Nicholas Kristof, Opinion | What Have Progressives Done to the West Coast? – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Portland, Ore.

“As Democrats make their case to voters around the country this fall, one challenge is that some of the bluest parts of the country — cities on the West Coast — are a mess.

Centrist voters can reasonably ask: Why put liberals in charge nationally when the places where they have greatest control are plagued by homelessness, crime and dysfunction?

I’ll try to answer that question in a moment, but liberals like me do need to face the painful fact that something has gone badly wrong where we’re in charge, from San Diego to Seattle. I’m an Oregonian who bores people at cocktail parties by singing the praises of the West, but the truth is that too often we offer a version of progressivism that doesn’t result in progress.

We are more likely to believe that “housing is a human right” than conservatives in Florida or Texas, but less likely to actually get people housed. We accept a yawning gulf between our values and our outcomes.

Conservatives argue that the problem is simply the left. Michael Shellenberger wrote a tough book denouncing what he called “San Fransicko” with the subtitle “Why Progressives Ruin Cities.” Yet that doesn’t ring true to me.

Democratic states enjoy a life expectancy two years longer than Republican states. Per capita G.D.P. in Democratic states is 29 percent higher than in G.O.P. states, and child poverty is lower. Education is generally better in blue states, with more kids graduating from high school and college. The gulf in well-being between blue states and red states is growing wider, not narrower.

So my rejoinder to Republican critiques is: Yes, governance is flawed in some blue parts of America, but overall, liberal places have enjoyed faster economic growth and higher living standards than conservative places. That doesn’t look like failure.

So the problem isn’t with liberalism. It’s with West Coast liberalism.

The two states with the highest rates of unsheltered homelessness are California and Oregon. The three states with the lowest rates of unsheltered homelessness are all blue ones in the Northeast: Vermont, New York and Maine. Liberal Massachusetts has some of the finest public schools in the country, while liberal Washington and Oregon have below-average high school graduation rates.

Oregon ranks dead last for youth mental health services, according to Mental Health America, while Washington, D.C., and Delaware rank best.

Drug overdoses appear to have risen last year in every Democratic state on the West Coast, while they dropped last year in each Democratic state in the Northeast. The homicide rate in Portland last year was more than double that of New York City.

Why does Democratic Party governance seem less effective on the West Coast than on the East Coast?

Sometimes I wonder if the West is less serious about policy than the East and less focused on relying on the most rigorous evidence. There’s some evidence for that. But I’m not sure, for it’s also true that West Coast states have managed to innovate exceptionally well in some domains. Oregon pioneered “death with dignity” through physician-assisted suicide and led the way to vote by mail, an important step for democracy. California has some of the smartest gun safety laws in America, championed by Gov. Gavin Newsom. As a result, California has a firearms death rate 40 percent below the national average.

So my take is that the West Coast’s central problem is not so much that it’s unserious as that it’s infected with an ideological purity that is focused more on intentions than on oversight and outcomes.

I ran for governor in Oregon two years ago (I was ousted from the ballot by Oregon’s then-secretary of state, who said I didn’t meet the residency requirement). While running, I’d meet groups of liberal donors in Portland, as the city’s problems cast a shadow over all of us; we’d all be wondering nervously if our catalytic converters were in the process of being stolen. The undercurrent in such a liberal gathering would be the failures of Republicans — but Portland was one mess we couldn’t blame on Republicans, because there simply aren’t many Republicans in Portland. This was our liberal mess.

Politics always is part theater, but out West too often we settle for being performative rather than substantive.

For example, as a gesture to support trans kids, Oregon took money from the tight education budget to put tampons in boys’ restrooms in elementary schools — including boys’ restrooms in kindergartens.

“The inability of progressives, particularly in the Portland metro area, to deal with the nitty-gritty of governing and to get something done is just staggering,” Representative Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat who has been representing and championing Portland for more than half a century, told me. “People are much more interested in ideology than in actual results.”

Consider a volunteer group called the Portland Freedom Fund that was set up to pay bail for people of color. The organization raised money from well-intentioned liberal donors, and the underlying problems were real: Bail requirements hit poor people hard.

In 2022, the Portland Freedom Fund helped a Black man named Mohamed Adan who had been arrested after allegedly strangling his former girlfriend, holding a gun to her head and then — in violation of a restraining order — cutting off his G.P.S. monitor and entering her building. “He told me that he would kill me,” the former girlfriend, Rachael Abraham, warned.

The Freedom Fund paid Adan’s bail, and he walked out of jail. A week later, Adan allegedly removed his G.P.S. monitor again and entered Abraham’s home. The police found Abraham’s body drenched in blood with a large knife nearby; three children were also in the house.

Adan was charged with murder — no bail this time — and the incident prompted soul-searching in Portland. But perhaps not enough. A well-meaning effort to help people of color may have cost the life of a woman of color.

One of the passions of the left, drawing partly on Ibram X. Kendi’s book “How to Be an Antiracist,” has been that if a policy leads to racial inequity, then it’s racist even if it wasn’t meant to be. But by that standard, West Coast progressivism abounds in racism.

We in the West impeded home construction in ways that made cities unaffordable, especially for people of color. We let increasing numbers of people struggle with homelessness, particularly Black and brown people. Black people in Portland are also murdered at higher rates than in cities more notorious for violence, and Seattle and Portland have some of the greatest racial disparities in arrests in the country.

I don’t actually agree with Kendi. I think intentions and framing can matter, but it’s absolutely true that good intentions are not enough. What matters is improving opportunities and quality of life, and the best path to do that is a relentless empiricism — which clashes with the West Coast’s indifference to the laws of economics.

The basic reason for homelessness on the West Coast is an enormous shortage of housing that drives up rents. California lacks about three million housing units, in part because it’s difficult to get permission to build.

As long as there is such a vast shortage, housing is like musical chairs. Move one family into housing, and another won’t get a home.

Public sector efforts to build housing are often ruinously expensive, with “affordable housing” sometimes costing more than $1 million per unit, so the private sector is critical. Yet one element of progressive purity is suspicion of the private sector, and this hobbles efforts to make businesses part of the solution. Business owners who earn an income from their company are effectively barred from serving on the Portland City Council.

Perhaps on the West Coast we have ideological purity because there isn’t much political competition. Republicans are irrelevant in much of the Far West, so they can’t hold Democrats’ feet to the fire — leading Democrats in turn to wander unchecked farther to the left. That’s not so true in the Northeast: A Republican, Charlie Baker, was until recently governor of Massachusetts, and Republicans are competitive statewide in Maine, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Hampshire, New York and New Jersey.

Maybe a healthy Republican Party keeps the Democratic Party healthy, and vice versa.

Without opposition party oversight, problems aren’t always fixed expeditiously. For example, some blue states have well-intentioned laws meant to protect citizens from involuntary commitment to mental institutions — but these days, with drugs and untreated mental illness interacting to produce psychosis, such laws can crush the people they’re supposed to help.

One of my school friends in my hometown, Yamhill, Ore., Stacy, struggled with alcoholism and mental illness. She became homeless and lived in a tent in a park, but it is almost impossible in such cases to move someone involuntarily into an institution. So she froze to death one winter night.

I think of Stacy suffering and dying unnecessarily, and I believe that instead of protecting her, our liberalism failed her.

One encouraging sign is that the West Coast may be self-correcting. I’ve been on a book tour in recent weeks, and in my talks in California, Oregon and Washington I’ve been struck by the way nearly everyone frankly acknowledges this gulf between our values and our outcomes, and welcomes more pragmatic approaches. California and Oregon have taken steps to boost housing supply, and Oregon ended an experiment in drug decriminalization. Homelessness seems a bit better in San Francisco and other cities, and homicides have dropped.

I’m still a believer in the West Coast. Partly it’s the physical beauty of the region and the outdoor opportunities, and partly it’s that the West has a history of reinventing itself. I remember Seattle’s struggles in the 1970s, when a billboard near the airport read, “Will the last person leaving Seattle — turn out the lights.” The West Coast has always rescued itself by seizing new ideas, from personal computers to the internet, and building on them. The Bay Area may be doing that again today with artificial intelligence.

On a visit to San Francisco in May, I took a Waymo self-driving taxi. It eerily stopped in front of me, unlocked itself and then drove me smoothly to my destination. That did feel like a futuristic journey in a futuristic city.

We need to get our act together. Less purity and more pragmatism would go a long way. But perhaps the first step must be the humility to acknowledge our failures.”  -30-

David Lindsay: Bravo Nicholas Kristof.  I have read through this piece twice, the second time, outloud to my partner, and it is fabulous. You want the good moments, just read it again.

Nicholas Kristof, Opinion | Less Marriage, Less Sex, Less Agreement – The New York Times

 

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

I wrote a column recently lamenting the decline in marriage rates, noting that a record half of American adults are now unmarried. As a long-married romantic myself, steeped in statistics suggesting that marriage correlates with happiness, I found that sad.

My readers, not so much.

Many women readers in particular dismissed heterosexual marriage as an outdated institution that pampers men while turning women into unpaid servants.

“Marriage is generally GREAT for men,” declared a woman reader from North Carolina whose comment on the column was the single most liked, with more than 2,000 people recommending it. Wives get stuck with the caregiving, she added, and “the sex that receives the care is gonna be happier than the sex that doesn’t receive the care.”

The second most recommended reader comment came from a woman who said that when she and her women friends get together, “We all say, ‘Never again.’ Men require a lot of care. They can be such babies.”

I think these skeptics make some valid points — we men do need to up our game! — even as I remain a staunch believer in marriage for both straight and gay couples. But put aside for a moment questions about marriage. The deluge of annoyance among some women readers intrigued me because while it’s anecdotal, it aligns with considerable survey evidence of a growing political, cultural and social divide between men and women throughout the industrialized world.

A poll across 20 countries by the Glocalities research group found “a growing divide between young men and young women” in political and social outlook, while The Economist examined polling across rich countries and likewise found that young women are becoming significantly more liberal as young men are becoming somewhat more conservative.

A study by Pew found that compared with never-married women, never-married men in the United States are 50 percent more likely to align with Republicans.

One gauge of the rightward drift of young men: In 2014 men ages 55 to 65 were the most conservative group, according to the Glocalities data, while now young men are more conservative than older ones.

The backdrop is that boys and men are lagging in education and much less likely than women to get college degrees. Many of these less educated men struggle in the job market, and increasingly some of them seem to blame their problems on feminism. Young men are more likely than older men to tell pollsters that “advancing women’s and girls’ rights has gone too far”; women of all ages disagree.

A remarkable 45 percent of young men ages 18 to 29 say that in America today, men face discrimination. Older men are less likely to feel that way.

The upshot, polling suggests, is that men are becoming grumpier and more resentful of women’s success, and more drawn to conservative authoritarian populists, from Donald Trump to misogynist internet personalities like Andrew Tate.

The Glocalities survey concluded that around the world the “radical right increasingly finds fertile ground among young men, which is already impacting elections.” Representative Matt Gaetz suggested that it doesn’t matter if Republicans antagonize female voters because they can be replaced by male voters.

The gender gap is easiest to measure in politics, but the Brookings Institution warned last week that it “also appears in measures other than politics and points to some deeper and potentially even more concerning issues among young people.”

“The social bonds of previous generations appear to be eroding among young people, and this has serious consequences for coupling, future birthrates and social cohesion,” Brookings said.

One of the most discussed chasms between the sexes is in South Korea, where nearly 80 percent of young men say that men are discriminated against, and where (male) President Yoon Suk Yeol was elected in 2022 in part on an antifeminist platform. Women have their own complaints, including how unhelpful their husbands are in the house. Some Korean feminists have created the 4B movement, which promotes no marriage, no babies, no dating and no sex. South Korea’s total fertility rate has plummeted to one of the lowest in the world, with the average woman now having just 0.7 children.

Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, suggests in a recent book on marriage that the gender divide in South Korea and other Asian countries may offer a glimpse of what is coming to the United States. He estimates that perhaps one-third of today’s young Americans will never marry, with couples living together not replacing marriages. More people, he says, are simply detached and on their own.

Some women in America have publicly proclaimed that they are distancing themselves from men, abstaining from sex or going “boy sober.” Nearly 70 percent of breakups of heterosexual marriages in the United States are initiated by the wife.

One window into gender tensions is a viral meme on TikTok in which women discuss whether they would rather encounter a bear in the woods or a man. Many go with the bear.

Young people are not only marrying less and partnering less; they’re also having less sex. Traditionally, older folks worried that young people were too promiscuous; now perhaps we geezers should fret about youthful celibacy.

Perhaps this gender divide will reverse and fix itself. Or perhaps, as some of those women commenters suggested, it’s not a problem, or else it’s a problem for men alone. But polling finds that both young men and young women across the Western world are deeply unhappy at a time when they seem to be drifting apart and increasingly report that they are “unpartnered.” I’ve written enough about the epidemic of loneliness to be troubled by these divides; social isolation is estimated to be as lethal as smoking.

To me, the fundamental problem is the struggle of men to adapt to a world in which brawn matters less than brains, education and emotional intelligence. That’s an important topic that we haven’t addressed enough, despite alarm bells like Richard Reeves’s 2022 book, “Of Boys and Men.”

Reeves and others have proposed many ideas, including recruiting more male teachers, adding more recess and holding boys back so they start school later than girls. Vocational training programs like career academies and Per Scholas help, too.

I worry that gender frictions may grow and add tension to modern life, leaving more people facing the world alone with no one to snuggle up to and provide long-term comfort. I fear that I’m a romantic in a world that is becoming less romantic.”  -30-

Nicholas Kristof, Opinion | In Gaza, Biden Gets the Chance to Do the Right Thing – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

“In a speech in Warsaw two years ago, President Biden declared that “the great battle for freedom” is one “between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.”

Now we’ll see whether he meant it.

By a lopsided vote of 13 to 2, the International Court of Justice has ordered Israel to “immediately halt its military offensive” in Rafah and open border crossings for “unhindered provision” of humanitarian aid. But the court’s order, while binding, has no enforcement mechanism — which in practice means it is up to the United Nations Security Council and, in particular, Biden to enforce.

This should be an easy call, and it offers Biden a chance to rescue his failed Gaza policy, for, in this case, Biden and the World Court are fundamentally aligned: They both oppose an all-out invasion of Rafah, and they both want Israel to allow in more humanitarian aid. But for seven months, Biden has allowed himself to be ignored and steamrolled by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the question now is whether the court ruling will help Biden find the gumption to pressure Israel to obey the decision.

Biden’s leverage is obvious: He can suspend the provision of all offensive weapons to Israel as long as it defies international law, building on his pause in the transfer of large bombs. This would still allow the transfer of defensive weapons so that Israel would not be in significant danger from missiles or other threats, and it is a step that 40 House Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, called for last month.

When President Ronald Reagan faced a similar situation during Israel’s catastrophic invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (which led to the rise of Hezbollah), he suspended some weapons transfers and warned that the American-Israeli relationship was in jeopardy; it worked. Biden’s DNA may not allow him to apply similar pressure.

While Biden is deeply knowledgeable about international relations and has generally overseen a smart foreign policy, particularly in Asia, he has bungled the Middle East and damaged America’s moral authority. When he champions the “rules-based international order” in Ukraine against an enemy that breaches international law, undermines the norms of war and attacks infrastructure so as to make civilians suffer, yet then provides weapons and diplomatic protection for Netanyahu’s war in Gaza, much of the world sees only hypocrisy.

To be blunt, Biden’s policy in Gaza has been a moral, practical and political failure. It has made the United States complicit in civilian deaths, including in the starvation of children. It has undermined our stance in Ukraine. In my view, it hasn’t helped Israel eliminate Hamas, recover hostages or improve long-term security. And it may be hurting Biden’s chances of winning key states like Michigan.

One window into Biden’s failure: the temporary pier that he ordered the United States military to set up to deliver aid into Gaza.

Instead of pressuring Israel firmly to allow the thousands of trucks at the border to enter Gaza, the Biden administration in December effectively blocked a U.N. resolution that would have set up a U.N. system to get around the Israeli inspection bottleneck. So children starved to death.

Biden then dispatched the American military to create the pier, at a reported cost of $320 million. After more than two months, the pier is in place, but there isn’t a good system to actually get food to people who need it — so it has made little difference. It has amounted to an expensive gesture, a substitute for action rather than a spur to it.

Meanwhile, the World Food Program warns that there is now a full-blown famine in parts of Gaza. And the United Nations indicates that the situation has deteriorated since Israel began its Rafah operation. “Barely any fuel or aid is getting into any part of Gaza,” the World Food Program said this week, adding that “humanitarian operations in Gaza are near collapse.”

In its argument before the court, Israel made a legitimate point: “The fact remains that the city of Rafah also serves as a military stronghold for Hamas, which continues to pose a significant threat to the State of Israel and its citizens.” Israelis were shattered by the brutality of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, and I understand their determination to eradicate every remnant of Hamas.

But as I’ve argued, leveling Rafah is unlikely to achieve that or lead to the recovery of hostages (the U.S. reportedly believes Hamas leaders are in Khan Younis, not Rafah). Prolonging this war is in Netanyahu’s interest, but it is not in the interest of Israelis, Americans or Palestinians.

This week, when the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court sought arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders alike for war crimes, Biden fumed that the action was “outrageous.” I wish he had instead focused on getting food to starving children, but now he again has a chance to uphold international law and begin to extricate himself from a policy nightmare.

Without any clear plan for post-conflict Gaza or for the West Bank, Biden’s Middle East policy is in tatters. It is possible that his goal of a three-way deal with Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United States will come together and create a path out of this mess, but it seems a long shot, and there’s no obvious Plan B.

So I suggest it’s time for Biden to act firmly and withhold all offensive weapons as an imperfect approach that just might be a step toward easing the humanitarian catastrophe, ending the war and upholding that rules-based order that he says he believes in.”

Nicholas Kristof, Conversations and Bienabout the moment. – The New York Times

Pinned

Updated 

May 9, 2024, 1:33 p.m. ET11 minutes ago

11 minutes ago

Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

Months Late, Biden Uses His Leverage on Israel

For seven months, President Biden has called on Israel to show more restraint in its war in Gaza and to allow more aid into the territory, and he has been mostly ignored. Now, belatedly and reluctantly, he is doing what presidents do all over the world: He is applying leverage.

Biden has delayed the transfer of 3,500 bombs to Israel and has warned that an all-out Israeli invasion of the packed southern Gaza city of Rafah would lead to further suspensions in the weapons flow. It was the only way to get the attention of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli leadership.

Republicans have denounced Biden’s move as weakening Israel and impeding its war effort, but the United States is continuing to provide defensive weaponry to Israel. The new moves affect only munitions that would be used to pulverize Rafah and cause thousands more civilian casualties there.

President Ronald Reagan likewise delayed arms shipments after Israel’s reckless invasion of Lebanon in 1982 led to enormous civilian casualties.

As I see it, Biden had to act, for both humanitarian and practical reasons. United Nations agencies have been warning that an invasion of Rafah would result in a catastrophic civilian toll. The United States would be complicit in that blood bath, through the use of American munitions and American backing for the war.

I only wish that Biden had taken such actions months ago. That might have saved the lives of so many Gazan children and prevented people from starving to death as aid flows were constricted.

It’s not clear how Israel will respond. Netanyahu may defy Biden, seeing an invasion of Rafah as his path to staying in power by retaining support from extremist parties in his country.

While Biden’s focus is on preventing an all-out invasion of Rafah, I hope he will also use this leverage to press Israel to allow more aid into the territory. Cindy McCain, the head of the World Food Program, warns that there is already full-blown famine in parts of Gaza, even as trucks with food are lined up outside the Israel-controlled entry points on the border. This is unconscionable.

Nicholas Kristof, Opinion | Reasons to Have Hope – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

• May 9, 2024

Mr. Kristof is the author of a new memoir, “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life,” from which this essay is adapted.

“More than three-quarters of Americans say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. This year, for the first time, America dropped out of the top 20 happiest countries in this year’s World Happiness Report. Some couples are choosing not to have children because of climate threats. And this despair permeates not just the United States, but much of the world.

This moment is particularly dispiriting because of the toxic mood. Debates about the horrifying toll of the war in Gaza has made the atmosphere even more poisonous, as the turmoil on college campuses underscores. We are a bitterly divided nation, quick to point fingers and denounce one another, and the recriminations feed the gloom. Instead of a City on a Hill, we feel like a nation in despair — maybe even a planet in despair.

Yet that’s not how I feel at all.

What I’ve learned from four decades of covering misery is hope — both the reasons for hope and the need for hope. I emerge from years on the front lines awed by material and moral progress, for we have the good fortune to be part of what is probably the greatest improvement in life expectancy, nutrition and health that has ever unfolded in one lifetime.” . . . . .

Nicholas Kristof, Opinion | The Loss in Gaza Captured in One Photo – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

“An American surgeon who volunteered in Gaza sent me a photo that sears me with its glimpse of overwhelming grief: A woman mourns her young son.

I’ve known the surgeon, Dr. Sam Attar, a professor at Northwestern University School of Medicine, for a decade. He has worked in war zones around the world, from Ukraine to Iraq to Syria, but Gaza has been particularly harrowing for him, in part because so many children have suffered or died.

He performed amputations and other orthopedic surgeries recently at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. He was preparing to go into the operating room one day when a woman called him over and asked him to photograph her young son, Karam, in his bed in the I.C.U. Sam went over and only then realized that the boy was dead.

“Every time staff wanted to cover him fully with a blanket, she would flip it back and say, ‘No!’” Sam told me. “And she would start talking to him, asking him where he went.” 

“Every time staff wanted to cover him fully with a blanket, she would flip it back and say, ‘No!’” Sam told me. “And she would start talking to him, asking him where he went.”

The nurses and other doctors who were in the I.C.U. that day said that Karam died of complications from malnutrition. The United Nations confirms that Gazan children have starved to death.

The nurses wanted to remove Karam’s body after he died an hour earlier, but his mother wouldn’t allow it. In her grief, she told Sam that Karam was a prince and she wanted Sam to share the boy’s photo. Perhaps she thought this was a way of commemorating her son.

I’ve criticized the way Israel has conducted the war in Gaza and President Biden’s strong support for it, for a child is killed or injured in the war every 10 minutes, according to the United Nations. More than 14,000 children have been killed in the war, according to the Gaza health authorities. But that’s a number; this photo captures a preventable tragedy.

As I argue that it’s time to end this war, I think this photo has a persuasive power greater than my words, so I’ve given my column space over to this image. As we discuss Gaza, let’s keep in mind that the war unfolds through lives like Karam’s.”  -30-

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT NYT comment:

Thank you Nicholas Kristof. I salute you and your work. Dear Joe Biden, Do your really want to go down as the enabler of ethnic cleansing of over 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza, unarmed, men, women and mostly, children. Several journalists in the New York Times, including Nicholas Kristof, and in Time Magazine, quote historians who say, the Israeli government only takes our advice when we threaten to withdraw our support. It is way past the time to get tough. One writer, maybe Kristof, in the NYT wrote, when the UN put forth a resolution, that it would take over the inspection of trucks going into Gaza, for the Israli Defense Forces, the US blocked the measure. It is time to unblock this measure, and let the trucks into Gaza. InconvienientNews.net

Nicholas Kristof, Opinion | How Protesters Can Actually Help Palestinians – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

“Student protesters: I admire your empathy for Gazans, your concern for the world, your moral ambition to make a difference.

But I worry about how peaceful protests have tipped into occupations of buildings, risks to commencements and what I see as undue tolerance of antisemitism, chaos, vandalism and extremism. I’m afraid the more aggressive actions may be hurting the Gazans you are trying to help.

I’m shaped in my thinking by the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s. Students who protested then were right on the merits: The war was unwinnable and conducted in ways that were reckless and immoral.

Yet those students didn’t shorten that terrible war; instead, they probably prolonged it. Leftist activists in 1968 didn’t achieve their goal of electing the peace candidate Gene McCarthy; rather, the turmoil and more violent protests helped elect Richard Nixon, who pledged to restore order — and then dragged the war out and expanded it to Cambodia.

I think that history is worth remembering today. Good intentions are not enough. Empathy is not enough. I’m sure we all agree that it’s outcomes that matter. So the question I would ask you to ask yourselves is: Are your encampments and sacrifices — more than 1,000 protesters have been arrested so far, and unknown numbers have been suspended or expelled — actually helping Gazans?

I’ve been strongly criticizing Israel’s conduct in Gaza since last fall, and President Biden’s unconditional support for the war. So while my heart’s with the cause, it seems to me that the campus upheavals have distracted from the crisis in Gaza, rather than called attention to it.

After all, what are we talking about right now? It’s not hunger in Gaza. It’s not a potential invasion of Rafah, which the U.N. humanitarian chief said this week would be “a tragedy beyond words.” ” . . . . .

Nicholas Kristof, Opinion | Gaza Is Biden’s War Now – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

• April 19, 2024

“During the Darfur genocide and humanitarian crisis two decades ago, then-Senator Joe Biden passionately denounced then-President George W. Bush for failing to act decisively to ease suffering. Biden expressed outrage at China for selling weapons used to kill and maim civilians, and he urged me to write columns demanding the White House end needless wretchedness.

Darfur and Gaza are very different, of course, but I recall the senator’s compassion and urgency — and I wonder, where has that Joe Biden gone?

Gaza has become the albatross around Biden’s neck. It is his war, not just Benjamin Netanyahu’s. It will be part of his legacy, an element of his obituary, a blot on his campaign — and it could get worse if Gaza cascades into a full-blown famine or violent anarchy, or if a wider war breaks out involving Iran or Lebanon. An Israeli strike on a military base in central Iran early Friday underscored the danger of a bigger and more damaging conflict that could draw in the United States.

Consider just one example of America’s fingerprints on this war under Biden’s leadership. In January, the Israeli military dropped a bomb on a compound in Gaza used by the International Rescue Committee, a much-respected American aid organization that is supported in part by American tax dollars. The International Rescue Committee says that the near-fatal strike was caused by a 1,000-pound American-made bomb, dropped from an American-made F-16 fighter jet. And when an American-made aircraft drops an American-made bomb on an American aid group in an American-supported war, how can that not come back to Biden?

“Biden owns that,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former Biden and Obama administration official who now runs Refugees International, another aid group. “They’ve provided the matériel that sustains the war. They provided political support that sustains the war. They provided the diplomatic cover at the U.N. that sustains the war.” . . . . . .

“Biden’s efforts to persuade Netanyahu to allow more aid trucks into Gaza were, at least until recently, so ineffectual that the White House had to drop food from planes. In 1948, the United States organized the Berlin Airlift to overcome Soviet obstructionism; that meant confronting our adversary and constituted a show of strength. In 2024, the United States was reduced to organizing the Gaza airlift to get around the intransigence of our longtime aid recipient; that reflected Biden’s failure to confront our ally and amounted to a show of weakness.

Instead of organizing an airdrop (which has killed some people when aid fell on them), Biden had an opportunity to do something much more substantial to avert starvation. In December the United Nations Security Council tried to set up a U.N. system to inspect trucks entering Gaza rather than letting them get stuck in the Israeli inspection bottleneck. Reports were already coming in of catastrophic starvation in Gaza, yet the Biden administration effectively blocked this alternative by watering it down to nothing, according to people close to the negotiations. The upshot: Children starved to death.

The administration also tolerated a ferocious crackdown and land grab by Israeli West Bank settlers who operate with the backing of Netanyahu’s extremist cabinet. The United Nations reports that almost 5,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been injured since Oct. 7 in confrontations with Israeli troops and settlers, who periodically steal Palestinians’ sheep or drive them from their homes. By the U.N.’s count, 451 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank in this period, including 112 children (nine Israelis were killed in the West Bank during this time). Then last month, Israel announced the largest seizure of West Bank land since the Oslo peace accords in 1993. It was a slap in the face of Biden, who has mostly turned the other cheek.” . . . .

“As time went on and Israel leveled entire neighborhoods and killed large numbers of women, children and aid workers, Biden became more critical of Israel. But while his rhetoric changed, his policies didn’t — and he repeatedly allowed his calls for restraint to be ignored. Indeed, in the first months of the war, Biden’s first serious move to impose accountability wasn’t aimed at Netanyahu but at UNRWA, the United Nations agency working desperately to prevent famine in Gaza.

After allegations in January that a dozen (later 14) of the agency’s 30,000 employees may have joined the Hamas terrorist attack and that many others were Hamas members, Biden suspended funding for UNRWA without waiting for confirmation. Investigations are now underway, and a small number of UNRWA staff members may have been involved in the Hamas attack, but there are growing doubts about the larger Israeli allegation of fundamental UNRWA complicity.

“They’ve been saying UNRWA is an arm of Hamas,” Senator Van Hollen told me. “There’s nothing — nothing! — in the intelligence to support that claim. That’s a flat-out lie.”

It now appears that while Biden was too slow to confront Netanyahu for killing Gazan children, he acted too hastily against the U.N. agency trying to save Gazan children. “We contributed,” Van Hollen noted, “to punishing over two million civilians who relied on UNRWA.” ” . . . . .

David Lindsay:  Joe Biden needs to immediately refund UNRWA, to organize the feeding the people of Gaza and let the UN take control of examining aid going in for weapons, instead of leaving it to the Israeli Defence Force, who reduce the flow of aid to a trickle.

Nicholas Kristof, Opinion | President Biden, You Have Leverage That Can Save Lives in Gaza. Please Use It. – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

“President Biden is sounding tougher toward Israel these days and showing more compassion for people starving in Gaza. “There are a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying,” Biden said. “And it’s got to stop.”

But it’s not going to stop on its own — indeed, it may get worse if Israel invades Rafah, or if hunger tips into famine. And Biden’s concern for Palestinians rings hollow to me because he has been unwilling to lean hard on Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make it stop.

So we’re now in a bizarre situation: American bombs and American aid are both falling from Gaza’s skies.

In 1948, the United States and its allies undertook the famous Berlin Airlift to rescue West Berlin from a Soviet blockade. Now we are engaged in another humanitarian airlift — this time because of the actions not of an enemy but of our partner. Israel is insisting on painstaking inspections of every aid truck going into Gaza. A senior administration official told me that Israel was turning back entire truckloads if they contained emergency birthing kits, apparently because these include a small scalpel for cutting umbilical cords. UNICEF tells me that Israel is refusing to allow it to bring in portable toilets. Senators Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley visited the Gaza border and found that Israel has blocked water purifiers. A British member of Parliament said that Israel had blocked 2,560 solar lights.

Because Biden couldn’t persuade Israel to ease up on this nonsense and allow in enough aid to avert starvation, he moved to airdrops and a sea corridor — better than nothing and also woefully inadequate. Cindy McCain, head of the United Nations World Food Program, warns that road access to Gaza is essential, and that “if we do not exponentially increase the size of aid going into the northern areas, famine is imminent.”

Diplomacy is about arm-twisting as much as persuasion, but Biden seems unwilling to act in ways that give force to his words. Simply put, Netanyahu ignores the White House because there is no cost to doing so.

That’s not entirely new. “Our American friends offer us money, arms and advice,” the Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan told a visiting American Zionist leader in 1967. “We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice.”

Avi Shlaim, the historian, recounts that the visitor asked what would happen if America said that Israel would get aid only if it took the advice. Dayan replied: “Then we would have to take the advice, too.”

Under tough-minded presidents, that has occasionally happened. My first visit to the Middle East involved backpacking through a battered Lebanon after the 1982 Israeli invasion, which left many Palestinians dead but hasn’t improved Israel’s security. I didn’t know that behind the scenes President Ronald Reagan called up Prime Minister Menachem Begin after one particularly horrific artillery barrage and, instead of pleading for a halt, commanded it.

“I was angry,” Reagan wrote in his diary, as The New York Review of Books noted. “I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately and said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7-month-old baby with its arms blown off.”

“Twenty mins. later,” Reagan added, “he called to tell me he’d ordered an end to the barrage and pled for our continued friendship.”

I wish Biden would show similar mettle. He could attach end-use restrictions to shipments of offensive arms, limiting how they can be used (as he does with Ukraine). He could simply adhere, as eight senators have urged, to American law that ends military support to any country when the president finds that it “restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.”

Under congressional pressure, Biden last month issued National Security Memorandum 20, which amplifies the law and will require Israel to confirm by late March that it is allowing humanitarian aid delivery; otherwise, it risks its supply of offensive weapons. That is leverage, but only if Biden is willing to use it.

The president can also publicly urge Egypt to let aid trucks now stalled at the border while awaiting Israeli inspections to pass into Gaza even without Israeli approval. (It could do its own inspections if necessary.) Egyptian-Israeli security cooperation is important, but not if it keeps food from Gaza.

The U.S. can also abstain on humanitarian resolutions at the U.N. instead of vetoing them. Biden can bypass Netanyahu and speak directly to Israelis — maybe at the Knesset — and make the case for humanitarian aid, a cease-fire and a path to a two-state solution.

Biden might deny that he actually has much leverage. It’s a fair point: Israelis were shattered by the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack and aren’t in the mood to hear outsiders who are sitting safely in distant lands call for restraint. One depressing poll last month found that 68 percent of Israeli Jews oppose allowing food and medicine into Gaza.

On the other hand, Israel has responded — albeit inadequately so far — to public pressure and criticism. Just in the last few days, officials have signaled that they want to see more humanitarian assistance, with a military spokesman saying it was trying to “flood” Gaza with aid. A convoy of six aid trucks was allowed to enter northern Gaza directly from Israel, which was encouraging.

The truth is that we don’t know how much leverage Biden has because he hasn’t truly tested his power. When Biden seemed to suggest this month that invading Rafah would cross a red line and might have repercussions, the White House immediately walked his statement back.

Perhaps Biden believes he is projecting friendship and loyalty to a beleaguered ally. To Netanyahu and most of the world, it looks like weakness.

Meanwhile, Gazans starve unnecessarily, and this may become part of Biden’s legacy.

To explain how the present policy is failing, I’ll give the last word to the Gaza linguistics scholar Mohammed Alshannat, whose texts I quoted in my column last week. In a new message, Alshannat told how he tried to collect food from an airdrop to avert starvation:

“Me and my wife decided to go to the beach hoping that we get something to feed our children. There were dozens of thousands of people waiting. Around 2:20 three planes started to drop their parachutes across the beach. People started chasing them. We chased one of these parachutes. However, when it was opened, we found water bottles and vinegar bottles. Two children died of stampede. Because we are so malnourished and have not eaten anything, it took us three hours to get back home, as we had to take a rest every 10 minutes. We wept all the way back.” ” -30-

Nicholas Kristof, Opinion | Israel, Gaza and Double Standards, Including Our Own – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

“Does the West have a double standard when it comes to Israel, pouncing on everything it does with undue harshness?

When he was challenged about the bloodshed in Gaza on “Face the Nation” last weekend, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel responded, “What would America do” after something like the Oct. 7 Hamas attack? “Would you not be doing what Israel is doing? You’d be doing a hell of a lot more.”

Rabbi Marvin Hier in The Jerusalem Post condemned “an unprecedented double standard” that relentlessly criticizes Israel’s bombing of Gaza but is unbothered by the Allied bombing of civilians in Germany and Japan in World War II. And the World Jewish Congress cites “criticizing Israeli defensive operations, but not those of other Western democracies” as an example of antisemitism.

All this strikes me as both right and wrong, a fair point and a false one. I’ll come to why it’s wrong in a moment, but it is undeniably true that the world applies more scrutiny to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians than to many other horrors.

In 2023, for example, the United Nations General Assembly adopted 15 resolutions critical of Israel, and only seven resolutions critical of all other countries in the world together, by the count of one pro-Israel group. Does anyone think that represents even-handedness?

People are more focused on Israel than on what Unicef describes as a “wave of atrocities” currently underway against children in Sudan, while the number of children displaced by recent fighting in Sudan (three million) is greater than the entire population of Gaza. University students in America and Europe protest about Gaza but largely ignore the 700,000 children facing severe acute malnutrition in Sudan, after a civil war began there last April.

The Darfur region of Sudan two decades ago endured what is widely described as the first genocide of the 21st century. Now bands of gunmen once more are killing and raping villagers belonging to particular ethnic groups. I was seared by my reporting from Darfur during the genocide, and it staggers me that the world is ignoring another round of mass atrocities there.

Meanwhile, some of the worst mistreatment of Arabs in recent years was inflicted by Arab rulers themselves, in Syria and Yemen.

So is there a double standard in global attention? Absolutely. Defenders of Israel have every right to point all this out, and sometimes it does reflect antisemitism. Yet — now we get to the other side — it also strikes me as unconscionable to use the world’s hypocrisy, however invidious, to justify the deaths of thousands of children in Gaza.

That would be an echo of Russian whataboutism: How can you talk about our war in Ukraine when you Americans invaded Iraq and tortured people there?

It’s also true that while some university campuses may be guilty of selective outrage, that is not true of all observers. Some of the most incisive critics of Israel’s actions are from the very U.N. agencies and human rights groups whose staffs are risking their lives in the field to save lives in Sudan, Ethiopia and other countries.

In any case, there is a reason to focus on Gaza today, for it is not just one more place of pain among many contenders but, in the judgment of Unicef, the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.

Consider that in the first 18 months of Russia’s current war in Ukraine, at least 545 children were killed. Or that in 2022, by a United Nations count, 2,985 children were killed in all wars worldwide. In contrast, in less than five months of Israel’s current war in Gaza, the health authorities there report more than 12,500 children killed.

Among them were 250 infants less than 1 year old. I can’t think of any conflict in this century that has killed babies at such a pace.

Of course Israel had the right to respond militarily to the Oct. 7 attacks. Of course Hamas leaders should give up their hostages. But none of this excuses Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombing, in the words of President Biden, and restrictions on food and other assistance.

Because of America’s support for Israel’s invasion and diplomatic protection for it at the United Nations, this blood is on our hands, and that surely justifies increased scrutiny.

Yet here’s another double standard: We Americans condemn Russia, China or Venezuela for their violations of human rights, but the United States supports Israel and protects it diplomatically even as it has engaged in what President Biden has called an “over the top” military campaign.

“How can the U.S. condemn Russia’s bombing of civilians in Ukraine as a war crime but fund Netanyahu’s war machine, which has killed thousands?” Senator Bernie Sanders asked.

So it’s fair to talk about double standards. They are real. They run in many directions, shielding Israel as well as condemning it. And in a world where we are all connected by our shared humanity, I believe we should never let our very human tangles of double standards and hypocrisies be harnessed to deflect from the tragedy unfolding today for the children of Gaza, or America’s complicity in it.” -30-