United States of America eSeries: Israel’s Crisis and a Diplomatic Disappointment

Israel’s Crisis and a Diplomatic Disappointment

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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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May 18, 2021

Israel's Crisis and a Diplomatic Disappointment

"The nine-day-old battle between Hamas militants and the Israeli military has created a humanitarian catastrophe that is touching nearly every civilian living in Gaza, a coastal territory of about two million people," The New York Times' Marc Santora and Iyad Abuheweila report, as Hamas continues to fire rockets at Israeli civilian targets and as the Israeli military continues its airstrikes against Hamas in Gaza. Meanwhile, Israel's mixed Arab-Jewish cities have been wracked by street violence.

As others have, the Financial Times' Gideon Rachman argues the crisis has resulted partly from a miscalculation. In signing the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords to normalize ties with Arab countries, Rachman argues, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have hoped to solve the 73-year Israeli–Palestinian conflict with an "outside-in" strategy. Becoming friendly with the rest of the Arab world was supposed to sideline the Palestinian cause and produce "quiescence," as Rachman frames it.

Things have turned in the opposite direction.

As Jack Khoury writes for Haaretz, the present wave of conflict—sparked by court cases to evict Palestinians from an East Jerusalem neighborhood and exacerbated by an outcry over Israeli police firing stun grenades around and into the city's Al-Aqsa mosque—has united Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line that separates those living in Israel, with citizenship and the rights that go with it, from those living in the occupied territories. As the Times' Patrick Kingsley reports, millions of Palestinians living in both Israel proper and the occupied territories joined in a general strike, "in what many Palestinians described as a rare show of political unity."

"The Palestinians in the West Bank and in Israel live in two separate cantons," Khoury writes for Haaretz. "The government's treatment of them is different, and economic and social differences between them are not insignificant. Yet in the past week it looked like the Green Line had disappeared for a moment, and it became clear that it's not difficult for Palestinians on both sides to find a common denominator and take to the streets in the face of bullying and oppression."

Where's Modi?

Since becoming prime minister in 2014, The Economist writes, Narendra Modi and his image have been ubiquitous in India. "Yet, as covid casualties climbed and then rocketed up in mid-April, the omnipresent Mr Modi started fading like the Cheshire Cat. One month on, newscasts still tell of 'top level' prime-ministerial meetings, but without accompanying footage. His ever less frequent speeches sound droning and perfunctory." Now, cartoonists are starting to poke fun, depicting a prime minister in hiding, and "[o]n May 12th India's biggest student union filed a missing-person report for Amit Shah, the home minister," alleging he, too, has been absent during a crisis of epic proportions.

Covid-19 Comes for Southeast Asia

As India has spiraled, Southeast Asia has seen a Covid-19 uptick, Sebastian Strangio wrote for The Diplomat earlier this month. Parts of the region had largely avoided the worst: Vietnam has reported the world's lowest total of Covid-19 deaths per 100,000 people, at 0.04 (for context, that figure sits at more than 178 in the US), with Thailand, Singapore, and Cambodia not far behind. But in April, Vietnam saw its first instance of community transmission in over a month, with dozens more following. Viral spillover from India may have become an issue: Vietnamese media noted an Indian national who had tested positive for a new variant even after a two-week quarantine, and two negative tests, upon arrival in Vietnam, Strangio pointed out.

The Economist writes that other, relatively unharmed countries in the region have recently "lost control" for various reasons. (For Malaysia, the magazine cites evening socializing that has accompanied Ramadan; for Thailand, it cites holiday festivals and Bangkok nightclub activity.) "The rise is particularly worrying for countries that had avoided big outbreaks, and so have a wholly vulnerable population," the magazine writes.

Lessons in Sustainable Capitalism From a Wall Street Fixture

What can we learn about American capitalism from the long-tenured financial firm Brown Brothers Harriman? At The Wall Street Journal, Zachary Karabell, author of the new book "Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power," writes that it typifies elements of capitalism's past and present.

"[A]s the largest cotton trader before the Civil War, the firm was deeply complicit in the evils of slavery," Karabell writes, though it would later become a staunch supporter of the Union cause. And it's an exemplar of government–business nexus, as the original Brown Brothers firm evolved into its current form after a train ride shared by a cadré of wealthy Yale alums, which they chartered to their reunion in 1930. The group included "Prescott Bush, a tall, lanky man who had married the daughter of George Herbert Walker of St. Louis" and who would become "the father and grandfather of presidents." Some firm leaders would hold senior government positions; one was "summoned" by President Harry Truman to be Secretary of State George Marshall's second in command.

But Karabell depicts the firm as heroically restrained. Unlike other Wall Street titans, it didn't expand to meet business opportunities. In the 1980s, he writes, "Wall Street was lionized in popular culture. Brown Brothers Harriman ... received almost no attention as flashier firms like Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley went public, and Drexel Burnham Lambert and its junk bonds went ballistic." Karabell cites the firm's 1800s roots, when its Baltimore-based founders financed a rail line connecting the city to Ohio, at little profit for themselves, understanding they would only succeed if Baltimore did. Today, Karabell writes, the firm's history contains important lessons about "how to tame the power of money so that it builds up rather than tears down; how to ensure that those who have benefited greatly from American capitalism serve and contribute in return; above all, how the U.S. might once again play a global role that helps to increase prosperity and security for all. For more than 200 years, Brown Brothers has grappled with those questions; now we all have to do the same."