The Fire 6000 Miles Away

We may have our hands full fighting the chaos Trump/Musk and Co. are creating in the US, but if we don’t pay attention, the fires in Israel/Palestine will burn us here too.

I had the opportunity to chat this week with New York Times columnist Nick Kristof, one of this generation’s most astute observers of the American – and global – condition.

I particularly value his insights into how Democrats lost – and MAGA won – the hearts and minds of the swath of the country that powered Trump’s win in 2024. So many in blue America can’t fathom how a President we see as destroying all that is great about America remains so popular with those likely to suffer most from the havoc he wreaks. Kristof writes,

“Part of the problem, I think, is that many educated Democrats are insulated from the pain and frustration in the working class and too often come across as out of touch. Instead of listening to frustrated workers, elites too often have lectured them, patronized them or dismissed them as bigots.”

He suggests an idea I love, establishing a Bewildered Liberals Book Club for people looking to understand how it is that a plurality of Americans can support a felon working to corrode our democracy.

Though much of our conversation focused on the diagnosis of and prescription for “Bewildered Liberal syndrome,” that wasn’t why I invited Nick to a recent J Street webinar (I’ve pasted a link to it below).

He had recently traveled to Israel and the West Bank, and when I thanked him for his reporting and for bringing these stories to life, he replied wistfully, “You read it, Jeremy, but I don’t think a lot of others did. People have really kind of tuned out.”

I get it.

Our brains can only process so much calamity at any one time. Right now our own home is burning, which makes it hard to focus on the fire 6000 miles away.

Of course, that lack of attention is precisely what is giving Netanyahu and his far-right government much freer rein. The Israeli right has taken President Trump’s call for what amounts to ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Gaza as a green light to pursue their most extreme fantasies and policies.

All food, water, medicine and other forms of humanitarian aid have been blocked from entering Gaza for over a month now.

Large areas of Gaza are being literally bulldozed to create a buffer zone. Hundreds of thousands of people are being pushed into smaller and smaller areas. And in those areas, Israeli military operations purportedly aimed at militants become ever more likely to catch civilians in the crossfire.

And through it all, dozens of Israeli hostages remain trapped in tunnels - suffering inhuman abuse and deprivation for eighteen months now. Their - and their families’ - only hope continues to be a negotiated deal to end the fighting, bring them home and restart aid. Yet this is precisely the deal their Prime Minister has to avoid to stay in power.

Over on the West Bank, Kristof relays that it has never been this bad. He calls what’s going on there the “Gazaification of the West Bank” – applying the military toolbox from Gaza to the refugee camps on the West Bank.

Tens of thousands of people displaced – most likely permanently. Tanks in the streets, airstrikes a regular occurrence.

The inevitable result? The creation of the kind of hopelessness and despair on the West Bank that fueled Hamas’s rise in Gaza.

Nick relays the story of Mohammed Abdul Jalil, a 12-year old boy whose home in a refugee camp was demolished by the Israeli army. Asked what he hopes to be when he grows up, Mohammed says “with great bravado,” a fighter for Hamas. So long as Palestinian children like Mohammed have nothing to live for, they can only find meaning in life through having something to die for.

Who in the US has time for any of this when the foundations of American democracy are being destroyed? When the world economic order is being undone? When our most respected institutions of research and higher education are being undermined?

Legal immigrants are being seized from our streets by masked agents and whisked to detention facilities in other states or even other countries. Wait, can it be that Head Start is going to be eliminated? Environmental groups are losing their tax-deductible status? And DOGE staff have access to all our data? And, and ….

Steve Bannon describes the strategy as “muzzle velocity.” Come at the ‘enemy’ with so much so fast that the defenses are overwhelmed. Who’s the enemy: the media, the courts, the universities, the Congress. Us.

Ezra Klein picked up on this quickly as the game plan:

“Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

… [T]he White House followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now.”

My message today? If you care about Israel’s future and want there to be a secure, democratic home for the Jewish people in Israel for the long-term – don’t give in to the ‘flood’, to the ‘overwhelm.’

And don’t take your eye off what Netanyahu and company are doing. If we don’t stop the Israeli far right from using the cover of this darkness for their own purposes, the fires they are lighting will ultimately burn down not only the Jewish home there, they will come back to burn us here as well.