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“Candles give me anxiety. We spent so much time studying by candlelight after school.”

“It’s a collective trauma in Lebanon, and a complex trauma, because we aren’t talking about one thing, but many events that people have lived through,” said Ghida Husseini, my former therapist in Lebanon who specializes in trauma. “It’s the war, it’s the stress of losing your livelihood and not feeling secure.”

The war lasted for 15 years, until 1990. Tired of waiting, the nation accepted a blanket amnesty for a shaky peace. We watched as militia leaders traded in their blood-soaked fatigues for designer suits and started running the country.

Now we find ourselves waiting, again, as those war criminals-turned-politicians have mismanaged the country — an ongoing banking crisis has seen the currency shed over 90 percent of its value — and skirted responsibility for an explosion at Beirut’s seaport in the summer of 2020.

Decades later, sunsets are one of the sources of trauma for him, still.

“I remember sitting on a mattress as a kid, surrounded by candles. There’s a feeling of being trapped. There is no TV. No music. No electricity. You can’t go outside, it’s too dangerous. All there is — is cards.”

One night, as Raoul slept — his bedroom window had the dining table nailed to it, to protect against snipers — bombing started. His mother cried out for him, looking frantically until they found Raoul, then 5, crying while hugging a framed photo of the Virgin Mary that had fallen from the wall, praying for his life. He developed a stutter after that.

Yet every summer, no matter what happened — an Israeli invasion, the suicide bombing that killed hundred of U.S. Marines — we went back, to be with our family, to hold their hands and say: We have not abandoned you. It was the most twisted of survivor’s guilt

Many are left wondering how their adult lives would be better if their childhoods had been different.

Reminders of a past war are now staples of the present decay.

Because it meant night was coming. And nighttime meant shelling.

“I could have been a better person, a stronger person, maybe wiser, with less fear,” he said. “Especially the fear. Because fear is trauma. I’m a grown man and I'm afraid to walk in the dark. Because to me, the dark is war.”

only 8.8 million Ukrainians have been fully vaccinated—less than one third of the population.

The pandemic has killed more Ukrainians in the past four months than the ongoing war in Donbas has in seven years.

Seven years later, tensions are still flaring on an on-again-off-again basis, as Ukrainian forces continue to fight Russian-backed militias, resulting in the loss of some 4,500 Ukrainian citizens so far.

Now, the Ukraine-controlled part of Donetsk, a virtual warzone, is bearing the brunt of the COVID crisis in the country, registering 120 virus-induced deaths on Monday alone

locals seem to be directing their fury at their own government for its staggering vaccine campaign and overwhelmed medical institutions.

7,507 people have died in the self-proclaimed People’s Donetsk Republic since the beginning of the pandemic.

Tens of thousands of young professionals, including medical personnel and doctors have left the Ukrainian government-controlled parts of the Donbas region since 2014.

The remaining population of about 300,000 live in small towns close to the frontlines.

More than three million people live in the seperatist Donetsk and Luhansk republics, where they rely on Russian-supplied vaccines. Due to the pandemic, most of the checkpoints along the line of contact were shut down, and up to 200,000 pensioners living in the separatist regions were not able to enter Ukraine to receive their funds.

To promote COVID vaccination, President Zelensky announced this week that every fully vaccinated Ukrainian would receive a reward of $38, but since Ukraine does not recognize the Russian vaccine, residents of the separatist territories will not be paid the promised reward.

Symbolic acts of sanctioning individuals and issuing sharply worded statements are nothing new in the long and troubled relationship between Tehran and Washington.

The Biden administration needs a foreign policy success, particularly after the chaotic exit from Afghanistan, and has said it prefers a diplomatic resolution to the nuclear standoff over military confrontation.

The Biden administration initially wanted to return to the original deal while following the Trump blueprint on missiles and foreign policies, but has now indicated it would accept a return to the 2015 accord without those strings attached.

initially demanded the lifting of all sanctions imposed by Mr. Trump and guarantees that a future American president would not withdraw from the deal. But Tehran has softened those demands as the negotiations have progressed in Vienna.

Former President Donald Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018 and imposed tough economic sanctions cutting off most of Iran’s oil revenues and international financial transactions. Mr. Trump’s goal was to pressure Iran into a deal that reached beyond its nuclear program, restricting its ballistic missiles and regional political and military activities.

“We will facilitate revenge on Americans in any place, even their own homes and by people close to them, even if we are not present,” he said in a video of the speech.

Yet neither side wants to seem too eager to compromise, which would risk appearing weak.

The recent jousting between Tehran and Washington is linked to Iran’s commemoration on Jan. 3 of the two-year anniversary of the U.S. assassination of General Suleimani. In speech after speech during the ceremonies, Iranian officials threatened revenge against American officials — even though Iran had retaliated five days after the assassination with a ballistic missile strike on an American military facility in Iraq.

Ebrahim Raisi, the newly elected hard-line Iranian president, said that former President Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, should stand trial in an impartial court and face “ghesas,” a term that in Islamic jurisprudence means an “eye for an eye.” Otherwise, he warned, people would take their own revenge.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, signaled an indirect endorsement of talks with the U.S. in a speech on Monday when he said the Islamic Republic “holding talks and negotiating with the enemy at certain junctures does not mean surrendering.”

Over a four-day period, they unleashed a series of rocket and drone attacks on a U.S. military base in western Iraq and on the living quarters of State Department employees at the Baghdad airport, according to the Iraqi military and an official with the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition based in Baghdad, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

In northeastern Syria, artillery rounds were fired at a Syrian-Kurdish-led base with U.S. advisers, according to the U.S.-led coalition, which issued a statement blaming the attacks on “Iran-supported malign actors.”

Tehran’s proxies were launching the attacks, Iranian officials were expressing a surprisingly optimistic view of the talks in Vienna, now in their eighth round, while the State Department was offering a more measured assessment.

An adviser to Iran’s Foreign Ministry said he believed a deal could be reached before mid-February, which would coincide with the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution.

made an important concession to get things rolling by agreeing to work from a draft agreement worked out with Mr. Rouhani’s team,

Under that agreement, the U.S. would lift all sanctions related to the nuclear deal (while keeping those for human rights and other issues) and Iran would return to its technical commitments regarding its nuclear program under the old treaty.

Washington’s outlook has been more cautious than Tehran’s.

“I’m not going to put a time limit on it or give you the number of meters remaining on the runway, except to say, ‘Yes, it is getting very, very, very short,’”

Iran may have softened its initial demand for the removal of all sanctions imposed after Mr. Trump exited the deal, including those related to human rights.

Iran was pursuing “the removal of sanctions” related only to the original nuclear deal and looking to complete sanctions removal sometime in the future.

Iran has long maintained that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. But if the talks fail, he said, its efforts at enriching uranium since the U.S. exited the nuclear deal have put it in a position to move toward weaponization very quickly.

For Berlin, loosening its energy dependence on Russia is not simply about hitting Moscow’s main revenue stream. It’s a threat to roll back “Ostpolitik,” a totemic post-World War II policy of rapprochement with the Soviet Union, and by extension later Russia, that involved economic and political engagement, notably through oil and gas links.

Yet as customers desert Russia, its partnership with the oil titans of the Middle East, with which it jointly leads the OPEC+ coalition, has so far stayed intact. Russia and Saudi Arabia are the world’s top oil exporters, accounting for 29% of the global total. 

“The U.S. can try to make Saudi Arabia increase production, but why would they accept a break in the alliance, which is key for them?”

Riyadh’s OPEC+ partnership with Moscow calmed years of distrust between the two oil rivals, and saved the kingdom from relying exclusively on Washington.

“Saudi Arabia doesn’t want to switch horses mid-race when they do not know if the other horse is actually going to show up,”

Gulf Arab nations accused the U.S. of a lack of support in the face of repeated attacks by Iranian-backed militia on Saudi oil facilities and Gulf tanker traffic, and on Abu Dhabi this year. In a measure of the discord, the United Arab Emirates abstained in a U.S.-led United Nations Security Council vote to condemn Russia’s invasion.

“Now that we are in a crisis moment, we’re reaping the effect of that lack of trust that’s been building over the years,” said Karen Young, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. 

Another source of friction lies in U.S. efforts to reinstate the nuclear agreement with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional rival.

Demonstrating just how exceptional the times are, a U.S. delegation traveled to Russian ally Venezuela last weekend in an overture to a country that holds the largest known crude reserves in the world.

Venezuela has been subject to international sanctions since the Trump era that have crippled its ability to sell oil. While there is not yet talk of allowing exports to resume, President Nicolas Maduro responded by offering to turn on the taps anyway, saying that state oil company PDVSA is prepared to raise output to as many three million barrels a day “for the world.”

the U.S. visit was “unexpected, surprising, a complete change in policy orientation,” with energy as the strategic catalyst.

“But I think there is a more important geopolitical move that is redefining the West,” he added. The U.S. is looking to confine the spheres of influence enjoyed by Russia and especially China, and for Venezuela that means a gradual process “to reincorporate with the West, through energy.” 

China will continue to carry on “normal trade cooperation” with Russia, including in oil and gas, said Zhao Lijian, a foreign ministry spokesperson. China is considering buying or increasing stakes in Russian companies such as Gazprom PJSC,

Even assuming a discount on the price per barrel, state-owned importers would weigh very carefully the impact on their global business of large purchases from a country that’s subject to so many sanctions, according to Qin Yan, an analyst with research house Refinitiv.

Neither would buying energy from Moscow be an easy solution, even if it meant less pollution, said Li Shuo, a climate analyst at Greenpeace East Asia. “To change China’s current energy structure, to replace a lot of coal it uses now with Russia’s oil and gas, would be a huge project for China, and it would take time,”

In Europe, the EU is refusing to budge on its climate commitments as it seeks to slash imports from its biggest supplier this year and replace flows from Russia completely by 2027. Those efforts were given a jolt by a suggestion that Moscow might shut off gas supplies through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Europe.

“We simply cannot rely on a supplier who explicitly threatens us,” EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said as she unveiled the bloc’s plans this week. 

as Scholz told the Bundestag, Russia’s attack on Ukraine means “we are in a new era.” The world today “is no longer the same world that it was before.”

Surprisingly, Iran is not happy with Azerbaijan’s victory. As openly as the Iranians ever do, they’ve threatened to use force against any changes to the borders of Armenia. Iran, a millenniums-old civilization central to a whole continent, cannot tolerate being walled off behind a chain of Turkish dependencies. India, similarly, is on Armenia’s side and has been sending a regular supply of weapons. One spur for such support, no doubt, is Pakistan’s joining the Azeri-Turkish alliance. In the jargon of American lawyers, this opens a whole new can of worms.

Then there’s Russia, whose absence from the denouement in Nagorno-Karabakh was striking. Even after the 1990s, Moscow still remained by far the biggest supplier of weapons to both Armenia and Azerbaijan. Their economies and societies, above all the elites and their corruption networks, were until very recently molded together. What we are seeing now, as both nations slip out of Russia’s orbit, might be the second round of Soviet collapse.

Once again, Armenia started the shift. In spring 2018 a tremendously hopeful uprising, reminiscent of 1989 in Central Europe, forced the post-communist elites to surrender power. Vladimir Putin was visibly displeased to meet Nikol Pashinyan, the anticorruption journalist and street rebel elected Armenia’s premier by an overwhelming majority. Mr. Pashinyan admittedly had neither political team nor experience; he is learning statesmanship on the job, often at great expense to his nation. Yet he managed to significantly reduce corruption, helping to unlock the legendary entrepreneurship of Armenians. Amid all the grim news, the Armenian economy, led by the I.T. sector, is registering impressive growth.

History has a habit of serving the same lessons with changed variables. In 1988, it was the dreamer Gorbachev stumbling over Nagorno-Karabakh that unwittingly shattered the world order. Today, Mr. Putin could become the second, much darker incarnation of the Kremlin aggrandizer going awry on all fronts. The consequences — from emboldening international aggression to reanimating the West under the banner of NATO — will be profound. As events in Nagorno-Karabakh show, the fragile post-Cold War order is giving way to something else entirely.

The Caucasus might seem strange and distant. Yet it might prove the wedge that turns the fortunes of world order. Trieste, Smyrna, Sarajevo, Danzig and Crimea were all such places. Let us not have to relearn history at the cost of yet another ethnic cleansing

For many years, the Civil War was remembered as a family quarrel among white Americans in which their Black countrymen played no significant role—a fiction reflected in the paucity of memorials indicating that enslaved men and women had been active agents in shaping the course of events. Lately, some historical erasures have begun to be remedied. For example, a memorial honoring Robert Smalls, the enslaved Civil War hero who famously sailed a Confederate vessel out of Charleston Harbor and turned it over to the Union navy, and later served five terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, is now on display in Charleston’s Waterfront Park.

White-supremacist Democrats viewed scalawags, who could be found in many parts of the South, as traitors to their race and region. The largest number were small farmers in up-country counties where slavery had not been a major presence before the Civil War—places such as the mountainous areas of western North Carolina and northern Alabama and Georgia. There, many white residents had opposed secession and more than a few had enlisted in the Union army

Even though supporting Reconstruction required them to overcome long-standing prejudices and forge a political alliance with Black voters, up-country scalawags saw Black male suffrage as the only way to prevent pro-Confederate plantation owners from regaining political power in the South

All scalawags were excoriated in the white southern press, but none as viciously as Longstreet.

First, Israel is facing threats from a set of enemies who combine medieval theocratic worldviews with 21st century weaponry — and are no longer organized as small bands of militiamen, but as modern armies with brigades, battalions, cyber capabilities, long-range rockets, drones and technical support.

my third, deep concern.

But Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza entails urban, house-to-house fighting that creates thousands of civilian casualties — innocent men, women and children

But President Biden can only sustainably generate the support Israel needs if Israel is ready to engage in some kind of a wartime diplomatic initiative directed at the Palestinians in the West Bank — and hopefully in a post-Hamas Gaza — that indicates Israel will discuss some kind of two-state solutions if Palestinian officials can get their political house unified and in order.

The second danger I see is that the only conceivable way that Israel can generate the legitimacy, resources, time and allies to fight such a difficult war with so many enemies is if it has unwavering partners abroad, led by the United States.

Netanyahu’s message to the world remains, in effect: “Help us defeat Hamas in Gaza, while we work to expand settlements, annex the West Bank and build a Jewish supremacist state there.”

Worse, I am stunned at the degree to which that leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, continues to put the interests of holding on to the support of his far-right base

Israel has the worst leader in its history, maybe in all of Jewish history — who has no will or ability to produce such an initiative.

This kind of chilling exuberance — Israel was built so that such a thing could never happen — explains the homemade sign I saw on a sidewalk while driving through the French Hill Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem the other day: “It’s either us or them.’’

After being slammed by the public for digitally stabbing his army and intelligence chiefs in the back in the middle of a war, Netanyahu published a new tweet. “I was wrong,” he wrote, adding that “the things I said following the press conference should not have been said, and I apologize for that. I fully support the heads of [Israel’s] security services.”

As a result, there is a conviction in the army that they must demonstrate to the entire neighborhood — to Hezbollah in Lebanon, to the Houthis in Yemen, to the Islamic militias in Iraq to the Hamas and other fighters in the West Bank — that they will stop at nothing to re-establish the security of their borders

it wants to show that no one can out-crazy Israel to drive them from this region — even if the Israeli military has to defy the U.S. and even if they do not have any solid plan for governing Gaza the morning after the war.

“Israel cannot accept such an active threat on its borders. The whole idea of people living side by side in the Middle East was jeopardized by Hamas.”

This conflict is now back to its most biblical and primordial roots. This seems to be a time of eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. The morning-after policy thinking will have to wait for the mourning after.

So, Netanyahu is saying that seven million Jews are going to indefinitely control the lives of five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza

while offering them no political horizon, nothing, by way of statehood one day on any demilitarized conditions.

Early on the morning of Oct. 29, as the Israeli Army was just moving into Gaza, Netanyahu tweeted and then deleted a social media post in which he blamed Israel’s defense and intelligence establishment for failing to anticipate Hamas’s surprise attack.

The euphoric rampage of Oct. 7 that killed some 1,400 soldiers and civilians has not only hardened Israeli hearts toward the suffering of Gaza civilians. It has also inflicted a deep sense of humiliation and guilt on the Israeli Army and defense establishment, for having failed in their most basic mission of protecting the country’s borders.

the damage was done. How much do you suppose those military leaders trust what Netanyahu will say if the Gaza campaign stalls? What real leader would behave that way at the start of a war of survival?

Netanyahu and his far-right zealots have taken Israel on multiple flights of fancy in the last year: dividing the country and the army over the fraudulent judicial reform, bankrupting its future with massive investments in religious schools that teach no math and in West Bank Jewish settlements that teach no pluralism — while building up Hamas, which would never be a partner for peace, and tearing down the Palestinian Authority, the only possible partner for peace.

“When you go to the front, you are overwhelmed by the power of what we lost.”

This is triggering a U.S.-China cold war, mass migrations from south to north and an America that has become more unreliable than indispensable.

that’s not the half of it. Because now that advanced military technologies like drones are readily available, smaller players can wield much more power and project it more widely than ever before, enabling even their bad choices to shake the world

This is why I referred to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as our first true world war, and why I feel that Hamas’s war with Israel is in some ways our second true world war.

They are being fought on both physical battlefields and digital ones, with huge global reach and implications.

Indeed, in today’s tightly wired world, it is possible that the war over the Gaza Strip — which is roughly twice the size of Washington, D.C. — could decide the next president in Washington, D.C., as some young Democrats abandon President Biden because of his support for Israel.

before we become too pessimistic, let us remember that these choices are just that: choices. There was nothing inevitable or foreordained about them

Gorbachev, Deng, Anwar el-Sadat, Menachem Begin, George H.W. Bush and Volodymyr Zelensky, to name but a few, faced excruciating choices, but they chose forks in the road that led to a safer and more prosperous world, at least for a time

What is the essential ingredient that Dubai has and Gaza lacks? Because both began, in one sense, as the convergence of sand and seawater at crucial intersections of the world.

The short answer is visionary leadership.Dubai has benefited from two generations of monarchs in the United Arab Emirates who had a powerful vision of how the U.A.E. in general and the emirate of Dubai in particular could choose to be Arab, modern, pluralistic, globalized and embracing of a moderate interpretation of Islam

Their formula incorporates a radical openness to the world, an emphasis on free markets and education, a ban on extremist political Islam, relatively little corruption, a strong rule of law promulgated from the top down and a relentless commitment to economic diversification, talent recruitment and development.

Any of Dubai’s neighbors — Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Iran and Saudi Arabia — could have done the same with their similar coastlines, but it was the U.A.E. that pulled it off by making the choices it made.

Compare that with Gaza, where the role models today are Hamas martyrs in its endless war with Israel.

Among the most ignorant and vile things that have been said about this Gaza war is that Hamas had no choice — that its wars with Israel, culminating on Oct. 7 with a murderous rampage, the kidnappings of Israelis as young as 10 months and as old as 86 and the rape of Israeli women, could somehow be excused as a justifiable jailbreak by pent-up males.

Let’s go to the videotape: In September 2005, Ariel Sharon completed a unilateral withdrawal of all Israeli forces and settlements from Gaza, which Israel occupied in the 1967 war. In short order, Hamas began attacking the crossing points between Gaza and Israel to show that even if Israel was gone, the resistance movement wasn’t over; these crossing points were a lifeline for commerce and jobs, and Israel eventually reduced the number of crossings from six to two.

In January 2006, the Palestinians held elections hoping to give the Palestinian Authority legitimacy to run Gaza and the West Bank. There was a debate among Israeli, Palestinian and Bush administration officials over whether Hamas should be allowed to run in the elections — because it had rejected the Oslo peace accords with Israel.

Yossi Beilin, one of the Israeli architects of Oslo, told me that he and others argued that Hamas should not be allowed to run, as did many members of Fatah, Arafat’s group, who had embraced Oslo and recognized Israel. But the Bush team insisted that Hamas be permitted to run without embracing Oslo, hoping that it would lose and this would be its ultimate refutation.

Fatah ran unrealistically high numbers of candidates in many districts, dividing the vote, while the more disciplined Hamas ran carefully targeted slates and managed to win the parliamentary majority.

Hamas then faced a critical choice: Now that it controlled the Palestinian parliament, it could work within the Oslo Accords and the Paris protocol that governed economic ties between Israel, Gaza and the West Bank — or not.

Hamas chose not to — making a clash between Hamas and Fatah, which supported Oslo, inevitable

That led to the first Israeli economic blockade of Gaza — and what would be 22 years of on-and-off Hamas rocket attacks, Israeli checkpoint openings and closings, wars and cease-fires, all culminating on Oct. 7.

These were fateful choices. Once Sharon pulled Israel out of Gaza, Palestinians were left, for the first time ever, with total control over a piece of land. Yes, it was an impoverished slice of sand and coastal seawater, with some agricultural areas. And it was not the ancestral home of most of its residents. But it was theirs to build anything they wanted.

Hamas had a choice: to replicate Dubai in 2023 or replicate Hanoi in 1968. It chose to replicate Hanoi, whose Củ Chi tunnel network served as the launchpad for the ’68 Tet offensive.

Hamas is not simply engaged in some pure-as-the-driven-snow anticolonial struggle against Israel. Only Hamas’s useful idiots on U.S. college campuses would believe that.

Hamas is engaged in a raw power struggle with Fatah over who will control Gaza and the West Bank, and it’s engaged in a power struggle in the region — alongside other pro-Muslim Brotherhood parties and regimes (like Turkey and Qatar) — against pro-Western monarchies like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and the U.A.E. and military-led regimes like Egypt’s.

In that struggle, Hamas wanted Gaza isolated and in conflict with Israel because that allowed Hamas to maintain its iron-fisted political and Islamist grip over the strip, foregoing elections and controlling all the smuggling routes in and out, which funded its tunnels and war machine and the lifestyle of its leaders and loyalists

The only exit from this mutually assured destruction is to bring in some transformed version of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — or a whole new P.L.O.-appointed government of Palestinian technocrats — in partnership with moderate Arab states like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. But when I raise that with many Israelis right now, they tell me, “Tom, it’s not the time. No one wants to hear it.”

please, spare me the Harvard Yard nonsense that this war is all about the innocent, colonized oppressed and the evil, colonizing oppressors; that Israel alone was responsible for the isolation of Gaza; and that the only choice Hamas had for years was to create an underground “skyline” of tunnels up to 230 feet deep (contra Dubai) and that its only choice on Oct. 7 was martyrdom.

But our story about agency and choices does not stop there. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister — 16 years — also made choices. And even before this war, he made terrible ones — for Israel and for Jews all over the world.

Before this war, Netanyahu actively worked to keep the Palestinians divided and weak by strengthening Hamas in Gaza with billions of dollars from Qatar, while simultaneously working to discredit and delegitimize the more moderate Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, committed to Oslo and nonviolence in the West Bank.

Netanyahu’s goal has always been to destroy the Oslo option once and for all. In that, Bibi and Hamas have always needed each other: Bibi to tell the United States and Israelis that he had no choice, and Hamas to tell Gazans and its new and naïve supporters around the world that the Palestinians’ only choice was armed struggle led by Hamas.

This is now a common strategy for consolidating and holding power forever by a single political faction and disguising it with an ideology of resistance. It’s no wonder they all support one another.

Don’t they get it? Netanyahu’s greatest political achievement has been to persuade Israelis and the world that it’s never the right time to talk about the morally corrosive occupation and how to help build a credible Palestinian partner to take it off Israel’s hands.

He and the settlers wore everyone down. When I covered the State Department in the early 1990s, West Bank settlements were routinely described by U.S. officials as “obstacles to peace.” But that phrase was gradually dropped. The Trump administration even decided to stop calling the West Bank “occupied” territory.

Israel is being surrounded by what I call Iran’s landcraft carriers (as opposed to our aircraft carriers): Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militias in Iraq. Iran is squeezing Israel into a multifront war with its proxies. I truly worry for Israel.

But Israel will have neither the sympathy of the world that it needs nor the multiple allies it needs to confront this Iranian octopus, nor the Palestinian partners it needs to govern any post-Hamas Gaza, nor the lasting support of its best friend in the world, Joe Biden, unless it is ready to choose a long-term pathway for separating from the Palestinians with an improved, legitimate Palestinian partner.

For all these reasons, if Netanyahu keeps refusing because, once again, politically, the time is not right for him, Biden will have to choose, too — between America’s interests and Netanyahu’s.

In sum, this war is so ugly, deadly and painful, it is no wonder that so many Palestinians and Israelis want to just focus on survival and not on any of the choices that got them here

The Haaretz writer Dahlia Scheindlin put it beautifully in a recent essay:The situation today is so terrible that people run from reality as they run from rockets — and hide in the shelter of their blind spots. It’s pointless to wag fingers. The only thing left to do is try and change that reality.

At least three requests have been filed to the International Criminal Court demanding that Libyan and European officials, as well as traffickers, militiamen and others be investigated for crimes against humanity.

A U.N. inquiry published in October also found evidence that abuses committed in Libya may amount to crimes against humanity.

The EU report noted the “excessive use of physical force” by a Libyan patrol during the Sept. 15 interception of a wooden boat with about 20 migrants off the coast of Libya.

In 2018 she got on a smuggler’s boat bound for Europe but her group was caught by Libyan authorities and taken to the notorious Tajoura detention center where detainees were beaten and abused. She was only released after a friend paid a $700 ransom to the guards.

Questioned about the detention centers in Libya, Stano said the EU’s position is clear: “They are unacceptable. The current arbitrary detention system must end.”

The Libyan government last month named Mohammed Al-Khoja, a militia leader implicated in abuses against migrants, to head the Department for Combating Irregular Migration, which oversees the detention centers.

“The Europeans pretend to show the good face,” said a Cameroonian woman who arrived in Libya in 2016 with her child thinking she would find work. Instead, she was trafficked and forced into prostitution after being separated from her daughter. The AP does not identify victims of sexual violence.

The Libyan forces used tactics “never observed before and not in compliance with (EU) training ... as well as international regulation,”

Iran-backed Shi'ite political coalition Fatah and the State of Law coalition, which is led by former Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, submitted a document to the acting speaker requesting that their coalition be the largest bloc in parliament.

Lawmakers from Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's party, which came first in the October election, strongly objected to the request, defending their position as the largest bloc.

Sadr is a populist who has positioned himself as a staunch opponent of both Iran and the United States. His bloc, already the biggest in parliament before the October election, will expand to 73 seats from 54. Its main rival for years, the Fatah bloc of factions linked to pro-Tehran militia, saw its parliamentary representation collapse in the election to just 17 seats from 48.

Under Iraq’s governing system in place since the post-Saddam Hussein constitution was adopted in 2005, the prime minister is a member of the Shi’ite majority, the speaker is a Sunni and the largely ceremonial role of president is held by a Kurd.

Among the investigators’ other findings, they also highlighted how people had been reportedly detained for expressing “views about the elections, or support for candidate

what worries me even more is the change I see in ordinary Americans. I live in the heart of MAGA country, and Donald Trump is the single most culturally influential person here. It’s not close. He’s far more influential than any pastor, politician, coach or celebrity. He has changed people politically and also personally. It is common for those outside the Trump movement to describe their aunts or uncles or parents or grandparents as “lost.” They mean their relatives’ lives are utterly dominated by Trump, Trump’s media and Trump’s grievances.

never before have I seen extremism penetrate a vast American community so deeply, so completely and so comprehensively.

Polling data again and again backs up the reality that the right is abandoning decency, and doing so in the most alarming of ways. It began happening almost immediately with white evangelicals

In 2011, they were the American cohort least likely to agree that a politician could commit immoral acts in private yet “still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.”

They went from least likely to most likely to excuse the immoral behavior of politicians.

An increasing percentage are now tempted to embrace political violence. Last October, a startling 33 percent of Republicans (and an even larger 41 percent of pro-Trump Americans) agreed with the statement that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

That percentage is far higher than the (still troubling) 22 percent of independents and 13 percent of Democrats who shared the same view.

As the Iowa caucuses approached, Trump escalated his language, going so far as to call his political opponents “vermin” and declaring that immigrants entering America illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The statement was so indefensible and repugnant that many expected it to hurt Trump. Yet a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll found that a 42 percent plurality of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers said the statement would make them more likely to support Trump — a substantially greater percentage than the 28 percent who said it would make them less likely to support him.

While political violence is hardly exclusive to the right, the hostility and vitriol embedded in MAGA America is resulting in an escalating wave of threats and acts of intimidation.

The result is a religious movement steeped in fanaticism but stripped of virtue. The fruit of the spirit described in Galatians in the New Testament — “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” — is absent from MAGA Christianity, replaced by the very “works of the flesh” the same passage warned against, including “hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions” and “factions.”

in the upside-down world of MAGA morality, vice is virtue and virtue is vice. My colleague Jane Coaston even coined a term, “vice signaling,” to describe how Trump’s core supporters convey their tribal allegiance. They’re often deliberately rude, transgressive or otherwise unpleasant, just to demonstrate how little they care about conventional moral norms.

For most of my life, conservative evangelicals (including me) have been fond of quoting John Adams’s 1798 letter to the Massachusetts Militia. It’s a critical founding document, one that forcefully argues that our Republic needs a virtuous citizenry to survive. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” he asserts. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

I’ve appreciated that quote because it recognizes the obligations of a free people in a constitutional republic to exercise their liberty toward virtuous purposes.

Absent public virtue, a republic can fall. And a Trump win in 2024 would absolutely convince countless Americans that virtue is for suckers, and vice is the key to victory.

if he wins again, the equation will change and history may record that he was not the culmination of a short-lived reactionary moment, but rather the harbinger of a greater darkness to come.

The Israeli military relies on reservist soldiers, some of whom have described growing exhaustion as Israel manages conflicts for months on end on multiple fronts, including the border with Lebanon and in the West Bank. An end to fighting in Gaza would give Israeli forces a respite that analysts say is needed, especially if fighting with Hezbollah escalates further.

Israel Ziv, a retired Israeli general and veteran of multiple wars, said tensions between the Israeli military and security establishment and Netanyahu are at a record high.“The IDF feels and the security echelon feels that we exhausted the purpose of the war. We reached the maximum tactical peak that we can achieve,” he said. “As long as Rafah was there, they could say finish the job. OK it’s finished now.”

Netanyahu has rejected a series of proposals for possible alternatives to Hamas, including an American plan to bring in the Palestinian Authority and Arab calls for a Palestinian unity government that would include Hamas. Some military analysts and former Israeli officials have questioned whether installing a new government in Gaza was ever possible, given that Hamas has managed to survive the Israeli military assault.

“We need to make a decision,” said Ziv. “Even a bad decision, that’s OK. Let’s say [we] occupy Gaza in the next few years because we need to clear up the last few terrorists. OK, it’s a bad decision, but it’s a decision. The military needs to know.”

The dispute between Netanyahu and the military centers in part on how officials define a defeat of Hamas. An Israeli military official said the army considers a battalion “dismantled” not when all its fighters are killed, but when its command structure and ability to carry out organized attacks are eliminated. 

Military analysts say that Hamas’s militia forces are likely to survive the Israeli military operation even in Rafah, in part because the Israeli army’s approach leaves many lower-ranking Hamas fighters in place. Hamas’s top leadership in the enclave, including its leader, Yahya Sinwar, have also eluded Israeli forces throughout the war.

“Hamas is preserving its forces in Rafah rather than engaging the Israel Defense Forces, likely because Hamas does not believe Israel’s Rafah operation will be decisive,” said an assessment this week from the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project.