One more indictment! This time, it comes from Fulton County, Georgia, where Trump tried to bulldoze the Secretary of State into “finding” him enough votes to win. Eighteen additional friends (and 30 unnamed co-conspirators, probably anonymized to entice them to flip on the named defendants as in the recent federal indictment) come aboard for the ride with RICO violations and a conspiracy. Read the indictment in full here.
This is a lengthy indictment, containing 41 charges, the first of which is a violation of the Georgia RICO Act, which requires that the defendants “while associated with an enterprise, unlawfully conspired and endeavored to conduct and participate in, directly and indirectly, such enterprise through pattern of racketeering activity.” Beyond the strategic value of using the RICO Act as a framework for the conspiracy (it is easier to prove than its federal equivalent, and it encompasses a lot of the remaining charges, thus helping create a streamlined narrative), there’s something symbolic about relying on a statutory machine birthed for the purpose of bringing down crime organizations, which, come to think of it, is exactly what this enterprise was.
One’s gotta love the simplicity of the opening paragraph:
Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia. Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump. That conspiracy contained common plan and purpose to commit two or more acts of racketeering activity in Fulton County, Georgia, elsewhere in the State of Georgia, and in other states.
After defining the relationship between the defendants and their co-conspirators as an “enterprise,” the indictment continues its on-the-nose organized crime reference by listing the “manner and methods of the enterprise”: holding hearings in which they issued false statements about the election results, repeating these falsehoods to various office holders in Georgia, convening a fake slate of electors (complete with forged documentation–as part of the Eastman-Chesebro scheme), false accusations of election workers, stealing data, soliciting the assistance of Pence and the DOJ to bring about the reversal of fortune in Georgia and, of course, the inevitable coverup, including perjury.
As per RICO requirements, the indictment then lists 161 racketeering acts, breaking the aforementioned modus operandi into discrete events. These are a real eye opener even for those of you who were following the events in real time. At the time, I was under the impression that the Trump phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was the coup de grâce of the whole thing, and I don’t think that was far from the truth, particularly if you listen to the whole thing:
I remember listening only to the critical bit, in which Trump bullies and threatens Raffensperger, but in the full recording you can hear his usual tactics: bombard the listeners with facts that sort of sound valid but are completely false, and revert to insults, etc., when that doesn’t yield immediate submission.
Thing is, reading each of the additional acts fleshes out a story of brutal, systematic intimidation, complete with utter disregard for the safety of election workers who simply did their job and were rewarded with death threats. The remaining 40 charges are of more particular crimes: forgeries, impersonations, threats against public office holders, etc. The emerging picture is well worth the criminal enterprise framing; this indictment, even more than the federal ones, calls Trump and his lackeys what they are.
Our family tragedy kept me in Israel for three and a half months, during which my weekly escape was the second season of HaShotreem (“The Cops”) on Israel’s Channel 12 (all episodes available on the Mako website.) The show’s first season closely followed real-life events that occurred in Nahariya in 2006. At that time, northern seaside city Nahariya was controlled and terrorized by mob boss Michael Mor, whose stronghold on drugs, protection money, etc., extended to the city’s legitimate businesses and political structure. By contrast to the U.S., Israel has a national police force, rather than independent units for different municipalities. Nonetheless, the Nahariya police could not take on Mor and his organization; national headquarters refused to offer them help, because Mor was perceived to be a local threat, rather than someone serious on a national scale; and, consequently, their intelligence and covert operations units fell apart. Major Yaniv Ashur was summoned to rehabilitate the unit and confront Mor’s organization. Ashur’s invigorated, aggressive investigation saw some success: Mor was sentenced to seven months in prison for criminal threats.
But the retaliation from Mor’s side took a sinister turn: his people targeted the investigative detectives and threw grenades into their home, and even tried to kill the current mayor, vice mayor, and former mayor. The inability to protect themselves and their families, and Mor’s impunity, brought the cops, who received no backing or protection from the station or from headquarters, to hatch a desperate plan: they decided to shake up Mor’s confidence in order to push him to make a mistake. After consulting with an explosives expert, they laid pipe bombs under Mor’s vehicle and close to a home he owned. No one was hurt, and the investigating officers initially suspected Mor’s underworld competitors. Eventually, however, through an informant, the police arrived at the truth and managed to turn one of the “avenging cops” state witness against the others. The officers were tried, convicted, and sentenced to a year in prison.
The whole affair was silenced, but somehow, the names of the suspected cops leaked to the newspaper in the form of a fictitious obituary. Mor and his associates were suspected of paying for the ad, but have declined. In any case, even after the cops’ release from prison, they continued to be targeted by Mor, until his recent arrest.
The second season of HaShotreem, which ended last Tuesday, was fictional, but shared some elements with the first. In the series, the cops, recently released from prison thanks to a campaign spearheaded by their families and generally regarded as heroes in Nahariya, are unable to return to the force because of their criminal record and face dangerous retaliation efforts from the underworld. In their despair, they take a deal offered by their colleague who turned state witness (and, in the show, remained a cop): they agree to become undercover agents working for the crime boss’s competitor and bring him down in return for restoring their efforts. In the meantime, an anti-corruption candidate challenges the current mayor (who is mixed up with the underworld). The cops engage in dangerous missions as double agents, sometimes exceeding the framework and permissions of their jobs, and end up bringing down both their nemesis and his competitor. Here’s the first episode of the second season:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTwfQXoQois&t=17s
Commentators and reviewers have praised the acting and action scenes and the show’s riveting plot, but complained that, beyond that, it does not offer a moral center. They make a valuable point. At no point during the narrative are the viewers conflicted about the goodness or moral validity of the cops’ actions. They say to their commander, “we’ve learned from our mistakes,” but have they? No one makes any convincing argument that crossing the line like this could be problematic and, in the long run, erode what little legitimacy the police still has in high-crime neighborhoods. In that respect, the cops are quintessentially Israeli heroes: good guys fighting bad guys with the end justifying any means, and with no questions about shades of gray in “goodness” and “badness.”
Admittedly, I too have empathy for the show’s protagonists and for their real-life counterparts. They were placed in an impossible situation, with serious life threats against them and their families, with no backup or protection from their superiors, and later faced a thankless system. But one does not have to eschew this narrative wholesale to ask more difficult questions about how such events can affect the legitimacy of the police overall, or about whether we truly believe that, whenever the police crosses the line, it’s for a laudable goal and against a deserving target.
It’s been especially demoralizing to think about this slippery slope in light of what is happening as the show is broadcast: the increased military and border patrol support for horrendous settler violence in Palestine; the deliberate boundary-blurring similarities between police officers and rightwinger goons beating up protestors; deliberately sloppy police investigations leaving rightwing murderers free; and the constant talk of creating right-wing militias that will further blur the line between goon and lawman. How could the show’s producers not notice that this issue raises concerns that every Israeli should be pondering in 2023?
In the previous two installments of this series, I discussed parallel processes I see in Israel and in California: rising crime rates and resulting miseries within underserved communities–Arab-Israeli towns and villages, and Black communities in Bay Area cities (disproportionately affecting these communities both in terms of perpetrators and victims). In the first installment, I showed that these issues have yielded calls from “inside the house” to improve police response to crime rates. In the second installment, I discussed a curious difference: the Arab Israeli calls are monolithic and they demand solidarity from allies in securing police presence and protection, whereas Black American calls–the recent NAACP letters in Oakland and San Francisco–are heavily contested and far from representative of the defund-abolish-dismantle-repeal sentiment. I proposed a few differences between the two scenarios and concluded that the problem is one of intra-movement politics.
In this last installment in the series, I want to posit two additional issues: one of timing and one of civic expectation. The first is, in some ways, a continuation of the argument I made in my article Bad Role Models, in which I discussed American influence on Israeli criminal justice. In that article, I showed how criminal justice developments in the U.S. migrated to Israel through a process of elite networking, often with a delay of 15-20 years, to the point that Israel implements American policies long after empirical evidence already undermines their merit or efficacy. I listed four developmental stage: the rise of American criminal justice as a model of influence; the “decade of rights”, inspired by the mistaken perception in 1990s Israel that American criminal justice is pro-defendant; the “law and order period” in the 2000s, in which Israel adopted victim rights and anti-sex-offender paradigms that were already being eschewed in the U.S.; and the “era of contrition”, in which new Israeli elites, who learned about mass incarceration in the U.S., started chipping at the punitive block.
My friend and colleague Hagit Lernau thinks that the Arab Israeli faith in policing as an answer to violent crime might be temporary, an echo of the period in the 1980s and 1990s in which Black politicians and police chiefs in D.C. wanted massive police intervention in the crack epidemic. In Locking Up Our Own, James Forman found great empathy for these Black power brokers, even though, as an abolitionist, he disagrees with them. He does not think the crime problem was exaggerated or did not exist–he fully admits that the calls for more policing came out of real distress that was grounded in fact–even as he rejects the premise that aggressive enforcement could have improved things.
To understand Hagit’s argument, let’s locate Forman’s politicians and cops along a timeline. Their preoccupation with internal community problems of crime can be seen as a retreat from Martin Luther King Jr.’s general message of a great project of equality, as well as from Malcolm X’s general message of militant opposition to white supremacy, toward sectorial interests of personal safety within Black cities and neighborhoods. This retreat, which happened in the 1980s-1990s, can be seen as a harbinger of the Arab-Israeli retreat from full commitment to the idea of Palestinian liberation/independence toward sectorial interests of citizens within the 1967 borders. If so, we might expect that the later developments in critical race perspectives on criminal justice–the academic concerns about police oppression and race and their migration to the mainstream of the progressive movement–might eventually make it in Arab-Israeli societies, perhaps through a process of elite networking (or through some other process) and we simply have to work through the delay. But eventually the moment of yearning for police will pass, and we’ll be in a defund/dismantle/abolish/repeal moment in Israel, too.
Here’s another theory on how this could happen: Perhaps, as in the case of D.C., the disillusionment that accompanies massive, oppressive police presence will cool the population’s enthusiasm for enforcement. A couple of weeks ago I talked to a friend who is a police detective investigating serious crimes, including in Arab-Israeli towns and villages. My friend tells me that, as soon as a serious crime is committed in a village, the police’s modus operandi is to send in border patrol officers, who proceed to harass and humiliate everyone around them and make life in the village unbearable. Unsurprisingly, after a few weeks of this, the officers who want to actually solve the crime encounter a wall of silence and mistrust. It is only a question of time until this realization becomes generalized and the community nationwide will stop calling for the police to help.
Which brings me to my second point, the issue of civic expectation. The famous serenity prayer invites us to have the wisdom to tell apart things that can be changed (and require courage) from things that are immutable (and require serenity.) The Forman moment, as well as the current moment in the Arab-Israeli crime prevention movement, assume that crime-ridden streets can be cleaned and that the erosion in public safety can be stopped, or even reversed, if the Israeli government wakes up from its appalling neglect and acts. The Defund movement makes the opposite assumption: nothing good can come from police intervention, so they might as well stay out of it and leave us to resolve the crime problem through non-criminal-justice means. I think both perspectives miss out on an important dimension: it doesn’t just matter how much policing is taking place, but also what kind of policing.
William Muir’s 1977 classic Police: Streetcorner Politicians offers a matrix that characterizes police officers based on their psychology. Muir is interested in two dimensions: the officer’s proactivity and their worldview. These create four types of cops.
Proactive
Reactive
Tragic
Professional
Reciprocator
Cynical
Enforcer
Avoider
Adapted from: William Muir, Police: Streetcorner Politicians (Chicago, 1977)
Out of these four, Muir’s preference is for the professional, whom he sees as an energetic, passionate problem solver who has compassion for their community. But preferring the professional to other types depends on the extent to which one believes that cops can still have a tragic/empathetic approach to human nature and the human condition. People who assume that all cops are cynical about the people they serve face a choice between enforcers and avoiders and might prefer avoiders. People who believe that some cops can be professional and compassionate, will prefer professionals to reciprocators.
If Muir’s typology is not applied to individual cops, but rather to hypothetical cops as “ideal types” of what we would and would not like to see in the streets, I think the best way to understand the Arab-Israeli call for help is as a call for professionals, not for enforcers. Which raises the question, given that we pay taxes so that we can have police services, why not insist that the force hire professionals rather than enforcers? Why give up and settle for avoiders, or for shrinking the force (and its utility) altogether? How much despair people experience and, consequently, how much they believe that they can have the police force they deserve, could be (as I argued in the previous installment) a function of where they live or (as I argue in this installment) on what moment we are in.
In the last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about the issue I brought up in my previous post The Call Is Coming from Inside the House–situations in which a minority community with an appalling history of oppression by law enforcement asks for law enforcement intervention due to rising crime rates. I compared the Arab Israeli protests for law enforcement intervention to the letters recently penned by NAACP leaderships in Oakland and San Francisco.
What I didn’t discuss was an obvious difference in the way these calls for enhanced law enforcement reverberate within these communities and outside them, which puzzles me. As I explained in that post, the Arab Israeli community is fairly united in its call for police intervention and personal safety. The pressure on allies and other members of the center-left opposition to Netanyahu is to participate in protests calling for the police to investigate and solve these crimes. People get excoriated for not embracing this call.
By contrast, the NAACP calls I looked at in the previous post have by no means represented the consensus in the Black community and, in fact, provoked a lot of strife and antagonism. There is serious critique and questioning of the concept of “Black-on-Black crime”, efforts to present police violence as a much more important and salient problem than the crime problem, and pretty oppressive silencing of the few white voices that don’t fall in line with the “don’t call 911” ethos.
This difference in approaches is striking not only within minority groups and their adjacent communities, but also among academic and human rights milieus. In Israel, ACRI (the equivalent of the ACLU) feels deeply conflicted on what to do and who to support. And in the U.S., academics and nonprofits by and large fall in line with the idea that the priority is to curb police violence, rather than intra-racial civilian violence.
At the recommendation of a friend, I started listening to Micha Goodman and Efrat Shapira-Rosenberg’s podcast Miflegeth HaMahshavot (“The Party of Thoughts”), which explains ideologies in Israeli politics. In one early episode, they explain the rise of Ra’am, the first time a major Arab party was part of the Knesset. According to Goldman, this election represents the triumph of sectorial interests, which Ra’am sought to promote, over the big issue of the Palestinian occupation that the Joint Party, the other Arab party, sought to promote. Ironically, though, Ra’am is an Islamist party, presumably less inclined toward compromises, which raises the question how it came to offer Arab-Israeli voters a pragmatist, sectorial platform. Goodman thinks that it reflects a unique form of religious pragmatism: we, humans, worry about our immediate, short-term issues (chief among which is the intraracial crime problem), while God/Allah will worry about our ultimate salvation (an Arab state from Jordan to the Mediterranean sea).
If applied to the U.S., Goldman’s might predict a similar sectorial emphasis on restoring personal safety to the neighborhoods referred to in Supreme Court jurisprudence “high crime areas” and in sociological parlance “neighborhoods where poor people of color live.” And yet, that’s not what we’re seeing. Either fighting crime is not (or, until recently, was not) a sectorial issue of high priority for Black communities, or police violence is more of an issue of that sort. Why are we not seeing parallel processes in the two countries, then? hypothesis would So, why is there a difference?
I’ve tried to hash this with friends, and I’m not sure I’ve nailed the issue, though I have some thoughts. Let’s work through this the way Hercule Poirot would solve a crime: by gathering suspects and eliminating them from our inquiries. The first two possibilities are related to the with the relevant weight of the crime and police problems in the two countries, and I find both unpersuasive:
The crime problem and the threat to personal safety are much more serious in Israel than in the U.S. This is not something that is easy to measure, and geography makes a big difference. Crime is not evenly distributed in either country. The existence of “million dollar blocks” and places ravaged by gang warfare is unfortunate, but not fictional. I think in both places there are people living under a serious threat of violent crime.
Police violence toward minorities is a much more serious problem in the U.S. than it is in Israel. This is also something that is difficult to measure, especially due to problems of underreporting. Again, geography makes a big difference, because in both countries enforcement is selective and very geography-driven. In addition, the national security/conflict in Israel throws in another factor (there are now voices calling to involve Israel’s security service, the Shabak, in crime solving in Arab Israeli villages. Yikes.) I would have to parse out the statistics, but I don’t see that Arab Israelis are more fortunate than Black Americans in the treatment they receive from the police.
If we accept the premise that crime rates and police violence are serious problems for both populations in both countries, we should consider the extent to which the crime picture emerging from the two context is different. In other words, can Arab-Israeli crime be distinguished from Israeli crime in general to the degree that Black crime can be disaggregated from American crime? How easy is it to treat it as a unique, endemic problem? Again, two options emerge, one sociological and one involving framing.
The sociological issue: Perhaps voices in the Arab-Israeli community are more successful in raising crime rates as a problem because intra-racial violent crime in Israel is, or is perceived as, more of a stereotypically/characteristically Arab/Palestinian problem than intra-racial violent crime in the U.S. is perceived as a stereotypically Black problem. This requires viewing murder cases, including unsolved murders, through a criminological lens. I have the 2021 data. What it tells us is that Arab- Israeli murders might not be as distinctive as the media suggests. In a previous post I described the disturbing statistics about the murder of Arab women, but those are less than 13% of overall murders in the Arab community. We know most of these are shoot-outs and most of the victims are under 30 years old. This doesn’t seem to paint a picture full of honor killings and, in fact, resembles organized crime killings in the U.S. Both countries also feature problems involving the proliferation of guns in criminal hands that are certainly not limited to this or that ethnic/racial group. It is true that, in Israel, 64% of murder cases are perpetrated by Arabs (usually against Arabs), who are merely 21.1% of the general population. FBI UCR data for 2019 shows that African-Americans (who were 14% of the U.S. population in 2021) accounted for 55.9% of all homicide offenders in 2019. In both cases we have considerable overrepresentation that cannot be explained merely by discriminatory policing/investigatory practices.
The framing issue: Perhaps politicians on the left in Israel feel more comfortable calling for police intervention to solve intra-racial crime in Israel because there it is not perceived as being tied to, or stemming from, the Jewish/Zionist hegemony to the extent that intra-racial crime in the U.S. is perceived as a response to white supremacy. Even if this is true, it raises a further question: what impacts the framing?
Which brings us to the final frontier: I think that a big difference between Israel and the U.S. has to do with intra-movement politics and positionality, and these factors are responsible for how the problem is framed:
I think that Goodman is right in that Israeli Palestinians/Arabs have become more invested in sectorial politics, while the U.S. Black community has by-and-large retained its interest in the bigger questions of criminalization/incarceration.
This could be related to the respective size of the two countries in two ways. First, in Israel there’s more segregation in terms of where people live. This means that educated, middle-class Arab Israelis will live in closer proximity to crime than middle-class Black Americans and, because of that, will be more invested in personal safety and law enforcement (this is in line with James Forman’s argument about D.C., which is a city in which Black politicians and police officers hold considerable power and use it to “lock up their own.”) Second, the sheer population of the minority group is so much smaller in Israel that, to the extent that someone even cares about the plight of the community, it will hear mostly from middle-class, law-abiding folks afraid to let their kids outside to play; in the U.S. there’s a multiplicity of voices which, amplified by social media and activism, includes the interests of those more concerned about police persecution than about crime prevention.
Finally, I think the Israeli scenario contains an important factor: Arab/Palestinians who are Israeli citizens are in a completely different situation than Palestinians living in Palestine. The latter are in such dire straits, and treated so appallingly by the army, the security services, and the settlers, that the police-citizen encounters against Israeli citizens, ugly as they may be, don’t even register as a problem by comparison.
The image above, captured by movement photographer Gal Mosenson, comes from a protest held yesterday in Tel Aviv in support of the Arab-Israeli population. As some commentators have mentioned, Arab-Israelis are conspicuously and understandably absent from the pro-democracy, anti-government protests; the proliferation of Israeli flag and the coalition with centrist movements, obscuring the occupation of Palestinian land and the horrors visited not only on Palestinian refugees but on Israeli citizens who are ethnically Palestinian, are huge hindrances to collaboration. Yesterday’s protest organizers asked their Jewish allies to show up without protest t-shirts or Israeli flags.
I’ve previously posted about rising crime rates amongst Arab-Israelis, and things have grown even more dire since then: the number of murder victims is skyrocketing. The confusion among civil rights organizations whether to support the Arab-Israeli demand for assistance from a police force that oppresses and uses violence echoes some of the dilemmas that James Forman spelled out in Locking Up Our Own. But there’s something deeply patronizing about downplaying calls from thoughtful citizens who have realized that they simply cannot have their kids leave the house out of fear of shoot-outs and family vendettas gone wrong.
Meanwhile, in the New World, similar calls are being heard regarding crime rates in Oakland and San Francisco. The Oakland call comes from no other than the NAACP:
Oakland residents are sick and tired of our intolerable public safety crisis that overwhelmingly impacts minority communities. Murders, shootings, violent armed robberies, home invasions, car break-ins, sideshows, and highway shootouts have become a pervasive fixture of life in Oakland. We call on all elected leaders to unite and declare a state of emergency and bring together massive resources to address our public safety crisis.
African Americans are disproportionately hit the hardest by crime in East Oakland and other parts of the city. But residents from all parts of the city report that they do not feel safe. Women are targeted by young mobs and viciously beaten and robbed in downtown and uptown neighborhoods. Asians are assaulted in Chinatown. Street vendors are robbed in Fruitvale. News crews have their cameras stolen while they report on crime. PG&E workers are robbed and now require private security when they are out working. Everyone is in danger.
Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police, our District Attorney’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who murder and commit life threatening serious crimes, and the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric have created a heyday for Oakland criminals. If there are no consequences for committing crime in Oakland, crime will continue to soar.
People are moving out of Oakland in droves. They are afraid to venture out of their homes to go to work, shop, or dine in Oakland and this is destroying economic activity. Businesses, small and large, struggle and close, tax revenues vanish, and we are creating the notorious doom-loop where life in our city continues to spiral downward. As economic pain increases, the conditions that help create crime and criminals are exacerbated by desperate people with no employment opportunities.
Notably, their call to action recognizes the progressive shaming that hinders action, and they call out the relevant communities without mincing words:
We urge African Americans to speak out and demand improved public safety. We also encourage Oakland’s White, Asian, and Latino communities to speak out against crime and stop allowing themselves to be shamed into silence. There is nothing compassionate or progressive about allowing criminal behavior to fester and rob Oakland residents of their basic rights to public safety. It is not racist or unkind to want to be safe from crime. No one should live in fear in our city.
A somewhat more tepid call, but still important, comes from San Francisco’s NAACP President:
It can be difficult to exercise compassion when the situation is this dire. In one of the wealthiest cities in the world, poverty remains a significant problem, made worse by ever-increasing income inequality. Too often, our reaction to this suffering is to call for it to be removed in sweeps that only create more suffering by moving the problem to a new place in the city. We have seen regrettable responses, such as the owner of a North Beach art gallery who sprayed an unhoused woman with a hose when she refused to move from the sidewalk in front of his business. I understand his frustration, but as difficult as it is, we must exercise compassion; today, I am working with the gallery owner to help him through this challenge.
But compassion must be accompanied by responsibility.
First and foremost is for people in this city to take personal responsibility, even in the most difficult of circumstances of being unhoused.
Setting up an encampment underneath an occupied building and setting open fires, as has happened recently in the Haight, is utterly unacceptable. So is erecting a tent city that prevents others from safely walking in their neighborhoods or makes it dangerous for them to come and go from their own homes. Engaging in open drug use, committing violence and carelessly creating unsanitary conditions are all the outcome of a lack of personal responsibility.
We also must practice community responsibility. Those who need help should be able to receive it, and we need to take the steps to streamline the creation of safe, affordable housing to get people off the streets permanently. At the same time, there must be consequences for those who refuse help yet continue to refuse to take personal responsibility for their actions.
Perhaps the most important thing we need, however, is accountability — by the city, by the array of agencies and organizations that serve the unhoused and those dealing with addiction, and by the larger community. Too much money is spent without effective oversight, coordination and collaboration. We can provide an individual with some of the help they need but fail to connect them with other essential resources. Organizations duplicate efforts, work at odds with one another, and in the end, fail to solve the problem they all profess to be fighting.
I assume the culture wars will now lead to an argument that the NAACP has sold out to white supremacy or whatever (the term “personal accountability” in particular, as my friend Paul Belonick notes, will be read by some as a right-wing dog whistle), but that would be reductive, disappointing, and mostly disrespectful. At some point, this movement will have to contend with the fact that the call is coming from inside the house, and that the big talk about “lived experience” means we should believe people who tell us they can’t live with crime around them.
Twenty years ago, when I studied radical/critical criminology, it struck me that the biggest weakness of Marxist/critical race theories were that, for all the political incentives of the oppressed to fight against the machine, the vast majority of poor people of color do not commit crime. And the fact that crime, especially violent crime, tends to operate intraracially. The radical rhetoric was intoxicating, but after years in the military defense, seeing how the haves and the have-nots fared, I realized that left realism was the best framework for understanding what I saw around me. What is novel and worthwhile about the calls for help from the Arab-Israeli community and from the Bay Area NAACP chapters is that it’s not just about oppression: they realize that enforcement must come hand in hand with opportunities for youth, otherwise there is no hope for the community. The Oakland NAACP writes:
Our youth must be given alternatives to the crippling desperation that leads to crime, drugs, and prison. They need quality education, mentorship, and, most importantly, real economic opportunities. Oakland should focus on creating skilled industrial and logistics jobs that pay family sustaining wages, and vocational training so Oakland residents can perform those jobs. With this focus we can produce hundreds, if not thousands, of the types of jobs desperately needed to stem economic despair. Unfortunately, progressive policies and failed leadership have chased away or delayed significant blue collar job development in the city, the Port of Oakland, and the former Army Base. That must change!
We also must continue with mentoring programs like the Oakland branch of the national OK Program that steers youth away from criminal activity. We believe that young people currently in the criminal life will choose another path if they are shown a way.
The idea that improving opportunities reduces crime is not new. It comes from Cloward and Ohlin, architects of Opportunities Theory. Even in the late 1950s it was evident that young people treated as second-class citizens make use of the opportunities available to them, and those tend to be illegitimate opportunities. This is common sense, but what I see all around me (Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime is a prime example, but there are others for sure) is derision of Cloward and Ohlin as white, top-down do-gooders who are almost (if not absolutely) worse than rightwingers. The appeal of Hinton’s argument is that it is clever and counterintuitive, and it is just perverse enough to appeal to academics who don’t have to actually deal with the people victimized by crime in dilapidated neighborhoods. Margo Schlanger presents this critique against another one of these lefties-are-worse-than-conservatives books, Naomi Murakawa’s The First Civil Right.
The secret truth–the thing that happens to best reflect reality, but does not fill auditoriums or gets you coffee with the cool people at socio-legal conferences and punishment workshops–is that Cloward and Ohlin were right. It’s not sexy to talk about namby-pamby proposals for reform, but Lyndon Johnson had the right idea initially, as did Kennedy, and the reason it didn’t work is related to a lot of things, but not to the fact that crime was just a figment of the conservative imagination. Crime was real in the 1950s, and it was real in the 1980s, when lots of people had to live in environments saturated with lethal violence brought about by the crack epidemic. That the CIA is now widely, and rightfully, acknowledged as having at least negligently brought that about by turning a blind eye from midlevel drug dealers, doesn’t mean those years did not exist. It does not mean that thousands of people did not die from addiction or addiction-adjacent violence, and many more ended up incarcerated for the same reasons. Reality is not spicy, but it’s an essential ingredient in cooking up criminal justice policy. And who best to obtain a reality check from than the people who have to live with the outcomes?
If I’m going to be truly respectful–listening to people’s “lived experience” in crime-ravaged zones not only when it fits my politics, but whenever they opine about something they actually know best–I have to respect that the call for crime control is coming from inside the house, from unimpeachable, reliable sources, and that the wave of pretending that crime doesn’t exist either has crested or is very close to cresting. Criminal justice professionals like Pamela Price might realize that her constituents don’t actually want the sort of nonjustice her office is doling out (I read that scenario as different from Chesa’s recall, but there are parallels.) Whoever brings about nonjustice ends up with Nancy O’Malley or Brooke Jenkins as DAs, and that is not a scenario in which anyone, right to left, can thrive.
Last night I finished copyediting FESTER (or, more accurately, responding to our copyeditor’s queries, which were blissfully few.) Indexing, cover art, and other stuff should follow, and we won’t be at your favorite book purveyor until January 2024. But we already have an ISBN for all three editions–hardcover, paperback, and ebook–and that makes the book feel more real somehow. As regular readers know, this has been a rough, rough summer, submerged in heartbreak and tragedy for my family and beyond, and any step forward feels like an accomplishment.
Reading the book again after several months of disengagement clarified some of what happened in the world since then. In Chapter 7, we wrote about Leslie Van Houten’s parole quest in the context of COVID-19 (I still think that denying a fully rehabilitated septuagenarian person’s parole while their institution experiences an outbreak reeks of politicization); I don’t think either of us imagined that, so shortly afterward, Van Houten would prevail in court and the judges would call Newsom’s “lack of insight” bluff so plainly and explicitly, resulting in her release. Having reread our manuscript, I now wonder whether the court’s newfound courage to push against denial decisions that turn our prisons into nursing homes is part of the sad legacy of the pandemic. Recall that it was the California Court of Appeal that recognized the gerontological aspect of the prison pandemic and urged CDCR to factor people’s age into account more clearly when seeking population reductions. Everything involving work is wrapped in a fog of exhaustion and despair now, but just a couple of short weeks ago I managed to give an interview about Van Houten’s release to Nightline, and was later dismayed that the mainstream coverage of her release was idiosyncratic and focused on the uniqueness of the case. I wish they had made more of an effort to see the decision as part of a possible post-pandemic reckoning.
Another thing that struck me lately was how not just courts, but everyone, seem so eager to file the COVID disaster away as a “one off” and learn nothing from it. A week ago I gave a talk (on a different topic) to police detectives investigating serious crime in Haifa. Conversation veered toward the age of prisoners; at least one of the officers expressed strong, even angry, resistance, sharing anecdotes about the rising crime toll in Arab towns and villages and saying that age does not seem to be a barrier for family vendettas. This may well be true (and here, it is a true epidemic), but it’s also true that family honor killings are a unique phenomenon with unique features and by no means characterize crime throughout the world. When I talked about the risks of incubating COVID in prisons, the chorus in the room was “that was an isolated case, it has nothing to teach us about appropriate sentencing.” For this reason, I’m delighted that the UCLA COVID-Behind Bars Data Project is pivoting toward charting mortality in correctional facilities more generally. With valley fever still a factor in central valley prisons, mpox in jails, and who knows what other horrors that flourish in filthy, overcrowded places in the wings, I want to see more thought put into the continuum between prisons and their communities. If we encounter questions about this on the book tour, we should have data on other mortality factors and chronic disease issues to show the relevance of COVID to the next phase in correctional policies.
I also reread the parts we wrote about the #StopSanQuentinOutbreak coalition, which would later be partly depicted in Adamu Chan’s film What These Walls Won’t Hold. In the last few weeks I’ve watched, with bitterness and dismay, the internal splits in Israel’s protest movement and in the open rescue community. It’s the stuff of my nightmares and the main reason I stay away from many activist spaces, particularly with younger people who take to in-movement splintering with natural joy that repels me. I can’t stand the moralizing, schoolmarmish idioms, flagellation (of self and others), massive hatred directed at the people who are closest to the haters and most want to help, and since it’s such a defining feature of any experience on the left I try to avoid this stuff like the plague and work around it as much as possible. The #StopSanQuentinOutbreak coalition was different. This is not to say it was completely devoid of the usual diseases of activist space: there was a “white people group,” though I’m not sure whatever for (I seemed to be the only person to whom this wasn’t clear) and there were some of the usual speech tics of the movement. But for the most part, what I experienced was a bunch of great people from all walks of life–family members, folks just recently released who rolled their sleeves right away and got to work, people of all ages and professions–who came together to do whatever it took to save lives and get folks out. Perhaps the urgency of the group was part of the appeal: most folks belonged to the big tent of abolitionism (whatever the hell that even means anymore) but the dismantlement of all prisons was not on the table. Saving old, infirm people from a preventable disease augmented by the ineptitude, indifference, and sometime sadism of a garbage system was. Which made a lot of the usual shibboleths and speechifying unnecessary and freed everyone, regardless of perspective, to tend to what was in front of them in a practical way. Perhaps if the left were less precious, smug, and academic, and engaged in activism as an emergency response (climate! Collapsing democracies worldwide! Health and poverty crises!) we could unite more and accomplish more. This is why I still maintain (and you’ll see it in the book) that aggressive pruning of the prison system (Cut 50!), particularly in the context of aging and infirm people, is eminently practical and achievable and not at all an abolitionist pipe dream. If we treat this with the urgency it deserves, rather than as an esthetic prop for our goodness, you’ll be surprised what we can accomplish.
As FESTER continues its production journey, I’ll share info about our cover art, blurbs, reviews, and release. Expect a big party in 2024 and a string of fabulous book tour conversations in the year to follow.
It’s a surreal experience to read the new Trump indictment, which you can find here verbatim with NYT annotations, while in Israel – it reads disturbingly prophetic about other parts of the world. It’s also been deeply unpleasant to relive the events from last year, as they are narrated chronologically and concisely (rather than revealed daily through the news cycle.) I just spoke about this with the one and only Mitch Jeserich on KPFAand here’s a link to the show. Here are some of the basics.
Charges
The indictment consists of four counts, all of which are based on the same factual basis:
Conspiracy to Defraud the United States, which requires proving that (a) two or more people (b) conspire to commit an offense against or defraud the United States and (c) at least one of them commits an act to further the conspiracy (5yrs max and/or a fine);
Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice, which requires proving that (a) two or more people (b) conspire to obstruct justice [see below] and (c) at least one of them commits an act to further the conspiracy (sentence is the same as for obstruction, a 3yr exposure);
Obstruction or Attempted Obstruction of Justice, which requires proving that the defendant (a) knowingly (b) use intimidation/threats/corruption to (c) persuade or attempt to persuade another person to (d) change documents or withhold records needed for an official proceeding, or, which is more directly applicable here, that the defendant (a) corruptly (b) obstruct, influence, or impede, (c) an official proceeding (3yr exposure); and
Conspiracy Against Rights, which requires proving that (a) two or more persons (b) conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person (c) in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege [in this case, the right to vote.]
Who
Only Trump is listed by name in the indictment, with six other co-conspirators referenced by numbers. The purpose is, likely, to leave the door open for any of them to decide to testify against Trump before they are named and officially charged. Five of the co-conspirators are fairly easy to identify based on the information we already have about the 2020 election putsch: Co-conspirator 1 is Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s right-hand and spreader-par-excellence of manufactured election fraud conspiracies; co-conspirator 2 is John Eastman, the spirit behind the effort to puppeteer Pence, VP and President of the Senate, into subverting his ceremonial role by refusing to certify the electors for Biden and certifying fake electors for Trump in their stead; co-conspirator 3 is Sidney Powell, disgraced attorney who tried (and lost) Trump’s baseless election cases; co-conspirator 4 is Jeffrey Clark, Trump’s man in the Department of Justice who met with Trump behind his bosses’ back to further the conspiracies even they would not back and tried to fire his own boss; co-conspirator 5 is likely Kenneth Chesebro, the mind behind the fake electors’ scheme and the operator filing sham legal proceedings so as to swindle the fake electors into agreeing to participate in the scam; I’m unclear on who the sixth co-conspirator can be, and it looks like mainstream media commentators are alsounsure. This person, who is described as a “political consultant,” was behind some of the memos that crafted the language submitted to the fake electors.
What They Did
The story of what happened before January 6th was eclipsed by the violent putsch that follows, which is why you can be forgiven for forgetting the details (they were also doled out chaotically and serially while the events were happening.) Reading the indictment brought the story and the characters back into clear focus, and here’s a simple (hopefully not oversimplified) chronology.
The way the U.S. presidential election works is this: each state has its own regulations for figuring out the popular vote.
This means that, when challenging presidential election results, candidates have to interact with state bureaucracies and pursue litigation in the different states attacking the integrity of the election. The indictment does not attack all of Trump’s litigation challenges which, while frivolous (32 submitted, 0 won) were not unlawful. It focuses on illegitimate pressures and threats that Trump & Co. placed upon various state bureaucrats, most famously in Georgia (the “find me enough votes” threat emitted to the Georgia Secretary of State, now the focus of a state criminal investigation that might ensnare Trump in more criminal proceedings.) Trump’s incessant harassment of state bureaucrats–most of them loyal to Trump, people who worked for his campaign and hoped he would win but did not go as far as to throw the election his way–consisted of banding around (and repeating) false theories of fraud (which Giuliani and others parroted around social media), consistently ignoring the refutations of state officials, lying to them about supposed evidence that backed up the conspiracy theories, threatening them with criminal charges or political consequences, and repeatedly pestering them to deliver results in the face of no factual support for fraud claims.
Severe as these behaviors were, the heart of the indictment has to do with how Trump and his co-conspirators attempted to manipulate the electoral college process to thwart the popular vote. This NPR story, published during Trump’s scheming but before January 6th, offers a good primer to how states select their electors. In short, there are 538 electors, one for each U.S. senator and U.S. representative, plus three for Washington, D.C. Electors are selected by the state, usually from lists made by state parties. In 32 states and D.C., electors must vote for the candidate the party has nominated, and the Supreme Court has found that laws that bind electors to the outcome of the popular vote are constitutional. The list of electors by party is certified at the state level and then sent, through a special verification process, to the senate, where it is ceremonially certified by the Vice President. The electors then cast their votes–if a candidate won by majority, he or she receives all the electoral votes–and thus the presidential election is decided (watch this video of how the electors announce their vote casting.)
Trump’s conspiracy targeted this process. [Probably] John Eastman and [probably] Kenneth Chesebro concocted a legal theory according to which the Vice President, who is also the President of the Senate, holds an authority over the electoral process that goes beyond his purely ceremonial role of certifying the electors. According to their theory, Mike Pence could simply refuse to certify the electors’ votes, opting instead to certify votes by a slate of alternative electors casting their votes for Trump. To make this theory into reality, they reached out to prospective electors to persuade them to participate in this scheme. Some refused to have anything to do with it, and many others expressed doubts about the legality of this plan. To mollify and assuage them, the co-conspirators lied to some of the alternative electors in some of the states, telling them that their votes for Trump would only be used in the event that litigation produces evidence of election fraud. For verisimilitude of these false claims, Trump’s operatives–Giuliani, Powell, and their lackeys–actually filed frivolous cases in the seven states in which this plan was pursued, persuading the so-called alternative electors that things were being set in motion that could result in their votes counting (the plan was to push forward these fictitious votes regardless of the lawsuits.) In some cases, the co-conspirators (notably, Chesebro) crafted the fallacious elector certificates themselves. The co-conspirators tried to push these slates of electors onto the Vice President’s staff, in some cases with the staff members declining to receive them on his behalf.
Pence also had to be convinced to go along with this scheme, and so, Trump et al. conducted numerous meetings with Pence, putting direct pressure on him to participate in the face of his repeated declarations that he did not believe he had the authority to thwart the popular vote. Trump’s choice of words at these meetings matters: he threatened Pence to publicly criticize him for his refusal to participate in the plan (this rebuke reverberating in the social networks during the ramp-up toward January 6) and included only certain people at the meetings (notably, not the White House Counsel, who repeatedly stated that the plan was not legitimate.) Trump also used Jeff Clark to pressure his superiors at the Justice Department (notably, Jeffrey Rosen, then the Acting Attorney General) to go along with the electoral thwarting plan. You can find more information about the near-catastrophe in the Justice Department in this Washington Post piece. Essentially, if Rosen et al. were not going to go with the fraudulent electoral votes, Trump would fire them and place Jeff Clark atop the Justice Department; he backed down from this plan only when told by White House counsel that mass resignations would ensue.
Even though the indictment does not tackle Trump’s role in inciting the Jan. 6 putsch, it does tie those events to the charged offenses. While engaging in the machinations required for the fraudulent electoral plan, Trump continuously manufactured public belief in the integrity of the plan by tweeting about it to his fans and stoking their anger toward Pence and others who would not play ball. This was the trigger for the Jan 6 gathering, which Trump initiated, and the hook for the insurgents’ rage.
Criminal Behavior vs. Atrocious Behavior that Isn’t Criminal
The indictment seeks to provide clarity on what parts of Trump’s behavior surrounding the elections were and were not criminal. Much of his truly atrocious behavior, such as the lies he massively and systematically spread about the legality of the election, were the epitome of maliciousness and political irresponsibility, but according to the indictment do not constitute criminal offenses, as they fall under the umbrella of free speech: Trump had “a right, like any American. . . to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.” He also had a right–which he used, by engaging in frivolous litigation–to use legitimate means to challenge the results of the election. The indictment distinguishes these behaviors from the unlawful steps Trump and his co-conspirators undertook to change the results of the election–namely, threats, pressure, and efforts to bring about a fictitious and delusional legal process by which Pence, singlehandedly, would discount the votes of American citizens and instead would hand the decisionmaking process to fake electors.
This distinction might be clear to me and you, but I decided to take a trip through the looking glass and read up on Fox News to see what Jonathan Turley and Andy McCarthy are peddling. Out of all the drivel in that story (political witchhunt yada yada) the least preposterous proposition comes from Andy McCarthy, who has this to say about the fake electors theory: “[I]n this country, what we do with frivolous legal theories is we figure that the jury system will take care of it or the political system will. We don’t criminalize them. And that’s what this indictment attempts to do.” In other words, McCarthy seems to bundle John Eastman and Ken Chesebro’s fake electors plan with the legitimate efforts to reverse the course of the election: rather than a malicious, fictitious scheme to wrest the election results from the hands of the electorate, this was merely a legal theory–and don’t all legal theories stand a chance? The answer the indictment provides is this: there’s a difference between submitting to a court the possibility that the Dominion machines were flawed or that people who shouldn’t vote did (nonexistent folks, nonresidents, noncitizens, dead people), all of which are legitimate challenges to the election whether they succeed or (as in this case) fail, and submitting a proceeding according to which it is, on this planet, totally fine to substitute actual votes for imaginary ones and then threaten, pressure, and push people to pretend that the imaginary votes are real. At least McCarthy admits the theory was “frivolous”; even a broken clock shows the right time twice a day.
The Mental Element (Mens Rea)
All the charges pursued in the indictment require a fairly high degree of intent: conspiracy calls for intent to further the aims of the conspiracy itself, and obstruction of justice requires general intent. For our purposes, a criminal conviction here could result only if a jury agrees that Trump actually knew that the false fraud theories he was peddling on social media and threatening state secretaries to accept were, indeed, false. The indictment spends a long time elaborating how we know that Trump was lying, rather than delusional. I’m not sure the distinction is as clear to me as it is to them. We’re clearly talking about someone with serious delusions of grandeur, and I think that serial liars and psychopaths are successful in what they do because, on some level, they believe the lies they tell. I wonder whether the defense theory here will be that the lies were actually true (this is not a winning proposition in court, but they might luck out with some Trumper jurors) or that Trump thought they were true (which is also going to be tough to prove, given the multiple sources, including people close to him and credible to him, who repeatedly tried to disabuse him of these notions.) I’m betting his ego will not let him claim any sort of mental deficiency or clinical delusion.
What This Portends for 2024
Dan Rather (whose newsletter Steady is always a worthy read) wrote today:
Today marks a reckoning, but it’s far from a resolution. The danger Trump and his legions of MAGA supporters pose remains very present, very real, and very dire. The polls indicate this con man, divisive charlatan, and wrecking ball to the rule of law is running away with the Republican nomination for the presidency. And he looks, at this point, despite everything, to be competitive with President Biden. He could be reelected.
The more scrutiny he receives, the more evidence of his unfitness for office is laid out publicly, the more his stalwarts rally behind him. Trump has no coherent or persuasive rejoinders to the numerous charges he faces. He instinctively relies on his overused playbook of lies, divisiveness, and dystopian rhetoric. It’s all he’s got. Nevertheless, his crowds roar their delight without hesitation.
This is certainly true with respect to the Fox News commentators whose takes I read this morning, and I’m sure the talking points were set long ago. Nothing will persuade the truly faithful. A lot of what will happens here depends on timing. Should Trump be able to run and, perhaps, get elected, all this effort will come to naught, and if, Goddess forbid, I were on the defense team, my number one mission would be to file for continuances upon continuances. It’s not likely that there will be immediate movement on this in a criminal courtroom anytime soon. The voir dire will be absolute hell and the media coverage will be ridiculous.
On Monday, Israel’s Knesset approved a basic law that prohibits judicial review of administrative and executive actions on the basis of “extreme unreasonableness.” In anticipation of this legislation, and the general plan to weaken basic democratic protections and civil rights guarantees, hundreds of thousands of Israelis walked, in high-90s temperatures, all the way to Jerusalem to protest. They were met with violent oppression by the police (high pressure hoses, horses trampling them) and some were injured. The protest continues, with millions of people out in the streets on an ongoing basis for the last 28 weeks.
How come I haven’t even heard about this?
Mainstream U.S. reporting on Israel is scant and of low quality, and most of what you hear would suggest that Netanyahu enjoys consensus and that all Israelis are in favor of this. The opposite is true–even people who voted right-wing are opposed to this governmental overhaul, and people have been in the streets nonstop for years now, and almost daily since this government assumed power.
Why are all these people so worried?
They know this is merely the opening shot in this government’s battle to weaken democratic protections. The planned judicial overhaul would also politicize judicial elections; undermine judicial tenure and independence; make governmental legal advisors into, essentially, personal assistants to their ministers; etc. This basic law is there to help usher in the rest of these reforms, as well as other outrageous legislation that is already in the pipeline. As Internal Security Minister, terrorist, and convicted criminal Itamar Ben Gvir tweeted on Monday, “the salad bar is open.”
Wait, back up for a minute. What is a basic law?
Israel does not have a written constitution. In the 1950s, efforts to establish one failed due to the irreconcilable differences between religious and secular legislators. A compromise was reached, according to which the Knesset would, from time to time, enact “basic laws” with an enhanced majority. In the 1990s, the Supreme Court awarded these laws a special, quasi-constitutional status, allowing the judiciary to strike down regular laws that contradicted basic laws. All laws that violate or undermine a principle in a basic law must entail minimal injury and be legislated “for an appropriate purpose.”
So what’s up with this “extreme unreasonableness” basic law?
Because Israel does not have the level of democratic control–through checks and balances, or through the constitutional review structures in places like the US–that other countries have, its courts could strike down executive decisions and actions that appear to be purely malicious or don’t make any sense. Now that this amendment is in the books, and enshrined as a basic law, supposedly any government action will be immune to judicial review provided that it is done under proper authority. For example, if a government minister chooses to uproot a Palestinian village, require all women in the office to dress a certain way and earn a quarter of what men earn, award jobs to unqualified people based on whims, etc., courts would not be able to do anything as long as the minister acts within their authority
Why would Netanyahu ram this amendment through? Does he not care at all about what the public wants?
Not even a little bit.
What does this government care about?
Israel has a coalition-based governance, which means that governments are put together out of various political parties that have different, and sometimes contradictory, values and interests, but they all benefit from being in power. In this particular case, what they all have in common is that they don’t care at all about the democratic culture of the country or its citizens (and certainly not the Palestinians.) Netanyahu chose this adventure for a simple reason: he is facing multiple charges of corruption. The offenses are serious and there’s plenty of evidence, and he could be serving years, or even decades, in prison. He will do anything and sell out to anyone to avoid that. These amendments will provide loopholes for him to escape criminal accountability. His partners, to whom he has sold out, are an assortment of convicted criminals (Arye Der’i, bribery; Itamar Ben-Gvir, terrorism); known homophobes (Smotrich, organizer of the Pride counterprotest “the beast march”); and theocracy-bound bureaucrats taking orders from the religious think-tank Kohelet Policy Forum (Yariv Levin, Simha Rothman.) What they want is a theocracy, consisting of Jewish supremacy; an annexation of the West Bank and elimination of any hope or reality of Palestinian independence; the denial of rights to Israel’s Arab citizens and other non-Jews; taking away rights from women and unconventional families; and shifting mountains of money from the tax-paying, military-service-performing secular people to the Ultra-Orthodox, who neither serve nor work or pay taxes.
How do we know that’s what they want?
They have been open about it since day one. Folks like Ben Gvir and Smotrich came into power explicitly to annex the West Bank, obliterate any hope of Palestinian independence, and grind to dust any hope of upward mobility for Arab Israeli citizens. All you need to do is look at the list of laws presented to the Knesset for approval yesterday, the day after they stripped judicial review: a law requiring compensation for “Torah students” to match that of people serving in the army, sometimes at great risk and sacrifice; a law that ministers or legislators suspected of criminal activity can only be removed from office by the coalition’s agreement, not through judicial review; new criminal penalties–three years in prison to anyone blocking roads (i.e., the nonviolent protesters); extensions to the criminal immunity of parliament members; affirmative defenses for rabbis publishing their opinions in religious pamphlets (including incitement to racism, murder, etc.); recognizing rabbinical certificates as the equivalent of academic degrees for all public jobs. And that’s just yesterday. This will not be a democracy for long.
Was Israel ever a democracy, you colonialist monsters?
The occupation of Palestine, whose tragic roots date back to 1948 and arguably, before that, to the British Mandate, is indeed an ugly and horrifying aspect that is inexorable from the rest of this mess. It is arguably the root of much of the problem, and inhumane policies and practices have been a fact of life in Palestinian territories since they were conquered in the Six-Day War in 1967. Many people live in horrid conditions, under a military regime that controls even minute aspects of their lives and accords these lives little to no value. At the same time, all Israeli governments, right and left alike, have allowed Jewish settlers to occupy and expand these territories, and often given them free rein in acts of agricultural vandalism, sabotage, and horrific violence against Palestinians with no consequences. Courts have offered precious little protection to Palestinians in these matters.
So why would Palestinians even care about judicial overhaul?
Even though the situation in Palestine has always been dire, any person who believes things cannot be worse is seriously deluded. With the de-facto elimination of Judicial review, people like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich can run unchecked and unfettered in Palestine. Since their explicit goal is to burn down Palestinian villages–and they’ve been acting on it–you can expect worse. At the same time, it’s understandable that people who have been through so much are cynical about the protest and not participating as the Jewish protesters would hope.
Isn’t there any merit to the claim that this government is trying to disempower the old, oppressive Ashkenazi elites and bring about more equality?
No, this is a cynical ploy that persuades people who have been neglected and kept in ignorance by Netanyahu et al.–the epitome of an oppressive Ashkenazi elite–so that they can be duped into supporting this nonsense. It is true that long-festering resentments have lingered since the 1950s, when immigrants from North Africa and Arab countries were treated condescendingly and appallingly by the local Ashkenazi authorities and residents. Ethnic tensions still exist. But many, many talented, hardworking people who came from nothing are utterly disgusted with the effort to make ethnic tension into a cudgel to foment hatred and schadenfreude and have spoken out publicly about this farce.
Is there nothing that can be done to change course?
Some of the more effective pressure has already been deployed: reservist pilots, military intelligence chiefs, and cyber unit specialists have withdrawn their commitment to volunteer for military service. This has considerably weakened Israel’s security situation and it’s not unlikely that the army is unfit to protect the country at this point. Iranian leadership, who now has nuclear weaponry that can reach Israel, won’t even have to use it. Yoav Galant, the security minister, has announced that, with these retreats, we must pause and reverse course before it’s too late. Similarly, the shekel is in free fall, investors are pulling out of tech companies, and bright minds are fleeing the country on the daily. Both of these things should have given anyone with an iota of public concern some pause (when you think about it, Israel’s survival in the Middle East is largely thanks to a few hundred pilots, some cyber defense systems, and robust scientific invention) but these government ministers are ruthless, unprincipled, and out for whatever they can get, and Netanyahu himself could not care less as long as it keeps his own ass out of the slammer.
Can the U.S. do something?
Emphatically, yes. The U.S. government generously and without asking any questions supports Israel with massive funds (these are sort of a reverse subsidy to American contractors, because the money purchases American weaponry and military equipment.) President Biden’s message to Netanyahu was an opening shot in this direction, and he can and should make it clear that the support is not unwavering or unconditional. Ben Gvir seems to think this is a bluff. Biden can call his bluff.
What can we do?
For heaven’s sake, speak out. It is inconceivable that the only U.S. Jewish voices heard on this topic come from nutty right-wingers or namby-pamby lefties mumbling DEI platitudes. If you don’t like fascism and want Biden to stop funding it, for heaven’s sake, pressure your rabbi, your Jewish organization, your nonprofit, your company, AIPAC, to say something.
I don’t want to seem antisemitic or offend anyone.
You know what’s worse than “seeming antisemitic” or “saying something offensive?” actually ushering in bigotry, discrimination, hatred, and animosity toward Israeli Americans and Jewish Americans by lending credibility to the government that has taken Israel hostage. The more Israel devolves into a decrepit, impoverished backward, theocratic, violent cesspool, the more credibility the bigots will have and the more difficult it will be for Israeli or Jewish people, businesses, and organizations to defend themselves against these noxious phenomena. It is your patriotic duty to both Israel and the U.S. to speak out.
As I write this, hundreds of thousands of friends are protesting in Jerusalem, being beaten up by police thugs, as Israel’s theocratic, messianic government celebrates their massive success in eroding democracy. The first step was curtailing the type of discretion courts may apply when reviewing executive/administrative actions, by ruling out the use of “reasonability” as a standard. It should go without saying that whoever does not want their actions to be reviewed through a lens of reasonability is planning on doing unreasonable things, and given who is in government now and what their aims are–theocracy, annexation of Palestinian territories, etc.–it’s not a secret what these acts will be. After the new law passed, internal security minister Itamar Ben Gvir, a convicted terrorist who assaulted Palestinians and police officers and who never did a day of military service, tweeted, “the salad bar is open.” What more do you need to get a sense of where this is going?
I was going to write a long post, explaining the American implications, but Thomas Friedman did my job for me. Here he lists some ways in which the Israeli catastrophe can affect U.S. interests in the Middle East:
It should be obvious to every U.S. policymaker by now that Netanyahu’s cabinet, one that you described as one of the most “extreme” you’ve ever encountered, has its mind set on two dismantling projects.
One is to dismantle the power of the Supreme Court to rein in this government’s extreme agenda, and the other is to dismantle the Oslo peace process and its road map for a two-state solution, in order to pave the way for a unilateral Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Oslo has been a cornerstone of America’s Middle East policy since 1993.
These twin dismantlings are interconnected: the Jewish supremacists in Netanyahu’s cabinet need to get the Supreme Court out of the way in order to carry out their plans to annex the West Bank. Such a move could easily destabilize Jordan, as it would likely push more and more Palestinians there and change its fragile demographic balance. Jordan is the most important buffer state in the region for the U.S., which operates from Jordanian territory, in collaboration with Jordan, to deal with U.S. security threats from Syria and western Iraq, where ISIS forces continue to operate.
At the same time, Mr. President, you are wrestling with one of the biggest decisions ever involving U.S. strategy in the Middle East: whether to meet Saudi Arabia’s requests for a formal security guarantee from America, for a U.S.-overseen civilian nuclear program and for access to some of the most advanced U.S. arms. In return for this, Saudi Arabia would normalize its relations with Israel (provided that Israel makes some concessions to the Palestinians) and limit its collaboration with China.
It would be both difficult and unfortunate to get such a deal through Congress without strong support from Democrats in the Senate. As you know, Mr. President, Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are two of the least popular world leaders among progressive Democrats, especially considering the way Netanyahu, over the past decade, moved to make support for Israel a Republican cause and spurned the embrace of secular American Jews for that of Christian evangelicals instead.
In short, winning enough support among Democrats to forge this complex deal with Saudi Arabia will be a huge lift on a good day; it will be even harder if Netanyahu neuters the Israeli Supreme Court — undermining our shared values of an independent judiciary — and moves ahead with plans to annex the West Bank. And without you as president, such a deal would be virtually impossible, because very few Democrats in the Senate would support it if it was pushed by a Republican president. In short, the window for this deal is small.
Moreover, in 2016 you and President Barack Obama signed a 10-year, $38 billion agreement to enhance Israel’s military. Are we supposed to just sit back and watch silently while that military — which we have made such a huge investment in to amplify our power projection in the Middle East — fractures over efforts to restrict the power of the Israeli Supreme Court? That would be a disaster for us and for Israel, which has real enemies like Iran and Hezbollah on its doorstep.
Also, we can already see that the extreme behavior of this Israeli government in expanding settlements in the West Bank is beginning to damage the historic relations forged by President Donald Trump between Israel and the U.A.E., Bahrain and Morocco with the Abraham Accords. All three Arab countries have been forced to cool their diplomatic ties with Israel.
Which leaves me to make a more minor comment, but important to me, anyway. I see a glaring failure on the part of U.S. Jewish authorities here. I suspect that Biden’s move to pick Friedman as his (able and well respected) messenger was calculated to reach the ears and minds of U.S. Jewry, especially those who are too apathetic or too hoodwinked by Netanyahu and Kohelet to reduce their ideological and financial support for this mess. It might have also been calculated for the benefit of the Jewish left (or, really, any left) that just waits to hear of more scandals to tarnish Israel completely, failing to distinguish between the government and its massive opposition.
This is not solely the audience’s fault: Before Friedman’s important reporting on this, U.S. coverage of recent Israel affairs tended to equate Israel’s 37th government with Israel itself. Generally speaking, U.S. media is very domestically focused compared to, well, every other country in the world, and on the rare occasions it reports on foreign affairs, it does so in an infantilizing and paternalistic way. To be fair, Netanyahu has been in government for so long that, for the ill-informed U.S. populace, it’s easy to identify him with the country he’s hijacked. Coverage of this mess has really diverged: U.S. newspapers extensively cover harm to Palestinian towns and villages (with good reason! Israeli media grossly and criminally downplays these horrors!) but remains mostly silent about the size and courage of the anti-government protest movement. To get a better idea of what is not being properly reported, imagine that half the U.S. had marched in the anti-Trump protests and risked serious violence by police and right-wing goons. The temperatures here are in the high 90s and, nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of people have walked by foot to Jerusalem, for days, to protest, and have taken over a park near the Knesset to continue their operations. Some have been injured, seriously even, by police water hoses and horses (poor, sensitive, gregarious creatures, again dragged into the depravity of homo sapiens.)
The outcome of all this is all too obvious to me, having lived in the United States for more than two decades. Pretty much every Israeli American has coped with hostile sentiments from both the right and the left. I won’t tire you with my “lived experience” of bigotry and ugliness, in some cases seriously career harming, because we don’t really need more earnest, whiny confessionals, nor will I get dragged into the tiresome and intractable problem of whether these noxious sentiments are antisemitic, anti-Zionist, or anti-Israeli (this is open to interpretation, and the sentiment is misguided and its expression sickening either way.) The bottom line is this: the more unconscionable governmental behavior takes place unchecked and unchallenged by Jewish authorities abroad, and the more Israeli consulates throughout the U.S. parrot it and defend it, the more justified and less objectionable these bigotries will be.
This has several corrosive implications. First, it means far fewer business opportunities, especially in tech, for Israeli companies. Second, it means that the unspoken but quite obvious sentiment that there seem to be “too many of us” in intelligentsia will strengthen and become spoken (back to the “quota system” in university admissions?) Third, it will unfairly and counterproductively target precisely the demographics that are doing what they can to oppose these travesties (this is why I’ve always thought BDS incredibly foolish when applied to academics and/or journalists. And yes, I’ve been on the receiving end of that nonsense as well.)
There are a few things Jewish leadership in the U.S. should be doing right now:
Speak out against all this. Yes, your congregation can and should have at least as much of an opinion about this as it does about Ukraine and Iran. You have a voice. Some of you have Biden’s ear. Sure, your lefty, scrappy, civil-rightsy temple/shul/congregation can marinate in the same advocacy that any progressive organization in the U.S. does–the usual DEI talking points and capitalizing on domestic controversies. Your duty is to expand your congregation’s parochial concerns and figure out how to talk to and about Israel.
Put your money where your mouth is. If you are funding think tanks like Kohelet, stop it immediately. Even Kohelet’s nauseating captains are horrified by the monster they helped create. Instead, put your money, openly and explicitly, in the service of the protest organizations. My friends are being brutalized by cops and fascist goons to cultivate a safe, democratic haven for you and yours. Help them.
Israel is not a fun summer camp for your kids. Stop sending them to Birthright which, at best, sickens them about the settler and antimiscegenation propaganda they are subjected to, and at worst, converts them to be Netanyahu supporters.
Dissent, even abroad, is patriotic. Join a local protest. I’ve seen people express precious qualms about how they don’t have a “right” or a “say” in Israel. And yet, when horrors happen elsewhere in the world you speak up and donate. What I keep hearing from my friends in Israel is how heartened they are when they see pictures from protests around the world.
Following the tragic passing of my father, I spent a lot of time thinking about mourning rituals, and particularly about the invaluable work of Menuha Nekhona (“A Righteous Rest”), the all-volunteer organization that runs the secular-civil cemetery in my parents’ town. I was so impressed with them that I started drafting a book proposal about secular burials in Israel, but a few days later found out that someone has already written a book about alternatives to religiously sanctioned deaths: Zohar Gazit’s A Struggle to the Death (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2016) (Hebrew.) The original title, “Osim et HaMavet” (“making death”) is a double entendre: it’s a figure of speech meaning “haranguing someone” and also, in this context, implies the creative remaking of a hegemonic ritual in a way that fits the needs and concerns of deeply underserved populations.
Gazit’s book, which is based on his doctoral dissertation, examines three alternative death initiatives: in addition to Menuha Nekhona, he looks at Path to Life, an organization devoted to the healing and welfare of family survivors of suicide and to the destigmatizing of these deaths, and at Lilach, an organization promoting death with dignity (passive euthanasia) for terminally ill patients. Gazit’s theoretical framework heavily relies on Bordieu’s “field” concept (what sociological work doesn’t?) and shows the complicated relationship that each of these organizations has with the death “field.” All three of these organizations struggle against the hegemonic death rituals and perceptions in Israeli society: the religious concept of suicide (and any other actively chosen form of death, including some forms of euthanasia) as defying halakhic rules; the aggressive and greedy religious monopoly on burials in Israel, run by Orthodox Hevre Kadisha organizations who perform alienated, antiquated rituals, discriminate in plot allocations, and humiliate the dead and their loved ones; and the Israeli hierarchy of death, which glorifies military casualties and features a constant contest among other groups about their relative prestige, access to services, and differential stigma.
Gazit’s analysis is incisive and sensitive. His ethnography (participation in meetings and rituals, plenty of interviews, clever media analysis) shows internal conflicts and contradictions within the organizations he examines. What they want to highlight, and who they want to associate themselves with, is a delicate and carefully strategic dance of courting legitimacy and support. For example, Path to Life activists fiercely oppose efforts to downgrade the status of soldiers who committed suicide beneath that of supposedly legitimate military casualties; at the same time, they assiduously avoid even the semblance of supporting suicide as a legitimate option. They also contest professional opinions that discourage open talk of suicide as potential encouragement, arguing that open conversation can invite attention, help, and saving lives. Similarly, Lilach activists try to disengage from suicide organizations and stick to passive euthanasia, so as not to invite displeasure. And Menuha Nekhona have faced a complicated relationship with the very few people in Israel who sought cremation, an option associated with deeply negative stigma in Israel due to the legacy of the holocaust; at the same time, they’ve had to partner sometimes with Hevre Kadisha for burial services, among other surprising disclosures in procuring coffins: traditional Jewish burials are in shrouds, with no coffin, but bodies flown in from abroad arrive in coffins and Hevre Kadisha sell these to Menuha Nekhona.
Gazit’s book is full of fascinating information for anyone interested in social movements, sociology of religion, political theory, and constitutional law. I learned a lot. There is plenty I’m interested in that I didn’t find in the book (such as the negotiations of individual burial styles, headstones, and maintenance), but there’s only so much one can include in one work. My only quibble–a minor one, and by no means limited to Gazit’s book–is that he repeatedly relies on the terms “good death” and “bad death” for, respectively, the hegemonically sanctioned death and the alternatives. I know these are both well-established sociological terms of art and Gazit is correctly using them. But terms of art in sociological theory can sometimes sound jargony and, in this case, given that these organizations fight deep injustices, come off a bit precious and more than a bit jarring in their aesthetic and moral removal. I would have preferred “hegemonic” and “alternative.”
This minor issue aside, Gazit’s book is an important and worthy addition to other texts investigating national-religious hegemonies in Israel and those who try to contest them, such as Daphne Barak-Erez’s Outlawed Pigs and Michal Kravel-Tovi’s When the State Winks. I’ll end with my favorite passage (in my own translation from Hebrew):
All three organizations have emblazoned death on their flag, but they carry a message of life. Better, safer, richer, more mindful life, achieved through dealing with the “bad death.” From an event that happens to us, death is shaped as an event that we are active in. Passive social isolation, leaving decisionmaking to the medical establishment and later to Hevre Kadisha with no input from the individual and their loved ones, are replaced by decisions, choices, and action. Addressing “bad death” is framed as an empowering resource in the activists’ lives–an expression of courage, principled stance, and a struggle against injustice.
