Attention to the Unseen

Patrick Kingsley reports: We found Shai Melamud just before dusk, standing on his patio near Israel’s northern border, opposite a slope scorched black by recent rocket fire from Lebanon. Mr. Melamud, 86, was born 13 years before the state of Israel. He grew up in these hills, the son of early Zionists who helped build one of the area’s first Jewish collective farms, or kibbutzim. Over dinner, he remembered the Arab village that once stood on the now-empty hill to…

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The New York Times reports: In the summer of 2020, as pandemic shutdowns closed businesses and racial justice protests erupted on American streets, Rae Grulkowski, a 56-year-old businesswoman who had never been involved in politics but was alarmed about what was happening to the country, found a way to make a difference. The connection to the turbulence of national politics might not have been immediately clear. Ms. Grulkowski had just heard about a years-in-the-making effort to designate her corner of…

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Binyamin Appelbaum writes: Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the top House Republican, recently took to social media to warn that Democrats have hatched a dastardly plot. “Democrats,” he said, “want to track every penny you earn so they can then tax you and your family at the maximum possible amount.” Well, yes. Democrats want Americans to pay the full amount they owe in taxes. What doesn’t get enough attention is that many Republicans seem not to agree. Resistance to taxation…

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Eliav Lieblich and Adam Shinar write: On Friday, Oct. 22, 2021, Israeli Minister of Defense, Benny Gantz, declared six West Bank Palestinian civil society organizations as “terrorist organizations.” Among them are prominent and well-established human rights organizations such as Al-Haq – which has been active in the occupied territories since 1979. The declaration has received sharp rebukes from international and Israeli human rights groups, the UN, and several members of the U.S. Congress. The U.S. State Department requested Israel to…

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The New York Times reports: American presidents have spent decades trying to sidestep the question of how forcefully the United States would come to the aid of Taiwan if China invaded it or, more likely, tried to slowly strangle the island in an effort to force it back under the control of the mainland. The American policy — called “strategic ambiguity” because it leaves vague exactly how the United States would react — does not lend itself to a tough-sounding…

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