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Notes -
A short prompt of good news for starting the week- the likelihood of the current Gaza conflict ending just got significantly higher today, as Hamas has released at least the first 7 of 20 surviving hostages to Israel, with more expected later today (or maybe already completed), as part of a Trump-mediated peace deal that is excepted to culminate in a regional summit this week.
Big if carried through, and while there was leadup to it last week, there was a fair bit of (and fair grounds for) skepticism on if the deal would actually be followed through. There were questions on if Hamas even could deliver all the living hostages given how the hostages were often not under Hamas's direct organizational control (but sometimes under other groups), and this deal does not address the bodies of the dead hostages, among other things.
There is also some irony, or possibly some future culture war conspiracy theories, about how this will not get Trump a noble peace prize, since they announced that late last week.
That said- and I think this is good news in general- it's also worth noting this doesn't mean stability or even a lasting peace. While the Yemen-based Houthis have indicated they will stop their Red Sea attacks so long as Israel upholds the ceasefire, this runs into complications like how Hamas has already engaged in gun battles with gazan clans as it tries to re-assert control, which goes significant premise of Hamas being removed as the military and civil authority of Gaza. Which remains a huge, unanswered question which could restart this problem all over again, if Hamas remains in power for lack of anyone actively displacing. The NYT is running a piece on how mediators are already signaling this isn't a comprehensive deal for either side.
One thing that isn't in question, however, is that the return of the still-living hostages is going to reshape the underpinnings of Israeli politics, as the post-October 7 war cabinet coalition that kept Netanyahu in power will lose much of the reason for being. This means political instability, for worse or for better, as Israel rebalances. The next election would be no later than late next year regardless, and could come earlier.
Absent some new (and detrimental to all) nonsense, this means that a lot of the people who only supported Nnetanyahu because of the war will likely be more willing to withdraw their support and trigger early elections, which would be no later than about a year from now anyways. This does not, however, mean a general discrediting of the Israeli right, and a decades-belated return of the Israeli left (whose original decline was after the failure of the gaza withdrawal almost two decades ago). The war was a significant polarizing effect on Israeli politics and society, and while I'd not bet on Netanyahu I'd also not bet on any part of the political left seen as opposing the war for pro-Palestinian reasonings.
I'll end it there. While there is plenty of reasons things could yet again get worse, and while I am sure eventually they will, for the moment I'll encourage people to view this new news as good news, which can well make many people's lives better.
Thank you for the detailed, succinct write-up. I intended to make a top-level post using the presumptive end of the current Gaza conflict as a jumping-off point to ask a much broader question, namely:
What will the next Current Thing™ be?
In May of last year, I argued that media minutes, column inches and the forefronts of public consciousness follow a Pareto distribution, in which one issue clearly dominates at the expense of all others. In Ireland (and presumably a significant chunk of the Anglosphere and also the entire world), a list of these "primary" issues over the past decade or so looked as follows:
I'm not saying the Israel-Palestine conflict is permanently over: as a cold conflict which periodically goes hot for 77 consecutive years, it would be very impressive indeed if the imminent cessation of hostilities represented a decisive end to the conflict. But I do think there's a very good chance that it stops being the "primary" issue that dominates the discourse, and retreats to the status it occupied prior to October 7th, 2023. Diehards will still emblazon their balconies with Palestine flags, you have not heard "from the river to the sea" for the last time, there will be periodic calls to boycott and divest — but it will go back to being a page 4 story. I strongly suspect that the era of copycat attacks on random Jewish civilians in First World nations has come to an end.
Which invites the obvious question: what will the next Current Thing™ be?
Playing the game on Easy Mode, and the answer might be that something which was a secondary issue for the last two years now jumps forward to become the pack leader in the Pareto distribution. Sometimes the easy, obvious answer is the correct one: activists had been complaining about police mistreatment of black Americans for years prior to the murder of George Floyd, and Putin's invasion of Ukraine could not have come as a complete surprise to anyone with even the most passing familiarity with the geopolitics of the region. In this framing, obvious candidates for the next Current Thing™ include AI, the ongoing debate about immigration from the global south, and Orange Man Bad. In the latter case, it's entirely possible that all of the "ceasefire now" people will quickly realise that their moment in the limelight has passed, exchange their keffiyehs for black bloc and get back to partying like it's 2017.
Playing the game on Hard Mode, the answer might be something completely unexpected. In January 2020, who among us could have foreseen that a virus in Wuhan (whether from a lab or a wet market) would determine the course of our lives for pretty much the duration of March 2020-December 2021? In this light, do any of you have candidates in mind for dark horse black swan events which could dominate the discourse for the next two years or so?
I don't think that the Israel issue is over - even though the focus might change away from Palestine, my money on the next major issue in US politics is the US-Israel relationship. The current arrangement isn't sustainable, and the polling I've seen suggests that a majority of Americans want AIPAC and Israel brought to heel. There's no way this particular milk gets unspilled, and none of the normies who supported Palestine because it was the Current Thing are going to forget what they saw Zionists and those funded by them do. The activists are already hard at work on projects like the Hind Rajab foundation and other efforts to make sure the world does not forget what Israel did. The outsize influence of Israel over western governments is being pulled into the spotlight all over the world, and the consequences of that conflict have in no way finished playing themselves out. Given that Israel is potentially going to be restarting the conflict with Iran and drawing the US in to that fight as well, I don't think this particular issue is going to leave "current thing" status barring some other major event (AGI getting achieved, climate disaster, another pandemic, another war, etc).
Well, for my money the Current Thing at the moment is the hot war in Gaza. So assuming that specific war ends and stops being the Current Thing, my question is what will be the next Current Thing other than the hot war in Gaza.
Personally, I am sceptical that "the relationship between the US and Israel" will become the thing that everyone in the Anglosphere is talking about in the way that e.g. the conflict in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, BLM and Covid were. Even if a majority of Americans want something (such as AIPAC being brought to heel), that doesn't mean it'll be the thing that everyone is talking about (indeed, per the toxoplasma criterion, controversial things get discussed more than things about which there is widespread agreement).
I think you greatly overestimate the staying power of Current Things and the degree of emotional investment normies hold in them. I think that, by Christmas, an absolute majority of normies will have completely forgotten about the "genocide" they spent two years performatively condemning. In the US, Google searches for "Black Lives Matter" peaked in June 2020 and had fallen to 6% of the peak by December. Of the people who posted a black square on their Instagrams in the summer of 2020, what proportion of them do you think could name an unarmed black person killed by a police officer since George Floyd? Of the people calling for others to mask up and calling the unvaccinated "plague rats", I suspect that a majority of them believe that literally no one has died of Covid since the lockdowns ended. Out of sight, out of mind.
Think about how much the average American (even the average Democratic-voting American) cared about the Palestinian cause before October 7th, 2023. By January, I think they'll have regressed to the historical mean. Expecting anything else is almost certainly the product of wishful thinking.
Yeah but on the other hand I'd expect the majority of BLM people wouldn't have really changed their minds on the underlying subject, just buried it underneath other issues in terms of primacy.
I disagree. I suspect most of the people loudly chanting "defund the police" in the summer of 2020 would be very embarrassed if you pointed that out to them five years later. And as for the people actually calling to abolish the police, forget it.
Data points: in June 2020, 34% of Americans supported defunding the police. Nine months later, that figure had fallen to 18%. By October 2021, only 15% of Americans wanted police departments defunded at all, of which 9% only wanted them defunded "a little" (Ctrl-F "a little").
In other words, at most one-sixth (probably more like one-twentieth) of the US are progressive diehards, and a further sixth (or perhaps a quarter) will pretend to be progressive diehards so long as they think it's socially advantageous to do so.
If by "change their minds on the underlying subject" you mean "most BLM people think it's bad when the police kill unarmed black people who are not resisting arrest" — that was never the part of the movement that was under dispute. Even MAGA types agreed that this was bad. Even Bill O'Reilly was horrified by the Eric Garner case.
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