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read about anti-UNRWA efforts.

Writing in Jewish Currents, Peter Beinart has a report [[link removed]] on the “current effort to abolish UNRWA," the United Nations Relief and Work Agency that has provided essential services to Palestinian refugees since 1949.

The current effort, per Beinart, “dates from late January, when Israel alleged that 12 of the agency’s staff members took part in the October 7th massacre, and that roughly 1200 employees — 10% of UNRWA’s workforce in Gaza — have ties to Hamas or other militant groups. But Israel and its supporters in the US have been seeking to undermine the agency for at least a decade.”

Beinart argues that there is another dynamic at play: “This longstanding campaign against UNRWA reflects a deeper pattern in Israeli political discourse: an inclination to frame Palestinians not as a people with their own political opinions and aspirations, but as marionettes operated by someone else.” Beinart argues that current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu best exemplifies this strategy. The issue is that UNRWA hires from the local population, and that with “the amount of violence Israel has inflicted upon Palestinians in Gaza, it’s hardly surprising that many of the Strip’s inhabitants believe Palestinians have the right to employ violence themselves.”

Beinart is clear that this doesn’t justify violence, but “does mean there is little reason to believe that a successor agency would prove any more effective at insulating its workforce from armed groups than UNRWA has been.”

This is also true, Beinart writes, in Netanyahu’s claim that “UNRWA stokes Palestinian dreams of refugee return.” But here, Beinart writes, “Netanyahu has the issue backwards. UNRWA doesn’t make Palestinian refugees want to return; it’s because Palestinian refugees want to return, and are entitled to do so under international law, that UNRWA exists.”

Meet the Press

In Africa Is a Country, Israel Campos writes [[link removed]] about the state of press freedom, or lack thereof, in Angola.

“In addition to the fight against misinformation and disinformation, there is another challenge that the Angolan media has to face: a delusional political leadership, whose discourse feeds the illusory idea that there is currently an appropriate environment that enables the press to fulfill its key purposes,” Campos explains.

Angola’s government is not unique in wanting state media to serve as part of the party in power, praising the status quo and discrediting alternatives. Campos also writes that self-censorship exists alongside censorship proper, as journalists “are forced to produce journalism that they know does not comply with the basic principles of the job, such as truth and accuracy, independence, fairness and impartiality, humanity, and accountability.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Shabbat Shalom

Sarah Blum has a dispatch [[link removed]] in the Nation about a recent Shabbat dinner hosted at the Ditmas Park branch of Ayat, a Palestinian restaurant.

The dinner was a sort of thank you to neighbors and diners, Jewish and not, who pushed back after Ayat was smeared by pro-Israel individuals as antisemitic (the seafood portion of the menu had been labeled “From the River to the Sea,” which Zionist groups have described as hate speech and which the owners of the restaurant, Abdul Elenani and Ayat Masoud, described as a call for equality and peace. The event featured a Torah reading, klezmer band, and kosher food options. The owners estimated that it cost them $40,000 to put on (diners did not pay for the event). “If we’re able to utilize our cuisine and our kitchen to bring people together, I think that’ll always be the case, and we hope for it to stay as the case,” Elenani told Blum.

Blum’s report includes commentary from various diners, including a 69-year-old daughter of a Holocaust survivor and the cantor who assembled the night’s prayer book, Laura Elkeslassy, who told Blum that the event “brought hope.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Voting Rights and Voting Wrongs

Kevin T. Morris of the Brennan Center for Justice and independent scholar Ian Shapiro have written a study [[link removed]] called “On Fertile Ground: How Racial Resentment Primes White Americans to Believe Fraud Accusations.” As the title suggests, the work looks at how conversations and convictions around voter fraud are motivated by anti-Black racism.

“White Americans face a democratic dilemma: do they remain committed to electoral democracy, beneficial as it has historically been for them? Or abandon it in the face of gains from nonwhite Americans? We argue that ‘fraud’ allows them a way out: they can reject specific democratic outcomes, while remaining committed to democracy as an ideal,” the authors write.

The authors explain that stories “that insinuate fraud was perpetrated by racial minorities are buoyed by several factors. They are consistent with racial stereotypes about criminality, appeal to those harboring racial animus, and are psychologically convenient in that they allow whites to reject short-term outcomes while maintaining confidence in a political system that has benefited them over time. By focusing accusations of fraud on Black individuals and municipalities, elites made their claims more believable to a white audience.”

The authors believed that these "racialized accusations of fraud leading up to and especially following the 2020 election provided an avenue through which white Americans could reject specific outcomes of electoral politics even as they maintain the legitimacy of the system as a whole,” and set out to test this in three studies.

They explored what kind of municipalities were mentioned on Twitter alongside voter fraud and found that, besides population, “the Black share of a city’s population was the only significant predictor of how frequently it was mentioned on Twitter alongside the phrase ‘voter fraud.’”

They used the panel structure of the 2020 Cooperative Election Study to show white respondents’ confidence deteriorated most after the election when accusations of fraud zeroed in on racialized municipalities.

Then, “After demonstrating that racially resentful white Americans were likely susceptible to these claims, we use a survey experiment to test the relationship between racialized narratives and fraud belief in a causal framework. Manipulating the majority racial group of a fictional city, and the race of the chief election official working there, we show that accusations of fraud were more credible among white Americans when they were levied against Black-led municipalities.”

And when white Americans were presented with a Black official denying electoral fraud, they actually became more concerned about election insecurity.

The authors also remind their readers of the historical and political context for their study, writing, “it is no accident that the political content of crime in the United States is singularly racialized; since at least the 1960s, conservative elites have sought to tie Blackness to criminality in the public mind to justify policies undermining their electoral power.”

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

Kyriakos Finas reported [[link removed]] on Turkey — and on how, a year after devastating earthquakes quite literally shook the country, many are still struggling to put their lives back together. “More than a year later, the Hatay Province, home to the historic city of Antakya, is still the site of thousands of containers that provide shelter for some 50,000 households. The container cities, as locals call them, sit on the outskirts of cities and villages around the province,” Finas wrote. People are struggling to pull together what once was whole. As Finas described, “Many lost homes, land, and businesses. Nearly everyone lost loved ones, relatives, and friends.” As one interviewee put it, it is impossible to rebuild their lives and to overcome trauma that is still an open wound.

Norman Solomon warned [[link removed]] about US nuclear weapons and the nuclear arms race. “In the case of budgets for nuclear arms, the huge price tags are — in the most absolute sense imaginable — markers for a sustained, systemic, headlong rush toward omnicide, the destruction of the human species,” Solomon wrote. “Meanwhile, what passes for debate on Capitol Hill is routinely an exercise in green-eyeshade discourse, assessing the most cost-effective outlays to facilitate Armageddon, rather than debating the wisdom of maintaining and escalating the nuclear arms race in the first place.” Solomon also noted the lack of muscle behind the disarmament movement in the United States.

Tibisay Zea wrote [[link removed]] about how asylum became the main route for mass migration into the United States. “To address the labor-market shortage, the US needs more immigrants…But the economic needs don’t mesh well with immigration policies. The reality is that there aren’t a lot of options for low-skilled workers, besides seasonal visas, to come to the US legally,” Zea wrote. Asylum has become the “de-facto alternative” — but the asylum route was not designed to be the primary channel for mass migration, and that means the asylum system is overwhelmed administratively, with somewhere around 3 million applications pending, and asylum-seekers “waiting an average of four and a half years for their cases to be resolved.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL-PLAYED

So true [[link removed]], Michael Caine.

In a “need to log off” [[link removed]] era.

Last night was a movie [[link removed]] (the movie is Office Space).

This you [[link removed]]?

Everything that dies someday comes back [[link removed]].

American soft power [[link removed]].

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Critical State is written by Emily Tamkin with Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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