When President Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel last week, his announcement was bracketed by a slew of dire warnings from around the globe that it would spark mass violence and widespread instability across the Middle East.

The Arab League, an organization of 22 mostly Arabic-speaking countries, warned on Sunday that Trump’s announcement “deepens tension, ignites anger, and threatens to plunge the region into more violence and chaos.” Hamas, the Islamist extremist group and political organization that controls the Gaza Strip, said Trump’s decision on Jerusalem “opens the gates of hell.”

The US State Department cautioned American diplomatic staff and their families to avoid Jerusalem’s Old City and the West Bank, including the cities of Bethlehem and Jericho, and to steer clear of crowds, and US embassies were instructed to be on alert for a backlash. The Israeli army sent in additional battalions to the West Bank following the announcement.

But while many thousands did take to the streets in Jerusalem, the West Bank, Lebanon, Morocco, Yemen, Indonesia and Turkey, by Monday morning they had begun to walk away. Leaders around the world condemned Trump’s decision, and the region remains on edge, but, despite street protest, the predicted tidal wave of regional instability has so far failed to materialize.

That’s not to say there wasn’t violence: Four Palestinian protesters were killed in clashes with Israeli security forces, and hundreds were wounded. On Sunday afternoon, a lone Palestinian attacker stabbed an Israeli security guard. But the incidents remained isolated and so far haven’t sparked wider protests.

So why didn’t the regional instability materialize as predicted?

Analysts say part of the reason protests in Israel and the West Bank are not being sustained is that the primary feeling among Palestinians right now is not rage, but rather despair and fatigue. “Many Palestinians who went through the second intifada don’t want to repeat it,” says Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, referring to the five-year bloody uprising against the Israeli occupation that led to the deaths of over 3000 Palestinians and more than 1,300 Israelis, and thousands more wounded on both sides.

Plus, Omari adds, Palestinians sense there is a lack of direction, and a lack of stewardship, from their political leaders, and are thus reluctant to protest without a clear purpose or guidance.

However, he explains that individual acts of violence may still occur: “When there is despair, there is no way to predict what will trigger people.” Which means the situation remains potentially volatile.

Disputes over Jerusalem have provoked violence before

Israelis and Palestinians both claim Jerusalem as their capital. Though Israel’s parliament and the prime minister’s home are in Jerusalem, they sit in West Jerusalem, the side of the city Israel has controlled since 1949. Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967 and annexed that half of the city. The international community views that land as occupied territory; the Palestinians would like it to be their capital oen day.

Since 1988 and the beginning of a peace process that envisioned a two-state solution to the conflict — that is, an independent Palestinian state and an independent Israeli state side by side — US policy has been to leave the status of Jerusalem to be decided by the two sides as part of a final peace agreement.

But decades later, there’s still no peace agreement. And the city has not stayed stagnant in the intervening years. The Israelis have continued to build neighborhoods around the city, and its two sides, East and West, have become more and more entwined.

And over the years, changes to the status quo in Jerusalem has triggered violence.

In 2000, Israel’s then-Israeli-opposition leader Ariel Sharon made a widely criticized and highly publicized visit to the central area of Jerusalem known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif. The move sparked riots in the city that eventually resulted in the second intifada.

Just this past July, Israeli security measures restricting access to the al-Aqsa Mosque complex set off another wave of protests and clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces.

This time, though, experts aren’t seeing that kind of sustained violence and chaos, and they aren’t — yet — predicting it to emerge.

Protests may start spontaneously, says Khaled Elgindy, a fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution who served as an adviser to the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah on permanent status negotiations, but “to sustain an uprising … they have to be driven by political organization.” That’s not happening, he says, in part because “Palestinian politics is in a state of disarray.”

The biggest protest Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has made thus far is his announcement that he will not meet with Vice President Mike Pence when he arrives in the region next week.

Trump’s announcement has made life very difficult for Palestinian leaders

The Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian interim government conceived in 1993 when the Oslo peace process began, is in turmoil, Elgindy notes.

Among Palestinians, several experts told me, there is a lot of frustration directed at their own leaders over their decision to try, initially, to work with the Trump administration, despite widespread concern about Trump’s approach to the region.

Trump’s announcement on Jerusalem, Elgindy says, “was a huge set back” for Palestinian leadership.

“The discourse inside Palestine,” he continues, “is that’s it’s over. Trump stabbed the two-state solution and the whole Oslo process in the heart.”

That means the frustration and concern in the Palestinian cities and towns is directed at Palestinian leaders as well as at Israel and the US. There is also a dawning anxiety that Palestinians have no purchase on the international stage. They are alone.

“I think people are a) a little bit in shock, and b) regrouping,” says Diana Buttu, a Ramallah-based analyst and a former legal adviser to Abbas and Palestinian negotiators.

“I also suspect that people are quite tired. It is exhausting to live here,” she adds. “Jerusalem is definitely important, but it is exhausting to have to think about all the issues you have to push back against on a daily basis.”  

A Polish artist filmed a group of fully naked men and women playing tag inside the gas chamber of a former Nazi death camp. And yes, you read that right.

Now, groups representing Israeli Holocaust survivors are calling on Polish President Andrzej Duda, an independent, to explain how, exactly, that was allowed to happen and to condemn the movie.

The four-minute video — called “The Game of Tag” — was filmed inside the Stutthof death camp near Gdansk, Poland. As the film opens, a half-dozen completely naked men and women walk slowly into one of the camp’s stone gas chambers. They appear cold, and wary, until they begin to laugh and shout. They chase each other down hallways and into closed spaces and giggle, slapping at each other. They are clearly having fun. It is deeply unsettling.

The film was controversial when it was exhibited two years ago, but the concentration camp itself wasn’t identified until Wednesday. An Israeli lawyer and Holocaust historians compared footage in the film to videos taken when Prince William of England visited Stutthof in July of this year.

65,000 people, including 29,000 Jews, were murdered in Stutthof, which was built by Nazis in 1939.

Several organizations, including the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Organization of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, have filed a letter of complaint to Polish government officials.

The film was meant to inspire controversy

The artist, Artur Żmijewski, never denied he shot the film in a concentration camp.

Żmijewski’s statement accompanying the film’s online display reads, “Just as it was back then: naked people in a gas chamber. But instead of horror, we have giggles, toys, erotic games, innocent frolics. What a relief!”

The game of tag (also the name of the film) was filmed in 1999, and originally displayed in 2015 at the Krakow Museum of Contemporary Art in an exhibition called Poland-Israel-Germany the Experience of Auschwitz. It caused a ruckus then as well. The World Jewish Congress and Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum, asked for the film to be stripped from the museum’s display.

Instead, the Krakow museum decided to simply provide more context for the film. Anna Maria Potocka, the museum’s director, told the press at the time the film wasn’t mean to dishonor the dead but merely meant to “to awaken [the] young generation’s empathy with the tragedy of the Holocaust by stirring their imagination.”

It was also, briefly, displayed at an exhibit in Estonia — but it was removed after the Simon Wiesenthal Center asked for it to be taken down.

The film — which is both graphic and uniquely horrifying in its frivolity — can still be viewed on the website of Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art.

One day after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson finally labeled the brutal treatment of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar “ethnic cleansing,” representatives from Bangladesh and Myanmar announced they had inked a preliminary agreement negotiating the possible repatriation of the displaced, persecuted, Rohingya population back to Myanmar. Amnesty International called the news “unthinkable” for a country that has not yet addressed the atrocities committed against this minority population, let alone the system that has oppressed them for decades.

Since August 25, when a small insurgent group of Rohingya Muslims attacked border guards in Myanmar, the Buddhist Myanmarese military has engaged in a brutal crackdown on the Muslim minority population. Some 620,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar’s Northern Rakhine state for Bangladesh since August. They carry with them stories of unfathomable brutality: Whole villages have been burned, men, women and children have been killed, and women report they have been subject to systematic gang rape at the hands of uniformed soldiers.

Much of the world has looked to Myanmar’s civilian leader, the Nobel prize-winner and celebrated democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi, hoping she would influence her military to stop the random, brutalizing attacks. She has failed to do so.

Tillerson’s words were a long-awaited acknowledgement by the Trump administration of the real impact of the world’s fastest-growing humanitarian disaster. (The United Nations high commissioner on human rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, has been using the term for months.) Yet even when Tillerson met with Suu Kyi on November 15, he notably skirted the phrase “ethnic cleansing,” which carries with it a responsibility for the United States to address the problem more robustly. Finally saying it on Wednesday meant the administration may be mulling imposing sanctions on the Myanmar military and government.

But the preliminary agreement to begin the process of returning the refugees comes as a surprise to human rights watchers. Given the destruction of Rohingya villages, it is not clear what the Rohingya will be returning to even if the systemized discrimination of and violence against the Rohingya had been properly addressed. And it has not been.

Back in September, I spoke to Paolo Lubrano, an Oxfam worker in Cox’s Bazar, a town on the Myanmar-Bangladesh border where the majority of refugees have settled. “We are hearing really horrendous stories of people who have survived by the skin of their teeth,” Lubrano told me by Skype. Lubrano described “dire violence” and a huge number of very young, and very traumatized, Rohingya refugees. Among those fleeing Myanmar, he added, are many pregnant women who have been walking for three, four, or even five days to find safety.

On November 16 the world learned that many of those women have been fleeing gang rape. “Rape has been a prominent and devastating feature of the Burmese military’s campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya,” Skye Wheeler, women’s rights emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch and author of the report, said in a statement on Human Rights Watch’s website.

Human rights groups aren’t celebrating the idea of returning refugees.

That’s in part why human rights groups met the news of potentially repatriating these refugees with horror, rather than encouragement. “While precise details of this deal have not yet been revealed, talk of returns is clearly premature at a time when Rohingya refugees continue to trickle into Bangladesh on an almost daily basis as they flee ethnic cleansing in Myanmar,” Amnesty International’s Director for Refugee and Migrant Rights Charmain Mohamed said in a statement emailed to journalists on Thursday afternoon.

“There can be no safe or dignified returns of Rohingya to Myanmar while a system of apartheid remains in the country, and thousands are held there in conditions that amount to concentration camps.

“Returns in the current climate,” he added. “are simply unthinkable.”

Mohamed’s reference to concentration camps wasn’t an idle one: The crackdown on the Rohingya in 2017 may have been the most brutal attack on this minority population, but Myanmar’s Buddhist military has consistently attacked the Rohingya for years.

As I wrote back in September, many reports on Rohingya persecution and marginalization begin with Myanmar’s 1982 citizenship law, which stripped the country’s 1 million Rohingya of citizenship, leaving them without access to health care or education. Waves of violence soon followed.

In Myanmar, even the word “Rohingya” itself is taboo: The country’s leaders do not use it, and some have asked the international community not to use the name. The Rohingya are not included among the 135 ethnic minorities officially recognized by the state.

A 2013 Harvard Divinity School study concluded: “Today, the Rohingya face discrimination in areas of education, employment, public health, housing, religious activity, movement, and family life.” That includes a mandatory two-child limit per Rohingya household — a restriction that is only applied to the Rohingya. They also suffer from onerous restrictions on freedom of movement and the freedom to marry. Rohingya must request the right to marry from the government, a requirement also not imposed on other groups.

In late May 2012, four Muslim men gang-raped and killed a Buddhist woman. That horrific crime became a spark for mass violence between the two religious groups and a brutal government crackdown on the Rohingya. A 2013 Human Rights Watch report found that around 125,000 Rohingya, and some local non-Muslims, had been forced to flee their homes for squalid refugee camps in Rakhine state. Children had been hacked to death. Many thousands of homes were burned. The report’s authors concluded the violence amounted to ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

In retrospect, the crackdown was a dark harbinger of the military attacks that would take place in 2016, and then again over these past few months.

In 2014, New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof visited Myanmar and walked through refugee camps still crammed full with Rohingya. The Times posted a brutal video, narrated by Kristof, titled “21st Century Concentration Camps.” The people he met there had no freedom of movement and little to no access to health care. Their existence hung by a thread. It’s very hard to watch.

That same year, Fortify Rights, a human rights advocacy group based in Southeast Asia, published a report that detailed the problem further. “This report,” they wrote, “provides evidence that protracted human rights violations against Rohingya result from official state policies and could amount to the crime against humanity of persecution.”

Then in early 2015, researchers from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide visited Myanmar on a fact-finding mission. They reported on the “human rights violations [that] have put this population at grave risk for additional mass atrocities and even genocide.”

“We saw firsthand the Rohingya’s physical segregation, which has resulted in a modern form of apartheid, and the devastating impact that official policies of persecution are having on them,” the resulting report from the museum explained. “We left Burma deeply concerned that so many preconditions for genocide are already in place.”

But 2017 has been the most brutal year yet.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Tillerson finally acknowledged the breadth of the problem.

He noted the attack on the border guards in August but said “no provocation can justify the horrendous atrocities that have ensued. These abuses by some among the Burmese military, security forces, and local vigilantes have caused tremendous suffering and forced hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children to flee their homes in Burma to seek refuge in Bangladesh. After a careful and thorough analysis of available facts, it is clear that the situation in Northern Rakhine state constitutes ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, long Europe’s most boringly stable leader, is facing a political predicament that could cost her her job.

Late Sunday evening, almost two full months after Germany’s national elections, Merkel announced that she had failed to corral smaller parties into a ruling coalition. If no agreement between parties is made soon, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will be forced to move to hold snap elections. Such a move is almost unprecedented. It’s also a multi-tiered process, which takes weeks to carry out. That could mean weeks of German instability — possibly dragging out this process into early spring.

Worse, Merkel’s sudden stumble isn’t just a sign of German instability; it’s a concern for the rest of Europe too. The European Union has long taken Merkel’s hand on Europe’s tiller for granted. Now it’s not clear if she will remain in power at all. That’s a problem for a continent facing some big questions including negotiating Britain’s exit from the EU, integrating refugees, and the increased political clout of the far right from Poland to the Czech Republic to Austria.

And that’s not to mention the economic angle: Merkel’s strong hand, and Germany’s strong economy, was an essential stabilizing agent during the European economic crisis. When Merkel wobbles, the markets tremble as well.

Her sudden instability was in part triggered by the rise of the far right in the recent German elections. Merkel moved her party, the Christian Democratic Union, to the center, leaving her right flank open. Both the far-right Alternative for Germany and the libertarian Free Democrats saw that right flank as a space to increase their own political power and visibility, attracting those who haven’t been happy to see the CDU become more moderate.

It was the Free Democrats who, in part, upended coalition talks this week. They disagreed with Merkel and her other potential coalition partners on several essential issues including refugees, taxes, and climate change.

“I think the whole landscape may be ripe for a leadership shake-up,” Constanze Stelzenmüller of the Brookings Institution told me on Tuesday. “My bottom line is that this could — but doesn’t have to — become a constitutional crisis. But it could also just be an occasion of the regeneration of the political landscape.” That may mean Merkel herself.

Merkel’s governing options just got a lot more complicated

None of Merkel’s options are ideal at this point. She could run a minority government, she could try to cajole the parties back to the table to create a majority government, or she could stand back and wait for the president to call for a new round of elections. On Monday, she said she actually preferred new elections to running a minority government that struggles for consensus on every issue. “My point of view is that new elections would be the better path,” she said on German television.

The turn of events was a shock to Germans and Europeans alike. When Germany went to the polls on September 24, Merkel was expected to easily continue at the helm of German government for another four-year term. But late Sunday night, four weeks of coalition negotiations came to an end when the libertarian Free Democrats abruptly curtailed talks between Merkel’s Christian Democrats, their sister party the Bavarian Christian Social Union, and the liberal Green Party.

Merkel’s alternative would be a so-called “grand coalition” government with the Social Democrats (SPD), led by Martin Schulz. The two parties governed together over the past four years. But the SPD made it clear on Monday that they had absolutely no interest in remaining partners.

Germans hate chaos. This election was supposed to be boring.

This kind of chaos is anathema to Germans in the post-World War II era. Everyone predicted a “boring” election. Every poll predicted a fourth term as chancellor for Merkel.

But while Merkel’s Christian Democrats did pick up more votes than any other party on September 24, they only managed to claim about 33 percent of the electorate. To govern, they needed to either enter into a new grand coalition with the SPD — like they did under Merkel’s last government — or cobble together a coalition of other parties.

That second option was what broke down this weekend. It was to be a broad coalition, set to include the liberal Green Party and the libertarian Free Democrats, dubbed the “Jamaica” coalition for the colors of each of the parties involved, which reflected the Jamaican flag. It was always going to be a tough sell, given the range of political positions and opinions.

But it wasn’t just coalition building that made these elections dicey. Over the summer, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) began to gain momentum in the polls. They ended up as the country’s third-largest party, entering the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, for the first time using a powerful cocktail of anti-immigrant sentiment and populist rhetoric.

After the election, the biggest shock to the German political system was the near-total electoral disintegration of the left-leaning SPD led by Schulz, who had once seemed a viable contender to unseat Merkel.

“I don’t think we have ever had a situation in which coalition talks failed and that failing of coalition talks led to another election,” Ulrike Esther Franke of the European Council on Foreign Relations told me by Skype from Berlin.

Coalition talks broke down, in part, over refugees

The talks broke down over three major issues, Sudha David-Wilp, deputy director of the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, explained to me on Monday: refugees, taxes, and climate change initiatives.

Merkel’s open-door refugee policies allowed 1.2 million asylum seekers and migrants to make their home in Germany from the beginning of the crisis in 2015 through 2016. The breakdown in talks around allowing these refugees to reunite with family members was, in part, motivated by anger over Merkel’s decision to allow them to come in the first place.

The second had to do with ending the so-called “solidarity” tax, which raised money to help areas that were formerly part of East Germany recover after unification — it was unclear how and if to end this policy. And the last was about Germany meeting climate goals through policy. “The Greens,” David-Wilp explained, “were really keen to take a number of coal plants offline in order to reach Germany’s carbon emissions goal for 2020.”

These issues stymied coalition talks, meaning that Europe’s strongest leader is suddenly facing an end to her 12-year run at the country’s helm. “It is difficult to overstate the impact of the collapsed talks,” Severin Weiland of the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel wrote online.

Is this the end of the Merkel era?

Political analysts say that even if Merkel is able to pull a government together, we may be witnessing a moment of larger political change: the beginning of the end of her tenure.

“She is still very popular in Germany and abroad; her popularity ratings are still high,” David-Wilp told me on Monday. But, she added, “most people think the era of Merkel is slowly coming to an end.”

That means analysts are also taking stock of her leadership style and her legacy. The Merkel era was not one, David-Wilp noted, of visionary leadership. “The era of Merkel meant incrementalism and calculated decision-making,” she said, in a nod to what was often seen as Merkel’s tortoise-like decision-making on major issues. “It could be that Europe is now ripe for visionary leadership.”

But for a Europe that’s facing an increasingly strong Russia, the continued questions over integration and flow of migrants, Brexit, and the rise of a new far right in the former Eastern bloc, it’s an uneasy turn of events.