Alexia Underwood | Vox

My great-grandmother’s struggle with mental illness — and the therapy that saved her life

2019-09-12T15:03:48-04:00

At the age of 44, my great-grandmother Carmela became convinced that people were out to get her.

She refused to let anyone visit her house in Modesto, California, where she lived with her husband, two children, and sister-in-law. She insisted that all the windows and curtains be closed. She had hallucinations and manic episodes. Sometimes she would rush out of the house into the street for no reason, and her children would have to chase her and bring her back home.

As her mental health deteriorated over a few months in 1953, Carmela even tried to strangle her 23-year-old daughter, Beatrice (my grandmother), according to two relatives. “She was really out her mind, basically,” my aunt Rochelle told me. She had heard the stories from Beatrice, her mother.

Treatment for mental illness in those days was fairly limited, but the family doctor suggested that she try a revolutionary new method: “shock therapy,” or electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which involves using electricity to induce a seizure in the brain. For some patients with mental illness, it makes their symptoms decrease or go away entirely — though doctors don’t completely understand why. It’s one of the most controversial treatments for mental disorders.

Much of Carmela’s large, close-knit Italian American family objected to the treatment — it sounded horrific. But her daughter was adamant that something had to change. Carmela underwent ECT several times over a few weeks.

To everyone’s surprise, it seemed to work. My great-grandmother’s manic behavior stopped, and as far as we know, she never threatened her daughter again.

Carmela ended up living well into her 80s. The woman I got to know as a child was tough and funny, with an acerbic wit. She was short, with a distinct accent that belied her Italian immigrant roots, and had a particular love for cigarettes and coffee. Carmela also loved to gamble; during vacations to Lake Tahoe in the summers, she would sometimes stay out all night at the casino, where the pit bosses called her “Mamma.” She taught her granddaughters how to play blackjack.

As far as I know, she never displayed any mania or paranoia after her experience with ECT.

I’ve been thinking about Carmela’s experience lately, in light of the growing public awareness of mental illness, and depression in particular.

Celebrities like Kitty Dukakis and Carrie Fisher have come out loudly in favor of ECT, which research shows can work well for people experiencing severe, treatment-resistant depression. Esketamine, a fast-working drug that’s similar to the hallucinogenic club drug Special K, was recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration and seems to hold promise for people with this type of disease. And brain stimulation treatments like tDCS, or transcranial direct-current stimulation, are getting a lot of press as well.

But even though most psychiatrists now believe that ECT is an effective treatment for severe depression, it’s still the object of suspicion. This is due in part to the early methods of administering the treatment, which were, by all accounts, barbaric, and which still reverberate in our cultural consciousness. But it’s also due to two other factors: One bout of ECT is rarely enough to help people control their symptoms — and there’s a really good chance that it will cause some level of temporary, or long-term, memory loss.

Still, tens of thousands of Americans allow doctors to apply electricity to their brains every year. I wanted to know more about this treatment that helped my great-grandmother, and whether the debate today over ECT was well-founded — or if it’s keeping people from getting treatment that could potentially save their lives.

A mysterious illness and “shock treatment”

It’s difficult to know exactly what happened nearly 70 years ago when Carmela had ECT. Most of my relatives who were alive at the time have died, and her medical records are long gone. After speaking to three relatives who were alive at the time and two others who have heard stories secondhand, here’s what I’ve managed to piece together.

Carmela, the eldest of nine siblings, was born in 1909 in a small village near Bari, a port city in southern Italy. According to family lore, Carmela’s father, Angelo, was a soldier in World War I; when he returned home, his teenage half-brother was playing with his gun and accidentally shot and killed a neighborhood girl. Angelo took the fall for the crime and went to prison, and the family went to great expense to hire a lawyer to get him out. The lawyer told Angelo that he would need to leave town if he ever wanted to find work again, so the family decided to try their luck in the US. They immigrated to the US by ship when Carmela was 11.

It was a harrowing trip, and Carmela’s infant brother Saverio (whom they called Sam) died before they reached Ellis Island. A second brother whom the family also named Sam was born in the US, but he died at a young age as well after being hit by a car. A third brother named Sam survived, however, and is still alive today.

Carmela’s family moved to Chicago, where she started working at age 12, making pasta by hand and selling it to restaurants to help the family make ends meet. At 13, she moved on to working in a department store. (We don’t know if she ever had formal schooling, though she did learn to read and took classes before getting her US citizenship.)

The cold Chicago winters soon drove her family to California. It was there that Carmela had an arranged marriage at age 17 to a man who’d immigrated to the US from an Italian village near where her family was from. He was 10 years her senior. They married on February 27, 1927, in Oakland.

My great-grandparents settled in the Central Valley and started growing peaches and wine grapes from the rich brown California soil. Carmela’s first child died at 3 months old due to something the family referred to as “crib death,” but she had two other children who survived. She taught herself to drive on the ranch, in order to gain some freedom. After years of living in a Chicago basement apartment surrounded by family, her time out on a farm with a man who was much older than her was difficult and isolating, her niece, who visited her often at the time, told me.

In late 1953, something changed. Carmela developed a strong sense of paranoia and began acting oddly.

“She was delusional, she was hallucinating, seeing things that weren’t there, people that were after her,” my aunt told me. “Running around in the house, opening up and closing doors.”

“She was afraid of everything,” Carmela’s sister-in-law said. “She would get really bad, and just tear out of the house and do crazy things.”

Carmela’s husband was traveling a lot during this period, hauling wine grapes by train to Chicago to sell, and battling diabetes, a disease that eventually killed him. I don’t know how he responded to his wife’s illness.

But my living relatives have a variety of explanations for her behavior. She was unhappy in her marriage, a cousin told me. Another person attributed her strange behavior to thyroid issues. At the time, much of Carmela’s family thought she was just “going through the change,” i.e., menopause. They also described her as “nervous,” which was used to apply to all kinds of unnamed mental illnesses at that time. (I was not able to find records of her diagnosis.)

Whatever the reason, Carmela’s mental state seems to have deteriorated, to the point where her daughter Beatrice felt she had no choice but to take drastic measures.

Against the wishes of some members of the family, Beatrice took her to a clinic that was in either Modesto or the nearby city of Stockton, according to relatives. There, doctors administered ECT. “They would take her away for shock treatments, and when she came back, she was very sweet and nice and calm,” her sister-in-law said.

In the ’50s, ECT was in its heyday in the US, and doctors used it on hundreds of thousands of patients a year. That didn’t make it palatable to the general public, though. Beatrice must have seen the ECT being administered, because she described the treatments, which were followed by ice baths, to relatives as violent and disturbing.

Finally, Carmela was admitted to a hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area, likely in Livermore. She spent several weeks there and was apparently given more ECT.

When she came back, the erratic behavior was gone, and she had recovered from the mania that had plagued her. “She was like she was before, the person we all knew,” Carmela’s sister-in-law said.

There were, however, some serious side effects.

From bludgeon to scalpel

The basic concept underlying ECT is not new; humans have been experimenting with using electricity to cure illness since antiquity. The ancient Romans used electric eels to treat problems like headache and gout.

Doctors attempted to use electricity as a cure for different disorders in the 1700s as well, but the modern-day version of electroconvulsive therapy wasn’t developed until the 1930s.

In 1934, a Hungarian doctor named Ladislas Meduna claimed he’d had much success treating patients with schizophrenia by inducing seizures. Psychiatrists began using injections or administering oral doses of a drug called Metrazol to create seizures in patients with psychosis, Jonathan Sadowsky, a historian of medicine and author of a book about the history of ECT, told me.

But there were a lot of problems with this; the injections could cause severe neurological damage, and the Metrazol often gave patients a feeling of absolute terror before the seizures came on. Doctors sometimes had to chase patients around the room to administer the drug.

In 1938, Italian neurologist Ugo Cerletti and his student Lucino Bini developed ECT as an alternative. It was viewed as a much more humane method for helping patients with schizophrenia, and the new treatment quickly caught on in the US.

A 1940 New York Times article with the headline “Insanity Treated by Electric Shock” described the treatment as “safer than injections” and “less expensive and less disagreeable.” Over time, doctors learned that it was more useful for people with other types of illnesses — like severe depression that didn’t respond to other forms of treatment.

But while it was preferable to the chemical alternative, ECT could still be, by many accounts, cruel. The seizures could lead patients to thrash about wildly and even break bones, and was generally an “extremely unpleasant” experience, Sadowsky said.

In 1953, at age 20, the author and poet Sylvia Plath underwent ECT — the same year that my great-grandmother had the treatment. She was experiencing severe depression and suicidal impulses, and was administered the treatment in its crudest form. In her novel The Bell Jar, Plath describes the experience:

Doctor Gordon was unlocking the closet. He dragged out a table on wheels with a machine on it and rolled it behind the head of the bed. The nurse started swabbing my temples with a smelly grease. … Doctor Gordon was fitting two metal plates on either side of my head. He buckled them into place with a strap that dented my forehead, and gave me a wire to bite. I shut my eyes.

There was a brief silence, like an indrawn breath. Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap would fly out of me like a split plant. I wondered what terrible thing it was I had done.

Later in the 1950s, doctors began administering general anesthesia and giving patients muscle relaxers before the treatment. This much safer method is known as modified ECT and is how it’s still administered today.

Plath had another bout of the treatment, in its modified version, a few months later; a new doctor told her the first round had been done “improperly.” She describes it differently, writing, “the darkness wiped me out like chalk on a blackboard,” and afterward, upon waking, wrote that “all the heat and fear purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace.”

But those new modifications were not practiced everywhere, and took a while to catch on.

In his 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey drew on his experience working at a hospital in California to describe how ECT was used as a disciplinary tool to tame unruly patients at the time. (Sadowsky, the medical historian, confirmed that this did happen, but it’s not clear how often.)

Kesey’s book, in addition to the 1975 film based on it, where Jack Nicholson is shown flailing around wildly in terrible pain while he receives ECT, seemed to have increased fear of and stigma around the treatment.

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I still remember watching a scene from the 1985 film Return to Oz, in which Dorothy’s aunt and uncle bring her to a hospital to receive what appears to be a rudimentary version of ECT, apparently because she won’t stop talking about a magical land she claims she visited.

“What are those?” Dorothy asks fearfully about the electrical conductors that the severely dressed nurse is holding. “Oh, when you’re ready we’ll just put them over your ears and pretty soon they’ll draw all those unpleasant dreams out of your head. And when you wake up, you’ll never be bothered by them again,” the doctor says. As a child, I watched this scene and shuddered. At the time, I had no idea that my great-grandmother had probably experienced something similar.

ECT has a controversial past for other reasons too

Other factors have hurt ECT’s image as well. One is the gender concern, given that the majority (as much as 67 percent) of people treated with ECT are women.

In the 1940s and ’50s, women were often seen as more mentally unstable, and cognitively weaker, than men. They were sometimes diagnosed as “hysterical” and given lobotomies and other forms of now-debunked “treatments” that could function as a type of social control. Some have questioned whether ECT falls into this category as well.

Women are diagnosed more often with depression — so it makes sense that they’d be given ECT more often. But Laura Hirshbein, a clinician and medical historian at the University of Michigan, told me this may be more complicated, since “the way the criteria for depression were developed skewed toward women,” she wrote in an email.

The criteria were based on medication clinical trials in the 1960s and ’70s, and Hirshbein said that more women were used in these trials than men.

“First, individuals with severe substance use problems were excluded (among them a lot of men), and second, there is evidence that women have been more likely to be selected for psychiatric treatments than men. In the past, historians thought this was a way for psychiatrists to exert patriarchal authority,” she said. But current researchers suggest that it could be because “physicians were more sympathetic toward the women in distress in the hospital.”

“I also think,” Hirshbein continued, “that increased sympathy and a desire to help is leading to more women being selected for ECT now.”

In short, a patient’s gender may have played and may still play a role in who’s diagnosed with depression and who receives treatments like ECT.

Though Sadowsky said he didn’t find evidence that ECT was used as a form of social control in regard to women in the 1950s, he did say doctors may have felt freer to use ECT on women during that era because their minds were not valued as highly, say, as a male professional’s. “I think it’s a possibility,” he said. “Did they want to mess with the cognitive abilities of a [male] CEO or attorney? Maybe not.”

By the time the 1960s rolled around, new antipsychotic drugs and the first round of antidepressants had helped spark the “deinstitutionalization movement,” a concerted effort to move people from mental hospitals into private homes. Distrust in psychiatry grew, and ECT fell out of favor, though there’s no good data on the extent of that.

But by the 1980s, ECT was making its way into mainstream psychiatry again, because many severely depressed people were not responding to medication. Scientific studies of the treatment proliferated as well.

And doctors developed better ways to apply electricity to the brain — such as using electrodes on only one side, instead of both — which reduced cognitive side effects like memory loss. They also started using brief-pulse ECT instead of sine-wave ECT, which used the type of electricity that comes out of a regular socket.

As psychiatrists developed a better understanding of different types of depression, it became clear that where antidepressants failed, ECT could help.

An electrical storm in the brain

The American Psychiatric Association defines depression as a common, serious illness that has a negative effect on how a person feels, thinks, and acts, and causes feelings of sadness.

There are various types, like major depressive disorder (which can be mild, moderate, or severe) and secondary depression, which results from another underlying medical problem.

No one knows exactly what causes depression, but it has been linked to brain chemistry, genetic makeup, personality, and environmental factors, like violence or abuse.

And the problem isn’t going away — experts told me that the number of people diagnosed with depression has very likely increased since the 1950s. I wasn’t able to find definitive data, though I did find one study showing that depression rates nearly doubled between 1991 and 2002.

In 2017, more than 17 million American adults had at least one major depressive episode — defined by the National Institute for Mental Health as when feelings of sadness or hopelessness occur for most of the day, every day for at least two weeks, and hinder a person’s ability to work, sleep, study, eat, and enjoy life.

Psychotherapy, including cognitive behavioral therapy, is considered the first line of treatment, but it’s not always successful. Severe depression can be incredibly stubborn, and people with this form of the disease may not respond at all to medications or talk therapy.

This is where ECT comes in.

For some patients who have tried everything else and failed, several experts told me, ECT could very literally save their lives.

Dr. Allen Frances, a professor emeritus and former chair of the psychiatry department at Duke University School of Medicine, believes ECT works for people with severe depression and describes the typical ECT patient as someone close to death’s door.

“They’ve lost an enormous amount of weight. They can’t sleep. They’re enormously agitated. Sometimes they’re kind of paralyzed. They can’t move, they can’t think. They’re subject to delusions. It’s a desperate state of affairs for them. [But] within a few ECT treatments, they’re back to themselves,” Frances said. “It’s a very dramatic improvement, and nothing else works as quickly. If I had severe depression, there’s no doubt in my mind that for me, I would want ECT.”

One of the most well-known advocates of ECT is Kitty Dukakis, the wife of former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Michael Dukakis.

Michael Dukakis described to me how for 17 years, beginning in her 40s, Kitty, for no apparent reason, went through recurring cycles of depression. About every eight months, she would fall into a slump, he said. “She had the best care and best doctors and so on and so forth, tried every antidepressant known to man, and nothing worked.” Until she tried ECT.

Kitty said the treatment “worked better than anything else.” She also co-wrote a book about her experience, where she documented her struggle with depression and addiction, and described how ECT helped her feel in control and hopeful. She wrote that it brought her back to being herself — and that it saved her life. “I’ve been very fortunate,” Kitty told me.

After her first round of ECT, she received treatments every eight months, when her depression typically returned. She now has a short treatment about every six weeks, which she said takes about 20 minutes, to keep her symptoms under control. Her doctor calls it maintenance ECT. “I think, partly thanks to her work and the effectiveness of the treatment, it really now has become accepted,” Michael told me.

Doctors still don’t know exactly how ECT works

To get a better sense of how ECT is applied, I visited a clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore that treats between 10 and 20 patients a day.

The clinic was white and clean, and six gurneys were set up where doctors prep patients by giving them an IV and monitoring their vital signs. After this, the patients are wheeled into a small room, where they receive general anesthesia and a muscle relaxant to avoid full-body convulsions.

The psychiatrist then uses electrodes to administer several quick electrical pulses to the brain, which cause the patient to have one or more grand mal seizures in a controlled, barely noticeable way that might, for example, twitch a toe or finger.

Patients can spend two to three hours in the hospital having their vital signs monitored and being prepped for the treatment, but the actual process takes less than 20 minutes. People generally repeat the procedure several times over a few weeks.

ECT is most often prescribed these days as a sort of last resort for patients with severe depression; studies have shown that about 58 to 70 percent of patients with depression respond to ECT. It can push patients toward remission and works faster — and in many cases better — than antidepressants.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, ECT can also be used to treat schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and catatonia — a condition that can cause patients to freeze, lose their ability to control movement, and stop responding to any kind of stimulus. ECT is also now being used to a limited extent to treat children with severe autism who regularly hurt themselves.

Though various studies indicate that ECT works, researchers still don’t know exactly why.

While visiting Johns Hopkins, I spoke to Dr. Irving Reti, the director of the brain stimulation program and a professor of psychiatry. He’s a soft-spoken man with a barely noticeable Australian accent who has treated thousands of patients with ECT.

Reti’s research focuses on what ECT does to the brain. Based on studies of mice, Reti and other researchers found that brain seizures can create molecular changes, which activate certain genes in the hippocampus, an area of the brain known to regulate emotions and the same area that responds to antidepressant drugs.

Many people have compared ECT to hitting a “reset button” in the brain. The treatment can help people who were previously unable to go about their daily lives be functional again, in a short period of time.

For example, Dukakis wrote in her book that she couldn’t leave the house for months due to her debilitating depression, but the same day that she had ECT, she told her husband she wanted to go out for dinner. “These effects, when they’re triggered by ECT as opposed to medications, are more robust and come on more quickly,” Reti told me.

While most patients don’t experience such dramatic or quick improvement — the effects can take weeks or months to appear — many describe it as transformative, or even miraculous. They say it helped them get their life back.

Given all of this, and given what doctors like Reti and Frances say about ECT, it may be surprising that there’s still a debate about whether it should be used at all.

Critics of ECT are concerned about relapse and memory loss

ECT certainly won’t work for everyone. But there’s a vocal group stringently opposed to its use altogether.

John Read is one of the most well-known critics of ECT. In 2010, the professor of clinical psychology at the University of East London began looking at placebo studies to try to figure out if ECT works. And he found that no study had compared ECT to the placebo effect since 1985.

“There’s pretty much no evidence or no strong evidence that it works short-term except for maybe a small number of people, and there’s no evidence that there’s any benefit beyond the end of the last shock,” he told me.

When I asked about the studies showing that it has helped severely depressed patients, he responded that he thinks it’s mainly the placebo effect. “Any success is short-term; [people] almost definitely relapse within the next three to four weeks,” he told me.

I saw this criticism of ECT echoed elsewhere — it has a high relapse rate, and between 30 and 50 percent of patients see their symptoms return, though it varies in how long this takes. Because of this, many people receive regular treatments or continue taking medication after they have ECT. “Some people will be on maintenance antidepressants after ECT. Others will be on maintenance ECT, which is usually something like one treatment a month,” although this depends a lot on the patient, Frances said.

The other problem that most ECT critics cite is memory loss.

One famous case is the singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, who claimed it made him lose all his childhood memories.

Read also said that ECT creates “major memory problems” and causes brain damage. In a January 2019 article in the BMJ called “Should we stop using electroconvulsive therapy?” he argued this point with other professionals who were in favor of the treatment, noting that 29 to 55 percent of patients said they had experienced “persistent or permanent memory loss,” according to a literature review.

Doctors who advocate for ECT say there can be some short-term memory loss, but add that it’s difficult to pinpoint the cause — because severe depression can also cause this to happen.

Jane Rice, who runs a blog called Life After ECT, considers herself a survivor of the treatment, and said that she wants ECT to be banned.

In an email, she told me that she was misdiagnosed as bipolar at a very young age. After a series of drugs, she decided to try ECT, a decision she calls “the worst mistake of my life.”

She received a high number of treatments, roughly 80 of them, between the ages of 17 and 24, and said that they caused brain damage and serious memory loss. When she woke up from one session, Rice said, “it was like someone took my brain apart and put it back together wrong. I couldn’t process my emotions, where I was in space or time, and words disappeared from my mouth before I could say them. I couldn’t do basic tasks like laundry or cooking. Whoever I was before died in that shock clinic.”

Sadowsky, the historian of medicine, thinks memory loss is a big reason many patients don’t want to try ECT. “The side effects of antidepressants are not pleasant, but most people regard severe memory loss as a much bigger risk,” he told me. “People feel, and I think very rightly, that their memories make them who they are.”

Most of the physicians and experts I spoke to who support ECT say it’s plausible that the treatment could be administered incorrectly or to people who don’t have severe depression, causing long-term harm.

But for some patients who are desperate, Frances, Reti, and many others say it’s incredibly useful.

Kitty Dukakis has helped set up support groups for people undergoing ECT in Boston and Seattle. She’s also working on the issue of veteran suicide, she said, and getting ECT to be offered through the VA. “The stigma, it’s probably there but it’s not as bad as it was years ago,” she said.

Researchers are also experimenting with different forms of brain stimulation, to see if they can minimize memory loss.

One type, magnetic seizure therapy, triggers a seizure using magnets instead of electricity. Doctors are also trying out different placements for electrodes to minimize cognitive side effects, Reti told me.

Another type of treatment, tDCS (transcranial direct-current stimulation), uses far less electrical current, and some patients say they’ve had really positive results. Yet many psychiatrists dismiss this type of treatment as still too experimental.

“It’s hard to convey how desperate it is for people who have very severe depression,” Frances told me. “These are not circumstances in which you have the luxury of trying something new that probably is not going to work.”

In search of lost memories

While it seems clear that ECT is a useful tool for some, if the specter of forgetting one’s past didn’t hang over the treatment, I wondered, would it be less vilified, and more frequently used today?

My great-grandmother also experienced memory loss. In February 1954, not long after the ECT treatments ended, Carmela’s daughter Beatrice got married. Though Carmela attended the event as the honored mother of the bride, according to several family members I spoke to, she later said that her memories of this whole time period were fuzzy — and of her daughter’s wedding, she had absolutely no memory at all.

For years, Beatrice feared the long shadow cast by her mother’s mental illness — that she would try to harm her own three daughters when she went through “the change,” and that she, too, would have to undergo some sort of treatment that made her forget happy events, even whole parts of her life. She spoke about it to them often, as a way, perhaps, to ward off the demons that would come for her too.

But in the end, Beatrice never experienced the same mysterious mania that attacked her mother’s brain.

She was always racked with guilt about her decision to give her mother over to the doctors for the new experimental treatment, though. The collective family trauma around this event has outlasted my great-grandmother, and remains today. Some family members didn’t want to talk to me about the experience because, I suspect, it called up too many negative emotions.

However, considering all of this, I’m grateful that my great-grandmother had the treatment, since she survived her battle with mental illness and lived a full, healthy life for many more decades. I wish she were still around today, and that I could talk to her about the experience — what exactly happened so many years ago, and about whether the “shock treatments,” as they called them back then, were worth it. Based on what I know about her life afterward, and the memories we’ve shared, I have to hope they were.

Photo illustrations by Christina Animashaun

Here’s what we know so far about the Poway synagogue shooting

2019-04-29T16:51:25-04:00

Community members and congregants attend a candlelight vigil for the victim of the Chabad of Poway Synagogue shooting at Valle Verde Park on April 28, 2019, in Poway, California. | Sandy Huffaker/AFP/Getty Images

On Saturday, the last day of the Jewish holiday of Passover, a man entered a synagogue in a suburb of San Diego and opened fire on the worshippers inside.

He killed one person, 60-year-old Lori Kaye, who was present at the service to mourn her mother’s death, and injured three other people. Authorities have since arrested the suspect, who has been charged with one count of murder and several counts of attempted murder. On Monday, the suspect’s family released a statement expressing their shock and sadness for the “grief and anguish our son has caused for so many innocent people.”

The Chabad of Poway Synagogue shooting is the latest in a wave of attacks on places of worship in recent months. On Easter Sunday, suicide bombers targeted eight churches and hotels in Sri Lanka, killing over 300 and injuring hundreds more. Last month, a shooter attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, leaving more than 50 people dead. And exactly six months ago, a man attacked the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 people.

The motivations behind these attacks differ, but they share one thing in common: The attackers have tried to transform places of worship and peace into spaces filled with violence, fear, and hate. The tragic irony is that these attacks tend to have the exact opposite effect.

In the wake of the Poway synagogue attack, communities across the US and other faith groups have spoken out in support of the victims, to show their love, support, and solidarity. In an act of incredible composure and defiance, Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, who was injured in the attack, returned to his sermon after the gunman had left the building.

“I guarantee you, we will not be intimidated or deterred by terror,” he told the Today show on Sunday. “Terror will not win.”

If you’re getting caught up on the news from this weekend, here’s what you need to know about the Poway synagogue attack: what happened, who was involved, and how people have responded in the aftermath.

What exactly took place?

On Saturday morning, a man wielding an assault-style rifle entered a synagogue in Poway, a town about 21 miles north of San Diego, during a Passover service.

Lori Kaye, who was attending the service to pray for her mother who had recently died, reportedly jumped in front of the rabbi to protect him. Kaye was shot and killed, and Goldstein was injured in both hands. A 34-year-old man named Almog Peretz and his niece, an 8-year-old girl named Noya Dahan, were injured in the attack as well.

The shooter’s gun apparently jammed, and he then left the building. An off-duty Border Patrol agent who sometimes provided security for the synagogue shot at the suspect and missed as he was driving away. According to Reuters, the suspect called police and admitted to being involved in the shooting and then surrendered on a highway nearby soon after.

The suspect is currently being held on one count of murder and three counts of attempted murder.

Who’s the suspect, and what motivated him?

Police have identified the suspected gunman as 19-year-old John Earnest, a nursing student at California State University San Marcos.

Earnest reportedly published an anti-Semitic manifesto on the far-right message board 8chan hours before the attack. In the letter, which the New York Times describes as full of “racist slurs and white nationalist conspiracy theories,” he expressed his desire to kill Jewish people and wrote that his role models included Jesus Christ, Adolf Hitler, and the Tree of Life and Christchurch shooters.

It was also extremely similar in tone to the manifesto attributed to the Christchurch shooter, NBC News reported, and followed a similar “Q&A” style format.

How have people responded?

On Sunday night, hundreds of people attended a vigil at a community park near Chabad of Poway Synagogue to express their solidarity with the Jewish community. They held candles and prayed for Kaye, the woman who was killed.

President Donald Trump also condemned the attack at a rally in Wisconsin on Saturday, saying, “Our entire nation mourns the loss of life, prays for the wounded, and stands in solidarity with the Jewish community. We forcefully condemn the evil of anti-Semitism and hate, which must be defeated.”

The president also contacted Goldstein, who said that he was “amazed” to have received the phone call. In a press conference on Sunday, Goldstein said that they talked about a number of topics, including the president’s love for Israel, for around 15 minutes. “I’m really grateful to our president for taking the time and making that effort to share with us his comfort and consolation,” he said.

On Monday, the suspected shooter’s family released a strong statement decrying the attack, and expressing their shock and anguish. “Our son’s actions were informed by people we do not know, and ideas we do not hold,” they wrote, and expressed sadness that their son was “now part of the history of evil that has been perpetrated on Jewish people for centuries.” They thanked the first-responders and gave their condolences to the victims and survivors of the attack.

Statement from the family of John T. Earnest. The Earnest Family does not anticipate giving any more public statements on this matter until after the criminal case is resolved. Please direct all inquiries to their attorney, Earll M. Pott at (619) 239-8131. pic.twitter.com/81662R7Egy
— Klinedinst PC (@klinedinstlaw) April 29, 2019

Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday bombings, in 22 pictures

2019-04-23T08:52:21-04:00

Security personnel stand guard outside St. Anthony’s Shrine in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on April 22, 2019, a day after the church was hit in series of bomb blasts. | Mohd Rasfan/AFP/Getty Images

On Easter Sunday, one of the holiest of Christian holidays, a series of coordinated suicide bomb attacks targeting churches and hotels swept across the island nation of Sri Lanka.

By the time the smoke cleared, more than 300 people had died, and hundreds more had been injured.

The vast majority of the victims were Sri Lankan, but citizens of eight other countries, including the US, were reportedly killed in the attacks as well.

Authorities have blamed an Islamist militant group called National Thowheeth Jama’ath for the devastating explosions and are holding 24 people in custody. The Sri Lankan government believes that the group had help from an international terrorist organization in carrying out the attacks.

The bombings come after a decade of relative calm in Sri Lanka — though it’s been rocked by ethnic tensions and fighting in the past.

The Sinhalese ethnic group, who are mainly Buddhist, make up the majority of Sri Lanka’s population, while the Tamil ethnic group, who are mostly Hindu but also include Christians and Muslims, are a minority. Tamils have been historically marginalized and disenfranchised, and after the country (which was known as Ceylon at that time) gained independence from the British in 1948, tensions between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority increased.

Beginning in the 1980s, a separatist group called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or Tamil Tigers, fought a civil war with the Sri Lankan government. The decades-long conflict scarred the country, and left as many as 100,000 people dead. (The country also was hit hard by an Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, which decimated much of Sri Lanka’s coastal infrastructure.)

After the civil war ended in 2009, though, a relative calm ensued. Sri Lanka is known for its lush jungles, tea plantations, Buddhist temples, and beaches, and is a popular tourism destination. Lately, though, Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism has been on the rise; last year Buddhist mobs violently attacked Muslims and Muslim-owned businesses on the island.

The scale of Sunday’s attack targeting Christians, who make up roughly 7 percent of the country’s population, was completely unprecedented, though. It appears the government had advance notice of terrorist threats to churches, but political squabbling among fractious politicians led to the squandering of this intelligence.

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process is dead. An expert explains why.

2019-04-15T10:04:32-04:00

A woman passes in front of the graffiti that depicts a Palestinian flag in the city center of Amman on February 12, 2019. | Artur Widak/NurPhoto/Getty Images

One big question that’s bound to come up in the 2020 presidential election is where do the candidates stand on Israel? It’s an issue that some say is already threatening to split apart the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — which the US attempted to broker for decades — has basically disappeared from view.

Though President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner is working on a peace plan, there’s been almost zero Palestinian input. And Israel’s recent election, which will almost certainly allow right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to maintain his grip on power after he promised to extend sovereignty over large portions of the West Bank, does not bode well for any future vision of peace that includes an independent Palestinian state.

For these reasons and others, there’s a good chance that Kushner’s plan will be dead on arrival.

America’s consistent attempts and failures to broker peace are striking — and a new book by Middle East scholar Khaled Elgindy argues that it’s due to a particular “blind spot” the US has toward the Palestinians.

Elgindy served as an adviser to the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank on peace negotiations in the 2000s and is currently a fellow in the Middle East center at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, DC.

I reached out to him to talk about why the US has failed to broker peace, what role Trump has played in all of this, and how the issue of Israel and the Palestinians will continue to reverberate in the runup to the 2020 election.

A transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity and length, is below.

Alexia Underwood

So let’s start by talking about the US’s “blind spot,” which is the title of your book. Explain what that means.

Khaled Elgindy

The blind spot refers to two areas of diplomacy that American policymakers traditionally have tended to downplay or ignore altogether: Israeli power and Palestinian politics.

The United States has the tendency to treat the two parties as though they were somehow co-equal in power, when in reality, one party is occupying the other. Israel is an occupying power. So it’s not only a conflict, it’s also an occupation.

We’ve seen various moments in history where that plays out very dramatically. For example, when the Israeli army was besieging Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s compound during the second intifada [Palestinian uprising] in 2002, that’s not something that you would see in other contexts. In the negotiations between Egypt and Israel in the 1970s leading up to the 1979 Peace Treaty between the two countries, Israeli tanks didn’t surround Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s headquarters, right?

However, the United States tends to treat the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations like it did with those negotiations between Egypt and Israel, or the Northern Ireland negotiations: If we can just get the two leaders in the room to sit around the negotiating table, they can decide on the difficult compromises.

The other side, the flip side of this blind spot, is Palestinian politics.

American politicians instinctively understand that when you’re negotiating [with a foreign power], you’re not only negotiating with the person in front of you; you’re negotiating with their political opposition, with their public opinion, and so on.

Americans understand that there are certain things you can push the Israelis to do and not do because of their own domestic political pressures. But when it comes to the Palestinians, the tendency is to treat them as if they don’t have politics, as if they don’t have a political opposition that they have to answer to, or a public opinion. It’s not only that they don’t understand the nuances of Palestinian politics. It’s that they treat them as though they don’t have politics at all.

So it’s this sort of twin blind spot — where the Americans downplay Israeli power, especially its ability to dictate realities on the ground, and also neglect of Palestinian politics — that has hampered the US ability to act as an effective broker.

But to add to this, America’s role in the peace process wasn’t only ineffective, it actually made things worse because it exaggerated that already significant power imbalance. And where are we today?

We’ve got a triumphant Israeli government saying, essentially, we won. The settler project is a huge success. And on the other side is this broken, dysfunctional, divided Palestinian leadership that is barely capable of governing the few cantons under its jurisdiction: the West Bank and Gaza. It’s a very dysfunctional reality.

Alexia Underwood

So what’s happened, then, under the Trump administration? Have they made things worse?

Khaled Elgindy

You know, in some ways they’ve made things worse, but in some ways I would argue they’ve actually helped clarify certain things.

There are a couple of different ways to look at the Trump administration. You could say, “Well they’ve adopted a radically different approach.” It’s not at all clear that they actually support a real two-state solution. They’ve essentially thrown out the old peace process. That’s one way to look at it.

Another way to look at it is, “Well, this administration is basically doing, in a very extreme form, what its predecessors had already started doing.” They just took it to its most extreme conclusion.

So take, for example, UN Resolution 242, which has been the basic guidepost for the peace process for more than 50 years. It’s based on the principle of land for peace: that Israel would withdraw from land that it occupied in the 1967 war, in exchange for peace and recognition and normalization with the Arabs.

That was the formula that was used in 1979 with Egypt. And Egypt got the Sinai Peninsula back [which Israel had captured in the 1967 war]. That was the formula in the negotiations in 2000 between Israel and Syria. And that was also the basis for the Oslo Accords [the set of agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1993 and 1995 that kicked off the “Oslo process” — negotiations aimed at getting a peace treaty between the two sides].

US policy was always to frown on Israeli settlements because Israeli settlements directly interfere in that land-for-peace formula. How can you give up land if you’re eating the pie as you negotiate, right? You’re negotiating over how to divvy up the pie, but one side is consuming it.

But though the official position was “settlements are bad,” every US president since the Oslo process began basically carving out loopholes for Israel. They would say, “Yeah, settlements are bad. Israel shouldn’t do it, but I know how important Jerusalem is to you, so go ahead and build in East Jerusalem even though that’s technically still occupied territory. We’re going to treat East Jerusalem different than the rest of the West Bank.”

And then other administrations came in and said, “Well, you know these settlement blocks [in the West Bank] are probably going to be part of Israel anyway, so go ahead and build there too.”

So what ends up happening, then, is that those exceptions become the rule. You’ve gone from something like 270,000 Israeli settlers [in the West Bank and East Jerusalem] in 1993 to now more than double that, around 630,000.

We didn’t get here by accident. We got here because of all those loopholes and allowances and exemptions that were carved out for Israel, because the US and Israel have that “special relationship,” and because the US wanted to accommodate Israeli politics, and imposing a settlement freeze is too hard for an Israeli prime minister to justify to their cabinet or to their political opponents.

So we’re always willing to compromise on these basic rules of the peace process. But in doing that, the consequences are that the settlement enterprise thrived. And they now feel that they are victorious. And land for peace is basically dead.

The word I use in the book for that contradictory position is “ambivalence.” It’s not a very sexy word, but it shows how the US has one position yet holds the opposite position at the same time.

When President Barack Obama came in, I think he recognized the dangers of that ambivalence — that if you’re going to take a position on something, you ought to mean it. Obama said, “I want to stop the settlements. Not some settlements, not just small settlements. All settlements.” He tried to go back to the original peace process. The basic ground rules.

But he didn’t put any teeth into it. He wasn’t prepared to impose any consequences on Israel for not being up to those standards.

So then here comes Trump, and he says, “You know what? I have a different way of resolving this basic contradiction, which is to simply normalize the new reality on the ground — the old rules don’t really apply anymore because there are these realities on the ground, and that’s the new basis for a peace process going forward.”

The problem with that view is that it’s totally arbitrary. It’s one that is dictated by power. That Israel essentially takes what it wants and we, the United States, will endorse that, and whatever is left over can go to the Palestinians.

If, say, Hillary Clinton had won and she was president and was inclined to start a peace process, it would have looked a lot like the Obama peace process. It may have also looked a lot like Bill Clinton’s peace process, where they sort of blur the lines, and fudge the issues, and go through the process for its own sake. You create the illusion of a process even though nobody thinks it’s going anywhere.

I think Trump is the blind spot in its most extreme manifestation. He’s almost a caricature of the blind spot. But by taking things to their absurd extreme, he’s created a clarifying moment for people, so a lot of Democrats are now like, “Oh, my god. This is not acceptable.” Maybe there are even some Republicans out there who are uncomfortable with these new dynamics.

Alexia Underwood

So you’re saying that Trump has done away with the illusion.

Khaled Elgindy

Yes, he’s done away with the pretense and the illusion and all of that. Now we’re facing this stark choice: Are we supporting a two-state solution or we supporting a binational, one-state solution? Or are we getting behind what is effectively an apartheid reality on the ground? By unblurring the lines, he’s kind of put those options in stark focus.

Alexia Underwood

Let’s talk for a moment about his administration’s Middle East peace proposal, the so-called “deal of the century” that Jared Kushner has been working on. Many people think it’s going to be dead upon arrival. But what would it need to actually have a chance of success?

Khaled Elgindy

Let me answer that question in a slightly different way. There’s basically a litmus test that you can apply to see whether this is a serious thing.

First is does it call for an end to Israeli occupation? Does it actually say “end to occupation,” the way every president before Trump has? Second, does it refer to UN Resolution 242? Again, this is the basic, big ground rule of the peace process. And third, does it call for the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state?

If it doesn’t meet all three of those standards, then we’re not even at the most minimal requirements of a pretend peace process.

Then we have to broaden the criteria. If we’re not talking about a two-state solution, what are we talking about? Does whatever you’re calling for allow for self-determination for both Israelis and Palestinians? Or does it simply repackage the subjugation of one group over another one?

If your solution does not include self-determination for everyone, and basic civil, human, and political rights for everyone, then it’s not a real process. Any plan that is based on or implies the continued subjugation of one group over the other is just repackaging the conflict and perpetuating it.

Alexia Underwood

Okay. I think we can say based on what we know that this plan doesn’t meet those requirements. So what comes next? What’s the next effective step that Palestinians and Israelis can take?

Khaled Elgindy

I don’t see a diplomatic process on the horizon. It’s possible that one could emerge at a later stage, but currently there’s no replacement to either an old Oslo process or to the United States as the chief mediator. And so we’ve got a bit of a vacuum there.

But we also have a dysfunctional reality on the ground.

I think if the Palestinians, especially as the weakened party, are going to change their circumstances, it’s not going to come from the United States. It’s not going to come from the Israelis. It’s probably not going to come from the United Nations. It’s going to have to start with themselves first.

Right now the only party that really wants to radically alter the status quo is the Palestinians, and I think the first step to doing that is going to have to be to fix their own house, to put their political house in order. Ending the division between the West Bank and Gaza and the political split between Hamas [the Palestinian organization that rules Gaza] and Fatah [the Palestinian organization that runs the government in the West Bank] is the first step, but it’s also kind of a necessary but insufficient condition. That’s only the beginning. Then the Palestinians have to decide what is the future of these institutions.

The Palestinians need a new kind of constitutional moment, a new consensus-building process that will redefine the Palestinian national movement, its priorities, its institutions, its strategy, because clearly all the old ones are either broken or failed or have disappeared.

I think it’s really important for them to start thinking about these issues — not just reconciliation, but also what happens after.

Alexia Underwood

Given all this, I’m curious to hear what you think about how the conversation around Israel and the Palestinians is shifting in the US. Some people on the progressive left seem more willing to talk about the Palestinians’ situation. Do you think this is something that’s going to come up in the 2020 election?

Khaled Elgindy

Yeah, I think it is going to be a factor, because if nothing else, the Republicans will make it a factor.

We’ve already seen how. We have this emerging division inside Democratic ranks, within the party, that the Republicans are very keen on exploiting. We saw that with the anti-BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions] legislation, which they immediately tabled as soon as the government shutdown ended.

I know a lot of folks in the Democratic establishment are nervous. They would rather not be divided on any particular issues, because they need a united front to be able to defeat Trump and all that. And I think the impulse of most of the campaigns will be to avoid this issue as much as they can.

But I think it will be very hard to avoid for two reasons: One, the Republicans will make it an issue, to put Democrats on the spot. And two, because there is now a very mobilized political constituency that cares about the issue and has a different view from either the Republican or the Democratic party establishment. And they are becoming increasingly restive. They want to be vocal on this issue.

I think the progressive grassroots want to make it kind of a litmus test for Democratic candidates, because they see this is part of intersectional relationships with other issues, like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, and non-intervention in general in places like Venezuela.

They see this as part and parcel of this kind of ideological approach. And they’re going to make it an issue. So it’s going to come from both sides. It’s going to come from the progressive grassroots, and it’s going to come from the Republican establishment.

One thing I’ve heard from more than one Democratic campaign is that, for the most part, they don’t expect foreign policy to be an issue in 2020, except on this issue of Israel and the Palestinians. They’re anticipating that it will come up.

Alexia Underwood

Which 2020 candidate who has announced so far do you think seems to have the best handle on this issue — meaning, who’s the least likely to have the “blind spot” that you mention?

Khaled Elgindy

So far, the person who has the most clearly articulated view on this issue has to be Bernie Sanders. Since 2016, he’s been articulating a series of positions on Israel-Palestine. He’s not just responding. You know, a lot of times campaigns or candidates will have to stake out a position because they’re asked, “Well, where do you stand on this?” — on the US decision to move their embassy to Jerusalem, or the Iran deal, or whatever.

I think most of the other candidates are probably still a little bit gun-shy; none of them have, to my knowledge, anything like Sanders’s fleshed-out set of positions on this issue. I think what we’ve mostly heard is falling back on “We want a two-state solution to the conflict,” etc. But I don’t think they’ve really been pressed on it.

But Sanders has staked out, proactively, a fairly coherent set of policies, and what was pretty remarkable was that he did it in 2016, in Brooklyn, when he went into the debate with Hillary Clinton. I think he recognized that this is no longer a political liability — and that there’s actually a political benefit that can be gained from taking on this issue.

5 things to know about one of Israel’s most important elections in decades

2019-04-10T10:46:21-04:00

A man passes by a Likud party election campaign poster showing its leader, Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu, on April 1, 2019, in the city of Haedera, Israel. | Amir Levy/Getty Images

Israelis head to the polls Tuesday in what could be the most consequential election in decades.

Right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, who has spent a total of 13 years in power, is seeking his fourth consecutive term. It’s one of the toughest election fights he’s ever encountered.

Netanyahu is facing possible indictment by Israel’s attorney general on fraud and corruption charges, and he’s also going up against a particularly formidable opponent: Benny Gantz, a centrist former military chief whose impressive national security credentials pose a direct threat to Netanyahu’s grip on power.

President Donald Trump has taken a number of steps to help shore up victory for Netanyahu, one of his closest allies in the region — including making the decision last month to formally recognize Israeli sovereignty over the disputed Golan Heights.

But the prime minister still seems worried that power could slip from his grasp — and polls suggest he has a right to be. On Saturday, in what was seen as a dramatic, last-minute attempt to energize far-right voters and thus tip the scales in his favor, Netanyahu announced that, if elected, he would annex large parts of the West Bank.

Officially extending Israeli sovereignty over Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which has long been seen as a critical part of any future Palestinian state, would effectively spell the end of the dwindling hopes of one day achieving peace and creating a real, functional state for Palestinians.

It’s anyone’s guess whether Netanyahu’s brash move will be enough to put him over the top — and given the peculiarities of Israel’s parliamentary system, even if his Likud party wins a plurality in Tuesday’s election, it’s still not a guarantee that he will be able to form a coalition government and stay in power.

With so much at stake in this election, all eyes will be on Israel. Here are the key issues you need to know so you can follow along.

1) Israel’s prime minister is fighting for his job

Netanyahu is headed into this election plagued by multiple corruption scandals that just won’t seem to go away.

Over the past year, the 69-year-old prime minister has been the focus of three investigations into allegations that he doled out political favors in exchange for positive news coverage and committed fraud, among other things. In late February, Israel’s attorney general announced that he intended to charge the prime minister for crimes related to corruption, pending a hearing.

This puts a lot of pressure on Netanyahu and his party to perform well at the polls, because if he manages to retain his position as prime minister, there’s a chance he can pass a law that would basically protect him from being put on trial.

“He’s desperate to avoid criminal prosecution,” Ilan Goldenberg, who directs the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington, told me.

But while some voters are surely put off by the corruption allegations, many Israelis still see Netanyahu as the right candidate for the job. Israel’s economy has prospered in the past decade, and Netanyahu is seen as being tough on Iran, a country Israel regards as an existential threat. Many view Netanyahu’s close relationship with Trump as another point in his favor. The US president’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the decision to hand sovereignty to Israel over the Golan Heights, and Trump’s much harder line toward Iran have all reflected well on Netanyahu.

In another election year, these examples may have been enough to easily counteract stubborn corruption allegations — but it may not be so simple this year. Netanyahu is also facing a particularly compelling opponent.

2) Benny Gantz is portraying himself as the anti-Netanyahu

Netanyahu is up against Benny Gantz, a 59-year-old retired general who from 2011 to 2015 served as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff — the supreme commander of the entire Israeli military and its highest-ranked officer.

Gantz is new to Israeli politics, and has been described as calm, cool, and soft-spoken. He was reportedly considering the role of Israel’s defense minister before polls showed that he was an extremely popular choice for prime minister prior to him even entering the political arena.

In December 2018, Gantz created a new party called Israel Resilience, whose stated platform was to pursue “the continued development and strengthening of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state” and focus on issues like education, agriculture, and internal security. Then in February, Gantz joined forces with the Yesh Atid party to form a centrist alliance that branded itself the Blue and White party, after the colors of the Israeli flag (basically the equivalent of an American political party calling itself the “Red, White, and Blue Party.”)

The former military officer has painted himself as a political outsider who would be a breath of fresh air. He’s talked about “uniting” Israel and refocusing on democracy. He’s taken aim at Netanyahu by saying he’ll fight corruption and impose term limits. But he doesn’t differ much from Netanyahu in other areas, like his policy on the Palestinians. He’s also allied with some extremely hawkish politicians in the Knesset.

In short, some say, he’s trying to be all things to all people — but mainly offer an alternative to the embattled prime minister.

Netanyahu, for his part, has had a lot of success partly by portraying himself as tough on security issues, like his policy toward Iran, and his forceful response to rocket attacks from Gaza. In past elections, that has served him well. But he is finally facing off against someone he can’t so easily paint as weak on security — though he’s certainly tried.

3) The future of the West Bank — and the prospects for peace — is on the line in this election

In a bid to win support from Israel’s far right, Netanyahu declared over the weekend that he would “extend sovereignty” to the roughly 130 Jewish settlements in the West Bank if he’s reelected.

The West Bank is a section of land east of Israel that’s home to about 2.6 million Palestinians. As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp writes, “Israel took control of it in 1967 and has allowed Jewish settlers to move in, but Palestinians (and most of the international community) consider it illegally occupied Palestinian land.”

Today, about 622,000 Jewish settlers now live in the West Bank, in enclaves that range from sizable cities with middle-class villas to small encampments.

The West Bank would likely form the basis of a future Palestinian state in any two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — a plan that Netanyahu and past US administrations have endorsed. But Netanyahu’s promise to start annexing parts of the region would significantly change things.

One reason is that these blocs are spread out across the West Bank. So if they become official territory of the state of Israel, that leaves the land left for a future Palestinian state looking a bit like a piece of Swiss cheese — a bunch of disconnected pieces of territory with sovereign Israeli land dotted throughout. That’s hardly conducive to forming a coherent, sovereign state where Palestinians can one day live in peace.

And that is precisely the point: By annexing these settlements, rather than treating them (at least on paper) as illegal outposts that will one day be dismantled, Netanyahu would essentially be giving a huge gift to the Israeli right.

“It seems clear that he is making a bid for right-wing voters and especially the pro-settlement, ‘Greater Israel’ crowd that has been pushing for annexation for several years,” said Khaled Elgindy, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, DC. “Such a move would likely signal the death knell of the two-state solution, and move Israel closer to a formal apartheid reality on the ground.”

In addition to Netanyahu’s desire to shore up support from Israel’s right, there’s another factor behind this announcement. Last month, Trump announced that the US would recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a disputed area of land that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War, though the international community regards this as a clear violation of international law.

“The reason Netanyahu didn’t do this before is because of the international pressure that’s been brought to bear on him,” said Diana Buttu, a Palestinian Canadian lawyer and former spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). “But he got the green light with the recognition of the Golan, and previously with [Trump’s] recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. It’s a process that’s been a long time in coming.”

4) There’s a chance that Arab Israelis could swing the election

This group — many of whom prefer to be called Palestinians in Israel, or Palestinian citizens of Israel — make up about one-fifth of the Israeli electorate. They include Muslims, Christians, and Druze (a religious minority). Many Arab citizens of Israel are frustrated and disillusioned with the political process, and point to decades of systemic discrimination against them.

Buttu specifically pointed to a law that was changed the year before the 2015 election that requires that political parties receive 3.25 percent of total votes cast in order to meet the electoral threshold to join the Knesset (Israel’s parliament). That law, Buttu said, has made it difficult for some minority groups to be properly represented.

According to recent polls, only about 50 percent of this group said they planned to vote, and there have been calls to boycott the election. In recent weeks, though, some prominent figures have spoken out to emphasize the importance of participating in the political process, however flawed. Palestinian rapper Tamer Nafar even made a music video encouraging Arabs in Israel to fight racism by making their voices heard at the ballot box. “If our vote will … imprison Bibi, then we’re ready,” he says.

If they do, it could be a game changer, since they could give enough support to Gantz’s bloc that he edges out Netanyahu, Haaretz reports. If they largely decide not to participate, though, Netanyahu has a better chance of winning.

Netanyahu has been running a distinctly anti-Arab campaign — even more so than in previous elections. He recently joined with the openly racist, previously banned ultra-right-wing Jewish Power party, which earned him rare criticism from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups. It’s possible that frustration with Netanyahu’s approach could inspire more Arabs in Israel to cast their ballots — and tip the scales away from the sitting prime minister.

5) Even if Netanyahu’s party wins big Tuesday, that doesn’t necessarily guarantee he’ll remain in power

According to some polls, Netanyahu’s Likud party has a slight leg up going into the election, but the intricacies of Israel’s electoral system, and the fact that there are still a number of undecided voters, mean the outcome is anything but clear.

Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, is composed of 120 seats. Israelis don’t vote for individuals, but instead choose parties. There are dozens of parties competing to win spots in the Knesset, but Likud (headed by Netanyahu) and the Blue and White party (headed by Gantz) have the most support by far.

However, because no party has ever won an outright majority of seats and they’re not expected to this time, Gantz and Netanyahu’s parties have to ally with some of the smaller parties to form a coalition that would allow each of them to govern.

But some of these parties may not win enough votes to meet the threshold to even enter the Knesset (3.25 percent of the national vote, or about four seats), which means it’s difficult to predict who, at the end of the day, will end up on top.

There’s also another complicating factor: The leader of the party with the most votes doesn’t just become the next prime minister; Israel’s president (who is elected to a seven-year term by an absolute majority in the Knesset) ultimately decides who forms the next government.

After all the votes have been counted, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin will consult with the leaders of the winning parties and make a decision about who among them should be the next prime minister.

That process could take about a week. The party leader who is chosen will then have six weeks to form a governing coalition. If they fail, another party leader takes over.

In short, there are lots of scenarios that could play out on Tuesday. Which makes this election a nail-biter — one that could have ramifications for decades to come.

The recent spike in tensions between India and Pakistan, explained

2019-03-01T15:39:07-05:00

Supporters of the youth wing of India’s governing party in Noida, India, celebrating after the airstrike on Balakot on February 26, 2019. | Virendra Singh Gosain/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

Tensions between two nuclear-armed countries, India and Pakistan, are at one of the highest points in decades. On Friday, though, the situation seemed to improve somewhat when Pakistan released an Indian combat pilot that they had captured earlier that week.

Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman’s plane was shot down during an air skirmish between the two countries on Wednesday. After parachuting into Pakistani territory, he was reportedly beaten by a mob of people before the military took him into custody. In one video that emerged, Varthaman is shown blindfolded and bloody, and in another, he is drinking tea and saying that he’s been treated well.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s decision to release the pilot comes amid public pressure on the two leaders to back down from the brink of war, after a number of recent tit for tat attacks.

Earlier this month, a militant group based in Pakistan carried out a suicide bomb attack that killed dozens of Indian troops in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir, a disputed border region. Then, on Tuesday, India launched an airstrike on Pakistani territory, reportedly targeting the militant group’s training facility — the first time India has sent warplanes into Pakistani territory since the 1970s.

The next day, Pakistan’s military said that it had conducted airstrikes within Indian-controlled Kashmir and had shot down two Indian planes that had entered Pakistani airspace. A spokesperson for the Pakistani military also confirmed on Twitter that they had captured the Indian Air Force pilot.

Meanwhile, India’s foreign ministry said that they had shot down a Pakistani plane, and confirmed that one of their own planes had been lost.

On Tuesday, Khan scheduled a special session of the National Command Authority, the government arm that oversees the country’s nuclear weapons. The situation remains tense, and some fear that things could escalate out of control, potentially even ending in the unthinkable: the use of nuclear weapons.

Hans Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project, tweeted that both sides needed to take immediate steps to improve the situation. “Why do both Pakistan and Indian heads of state signal that they have no control over rapidly evolving military escalation?” he wrote. “They need to rein in their generals and make decisions to de-escalate the crisis.”

And Vipin Narang, a nuclear expert and associate professor of political science at MIT, warned that while neither side wants war, the conflict was starting to spiral out of control. “This is getting ugly quickly,” he wrote on Twitter. “Need off-ramps and now.”

India and Pakistan have been engaged in simmering conflict for decades

India and Pakistan are neighbors who have been engaged in varying levels of conflict for decades. As Tom Hundley wrote for Vox last year:

India and Pakistan have gone to war four times since 1947, when Britain partitioned what had been a single colony into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. They have been in a state of constant hostility ever since, and for the past two decades, they have been locked in a frightening nuclear arms race on land.

The main source of conflict at the moment is Kashmir, a disputed border region between the two countries.

On February 14, a massive suicide attack killed dozens of Indian soldiers who were traveling in a convoy to the city of Srinagar, in a part of Kashmir that’s under India’s control.

Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), an Islamist militant group that wants the disputed border region to become part of Pakistan, claimed responsibility for the attack. The group is designated as a terrorist organization by the US State Department, as well as the United Nations, the United Kingdom, and India.

Since its founding in 2000, JeM has carried out numerous high-profile terror attacks in India, and is believed to responsible for the kidnapping and beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002.

That same year, Pakistan officially banned JeM. Yet today, some 17 years later, the group continues to exist in the country and is still capable of carrying out deadly attacks outside of it.

That’s the reason India blamed Pakistan’s government for the February 14 terror attack. India says Pakistan’s government allows JeM to operate in the country freely and is demanding that the government take action to prevent further attacks from being carried out.

India also retaliated by launching an airstrike against what it says was a major JeM training camp. In doing so, India’s planes appear to have crossed the Line of Control, or LoC, an extremely sensitive dividing line between India and Pakistan in Kashmir, which the country had been careful to avoid in the past.

It was a major provocation, and one that dramatically ratcheted up tensions between the two nuclear powers.

After the flurry of subsequent airstrikes on Wednesday, Michael Kugelman, a South Asia expert with the Wilson Center, told Vox that the situation had reached a pivotal point.

“Now that New Delhi and Islamabad have both demonstrated their resolve and muscle by staging limited military strikes, will each side now claim victory and agree to deescalate? Or will political and public pressure prompt the two to double down and consider additional escalatory measures?” he said.

Despite the news of the pilot’s release, it’s not yet clear which route they’ll choose.

Alex Ward and Jennifer Williams contributed reporting to this article.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu to be indicted on bribery charges pending hearing

2019-02-28T17:35:17-05:00

Israeli protesters raise signs as they demonstrate against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the wake of police recommendations to indict him on corruption, in the coastal city of Tel Aviv on February 16, 2018. | Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images

In a long-awaited decision, Israel’s Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit announced on Thursday that he intends to officially charge Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu with crimes related to corruption.

The attorney general plans to indict the prime minister on bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, charges related to three different corruption cases, the Israeli news outlet Haaretz reported. The indictment is pending the results of a hearing and is not final.

Israeli police recommended three times last year that Netanyahu be indicted on corruption charges — so Mandelblit’s decision didn’t come as a complete surprise. But it’s still pretty bad timing for the prime minister.

Israeli elections are coming up on April 9, and Netanyahu is running for his fourth consecutive term. The attorney general’s decision could lead to the conservative Likud party losing its grip on power, and also make it difficult for them to form a coalition after elections.

Similar to a certain US president, Netanyahu has accused investigators of leading a “witch hunt” against him and decried the “liberal” media for conspiring to undermine him.

In a speech on Thursday after the attorney general’s announcement, Netanyahu doubled down on these claims, calling himself “the most vilified person in the history of Israeli media,” according to the Jerusalem Post. He also vowed to continue serving as prime minister for years to come.

The attorney general’s decision comes after years of investigations

Netanyahu is facing charges related to three corruption cases.

In the first, known as Case 1000, Israeli police allege that for years, Netanyahu and his wife Sara received gifts in the form of hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of champagne, jewelry, and cigars from wealthy individuals in the United States and Australia.

In exchange, Netanyahu reportedly tried to extend tax exemption legislation that would have benefited at least one of the men involved. The new charges related to this case are fraud and breach of trust.

In the second case, known as Case 2000, one of Netanyahu’s aides recorded lengthy conversations between the prime minister and the head of Yedioth Ahronoth, one of Israel’s largest papers, in which they discussed a deal making the paper less critical of Netanyahu.

In return, the prime minister would stop the weekend publication of the paper’s commercial rival, Israel Today, which is owned by US casino magnate Sheldon Adelson (which is sometimes known in Israel as the “Bibi paper” for its pro-Netanyahu stance).

The deal apparently was never settled, but the conversations in themselves were damning enough. The charges in this case are breach of trust and fraud.

The third and most recent case against the prime minister is known as Case 4000, and experts agree that this is the most damning.

On December 2, Israeli police accused Netanyahu of trading regulatory favors for positive media coverage of himself and his family. Over a period of five years, the prime minister reportedly intervened in the day-to-day coverage and affairs of Walla, a news website run by the country’s telecommunications company, Bezeq.

In return, Netanyahu — in his role as minister of communications, which is one of his titles — allegedly rewarded the company by using his political power to give them more favorable regulations, despite political opposition. The charges related to this case are bribery and breach of trust.

So what’s next for Israel’s prime minister?

Netanyahu will likely participate in a hearing, where he will have the chance to rebut the accusations. If the indictment becomes official, there could be appeal hearings, and the process could potentially last several months, or even years.

If Netanyahu is reelected — and that’s a big if — it’s unclear how this process will affect him. There’s an ongoing legal debate about whether the prime minister can be forced to resign if he has to sit trial, experts told me.

In the meantime, the prime minister still enjoys a high level of popularity among Israelis. He’s proved remarkably resilient to corruption claims that have plagued his administration for years.

But with elections coming up right around the corner, it remains to be seen how the news about the potential indictment could cause the political landscape to shift.

This new art exhibit wants to change the way you think about the Syrian refugee crisis

2019-02-05T15:51:54-05:00

Syrian Migration Series #5 by Helen Zughaib. | Courtesy of the artist

Syrians have been fleeing war for the better part of eight years — and their plight barely registers on the news anymore.

But the slow-motion train wreck that is the Syria conflict is still happening.

In Washington, DC, renowned Arab-American artist Helen Zughaib, whose work has been presented to foreign heads of state by former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is trying to draw attention to Syrians’ struggle.

Her new art exhibit, the Syrian Migration Series, tells a compelling story of protests, rebellion, and civil war, the events that led millions of people to flee Syria for a safer harbor.

It was also inspired, she says, by something a little closer to home: artist Jacob Lawrence’s famed Migration Series, which depicts the challenges African Americans faced during the Great Migration out of the South in the early to mid-1900s.

While the two migrations are vastly different in many ways, they also share some similarities, Zughaib said. And it’s the desire to bring home the impact of this seemingly far-away crisis that has inspired Zughaib to spend three years on this particular series.

“This massive displacement of people … has affected the world, and has had ramifications here, Europe, certainly the Middle East,” Zughaib told me. “It’s an important story to tell. And it’s not finished yet.”

Zughaib’s paintings are bright and accessible. They also depict a people in crisis.

Gallery Al-Quds, which houses Zughaib’s latest exhibit, is a small, intimate space within the offices of the Jerusalem Fund, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit that focuses on educational and humanitarian work on behalf of Palestinians.

Walking inside, you’re greeted with racks of Palestinian olive oil, books, and art prints for sale. But Zughaib’s colorful paintings, which line a corridor, quickly command attention. They also appear suddenly, around curved corners, and on small, hidden walls. If you want to view the collection in its entirety — the way it’s meant to be viewed — you’re forced to go on a journey.

Zughaib begins the series with an artist statement, which grounds viewers in some of the history of the Arab Spring, the wave of protests that swept much of the Middle East beginning in late 2010. It led to the overthrow of dictators in some countries, but to grueling civil war in others. In Syria, the ensuing conflict has displaced millions, and left hundreds of thousands dead.

Zughaib had just returned from a show in Beirut, Lebanon, in 2010 when the uprisings began, she told me, and she was inspired to start documenting the political changes sweeping the region. “Everyone was so optimistic in the beginning, and then the years dragged on, the revolutions continued,” she said. The result in Syria was civil war.

For nearly eight years, Zughaib has sought to highlight the most vulnerable victims of the war — as she writes in her statement, “the women and children left to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives.”

One might expect, then, that her paintings would be dark and dismal. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

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Instead, her 25 gouache and ink-on-board pieces are awash with bright, vivid colors and lively geometric patterns. At first glance, they’re almost whimsical, until you look a little closer.

The brilliant rainbows, it turns out, are actually fire and explosions. The colorful robes, hijabs, and bows that adorn her figures distract us from noticing that they are fleeing their Syrian towns in droves, heading to Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan, or mourning their injured or dead family members.

If you follow the narrative arc of the paintings, and learn to see past the brilliant color and geometric shapes, the war’s horrors become startlingly clear: arrest, interrogation, chemical weapons attacks. The most somber painting in the entire collection depicts the tens of thousands of Syrians who have been “disappeared” — many in Syrian prisons — by showing a few figures dressed in black and white against a stark black background.

Later, refugees in colorful attire appear in a boat on a wild sea. The picture could almost be joyful, until you read the caption, which reminds the viewer that many such boats capsized, drowning everyone on board.

What the caption doesn’t say is that those boats are still coming. And those boats are still sinking.

Zughaib told me that while she strives not to cast blame on one side or another in her work, she was inspired by the need to show that the consequences of this war are still happening, and are having long-term effects far beyond the immediate region.

The migration crisis has strengthened the rhetoric of right-wing groups in some countries and led to political parties that are “a little fanatical” taking power, she told me, amid a surge of anti-immigrant sentiment.

Far-right leaders like Matteo Salvini, Italy’s interior minister, have pushed for stringent anti-migrant policies. Salvini recently drafted legislation that would revoke humanitarian protection for migrants and refugees in the country, and make it easier for them to be deported.

“It’s the largest displacement of people that’s ever been recorded, and many times the unwillingness or inability of different countries to host them, take care of them, assimilate them, to deal with the myriad of problems that come with a huge influx of people — it’s a day-to-day situation that hasn’t been resolved,” Zughaib said.

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The exhibit draws subtle parallels between Syrians and African Americans fleeing the South in the past century

In some ways, the arduous journey that many Syrians have embarked on is emblematic of other forced migrations as well.

Zughaib is Lebanese American, and her parents are both US citizens. They were living in Lebanon in the 1970s when she and her mother and two sisters were forced to flee because of the civil war there. Her father stayed behind for several months. “He told me we’d be back in a week,” she said. “We didn’t actually return until 35 years later.” Though Zughaib is not an immigrant, and does not consider herself a refugee, she feels that her experience helps her relate to what Syrians today are experiencing.

Part of her inspiration, as well, came from artist Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series, which is on display at The Phillips Collection, a modern art museum in Washington, DC. His 60 panels, painted between 1940 and 1941, depict the arduous journey that many African Americans took during the first half of the last century to leave the South and find new economic opportunity in the North.

"Black Bodies in Motion and in Pain:" Edwidge Danticat on Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series. http://t.co/w31nVA2gwL pic.twitter.com/agzD8dGDkb
— MoMA The Museum of Modern Art (@MuseumModernArt) June 23, 2015

Zughaib said she had known of his collection for years, and saw some obvious parallels between the two journeys, including the fact that many Syrian children were forced to work instead of attending school, just like African-American children who migrated with their families to the North and West.

The composition of one painting in particular also spoke to her.

“I looked at one of his pieces in the beginning of The Migration Series, where people are going to St. Louis and Chicago and New York; I thought, the Syrians are going to Germany and Turkey and Greece,” Zughaib said. “It felt like a natural progression to me, to link them up.”

Zughaib considers Lawrence an influence on her own style, and when she had the opportunity to meet the renowned American artist before he died, she was overcome with emotion. “I got to shake hands with him, and since he was one of my artist heroes, I just ended up crying. I was so overwhelmed. I love his work and style, and feel a kinship to his style, regardless, with the pattern and color, and sort of geometry and the movement of his pieces,” she said.

The museum curator at Gallery Al-Quds, Dagmar Painter, has placed a card under each of Zughaib’s pieces with a caption and a thumbnail image of the Jacob Lawrence work that inspired it.

For a painting of Lawrence’s that depicts African-American migrants traveling under a blue sky lined with birds, for example, Zughaib has chosen to paint Syrian refugees traveling in a similar manner, and replaced the birds in the original image with airplanes, carrying bombs.

Painter, the gallery curator, told me that the exhibit was intentionally meant to foster a feeling of intersectionality — that one group of refugees’ struggles can share similarities with other people’s migration struggles.

Zughaib seems to agree.

While she has purposefully chosen to depict the journey of Syrians fleeing war, “within that context that brings up the whole idea of immigration and migrants. That seeps into the whole drama of what’s been happening,” she said.

Eight years into the process, her attempt to document the crisis is not over. “I will keep at it,” Zughaib told me. “I will keep telling the story until there seems to be a natural end.”

Helen Zughaib’s Syrian Migration Series will be on display at the Jerusalem Fund’s Gallery Al-Quds from January 25 to February 28, 2019.

Egypt’s president tried to stop a 60 Minutes interview from airing. It’s now clear why.

2019-01-07T14:15:14-05:00

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi during bilateral talks prior to the “Compact with Africa” conference on October 30, 2018, in Berlin, Germany. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images

One of President Donald Trump’s favorite Middle Eastern dictators, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, just gave a hell of an interview to 60 Minutes — one so controversial that his government tried to stop it from airing.

In the Sunday interview with CBS correspondent Scott Pelley, Sisi uttered a series of lies and half-truths about his government’s gross human rights violations, and confirmed for the first time that Egypt’s military is working closely with Israel in the Sinai Peninsula.

Looking visibly uncomfortable at moments, Sisi, who seized power from the country’s democratically elected leader in 2013 after a wave of popular protests, deflected several pointed questions about his government’s repressive tactics.

For example, when Pelley asked him directly about the high number of prisoners of conscience in Egypt’s prisons, Sisi denied that they existed.

“Mr. President, the organization Human Rights Watch says that there are 60,000 political prisoners that you’re holding today as we sit here,” Pelley pressed.

“I don’t know where they got that figure. I said there are no political prisoners in Egypt. Whenever there is a minority trying to impose their extremist ideology, we have to intervene, regardless of their numbers,” Sisi said, referring to members of deposed president Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood party, which Sisi’s government has designated a terrorist organization.

Why is U.S. tax money aiding a leader accused of the worst abuses in Egypt’s modern history? Scott Pelley sits down with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi for an interview the leader didn’t want you to see. https://t.co/GIcxF6sNB7 pic.twitter.com/Xtsf4srQfw
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) January 7, 2019

Pelley also raised the issue of the horrific 2013 Rabaa massacre, in which Egyptian security forces gunned down more than 800 protesters in a matter of hours. Human Rights Watch’s executive director Kenneth Roth has described the event as “a violent crackdown planned at the highest levels of the Egyptian government,” and “one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history.”

Sisi, however, denied responsibility, saying that the Human Rights Watch report was inaccurate and that thousands of protesters were armed. However, Egyptian media reported at the time that only 16 or 17 weapons were found at the protest encampment. “Whenever there is an armed confrontation with a big number of people, it’s difficult to control the situation and to decide who killed whom,” Sisi said.

Egypt’s president also admitted for the first time publicly that his government is working closely with Israel’s military to wipe out a growing insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula, confirming that Egypt has a “wide range of coordination with the Israelis.”

The New York Times first reported the secret alliance in February of last year. Israel and Egypt have a complicated and sometimes contentious history, and many have speculated that Sisi’s public admission of the military cooperation with Israel was the reason Egypt tried to block the interview from being aired.

Sisi may have committed crimes against humanity, but Trump still thinks he’s a stand-up guy

In the five years since he’s been in office, Sisi has presided over a security crackdown that’s left thousands dead, imprisoned tens of thousands more, and made the use of torture routine. He’s repressed free speech, undermined civil society, and ramped up a failing war ISIS-linked fighters in the Sinai.

Throughout it all, he’s blamed unrest on the supporters of former president Mohamed Morsi and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood party, which Egypt has now designated a terrorist group.

Andrew Miller, a national security official who served under President Barack Obama, was also interviewed in the same 60 Minutes segment and called Sisi’s government the most repressive in modern Egyptian history.

“Since Sisi took office, living standards have declined. The country is crumbling. The insurgency problem in the Sinai has only gotten worse. It’s backed by the Islamic State, entering its sixth year. And you’ve seen the mass incarceration of peaceful activists alongside hardened jihadists, which threatens to turn more Egyptians to terrorism. That seems to be a recipe for the very instability that Sisi claims he’s preventing,” Miller said.

However, this hasn’t seemed to have a significant effect on Egypt’s relationship with the US. Egypt remains the second biggest recipient of US aid after Israel, and President Donald Trump has hosted Sisi at the White House, referred to him as a “fantastic guy” — and even complimented him on his shoes for good measure.

A few hours before the interview on Sunday, President Trump praised Sisi on Twitter, writing that he was “moving the country to a more inclusive future!”

Excited to see our friends in Egypt opening the biggest Cathedral in the Middle East. President El-Sisi is moving his country to a more inclusive future!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2019

It’s probably safe to say that many, many Egyptians — like the families of the 60,000 political prisoners, for example — would beg to differ.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu could be indicted. Here’s what you need to know.

2019-01-01T16:57:09-05:00

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks with Ronen Peretz during the weekly cabinet meeting at the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem on December 16, 2018. | Abir Sultan/AFP/Getty Images

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu continues to find himself in deeper and deeper legal trouble — but that doesn’t mean he’ll be leaving office anytime soon.

Last month, Israeli police recommended that Netanyahu be indicted on fraud, bribery, and breach of trust charges, and accused him of granting regulatory favors to Israeli telecom giant Bezeq in exchange for flattering news coverage of himself on a website owned by the telecom company.

But at a press conference on Monday in Brazil, the prime minister said that he would not step down if he were called to a corruption hearing before Israeli elections in April. “The hearing doesn’t end until you hear my side, and it doesn’t make sense to open the hearing process before the election if you can’t finish it before the election,” he said.

This isn’t the first time Netanyahu has found himself at the center of a corruption scandal — he’s been dogged by legal troubles since he first served as prime minister in the 1990s. But this is the third time in a year that Israeli police have recommended he be indicted on serious corruption charges — and the most recent case, experts agree, is the most damning one to date.

It also comes at a precarious time for Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition, which holds a slim majority in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. Netanyahu has received pushback from Israeli hawks for negotiating a ceasefire with the militant group Hamas in Gaza in November; his defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, resigned over the issue. Last week, coalition leaders decided to dissolve the Knesset and move Israeli elections up to April — several months earlier than planned.

Netanyahu is still popular among Israelis, but if the country’s attorney general decides to put the sitting prime minister on trial, there’s no saying what could happen. And if he is forced to resign, there’s no clear alternative to replace him. Both outcomes could have a significant impact on the country and the region.

Here’s a brief guide to the legal woes currently afflicting Israel’s prime minister, and what they could mean for the future of US President Donald Trump’s closest ally in the Middle East.

Israel’s prime minister is a suspect in several corruption cases

There are currently three cases in which Netanyahu himself is a suspect. There’s also another case where his wife, Sara Netanyahu, is under indictment. And there’s yet another case that involves procurement of submarines and corruption of the military, in which people very close to the prime minister are suspects, though not Netanyahu himself.

In the first of the three cases, Israeli police allege that for years, Netanyahu and his wife Sara received gifts in the form of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of champagne, jewelry and cigars from wealthy individuals in the United States and Australia. In exchange, Netanyahu reportedly tried to extend tax exemption legislation that would have benefitted at least one of the men involved.

It’s unclear if there actually was a quid pro quo arrangement, but the charges could constitute bribery regardless. It’s worth noting that Netanyahu’s predecessor, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, went to prison after being convicted of accepting bribes, so it’s not a charge to be taken lightly.

In the second case, one of Netanyahu’s aides recorded lengthy conversations between the prime minister and the head of Israel’s largest opposition paper, in which they discussed making a deal where the paper would be less critical of Netanyahu.

In return, the prime minister would stop the weekend publication of their commercial rival, Israel Today, a paper owned by US casino magnate Sheldon Adelson (which is sometimes known in Israel as the “Bibi paper” for its pro-Netanyahu stance). The deal apparently was never settled, but the conversations in themselves were damning enough.

But experts who I spoke to told me that the third and most recent case against the prime minister is the strongest.

On December 2, Israeli police accused Netanyahu of trading regulatory favors for positive media coverage of himself and his family. Over a period of five years, the prime minister reportedly intervened in the day-to-day coverage and affairs of Walla!, a news website run by the country’s telecommunications company, Bezeq.

In return, Netanyahu — in his role as minister of communications, which is one of his titles — rewarded the company by using his political power to give them more favorable regulations, despite political opposition.

This case is more powerful than the first one, Natan Sachs, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, DC, told me. That’s because the deal actually took place. Police also interviewed close to 60 witnesses in order to piece their case together, so it doesn’t look like it’s going to be easy to sweep under the rug.

Netanyahu has already tried, though.

Netanyahu is trying to deflect attention from his current legal woes

In order to deflect from this and other past investigations, Israel’s prime minister has turned to tried and true tactics right out of the Trump playbook: calling the investigations against him “fake news” and a “witch hunt,” and decrying the “liberal media.”

“While Netanyahu and Trump are profoundly different—Bibi’s many faults aside, he is erudite, cautious, and experienced—the two men share an approach to confronting political adversity: divide and conquer, turn the spotlight on the ‘other,’ create an other when none is available, and always, always, feed the base,” Sachs wrote for the Atlantic in 2017.

And what better way to distract the public than with a new military offensive? On December 4, just two days after the police made their recommendation about the corruption charges, the prime minister announced that they would be launching an effort to destroy tunnels that he says the militant group Hizbollah is using to infiltrate Israel from Lebanon.

Launching this operation now could partly be a tactic to distract from the negative press around the corruption allegations ahead of Israeli elections.

When I spoke to him in mid-December, Sachs pointed out that while there’s a good, legitimate reason for the operation, it’s actually in Israeli territory, and the drama in the press around it is overblown. Netanyahu “tried to build this up publicly as some brave, huge operation, and that of course helps him politically,” he said.

Other experts have said that the prime minister pushed to move Israel’s elections up to the Spring in an attempt to undercut any potential indictment and its aftermath.

“He wants to turn around to the attorney general and say, pay attention, the people of Israel have re-elected me for the [fifth] time; you cannot overturn the results of a democratic election,” Reuven Hazan, a political-science professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, told the Wall Street Journal.

What’s going to happen next?

It ultimately falls to Israel’s attorney general, whom Netanyahu appointed, to make the final decision about whether or not to indict the prime minister. If he does choose to pursue charges, he’ll likely schedule a hearing, where Netanyahu will have the chance to rebut the accusations.

There’s no set timetable, though, and the process could take easily take months. “It’s a really complex financial investigation, and add to this the fact that it’s the prime minister and some of the most powerful, influential business people in Israel who are involved,” Anshel Pfeffer, a Jerusalem-based journalist and author of a recent biography about Netanyahu, told me. “These things combine together to make it a very long, detailed, laborious process.”

If he is indicted, he still may not have to leave office. There’s an ongoing legal debate about whether or not Netanyahu can be forced to resign if he has to sit trial. But leaders of other parties could likely say an indictment is a step too far, and call for his resignation.

If he’s convicted, however, the law is very clear, Sachs says: “He would have to resign.”

In the meantime, the prime minister still enjoys a high level of popularity among Israelis. He’s proved remarkably resilient to corruption claims that have plagued his administration for years.

“His coalition prefers to stick with him even though they may not like him; he’s an election winner, he delivers what the coalition wants most of the time,” Pfeffer told me when we spoke in December. “Also because it’s a right-wing coalition, none of them want to be seen as being responsible for bringing down the right-wing government.”

But if Netanyahu does leave office eventually, Israelis will have to contend with finding a new candidate to fill his shoes. “He’s quite popular right now and the key thing to think about is, is there an obvious challenger to him?” said Mira Sucharov, an associate professor of political science at Carleton University in Ottawa. “There doesn’t really seem to be,” she concluded.

If Netanyahu is indicted and he decides to stay in office, it could theoretically provoke a constitutional crisis inside the country. “We’ve never had a situation where a prime minister insists on serving while on trial,” Pfeffer told me.

But it’s a new year, and anything is possible.