Hello, and happy Friday! I scarcely remember what a “normal” news week is, but the last fortnight has really taken the cake in terms of sheer absurdity. Since our last correspondence:
Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko grounded a commercial flight in a bid to arrest a dissident journalist, and then proceeded to blame the whole thing on Hamas. The Palestinian militant group was forced to deny its involvement in the plot (“Hamas is limiting its struggle against the occupation in the occupied territories,” a group official told ABC’s Julia Macfarlane), though this didn’t stop Belarusian authorities from publishing a delightfully fake email to bolster their claims. The alleged sender was a Hamas operative named *checks notes* Ahmed Yurlanov.
Famed eyesight tester and former Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings gave seven hours of damning testimony about Britain’s mishandling of the pandemic, during which he claimed not only that his former boss, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, was “unfit for the job,” but that the British government’s incompetence resulted in tens of thousands of excess deaths. The absurdity wasn’t so much in Cummings’s claims (much of which was already suspected), but the way in which he presented them: he likened the chaos in the early days of the crisis to “a scene from Independence Day with Jeff Goldblum saying ‘the aliens are here and your whole plan is broken and you need a new plan” and compared the lack of government accountability to “that Spider-Man meme.”
Israel’s (possibly outgoing) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused several Israeli politicians to his political right of forming a “dangerous left-wing government.” It’s an absurd claim, not least because there is nothing remotely left wing about the man who is likely to replace him: Naftali Bennett, who was once Netanyahu’s chief of staff, is an ultranationalist champion of Israel’s settler movement. He is a vocal opponent of the two-state solution and of Palestinian self determination. He has even boasted about the number of Palestinians he has killed during his military service.
But perhaps the greatest absurdity is that the coalition that just might bring about an end to King Bibi’s 12-year reign is none other than this motley crew:
In podcast news: I joined this week’s Bunker panel to discuss Britain’s June 21 reopening plans (and how the Delta variant could scupper them), the fallout of the Cummings testimony, and more. You can tune in wherever you get your podcasts, or by clicking below:
What I’ve written
It’s been a year since Belarus’s prodemocracy movement began, but the country is no closer to fresh elections or an end to Lukashenko’s decades-long regime. I interviewed Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya about the anniversary, what Western leaders must do to help Belarus, and why she still believes Lukashenko hasn’t won.
[S]he admits that getting countries to continue caring about the fight for democracy in her home country—which this weekend marks the first anniversary of the beginning of the movement against Lukashenko’s rule—hasn’t always been easy. “Sometimes you see real support and a real wish to help,” she said of her meetings with politicians and diplomats, “and sometimes in meetings, you see empty eyes.” In the latter instances, she told me, she tries to steel herself and turn off her emotions, to “just tell them mechanically what is happening.” Keep reading here
What I’ve read
This heartbreaking and candid essay on death and grief, by brilliant friend Anand Menon (Tortoise)
Losing family is like losing your sense of social gravity. It affects who you think you are and how you relate to the rest of the world. Losing four of them almost at once was correspondingly more unsettling, more destabilising, and subverted my notions as to who I was.
This profile of journalist and commentator Peter Beinart, whose evolution on Israel and Palestine has been fascinating to behold (The New Yorker)
This summer, he was praying during Tisha B’Av, a holy day during which Jews are invited to imagine themselves leaving Jerusalem when it was in flames, and to imagine hoping to redeem it through return. The experience made him think of how hypocritical it seemed for a Jew to tell a Palestinian to give up on returning home. On the one hand you had the temple, on the other the nakba. In Gaza, no one needs to cast his mind thousands of years into the past to imagine himself as a refugee. Beinart said, “There’s just something kind of absurd about the idea that we think so little of Palestinians that we don’t think that they know how to teach their children to remember things.”
This great long read on America’s drinking problem, and why we drink (The Atlantic)
[A]bout 10 million years ago, a genetic mutation left our ancestors with a souped-up enzyme that increased alcohol metabolism 40-fold. This mutation occurred around the time that a major climate disruption transformed the landscape of eastern Africa, eventually leading to widespread extinction. In the intervening scramble for food, the leading theory goes, our predecessors resorted to eating fermented fruit off the rain-forest floor. Those animals that liked the smell and taste of alcohol, and were good at metabolizing it, were rewarded with calories. In the evolutionary hunger games, the drunk apes beat the sober ones.
What I’m thinking about
Not a thought, but a programming note: This newsletter is taking a brief sabbatical this month as I’m planning to be out of office (and out of London!) for some much-needed social distancing from my laptop. This correspondence will be back in your inboxes in July.
Until next time,
Yasmeen
P.S. If you were as moved as I was after reading Anand’s piece, please consider contributing to his fundraiser in support of the Marie Curie Hospice in Edinburgh.