Moving from that premise, what I do very often in my films is I try to profile people who are making a difference, who are acting on that instinctive survival. A communal instinctive survival, of a way to make things better for themselves and for others. Women have been certainly at the forefront of this, because at various times in the last 60 years, a large percentage of the male population has been incarcerated. This, again, inadvertently created strength within the community. Every time they take a blow, whether it’s a military blow or a political blow, something new is born. A new form of resistance to that eradication.

Now sometimes that eradication is a physical eradication and sometimes it’s a political, economic social one. It works on many levels. The characters I found, the people I found, as a storyteller, of course, they become characters to me. But the people I found are real and they’re really quite fabulous.

RS: People always object when you draw parallels between people. But what hit me about being a witness to a part of the Six-Day War and so forth, were what you just said about the Palestinians, of course, is what drove the idea of a Jewish state. There are people who denied that there was a Jewish people until they, so many of them were exterminated. At that time, in the Six-Day War, I recall this vividly. The people who represent, who led Israel, the dominant Labor party, were people that I felt very comfortable with. They were on the left, they were socialists. I remember Moshe Dayan. He actually knew Arabic. I remember being with him. He said, very clearly he told me when I interviewed him. He said, “If you come back and we’re still occupying here, it will destroy Israel.” Whether he believed that or not, I don’t know. But the Labor Party people claimed at that time that they were not occupiers. That they understood the risk of being an occupier. What it would do to your national character.

This has always been the fear of people who oppose imperial adventures. It’s going to turn you into a monster. Yet now, we are at a time when the whole Labor Party people are considered, what, traitors or irrelevant or something. You have an out and out jingoism, Netanyahu for example, and he’s not even the worst of the bunch, if he’s defeated in the current election, probably end up being replaced by somebody even more [inaudible 00:10:28]. They’re talking about annexation, they’re abandoning the idea of two states. Two states for two people was the slogan before. Now they’ve already announced an annexing the Golan Heights and Trump supports that. They’re talking about annexing the West Bank and so forth.

The question I want to put to that is, how did this get to be such a third rail issue that we can’t even discuss it logically. If you dare say something critical of Israel under Netanyahu’s, the big victor of Trump’s selection. Recognized shifting the embassy. He supports everything the right wingers do. He’s actually accused of anti-Semitism, you know. On the other hand, what I can’t understand about all this is, the demonization. What your journalism and I wonder what reception you find for your journalism, it goes against that narrative of the innocent Israelis, victims of the Holocaust who have tried only to have a home and they are threatened by these fanatical terrorist Arabs.

Your films [inaudible 00:11:43], which do get something of a hearing, but primarily, now on Al Jazeera which is challenged as whether its real news or not. So just tell me a little bit about your work as a journalist. Because clearly your intention of your journalism is to record accurately. Your product wreaks of a pursuit of truth, of accuracy. Yet, because it’s different than the commonly accepted narrative, it’s probably difficult to get a venue for it.

MS: Well, I think historically that’s correct. Palestinians had difficulty being heard and difficulty in the west being recognized as equal partners, or as people who deserve a fair hearing. But I think that’s actually changing. I think as the world increasingly becomes more polarized, there’s more people willing to listen to Palestinians. We have an enormous number of, for example, film festivals which also show documentaries like the ones I make and many others across Europe, across Asia, across South America. In Africa; and in the United States. In the land where some of the biggest opponents of a Palestinian identity and entity govern.

Only last week, you had what’s probably the second biggest film festival in Israel, in Haifa. It was a Palestinian film festival. I actually think things are changing. I think things are changing even from the time that I was younger and I began, because we were … and I continued to be, I think, relatively soft-spoken. My attempts also to really convince the other, and this case being the Israeli Zionist Jewish entity, that making real peace with the Palestinians, recognizing the Palestinians as equals and treating Palestinians as such, whether they’re citizens of the state of Israel, or whether they’re in the West Bank and Gaza is actually a good thing for the Jews. Frankly. I mean, this is … Because I’m always asked that by Israelis. “Is what you’re doing good for the Jews?” I always say, “I think it’s very good, because if you are able to make peace with Palestinians and live in harmony, 90% of your problems will be over. Because when the world around you, those who are hostile to you, recognize that you are actually a Democracy and a state which treats citizens and neighbors as equals, then half your problem is over.

That’s the premise from which we’re moving. In the past, you mentioned and I recognize that in my 25-year history with Israel. There wasn’t a call for annihilation. There was a call for sidelining, for maybe expelling. For killing, but not en masse. Today, there is a mentality, a right-wing mentality which has gripped many, many societies across the world or all shades and religions. That includes Israel. There are calls to kill an entire people. There’s no reprimand. There’s nothing. This is really scary.

One the one hand, you have a move to the right. On the other hand, you have a greater number of people who are saying, “Stop. This is not OK. We’re in the 21st century. We can’t go back. Going back is not an option.”

RS: Let me push this a little bit, because it seems the Labor Party, the peace movement in Israel, Peace Now and so forth, are quite weak.

MS: They’re persecuted. The Peace movement in Israel is persecuted.

RS: Yeah. I for instance, read [inaudible 00:16:51] in English regularly, but it represents a very small percentage. The voices of jingoism and so forth. You’re right about this right-wing Jingoisticmovement in the world. One perfect example is the one government that seems to have benefited from interference in the US election was Israel. By interference, I’m not talking about anything necessarily illegal, even surreptitious. I mean, Netanyahu came to the U.S. Congress and attacked a sitting American president over a major agreement with Iran to control nuclear weapons. He clearly supported Donald Trump. Donald Trump, as president, whatever you think of him, has been very supportive of a certain right-wing view of Israel. He has favored moving the embassy. He doesn’t talk about a two-state solution. He now talks about annexation of not only the Golan Heights, but the West Bank. I don’t know if he wants Gaza just somehow push that off into the sea.

So, you have a very odd circumstance where we have a lot of discussion about Russia’s influence here. They have got nothing. They have sanctions, nothing. As a journalist, I find it quite amazing that there’s no question raised with Pelosi, with Schumer, with any of the leading Democrats. What is going on? You attack Trump for everything. How come you don’t attack him for giving Netanyahu a blank check to do what he wants? It must be frustrating to an observer like yourself, no?

MS: Yes, it is. But I also, we follow American politics and we’re looking very closely at what the different Democrats who are running to lead the Democratic Party are saying about the conflict. The main conflict in the Arab world, which is between Israelis and Palestinians. But there are a few who are actually critical of Israel. Those include Bernie Sanders, certainly, I think even Beto, Beto O’Rourke has come out, criticizing Netanyahu, Netanyahu government. I mean, we’re taking note. Previously, I’m sorry, nobody was criticizing Israel at all and the fact that you have two candidates now running who are actually opening their mouth, one of them who happens to be Jewish, is very rewarding, in a sense that things have changed, perhaps because of Trump. Because perhaps he went too far to the right, that now some people, at least, are publicly pushing back.

RS: OK. First of all, let me take a break and then I’m going to push back on you on one thing.

MS: OK.

RS: We’ll be right back with this edition of Scheer Intelligence. I’ve been talking to Mariam Shahin, a very well-known journalist, filmmaker, author, whose work for major news organizations and does a really powerful series for Al Jazeera. We’ll be right back.

RS: We’re back with Mariam Shahin, Palestinian journalist and we’re talking about the ordinary folks of Gaza. But before we  lose the thread here, one thing that’s used to say, “You can’t have peace and justify a hard line,” is that the people of Gaza have been represented by hardliners, the Hamas movement, who attack even the Palestinian Liberation Organization for, as being too [inaudible]. They are an impediment. One of the contradictions while we’re doing this interview, right now this week, Egypt has moved into Gaza to help negotiations. Israel has made a deal with Hamas, one of the many they make over the years, has actually a historical record that Israel preferred Hamas originally and supported its creation of the PLO and so forth.

The irony is, that you can always find unattractive characters who are leaders on the other side in anything. In this case, the argument of some really even progressive Jewish organizations, we’d love to have peace, but we can’t find anybody to negotiate with. So really what has happened to these peace efforts?

MS: Well, I think it’s erroneous. I haven’t heard anybody from the Israeli peace movement actually say that, to be honest. I think there are still Israelis who are part of a peace effort. There were Israeli observers in downtown Hebron who basically documented settler violence against Palestinians. There’s an organization called Checkpoint Watch, which is manned predominantly by retirees, but they stand at checkpoints and they try to monitor and sometimes interfere in behavior of soldiers toward Palestinians.

Not everything has stopped and those who actually want to be involved are involved. There’s an association for bereaved parents, where both Palestinian and Israeli parents who have lost children or loved ones bond together and they hold discussions and they organize events.

RS: People listening to this, they’re going to say, “Scheer. You didn’t ask the really difficult question.” Can … I know you have a group, Hamas. They control Gaza, OK. Now maybe, with Arafat, maybe you could make the argument that he could have accepted peace. You know, after all, he was the partner in [inaudible 00:23:15] and so forth. Could you have peace with Hamas? Is it possible? Who speaks for the Palestinians?

Now, the irony in that, is that Israel actually, from time to time seems more favorable. The hard line in Israel, which is the government, to Hamas, than it does to the PLO. But really, you’re somebody who goes back and forth, who covers this and so, give me the reality check, because I’m just blowing smoke here. I’m based on headlines or whatever. You’re there. You deal with these people.

Is Gaza run by religious fanatics? There seems to be seething discontent. Will there be a Palestinian leadership that people could negotiate with? To what degree is this all confused by Israeli actions? Let’s end this on your assessment of the prospect for peace and normalcy in this contentious region.

MS: That’s a big one. I think the first thing that has to happen, who represents the Palestinian people? The people in occupied Palestine have to vote. This is number one. Both in Gaza and in the West Bank. There hasn’t been an election since 2006. That’s 12 years. It’s time for a vote. That’s number one.

Certainly, Israel is a major interferent if that word exists, in internal affairs, by the sheer fact that there’s constant raiding, there’s constant bombing in Gaza and killing. There’s constant raiding, killing and incarceration in the West Bank on a daily basis. As long as this continues, no democracy among the Palestinians and the Israeli military assault almost on a daily basis to varying degrees, we can’t have peace.

Two things have to happen. The Palestinians have to hold elections. Hamas is a political organization. OK? They want power like all politician parties want power and they’ve proved in the past that they can very much hold discussions with Israel. And the Israelis know that. But it’s not convenient. It’s more convenient to say, “This is my enemy.” It’s more difficult to make peace than to make war. That’s what we’re seeing now.

I think at the end of the day, of course it’s possible for Palestinians and Israelis to live together, but a lot has to be done. Above everything, there was to be a will. That will can be expressed at the ballot box. You see? When you vote for the peacemakers, when somebody comes with a program and says, “This is what we have to do” and the people say, “OK. I’ll sign on for that,” then we have hope. I don’t think it’s a hopeless situation, but it’s an extremely hard situation. Especially for the Palestinians. Because they’re the ones being killed. There are a few Israelis being killed also, but it’s basically the Palestinians who are being killed and it is apartheid. That’s what it is.

I think we all realize that. And the Israelis know that.

RS: So, let me conclude this with a notion about the swing of history.

You have a region here basically dominated by two forces in history that seem to be played out in most of the world. One is religion. Which for much of the world, seems to be increasingly irrelevant, or interpreted in benign, non-threatening ways. Even very large Muslim populations and Indonesia generally, manage to … I shouldn’t say even and certainly the Catholic Church which used to fight the Protestant church. A lot of that is played out and so forth. Yet here in this relatively small geographical area, religion is like it was described in the Biblical era and so forth.

One question is this hold of religion in this region. The other is the hold of nationalism. Increasingly, we live in a one world economy and people travel freely and nationalism seems to be on the decline. Well, people can evoke it when they want to go to war, but you yourself are very cosmopolitan, sophisticated person who has lived a lot of … I’m not putting you down for that. This is true of many people who go from the United States and live in Israel and come back and so forth. I guess that’s what I would like to conclude.

Here we have a part of the world that seems to be in the grip of these two forces that have lost their power, their energy and much of the rest of the world, nationalism and religion. Makes the region the most threatening, unstable, unsatisfying, destructive area in the world right now. Is that not the sad conclusion?

MS: I think a return to religion is actually almost a global movement in fundamentalisms. I mean, we look at Brazil. We look at India. We look at Eastern Europe, where national identity using religion, because I think nationalisms use religion to enforce whatever agenda they have. I think it’s on the rise everywhere. I think what has happened over the last 15 years, outside Palestine and the rest of the Arab world is an attempt to shed the forces of dictators. These efforts have, in many cases, not in all … Tunisia being a wonderful exception, have … Religious movements have hijacked these attempts. I think we need to differentiate between those who use religion as a means to gain power and use nationalisms and those who want genuine change and better living conditions for the people in their country, which was the case in, certainly again I say Tunisia, which is the only successful attempt to bring about that change.

Unfortunately, everybody had a role to play in that, including the Israelis. But the entire west, all of Europe, the Russians, the Americans, the Iranians, the Turks; everybody joined the Kabal. It’s been horrific.

RS: All right. Well that’s a depressing note to end on, but I will remind you, you did say earlier in this interview, you thought that we would get peace in the middle east, right?

MS: It has to play itself out, yes.

RS: Yeah. But as a filmmaker, when you photographed these children, when you describe … that’s the great strength. We haven’t talked enough about your art and your journalism, but when you capture these people … Like Sandy Tolan, who’s your friend who did in his book, “Children of the Stone” and “The Lemon Tree,” the humanity. That’s what drives me crazy about this issue. The Gaza Strip that I visited a half century ago and Israel I visited a half century ago, I did not see the big distinction between Arab and Jew, between Israeli and Palestinian on a human level. I felt comfortable with both. OK?

Again, there was so much in common of a culture, of a location, of a desert community, what have you. I mean, so much. And in fact, the original hope of the Kibbutz movement in Israel was normalcy. Tilling the land and so forth.

Do you think we could get to a one-state solution? Not a two-state, a one-state solution where it would be two different people living peacefully under the same roof?

MS: I think a one-state solution in Palestine and Israel is now the only realistic solution. I think the two people will have to work very hard at making it work. The more powerful of the two, ultimately has the greater responsibility. I think the future lies in mature, political action.

RS: Well, OK. I got it back to some optimism, so we can end it there. I want to thank you again, Mariam Shahin. You can Google her name and you can get her terrific work, just to mention a few. I mean, well first of all, she’s the author of “Palestine: A Guide, Unheard Voices, Women on Sanctions and War in Iraq.” She’s written for everyone, from the Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, The Global Male of Canada, The Guardian, et cetera. Check out her work. Go to Al Jazeera. She’s produced nearly 80 documentaries. We haven’t done her great journalistic work justice on this podcast. I wanted to tap into your deep insight on the region, so I’ll thank you again for taking this time.

Our engineers have been Kat Yore and Mario Diaz at KCRW. Our producer is Josh Scheer and here at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, the wizard engineer Sebastian Grubar has held it all together once again and we want to thank him and thank the University of Southern California for helping us here.

We’ll see you next week.