Apple News Exclusive: John McCain on Trump, His Cancer Battle, and What's Wrong with Washington
News Editors' Picks
The ailing Republican senator shares his thoughts on how to heal America's political divide Read the full story
Shared from Apple News
After Sweden, I still had my day job at Intel that didn't involve writing a compiler; I was the tech lead of the advanced rendering group. At the time, I reported to Elliot Garbus, then the VP in charge of graphics software.
Elliot was the best manager I've ever had. To be honest, I didn't expect that at first: while he'd been technical early in his career, it'd been years since he had done anything hands-on, and his background wasn't in graphics anyway. It wasn't clear to me that we had enough in common for much to come out of relationship, but he seemed nice enough at least.
Elliot turned out to be impressively intellectually curious; he always had insightful questions when I talked to him about the things I and the rendering group were working on. In time, I also came to learn that you could completely trust him to have your back; this was really helpful in the highly political environment of Intel. These were both great foundations.
Most importantly, I came to learn that he was a master of coming to understand the people who worked for him and then effectively guiding and coaching them. Sometimes other people can understand you in ways that you hadn't understood yourself, and Elliot was great at that. One felt that he truly cared about finding ways to help you grow as a person, pushing you in directions that were a little uncomfortable but worth stretching for. I've never had that sort of experience with another manager.
I was planning on leaving Intel the Fall after Sweden. I was burned out on the place after the drama of Larrabee and had already been making arrangements for the transition with Elliot. As we worked through the details, Elliot continued to be intrigued by each new result from volta as it came in. I was still hacking away on it. He'd seen first-hand how problematic it had been to not be able to use Larrabee's vector units effectively, and encouraged me to stick around and see where volta went. He argued that if I walked away, we'd never know if the approach really worked or not.
Fortunately, he convinced me to stay in the end, remaining at Intel as an individual contributor, just working on volta.
If I was going to stay, it was important to me to have confidence that volta wouldn't be killed. In the political environment of Intel, it very well might have happened at some point along the way.
For example, if I was actually in the compiler team, quite possibly at some point some folks would have stepped in and said, "Great, now we understand. Thank you so much! We got this—we'll take it from here and implement this in the commercial compiler. Oh, and there's no need for you to work on volta any more since that would just be wasted work." And if they sold management on that idea (quite possible), then that'd be the end of volta, regardless of whether they actually went through with their side of it.
In a rational world, that sort of thing wouldn't happen: why wouldn't they want their compiler to be the best it could be, regardless of where the ideas came from? It may have been that some of the folks who had established themselves as the experts in this area were more concerned with maintaining the appearance of mastery of the topic than anything else. It also may have been that they still didn't believe in the use-case volta was attacking—the HPC community was apparently plenty happy with auto-vectorization, and that seemed to matter the most.
In any case, it was quite possible that in the future, some of them would have been happy to have this thorn in their side just go away, so I had to be careful.
Elliot was key to my confidence that my work wouldn't be wasted. I knew he would protect the project, and he agreed that I could open-source the compiler once it was ready. It was really important to me that I could do that; once volta was open source, there was no way it could be killed through Intel politics. To open source software at Intel, all that was needed was VP approval (and going through some straightforward process), so with his agreement, I could get to work with confidence.
A few more words to explain why I had these worries.
First, to be absolutely clear, there were lots of great people at Intel and specifically in Intel's compiler team. There were plenty of good engineers doing good work, perfectly nice people who wanted to do the right thing. By numbers, they were by far the majority.
The problem was that just a few jerks, especially in positions of power or influence, could fuck you up real good.
Intel had more than its share of them and therefore, everyone at Intel balanced some amount of technical work with some amount of politics work. You had to. Politics was more than the standard "advocate for yourself" stuff; at minimum it was periodically defending yourself against attacks from others who wanted your territory and would try to get your project shut down so they could take it.
Some people there approached their work with little in way of technological contributions, but a lot of politics. It turned out that that could be a perfectly successful career strategy—undermining others as necessary to maintain and advance your position without ever actually delivering much of substance yourself. Those were the jerks.
One thing that made it easier for them was the fact that software career path at Intel was all about getting away from coding ASAP—writing code was for new grads and less expensive engineers in foreign countries.1 The glory was being in an architect, never coding yourself, but setting direction. In that role, one could go far without producing anything more than slide decks, I mean foils.
Because there were the jerks out there, you always had to be aware of them. Even if you didn't want to pursue that model for your own career, you had to defend against them or you'd be wiped out.
I never understood why Intel upper management didn't seem bothered by their presence. I suppose that once that mode of success takes root, it's cancerous to the organization and would be hard to root out. Perhaps they figured that Intel was doing pretty well as a company, so why fix what ain't broke? Maybe they saw it as a good kind of aggressiveness and were happy with the idea of everyone fighting it out, gladiators in the Colosseum fighting each other to win, all for the glory of Intel.
Sometimes the management enablers of the jerks would encourage you to "assume best intentions" in your interactions with them. You'd quickly be out-maneuvered if you did; they didn't play that game, and knew to take advantage of any opening they were given.
Elliot never told me to "assume best intentions" with them.
As he helped me figure out how to navigate my interactions with the jerks, I'm pretty sure he offered up a dismissive profanity to describe what he thought of them.
Next time for real, we'll talk about SPMD on SIMD and early design influences; it'll be a little more cheery than this one turned out to be. It'll be the posting after that before we get to the first reveal of results to the compiler team.
As always, there were exceptions. There were a handful of senior people who still programmed; much respect to them. ↩
A fascinating exploration of how computer algorithms can be applied to our everyday lives, helping to solve common decision-making problems and illuminate the workings of the human mind.
All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such problems for decades. And the solutions they've found have much to teach us.
In a dazzlingly interdisciplinary work, acclaimed author Brian Christian and cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths show how the simple, precise algorithms used by computers can also untangle very human questions. They explain how to have better hunches and when to leave things to chance, how to deal with overwhelming choices and how best to connect with others. From finding a spouse to finding a parking spot, from organizing one's inbox to understanding the workings of human memory, Algorithms to Live By transforms the wisdom of computer science into strategies for human living.
ON Tuesday, a tape that contains startling new revelations about the early days of Richard Nixon's White House will be released.
Sorry, folks, it's not what you think.
The release is an album from Blue Note Records, ''Duke Ellington 1969: All-Star White House Tribute.'' It was recorded at a black-tie dinner and jazz concert given in the White House by President Nixon on April 29, 1969, to celebrate Ellington's 70th birthday and award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and it has never been made available.
The album is 76 minutes of superb jazz designed and delivered by masters of the art form: Louie Bellson, drums; Clark Terry and Bill Berry, trumpets and fluegelhorns; Paul Desmond, alto saxophone; Gerry Mulligan, baritone sax; J. J. Johnson and Urbie Green, trombones; Jim Hall, guitar; Milt Hilton, bass. Ellington, Earl (Fatha) Hines, Billy Taylor, Dave Brubeck and Hank Jones played piano, and vocals were by Joe Williams and Mary Mayo.
The music is every bit as good as the lineup. But the release date is some 33 years late. Therein lies a story of mid-20th century America and of two individuals whose lives told much of that story: Ellington and Willis Conover, who was obscure in this country but famous in the rest of the world for his jazz program on Voice of America, which ran for 40 years until he died in 1996.
Conover did his program six nights a week, exercising his impeccable musical taste and his unmistakable voice. Both he and the broadcasts were apolitical. Yet during the cold war, the programs attracted millions of listeners in the Soviet bloc to the inherently subversive, freedom-celebrating sounds of jazz, and Conover knew that the programs moved his listeners in more than the strictly musical sense. Because Voice of America was prohibited by law from broadcasting within the United States, Conover and his influence were almost unknown at home.
Around the time of Nixon's first inauguration, in 1969, Conover hatched the idea for the Ellington party. I was then a special consultant to the president, and Conover conveyed it to me through Charles McWhorter, who had been an aide to Nixon when he was vice president. I recommended the concept to the White House. Nixon agreed, adding the idea of the Medal of Freedom.
Conover then took charge of the proceedings. He recruited the musicians, selected the program and handled the myriad details. I, having joined the White House staff, was happy to be a sometime assistant to the impresario.
In 1965, just a few years before the White House party, Ellington had been recommended for a Pulitzer Prize for his contributions to American music. The Pulitzer board turned him down, and the snub created a brief scandal among New York's cultural elites. Ellington, then 65, remarked: ''Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn't want me too famous too young.''
Now, on the evening of the party, here was Ellington in the White House, where his father had once been a butler, receiving from Nixon, of all people, the highest award the country could bestow on a civilian. More, he was receiving the award in the company of a remarkable gathering of American artists, including many who had created the art of jazz. Their collective presence was a fitting response to the Pulitzer pettiness. Ralph Ellison understood the significance of these contrasts. Two days before the party, he wrote in The Washington Star, ''That which our institutions dedicated to the recognition of artistic achievement have been too prejudiced, negligent or concerned with European models and styles to do is finally being done by presidents.''
The evening had its pleasures and incongruities, many of them collected in Doug Ramsey's excellent booklet notes for the Blue Note release. As the guests arrived, Vice President Spiro Agnew sat at the piano in the reception hall and decorously played ''In a Sentimental Mood'' and ''Sophisticated Lady.'' During the reception, Gerry Mulligan came upon a strolling trio of United States Navy musicians playing ''Honeysuckle Rose,'' unpacked his baritone sax and started a jam session in the hallway.
After dinner, Nixon awarded Ellington the Medal of Freedom, with the words ''In the royalty of American music, no man swings more or stands higher than the Duke.'' Ellington leaned forward and delivered his traditional two kisses on each cheek to Nixon; the president, visibly startled, grinned sheepishly. Then came the excitement of the concert, after which Ellington brought the gathering to a breathless silence while he improvised a gentle piece dedicated to Pat Nixon.
After the chairs were cleared, a jam session began. Virtually every musician in the house took part. Ellington played duets with all comers, including the pianist Marian McPartland, the jazz producer George Wein and Willie (The Lion) Smith, Ellington's old tutor in stride piano. The jazz critics Dan Morgenstern, Leonard Feather, Whitney Balliett and Doug Ramsey were there, strolling in professional heaven.
Nixon asked me to bring Earl Hines to join him in the family quarters, where they exchanged reminiscences about the benefits of childhood piano lessons. It was by memorizing piano pieces, Nixon said, that he had developed the skill of speaking without notes. Shortly before 3 a.m., someone noticed Paul Desmond and Urbie Green solicitously pouring each other into a cab outside the White House. Everything worked that night, and the Ellington presence gave the evening its magic.
A few months after the dinner, in July 1969, Conover and I traveled together to the Soviet Union as part of the American delegation to the Moscow Film Festival. Conover took along a short documentary about the concert; the film had been hastily assembled by a private contractor. Though something of a mess, it featured enough Ellington to play to standing-room-only fans of Ellington, Conover and American jazz. I had my first glimpse of the worldwide popularity of all three.
After Moscow, Conover and I intermittently turned our attention to getting the audio recording of the Ellington concert released at home. Frank Stanton, the president of CBS and chairman of the United States Information Agency, offered to produce the recording through Columbia Records; all profits would have gone to a fund to have been established for aged and indigent musicians, of whom there were more than a few. Conover set out on the herculean task of getting the consent required from every participant in the concert.
There was one holdout -- the guitarist Jim Hall, a gentle and witty man who, life being what it is, was a family friend. My brother Charlie had been best man at his wedding. Jim, a serious, steadfastly determined opponent of the Vietnam War, would not consent to anything that would bring credit to Nixon. Thus, our efforts ended for the indefinite future.
Conover and I also met from time to time to plot how to distribute the film of the Ellington concert. Here the obstacle was even greater than the problem of obtaining consents: we simply could not find the film. Over the years, we swept the White House, the United States Information Agency, the National Archives, the Library of Congress and every other hiding place we could think of. People cooperated with our effort, but all we could find were bits of film that were used in the abbreviated documentary. I sometimes daydreamed that the original reels were stuffed in a trash bag in some obscure closet of the building in which the maker of the documentary had committed his butchery. The joy of the search kept us going for a long time.
When Willis Conover died, I found someone admirably suited to carry on his work: Bill Kirchner, a jazz saxophonist, composer and writer. In 1998, we began to search for a commercial-quality copy of the original audio recording of the Ellington concert. We finally found one, neatly tucked away in the National Archives, and played it for Bruce Lundvall, the president of Blue Note, who agreed to produce the recording -- subject, of course, to getting those consents.
After some two years of letters, phone calls and personal conferences with musicians, family members and estate representatives, the task was accomplished. Jim Hall, for the benefit of his fellow surviving musicians and of music history, gave his consent, though he made clear that this was not to be taken as a sign of any diminution in his dislike of Nixon.
The search was worth undertaking for the sake of the music, of course. The release also preserves a moment that embodied the central role of jazz in this country's life and relationship to the world. Finally, it brought together and illuminated the lives of two authentic American heroes.
Ellington was an incomparable artist; he also seemed impervious to slights and refused to use his art or his fame for any but the most inclusive, constructive ends. Conover did as much as anyone to bring American jazz, as well as the American musicians who played it, to the rest of the world. He was required by law to be ''invisible'' in his own country, but he never appeared bothered by the absence of honor and fame at home.
The two, between them, played roles in some of the largest events of the 20th century, including the civil rights movement and the cold war. Each man responded to the bitterness and partisanship of such events with an unfailing generosity of spirit.
I'd like to think that jazz had something to do with it.
Duke Ellington 1969:
All-Star White House Tribute
Blue Note Records.
To be released on Tuesday.
Dealmaker Brad Jacobs of XPO Logistics has built a $12 billion transportation empire.
Decades ago, Bradley Jacobs studied math and piano (classical and jazz) at Bennington and Brown before dropping out to make money. Now the balding 61-year-old CEO of
If that sounds a tad highfalutin, consider this: In September 2011 Jacobs' family investment firm ponied up $62.5 million to gain control of Express-1, a Michigan-based freight expediter doing $170 million in sales a year. He renamed Express-1 after its XPO stock symbol, moved its headquarters to Connecticut and over four years spent more than $7 billion on 17 acquisitions. Today XPO's stock trades at $102, giving it a market cap of $12.3 billion, for a compound annual return of 38% under Jacobs' watch. That's more than double the S&P's return and better than Amazon's.
Jacobs' own stake is worth $2 billion, making up the bulk of his fortune, which includes a 50-acre Greenwich estate, a 17,000-square-foot Palm Beach waterfront mansion just down the road from President Trump's Mar-a-Lago, and a starter modern art collection with works by Picasso, de Kooning, Calder and Lichtenstein.
Truth is, corporate roll-ups have a bad rep. Some operators have overpaid, taken on too much debt, touted synergies that didn't exist or even cooked the books. Yet 14 of 16 analysts covering XPO rate it a buy, persuaded by Jacobs' dealmaking smarts, his execution and his vision of an integrated logistics company that uses technology to capitalize on the growth of e-commerce and the worldwide supply chain. After Jacobs' acquisition run, XPO has strong positions in the U.S. and Europe in freight brokerage, last-mile delivery (getting heavy goods like refrigerators from warehouses to consumers), less-than-truckload shipping and contract logistics (handling all of a company's logistics). Last year it netted $312 million ($2.45 per diluted share) on $15.4 billion in revenues. Free cash flow increased 77% to $374 million in 2017, and XPO projects it will top $600 million in 2018.
Significantly, after leveraging up in 2015 to buy U.S. trucker
Jacobs has hardly sworn off acquisitions; with XPO's leverage reduced by half since 2015, he brags about having $8 billion in "dry powder." But these days he's talking up organic growth and the $450 million a year XPO is pouring into automation and technology. Of its 95,000 employees, 1,700 are tech professionals, including 100 data quants. "Anything we can automate, we are either automating already or we have on the drawing board to automate," he says. In addition to pricing algorithms, XPO has developed the
"Back in the 1990s I wrote reports saying
For most of his career, Jacobs has been doing deals, moving things and looking to make money from an information edge. His father was a jeweler in Providence, but college dropout Jacobs was drawn to the big profits being made in oil as prices spiked in the late 1970s. He read up on oil brokers and then cold-called his way into the business, enlisting the legendary Ludwig Jesselson, head of commodity house Phillip Brothers, as a mentor. (Jesselson's son is now XPO's lead independent director.) Eventually Jacobs moved to London (where he met his oil-trader wife, Lamia) and made millions by securing oil from places like Russia and Nigeria and chartering ships to transport it to Europe. By 1989, however, futures markets were squeezing the profits of globe-trotting arbitrageurs like Jacobs, and he returned to the U.S. to research his next venture.
Jacobs settled on waste hauling after reading an analyst's report describing fat profits at Browning-Ferris. Looking for both talent and inside dope, he interviewed dozens of industry managers. Two former Browning-Ferris execs told him the company had ignored rural areas. Jacobs hired them and went on an acquisition tear, consolidating hundreds of mom-and-pop collectors with overlapping routes in areas like southern Kentucky and Michigan. He took United Waste public in 1992 and sold it in 1997 (to what later became
As that sale closed, Jacobs was already working with investment bankers on his next roll-up play: heavy equipment rentals. He liked it, he says, because it was not only a fragmented market but also a growing one, as companies switched from owning to renting equipment like bulldozers, generators and scissor lifts. He invested $35 million and in December 1997 took
But in 2004 the Securities & Exchange Commission began investigating URI's accounting practices. Two former top execs eventually pleaded guilty to fudging the books from 2000 to 2002 to meet earnings forecasts. Jacobs was never implicated in wrongdoing, and in July 2007 private equity firm Cerberus agreed to buy URI for $4 billion, or $34.50 a share, a 25% premium, plus the assumption of $2.6 billion in debt. Jacobs, then URI's chairman, resigned and went off to run his private investment company. Five months later, as credit markets tightened, Cerberus lost its financing and backed out of the deal. URI's stock eventually fell below $5; Jacobs himself wanted to take URI private but couldn't get the money. Yet since his departure from URI, Jacobs' vision for that roll-up has been vindicated: The stock now trades at $180, for a market cap of $15 billion.
It took a bit longer for Jacobs to find his next target industry. In 2011 he began assembling a team of logistics insiders to capitalize on what he frames as a highly fragmented but growing $3 trillion global market for moving goods. His thesis: Companies don't want to own their logistics headaches and will happily turn the worry over to an outfit like XPO that offers everything from intermodal and full-truckload shipping to partial-load shipping, distribution warehouses and deliveries of heavy goods to a consumer's door.
Jacobs purposely started out in a capital-light niche of the market. Freight brokers like Express-1 don't own trucks; they're middlemen connecting shippers with truckers. But that was only a beachhead for staging acquisitions. After lining up more financing, Jacobs snapped up 3PD, which gave him a presence in home deliveries and installations; intermodal shipping outfit Pacer; and contract logistics leader New Breed, which has such blue-chip customers as Disney, Boeing and Verizon. A big push now is cross-selling between units. Jacobs says 94 of XPO's 100 top customers buy multiple lines of service from it, up from 86 a year ago.
As for his controversial 2015 decision to spend $3 billion for Con-way, Jacobs makes no apologies. He coveted its Menlo Logistics unit in Silicon Valley and considered Con-way's fleet of trucks insurance against a capacity crunch--indeed, as the economy heats up, a truck shortage and surging freight costs benefit XPO. Today the company owns 16,000 tractors, 39,000 trailers and 10,000 53-foot intermodal boxes worldwide, plus it has 11,000 trucks with independent owners under contract and another million trucks available for brokered shipments in its freight network. It has 775 contract logistics warehouses, with 170 million square feet of space, and big plans for opening more hubs in North America and Europe for those last-mile deliveries to consumers.
"XPO is going to be a global logistics juggernaut," says Stephen DeNichilo, a portfolio manager at the $6 billion Federated Kaufmann Fund, which holds XPO shares. He calls the stock undervalued relative to peers J.B. Hunt,
And if the economy turns? Say this for Jacobs: He gets the value of improvisation. "In jazz, if you hit a wrong note, there's no such thing as a wrong note. That's the note, that's the reality. You radically accept that, and you build on it," he riffs. "Music is really business. ...You have to be using all of your senses at the same time, and you have to be dancing with the circumstances and evolving."
25 Essential Drives for a U.S. Road Trip
National Geographic
As you make your way across mainland America, be sure to look into these worthy roads. Read the full story
Shared from Apple News
Join Peter Beinart for a Twitter conversation about this piece with the hashtag #ForwardIsraelChat on Tuesday at 5pm.
"In our time," wrote George Orwell in 1946, "political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible." British colonialism, the Soviet gulag and America's dropping of an atomic bomb, he argued, "can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face." So how do people defend the indefensible? Through "euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness." By obscuring the truth.
So it is, more than 70 years later, with Israeli policy toward the Gaza Strip. The truth is too brutal to honestly defend. Why are thousands of Palestinians risking their lives by running toward the Israeli snipers who guard the fence that encloses Gaza? Because Gaza is becoming uninhabitable. That's not hyperbole. The United Nations says that Gaza will be "unlivable" by 2020, maybe sooner.
Hamas bears some of the blame for that: Its refusal to recognize Israel, its decades of terrorist attacks and its authoritarianism have all worsened Gaza's plight. Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority bears some of the blame too. So does Egypt.
But the actor with the greatest power over Gaza is Israel. Israeli policies are instrumental in denying Gaza's people the water, electricity, education and food they need to live decent lives.
How do kind, respectable, well-meaning American Jews defend this? How do they endorse the strangulation of 2 million human beings? Orwell provided the answer. They do so because Jewish leaders, in both Israel and the United States, encase Israel's actions in a fog of euphemism and lies.
The fog consists, above all, of three words — "withdrew," "security" and "Hamas" — which appear to absolve Israel of responsibility for the horror it oversees.
Withdrawal
Start with "withdrew." Earlier this month, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, defended Israel's shooting of mostly unarmed protesters by declaring that, "We withdrew entirely from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, removing every Israeli resident, home, factory and synagogue. We are not responsible for the well-being of the people of Gaza." American Jewish leaders echo the claim. "Israel withdrew totally" from Gaza, wrote Kenneth Bandler, the American Jewish Committee's director of media relations, last year. Thus, Palestinians rushing toward Gaza's fence with Israel are the equivalent of Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande. "No nation," insists the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, "would tolerate such a threat" to its "sovereignty."
These are anesthetizing fictions. Yes, Israel withdrew its settlers and soldiers in 2005. But Israel still controls Gaza. It controls it in the way a prison guard might control a prison courtyard in which he never actually sets foot.
Getty Images
Palestinians show leaflets that will be attached to a kite before trying to fly it over the border fence with Israel, in Rafah in southern Gaza Strip on April 20, 2018. The message on the leaflet reads in Hebrew and in Arabic: 'Zionists: There is no place for you in Palestine. Go back to where you came from.'
First, Israel declares parts of Gaza off-limits to the people who live there. Israel has established buffer zones — it calls them Access Restricted Areas — to keep Palestinians away from the fence that separates Gaza from Israel. According to the United Nations, this restricted area has ranged over the past decade from 100 to 500 meters, comprising as much as one-third of Gaza's arable land. People who enter these zones can — and over the years have been — shot.
In addition to barring Palestinians from much of Gaza's best land, Israel bars them from much of Gaza's water. In 1993, the Oslo Accords promised Gazan fisherman the right to fish 20 nautical miles off the coast. But since then, Israel has generally restricted fishing to between three and six nautical miles. (Occasionally, it has extended the boundary to nine nautical miles). Since sardines, which the United Nations calls Gaza's "most important catch," "flourish at the 6 NM boundary," these limitations have been disastrous for Gazan fisherman.
The second way in which Israel still controls Gaza is by controlling its borders. Israel controls the airspace above Gaza, and has not permitted the reopening of Gaza's airport, which it bombed in 2001. Neither does it allow travel to and from Gaza by sea.
Israel also controls most land access to Gaza. It's true that — in addition to Gaza's two active border-crossing points with Israel — it has a third, Rafah, with Egypt. But even here, Israel wields substantial influence. Asked this week about Hamas's desire to repatriate the body of a dead operative via Rafah, Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett boasted, "Could we prevent it? The answer is yes."
This doesn't excuse Egyptian leader General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who to his discredit, has largely kept the Rafah crossing closed since he took power in 2013. But even when Rafah is open, it isn't a significant conduit for Gazan exports. As Sari Bashi of Human Rights Watch explained to me, there is little market in Egypt for goods from Gaza, both because those goods are expensive for Egyptian consumers and because transportation across the Sinai is difficult. So when it comes to goods leaving Gaza, the Strip is largely under Israeli control.
Finally, and perhaps most profoundly, Israel controls Gaza's population registry. When a child is born in Gaza, her parents register the birth, via the Palestinian Authority, with the Israeli military. If Israel doesn't enter her in its computer system, Israel won't recognize her Palestinian ID card. From Israel's perspective, she will not legally exist.
This control is not merely theoretical. If Israel doesn't recognize your Palestinian ID card, it's unlikely to allow you into, or out of, Gaza. And because Israel sees Palestinians as a demographic threat, it uses this power to keep the population in Gaza — and especially the West Bank — as low as possible. Israel rarely adds adults to the Palestinian population registry. That means that if you're, say, a Jordanian who marries someone from Gaza and wants to move there to live with her, you're probably out of luck. Israel won't let you in.
Israel is even more zealous about limiting the number of Palestinians in the West Bank, where it still has settlers. So when Palestinians move from Gaza to the West Bank, Israel generally refuses to let them update their addresses, which means they can't legally stay. Israel can even prevent children in Gaza from changing their address to the West Bank to live with a parent. Let's say a child lives with her mother in Gaza but has a father in the West Bank. If the mother dies, and Israel deems there to be a suitable caretaker in Gaza, it can use that as grounds to deny the child the right to legally reunite with her father in the West Bank.
You won't hear about this at the AIPAC Policy Conference. But in these and myriad other ways, Israel constrains the lives of virtually every person in Gaza. As the indispensable Israeli human rights group Gisha has observed: "Gaza residents may not bring a crate of milk into the Gaza Strip without Israeli permission; A Gaza university cannot receive visits from a foreign lecturer unless Israel issues a visitor's permit; A Gaza mother cannot register her child in the Palestinian population registry without Israeli approval; A Gaza fisherman cannot fish off the coast of Gaza without permission from Israel; A Gaza nonprofit organization cannot receive a tax-exempt donation of goods without Israeli approval; A Gaza teacher cannot receive her salary unless Israel agrees to transfer tax revenues to the Palestinian Ministry of Education; A Gaza farmer cannot get his carnations and cherry tomatoes to market unless Israel permits the goods to exit Gaza." Claiming that Israel divested itself of responsibility for Gaza when it "withdrew totally" in 2005 may ease American Jewish consciences. But it's a lie.
It's a lie that keeps American Jews from reckoning with the effect Israeli control has had on ordinary people. In three wars — in 2008-2009, 2012 and 2014 — Israeli bombing damaged roughly 240,000 Gazan homes. According to The New York Times, Operation Cast Lead alone, in 2008-2009, cost Gaza's economy $4 billion, almost three times the Strip's annual GDP. Operation Protective Edge in 2014 damaged or destroyed more than 500 schools and preschools, affecting 350,000 students.
This destruction, along with Gaza's rapid population growth, has created a massive need for infrastructure and services. But Israel's buffer zones and partial blockade make it impossible for the Strip to effectively rebuild. Over the past three years, Israel has, to its credit, loosened restrictions on goods coming in and out of Gaza. Still, the United Nations reports that, in large measure because of "continued export restrictions" and "restrictions on import of material and equipment necessary for local production[B3]," Gaza exported less than one-fifth as much in 2016 as it had in the first half of 2007.
The consequences of this economic collapse have been profound. According to the United Nations, roughly half the people in Gaza are "moderately-to-severely food insecure," up 30% from a decade ago. Hospitals lack essential drugs. A shortage of teachers and buildings has forced many schools to run double and even triple shifts, which means many children attend school for only four hours a day. (By withholding donations to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which runs many of Gaza's schools, the Trump administration will likely make this worse). Most people in Gaza receive only a few hours of electricity per day. Abbas — who in an effort to weaken Hamas last year slashed the amount he pays Israel for Gaza's electricity — bears some of the blame for that. But so does Israel, whose export restrictions deny utility officials in Gaza the money to purchase sufficient fuel or to fully rebuild the Gaza power station Israel bombed in 2006.
Most alarming of all is Gaza's dwindling supply of water. In 2000, 98% of Gaza's residents had access to safe drinking water through its public water network. By 2014, the figure was down to 10%. Because overpumping has damaged the Strip's coastal aquifer, the United Nations warned last year that "Gaza's only water source will be depleted, and irreversibly-so by 2020, unless immediate remedial action is taken." The best long-term solution is to build a new desalination plant. But Gaza has neither the electricity nor the money to do so. Israel is not a bystander in this catastrophe. It is a primary cause.
Security
If pressed on these realities, American Jewish leaders will concede that the suffering in Gaza is deeply unfortunate. But they will deploy a second term to justify the situation: "security." Read statements on Gaza by AIPAC and The Anti-Defamation League and you'll encounter the term "security blockade." The implication is clear: Israel only harms people in Gaza when it is absolutely necessary to keep Israelis safe.
But this, too, is false. Certain elements of the blockade do have a plausible security rationale. Israel, for instance, restricts Gaza's import of many "dual-use" products, from cement and steel to cranes, x-ray machines and smoke detectors to wood planks thicker than 5 centimeters to even the batteries and spare parts needed to power children's hearings aids. The economic and humanitarian consequences of these restrictions are often grave. And Israel's definition of "dual-use" is far broader than international standards. Still, most of the products Israel restricts could be used for attacks on Israel, so there's a security rationale for restricting them.
One can also argue that Israel's buffer zones and restrictions on fishing serve Israeli security. If Palestinians are kept away from the fence, the rockets they launch into Israel can't travel as far. If Palestinian boats are kept nearer the coast, they are easier for the Israeli navy to track. Given the harm that these limits cause farmers and fishermen, Israel should pay them compensation. It should also compensate those Palestinians who suffer from Israel's import restrictions. But whether one thinks these restrictions justify the human cost, it's at least possible to divine the security rationale that underlies them.
When you examine Israel's travel restrictions, however, and its restrictions on Gazan exports, AIPAC and the ADL's security rationalizations largely collapse. With rare exceptions, students from Gaza cannot travel to the West Bank to study. Academics and researchers in Gaza cannot normally leave to attend international conferences, nor can foreign academics visit the Strip. Families in Gaza cannot travel to the West Bank or Israel proper to see their families unless a "first degree relative" (parent, child, sibling) gets married, dies or is about to die. Letting someone leave Gaza to visit his dying grandparent is an unacceptable security risk, evidently, while letting them leave to visit a dying parent is not.
Israel's blockade on exports is similarly vast and arbitrary. Israel allows farmers in Gaza to sell tomatoes and eggplants to Israel but not potatoes, spinach and beans. It allows them to export 450 tons of eggplant and tomatoes per month but not more. Spinach, evidently, is more dangerous than eggplant. And 500 tons of eggplant and tomatoes are more dangerous than 450.
From a certain ultra-myopic perspective, even this has a security rationale. If you see every person leaving Gaza only as a potential terrorist and every container only as the potential hiding place for a bomb, then the fewer people and goods that leave Gaza for Israel or the West Bank (which unlike Gaza, still contains Israelis), the safer Israel is. What this ignores is that terrorism doesn't only require opportunity; it also requires intent. And when you bankrupt a Gazan farmer by blocking his exports or crush a Gazan student's dreams by denying her the chance to study abroad, you may breed the desperation and hatred that produces terrorism, and thus undermine the very Israeli security you're trying to safeguard.
The dirty little secret of Israel's blockade is that elements of it are motivated less by any convincing security rationale than by economic self-interest. In 2009, Haaretz exposed the way Israeli agricultural interests lobby to loosen restrictions on imports into Gaza when Israeli farmers want to sell surplus goods. In 2011, Israel found itself with a shortage of lulavs, the palm fronds that observant Jews shake on the holiday of Sukkot. So Israel lifted its ban on Gaza's export of palm fronds. Had the security risk suddenly changed? Of course not. What had changed were the needs of Israeli consumers.
When you think about it, this isn't surprising. The Israeli government is accountable to Israeli citizens. It's not accountable to the people of Gaza, despite wielding enormous power over their lives. When governments wield unaccountable power, they become abusive and corrupt. Why does Israel maintain a blockade that is not only cruel but, in some ways, absurd? Because it can.
Hamas
Closely associated with the "security" justification is a third word that features prominently in American Jewish defenses of Israeli policy in Gaza: "Hamas." AIPAC declared in a recent fundraising email that "Hamas has a deliberate strategy: challenge Israel's sovereignty, attack Israeli citizens while hiding behind the people of Gaza, and find new ways to threaten Israel's very right to exist." The recent border protests, argued Anti-Defamation League head Jonathan Greenblatt, "featured literal calls by Hamas leaders in the crowds to march 'on to Jerusalem,' a theme consistent with the ideology of Hamas, which is to destroy the Jewish state." From one side of their mouths, American Jewish leaders insist that Israel no longer controls Gaza. But when confronted with the control Israel actually wields, their justifications generally boil down to: "security" and "Hamas."
Hamas is indeed a brutal and destructive force, to both Israelis and Palestinians. It has a long and ugly record of terrorist attacks. It does not recognize Israel. Its Islamist ideology is deeply oppressive, especially to women, LGBTQ Palestinians and religious dissenters.
But Hamas did not force Israel to adopt the policies that have devastated Gaza. Those policies represent a choice — a choice that has not only failed to dislodge Hamas, but has also created the very conditions in which extremism thrives.
In January 2006, four months after Israel withdrew its settlers from Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem went to the polls to elect representatives to the Palestinian Authority's parliament. (Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas was elected separately a year earlier). Hamas won only 45 percent of the vote. But because Fatah — the comparatively secular party founded by Yasser Arafat — ran multiple candidates in many districts, thus splitting the vote, Hamas gained 58 percent of the seats.
This presented Israel with a problem. In the 1970s and 1980s, Israeli leaders had actually viewed Palestinian Islamists as more moderate than the Fatah-dominated PLO, and therefore allowed them greater freedom to organize. In his book Gaza: A History, French scholar Jean-Pierre Filiu notes that in 1988 — a year after Hamas's creation — one of the party's cofounders, Mahmoud Zahar, met with Israel's then-Foreign Affairs Minister Shimon Peres "to propose a tacit recognition of Israel in exchange for its withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967."
But when the PLO publicly recognized Israel in 1988 and reaffirmed that recognition at the start of the Oslo Peace Process in 1993, Hamas's rejectionism became impossible for Israel to ignore. Hamas denounced the PLO for recognizing Israel. And during the Oslo Process and the Second Intifada that followed, Hamas launched numerous terrorist attacks. It's not surprising, therefore, that Israel did not welcome a Hamas-led government.
There were, however, signs that Hamas might be softening its opposition to two states. Just its decision to compete in the 2006 campaign — after boycotting previous Palestinian Authority elections on the grounds that they legitimized the Oslo Process — suggested a shift. In its 2006 election manifesto, Hamas made no reference to Israel's destruction. It spoke instead about "the establishment of an independent state whose capital is Jerusalem." After its surprise victory, Hamas leaders did not offer to recognize Israel. But Zahar did declare that, in return for "our independent state on the area occupied [in] '67," Hamas would support a "long-term truce" and "after that, let time heal." (As former CIA official Paul Pillar has noted, a long-term truce is what today exists between North and South Korea, since no peace treaty officially ended the Korean War.) Another Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal, argued that, "If Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, there could be peace and security in the region."
Getty Images
Hamas was likely following popular opinion. Exit polling by the Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki found that while Hamas benefited from frustration with Fatah's corruption and failure to uphold law and order, 75% of Palestinian voters — and a remarkable 60 percent of Hamas voters — favored the two-state solution. Perhaps that explains why, after its victory, Hamas proposed a unity government with Fatah "for the purpose of ending the occupation and settlements and achieving a complete withdrawal from the lands occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem, so that the region enjoys calm and stability during this phase."
Israel could have embraced this. Even in a unity government, Abbas — who had been elected separately — would have remained president. It was widely assumed that if he reached a peace agreement with Israel, Palestinians, like Israelis, would vote on it in a referendum. The crucial question, therefore, was not whether Hamas as a party endorsed the two-state solution. (After all, Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party had never endorsed the two-state solution.) The crucial question was whether — if the Palestinian people formally endorsed a two-state deal — Hamas would respect their will (something Hamas later pledged to do). Had Hamas, or any other Palestinian faction, committed acts of violence, Israel would have retained the right to respond.
That was the path not taken. Instead, the United States and Israel demanded that Hamas formally foreswear violence, embrace two states and accept past peace agreements — a standard that Netanyahu's own government does not meet. Hamas, which spent the Oslo years calling the PLO dupes for recognizing Israel without getting a Palestinian state in return, refused. So Washington and Jerusalem pressured Abbas to reject a national unity government and govern without a democratically elected parliament. Then, in 2007, the Bush administration encouraged Abbas's national security advisor, Mohammed Dahlan, to oust Hamas from Gaza by force, a gambit that backfired when Hamas won the battle on the ground. And with Hamas now ensconced in power, Israel dramatically tightened its blockade of Gaza, which it has maintained — with modifications — ever since.
The result: Gaza has been devastated, and Hamas remains in power.
Which brings us to the current protests. The Israeli government's American defenders insist that Israel cannot let thousands of demonstrators — some of them violent — tear down the fence and begin streaming toward the kibbutzes and towns on the other side. That's true, but it misses the larger point. No government finds it easy to quell mass protests. The deeper question is always: What has that government done to address the grievances that sparked the protests in the first place? For more than a decade, Israel's answer to the problem of Gaza has been collective punishment and terrifying force. For stretches of time, this has kept Gaza quiet. And it may again. In the coming weeks, Israeli soldiers may kill and maim enough protesters to scare the rest back into their prison enclave. But sooner or later, Gaza will rise again. And the longer Israel suffocates its people, the more desperate and vengeful their uprisings will become. A 10-year-old in Gaza has already endured three wars. According to the United Nations, three hundred thousand children in Gaza suffer from post-traumatic stress from the 2014 conflict alone. Do Israeli and American Jewish leaders really believe that brutalizing them even more by denying them adequate food, education, electricity and water will make them more likely to live in peace with Israel? By maintaining its blockade, Israel is not pushing Gaza's next generation toward coexistence. It's pushing it toward ISIS.
The alternative is a strategy built not on collective punishment but on hope. It would begin with dismantling much of the blockade. Israel has the right to search cargo entering and exiting leaving Gaza. It has the right to investigate people traveling to and from there — and to restrict their movement if it finds evidence they're a threat. But there's a vast difference between restricting the movement of particular individuals that you have reason to suspect of terrorism and restricting entire classes of people based on no individual suspicion at all. There's a vast difference between restricting certain imports that could be used to construct tunnels or bombs and prohibiting the export of potatoes and beans. Except when there's a clear, specific danger, Israel should allow the people of Gaza to study, travel, trade and gain the resources to live decent lives. Doing so would not only be humane. It would also be wise. Israel will be safer when people in Gaza have something to lose.
A strategy of hope would involve allowing (and even encouraging) Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem to hold free elections for the first time in more than 12 years. And that would require allowing Palestinians to vote for whichever party they choose. Israel has the right to retaliate if Hamas, or any other Palestinian faction, attacks it. It does not have the right to bar Palestinians from voting for parties that reject the two-state solution when Israelis do so all the time.
A strategy of hope would mean embracing the Arab Peace Initiative and the Clinton Parameters: a viable Palestinian state near the 1967 lines. It would mean ending settlement growth, and perhaps even paying settlers to move back inside the green line so as to keep hopes for a two-state solution alive.
Finally, a strategy of hope would require Israeli and American Jewish leaders to talk honestly about why 70% of the people in Gaza are refugees or descendants of refugees. Israeli and American Jews find it frightening that the Gaza protesters have labeled their demonstrations "The Great March of Return." But surely Jews — who prayed for 2,000 years to return to the land from which we were exiled — can understand why Palestinians in Gaza might yearn for lands from which they were exiled a mere 70 years ago. That yearning does not make Palestinians anti-Semites or terrorists. If Moshe Dayan could express sympathy in 1956 for the inhabitants of "the refugee camps of Gaza" who have "seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelt," why can't today's Israeli leaders acknowledge, and offer recompense for, the Nakba? Why is it considered inconceivable that Israel would permit the return of a single Palestinian refugee when, in 1949, a far more fragile Israel offered to readmit 100,000.
Netanyahu and Trump. But who makes it absurd? To a significant extent, we American Jews do. The organized American Jewish community doesn't only conceal the truth about Gaza from itself. It lobbies American politicians to do the same. The American Jewish establishment exports its "euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness" to Washington. It excoriates politicians who dare to suggest that Israel bears some of the responsibility for Gaza's suffering. In doing so, it helps to sustain Israel's current policies and to foreclose alternatives.
The struggle for human decency, Orwell argued, is also a struggle for honest language. Our community's complicity in the human nightmare in Gaza should fill every American Jew with shame. The first step toward ending that complicity is to stop lying to ourselves.
