Thursday, April 25, 2024
Campus Protests Over Gaza Intensify Amid Pushback by Universities and Police - The New York Times
Campus Protests Over Gaza Intensify Amid Pushback by Universities and Police
"There were more than 120 new arrests as universities moved to prevent pro-Palestinian encampments from taking hold as they have at Columbia University.
A wave of pro-Palestinian protests spread and intensified on Wednesday as students gathered on campuses around the country, in some cases facing off with the police, in a widening showdown over campus speech and the war in Gaza.
University administrators from Texas to California moved to clear protesters and prevent encampments from taking hold on their own campuses as they have at Columbia University, deploying police in tense new confrontations that already have led to dozens of arrests.
At the same time, new protests continued erupting in places like Pittsburgh and San Antonio. Students expressed solidarity with their fellow students at Columbia, and with a pro-Palestinian movement that appeared to be galvanized by the pushback on other campuses and the looming end of the academic year.
Protesters on several campuses said their demands included divestment by their universities from companies connected to the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, disclosure of those and other investments and a recognition of the continuing right to protest without punishment.
The demonstrations spread overseas as well, with students on campuses in Cairo, Paris and Sydney, Australia, gathering to voice support for Palestinians and opposition to the war.
As new protests were emerging, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, visited the Columbia campus in New York, where university officials were seeking to negotiate with protest leaders to end the encampment of around 80 tents still pitched on a central campus lawn.
Mr. Johnson said the school’s president, Nemat Shafik, should resign if she could not immediately get the situation under control, calling her an “inept leader” who had failed to guarantee the safety of Jewish students.
The speaker said there could be an appropriate time for the National Guard to be called in, and that Congress should consider revoking federal funding if universities could not keep the protests under control.
Republican lawmakers have accused university administrators for months of not doing enough to protect Jewish students on college campuses, seizing on an issue that has sharply divided Democrats.
Some of the campus demonstrations that have taken place since the war began last year have included hate speech and expressions of support for Hamas, the armed group based in Gaza that led the deadly attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, sparking the war that has left more than 34,000 people dead in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
One of the biggest new protests on Wednesday was in Texas, where dozens of police officers, many of them in riot gear and some of them on horseback, blocked the path of protesters at the state’s premier public university, the University of Texas at Austin. At least 34 people were arrested after refusing to disperse, according to a state police spokeswoman.
Gov. Greg Abbott said that arrests there would continue until the protesters dispersed. “These protesters belong in jail,” he wrote on X. “Students joining in hate-filled, antisemitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled.”
Hours earlier, at the Dallas campus of the University of Texas, a large group of student protesters briefly staged a sit-in near the office of the university president, demanding divestments. The students left after the president agreed to meet with them.
At the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, the police moved in just before lunchtime to break up an encampment of about 100 pro-Palestinian protesters at the center of campus. As demonstrators chanted, “Shame,” officers tackled at least one protester and put that person into a campus police car, but the protester was later released.
Claudia Galliani, 26, a master’s student in public policy at U.S.C., said she was protesting “to stand in solidarity with the students of Columbia and other campuses across the States who are receiving brutality due to their advocacy for Palestine.” She said that the protesters had been ostracized and accused of antisemitism.
Many U.S.C. students were angered at the cancellation of a commencement address by the valedictorian Asna Tabassum, who is Muslim, after complaints from groups on campus that cited her support on social media for Palestinians.
“I think universities don’t want what’s happening on the East Coast to spread to the West Coast,” said Maga Miranda, a doctoral student in ethnic studies at the University of California, Los Angeles who joined the protest at U.S.C.
Protesters returned later in the day, but the university prevented a permanent encampment from being established, as the tents that had been forcibly removed in the morning were not re-erected.
Just before 6 p.m., Los Angeles Police Department officers ordered them to disperse and threatened them with arrest and expulsion from school. Many protesters moved outside of a police perimeter, but more than two dozen locked arms in the middle of the campus quad, some holding Palestinian flags.
Officers ultimately arrested 93 people for trespassing and one person on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, L.A.P.D. officials announced late Wednesday. Capt. Kelly Muniz of the L.A.P.D. did not have further details on the assault.
By 9 p.m., officers cleared the remaining protesters from the private campus and locked the gates.
At Brown University in Rhode Island, scores of students pitched tents on the campus’s Main Green on Wednesday. Organizers said their minds were on the children and students in Gaza, not on the administration’s warning that the new encampment violated university policy. They promised to stay until they were forced off.
“What we’re putting on the line is so minimal in risk, compared to what Gazans are going through,” said Niyanta Nepal, a junior from Concord, N.H., and the president-elect of the student body. “This is the least we can be doing, as youth in a privileged situation, to take ownership of the situation.”
She said the emergence of a national student movement on college campuses had galvanized Brown students. “I think everyone was ready to act, and the national momentum was what we needed,” she said. Rafi Ash, a sophomore from Amherst, Mass., and a member of Brown University Jews for Ceasefire Now, said the student protesters were in it for the long haul. “We’ll be here until they divest, or until we’re forced off,” he said.
Administrators at Harvard University sought to head off a similar scene by shuttering Harvard Yard, a central gathering place on campus. But students flooded the yard’s grassy patches anyway on Wednesday, rapidly erecting tents as part of an “emergency rally” against the suspension a pro-Palestinian campus group.
At Cal Poly Humboldt in Arcata, Calif., administrators said they were shutting down the campus through the weekend, concerned that protesters occupying two buildings could spread to others.
Late Tuesday, two students were arrested at Ohio State University, school officials said, during an on-campus protest that had since dispersed.
The protests at the University of Texas at Austin were among the first to take place in a Republican-led state in the South, occurring within walking distance of the governor’s mansion. Like other Republican political leaders, Gov. Greg Abbott has been outspoken in his support for Israel, and last month, he vowed to fight any antisemitism on campus.
University leaders on Tuesday said they had revoked permission for a protest and warned those who might seek to gather anyway.
“The University of Texas at Austin will not allow this campus to be ‘taken,’” two administrators from the Office of the Dean of Students wrote in a letter to the Palestine Solidarity Committee.
State police were deployed to the campus on Wednesday at the request of the university and at Mr. Abbott’s direction, said the state police spokeswoman, Ericka Miller, “in order to prevent any unlawful assembly.”
When protesters began to congregate despite the warnings, the response was swift. Scores of officers formed crowd-control lines, some clutching batons. After having ordered the protesters to disperse, some officers surged into the crowd and hauled several people away, then returned for others.
“Let them go!” some people shouted as the crowd grew.
At one point, hundreds of students and their supporters were gathered on the south mall of the campus, including some who gathered in a large circle and chanted, “Pigs go home!” Soon, the police moved in again, pushing through the crowds and making further arrests.
Ms. Miller said the majority of those arrested were charged with criminal trespassing.
In a statement, the university’s Division of Student Affairs said that the university would not tolerate disruptions “like we have seen at other campuses” and would take action to allow students to finish their classes and final exams “without interruption.”
Anna Betts and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs in New York, Edgar Sandoval in San Antonio and Jose Quezada in Arcata, Calif., contributed reporting."
Cicadas Are Emerging Now. How Do They Know When to Come Out? - The New York Times
Cicadas Are Emerging Now. How Do They Know When to Come Out?
"Scientists are making computer models to better understand how the mysterious insects emerge collectively after more than a decade underground.
Earlier this month, millions of Americans looked up at the sky to witness a total eclipse. Now, another cyclical marvel has arrived, this time at our feet. Trillions of noisy, red-eyed insects called cicadas are emerging from the earth after more than a decade of feeding on tree roots.
The United States is home to 15 cicada broods, and in most years at least one of them emerges. This spring, Brood XIX, known as the Great Southern Brood, and Brood XIII, or the Northern Illinois Brood, are emerging simultaneously.
Cicada watchers have spotted the first insects coming out of the ground, reporting their sightings to apps such as iNaturalist and Cicada Safari. The Great Southern Brood, which emerges across the South and the Midwest every 13 years, has been seen at sites scattered from North Carolina to Georgia. The Northern Illinois Brood, which appears every 17 years in the Midwest, is expected to appear in the next month, as temperatures there warm.
How cicadas manage to rise en masse after spending so long underground remains largely a mystery. “There’s surprisingly little information about cicadas that you’d like to know,” said Raymond Goldstein, a physicist at the University of Cambridge.
Once a brood climbs out of the ground, the cicadas crawl up trees to mate, and the females lay eggs in tree branches. After hatching, the young insects drop to earth and burrow into the soil. Then, each cicada spends the next 13 or 17 years underground before emerging to mate and repeat the cycle.
That means that trillions of insects have to track the passage of time in the soil. It’s possible that they detect annual changes in tree roots. But how can cicadas add up those changes to divine when 13 or 17 years have passed? Scientists cannot say.
Chris Simon, a cicada expert at the University of Connecticut, suspects that some answers will be found in the insects’ DNA. “Is there a consistent difference between something that has a 13-year cycle and a 17-year cycle?” she asked.
Dr. Simon and her colleagues recently sequenced the genome of a cicada for the first time. They caught the insect, which belonged to a brood with a 17-year cycle, in Tennessee in 2021. They hope to sequence the genes of insects from other broods as well, and compare their DNA.
Once cicadas recognize — somehow — that they’ve reached their special year, they need a way to emerge together. Evolutionary biologists have proposed that cicadas come out in vast numbers as a survival strategy. Their enemies, such as birds and parasitic wasps, can attack only a small fraction of them, leaving the rest free to reproduce.
One crucial signal is the temperature of the ground. The soil needs to pass a threshold of about 64 degrees before broods start to appear.
But cicadas cannot surface together simply by sensing the warming soil. An immature cicada that happens to be a couple feet underground will experience cooler temperatures than one just a few inches below the surface. If cicadas paid attention only to the temperature they felt nearby, they would come out in small groups and be quickly wiped out by predators.
Dr. Goldstein and his wife, Adriana Pesci, a mathematician at Cambridge, recently became intrigued by this paradox. “We’re attuned to mysteries,” Dr. Goldstein said.
Working with their Cambridge colleague Robert Jack, Dr. Goldstein and Dr. Pesci created a mathematical model of an underground cicada brood based on observations of real insects. Then, they played with the different variables in their model to get the simulated cicadas to emerge together like real ones.
The scientists speculated that cicadas base their decision to come out not just on the rising temperature of the soil, but also on the actions of neighboring cicadas. The researchers allowed their virtual insects to eavesdrop on each other. If their neighbors were getting noisy as they prepared to climb out of the ground, the insects were more likely to emerge as well.
It turned out that the model worked only if the scientists let the cicadas communicate this way. The combination of temperature and communication caused broods to emerge in a rapid series of bursts — which is exactly what happens in the real world. Each burst included cicadas that were in soil that had not yet reached 64 degrees. Once they left, it took a few days for the soil to warm enough to prompt more cicadas to prepare to leave.
Dr. Goldstein acknowledged that he and his colleagues simply added a hypothetical communication channel to their model to make it work. They have no direct evidence that cicadas actually listen to each other underground.
“Nobody’s ever tried to figure that out,” Dr. Simon said. “It would be very difficult to do.”
As bizarre as cicada emergences may seem, Dr. Goldstein sees them as part of a broader pattern in biology. Many animals, from flocking birds to herds of wildebeests, have to make collective decisions based on noisy, unreliable signals. Even cells in a developing embryo have to coordinate their growth.
“It’s the essence of life,” he said."
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
Former Boeing Manager Says Workers Mishandled Parts to Meet Deadlines - The New York Times
Former Boeing Manager Says Workers Mishandled Parts to Meet Deadlines
"Merle Meyers, who left Boeing last year after a 30-year career, said he was speaking publicly about his experience because he loved the company “fiercely.”
Niraj Chokshi, who covers the aviation industry, reported from Everett, Wash.
Two framed documents from a long career at Boeing hang side by side in Merle Meyers’s home: A certificate from 2022 that thanks him for three decades of service. And a letter he received months later reprimanding him for his performance.
The documents reflect his conflicting emotions about the company. Mr. Meyers, who worked as a Boeing quality manager until last year, holds deep affection for the aircraft manufacturer, where both he and his mother worked. But he is also saddened and frustrated by what he described as a yearslong shift by Boeing executives to emphasize speed over quality.
“I love the company,” said Mr. Meyers, 65, who is publicly sharing his concerns for the first time, supported by hundreds of pages of emails and other documents. For years, he said, quality was the top priority, but that changed over time: “Now, it’s schedule that takes the lead.”
Boeing is revered by many aviation professionals as a lasting symbol of ingenuity and an engineering and manufacturing powerhouse. It is so important to the U.S. economy that presidents have effectively served as salesmen for its planes abroad. The company is a dominant force in Washington State and a top employer in the Seattle area, where it was founded and produces the 737 and other planes.
A job at Boeing is often a source of pride, and many employees have intergenerational ties to the company. In addition to his mother, Mr. Meyers said, his wife’s father and grandfather also worked there.
But that shared pride has been badly bruised in recent years. The company’s reputation was tarnished by a pair of fatal crashes of the 737 Max 8 in 2018 and 2019 and an episode when a panel blew out of a 737 Max 9 plane on Jan. 5. That flight reignited intense scrutiny from regulators, airlines and the public.
Last month, Boeing’s chief executive, Dave Calhoun, said he would step down at the end of the year, and its chairman left his position immediately. The company said it had since taken steps to improve quality, including increasing inspections, adding training and pausing production so managers can hear directly from workers.
“We are using this period, as difficult as it is, to deliberately slow the system, stabilize the supply chain, fortify our factory operations and position Boeing to deliver with the predictability and quality our customers demand for the long term,” Mr. Calhoun said in a letter to employees on Wednesday.
While aviation remains exceedingly safe — far fewer people die on planes than in cars, trucks or buses — the Jan. 5 flight highlighted quality concerns raised by Mr. Meyers and other current and former employees. Many who have spoken out say they have done so out of respect for Boeing employees and their work, and a desire to push the company to restore its reputation.
“The Boeing Company has done everything for me, and I will never be able to do enough for them,” said Mr. Meyers, a Christian chaplain who said his decision to speak out was informed partly by his faith. “We love the company fiercely. That’s why you fight for it.”
His career at Boeing, which included some long gaps, started in 1979 with a job making overhead storage bins. Starting in the mid-1990s, he oversaw quality at suppliers that made seats, galleys and other components in Texas, England and France. Mr. Meyers said he had been laid off twice, in the early 1990s and the early 2000s. He returned a few years later and spent the second half of his career in quality oversight in Everett, Wash., where Boeing makes several models of planes.
Mr. Meyers, who wears a ring on his right hand commemorating his 30 years at Boeing, said he had begun to notice slipping in the company’s high standards after its 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas. He said Boeing’s engineering-first mentality had slowly given way to a stronger focus on profits after executives from McDonnell Douglas assumed top jobs at Boeing.
Mr. Meyers said he was particularly troubled that workers at Boeing’s Everett factory felt such pressure to keep production moving that they would find unauthorized ways to get the parts they needed. That included taking parts assigned to other planes, taking newly delivered components before they could be inspected or logged, or trying to recover parts that had been scrapped. To Mr. Meyers, managers did little to dissuade or punish workers from such shortcuts.
“What gets rewarded gets repeated,” he said. “People get promoted by hustling parts.”
Thousands of people work at the Everett building, which is generally regarded as the world’s largest by volume, and Mr. Meyers acknowledges that his observations were limited to a portion of the work carried out there. But the pressures he described are similar to those identified by other current and former employees.
In one investigation from 2015, Mr. Meyers found that workers had used an unauthorized form to recover scrapped parts, such as landing-gear axles, at least 23 times over 15 years, according to email correspondence. Components are usually scrapped because they are substandard or defective, but workers in several cases said the parts had been removed mistakenly, an explanation that Mr. Meyers said was hard to believe. The movement of parts is generally highly documented and regulated to ensure quality and safety.
“Parts don’t just end up in scrap,” he said. His findings ultimately helped to end the practice, according to the documents provided by Mr. Meyers.
In 2021, his team identified multiple instances in which employees removed parts from receiving areas before those components could be inspected, according to the documents. In one case, an employee took parts and disposed of the associated paperwork and shipping crates. In another instance, Mr. Meyers shared with corporate investigators an annotated email chain showing that several 787 bulkheads had been removed from a receiving area without the knowledge of quality inspectors.
In a statement, the company said it took such violations seriously.
“Boeing’s quality team plays an important role in identifying issues, improving processes and strengthening compliance in our factories,” the company said. “To ensure the safety, quality and conformance of our products, we investigate all allegations of improper behavior, such as unauthorized movement of parts or mishandling of documents. We then work diligently to address them and make improvements.”
Mr. Meyers said that he would notify corporate investigators of such incidents when he believed that the practices he uncovered were widespread and that the company should do more to stop them.
But emails he shared with The New York Times also show that his efforts to get the attention of those investigators often ended in frustration. In some cases, the investigators said they could not substantiate his findings. Mr. Meyers frequently pushed back, succeeding in some cases in prompting additional action, he said.
By early last year, Mr. Meyers had received that written reprimand, which said he was responsible for creating “defective work product, service or output” but didn’t provide any details about what he had done wrong. He felt both that his concerns were not being taken seriously and that if he stayed at Boeing he might eventually be pushed out. He was offered a financial incentive to quit, so he took it.
It was not the departure he had expected or planned for.
Mr. Meyers was a teenager when his mother, Darlene Meyers, joined Boeing in the early 1970s. Her two-decade career there, in which she rose from a clerk to a high-profile role as a designated representative of the Federal Aviation Administration, had helped to lift the two of them out of poverty, he said.
His own Boeing career helped to provide a comfortable life for his family and a good education for his daughter and son, both of whom are in their late 30s and have families of their own.
Since leaving, he has focused more on work that he and his wife, Cindy, who is also a chaplain, have done for some time, helping survivors of trauma or people dealing with grief.
“I didn’t want to go back into aerospace,” he said. “I’ve had enough scars.”
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Opinion | Biden’s Deep Miscalculation on Israel and Gaza - The New York Times
Biden’s Deep Miscalculation on Israel and Gaza
Nicholas Kristof asks: Where has our moral president gone?
Below is a lightly edited transcript of this episode. To listen to this episode, click the play button below.
Biden’s Deep Miscalculation on Israel and Gaza
Nicholas Kristof asks: Where has our moral president gone?Sarah Wildman: Hello, I’m Sarah Wildman, staff writer and politics editor for New York Times Opinion. Today I’m in conversation with columnist Nicholas Kristof on Biden’s role in the war in Gaza. Nick has been writing about the conflict since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7. Most recently, he wrote a major column on what he sees as Biden’s complicity in the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Essentially, Nick makes the case that the Israel-Hamas war is now Biden’s war. This conflict, he writes, will be a significant part of Biden’s legacy.
Nick, thank you so much for joining me today. I know it’s a little early on your side of the country.
Nicholas Kristof: Oh, my pleasure.
Sarah: Nick, how do you think Biden wanted to position himself during this administration?
Nick: He’s a veteran on foreign affairs. He cares deeply about foreign affairs. He’s got a great foreign policy team, and well, they bungled Afghanistan at the outset. But then I think they did a very impressive job rallying Europe around Ukraine.
And I think that he thought that Ukraine was going to be his war — that was going to be his chance to stand up for international norms. And I’m afraid that the war he will be remembered for may not be so much Ukraine as the Gaza war.
This notion that, you know, since World War II, we have tried to preserve some international norms that have restrained governments, that have tried to promote certain values — we don’t live up to the standards that we proclaim, but they have made some difference. And now, you know, I’m afraid that a lot of the world looks at this and they just laugh at us. They roll their eyes.
Sarah: I want to talk a little bit about Biden’s legacy prior to all of this, when it comes to humanitarian crises. Back in 1986, as a younger senator, he spoke out passionately against apartheid.
[Archival audio of Biden] Our loyalty is not to South Africa. It’s to South Africans. And the South Africans are majority Black, and they are being excoriated. It is not to some stupid puppet government over there. It is not to the Afrikaners’ regime. We have no loyalty to them. We have no loyalty to South Africa. To South Africans.
Sarah: You’ve been covering human rights and conflicts for decades. How have you seen Biden position himself in the past?
Nick: He’s been a good, moral voice on a lot of these issues, including for those in which Muslims were victims.
In Bosnia, he was an important advocate for addressing the genocide there. I worked with him in the Darfuri genocide in the early 2000s. Senator Biden then felt that President Bush wasn’t doing enough. And he was urging me to write, you know, tough columns calling on the White House to not just talk but to actually do more to address the suffering in Darfur.
So I think of the passion and urgency that Biden has used in the past to offer a moral voice, and I wonder, “Where has that Joe Biden gone?”
Sarah: You write that Biden came to Israel with enormous empathy for Israelis, following the horrific attacks of Oct. 7. But you also say that you think the empathy has been unequally applied to the conflict. Can you explain what you mean?
Nick: So I think that there is something of an empathy gap, and when I see President Biden talk about the Israeli suffering after Oct. 7, you can just see how authentic that is. He means it. I mean, he’s, he’s hurting. He feels that suffering. And when he speaks about Gazan suffering, you don’t sense that same deep pain, that same sense of walking in other people’s shoes. And I think that this empathy gap does make it easier to support policies that, you know, he recognizes causes a great deal of suffering, a great deal of individual loss, led more than a thousand kids in Gaza to now be amputees. But it historically has been easier for us to impose costs on people abroad — whether they were Vietnamese or Afghans or Iraqis — when we identify a little bit less with them.
And I wonder if that isn’t the case right here.
Sarah: From a humanitarian standpoint, how would you describe Biden’s approach when it comes to Israel and to Gaza?
Nick: I think President Biden is legitimately deeply distressed by the suffering in Gaza and starvation. And he has regularly called on Israel to dial back the bombing and to allow more aid into Gaza.
I think he recognizes this is not the way he would want to conduct that war, but he imposes no consequences when his guidance is ignored and when the bombings continue and when the starvation continues. And so if you continue to provide the material, if you continue to provide the support, if you continue to provide the diplomatic protection, then it’s a little hard to then complain when 12,000 kids are killed, when kids do starve to death.
President Biden has talked a lot about how Israel should let in more food into Gaza, and he got to the point of organizing airdrops to drop food in. But back in December, he actually had a chance to do something, and the U.N. Security Council was organizing a structure that would provide a U.N. mechanism to inspect food going into Gaza to get around the Israeli system that has been a real block for food getting in. And the White House blocked that effort. They essentially watered it down to nothing. So the Israeli inspections are still the structure that is in place and that still are impeding food getting in.
Sarah: You say you think that there has been a miscalculation on the part of the administration, and Biden particularly, at how this war would play out. How was it miscalculated?
Nick: So I think that the Biden administration didn’t appreciate how harsh Israeli bombings would be. I don’t think they appreciated how much Israel would try to block humanitarian aid into Gaza, and this caused starvation. And I don’t think they appreciated how much their own advice would be ignored regularly.
I think that President Biden had a little more confidence that he would be able to nudge Benjamin Netanyahu in the direction of more restraint, and that did not happen.
Sarah: It’s interesting you say that you think he thought he would be able to nudge him. Can you walk me through the difference between his support for Israel and his support for Netanyahu?
Nick: I mean, Biden, forever, he’s been a very strong supporter of Israel.
I think that’s partly his generation growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust and remembering Israel as a deeply fragile state, surrounded by enemies who periodically tried to destroy it. And many Democrats have been at odds with Netanyahu, who they see as fundamentally working with Republicans to try to undermine President Obama, for example, when Biden was vice president.
And Americans have always found, have always found Netanyahu to be a really difficult person. Knowing all this, somehow Biden seemed to think that he could put his arm around Netanyahu and manage him.
And instead, looking back, it seems pretty clear that it was Netanyahu who managed Biden.
Sarah: What has Biden’s strategy been with Netanyahu, in particular?
Nick: Biden recognizes what a mess he’s gotten himself into in both geopolitical terms and in humanitarian terms. His strategy has been a kind of Hail Mary pass that would involve a three-way deal with Saudi Arabia, with Israel and the U.S., in which Saudi Arabia would normalize relations with Israel, which is something Israel would very much like. The U.S. would provide benefits to Saudi Arabia, and then Israel would agree to a two-state solution. And then there would be some kind of a cease-fire in which this would all be hammered out. And then the war wouldn’t actually resume, and then there would be work on getting some kind of Palestinian state created and end the fighting and have some kind of an international effort to rebuild Gaza.
It sounds great. It would be an incredible achievement if you were to pull it off. It seems not terribly likely to me right now, and there isn’t really a Plan B.
Sarah: One of the things you noted about the miscalculation in the piece is that you say they miscalculated the impact of Oct. 7 on Israeli society. And one thing we haven’t mentioned is that there are still hostages being held, and that has been, obviously, a driving force for much of Israeli society. How does that play into Biden’s understanding of the moment and his concern?
Nick: So that has been a real constraint, I think. And look, Israeli society was just shattered by Oct. 7, deeply, deeply traumatized. That moved Israeli public opinion and made people very suspicious that a Palestinian state would ever be feasible.
It led to a strong desire to try to completely eradicate Hamas and accept civilian losses if that was part of that path.
Sarah: So where do we go from here? Does the administration have diplomatic room to maneuver?
Nick: I think that right now Biden is on a cul-de-sac. I don’t think that the path he’s on right now is going to take him to a better place. And in fact, there are a lot of risks that things could get worse. We could have a wider war involving Iran, involving Hezbollah. We could also have famine break out in Gaza. And it’s also just hard to see how this ends, because even if Israel dials back the bombing, then what authority is there going to be in Gaza that can actually provide health care, can distribute food, can establish order?
So I’m afraid we’re not on a very good path, and I think that the answer has to be to try to create consequences when Israel doesn’t listen to Biden, and the obvious consequence is to withhold offensive arms.
I think that would get the attention of the Israel Defense Forces very quickly. It was notable that when Biden finally raised the possibility of using his leverage and had a tough conversation with Netanyahu and warned about those consequences, then almost immediately Israel did allow more aid in, and I just wish that he had had that conversation months and months earlier.
Sarah: Do you think it’s politically practical for him domestically to condition aid? Where would that position him on the domestic front, given the election?
Nick: I mean, it’s difficult for Biden because the Democratic Party has many people who are outraged by what Israel is doing in Gaza, but it also has many people who were deep, strong supporters of Israel and would be appalled by a suspension of offensive arms.
But public opinion has moved very quickly, and at this point, a majority — not just the Democrats — but a majority of Americans, as a whole, disapprove of Israeli actions in Gaza. And so I think that would be the smarter move.
Sarah: What do you think Biden must do right now, most urgently?
Nick: So I think he needs to suspend the transfer of offensive arms to Israel, pending food actually being delivered to Gaza to end this starvation, and some indication of dialing back the more reckless side of the bombing in Gaza and then push immediately for some kind of a cease-fire and hostage release and, likewise, then try to use that for some kind of an arrangement for a Palestinian state.
Sarah: Before I let you go, we’ve talked about possible practical political moves the administration might make, but really your piece is about morality and legacy. And I wonder if you can bring us back to that for a moment. What is the takeaway you have about this moment for Biden now on that issue?
Nick: I think of the compassion that Joe Biden has shown at various points for people who are suffering around the world and his sense of moral obligation to address that suffering. And then I try to juxtapose that with what is happening in Israel and Gaza, and I admire the compassion that he showed for victims of Oct. 7 and the moral clarity he showed after Oct. 7, when it was necessary to call this out as barbaric and intolerable. But if you only care about human rights for one side in a conflict, then you don’t actually care about human rights. And if you regard the deaths of children on one side of a conflict as a tragedy, as unacceptable, but deaths of children on the other side of the conflict as regrettable, then there is something profoundly wrong not just with your geopolitics but with your moral compass.
And I fear that is the direction we have strayed in, at the end of the day. We forget there’s the basic principle that all lives have equal value, and that has to be our sense of where we go forward, and it’s very hard to integrate that principle in military conflict and geopolitics, but we can do a lot better at integrating it than we have done.
Sarah: Nick, thank you so much. This is a tough conversation, but I really appreciate your time.
Nick: Thank you, Sarah.
Thoughts? Email us at theopinions@nytimes.com.
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Annie-Rose Strasser. Engineering by Efim Shapiro, with mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta."
Opinion | Marjorie Taylor Greene Has Reached the Outer Limit of Extremism - The New York Times
The Humbling of Marjorie Taylor Greene
"Ms. Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion and is a host of the podcast “Matter of Opinion.”
In our Trump-era politics, there’s always the question of how crazy is too crazy — how disruptive and extreme an elected official can get before becoming so embarrassing that members of her own team feel compelled to abandon her?
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene seems to have reached that outer limit. Again.
It’s not simply that Ms. Greene has taken such a Putin-pleasing approach to Russia’s war in Ukraine (Ukrainian Nazis? Really?) that the term “useful idiot” feels unavoidable. She has, in very little time, undermined the influence of her party’s entire right flank, driving less unhinged Republicans — most notably the House speaker, Mike Johnson — to brush back her and her ilk like the poo-flinging chaos monkeys they are.
Just look at what has come to pass in the House in the past several days: Mr. Johnson, a proud ultraconservative, pushed through a $95 billion foreign aid package, including $60 billion for Ukraine, with more Democratic votes than Republican ones. He is now counting on Democrats to save him from the Greene-led extremists’ plan to defenestrate him and install yet another Republican as speaker. There is much buzz about the emergence of a bipartisan governing coalition in the House, albeit one born of desperation. Squint hard, and Congress almost looks to be functioning as intended, with a majority of members coming together to advance vital legislation. With her special brand of MAGA extremism, Ms. Greene has shifted the House in a bipartisan direction (at least for now) in exactly the way her base loathes.
Can I get two cheers for the art of the possible?!
On a less high-minded note, how delicious was it to see Ms. Greene on the steps of the Capitol on Saturday, raving about Mr. Johnson’s various “betrayals” and proclaiming him “a lame duck,” even as she hemmed and hawed about when she would move to oust him? All in good time, she said, insisting she felt moved to let her colleagues first “go home and hear from their constituents” over this week’s House recess. “I said from the beginning I’m going to be responsible with this,” she said, in what may be her most laughable line in weeks — a high bar for the House member known for her keen insights on Jewish space lasers.
Seriously, how responsible did Ms. Greene look Sunday on Fox News, as she ducked Maria Bartiromo’s questions about her plans for ousting Mr. Johnson? (Short answer: She has no plan.) Ms. Bartiromo noted that Ms. Greene was drawing widespread criticism for “creating drama” and that there was concern she was making Republicans look like a bunch of squabbling incompetents unfit to run a neighborhood book club. (Those may not have been the host’s exact words.) Ms. Greene’s crackerjack defense was to insist, “The people criticizing me are not the American people.” The American people “are outraged, and what they’re saying is they don’t want to vote for Republicans anymore,” she asserted, adding that “the Republican Party in charge right now, it’s no different than the Democrat Party.”
I may be off base here, Marjo, but trashing your colleagues as no better than the other side in a high-stakes election year is not the best way to win them over to your kamikaze mission.
Because here’s the thing: Republicans already subjected themselves to painful mockery last fall by letting their right-wingers take down Speaker Kevin McCarthy without a succession plan in mind. It took them three failed candidates and three inglorious weeks to finally install Mr. Johnson. Precious few members are likely up for a second helping of humiliation this much closer to Election Day.
I mean, not even Donald Trump is throwing in with “Moscow Marjorie,” as she has been dubbed in some cheekier conservative corners. After an invigorating Monday spent in court, the former president reiterated his support and sympathy for Mr. Johnson in a chat with the conservative radio host John Fredericks. “Well, look, we have a majority of one, OK?” Mr. Trump noted. “It’s not like he can go and do whatever he wants to do.”
At this point, the most enthusiastic base of support for Ms. Greene’s shenanigans may be the Kremlin. More food for thought, congresswoman: When Russian propagandists start praising your politics and beauty, it’s time to rethink your life choices.
Could this show of spine by non-winger Republicans last more than a hot second? Maybe Mr. Johnson is recognizing that his responsibilities as the head of the people’s house go beyond serving his trolliest, most obstructionist members. And maybe, unlike Mr. McCarthy, who never exhibited signs of possessing a moral core, Mr. Johnson is serious about trying to do “the right thing” — by which he does not simply mean whatever Mr. Trump tells him to do.
Of course, if we really want to talk fantasy scenarios, I’d be thrilled if this speaker, having stiff-armed his wingers multiple times and lived to tell about it, feels liberated to keep nudging the House toward greater functionality. I mean, the guy has already blown his shot at being the ultimate MAGA speaker. Why not give being a genuine statesman a chance and do a deal on border security or the cost of prescription drugs?
Not that I’m holding my breath. In these MAGAtastic times, the humbled Ms. Greene could rebound faster than you can say “total presidential immunity.” But for now, her flapping and flailing are satisfying to behold.
Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion and is a host of the podcast “Matter of Opinion.” She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration.
@mcottle"