Foreign Correspondence, Vol 128
Noam Shuster Eliassi on why humor hits harder than diplomacy
Hello, and happy Friday!
I’d be remiss if I didn’t start this correspondence by acknowledging the Israeli airstrike on Gaza’s Nasser hospital that killed 20 people this week, including five journalists. One of them was Reuters cameraman Hussam al-Masri.
Nearly 200 journalists have been killed in Gaza since 2023, according to a tally maintained by the Committee to Protect Journalists — a figure exceeding the number of journalist deaths during the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in Yugoslavia, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined. As this April paper from Brown University put it, “It is, quite simply, the worst ever conflict for reporters.”
Israeli authorities often excuse these deaths as collateral damage or, in the case of recently slain Al Jazeera correspondent Anas Al Sharif, suggested that the reporters were actually Hamas in disguise. In this latest incident, the Israeli military pointed to what it described as the presence of a “Hamas camera” as grounds for choosing the strike target. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the incident a “tragic mishap” — a turn of phrase perhaps best reserved for unavoidable accidents like a car crash rather than a back-to-back strike on a hospital.
Now, more than ever, the world should demand that Israel lift its nearly two-year ban on foreign journalists entering Gaza. For far too long, Palestinian journalists have had the burden of simultaneously covering and living this war, often at the cost of their lives. They shouldn’t have to do that alone.
What I’ve worked on
My latest interview for Culture Current was with Noam Shuster Eliassi, the Israeli comedian at the center of the documentary “Coexistence, My Ass!,” one of the best films from Israel-Palestine I’ve seen in a while. Though I’d long been a fan of Shuster Eliassi’s work (most notably her satirical song “Dubai, Dubai,” which earned her viral fame across the Arab world), I hadn’t known the full extent of her background. We discussed her disillusionment with the peace industry, her decision to trade her diplomacy work at the United Nations for satire, and the power of comedy to confront systems of power.
We are way beyond the point of me being worried about the moral fabric of Israeli society. You're referring to a video that was 10 years ago, where the writing was on the wall and it was clear that the normalizing of the occupation, of the daily uprooting of Palestinians, of the blockade that already existed in Gaza, of the settlers' violence, of the checkpoints, of everything that has to do with the normalized day-to-day reality of occupation — the fact that we've normalized it for so many years, that was the big warning. Now, we are basically seeing the consequences of it, and we are seeing how the Holocaust education that we received throughout those years, instead of making us so sensitive to it and fighting against it and saying "never again is now, and (for) everyone," we have used the lessons as justifications to do it to other people. And so we are way, way, way beyond me being worried about the moral fabric of Israeli society. That ship has sailed; the train has crashed.
What worries me the most is that people are aware of what is happening in Gaza, but they have found a set of excuses and denials in order for them to live in peace with what is happening ... to tell ourselves every single excuse except admitting the truth.
Read the full Q&A here
Plus:
Our latest edition of AI&Us looks at the people turning to AI for therapy
Our latest Culture Current with 16-year-old chess grandmaster Rouda Alserkal
The latest edition of Inside Track — your essential guide to the weekend in sport, featuring the Premiere League’s closing transfer window, Sydney’s elite Marathon and the return of F1 after a summer hiatus.
What I’ve read
This revealing Q&A on how former Biden officials defend their Gaza policy:
When you would call them in the middle of the night and say, “What on earth happened?,” what was usually the answer?
The general pattern was that in-the-moment stories were inaccurate, and that the Israeli military and government establishment were not in a position to fully explain yet. We could almost never get answers that explained what happened before the story was fully framed in international media, and then when the facts were fully developed, it turned out that the casualties were much lower, the number of civilians was much lower, and, in many cases, the children were children of Hamas fighters, not children taking cover in places.
Sorry, what did you just say?
In many cases, the original number of casualties—
No, I meant the thing about who the children were.
They were often the children of the fighters themselves.
And therefore what follows from that?
What follows is that whether or not it was a legitimate military target flows from the population that’s there.
Hold on, Mr. Secretary. That’s not, in fact, correct, right? Whether it’s a legitimate target has to do with all kinds of things like proportionality. It doesn’t matter if the kids are the kids of—
If you’re in a command-and-control center, that’s different than if it’s a school that’s emptied out and innocent civilians are taking shelter there. If you’re the commander of a Hamas unit and you bring your family to a military site, that’s different. I’m not saying everything fits into that, and I’m not saying it’s not a tragedy.
This bonkers piece on how a number of publications unknowingly published AI-generated features that were entirely made up:
“Index has warned for a long time of the dangers of AI impersonating people, and its threat to journalism. We have sadly become the victim of the very thing we’ve warned against.”
This conversation from Ezra Klein’s podcast on how Trump is building his own paramilitary force:
I think my response to that would be that we have the Bill of Rights for a reason. You can’t vote away basic constitutional rights. They aren’t subject to the whims of a majority. … The government is not allowed to start violating our basic constitutional rights just because people voted for that in an election — or thought they were voting for that.
What I’m thinking about
I’m in the market for good podcasts to fuel some upcoming long runs. If you have any recs, please hit ‘reply’ and let me know!
Until next time,
Yasmeen