Hello, and happy Friday.
Despite beginning my professional journalism career in 2016, when journalists were first fully exposed to what Steve Bannon colorfully described as the “flood the zone with shit” strategy, I nonetheless find myself surprised — even slightly disoriented — by the sheer number of things that have happened in the fortnight since our last correspondence. For our sakes, I won’t bother going through them all, even in brief. Instead, I’m going to focus on recent developments concerning the futures of Gaza and Ukraine, and the ambitions of an American president that appear to, well, trump the wishes of those living in both places.
On Gaza, we’ve heard President Trump continue to promote the permanent displacement of Palestinians from the besieged enclave. In his defense of the idea, which has been roundly rejected by regional leaders, he has gone so far as to suggest that Palestinians might actually welcome their own expulsion, noting that “they don’t know anything else; they’ve never had an alternative.”
This kind of statement betrays a fundamental lack of understanding or care about Palestinians’ sensitivity towards dispossession, to says nothing of international law. But it’s a lack of empathy that isn’t necessarily unique to Trump. I recall once reading a Washington Post story in which a Palestinian village in the West Bank threatened with demolition was described as a collection of “miserable huts and sheep pens.” To that writer, and perhaps to other outside observers, Palestinian attachment to a land marked by so much death, destruction and occupation probably beggars belief. But if you can’t comprehend why a people might be so drawn to their home — so much so that generations cling to the keys of those that their parents and grandparents lost in 1948, 1967 and beyond — perhaps that’s because you haven’t had the misfortune of losing yours. They’d do well to acquaint themselves with some Mahmoud Darwish poetry.
Meanwhile Ukraine, which on Monday will mark the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, now faces a U.S. administration with its own vision for how to end the war—one that doesn’t appear to take into account its desire to reclaim its territories under Russian occupation or ensure the country’s longterm security and sovereignty.
“For Trump’s part, it fits neatly with his modus operandi that Russia and the United States would get to make those decisions,” Matt Duss, the executive vice-president at the Center for International Policy and former foreign policy adviser to the Senator Bernie Sanders, writes in the Guardian. “Just as with the spectacle of the U.S. president and Israeli prime minister a few weeks ago determining the future of the Palestinians who weren’t even in the room, in Trump’s jungle the powerful make decisions that the weak must simply accept, international law and human rights be damned.”
What I’ve read
This longread on the Murdoch family:
James Murdoch likes to think of himself as a student of dynastic dysfunction. He quotes Shakespeare and cites Roman imperial history in casual conversation. He is not sure he agrees with Tolstoy’s dictum—“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Because when he surveys the literature on families wrecked by wealth and power, he mostly sees the same sad patterns in endless repetition.
The contours of his own family’s story are familiar to the point of cliché—the legacy-obsessed patriarch slipping into senescence and paranoia, the courtiers whispering in his ear, the siblings squabbling over their portion of the kingdom. “It’s all been written down many, many times,” he said. “The real tragedy is that no one in my family doing this bothered to pay attention.”
This essay on why Gaza should be rebuilt by Palestinians, for Palestinians:
Palestinians do not need President Trump to talk about Gaza as if it were an empty hotel room that needs redesigning. What we need is for the rest of the world to hear about Gaza’s basic, immediate necessities. We need to erect tents and fill them with teachers so that children who have missed sixteen months of learning can go back to school. We need to dig through the debris for whatever remains of our brothers and sisters and parents and children so that we can bury them. We need heavy equipment to clear away fifty million tons of rubble and replace it with places to live and work. We need to replant devastated fields so that Palestinian farmers can grow our food again. We need to replace sites of death with hospitals where people can heal. We need an end to the state of siege that surrounds us. And the people who shape this future need to be us Palestinians—not the people who made Gaza look like a demolition site, or who now seem to think that an entire people should be demolished, too. All of these things are important. But nothing is more important than staying.
This piece about a scene from Frasier that I’ve probably seen dozens of times, but never fully understood until now:
This is an examination of one of its strangest moments, an episode that for about four total minutes abandons comedy in favor of an entirely unexpected, brooding meditation on long-lasting pain, the limits of compassion, and the meaning of justice. Which is quite the left turn from dinner party antics and exploding cans of shaving cream.
What I’m thinking about
The black seadevil anglerfish who captured the internet (and our hearts).
Until next time,
Yasmeen