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**DECEMBER 21, 2023**
On the Prospect website
Glenn and Ted's Excellent Adventure
Washington fought off the pandemic, but can the city get over the gall
of a billionaire sports mogul and a governor moving D.C. teams across
the Potomac? BY GABRIELLE GURLEY
Q&A: Arin Dube on the Benefits of Full Employment
The UMass professor details a reduction in wage inequality unseen in the
U.S. in half a century. BY DAVID DAYEN
Despite Historic Pay Discrimination Settlement, Little Has Changed for
Women on Wall Street
The $215 million deal made headlines, but the industry pay gap persists,
along with new cases of sexual harassment. BY SUSAN ANTILLA
Meyerson on TAP
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**** Year-End Musings, and How We Get Through
'24
Israel and Palestine, Europe and America: What's Next?
This will be my last On TAP of 2023; the
**Prospect**is off next week, barring the sky falling. Of course, 2023
has been one of those years where the sky actually sagged, if not fell,
so stay tuned. Absent such disruption, however, each Prospector
****has selected their favorite pieces from the year that we will be
posting between Christmas and New Year, so we'll be with you
retrospectively.
Some thoughts before I go into my short winter's nap:
Yesterday,
**The**
**Wall Street Journal**'s news pages ran a report
on the ongoing talks between the political (not military) leaders of
Hamas, Fatah, and various Arab states. Down in the middle of the piece
was the following sentence:
"The Hamas political leaders in these talks indicated that they would be
willing to join the PLO and support negotiations under a unity
government for a Palestinian state within 1967 borders."
In journalese, this is called "burying the lede"-that is, underplaying
the breaking news in the story by positioning it in the middle of the
piece.
Of course, this may overstate the position of Hamas's political
leaders, and it may not be the position of its military leaders at all.
Those kinds of splits are not uncommon: See, e.g., the Irish Republican
Army (provisional and regular wings thereof). Still, having lost, if not
its hold on Gaza, then the entirety of Gaza itself, it is at least
conceivable that a two-state partition along the 1967 borders is so
clearly the best available Palestinian option that Palestine's
multi-tendency political leadership supports it. Should that now emerge
as a Palestinian position, the obstacle would be Israel-at minimum,
Bibi Netanyahu's Israel, but likely, at least for a time, Israel under
any leadership, which is hardly inclined at this point to sanction the
establishment of a Palestinian state. That would reverse the stance of
the two nations at the Camp David bargaining session near the end of
Bill Clinton's presidency, where Ehud Barak's Labor-led government
was amenable to a partition and Yasser Arafat's PLO was not. Should
this reversal of positions now be the case, the very idea that the U.S.
continue to provide unconditional aid to Israel would be ridiculous, as
a two-state solution is the only conceivable solution to this long and
blood-drenched conflict. (If we end up with the nightmare scenario of
one state that runs from the river to the sea, it's almost certainly
going to be Israel, not Palestine.)
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Hopping between topics here, I think 2023 will also be remembered as a
year in which European politics looked increasingly and alarmingly
American. By that, I mean that immigration from Africa and Asia, both
current and future, real and imagined, is something that many Europeans
increasingly view as a threat to the relative ethnic and cultural
homogeneity of their nations.
Perhaps the main reason that social democracy became a norm in Europe
but not in the U.S. is that its nations were racially homogeneous, so
welfare states were viewed as benefiting a racially and culturally
unified majority, even as the unions and other working-class
organizations that were the prime movers of social democratic policies
were themselves racially and culturally unified. In the U.S., which was
multiracial from the get-go, which enslaved one race in particular, and
where successive waves of immigrants continually altered the religious
and cultural composition of the nation, such solidarity was seldom if
ever within reach. It's no accident that the world's most
comprehensive social democracies arose in some of the world's most
homogeneous countries, those of Scandinavia.
And it's no accident that Europe is now threatened by the kind of
white-backlash, racist political parties and groups that have been an
enduring blot on the American landscape.
I know that's a depressing thought with which to end the year,
particularly inasmuch as most of you, like me, probably view the coming
year with abject dread. Then again, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment
almost appears to have been written with Donald Trump in mind. Hope
springs eternal, but only if we work like hell to keep the dictatorial
wolf from the door.
See you in '24!
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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