Leo Correa/AP Photo
Families and supporters of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza rally in Tel Aviv, Israel, December 16, 2023.
This will be my last On TAP of 2023; the Prospect is off next week, barring the sky falling. Of course, 2023 has been one of those years where the sky actually sagged, if not fell, so stay tuned. Absent such disruption, however, each Prospector has selected their favorite pieces from the year that we will be posting between Christmas and New Year, so we’ll be with you retrospectively.
Some thoughts before I go into my short winter’s nap:
Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal’s news pages ran a report on the ongoing talks between the political (not military) leaders of Hamas, Fatah, and various Arab states. Down in the middle of the piece was the following sentence:
“The Hamas political leaders in these talks indicated that they would be willing to join the PLO and support negotiations under a unity government for a Palestinian state within 1967 borders.”
In journalese, this is called “burying the lede”—that is, underplaying the breaking news in the story by positioning it in the middle of the piece.
Of course, this may overstate the position of Hamas’s political leaders, and it may not be the position of its military leaders at all. Those kinds of splits are not uncommon: See, e.g., the Irish Republican Army (provisional and regular wings thereof). Still, having lost, if not its hold on Gaza, then the entirety of Gaza itself, it is at least conceivable that a two-state partition along the 1967 borders is so clearly the best available Palestinian option that Palestine’s multi-tendency political leadership supports it. Should that now emerge as a Palestinian position, the obstacle would be Israel—at minimum, Bibi Netanyahu’s Israel, but likely, at least for a time, Israel under any leadership, which is hardly inclined at this point to sanction the establishment of a Palestinian state. That would reverse the stance of the two nations at the Camp David bargaining session near the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency, where Ehud Barak’s Labor-led government was amenable to a partition and Yasser Arafat’s PLO was not. Should this reversal of positions now be the case, the very idea that the U.S. continue to provide unconditional aid to Israel would be ridiculous, as a two-state solution is the only conceivable solution to this long and blood-drenched conflict. (If we end up with the nightmare scenario of one state that runs from the river to the sea, it’s almost certainly going to be Israel, not Palestine.)
Hopping between topics here, I think 2023 will also be remembered as a year in which European politics looked increasingly and alarmingly American. By that, I mean that immigration from Africa and Asia, both current and future, real and imagined, is something that many Europeans increasingly view as a threat to the relative ethnic and cultural homogeneity of their nations.
Perhaps the main reason that social democracy became a norm in Europe but not in the U.S. is that its nations were racially homogeneous, so welfare states were viewed as benefiting a racially and culturally unified majority, even as the unions and other working-class organizations that were the prime movers of social democratic policies were themselves racially and culturally unified. In the U.S., which was multiracial from the get-go, which enslaved one race in particular, and where successive waves of immigrants continually altered the religious and cultural composition of the nation, such solidarity was seldom if ever within reach. It’s no accident that the world’s most comprehensive social democracies arose in some of the world’s most homogeneous countries, those of Scandinavia.
And it’s no accident that Europe is now threatened by the kind of white-backlash, racist political parties and groups that have been an enduring blot on the American landscape.
I know that’s a depressing thought with which to end the year, particularly inasmuch as most of you, like me, probably view the coming year with abject dread. Then again, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment almost appears to have been written with Donald Trump in mind. Hope springs eternal, but only if we work like hell to keep the dictatorial wolf from the door.
See you in ’24!
