Pope Francis was a globalist in an age of nationalists - Ishaan Tharoor (WP)

 

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall

Pope Francis was a globalist in an age of nationalists Pope Francis receives Vice President JD Vance before bestowing the blessing of Urbi et Orbi (Latin for To the city and the world) at the Vatican on Sunday. (Vatican Media/AP) The term “globalist” is mostly invoked in the pejorative. The West’s right-wing nationalists, in particular, have for years laid the failures and ills of their societies at the feet of “globalists” — conjuring a caricature of well-heeled, jet-setting elites who pursue multinational capital and cosmopolitan schemes supposedly at the expense of their countrymen. The anti-globalist mission is at the heart of President Donald Trump’s second term: It looms over the administration’s moves to deport undocumented migrants and foreign students, and animates Trump’s protectionist zeal as he tries to reconfigure the global economic order through sweeping tariffs. Contempt for the “globalist” agenda also shaped right-wing criticism of Pope Francis, the venerable Argentine Jesuit cleric who died Monday after suffering a stroke and cardiocirculatory collapse. His support for the rights of migrants, activism over climate change and qualified acceptance of homosexuality saw U.S. right-wingers cast Francis as a “woke” pope, sympathetic to the “liberation theology” of the Americas reviled by Vatican traditionalists and Western conservatives. Erstwhile Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon once told far-right counterparts in Europe to view the pontiffas the “enemy.” The Lepanto Institute, an ultraconservative Catholic think tank that raged against the Francis pontificate, frequently insisted the pope was doing the work of “Communists.” The pontiff’s decision in 2021 to apologize for the 16th century atrocities carried out in the New World by Spanish conquistadors in the name of the Catholic Church provoked anger in Spain, with a spokesperson for the far-right Vox party scoffing: “I do not understand how a pope of Argentine nationality can apologize on behalf of others.” Francis was not spared the ire of fellow Argentines, either, as ultralibertarian Argentine President Javier Milei declaredin an interview before taking office that the pope was “a representative of the evil left.” (He has since been more conciliatory, and waved away at their “minor” differences in a statement mourning the death of Francis.) It’s a small irony that one of Pope Francis’s last major meetings was with Vice President JD Vance, a convert to Catholicism who has since styled himself as a “postliberal” nationalist, in a nod to a particular tradition of reactionary Catholic thinking. In the early weeks of this Trump presidency, Vance attempted to frame his nativism in medieval Catholic terms, citing the concept of “ordo amoris,” or “order of love” or “charity,” that suggested one had a greater obligation to those closer to you than farther away. Up to his last days, Francis had little time for such arguments. “The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness,” he wrote in a recent letter to U.S. bishops. In Trump’s first term, Francis suggested the White House’s building of border walls and separation of asylum-seeking parents from their children made the president “not Christian.” The pope’s Easter address delivered this weekend by a surrogate bemoaned the hatreds of any increasingly illiberal age. “How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized and migrants,” the text said. “I appeal to all those in positions of political responsibility in our world not to yield to the logic of fear.” Francis spent years doggedly trying to counter this fear of the stranger. He washed the feet of Arab migrants seeking asylum in Europe. He begged forgiveness of Rohingya Muslims in a public ceremony after critics accused him of not doing enough to champion their plight during a 2017 visit to Myanmar, whose authorities treat the persecuted minority as stateless interlopers. And he broke with papal precedent to argue in 2023 against secular antigay laws and said “being homosexual is not a crime.” “His was the image of the Good Samaritan, and through him, the image he gave of the church was of a Good Samaritan,” Marco Politi, a papal biographer and longtime Vatican watcher, told my colleagues. Francis saw himself as a “globalist,” but not in the terms laid out by those who revile “globalism.” In an address last year to the World Economic Forum — that bastion of globalists — he said “the process of globalization” had made clear “the interdependence of the world’s nations and peoples” and therefore carried “a fundamentally moral dimension.” He called on states and businesses to promote “far-sighted and ethically sound models of globalization” and to subordinate “the pursuit of power and individual gain” in the cause of a greater common good. In 2018, he urged the “globalization of solidarity,” appealing for support for the poor and those stranded in warzones or mired in humanitarian disasters. Such entreaties have often gone unheeded and seem wholly at odds with the worldview of the White House, where Trump has invoked narrow national self-interest to justify the gutting of U.S. humanitarian aid to the rest of word and the slashing of environmental regulations and pledges. In 2017, Francis gifted Trump a copy of his 192-page encyclical on ecology that noted the solid scientific consensus about human-driven climate change and called for dramatic action to reduce carbon-based emissions. The U.S. president — never much of a reader — didn’t seem to take the message to heart, as he later pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement. Francis was elected by conclave in 2013, after the world had lurched out of the global financial crisis. But the ensuing years have seen waves of crises and instability. International diplomacy failed to stop hideous wars across the globe, including in Ukraine and Gaza — where Francis has long called for a lasting ceasefire. An epochal pandemic convulsed the world. In Western democracies, economic inequality expanded, the liberal establishment kept crumbling and angry right-wing populism came to the fore. It’s unclear which cardinal will follow Francis, but there’s a possibility an ultraconservative backlash could yield a more doctrinaire successor. Such a figure would be less adversarial with Trump and Vance, but would remind others of what has been lost in this pope’s passing. “He still was a voice — a moral voice, moral in the sense that he stood up for peace and justice and the dignity of people,” Brigitte Thalhammer, an Austrian nun who was standing next to a fountain in St. Peter’s Square on Monday afternoon, told my colleagues. “And I wondered: Who can be that voice now?”

Duas insurreições, dois processos bem diferentes, nos EUA e no Brasil - Ishaan Tharoor, Benjamin Soloway (WP)

 Duas insurreições, dois processos bem diferentes, nos EUA e no Brasil

By Ishaan Tharoor with Benjamin Soloway The Washington Post, Jan 7. 2025

After insurrections, the U.S. and Brazil went down different paths Rioters loyal to then-president Donald Trump rally at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (Jose Luis Magana/AP) In one country, a return to power and the promise of pardons. In the other, political marginalization and mounting criminal investigations. Four years after supporters of President-elect Donald Trump stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an insurrection that shocked the world, he is about to start a second term. He was impeached by the House for his alleged role in inciting the riot and to this day remains the only U.S. president not to accept an electoral defeat. But the U.S. system allowed him to run for election again. TheSupreme Court, stacked with a right-wing majority, issued a landmark ruling last year arguing he was immune from prosecution for “official acts” while in office. A string of legal investigations into Trump and his attempts to subvert the 2020 election are petering out. Emboldened, Trump has vowed to issue pardons after he takes office for dozens of Jan. 6 rioters who rampaged through the U.S. Capitol — much to the indignation of his political opponents, constitutional rights groups and the security personnel injured by those who acted in Trump’s name. “We’ve been seeking accountability for years,” a former Capitol Police officer told my colleagues. “It doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen.” Demonstrators protest amnesty for Brazil's former president, Jair Bolsonaro, in São Paulo, Brazil, on Dec. 10. (Felipe Iruata/Reuters) The picture in Brazil is rather different. On Jan. 8, 2023, supporters of defeated right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro stormed through the heart of the federal capital in Brasília in a spasm of rage marked by their refusal to accept his narrow loss to leftist rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, damaging government buildings. Some rioters called for a military coup to keep Bolsonaro in power — a demand he did little to discourage, declining to concede, departing for a strange sojourn in Orlando and skipping his successor’s inauguration. The Brazilian insurrection — a remarkable echo of what happened in the United States two years prior — elicited a more decisive reaction: Authorities swiftly rounded up pro-Bolsonaro rioters and opened legal proceedings that implicated a host of senior politicians and officials in plotting a coup and fomenting violence. ADVERTISEMENT   Six months later, Bolsonaro was barred from seeking public office until 2030 by the country’s top electoral court, even as separate police investigations continued. In November, Brazil’s federal police recommended charges against Bolsonaro, as well as dozens of his associates, for allegedly leading a plot to subvert the will of voters, assassinate political rivals and stay in power by military edict following his 2022 electoral defeat. The police report was submitted to Brazil’s Supreme Court, and the country’s top prosecutorial authorities are weighing what to do next. Bolsonaro has denied wrongdoing in this case and numerous others rumbling through Brazil’s legal system, casting himself as a victim of a witch hunt by political opponents and an overzealous Supreme Court. But his political star has fallen, and the hard-right firebrand may sooner find a home in a jail cell than the presidential office. Brazil is arguably as politically polarized as the United States, but both its experience of military dictatorships and its modern constitutional protections against a possible return to authoritarianism gave it “antidotes” — as a senior Brazilian official told me — to overcome a glaring challenge to its democracy. “History explains the difference between the two countries,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment on the matter. “Military interventions and political authoritarianism have haunted us throughout the 20th century.” President Joe Biden and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the White House on Feb. 10. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post) While many Republican politicians backed Trump’s baseless claims of electoral fraud and later offered support for the Jan. 6 participants facing prosecution and sentencing, there was less sympathy in Brazil’s more fragmented multiparty political landscape for the Jan. 8 offenders. “There is a consensus in our country, among the political class, to condemn these acts,” Ciro Nogueira, a prominent lawmaker who served for a stint as Bolsonaro’s chief of staff when he was president, told the New York Times last year. “I think it’s really unfortunate that a portion of American politicians applaud this type of protest.” ADVERTISEMENT   As the Harvard political scholars Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt observed last year, Brazilian civil society, big business groups and even the Catholic Church came out strongly against the possibility of a subversion of the country’s democratic order. New investigations have revealed that top Brazilian military officials balked at Bolsonaro’s alleged coup plot, much to the former president’s chagrin. Andre Pagliarini, a professor of Brazilian history at Louisiana State University, pointed to virtues of Brazil’s “postdictatorial institutional design.” The country’s 1988 constitution empowered the judiciary to take a strong line in defending civic and democratic institutions, especially the integrity of elections. Alexandre de Moraes, a top justice appointed by a right-leaning president in 2017, has been “focused on the Jan. 8 insurrection in Brasília in a way that no single legal actor in the U.S. — [Attorney General] Merrick Garland, lower courts, or the Supreme Court — has been,” Pagliarini told me. For his efforts, Moraes has engendered the fury of Bolsonaro and his allies, and locked horns with tech titan Elon Musk over Brazil’s moves to curb online disinformation on social media criticized as harmful to the country’s democracy. In 2022, with polls pointing to a looming defeat, Bolsonaro spent weeks spreading conspiracy theories about Brazil’s electronic voting machines and warning without meaningful evidence over possible fraud should he lose. Those efforts contributed to the June 2023 decision of Brazil’s top electoral court — another institution that has no parallel in the United States — to bar Bolsonaro from seeking office for the rest of the decade. Bolsonaro and his allies used “freedom of speech” as a “shield for crimes against democracy and a military conspiracy to overthrow it,” the senior Brazilian official told me. “The Supreme Court was empowered and ready to avert it.” The effect of that ruling barring Bolsonaro was “to scramble the Brazilian far right rather than allowing it to regain organizational cohesion as it did in the U.S. in the years after January 6,” Pagliarini said. “With Bolsonaro legally out of the running, the right is in disarray over who to back against Lula in 2026.” To be sure, Lula’s supporters have had their own doubts and fears about Brazil’s judicial system: Lula, who has been president twice, only returned to power in a grand comeback after serving part of a prison sentence for corruption — a ruling that made space for Bolsonaro’s rise, handed down by a judge who would go on to serve as Bolsonaro’s justice minister, and who an investigation by the Intercept later revealed had colluded with prosecutors to target Lula. With Trump returning, Bolsonaro and his allies could have a path forward. Trump and Bolsonaro sympathizers in his orbit may see in the former Brazilian president’s situation a reflection of their own battles. “We will see public pressure from Trump on Brazil’s Supreme Court, via the threat of sanctions against specific judges, to allow Bolsonaro to run in 2026,” Brian Winter, editor in chief of Americas Quarterly, suggested to me. “It will get loud and contentious, and it may backfire against Bolsonaro because I don’t think Brazil will react well to this kind of pressure.” Nevertheless, “Bolsonaro’s supporters remain, and they now have even less faith in the system than before, possibly radicalizing some of them even more,” Winter said. “We’ve seen this in Latin American history before — the most famous case possibly being when Juan Perón and his supporters were banned from politics in Argentina in the 1950s and 1960s, and he took on almost a mystical importance, the popular clamor growing until he was finally allowed to return in 1973. It’s an open question whether these bans backfire or not over time.”

A Libia afunda no caos - Ishaan Tharoor (The Washington Post)

 

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall  Email A new crisis may plunge Libya back into chaos Libyan Ministry of Interior personnel stand guard in front of the Central Bank of Libya in Tripoli on Aug. 27. (Ayman Sahely/Reuters) The news out of Libya that tends to grab international attention often involves stark tragedy and disaster. If it’s not the harrowing civil war that has convulsed the oil-rich North Africa nation for years and split it in two, then it’s the drowning of migrants motoring out from Libya’s poorly patrolled coasts or the epochal flood that killed thousands in the city of Derna a year ago. In recent months, though, the considerable drama gripping the country has been far more shadowy, shaped by backroom deals, black market transfers and illicit smuggling. But it’s equally important and fraught. A rolling crisis over control of Libya’s central bank has paralyzed the economy and sparked new fears of conflict. Oil exports have dropped precipitously in recent weeks, while ordinary Libyans are facing long lines at gas stations, restrictions on their ability to withdraw cash from banks and a collapsing electricity grid. The upheaval is the consequence of a spat that flared in August but was long in the works, experts say. A move by forces close to Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah, who leads the government in western Libya, centered in the capital Tripoli, saw officials in the Central Bank kidnapped and led the bank’s longtime governor, Sadiq al-Kabir, to flee into self-imposed exile in Turkey. The Central Bank, which is the sole legal repository of Libya’s oil-generated wealth, ceased functioning. Oil exports were quickly shut down. Kabir, in Istanbul, said Thursday that Libya was essentially cut off from the world financial system. “All international banks that we deal with, more than 30 major international institutions, have suspended all transactions,” he told Reuters. “All work has been suspended at the international level. Therefore, there is no access to balances or deposits outside Libya.” At its root, the dispute is about rival power brokers’ designs on oil revenue in a country with Africa’s largest oil reserves. Dbeibah’s faction is at odds with that of Khalifa Hifter, which holds sway in eastern Libya and has cultivated deep ties with foreign powers such as Russia and the United Arab Emirates. In the tail end of the country’s ruinous civil war, Haftar attempted an offensive to capture Tripoli that ultimately failed when Turkey rushed military aid and support to the government in Tripoli. The internationally brokered cease-fire in 2020 that followed has settled into an uneasy peace, with Dbeibah and Haftar fighting their battles through other means — for now. U.N.-led efforts to resolve the dispute are underway. But the situation is a reminder of the perilous state of affairs in Libya, which has lurched from crisis to calamity since the bloody revolution and NATO-backed campaign that overthrew Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi in 2011. The country has not experienced stable governance since and is now torn apart by two rival political entities and a patchwork of armed groups. The Dbeibahs and the Haftars have emerged as powerful, quasi-dynastic clans, vying for influence over the key institutions like the Central Bank and the National Oil Corporation, through which most of Libya’s oil revenue flows. Analysts say Dbeibah’s manipulation of the bank for his corrupt ends saw Kabir warm to Haftar, who is simultaneously alleged to also be presiding over vast networks of illicit smuggling. “Kabir had sown the seeds of his own demise,” the Economist explained. “At first he bought off his chief challengers: the people who had risen against dictatorship. After Gaddafi the state payroll almost doubled to 2.4 million in a country of 7 million. It is claimed the bank funded the warlords, paying fighters who both besieged and defended Tripoli.” ADVERTISEMENT   The British newsweekly added: “When the fighting ended in 2020, Kabir financed their ever-more grandiose schemes for hiving off Libya’s vast oil revenue. He paid billions to import fuel at market prices, subsidized it to make it the world’s cheapest, then let it be smuggled overland and increasingly by tanker to Europe. The more lucre and power the recipients amassed, the weaker he grew. When he tried to rein in the purse strings, it was too late.” A general drone view shows the Nafoora oil field in Jakharrah, Libya, on Aug. 27. (Jawhar Deehoum/Reuters) Deeper strains are showing. “The arrangements bridging east and west appear to be nearing a breaking point,” Libya scholar Wolfram Lacher wrote in a lengthy essay for New Lines magazine, pointing to a growing body of evidence regarding the state plunder carried out by both parties, but especially the Haftars. He added: “In the meantime, the Haftars’ greatly improved access to funds threatens to destabilize the balance of power. [Khalifa Hifter’s son] Saddam has told close associates that he is seeking to turn western Libyan factions against each other and buy the support of selected militia leaders — a task made easier by the money he now has at his disposal. His father has informed Western diplomats that he intends to make another attempt to seize Tripoli.” Over the past week, a flurry of top regional officials, including Turkey’s spy chief, have visited the country. The tensions have threatened a rapprochement between Egypt and Turkey, which find themselves at different sides of Libya’s divide. “Egypt and the UAE have backed Haftar in part because of his staunch anti-Islamist ideology that opposes the reliance of the Tripoli government on militias linked to the Muslim Brotherhood movement,” noted the Soufan Center, an independent global security think tank, in a memoearlier this month. “Turkey, by contrast, has engaged regional Muslim Brotherhood-inspired movements and views Haftar as a right-wing figure dedicated to reducing Ankara’s regional influence. Russia, for its part, sees Haftar’s control of most of Libya’s oil fields as a tool in Moscow’s global competition with the United States and its European partners, all of which are backing Ukraine.” The tangled geopolitics belies the frustrations of many Libyans who simply want a degree of political stability. “If you ask any normal Libyan, they’ll say we need one government, we need elections,” a former adviser to the Libyan government, speaking on the condition of anonymity over fears to their safety, told me. But, they added, the country’s power brokers aren’t interested in such an outcome. “Why would Haftar want one government?” the former official said. “He can print money as he pleases, now, and smuggle oil.” ADVERTISEMENT   A lack of Western attention here may be dangerous, especially at a moment when foreign powers could exert some pressure on Libya’s factions to get in line. “Diplomats may be busy stopping other wars in Ukraine and Gaza from growing into monstrous regional conflicts,” wrote Tarek Megerisi of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “But if they’re too consumed to take this brief opportunity, then they may well end up with a third before too long.”

Netanyahu goes to Washington in the shadow of Middle East disaster - Ishaan Tharoor, Anika Arora Seth (The Washington Post)

 The Washington Post, July 21, 2024

By Ishaan Tharoor with Anika Arora Seth The

Netanyahu goes to Washington in the shadow of Middle East disaster The last time Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington, hopes were high for peace — or, at least, one particular vision of it. It was September 2020, and Netanyahu appeared at a White House then home to Donald Trump. Through a pact brokered by the Trump administration, Israel was normalizing ties with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, two Arab monarchies that shared Israel’s antipathy toward Iran. The diplomatic feat was grandiosely titled the “Abraham Accords” and its promoters cast it as a civilizational breakthrough and the beginning of a new age — no matter that the two Gulf states had never been at war with Israel and already had substantial clandestine dealings with the Jewish state. “This day is a pivot of history,” Netanyahu proclaimed, alongside Trump and top officials from the UAE and Bahrain. “It heralds a new dawn of peace. For thousands of years, the Jewish people have prayed for peace. For decades, the Jewish state has prayed for peace. And this is why, today, we’re filled with such profound gratitude.” The deals generated some lucrative business links between Israel and the monarchies, and were padded by major U.S. arms sales to the Arab kingdoms. But even as more Arab countries warmed to the prospect of normalization with Israel, the new understandings did little to build peace in the context where it was needed most: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That was arguably by design: Netanyahu, a longtime opponent of a separate, sovereign Palestinian state, saw a pathway thanks to Trump to further integrate Israel into its neighborhood while placing the “Palestinian problem” on the back burner. Israel’s burgeoning crop of Arab partners, wary of Iran and frustrated with the dysfunctions within the Palestinian national movement, seemed content to go along with the process. Netanyahu was forced out of power but eventually returned at the helm of the most right-wing coalition in Israeli history. He showed up in September at the dais of the U.N. General Assembly with a map of Israel’s new connections in the region labeled “The New Middle East”; it had no trace of Palestinian claims or Palestine at all. Then Oct. 7 happened, and the world changed. The war that followed militant group Hamas’s deadly strike on southern Israel has convulsed the region. Israel’s ongoing campaign against Hamas pulverized the Gaza Strip, led to tens of thousands of deaths and a sprawling humanitarian catastrophe. International legal action against Israel and its right-wing government have picked up: The International Criminal Court may issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in a matter of days for their role in allegedly starving Gazans; the International Court of Justice, the U.N.’s judicial arm, is hearing a case accusing Israel of carrying out genocide and separately ruled Friday that Israel ought to end its occupation of Palestinian territory and dismantle its settlements. That’s a political nonstarter for Netanyahu, under whose long tenure in power the Israeli settlement project has flourished and expanded across the West Bank. He comes to Washington this week ahead of a controversial speech to Congress, with months of trauma and ruin looming behind him, and a murky political future ahead of him. A clutch of Israel’s Arab neighbors, along with President Biden and his allies, have fitfully tried to negotiate a truce between the warring parties. Talks have yet to yield the cease-fire desired by Palestinians and much of the international community, or the wholesale release of Israeli hostages sought by a grief-stricken Israeli public. In private conversations, some U.S. and Arab officials blame Netanyahu — whose own position may be imperiled in the event of a cessation of hostilities — for deliberately thwarting an agreement. “Netanyahu is under pressure from all quarters. He has a coalition that is unhappy with him and [far-right] partners in Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir threatening to bring it down if he agrees to a ceasefire,” explained Michael Koplow of the Israel Policy Forum. “He has hostage families and the political opposition demonstrating in the streets in increasing numbers in favor of a ceasefire, and a security establishment that is also strongly in favor of a deal to pause the fighting and bring living hostages back home. Biden has been pushing unreservedly for a ceasefire and hostage agreement, and Israel’s regional partners all want the fighting to have come to an end months ago.” The wily Israeli prime minister’s trip to Washington is a gambit to relieve some of this pressure. Netanyahu’s “prime directive is maintaining himself in power, and he’s succeeding,” Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a veteran former U.S. negotiator, told me. He is “coming here to use Congress and the White House as props, in demonstration of his indispensability” to the Israeli public, Miller added, suggesting Netanyahu was “playing for time.” Republicans, eager to twist the knife into Biden and the Democrats, will probably embrace Netanyahu and his defiant position on the war. “What Netanyahu is probably seeking is to make it to the end of the month and the parliamentary summer recess,” wrote Neri Zilber in the Financial Times. “The break stretches until late October, during which it is extremely difficult to topple or replace a sitting government. If Netanyahu makes it this far, the earliest an election could be held would be the first quarter of 2025.” By that point, there may be a new occupant of the White House, and Netanyahu probably expects a second Trump term to boost his own political fortunes — much as the first term did. But the Republican presidential nominee has shown less enthusiasm for Netanyahu in recent months, while the Abraham Accords — cast by Trump as his hallmark foreign policy accomplishment — seem an irrelevance in the current moment. The White House, meanwhile, has faced an insurgency from the left over Israel’s conduct of the war and the United States’ enabling of it. Biden and his advisers have sought to enlist the Gulf kingdoms and some of Israel’s other Arab neighbors in an ambitious “day after” project for Gaza that would see a Palestinian technocratic entity jointly administer that territory and the West Bank, funding from the Gulf for reconstruction pour into Gaza and the Israelis and Palestinians reentering talks over a two-state solution. As the war drags on and Netanyahu remains in office, that vision for peace also seems doomed. The Knesset, the Israeli parliament, voted on Friday to reject the establishment of a Palestinian state — a symbolic move that underscored Netanyahu’s attitude ahead of his trip to the United States. “As long as Netanyahu is there, there’s no chance of any movement toward the ‘day after’ plan,” an Arab official involved in the talks over postwar Gaza told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the press. There’s no “pivot of history” in sight, in other words. That may be exactly how Netanyahu wants it.