Josh Marshall

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Josh Marshall is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TPM.

A Brief Note on Tonight’s Elections

As you know there are key elections today across the country. The ones we’re following most closely are the constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights in Ohio and the legislative elections in Virginia, in which abortion is also a major issue.

One big thing to remember is that in something like the Virginia legislative races, the battle for control of the state Assembly and Senate will likely come down to a pretty small number of votes, perhaps just one or two races. A win is a win. That’s our system. But the electoral significance of a win for the future is much less clear. Given the frenzied panic among many Democrats right now, if Republicans take control of the Virginia House and Senate, it’s likely to send Democrats into full apoplexy and the national news media into a full Biden death watch. But the difference between that outcome and a Democratic win, which would led many to think that Times/Sienna poll wasn’t such a big deal after all, is likely to be a pretty small number of votes. Just keep this in mind as we go into the evening regardless of the result.

Further Observations on the Israel-Hamas War Prime Badge
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As with my post yesterday, this is a notebook of observations about various issues tied to the Israel-Hamas war.

Invisible War

As I noted yesterday, what amazes me is how little we know about what is happening on the ground in the battle between Israel and Hamas. The US press is filled with reporting on the domestic repercussions of the conflict; there’s lots of reporting on the civilian death toll in Gaza. Those issues deserve lots of attention. But Israel’s core goal is to physically eliminate Hamas’s de facto army, usually estimated to number around 30,000 militants; its arsenal of weaponry; and its complex of tunnels. It is very hard to find much solid information, from either side, on how much success they are having accomplishing that.

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Death of Jewish Man Reported at Dueling Demonstrations in LA

A Jewish man in his late 60s (reports about age vary), Paul Kessler, has died after being struck by a pro-Palestinian protestor in Westlake Village (a city in Los Angeles County) yesterday afternoon.

Reports are still sketchy. But there were apparently dueling demonstrations at an intersection in Westlake Village. There was some sort of interaction between one or more pro-Palestinian demonstrators and Kessler, a pro-Israel demonstrator. The pro-Palestinian demonstrator apparently hit Kessler on the head with a megaphone. Kessler then fell back and hit his head on the concrete. Looking at all the reports together, it seems like hitting his head on the concrete may have been the injury that eventually killed Kessler. Not all reports include the hit with the megaphone. Some simply report a scuffle which led to Kessler’s fall.

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That Scary Biden-Trump Poll Prime Badge
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As many of you have likely seen, over the weekend The New York Times and Siena released a poll showing that President Biden is running behind Donald Trump in all the big swing states with the exception of Wisconsin. Meanwhile a “generic Democrat” is polling ahead of Trump basically everywhere. Not surprisingly this has again released flurries of questions about whether Biden should be running at all or whether he should be replaced with another candidate younger and with less baggage. TPM Reader LD wrote in to ask, “Is TPM’s position still that we need to sit down and shut up if we have doubts about Biden’s appeal to the coalition necessary to win?”

Let me first respond to LD’s grievancy gripe. The dynamics of the online world make us all reflexively assume the posture of fed up little guy in a battle with the elites. But the truth is that I never said any such thing. (By the way, LD and I talked it over and now I think we’re back to being best pals.) What I said is that I don’t think anyone but Joe Biden will be the nominee and I don’t think we have any realistic way to change that. (Just why I think that you can see in the earlier posts.) So I’m focused on getting this guy reelected rather than imagining some alternative, usually fantastical scenario. As I told LD in my initial, slightly volcanic response, by all means go out and advocate for Biden to step aside. I’ll be here in what I take to be the real world trying to get him reelected. I don’t control people. I certainly don’t control Biden. This is just my interpretation of the situation before us.

But this isn’t the whole story.

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On-Going Observations

I wanted to share some thoughts on a miscellany of topics that have come up over the weekend in Israel/Palestine. Most aren’t the ‘big picture.’ Partly I’ve run out of things to say about the big picture and, to an extent, the emotional energy to say it.

These are just observations on topics just beneath the headlines.

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Are American Jews Caught in a Tide of Anti-Semitism? Prime Badge
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It’s hard to analyze public questions with dispassion and wisdom in today’s brutal cacophony of social media driven public conversations. It’s hard to do that when you bring deeply felt and even personal commitments to the questions at hand, though I seldom write about things I don’t have strong beliefs about. I wanted to share a few thoughts about the current arguments about anti-Semitism and Zionism.

There are a lot of American Jews at this moment who feel like they are seeing a wave of unconcealed anti-Semitism that they haven’t seen in their lifetimes.

Is that really true?

As the Israel-Hamas war grinds forward an emanation of that conflict is playing out in the United States with protests and counter-protests, fights over symbolic public actions, manifestos and public letters. Each in turn spurs a public debate about just what was going on in this or that social media viral video. Social media amplifies and accelerates every cut and thrust. What is anti-Semitic, what is simply protests against a war with harrowing numbers of civilian casualties? We see the same well-worn public debates, or rather yelling matches, about what’s anti-Zionism and what’s anti-Semitism, whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

It may help to start with some definitions and history, their relevance and often irrelevance.

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When Your Country Has Its Back Against the Wall Prime Badge
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Recently I’ve been thinking about a story I first read decades ago. In his mid-50s Winston Churchill wrote an autobiography covering his life through his mid-20s: “My Early Life, A Roving Commission.” Churchill was born well past third base. He was the nephew of Lord Marlborough, one of the most exalted British noblemen, and ended up a commoner only by a small accident of birth. But in his own world he was something of a reject. And that gives his account a sympathetic or emotional approachability it might otherwise not have.

Churchill’s father found him a disappointment, not bright enough for anything but a career in the army. It was a judgment he took little trouble to hide. When Randolph Churchill sent his eldest son to the Sandhurst military academy, the young Churchill thought his father had great expectations for him as a heroic warrior. He only later realized his father doubted he had any ability for anything else. Churchill’s mother, an American heiress, also had little time for him and spent much of her life in serial affairs. Only later did she take much interest in him, using her accumulated friendships with powerful men to give him critical assists in his improbable ascent. So Churchill is packed off to military school and ends up in India on his first deployment.

In India, he’s generally bored. He begins reading a lot and gets it in his head to be a journalist. Over the next few years, in large part through his mother’s connections and their deepening relationship, he gets a mix of military leaves, postings and journalistic assignments that lead him on a kind of grand tour of the conflict zones of the world. Over a couple years he’s in Cuba for the Cuban war of independence; he’s in Africa for the reconquest of the Sudan after the Mahdi rebellion; he catches one military expedition on what is now the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

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Who Takes Over Gaza? Prime Badge
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I saw a new poll out today which reports that 70% of Jewish Israelis says Benjamin Netanyahu should resign from office as soon as the war ends. The same poll of Arab Israelis is currently in the field. There’s no doubt it will push that number higher. That represents a major deterioration from the first week or so after the October 7th massacres which had already shown a dramatic decline in public support for Netanyahu’s government. What does this mean exactly?

From following the news closely and talking to many Israelis it seems clear to me that this is about more than accountability for a security failure: ‘You’re Mr. Security. You had one job. You failed.’ There seems to be a much more thoroughgoing collapse of all sorts of basic assumptions about security and whether the status quo can ever really work. Turning on Netanyahu doesn’t mean any lack of support for prosecuting the current war. Fighting the current war seems to have all but universal support among Jewish Israelis though there are, of course, differences of opinion on how to prosecute it. The real questions are what comes afterwards.

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Is A Two State Solution Really No Longer Possible? Prime Badge
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What can be called a “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians ended with the failure of the Camp David summit and the onset of the Second Intifada in late 2000. Over the subsequent years, as settlement activity continued, it became increasingly common, especially among the more hard-bitten and realist-minded, to say that the time had run out on a so-called “two state solution.” From different quarters this verdict had different meanings. For Israeli maximalists it was a concluding judgment on the folly of the Oslo Accords and refusal of territorial concessions. For Palestinians it signaled a rejection of territorial compromise born of disappointment with the failure of Oslo. More concretely it was a simple statement of the reality on the ground. The West Bank had become so shot through with settlements — not just the large agglomerations along the 1967 border but lines of control reaching much deeper into Palestinian areas — that it simply wasn’t possible to create a viable state even if there was the will to create one. And quite clearly there wasn’t the will to make one.

On the Israeli side, the Oslo Accords had been born of a strategic recognition on the part of significant elements of the Israeli national security establishment. It wasn’t possible to keep the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians in a permanently stateless/occupied status. Nor was it possible to absorb them into Israel since Israeli Jews would cease to make up the overwhelming majority of the population. The years between 2000 and 2008 represented a kind of back and forth holding pattern. Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power in 2009 was based on a very different premise: that the Palestinian issue could be managed indefinitely rather than resolved and with no major repercussions.

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Paralysis at the Top in Israel

One thing that is obscured into the current chaos and killing in Israel/Palestine is that the current government is essentially paralyzed. Benjamin Netanyahu remains Prime Minister despite a catastrophic loss of public support tied to his failure to prevent the October 7th massacres in southern Israel. In theory there’s a government of national unity now in place, with a war cabinet made up of Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Benny Gantz, one of the two main leaders of the opposition. But just how much control Gantz, a former IDF chief of staff, is exercising is unclear.

Meanwhile many government ministers have been close to invisible since the war started. Some basic news about government policy comes out in the US first and only then gets reported in Israel. I should add that from a distance and without a subtle grasp of the textures of Israeli politics it’s difficult for me to judge the extent of this invisibility. But I’ve asked this question of numerous Israelis whose opinion I trust and all seem to agree with this basic read of the situation.

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