2025-06-23 20:00:00
Among President Donald Trump’s lizard-brain intuitions is that Americans are overwhelmed by choice. This exhaustion is a strangely underexplored reason for his appeal; it may even help explain why his heavy use of executive power (verging on what some experts have no problem calling authoritarianism) is often met with shrugs and blank stares.
Just to take one surprising example: Last month, Trump swept away worries about his tariff war raising the cost of an array of consumer products by suggesting that children didn’t need so many toys (“I don’t think a beautiful baby girl needs—that’s 11 years old—needs 30 dolls”)—to which a chorus on the anti-consumerist left responded, Yeah, you’re probably right. Although most observers interpreted Trump’s comments as a gaffe (because what president since Jimmy Carter has suggested that Americans should scrimp?), the journalist Alissa Quart wrote that Trump had “unwittingly” put his finger on a real problem, that “American kids are being overly defined by material goods and they and we need to buy less.” Writing in Slate, Rebecca Onion, also holding her nose, admitted that “American parenthood is an intense encounter with the excesses of the consumer economy, where the acquisition of stuff feels like it’s not in your control.”
Much of Trump’s schtick—the aspiration to wear a crown (literally), the assertion that “I alone can fix it,” the ostentatious governing through reward and punishment—can be seen as a leader offering his subjects relief from the burden of making decisions. This is not to say that Trump has developed such a supreme case for himself as daddy, but rather that his popularity reveals the readiness of Americans to turn to one. The desire to have someone else choose might have to do with just how valueless our many options have become. Think of the expansive selection of “mid” TV shows to pick from on Netflix, or the nearly infinite number of possible sexual partners that fly by on Tinder, or the agony of selecting a candidate at the polls (among either, usually, two flawed politicians or, as in New York City’s ranked-choice Democratic primary, so many candidates that consensus feels unreachable).
The notion that Trump is the wrong answer to the right question has become something of a truism for liberals. But perhaps he is, in this unintended way, pointing us to the end of “choice idolatry.” This is the phrase that the historian Sophia Rosenfeld uses in her recent book, The Age of Choice, which sets out to explain how freedom came to be synonymous with having an endless number of possible doors to open, and how wrapped up our sense of self is with the ability “to make one’s own personally satisfying choices, with a minimum of impediments, from among a range of options.” She uses idolatry for a distinct reason, suggesting that we might be reaching a golden-calf moment: As shiny and captivating as choice has been for so long, it is revealing itself as a hollow source of identity and a distraction from what really matters.
[Read: America got the father it wanted.]
Rosenfeld, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, calls herself a “historian of the taken-for-granted.” (A previous book of hers traced the history of common sense.) The presumption that freedom equals choice is the kind of fixed notion she is primed to deconstruct. To think of humans as a species that revels in possibility—unlike, say, anteaters or mice, who are not exactly seeking out novelty—seems self-evident. But Rosenfeld’s book demonstrates just how recent and culturally constructed this definition is, a seeping consequence of social and psychological developments over the past 300 years that gradually saturated the way people came to see themselves.
Ceasing to think of freedom as the possession of many options would be no small rupture. What might take its place? Abandoning a consumerist worldview might not be the worst thing for humanity, and for Americans in particular—it might lead to a sturdier value system, maybe one more concerned with the common good. But the resulting vacuum could just as easily be filled by Trump’s idea of freedom, one based on power and sovereignty over others, and on screwing the other guy before he screws you. The cruelty of this vision almost demands a reinvigoration of choice, an effort to salvage what had made this human impulse so liberating to begin with.
For Rosenfeld, the first inklings of our choosiness could be glimpsed in Western Europe in the late 17th century. Picture a woman walking into a store that sells calicos, which were ornamental pieces of cotton from India printed with varied and colorful designs of flowers, birds, and the like. These were some of the first pieces of frippery available, sold at a price point that made them accessible to more than just the rich. No longer was the act of buying goods one of provisioning, asking for flour or butter from behind the counter. Now the products were on display, Rosenfeld writes, “hung from hooks inside shops or on the side of entranceways in enticing folds that stretched down to the floor in a simulation of women’s copious skirts.” This was not mere sustenance; it was seduction.
During the century that followed, choice exploded. Soon, sales catalogs laying out the choicest wares were read for pleasure, presenting opportunities to fantasize. A new style of eating establishment, by the 1790s exemplified in the Parisian bistro, offered expanding menus of meats and sauces and drinks in hundreds of possible variations.
The habits of mind that formed around these activities altered the way people thought about their lives. This is Rosenfeld’s central contention. But shopping was soon perceived to have a moral cost; it was seen, she writes, “as emancipatory and as selfish and indulgent.” An anxiety attached itself to choice even as the rituals of consumption were becoming ingrained—the coveting, the browsing, the haggling, the price comparison.
Shopping guides emerged to help guard against making bad choices. The Tea Purchaser’s Guide; or, The Lady and Gentleman’s Tea Table and Useful Companion, in the Knowledge and Choice of Teas, authored anonymously by “A Friend to the Public,” could be considered a kind of 18th-century Wirecutter. Such compendia were created to avoid choosing according to “fancy” or “whim,” two vices that made their appearance in novels of the time, as did a new stock female character: the coquette. This was the woman who exercises her power to choose by browsing extensively but also withholding a decision. She teases. As Rosenfeld emphasizes throughout her history, such excesses were often projected onto women, who were accused of causing “social and moral decay” through their frivolity and unexpected economic power.
[Read: There’s no such thing as free will.]
The shopping revolution was as significant as the more obvious political revolts that occurred around the same time. The philosophers of liberalism and the authors of new constitutions may have provided a language for talking about individual freedom, but it was the consumer’s habit, in Rosenfeld’s framing, that eventually trickled down and transformed political systems into expressions of personal preference.
Because of the dangers of unhindered possibility, the expansion of choice came with guardrails, rules meant to stave off anarchy and social disorder. The use of dance cards at 19th-century balls—another of Rosenfeld’s charmingly idiosyncratic examples—expanded women’s agency in choosing a mate. The little booklets allowed a woman to create a menu of options, but they also precluded a free-for-all—it was highly improper, for example, to dance with the same partner for more than a waltz or two.
With the introduction of the secret ballot, in the Yorkshire town of Pontrefract in 1872, choice idolatry conquered its last frontier: voting. No longer would elections be noisy, populous affairs in which candidates would treat voters to food and drink in a shared good time for all. No longer would political choice be the result of something like a public caucus, a ritual that mostly just codified already existing social alliances. The secret ballot began as an “experiment,” as one local paper put it, in which one was to go “alone and unbefriended to a compartment,” in the words of another, and indicate one’s favored candidate. This solitary physical act soon became, Rosenfeld writes, “what modern freedom is supposed to feel like.” The secret ballot became the most fundamental of rights in a democracy. Attention turned to the question of who should secure this right, and understandably so: Women and minority groups understood its power, even as an emblem (recall Afghan women in 2014 proudly raising their ink-stained fingers to indicate that they had taken part).
Yet even before that first ballot was shoved into a box, some saw the shift from the communal act of voting, messy as it had been, to the purely individual as carrying its own problems. Writing in 1861, John Stuart Mill, a champion of liberalism, worried about what would be let loose in the secrecy of the voting booth, where an elector might be encouraged to “use a public function for his own interests, pleasures or caprice.” Voters would think of their choices as a way “to please themselves,” or as an expression of their “personal interests, or class interest, or some mean feeling in his own mind.” The whole process, Mill argued, would move voting away from a referendum on a community’s values and toward an act of whimsy, like browsing from an array of calico clothes.
The 20th century only further solidified the idea of choice as the paramount freedom, which also meant shedding some of the guardrails of earlier eras. Many economists came to perceive an individual as the sum of their preferences, a choosing machine, Homo economicus, acting rationally and always maximizing the collective good through their own self-interest. The celebration of market-based individualism hit a peak when Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism triumphed in the 1980s. Friedman once wrote that “the freedom of people to control their own lives in accordance with their own values is the surest way to achieve the full potential of a great society.”
[Read: The friendship that created behavioral economics]
At the same time, paradoxically, the 20th century provided much reason for skepticism about how much control humans really have over their choices. Freud revealed the subterranean sources of our desires; advertisers manipulate our taste for breakfast cereals as well as presidents. In this century, at least to a behavioral psychologist such as the late Daniel Kahneman, even the question of free will seems unsettled. This insecurity is particularly glaring in a world of proliferating algorithms that serve us more of what they predict we will want and AIs that offer to do the thinking for us.
If choice is the “useless and exhausted idiom” that Rosenfeld suggests it might be by the end of her history, then maybe the concept is worth abandoning altogether. Doing so, she writes, would be akin to asking “if we are done with capitalism and democracy and their special offspring, human rights”—if we are ready, that is, to throw out the dominant principle of the contemporary world.
I don’t think we are. But if choice has indeed become an end unto itself, absent a set of principles for actually making choices, then something has gone awry.
Abortion rights is a telling test case. In the late 1960s, feminists began using the slogan “My Body, My Choice” to argue for the legalization of abortion in order to make it seem to be a self-evident right: Americans would never stand in the way of freedom, and to be free was to have choices. But what is clearer now, after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, is that the pro-choice argument was fragile. It gave conservatives the chance to challenge the consumerist-sounding appeal to “choice” with the more moral-sounding appeal of “life.” But even more damning are critiques of this framing from the left. The decision to rely on “choice,” Rosenfeld writes, made access to abortion “solely a civil right, a right to fulfill individual desires without government interference, not a social or economic right framed in response to essential needs or a matter of social justice.” She explains that this made abortion seem like “something for sale exclusively to those who had the resources—financial, familial, and psychological—to select it in a reproductive marketplace.”
Is it possible to make an argument for abortion without resorting to choice idolatry? I began to hear an inkling of this possibility during the recent presidential campaign. Access to abortion was presented not as a matter of personal bodily autonomy but as a public-health concern. In one memorable speech, Michelle Obama painted a dire picture of what would happen to women if, because of abortion bans, they didn’t get “the care” they needed; to the male partners of these women, she said, “You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something.” Kamala Harris, in her one debate with Trump, also turned to images of medical distress—of “pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room.” Rather than appealing to women’s personal agency, Harris invoked other values: communal care and well-being.
[Read: Abortion takes center stage.]
What I picked up in this tonal shift was a realization among liberals, conscious or not, that just arguing for having choices was not enough. It matters how you choose and what you choose. What matters is the moral choice in question, the stakes—in this case, what we value more: the health and happiness of the mother, or the existence of her fetus.
This is a harder debate to have, and it demands making a more profound argument than one simply in favor of choice, but it is also more rewarding. In his 1946 lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” Jean-Paul Sartre compared making moral choices to “the construction of a work of art.” The decisions you make at every juncture are what make you. This is as true of a person’s life as it is of a society. “Freedom could be reconfigured as the chance to do what one ought rather than simply what one desired,” Rosenfeld writes. Releasing ourselves from choice idolatry doesn’t have to mean letting someone else—an imperial president, for instance—decide for us. It means separating good choices from bad, understanding these categories as the ones that matter, delineating them alongside our fellow citizens. This, rather than just being drunk on options, should be the sweet slog of modernity.
2025-06-23 20:00:00
When President Donald Trump won a second term, the question wasn’t whether his economic policy would be different from the first-term version, but how. Two factions have vied to steer the administration’s agenda: Conservative populists came with a plan to roll back globalization and empower the working class. And the tech right brought a vision of an accelerated future driven by innovation and disruption.
Vice President J. D. Vance announced in March that “as a proud member of both tribes,” he believed that “this idea that tech-forward people and the populists are somehow inevitably going to come to loggerheads is wrong.” Trump would blend the two visions into a new synthesis that would simultaneously lift up his downscale voting base and unleash technological progress.
Three months later, the product that has emerged is not a better iteration of the original Trumponomics, which consisted largely of conventional Republican policy, but a worse one, much worse. It has managed, amazingly, to abandon the two tribes’ most attractive proposals while retaining the least-appealing elements of each. It discards the futuristic ambition of the tech right while preserving its social Darwinism. It leans into the closed-off nostalgia of the populist right while ignoring populists’ impulse to help workers.
One measure of the dismal result of the administration’s agenda is the slew of projections about the fiscal and economic effects of its tariffs and the megabill racing through Congress. The policies, in combination, amount to an enormous transfer of resources from people at the bottom of the economic scale to those at the top. The Yale Budget Lab projects that the bottom four-fifths of the income distribution would be made poorer by the combined tariffs and megabill, while only the most affluent would come out ahead. That is an incredible result for an administration that is increasing the national debt.
[Jonathan Chait: The largest upward transfer of wealth in American history]
Various economic models disagree as to whether the megabill would have no effect on economic growth or actually inhibit it. Again, this would be a normal outcome for a plan that would shrink the deficit, but it’s a difficult result to pull off when you are pumping stimulus into the economy. The perverse consequence of Trump’s plan to tariff foreign trade, cut taxes for the affluent, and take health insurance from some 10 million Americans is a smaller pie, divided less equally.
You might suspect that Republicans reject the assumptions behind such projections. Indeed they do. Yet it’s not as though Trump’s economic plan has satisfied the president’s own coalition. Elon Musk, the foremost spokesperson for the tech right, lambasted Trump for blowing out the deficit while cutting support for solar and battery technology (at least, he did before Trump bullied him into silence). Oren Cass, the chief economist at the right-wing think tank American Compass and a leading advocate for populist conservatism, denounced Trump’s legislation as “a death march through a series of choices that nobody really wanted to be making.”
Vance’s prediction that the populists and the tech right could come together turned out to be, in a way, correct. The two factions quietly agree that Trump’s plan is a failure.
[Read: The decline and fall of Elon Musk]
The effort to change the Republican Party’s economic program has been going in fits and starts for the better part of two decades. Starting in George W. Bush’s second term, a clique of reform conservatives, or “reformicons,” critiqued the party’s attachment to tax cuts for the rich as a political drag that fit poorly with its growing share of working-class voters. They derided the tax-cut fetish as “Zombie Reaganism,” a mindless adherence to an obsolete program. Yet they failed to make headway, precisely because Republicans believed, with theological certainty, that Ronald Reagan had discovered the eternally correct set of economic policies in the late 1970s, and that questioning their efficacy amounted to heresy.
The internal debate seemed to die down—until Trump emerged with his claim that every previous Republican, including the sainted Reagan, had been a total loser. At times, Trump made populist rhetorical gestures that resembled elements of the reformicon plan (promising to raise taxes on the rich, rein in Wall Street, and give everybody terrific health insurance). When he took office in 2017, however, he fell back on the old formula.
After Trump’s first term ended in defeat, his supporters set out to ensure that they would not squander their next opportunity. Most of the intellectual energy went toward building up authoritarian power that would overwhelm the hated “deep state,” as well as the judiciary, the media, and other forces that Trump loyalists blamed for undermining him. At the same time, his partisans sought to supply a second Trump administration with authentically Trumpian policies.
The populist version is laid out in a new book edited by Cass, The New Conservatives: Restoring America’s Commitment to Family, Community, and Industry. The authors lament the squandered potential of Trump’s first term, which could boast only another regressive tax cut as its sole major domestic-policy accomplishment was. Rather than continue lavishing such gifts on the affluent, Cass and his colleagues argue, the new administration should tax the rich more heavily and give the working class a break. The policies they favor would combine protection of key domestic enterprises with an industrial policy to create good-paying jobs for blue-collar workers.
The alternative vision floated by the tech right is more amorphous, as you might expect from supremely confident billionaires unburdened by deep familiarity with public policy. The general thrust is a desire to cut the deficit by slashing social-insurance programs, while supercharging economic growth by encouraging high-skilled immigration and investing heavily in science.
Each tribe’s plan has its merits and drawbacks. The strength of the populist program is its emphasis on low-income workers and its willingness to tax the rich. Its weakness is its static impulse to restore a 20th-century economy. The reverse holds true for the tech right: Its strength is its emphasis on dynamism, and its weakness is its social-Darwinist-infused hostility to the safety net.
Trump might have chosen one approach or the other, or—per Vance—tried to blend their best features. Instead, he did the precise opposite: He made scientists leave the country and put in doubt the future of hundreds of high-tech factories while exploding the deficit, jacking up inequality, and taking medical care from millions.
Amazingly, in the most obvious area of overlap between the populists and the tech right—government support for a domestic battery industry, which would be vital for powering AI, drones, and other key products—Republicans have imposed deep rollbacks. The House version would cut battery production by three-quarters in coming years, eliminating manufacturing jobs and strangling this tech incubator. And by cutting funds for green energy, the House bill would raise energy prices by 7 to 9 percent, according to different projections. Trump’s determination to crush low-carbon energy sources at any price was exemplified by his recent order to reopen antiquated coal plants in Michigan, which forced consumers to pay higher electric bills simply to subsidize coal.
The perversity of this outcome is almost impressive. Trump is not even mortgaging the future for the benefit of cheap, dirty energy. He is combining short-term pain with even greater long-term pain.
The collapse of the attempt to reform Republican economic policy under Trump has been so swift and complete that we can already discern causes for the failure. I propose four.
First, Trump, flushed with victory, rashly attempted to speedrun versions of both reform visions via executive order. DOGE was the tech right’s turn at the wheel. Trump gave Musk virtual carte blanche to remake the federal government. Rather than pursue a coherent reform agenda, Musk appeared to fall for a series of conspiracy theories, alienated Trump’s Cabinet, and wound up kneecapping some of the federal government’s tiniest but most cost-effective functions. In the process, he failed to generate any meaningful fiscal savings or operational improvements. One could envision a tech right–driven government overhaul that accomplished something useful, but Musk’s blundering resulted in fiasco.
In tandem with all of that, Trump worked with his populist trade adviser Peter Navarro to impose a set of global tariffs, on the erroneous premise that the trade deficit amounted to per se evidence of unfair foreign-trade practices. The “Liberation Day” tariffs overreached, generating a stock-market blowback that Trump couldn’t tolerate, causing him to fall back on lower across-the-board tariffs that have served little strategic purpose. No really smart way to use trade to revive manufacturing, as the populists had hoped, may have been available to Trump—but there were less dumb ways.
In both cases, Trump opted for speed and unilateral authority instead of care and legislative consultation; ham-fisted management by his ill-chosen staff did the rest.
A second source of failure is that Trump prioritized political control above any other objective, including economic outcomes. His slashing attacks on the bureaucracy, including deep cuts to scientific and medical research, incapacitated agencies that play a vital role in the economy. After paying lip service to the tech right’s hope for more high-skilled immigration, Trump not only abandoned the goal but also created a brain drain with his war on universities. In every case where Trump could choose between building human capital and punishing his enemies, he selected the latter.
Third, the deliberations among Republicans in Congress and the White House have revealed the hold that Zombie Reaganism retains over the party. The fiscal gravity of Trump’s tax cuts is so huge that it has pulled every other aspect of the party’s economic program into its orbit. Republicans have taken politically toxic votes to cut Medicaid and SNAP benefits because those cuts were needed to offset the cost of making Trump’s tax breaks permanent. The same dynamic drove Republicans to pull spending on batteries and green-energy manufacturing.
Republicans have not so much embraced these trade-offs anew as assumed them to be self-evidently good. No senior Republican elected official has advocated for letting the Trump tax cuts expire. Although many of them complain about deficits, they’ve blamed spending, not tax cuts—despite the fact that the megabill is slated to reduce spending.
The final and most profound reason that Republicans failed to revise their economic program is the corrosive influence of the Trump personality cult.
However strongly the populist wing wants to expand the party’s appeal by jettisoning unpopular policy baggage, it is committed above all to elevating Trump. Although populists such as Steve Bannon and Josh Hawley might warn of the dangers of cutting Medicaid, or urge their party to raise taxes on the rich, they have neither the leverage nor any willingness to press their complaints. The source of their political authority is loyalty to MAGA before all else, and they know that dissenting from Trump on any policy matter is a ticket to political exile—as the tech right has already discovered. Ardent Trump supporters horrified by his trade war have had to couch their dismay in obsequious pleading. Even Musk, after briefly entertaining the notion that he was free to argue with Trump in the way that Trump argues with people, shrank into humiliating contrition, adopting the tone of a defrocked Soviet official apologizing at his show trial to Stalin.
Remaking an economic strategy is an intellectual endeavor, one that is inherently fraught in the atmosphere of conformity and obfuscation that Trump has cultivated. The Republican Party’s economic philosophy was long trapped in mindless dogma. But rather than escaping it, the GOP has exchanged one cult for another.
2025-06-23 19:00:00
At an Oval Office press conference last month, Donald Trump described present-day South Africa as “the opposite of apartheid”—a phrase so perfectly weird that the man sitting across from him, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, took several seconds to process it, before literally biting his lip and letting the line pass without remark.
The opposite of apartheid sounds like a compliment. (“Apartheid. Terrible!” Trump had said, just seconds before.) But Trump didn’t mean it that way. He accused South Africa of rebuilding the system of racial hierarchy that had once made it, in the words of Nelson Mandela, “the skunk of the world.” Under opposite-of-apartheid, Trump said, white South African farmers are now the victims. The reek of oppression comes from the “thousands of stories” describing their murders and the theft of their farmland. In the course of dressing down Ramaphosa, Trump dimmed the lights for a screening of a sing-along led by the South African politician Julius Malema, in which a large group chants “Kill the Boer.” (Boer is “farmer” in Afrikaans, the native language of most white South Africans.) Trump suggested that the farmers are the victims of a “genocide” and said they feared having their land taken away. And he reiterated a policy announced in February that welcomed them to resettle in America as refugees.
Ramaphosa denied that a genocide was under way. He reminded Trump that black South Africans are being killed in even greater absolute numbers, in the course of robbery and other nongenocidal crime. (South Africa’s murder rate of 42 per 100,000 people is among the world’s highest. The United States’ is 6.8; France’s is 1.5.) “There is criminality in our country,” Ramaphosa said, copping to a lesser charge. The meeting adjourned awkwardly, with Ramaphosa inviting Trump to South Africa for a state visit.
Trump will probably resist this invitation. I could not. Although Trump cheapened the word genocide by using it to describe the situation of Afrikaner farmers, many conditions that fall short of genocide are nonetheless intolerable, including living in a country of extreme and routine violence. In that way, the plight of white South Africans resembles, as Ramaphosa suggested, that of their black countrymen. When white farmers are slaughtered in their homes, their murderers’ motivations are not, as Ramaphosa suggested, always genocidal.
[Nick Miroff: America is the land of opportunity—for white South Africans]
Signs of violent criminality are ubiquitous in South Africa. Electric fences and guard dogs protect homes containing something worth stealing. Reported rapes, carjackings, and armed robberies all occur far more frequently than in the United States. In Bloemfontein, one of the safer cities, I asked a hotel clerk for directions to a coffee shop, and she said it was “just across the road,” not more than 500 feet away. When I headed out on foot, she stopped me and said that for my safety, “I would prefer that you drive.” Driving is dangerous too. On highways, permanent signs announce that the next few miles are a “spiking hot spot,” where brigands plant obstacles to blow out tires and ambush drivers when they stop to change their flats. A couple of years ago, an American tourist rented a car at the airport in Cape Town and set up navigation on his phone. His app had an option to avoid tolls but not to avoid being shot in the face. Within an hour he was in a bad neighborhood, with his jaw hanging off his head and all his possessions gone. (He survived and vowed to sue Google Maps.)
Afrikaner farmers suffer, in this context, from what might be called the Willie Sutton problem. Why rob and assault them? Because that’s where the money is. In rural areas, farmers have expensive motors and other agricultural equipment, and sometimes stashes of cash to pay workers. It stands to reason that in dangerous and thief-ridden land, the richest people would get attacked now and then. White farmers are responsible for about 90 percent of agricultural output.
A little more than a week after the Trump meeting, I was in South Africa’s Limpopo state, a center of citrus production. At an agricultural training center, I met a white fruit packer, Davon Stoltz, 29, whose story was just as horrible and lurid as Trump had implied. Stoltz sat by me in a flimsy plastic chair, in the shade of a Tipuana tree, and told me what had happened to his family on the morning of April 30.
His aunt called and begged him to come quickly. She had found his grandfather, Robert Stoltz, 78, apparently lifeless on his bathroom floor. What she saw made her rush out and refuse to go back in. Davon drove 40 miles and beat the police to the scene. He told me Robert “was in the bathroom, with his face on the ground, in the corner.” The murder weapon was a panga, a type of machete. Robert’s arms had been bound with barbed wire. “They panga-ed his face,” Davon said. “His nose was off, all his teeth out, and there was a big hole in his face and on top of his head.”
Why brutalize an old man? Davon was both disgusted and puzzled. “They didn’t take anything but his phone and his car,” he told me. The car was found rolled, not far away. “They dragged him through the kitchen. On the way, there’s a lot of things to steal.” But the TV was still there, and the cupboards were undisturbed.
[Eve Fairbanks: When racial progress comes for white liberals]
Davon said the police, who were just a few miles away, dawdled and ignored key evidence. His grandfather didn’t smoke, but cigarette butts lay everywhere at the scene and remained there even after the police collected evidence, bagged up the body, and left. Only when the family came in to wash the gore from the tiles did they find the murder weapon, a homemade panga stashed above the bathroom mirror and still dripping with Grandpa’s blood. “I get angry when I talk about this,” Davon said. “The forensic team just didn’t care.” They don’t care, he told me, because “we are white.” He contrasted the indifference with the solidarity expressed by the 10 black workers on Robert’s farm, who attended the funeral and offered to help find the killers.
The family hired private investigators, and their efforts, not the police’s, yielded a suspect, Bobo Mokoena, now under arrest for the crime. Davon told me he confronted Mokoena at one of his first court appearances. Mokoena laughed at him and said he had thought the old man had money. That motivation does not satisfy Davon. “Why would you think he has money?” Robert was mostly retired, and not rich. “Why kill him? Come on. Honestly it’s because he’s white; he’s a Boer.”
Davon said mere greed could explain some roughing up, but not disfigurement and murder. “Show me where a black person is killed, and then I will show you my grandpa’s pictures, how he looked when he was killed—like my grandpa was an animal.” Davon said he was so traumatized by seeing his grandfather’s mangled face that after the corpse had been cleaned up, he asked to see it again, in hopes of replacing a gruesome sight with a sanitized one. “I tried to get that picture out of my head,” he told me. “Didn’t work. I promise you: That’s not a picture you want to see.”
I spoke with other white farmers in Limpopo who had suffered home invasions. Some, such as a woman who was beset in her kitchen by another panga wielder, had barely survived. Others managed to alert neighbors and police in time to avoid serious harm. For years, rural South Africans were spared the crime afflicting big cities—in part because the old rural security architecture, known as the Commando system, remained intact for a decade after apartheid’s end. That system—semi-militarized, with armed citizens patrolling the countryside—was tainted by its association with apartheid and disbanded in the 2000s. Now farmers are reacting to the rise in farm attacks by informally reviving it. They have hardened their defenses. They stuff guns in their trousers and have turned their farms into little islands of security, with so many cameras, drones, and surveillance monitors that in a drought year they could quit farming altogether and film a Truman Show remake.
How, in a country where violence is this common, is one to know whether it is racially motivated? It seemed possible that Davon’s grandpa was not targeted for his race, and that the cops missed the clues because of incompetence and corruption, rather than indifference to the murder of white people. (Twice I was told that to get police to consider evidence of a crime, one should bring a bribe to the precinct in the form of a tasty treat.) But it would have taken a lot of nerve to suggest to Davon and other white farmers that they ought to lighten up, when stories like theirs are so common, and “Kill the Boer” is pump-up music at political rallies. Hate speech is illegal in South Africa, but courts there have ruled that “Kill the Boer” is not to be taken literally, because the song is an anti-apartheid Communist revolutionary anthem and now no more offensive than an anti-Nazi song that calls for drubbing “the Krauts” or “the Hun.” Pleas to appreciate this nuance are less convincing when your Boer grandpa has recently been hacked to death.
Some incidents are not just grotesque but also mystifying—criminal encounters that are opaque in motivation, which leaves them open to interpret as one sees them, whether as race attacks or something else. One Afrikaner, Joachim Prinsloo, told me about a very peculiar home invasion that involved no violence at all. He said the intruder was easier to catch than he might otherwise have been, because he apparently believed that magical spells had rendered him invisible. He was found in the white family’s living room browsing Cook and Enjoy It, a classic Afrikaans cookbook, while holding it upside down. “When I spoke to him, at first he ignored me,” Prinsloo told me. “And then he was shocked that I could see him.”
White racists were preoccupied with these sometimes brutal, often extremely idiosyncratic, sometimes just strange incidents well before they became a source of outrage and fascination for Trump and people orbiting him, such as Elon Musk. They have implied that South Africa is experiencing what Zimbabwe suffered a quarter century ago: government-sanctioned attacks on white farmers, uncompensated seizure of their land, and eventually the collapse of the country’s agricultural sector and ability to feed itself. Trump referred to “over a thousand” dead farmers (upping it to “thousands” in the Q&A with reporters).
[Read: The day Grok told everyone about ‘white genocide’]
In part because of this context, many South Africans are suspicious of those who track the killings and organize farmer efforts to arm themselves and patrol their properties. AfriForum, a Pretoria-based advocacy group, does both. Even its data do not suggest organized mass killings or farm seizure resembling Zimbabwe during the late Robert Mugabe era. They count five farm murders so far in 2025, 37 in 2024, and 52 in 2023, out of roughly 27,000 annual murders in the country as a whole. But South Africa has only about 44,000 white commercial farmers, according to one estimate. AfriForum does not have complete data on the racial classification of the victims, but the group told me that in each year at least half were white, and only about 10 percent were confirmed to be nonwhite. That suggests that the murder rate for white farmers is higher than for the general population, and possibly as much as double the already very high national rate.
Kallie Kriel, AfriForum’s CEO, considers the South African government’s inattention to these killings an outrage and argues that the murder rate, rather than confessions or other statements about motives—of which there are few—shows that farmers are particularly targeted. These killings are not “ordinary crime,” he told me. He called the government’s refusal to denounce Malema—the politician who leads the “Kill the Boer” chants—“shameful,” and further evidence of non-ordinariness. (Ramaphosa distanced himself from Malema in the Trump meeting.) And Kriel noted the hypocrisy of South Africa’s position; in The Hague, South Africa is demanding that Israel punish and prevent incitement to genocide. (Indeed, the same lawyer, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, argued both cases—for Malema’s right to chant “Kill the Boers” in South Africa, and for Israel’s obligation to shut up its own violent loudmouths there.)
Nevertheless, Kriel declined to say that “genocide” was taking place just yet, and he refused to accept one of Trump’s premises: that Afrikaners are helpless victims who need shelter abroad. He noted that Afrikaners arrived in what is now South Africa more than 100 years before my own country was founded. “If we were victims, we would just say we’re finished, and that would be that,” he told me. That was not the Boer way.
The Boer way is to dig in, to outlast challengers, and, above all, to survive. Perhaps the weirdest manifestation of this hardiness is a little town called Orania. More than three decades ago, a small band of Afrikaners responded to the end of apartheid by creating a whites-only private settlement in the Karoo, a parched scrubland in the Northern Cape near the border with the Free State. The survival and growth of this pasty rural town, which now has thousands of inhabitants, is evidence that Trump’s assessment of South Africa—that it is systematically attempting to murder its white farmers—is wrong.
Orania is probably the most openly racist place I have ever visited. That is not to say that I, who would have been classified “Asian” or “Coloured” under apartheid, felt unwelcome. As a guest, I could come and go as I pleased, and during my two-day visit, I was treated graciously. The town looked like a sedate subdivision or kibbutz or retirement community, fringed with industrial parks. It was also safe—the only place I visited in South Africa where I had no fear of petty crime or violence. Its people were nice and patient with my attempts to speak Afrikaans. Their gift shop sold me a little keychain that says Vryheid in Ons Tyd, or “Freedom in Our Time.” “Freedom from what?” I asked, without getting a good answer. Vryheid from stupid questions, I guess.
“They say we are racists, and we hate black people—which never was true,” Hennie Pelser, one of the town spokespeople and tour guides, told me. The goal of Orania, he said, was to “protect ourselves, ensure our existence, and make sure we have something for our kids to inherit.” But he told me that to live there I would need to be white, Christian, and Afrikaans-speaking, a triple whammy in my case, and I noticed that the first of the whammies was unambiguously racial. He said that Oranians performed all work, so black people spotted walking around would be intercepted and politely asked to state their business. A sign at the entrance to the town announces no crime will be tolerated, and Orania may question any suspicious person. Elsewhere in Orania, residents spoke openly of their disdain for black people: their mentality, their morality, their smell.
I met Carel Boshoff IV, Orania’s leader from 2007 to 2019 and the son of one of its founders, at a coffee shop on Orania’s main street. The son and grandson of major Afrikaner politicians, he was dressed in a tweed jacket and reading a book by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan novelist and cultural theorist, who had died the previous day. Boshoff told me Ngũgĩ had influenced his thinking, and as we spoke I could see how. Ngũgĩ had advocated for the strengthening of “cultural freedoms” in the face of hegemonic powers.
Boshoff told me that he views Orania as “an evolutionary development towards something very fundamentally federalist.” From its beginnings in the 1990s, he said, Orania has found legal and spiritual shelter in the South African post-apartheid constitution, which recognizes “the right of self-determination of any community sharing a common cultural and language heritage.” If Zulus can have their land, why not Afrikaners? He said that Orania was conceived as a way to have an Afrikaner community, with schools and churches and security all provisioned by a recognized political entity. Boshoff said that the South African government would prefer that Orania not exist. But the constitution protects it. “They did not like it, but they could not be totally against it,” he said.
Pelser said that Orania was working well, and that Afrikaners being lured to the United States should instead come here. “We don’t have any crime,” he claimed. “We don’t have any unemployment.” He said that the Afrikaners of Orania didn’t think any work was beneath them. Because the land is private, they police themselves, admit residents according to their own criteria, and eject them even for lawful activities, such as smoking pot. Using white manual labor, he told me, made Oranians rugged and self-reliant. Pelser had previously been a banker. I asked whether the lack of black labor, and therefore cheap labor, had held Orania back. “Black labor eventually gets to you,” he said. “Having black labor costs you a lot more at the end of the day, you know.” It softens you, he said, and the presence of outsiders ultimately corrodes the community. “You should never rely on anybody else to do your work for you.”
The irony of this boring monoculture was that it was in some ways a repudiation of apartheid, and not, as it might appear, an attempt to revive it. Both systems endeavored to separate the races. But apartheid was fundamentally an attempt to keep black people out of cities while profiting from their rural labor and depriving them of political and civil rights. The Oranians, by contrast, eschewed black labor and retreated from South Africa’s cities to its countryside, just as black South Africans were doing the opposite. Orania is also a repudiation of Trump because it shows that Afrikaners can be as Afrikaner as they wish, and even openly racist, without being harassed, let alone crushed and exterminated, by the government.
I asked Boshoff what he thought of the 59 Afrikaners who came fast-tracked to America as refugees, while the Trump administration was working to halt resettlement of so many others. “The whole idea has more to do with President Trump’s politics than with ours,” he said. “It’s his agenda and his interest and might be the United States’ interest for all I know.” He was savvy enough to know that anyone seriously concerned about the survival of Afrikaners, collectively or individually, or about preventing genocide, would not approach these topics so cavalierly, and with such disregard for the efforts of Afrikaners themselves.
By leaving the place where his people had lived for 350 years, were these Afrikaners giving up, hastening a cultural suicide? He seemed very sad at the thought. The Afrikaners who came to America, he said, might find that they had lost something important by consenting to play this part in Trump’s pageant, at the price of leaving their country. “Wait for the depression to set in—the homesickness. It sits in your bones. And it is coming.”
2025-06-23 18:00:00
On May 26, 1967, the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, issued the following statement about a war he planned to start: “The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel.” Nasser and other Arab leaders believed that the annihilation of the Jewish state was both certain and imminent. Several days later, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Ahmed al-Shuqayri, said, “We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants and as for the survivors—if there are any—the boats are ready to deport them.” When he was asked about the fate of native-born Jews, he said, “Whoever survives will stay in Palestine, but in my opinion no one will remain alive.”
A short while later, on June 5, the Israeli government, believing the sincerity of these threats, launched a preemptive attack on Egypt and Syria, destroying their air forces on the ground. Six days later, Israel had gained possession of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula.
One would think that Yahya Sinwar, until recently the leader of Hamas in Gaza, had absorbed the lessons of 1967. But he overestimated his own capabilities, and those of the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance.” Like the leaders of Iran, he spoke violently and with great confidence. He allowed his reasoning capabilities to be overwhelmed by conspiracism and supremacist Muslim Brotherhood theology. He also made the same analytical mistake Nasser had made: He underestimated the desire of Israelis to live in their ancestral homeland, basing his conclusion on an incorrect understanding of how Israel sees itself.
In the end, the October 7 massacre Sinwar ordered did not cause the destruction of Israel but instead led to the dismantling of its enemies. Hamas is largely destroyed, and most of its leaders, including Sinwar, are dead, assassinated by Israel. Hezbollah, in Lebanon, is comprehensively weakened. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s main Arab ally, is in exile in Moscow, his country now led by Sunni Muslims hostile to Iran’s leaders. Iran’s skies are under the control of the Israeli Air Force, and its $500 billion nuclear program appears to be, at least partially, rubble and dust.
Not since Nasser has anyone in the Middle East been proved so wrong so quickly.
It is not at all clear how the latest Middle East war ends. It is not clear whether Iran and its proxies still possess the ability to hurt the United States and Israel in meaningful ways. And it is not clear if Israel will take advantage of its dramatic new security reality. But for now, there is a reasonable chance that the existential threat posed to Israel by the Iranian regime—ideologically committed to its destruction and to developing a weapon to carry out its vision—has been neutralized, perhaps for several years.
In 2001, the former president of Iran, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, said, “The use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However,” he added, “it will only harm the Islamic world.” For three decades, Israel and its longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, made the Iranian threat a singular preoccupation. But until the arrival of Donald Trump, no American president believed that the Iranian threat should be ended—to borrow from the language of the campus anti-Israel movement—by any means necessary.
Trump may yet be remembered as a hypocrite who promised a clean American exit from the Middle East but found his presidency—like those of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan before him—hopelessly trapped in Iranian quicksand. His radical intervention in the Middle East may turn out to be catastrophic, particularly if Iran manages to find a quick way to save its nuclear program. But he could also be remembered as the president who averted a second Holocaust.
What is certain is that the conventional components of the Axis of Resistance are in dismal shape. The demolition of this axis happened because Israel, after the humiliation on October 7, reconstituted its fighting and intelligence capabilities in remarkably effective (and severely uncompromising) ways, and because Sinwar and his allies fundamentally misunderstood their enemy.
The American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities happened because the country’s leaders misunderstood Trump. But to be fair to Iran’s leaders, Trump’s national-security and foreign-policy impulses have been confusing even to his own supporters. The closest I ever came to a clear understanding of his contradictory and sometimes incoherent policies was in 2018, at a lunch in the White House with one of his closest aides. We were discussing an article I had published a few years earlier in this magazine, about Barack Obama’s foreign policy, and I said that I thought it might be premature to discern a Trump equivalent. The official responded, “There’s definitely a Trump Doctrine.”
I asked him to describe it. He said, “The Trump Doctrine is ‘We’re America, Bitch.’ That’s the Trump Doctrine.”
The official continued, “Obama apologized to everyone for everything. He felt bad about everything.” Trump, he said, “doesn’t feel like he has to apologize for anything America does.” Another White House official explained it this way: “The president believes that we’re America, and people can take it or leave it.”
The Trump Doctrine, as articulated this way, doesn’t leave much room for the contemplation of potential consequences. On the matter of Iran, in particular, Democratic presidents—Obama, most notably—spent a great deal of time studying second- and third-order consequences of theoretical American actions. It is not clear that Trump even understands the meaning of second-order consequences. This is one reason he struck Iran—because he was frustrated, and because he could—and one important reason the long-term outcome is uncertain.
Sinwar’s misunderstanding of Israel was, if anything, deeper than Iran’s misunderstanding of Trump. Hamas and other Palestinian groups believe that Israelis see themselves as foreign implants, and therefore can easily be brought to defeat. Sinwar’s misplaced confidence in theories of settler colonialism and Jewish perfidy undermined his strategic effectiveness. Sinwar was so convinced of his beliefs that he even sponsored a conference in 2021 called “The Promise of the Hereafter—Post-Liberation Palestine,” in which specific plans were discussed for the building of Palestine on the ruins of Israel. “Educated Jews and experts in the areas of medicine, engineering, technology, and civilian and military industry should be retained in Palestine for some time and should not be allowed to leave and take with them the knowledge and experience that they acquired while living in our land and enjoying its bounty,” one presentation read.
The theme of this conference, which was held in Gaza, was an echo of a statement made by Hassan Nasrallah, then the leader of Hezbollah, who said in 2000, “This Israel, with its nuclear weapons and most advanced warplanes in the region, I swear by Allah, is actually weaker than a spider’s web … Israel may appear strong from the outside, but it’s easily destroyed and defeated.” Nasrallah was assassinated by Israel nine months ago.
I asked Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, in Jerusalem, to explain the root of this misapprehension. “The only way you can believe that Israel is Nasrallah’s spiderweb is if you believe that we don’t have substance here, that we’re not a rooted people,” he said. “The problem with Sinwar is that he believed his own propaganda. He believed that we ourselves believe that we don’t belong here. Our enemies in the Arab and Muslim worlds don’t understand that their perception of Israel and of Jews is based on a lie.”
If nothing else, the wars of the past 20 months have proved that Israel’s adversaries are not adept at analyzing political and social phenomena as they manifest in reality. Walter Russell Mead, the historian, once explained that a weakness of anti-Semites is that they have difficulty understanding the world as it actually works, and don’t comprehend cause and effect in either politics or economics. Sinwar, Nasrallah, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself saw Israel as they wished it was, not as it actually is. And in part because of this, they placed their movements in mortal danger.
2025-06-23 06:22:00
Whenever Donald Trump has contemplated confrontation with Iran, his decisions have been guided less by the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community than by his own calculation of risk and reward. At times he has pulled the trigger. At times he has backed down. All the while, the U.S. assessment of Iranian nuclear intentions has stayed remarkably consistent.
Now, Trump has gone all in. His decision this week to drop more than a dozen of the largest conventional bombs in the U.S. arsenal on key Iranian nuclear facilities was based, he has said, on his belief that Iran is close to being able to make the ultimate weapon.
That’s not exactly what his intelligence agencies have concluded. Their official, publicly stated assessment of Iran’s nuclear-weapons ambitions is that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei suspended the country’s nuclear-weapons program in 2003, the year that the U.S. invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein in order to seize his supposed weapons of mass destruction. Those turned out to not exist. But Iran’s leaders reasonably feared that the U.S. might next turn its sights on their country and its very real weapons program.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence and (on paper at least) Trump’s senior intelligence adviser, reiterated the consensus view in congressional testimony this March. But she also noted that Iran had built up its largest-ever stockpile of enriched uranium, the core ingredient of a weapon, in a manner that was “unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
Her brief remark escaped much scrutiny but turns out to have been telling.
In recent briefings with Trump, CIA Director John Ratcliffe has laid out what the intelligence agencies know, particularly about Iran’s uranium stockpiles, and said Iran was clearly trying to build a nuclear weapon, according to officials familiar with his presentation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. On its face, that appears to contradict the long-standing intelligence-community position. But Ratcliffe’s analysis is actually a more nuanced reading of the available information.
In a separate briefing for lawmakers last week, Ratcliffe used a football analogy to describe Iran’s ambitions: If a team had gone 99 yards down the field, its intention was obviously to score a touchdown, not stop at the one-yard line, he said.
International experts agree that Iran has enriched uranium to a point that is close to weapons grade, a fact that Vice President J. D. Vance has emphasized in his own public remarks. Senior administration officials take little comfort in Khamenei’s decades-old halt to the nuclear-weapons program. Trump believes that Iran is actively pursuing everything it would need to build a weapon, and in relatively short order, if the supreme leader gave the go-ahead. That’s the real threat, and the reason Trump gave the order to strike now, officials told me.
It also helps that Israel has assisted in paving the way. Trump’s thinking is in line with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s; the prime minister has said that Iran may have been months or mere weeks away from building a weapon, and has generally taken the view that the country’s leaders are stockpiling uranium precisely for that purpose. In the week leading up to the U.S. strike-–which Israeli leaders appear not to have known about in advance-–the Israeli air force pummeled nuclear facilities, killed nuclear scientists and experts, and degraded Iranian air defenses.
The Israeli attacks, like the American ones, appear to have been largely driven by a sense of opportunity, after Israel previously weakened the regime and neutralized its longtime proxy forces in the region. There is no reason to think that the Trump administration, or Israel, suddenly had some new window into Khamenei’s brain. But the president took an intuitive view of the intelligence the U.S. has long possessed, and a fateful set of actions based on it.
It’s too pat to say that Trump has ignored his intelligence advisers, although he certainly created that impression. “Well then my intelligence community is wrong,” he said earlier in the week when a reporter noted that the agencies had found no evidence that Iran was trying to build a weapon. Trump had previously said that Gabbard was also wrong when she testified earlier this year.
Officials have told me that they’re not just concerned about Iran’s ability to build a warhead that could be placed atop a ballistic missile—a complex process that would require Iran to build a device that could survive reentry into Earth’s atmosphere and land precisely on its target. The regime could construct a simpler device and hand it over to a third party.
In an interview last month with a state-linked news outlet, Fereydoon Abbasi-Davani, a prominent Iranian nuclear scientist and the former head of the country’s Atomic Energy Organization, warned that Iran could use nuclear weapons against the U.S., Great Britain, and Israel without deploying them on missiles or an aircraft. “What if they are attacked from within?” he asked, an unsubtle suggestion that Iran could give a nuclear weapon to one of its proxies.
Israel was apparently listening and thought that Abbassi-Davani might possess the know-how to make such a device. He was killed earlier this month in an Israeli air strike.
Democratic lawmakers and Trump’s critics are sure to press for more information on when and how the president came to his decision. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut told my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker that he was briefed last week on the intelligence. It “was clear to me that Iran did not pose an imminent threat, that they are not on the verge of being able to obtain a nuclear weapon that could pose a real threat to neighbors, and that negotiations were ongoing and certainly not at their endpoints,” Murphy said.
On Sunday morning, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth briefed reporters about the U.S. operation and was asked whether new information had persuaded Trump to act. Hegseth declined to share many details about Trump’s decision making, but he allowed that “the president has made it very clear [that] he’s looked at all of this, all of the intelligence, all the information, and come to the conclusion that the Iranian nuclear program is a threat, and was willing to take this precision operation to neutralize that threat.”
Ultimately, Trump’s decision to bomb Iran had little to do with any sudden change in intelligence assessments. The choice to use military force was a judgment call, and now, it’s his to own.
Isaac Stanley-Becker and Missy Ryan contributed reporting.
2025-06-22 23:56:55
Some dreams do come true.
At night, I dream of the rising screech of sirens across Jerusalem, of running to a bomb shelter, of thinking wildly about my grown children elsewhere in Israel dashing through dark streets for safety as missiles whoosh overhead. I dream of distant booms that I hope are interceptions and not direct hits on apartment buildings.
I wake to a chorus of sirens and to the harsh clack of the army’s Home Front Command app on my phone, announcing how many minutes we have to seek cover. Outside, running to the shelter, I see the red flash of rocket engines overhead and their long white trails, and I hear far-off explosions. After the all clear, I get texts from my children: “Safe.” News flashes appear of buildings hit in other cities by Iranian missiles that evaded interception, and of the search for the wounded and dead.
I do not sleep again. Until dawn, I ask questions about why this is happening: Are the reasons we have been given for war true; can we possibly trust the people who gave those reasons; how in the world will this end?
Life is a warped jigsaw puzzle: The pieces of the normal and the abnormal do not fit together. The small grocery on the next street seems fully stocked; the air-conditioning works in my apartment; faucets give water. The streets have not been this quiet since the pandemic lockdowns. I take morning runs through my untouched neighborhood, with my map app set to show public bomb shelters. Sometimes a workout ends with a sprint for cover. A news site shows pictures of an apartment building in another town: The “before” image looks like my building, a 1950s housing project; “after” shows savaged concrete and the gaping squares of what were people’s homes.
Everyone I know is sleepless because of the nighttime attacks. People who do not have bomb shelters or the reinforced rooms required by regulation in newer buildings camp out with friends or family members, if they can. Leaving Israel is virtually impossible, because all flights out have been canceled. In WhatsApp groups, friends trade long lists of suggestions for dealing with stress: dance and laugh with your family, breathe slowly, don’t scarf sweets, stop doomscrolling war news an hour before bedtime (who are you kidding?). I receive a text message purporting to be from the Israeli military warning that terrorists will target bomb shelters, so people should stay away from them. A news item cautions citizens to ignore such digital warfare. As a journalist, I get repeated emails from the military censor, reminding me that the location of direct hits cannot be published, lest it help the enemy aim better.
Some people work from home; some are not working. Many are serving in the reserves, as they have, off and mostly on, since the other war started more than 600 days ago. The Israelis killed by missiles get less coverage, my daughter points out, than if they’d been killed in terror bombings during the Second Intifada. The dead in Tehran are only a number. The dead in Gaza—our soldiers, many more Palestinian civilians—have mostly been relegated to back pages. Mass protests demanding that Israel’s government reach a deal with Hamas for the release of our hostages and the end of the war have stopped, because a missile could hit a crowd. Iran is the news.
That the unfinished war in Gaza has now barely become background is, itself, a reason to begin asking questions.
On June 12, media reports said a nighttime meeting of senior ministers would be held to discuss hostage-deal negotiations. Afterward, it emerged that the announced topic was a ruse, a diversion aimed at Iran. In reality, the ministers moved from the normal meeting room to a bunker, where they approved the attack.
Or, I ask: Is this new conflict itself a diversion from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war in Gaza, where he has promised but cannot deliver “absolute victory”?
[Read: Netanyahu takes desperate measures]
At 3 a.m. on June 13, sirens woke everyone in Israel. The Houthis again, I assumed. Just another single missile from Yemen that would be intercepted within 10 minutes, as has happened often over the past months. My wife and I ran for shelter, where we learned from news bulletins that Israel was bombing Iran. And yet, no missiles had been fired at Israel. The messages on the Home Front Command app, we realized once we had caught our breaths, warned only that we must be ready for Home Front Command instructions in case of an attack.
This was strange, as people around me noticed. Sirens normally sound only when missiles are on their way, when danger is immediate. At a press conference that first day, the army spokesperson explained that the aim was that citizens would “be alert and attentive” to instructions. This may be the full explanation. But trust in this government has been so strained that I consider other possibilities. I find myself wondering whether the oddly timed alert had a political origin, meant to create the sudden solidarity and support for fighting that sweeps a country when war begins.
At the outset of the Iran campaign, that support appeared to materialize. A survey conducted from the third to the fifth day found that 70 percent of Israelis favored the offensive. Prominent commentators repeated and expanded on Netanyahu’s explanation: that “within a short amount of time” Iran could build nuclear weapons. “The knife is at [our] throat,” one columnist wrote. “Israeli intelligence has uncovered the fact that Iran has begun the process of the ‘breakthrough’” to creating a bomb.
I cannot dismiss this evaluation. If it’s true, it’s nightmarish. What if one of those warheads that hit Tel Aviv were nuclear?
But, lacking our own sources of data, we journalists cannot verify or challenge this claim. Governments publish or leak intelligence for political purposes, which may not require that what is made public offers a complete or true picture of what secretive agencies have uncovered. And even when an intelligence community is convinced of its conclusions, it can be mistaken. Americans need only recall the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003. Israeli espionage obviously penetrated Iran to an extraordinary extent, as shown by the ability to locate Iranian generals. But this doesn’t mean its evaluations of Iranian intent are accurate. The U.S. assessment that Iran was not on the verge of building a bomb is at least as questionable.
Regardless, the attack on Iran is under way. How long can Israel, already exhausted by the Gaza war, keep fighting on a new front? Would Netanyahu, who rejected Barack Obama’s diplomatic agreement to stop Iran’s nuclear effort, accept a new one? Without an accord, how long would it take Iran to rebuild, and create a nuclear weapon? Iran’s air defenses have failed. Its stock of ballistic missiles did not deter Israel. For Tehran, a nuclear deterrent may have just grown all the more attractive. This danger did not end with the U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear sites, including the deep-underground Fordo facility. Arms-control experts have warned that Iran already had a significant supply of highly enriched uranium, and Tehran has now threatened to withdraw openly from the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
[Read: Israel plunges into darkness]
I am turning over these questions not just because they are the unanswerable anxieties of war but because we Israelis have so many reasons to distrust the man who has led us here. Perhaps no one said it better than Benjamin Netanyahu himself, back in 2008. At that time, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was under police investigation even as he was exploring peace talks with Syria. Netanyahu challenged Olmert’s motives in a television interview: “We’re talking about a prime minister who is up to his neck in investigations, and who doesn’t have a public and moral mandate to decide such fateful matters for the state of Israel. There’s a real concern … that he will make decisions on the basis of his personal interest in political survival and not the national interest.”
The same is now true of Netanyahu, who has refused to leave office despite being indicted in three corruption cases in 2019. His trial has dragged on for five years, and the prosecution finally began cross-examining him early this month. Because of the war with Iran, though, courts are holding only urgent hearings and the trial is on hold. Since the Hamas attack of October 7, Netanyahu has resisted public pressure for a judicial inquiry into the catastrophe. Last week, his government just barely survived a coalition crisis. These conditions hardly inspire confidence in his decision to drag the country into a potentially calamitous war.
These questions yield few answers so early in this war. But even without sirens wailing in dark hours, they would be enough to keep me awake.
