“Am I in the right place?” I asked a young lady wearing a mask as I opened the door to Old City Hall in Miami Beach. “What are you looking for?” she asked me. “O cinema,” I said with my eyes gazing downwards at Google Maps on my iPhone. I’ve probably driven by this building hundreds of times in my life, but have never stepped foot inside. It turns out that it’s an architectural landmark, a 1920s Mediterranean-style building that was the home of the Miami Beach municipal government until 1977. “You’re in the right place,” she said. “It’s a historic building, so we can’t put signs on it.” Hearing her words but still unsure, I glanced down the hallway of this 100-year-old lobby and finally saw the universal sign of a cinema, a dusty, red velvet rope. Cue the harp. I had made it.

But…I still needed a ticket to see the controversial Israeli-Palestinian, Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land”, which was unfortunately sold out. Given that this was the last night they were showing it at this theater, and that the film was unable to find a single U.S. distributor, I took a gamble and showed up 30 minutes early to try and figure out a way in.

This is normally a film I would see, given that I’ve seen nearly all of the best feature documentary nominees from the past 20 years. My first job in journalism was as a documentary critic for the Sun Sentinel newspaper in South Florida. It also focuses on this tiny region of the world, which I am deeply interested in and am also quite familiar with. My last job in journalism was as a video journalist who covered Israel and the Palestinian territories, where I spent a disproportionate amount of my work days going in and out of the West Bank.

This film had yet another thing going for it that caused me to rush to the theater on a Thursday night, dateless and alone, with my dear wife handling dinner and putting our three kids to bed. God bless her. That extra intangible was that this film, which was only being shown in one venue in South Florida, this tiny cinematheque that is leased by, and also partially funded by, the city of Miami Beach. The mayor of Miami Beach, Steven Meiner, who is Jewish, made international headlines after he drafted a city resolution to cancel said lease and funding, which essentially was an eviction order, due to O Cinema’s decision to screen the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land.” In a statement, Mayor Meiner branded the joint Israeli and Palestinian production as “antisemitic.”

Some may argue that the opinions of a mayor in South Florida, thousands of miles from the South Hebron Hills, don’t really have any consequence on events in the Middle East, but I beg to differ. As it turns out, the largest donors to the illegal West Bank settlements are wealthy South Florida families. Certainly, a film that shows how these tens of millions of dollars are being spent should be relevant to them and those who may be considering similar donations.

I grew up in North Miami Beach and became close friends with many of the children and grandchildren of these mega donors. We went to the same Zionist, Orthodox Jewish day school where we sang Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah,” every single morning before the pledge of allegiance. I have lived about 25% of my life in Israel. I am not that religious, but I am extremely proud to be Jewish and care deeply, perhaps irrationally, about Israel. I take accusations of “anti-Semitism” pretty seriously. Was the mayor correct in calling this film “anti-Semitic”? Who are these Leni Riefenstahl wannabes that would dare defame my people?

Yet another box this film checked for me is that it is rubbing up against my favorite amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, el numero uno. While I don’t believe there is anything unconstitutional about a city choosing which art or cinemas to finance or support, the Mayor’s accusations, along with parallel and related events, have effectively chilled free speech and legitimate non-violent protest in this country. This should concern anyone who cares about anti-Semitism and free speech in the United States.

The arrest and prolonged detention of Columbia student organizer Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States, is a case in point. While I don’t doubt that Khalil is anti-Semitic, since anti-Zionism is essentially a thinly cloaked veil for anti-Semitism, we should remember that opposing Israeli policies and anti-Zionism (read: anti Semitism) are two completely different concepts. Millions of people, including many Israelis and Jews around the world, oppose Israeli government policies and believe in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. They are clearly not anti-Semites.

There are also plenty of anti-Semites who do not engage in violent or illegal activities. As we learned in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision on the neo-Nazi rally in Skokie, Illinois in 1977, even the most vile, racist, anti-Semitic (read: anti-Zionist) speech is protected speech under the U.S. Constitution.

I don’t know which anti-Semitic bucket Khalil falls in, but I’m yet to see the proof that he has done anything illegal or has any relationship to the terrorist group, Hamas.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the United States arresting and deporting anyone they can prove supported the terrorist organization Hamas, or have done anything violent or illegal, but having been to many repressive countries, I’m glad to live in a country in which the government, in theory, protects all manners of non-violent speech and the writ of habeas corpus. Even the most loathsome individual or group should not be disappeared in the middle of the night without showing evidence to a judge in the first 24 hours of an arrest. This is what happens in Gaza, not in the United States.

The atmosphere in the US today rhymes with 1950s McCarthyism, substituting pro-Communist beliefs with an absurdly broad definition of anti-Semitism in which protected anti-Semitic speech is suddenly becoming the equivalent of working for Hamas. This is why, in today’s climate, an accusation of anti-Semitism can lead to devastating consequences for an individual or piece of art.

Which leads me back to the final reason I rushed out to see this film. Whenever a politician or government tries to censor, blacklist, or smear a piece of a film, a book, or a piece of art, don’t walk to see it. Run! Run as if your life depends on it. See it! Screen it! Write about it!

And so that’s what I did, bravely navigating the parking situation in Miami Beach and the hordes of frat boys who descend on my city for a strange annual American tradition called “Spring Break.” I approached the velvet rope and saw two female employees behind the counter. A glass container filled with individually wrapped Kettle Corn packets and an open bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon was ready to be poured. It was the quintessential arthouse cinema, the quaintest imaginable movie experience. It even had its own library. It felt like the quietest place I’ve been to in decades. I couldn’t even hear the hum of the air conditioner on a hot Miami night in March.

“Is this actually the place that made international headlines last week?” I asked sarcastically to no one in particular. The lady with the red hair interjected, “We’re a small theater with a big mouth.” She was the CEO, Vivian Marthell. We chatted and I congratulated her on the city dropping the resolution threatening her funding and her lease. “It’s not over yet,” she said. There’s another resolution encouraging us to show another film to balance this one.” I asked what she thought of the resolution. “It’s unconstitutional,” she said. I was surprised by the answer, which indicated that she was gearing up for another fight.

“I don't have a ticket, but I really want to see this film. Anyway, can I get in? “You’re in luck,” the girl in the mask said. Three people just cancelled, so we will have a ticket for you. Just wait on the other side of the velvet rope.” “Sure thing,” I exclaimed with a grin. I waited behind the velvet as instructed, unpeeled a mandarin, and unwittingly became part of the greeting committee. I befriended a Lebanese man who commented on my healthy eating choices. I smiled at an older lady with a Magen David on her necklace. The girl in the mask greeted every patron with a friendly “hello.” I felt as if I had landed in a different era, a nicer era.

Finally, I was allowed to buy a ticket. I skipped the kettle corn and the wine and found one of the last seats in the middle of the tiny 70-person theater. Marthell came in to give a little speech of gratitude before the show started, saying, “Our decision to screen No Other Land is not a declaration of political alignment. It is a reaffirmation of our fundamental belief that every voice deserves to be heard, and perhaps especially when it challenges us.” The packed house clapped. The theater went dark. The screen filled with light.

You probably want to know what I think of the film. I will get to that.

But first, I must share this with you. When I went to my Zionist elementary school, my Zionist youth movement, and on my Zionist trip to Israel in 1995, I learned a story. A beautiful, tragic, and true story about the Jewish people, my people, my ancestors, who came from South Africa by way of Lithuania by way of Judea — and then 2,000 or so years later, miraculously returned to this same land where our culture, language, and peoplehood came together and crystallized once again. We revived an ancient language and started a new country where an old kingdom once stood, called Israel, that is today thriving in countless ways. It is a truly remarkable story.

That said, there is another side to the story that I never learned in my Zionist school, or even in my public high school. It wasn’t until I went to college and studied international relations that I made my first Palestinian friend and learned this narrative that completely blew me away. The fact is that hundreds of thousands of Arabs who refused to accept the Jewish state lost their homes and their land. That is what we celebrate as “Yom Haatzmaut”, the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba, “catastrophe”. And this injustice runs like a river parallel to Anti-semitism. And surely, just as anti-Semitism has risen precipitously around the world, so too have land seizures and violence in the West Bank. Could it be that our greatest moment of justice, finally getting a state of our own after millennia of anti-Semitic repression and violence, led to the greatest moment of injustice for another people? Could it be that the joint failure of Israeli and Palestinian leaders to resolve this injustice has become the root cause of the latest strain of the anti-Semitic mind virus? Such is the luck of the Jews.

I honestly didn’t know the answers to these questions at age 23, but I was so curious, and admittedly frustrated, about this gap in my education that I decided to devote my life to filling it. I lived all over the map in Israel and the Palestinian territories, among Jews, Muslims, and Christians, in a kibbutz, in Rishon le Tzion, in East Jerusalem, in the West Bank, and even in Gaza. I worked as a journalist in all these places, along with many other Middle Eastern countries. I learned that I would never want to live anywhere permanently in the Middle East except Israel. For those living in Israel proper, including 1 million Muslim and Christian Arabs who are Israeli citizens, Israel is by far the freest and liberal country in the region. I fell madly in love with the vibrant, diverse city of Tel Aviv.

But when I drove about 45 minutes from my beachside Tel Aviv apartment into the West Bank as a journalist, driving a 1984 Opel Corsa sometimes through the Qalandia checkpoint or sometimes leaving it just outside, I entered a completely different reality.

It is a reality that triggered memories from another part of my personal, early history. My parents are South African, and I happened to be living there as a 6-year-old boy when I was just learning how to read. Some of my earliest memories were from mid-1980s South Africa. I remember asking my parents to explain the meaning behind the grotesque, racist signs of South African apartheid. Mommy, what does “European or Whites only bathroom” mean? Are we “white?”

At first, I remember this feeling of cognitive dissonance, reading similar signs that discriminate based on your religion. One highway for the Israeli cars with the yellow plates. The other is for Palestinian cars with the green plates. I was always surprised at how easy it was to get into the West Bank, and how hard it was to get out, even going from one city to a neighboring city. It’s eerily similar to the Bantustan system created by the white nationalists in South Africa. You can often just drive right in, or take a shared Palestinian taxi, without much hassle. But the way out of each enclave is a different story. Many times I would go back to Israel on foot, joining the lines of thousands of Palestinians being herded like cattle through gates in order to go work in Israel, or visit a relative in a nearby village, or pray in Jerusalem. I would try to sneak in a few shots, but filming there would lead to my camera getting confiscated, or worse. It was a dehumanizing experience that I don’t think anyone could ever get used to. Sometimes, upon returning to Israel proper, the IDF thought I was Palestinian because of my hooptie-looking vehicle (which screamed Arab) or because I was meeting with Palestinians. I would often get harassed until I could prove that I was Jewish. If showing my credentials or speaking Hebrew didn’t work, I’d have to mention the addresses of where my family lives in Israel. And if that failed, recite my Bar Mitzvah portion.

The West Bank is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to actual Apartheid in my lifetime, except that, instead of skin color, your religion is the sole factor that determines your rights. There are separate roads, separate schools, and separate laws governing the land. If you’re Jewish, you get building permits, due process, and resources like water and electricity. If you’re not Jewish, you are often not entitled to any of that. And in some tragic cases, you do not get any of those things, and when you complain or protest, you get thrown in jail or a bullet in the stomach.

I remember one night I was on a private bus with a church group on Christmas Eve, having just documented Christmas in Bethlehem for Time magazine. Upon reaching the checkpoint, the soldiers stopped us, individually frisked us, searching every seat, every bag, opening the engine block, only to discover sheets of music and women in tears. We were a group of Palestinian choir girls plus one random Jewish-South African-American journalist just trying to get home to East Jerusalem from Bethlehem after Midnight mass. A journey of 15 minutes was turned into a 4-hour ordeal. I watched as people with names and faces like mine harassed and embarrassed, verbally assaulting human beings for no good reason. Yes, there is a legitimate security component to the checkpoints, but this doesn’t excuse much of the terrible things that happen to innocent people on a near-daily basis. And the more time you spend in the West Bank, especially in the South Hebron Hills, you come to understand there is something else going on here.

What confuses a lot of people is that I’m only referring to the West Bank here. I’m not talking about Israel proper, which is largely a democracy with all the usual warts and challenges. I’m also not talking about Gaza, which is a theocracy currently run by a terrorist death cult. The West Bank is its own animal, and I would argue, is the most consequential battleground for the future of the people in the region.

Which leads me to the film. Almost. Before I get into it, I want to tell you something that has really irked me. So many people I know, referring mainly to Jews who live in Miami, many of whom since 10/7 have justifiably hardened their stance on the conflict, are citing some kind of principled position for why they won’t see this film. They espouse the same principle as Mayor Meiner of Miami Beach. They claim that the film is anti-Semitic propaganda. The proof, as you’ll see below, is nonexistent.

I've read countless social media threads in which folks from my community say they would see the film, but the “timing is bad” with anti-semitism on the rise around the world, or that they didn’t like the Oscar acceptance speech of its Israeli Jewish director because he didn’t mention the word “Hamas.” Some people from my community espoused Hamas-like views, indicating that they don’t give a damn what happens to the Palestinians.

To those who are already offended by a film you have never seen, get over yourself. You can’t claim to care about Israel and its future and also refuse to learn about all sides of it. How uncomfortable are you with your views that you are frightened to watch a little documentary? Wake up and smell the black, muddy Turkish coffee. Israel is not the fantasy land they show you on Birthright trips. The more this reality is hidden, the longer it will take for us to ever create an actual fantasy land where kids on both sides don’t have to die pointless and premature deaths.

Since I know that a handful of my readers might feel offended by the paragraphs above, I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. I love my community, including dear friends who may espouse the above views. My only goal, which has always been my guiding principle, is truth. I want people to better understand the reality of Israel and the Palestinian territories so we can have a more honest debate about reality and how to help the people there live in peace. Given the volume of donations and tax dollars that flow to Israel and the West Bank settlements from Miami and the United States, it’s an important conversation to have.

I understand that many people are still very upset about 10/7, and believe me, I am, too. This trauma will never go away. But this doesn’t justify living in denial about what’s going on in other parts of the Land. I also understand that all human beings suffer from the well-documented confirmation bias. My argument to you is that maintaining this bias does nothing to help, and only helps to perpetuate the conflict. Any decent human being with basic knowledge of the conflict should not see Israel and Hamas as morally equivalent, not by a long shot. However, those who ignore the reality of Palestinian suffering are doing precisely what the brainwashed hordes of Leftists or Hamas supporters do when they refuse to correct their own blind spots about Israel, Jewish indigenity, and the true horrors of anti-Semitic violence by Islamists. Justifying or ignoring your tribe’s violence or oppression weakens any moral claim you try to make against the other.

I’ve written in the past about how a shared narrative is one of the keys to lasting peace. Ignoring the other side’s narrative doesn’t make it go away, or make it any less true. It just reduces the conflict to a zero-sum game in which there is only one victim and one oppressor. This is the greatest, most comforting lie that zealots on both sides tell themselves before bed at night. This is the bedtime story that has already slayed tens of thousands of children. How many more will have to die before we start to tell a different story?

Ok, glad we got that out of the way. Hey, this is a film review, people. Pop your corn. Let’s talk about movies!

Wait, sorry. I have one more preamble before I get into this. It's the last one, and I promise no more rants.

All great films should have verisimilitude, which is a fancy way of saying believability. This means they can be made-up stories, but to be compelling, they must be believable. Documentaries, unlike fiction films, have a totally different bar to meet. Their origins are not in the theatrical arts but in journalism. Therefore, they must be grounded in reality and depict it accurately. The best docs are educational tools with an edge. Some of them actually lack verisimilitude because they are too unbelievable, but they are in fact true stories. The best docs stir up complex emotions on challenging subjects, but they must get the story they cover essentially right.

A great documentary presents a slice of reality. They often dive deep into a tiny place. They can be a narrow window into one person, one animal, or one village's world. The filmmakers choose the context and, in doing so, inject their biases. To tell the whole reality would be impossible, and if you were to try it, it would lead to a very long and terrible film. No, what we want in documentaries is access to a small, symbolic story that tells you about a reality you may not be aware of. The best documentaries present a hidden world that, for whatever reason, doesn’t get coverage on the more superficial mainstream news cycle.

This documentary, “No Other Land,” does all this and more. Its message rings true based on everything I know, have seen, and experienced myself in the South Hebron Hills after watching it for 95 unflinching minutes in the theater, and living in it for a decade.

It tells the first-person story of a young man named Basel Adra who grows up like many Palestinian kids in the tiny village of Masfer Yatta. He has basically spent his entire life watching his village get bulldozed, the people he loves get arrested, and or/shot by the IDF or radical Jewish settlers. In the West Bank, the settlers often act as paramilitaries, covering their faces, with the protection of the IDF. While there are certainly non-violent, peace-loving settlers, there is also this radical element that regularly intimidates, loots, and terrorizes innocent Palestinians with impunity. This is, unfortunately, a fact.

The film does present the Israeli government's side, which is that in the early 1980s, this cluster of villages with only about 1,000 residents who had been there for many generations, was suddenly declared a “closed military zone.” The villagers couldn’t do anything about it, except protest. Imagine your government suddenly closing your neighborhood so they can fire weapons there. They demolish your house, your school, your way of life. They cut off your water and electricity. Your permits to rebuild are never granted. You are forced to move into a cave. When you protest, they threaten you, arrest you, or shoot you. This is, unfortunately, Palestinian village life in the South Hebron Hills, and many other parts of the West Bank. I witnessed it with my eyes, in person, and through the magic of cinema, I felt as if I got transported right back there.

Nothing that I’ve written here should be controversial or debatable. This essay, like the film that I’m about to write about, is not about politics or some shadowy, murky history. It’s about actual daily life in the South Hebron Hills. You can go see it for yourself if you want today. In fact, the other Palestinian co-director of the film, Hamdan Ballal, was attacked by settlers and detained by the IDF in his first trip back after accepting his Oscar. Many times, and in this instance, the IDF will say they are responding to rock-throwing as the justification for far more serious violence against unarmed Palestinians. This is the pattern now for decades. Sometimes the Palestinians do start, it’s often impossible to know for sure, but in the wild West Bank, might equals right, and the IDF and the settlers are the ones with the guns and the jails.

The stories of Palestinian victimization are countless and backed up by plenty of visual and incanubular documentation by both Israeli and international human rights groups. They are also validated by thousands of testimonies of former IDF soldiers themselves, who often are traumatized by the things they are forced to do as part of their compulsory military service. The film doesn’t assign blame for the occupation or ask why it exists. It simply shows it for what it is. The question for people now is not whether this film is accurate, but how mature, responsible, and intellectually honest people should react to this terrible reality.

I really don’t know how to diagnose people who choose to live in a state of denial. Is it too difficult a concept for people to understand that the IDF can be both a heroic army and also capable of terrible crimes? There should be no confusion that in these small villages of the West Bank, these specific Palestinians, including Basel and his family, are the victims. And in this instance, the state, IDF, and the settlers who harass and shoot them are the oppressors. This equation obviously gets reversed when you consider the Jewish villages along the Gaza border, like Nahal Oz, Kfar Azza, etc, which were marauded in the most barbaric way on 10/7. In this instance, they are the clear-cut victims, and Hamas is the most depraved oppressor. An intelligent human being should be capable of holding both these truths in their brain at once without it exploding.

Speaking of Hamas, the film doesn’t mention them, and the filmmakers didn’t mention them in the Oscars because there is no evidence that the Masafer Yatta area is a Hamas stronghold, or even has a single Hamas supporter. While Hamas is very present in the refugee camps and larger cities of the West Bank, the Masafer Yatta area is not one of them. Even the PA has very little influence or connection to these villages that are sort of like tiny islands in this arid landscape abutting the Judean desert. Thus, it is totally fair not to talk about Hamas and the PA in a film about a village that has little or nothing to do with them. Ironically, if the IDF and the settlers get their way, the residents of Masafer Yatta will be moved to refugee camps where they will certainly be more exposed to the ideas and recruitment efforts of Hamas.

At the same time, it is also outside the scope of the film to provide a history on the IDF’s role in protecting Israel and Jews, without which there would be no Jewish state, as it would be instantly overrun by anti-Semitic terror groups from Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza, including but not limited to Hamas. This is also well documented and again has little or nothing to do with the village of Masafer Yatta.

What is relevant to this film is the unlikely story of the other protagonist and director, the Israeli Jew from Beersheva, Yuval Abraham, who has received death threats because he dared to show what is happening in this tiny village, and get international recognition for it. He speaks fluent Arabic and heroically shows up for the poor villagers morning, noon, and night. There he strikes up this remarkable friendship with Basel. They talk about everything. Yuval bears witness to the suffering of the villagers. He helps them rebuild after their home is destroyed, again by the IDF, forcing a large family to live inside a cave.

I empathized a lot with Yuval. He is a lonely truth teller in a world split into neat ideological camps where ignorance and intolerance are the paramount virtues. Palestinians accuse him of being a spy. Right-wing Israelis call him a traitor. The truth is that unlike the deranged knit kippah wearing Jewish terrorists who shoot unarmed Palestinian shepherds, or IDF soldiers who shoot, paralyze and ultimately murder villagers like Harun after destroying his home, Abraham embodies the Jewish values of truth “emet” and caring about ones’ negihbors as much as any great Tzaddik I can recall learning about in Yeshiva.

There certainly was nothing anti-semitic about this film. It didn’t come across as prejudiced towards Jews or Israelis as a group. What the film is prejudiced against are the actions of the Israeli government in the West Bank. That is not anti-Semitism. I, too, am critical of this Israeli government, for many reasons, including but certainly not limited to its West Bank policies and conduct of the war in Gaza. Is former PM Ehud Barak anti-Semitic for harboring similar views? Is former Shin Bet director Ami Ayalon a raging Jew hater for publicly criticizing the Israeli government? Are the majority of American Jews, who last I checked are still mostly liberal, and the Israeli left all anti-Semites now?

What about the film 5 Broken Cameras, another Oscar-nominated Israeli-Palestinian co-production from Bilin in the West Bank? And how can we not mention the other must-see Academy Award-winning Israeli documentary from 2012, “The Gatekeepers,” which discusses the strategic and moral blunders of the occupation directly from the mouths of six senior Israeli Shin Bet (Shabak) leaders, including Ayalon?

Mayor Meiner, are these films anti-Semitic too?

The mayor of Miami Beach, in defaming “No Other Land” and labeling it anti-Semitic, should be ashamed of himself and offer a public apology to all four directors, Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor. If he doesn’t, they should consider a defamation lawsuit against him for hurting their already slim chances at a major U.S. distribution deal.

Ironically, his broadening and bending of the definition of anti-Semitism to suit his political biases is a win for actual anti-Semites everywhere. His futile attempt to use city funds and power to coerce a tiny cinematheque into not showing this film provides ammo to the actual anti Semites, reinforcing the anti-semitic trope that Jews are using their power and money to control the media. In this instance, it is no trope. It is what actually happened.

Thankfully, it failed this time.

As for the O Cinema, I do hope they give it a longer run, and when it's over, screen a film that shows other slices of the pie that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially one that shows the radicalized Islamic terror groups who, in my view, remain the biggest obstacle to peace throughout the region. I haven’t seen it yet, but I hear October 8 is a film that would fit the bill. I’m glad to hear that, unlike “No Other Land,” they got a widespread distribution deal. Another good option would be an old Oscar winner, One Day in September, which depicts the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre, showing that radical Palestinian terror is nothing new. Heck, why not screen them both?

I don’t think O Cinema should be forced to screen films to balance out the politics of “No Other Land,” but Miami Beach also has no obligation to continue to lease them their space or fund them. I hope they continue to fund them regardless of their political biases. If the cinema is showing films that only tell one side of an important story, use the hundreds of millions of dollars you make in tax revenue to sponsor another cinema or screening. Nobody wins when you censor great films like No Other Land, or evict the last arthouse cinema still standing in Miami Beach. We need to provide the missing slices of the pie that lead to a fuller understanding of this complicated conflict, rather than increasing the ignorance gap. We need more great docs, more truth out into the world.

Great cities realize that places like O Cinema are tiny little bastions of liberalism, free expression, and culture in a sea of monotony and staleness. They are treasures to be preserved. Coercing or evicting the one indie theater in the city is a net loss for all residents. Miami Beach, a city that once staked its reputation on being one of the most diverse and tolerant places in the USA, is changing and growing more conservative like the rest of Florida. Regardless of the political trends of the moment, I think we can all agree that a plurality of voices is critical to a successful and dynamic city.

I remain a believer that a lot can happen behind the velvet ropes.

Come to think of it, Israel and O Cinema have something in common. They are both tiny bastions of liberalism and free expression floating around in a sea of sameness. And in the case of Israel, the sameness surrounding it is totalitarian repression. It is a testament to Israel’s inherent liberalism that a film like “No Other Land” can still be made.

I wonder how much longer this will be true?

Like in South Africa, Israelis and Palestinians can control their destiny. However, change will not happen unless we can have some kind of truth and reconciliation commission. Films like this, “No Other Land” and “October 8”, are part of that process. We need to figure out a way to get these films seen by more Israelis and Palestinians, and their supporters around the world, so they can fill their respective blind spots. They are the ones who need the courage and honesty to go beyond their victimhood narratives, and also study their oppressor narratives. For if each group can rein in its respective oppressors, there will be no more victims.

I commend the brave filmmakers who had the vision and tenacity to tell this important and difficult piece of the broader story, which is that we are both people with No Other Land. All 14 million people who live between the river and the Sea deserve equal rights. And in the meantime, the status quo of what is happening in the West Bank is neither moral nor acceptable.

After the film ended, I walked onto the streets of Miami Beach during Spring Break. It felt surreal, and I felt sad. I thought of Elie Wiesel's quote: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

If you want to bury your head in the sand, defame it as propaganda, and refuse to see it for whatever reason, that is your choice. But that decision does not absolve you of the sin of your complicity. If you dare to see it with your own eyes, I hope there will be a cinema near you brave enough to screen it.

Hello world! We’re Dana and Jaron. We are parents to three young children, Orion (7), Luca (5), and Vivian (3). We count our blessings daily to have three healthy kids and a roof over our heads. We currently live in our hometown, the moist, mosquito-filled, unofficial capital of Latin America, Miami, in an old, charming home under a mango tree. We are surrounded by our dear family and friends, whom we’ve known so long that they feel like family. Our kids are happy and thriving in their play-based nature schools and in general.

By all accounts, we have landed in a pretty idyllic life.

Since escaping the pandemic lockdowns in San Francisco in 2020 by moving into “La Tortuga” (our Airstream) and traveling across the USA for 6 months, we have been toying with the idea of doing something on a larger scale. We have been fantasizing about this secret family project we nicknamed “World Trip,” in which we’d take some of the learnings and inspiration from that journey and do it full-time with more of a clear purpose. World Trip (WT) became the code for this shared vision for a different kind of life that felt like a massive growth opportunity for us individually and as a family but also required a massive leap of faith.

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Every few days for a few years now, this idea gnawed at us. After short trips into nature, it would come up. Out to dinner with friends, it would come up. In our dreams, it would come up. We’d talk. Why do we want to do it? What’s the purpose? How do we find the time? How long will we go for? How to pay for it? Are we really moving again? How do we tell our family and friends? Will our kids be happier? Will we be happier? What about school? Are we qualified to homeschool? What will we do with our house? Where on Earth are we going? What are we doing again? Are we insane?

We’re not sure why or where the idea came from. Is it intuition? Some kind of calling? A crazy pipe dream? Whatever it is, we’ve spent much of the last four years suppressing it and hoping it would vanish. Unlike our other countless, amorphous business/project ideas (e.g., the sponge clamp), this was a persistent one that simply wouldn’t go away. This space is the beginning of us finally listening to it and taking action.

While we don’t have all the answers yet, we have decided that now is the time to go all in. We are pulling our kids out of school, selling or renting our house, and embarking on a family journey to try and encounter the most threatened animals and plants in the world. We honestly do feel slightly insane, but we also feel that if we don’t do it now, we will likely regret it for the rest of our lives. Not honoring that feeling would be more insane.

When you start anything new, the hardest and most consequential decision is whether to commit. Now that the really big decision is over, we have thousands of smaller decisions to make. The first was to decide what to call this project. After a long process that involved hundreds of note cards and brainstorming many good names for dry Chardonnay brands, we finally settled on the name Earth Parade, which we immediately loved.

Earth Parade will be many things, but if we are to distill it into one main idea, it will be a family celebration of life on our planet. We are seeking to enter the most godly kingdoms we can discover on this earth, the plant, animal, and mushroom worlds that are quietly struggling and, in some cases, hanging on for dear life. At the rate we’re going, some of these places will not exist. We must do this while we still can.

The first iteration of Earth Parade will be a physical journey through this special planet and a spiritual one for us as individuals and as a family. It will be the most exciting and challenging thing we’ve ever done. We will explore the world, study flora, fauna, and fungi, and learn about each other and ourselves. We will have fun, experiment, and devise awesome activities that anyone can do in the wild or in any green space!

Earth Parade is also an alternative lifestyle for our family. It will certainly evolve as we do. For now, we are committing to traveling for at least a year. We’ve done this before, but it was with only two much younger kids, and that was only for six months in one country. So this will be different. In addition to being parents, travel planners, cooks, and creators, we are also going to be teachers/learning mentors for our children. So we suppose Earth Parade is also the name of our new little homeschool in the jungle, arctic, or wherever we are. Figuring out homeschooling, or perhaps “roadschooling” in our case, will be another big adventure in its own right, but we figure there’s no better classroom than the Great Outdoors.

Finally, Earth Parade is this newsletter that you are reading right now. We can’t take on such a voyage alone, and we are encouraged by our friends and family, who have been a sounding board and emotional support to help us fulfill this dream. We are so grateful to you. This newsletter is a space for us to continue building our community, share our experiences and lessons from nature, and hopefully inspire others to pursue their own wild dreams or, at the very least, spend more time outside.

Here are some of the special things we have cooking up for you:

• Travel trips and guides

• Fun, family-friendly nature activity ideas

• Simple ways to reconnect and spend more time outdoors.

• Coloring pages for kids and adults!

• Art, photos, and videos

• Thought pieces and interviews on conservation, society, and the future of life

• Discount codes

• Recipes

• Behind-the-scenes access to our family odyssey

Through our new life in the field, we want to inspire people, and especially families, to have more green time than screen time! The more we learn about the soaring rates of anxiety and depression, especially in Gen Z, the more we understand that nature could be a remedy for so many of the physical and mental health issues plaguing our modern society. We will provide tools, activities, and ideas for people to overcome nature-deficit disorder wherever they are in the world.

If getting back into the natural world is part of the cure, then we feel that we must do a better job protecting it. Since 1970, we’ve already lost nearly 73% of global wildlife populations. At the rate we’re going, around 1 million animal and plant species could be extinct when our kids reach their 40s. Approximately 170 trillion plastic particles are contaminating our oceans, and as we type this, the problem is getting worse.

Of course, humans are not apart from nature. We are a part of nature, and we are inextricably bound together, for better or worse. Without the natural world, we risk losing part of what makes us human beings, and we are learning what makes us sane and happy. These ideas were once obvious, but somehow, modern generations have forgotten this ancient, conventional wisdom.

Over breakfast one morning, we wrote a mission statement for Earth Parade together as a family: to encounter 73 of the most threatened plants and animals. (Maybe you can guess why we picked the number 73?) When we find them, we will do our best to film them, draw them, and celebrate their existence.

How long will it take? We’re not sure. We are intentionally taking it slow to remain sane while traveling with three small kids and to develop a deeper understanding of some of the most pristine places on Earth. What’s our itinerary? We’re still figuring that out, too.

Subsequent posts will go into more detail about the plan as it develops, our backstory, and why we feel the urge to do this now, so feel free to check those out. In the meantime, thanks for being here. As we press publish on this Substack to introduce what we’re up to on the eve of the winter solstice, which happens to be Jaron’s 45th birthday, we’re having a “pinch me” moment. As we prepare to embark on this next chapter, we’ve got butterflies in our stomachs and hearts filled with gratitude.

Welcome to Earth Parade!

To Life!

Dana, Jaron, Luca, Orion, Vivian (DJLOV)

-Captain Jack Sparrow, protagonist of the Pirates of the Caribbean Film 

I dressed up as the fictional pirate Jack Sparrow for a Halloween party. It was dressed in this garb, tipsy and muttering inanities to anyone who would listen, that I came to better understand Donald Trump. 

Trump is, more than anything else, a vibe rather than a flesh-and-blood human politician. He is the “heel” in pro wrestling parlance, the archetypal villain who is what he always is, on brand and damn entertaining. His carefully crafted persona is that of a high society troll who wants to blow up the system that he claims to exist outside of. 

In other words, he is a modern-day pirate of politics.

That dishonest man that you can always trust to be dishonest. If you fear him he is a conman of the highest order. If you love him, you likely deploy euphemistic catchphrases to defend his nonsense. “It’s not lies, it’s bullshit.” “Take him seriously, not literally.” “That’s just Trump being Trump.” 

We’ve heard it all.

So when Trump repeatedly says that he won the 2020 election even though scores of trials have proven that he lost it fair and square, this is pirate code that he is always a winner no matter what, and if he doesn’t win it’s not his fault, its the fault of the system. In reality, he’s a sore loser who is willing to go to any length to deny his loss. He will do the same thing in 2024 if he loses. If he wins, the election will be the greatest, fairest election in history. If he loses, it will be the greatest fraud in history.  

The evidence for such fraud is irrelevant to either claim. The story always comes first. If evidence follows, then great. But the story always comes first.

Or as Jack Sparrow said, “Close your eyes and pretend it’s all a bad dream; that’s how I get by.”

So when Trump says matter of factly in a Presidential debate that Haitian immigrants are eating the dogs, cats, and pets of the residents of Springfield, this is pirate code for his supporters or would-be supporters who might be fed up that an illegal immigrant took their job or made them feel inadequate or threatened in some way. For them, it’s a lie that services a greater perceived truth. 

But for the rest of society and the world, it’s an unforgivable, unforgettable, xenophobic, racist slur.

And this perhaps explains Trump’s divisiveness. The pirate code invites you into his cult of personality, into this MAGA land wormhole where you either get the twang or you don’t. Those outside it cannot comprehend how anyone inside can be fooled by this bologna. Those inside are under the illusion that he is an imperfect messenger of the (capital T) Truth and that the actual fools are the ones taking him literally. 

For a younger generation of (mostly) men looking for ways to levy blame or escape the mundane, politics now resembles the fiction of Pirates of the Caribbean, a gripping tale of one man fighting the entire system by himself. That lone fighter may sling a thousand lies, but the code that is embedded in the lies, in their minds, triangulates to a few fundamental truths that connect with their very real feelings about America.

And this is the marketing genius of Trump, a politico made for this post-truth era. Thanks to social media and AI, fiction can be produced in milliseconds by a robot with a prompt, whereas a truth must be excavated slowly and meticulously from the rubble of history. Learning the truth takes years we can’t wait for and dollars we don’t have. The result is that we live in a society that has become increasingly subjective and polarized. I fear that the information that needs to come to light for us to make better decisions is constantly getting shoved into a proverbial treasure chest, locked up, and tossed into the ocean, only to be discovered too late, by accident, or not at all.

Case in point: Did Trump subvert the 2020 Election? Shouldn’t we have known this answer, or seen the evidence of this criminal case BEFORE the 2024 election? Well, it may be too late now. If Trump wins this election, Jack Smith will not get to prosecute this criminal case. And if the pirate gets his way, Jack Smith will be marooned on a desert island. If Trump loses, we may get to see the full evidence in this case. But of course, Trump will claim that the whole thing is rigged against him by his political; opponents.

But don’t despair my sea-weary friends.

Alas, could it be true that we live in a binary political world where maybe, just maybe, Trump, with all his warts, is still better than Kamala Harris? Could the devil we know better than the devil we don’t know? Or perhaps both options are trap doors leading to crocodile pits?

To go back to Sparrow-speak, are these the “honest ones you want to watch out for”? Well, maybe. We’ve certainly witnessed the Biden administration and the Democrats do some very stupid things these last 4 years. 

We watched them let chaos rein on our Southern border until it became a hot-button political liability for Kamala.

We watched them help Iran launder their dinosaur sludge for billions of dollars at the expense of the Middle East’s only semi-liberal democracy, Israel, and at the expense of humanity as they put more carbon into our atmosphere with no plan to get it out. 

We caught them covering up the fact that President Biden had mentally declined behind closed doors. 

We saw how they played politics instead of meeting with the Jewish communities in America who have been facing an anti-semitic wave like no other time in American history. 

We witnessed them coronate Kamala to the top of the ticket to preserve their campaign coffers rather than test her out against potentially better candidates.

All of these moves are dumb and despicable, and the worst part is that nobody has been able to ask Kamala the hard questions about these issues.  Has she and the Dems have even learned any lessons from these clear but follies? 

We don’t know. But what we do know is that Kamala is more likely to steward the ship to it’s next port of call - rather than towards the Bermuda Triangle of American democracy

Dumb and despicable? yes. But that’s par for the course for any political actor given enough time to bungle things.

Damning or disqualifying? These are adjectives that can only be reserved for the actions of Captain Orange. 

Before I make my case, I want to point out an obvious exception. Sometimes having a pirate at the helm is a virtue in foreign relations, in which unpredictability makes both rational and irrational actors uneasy. The Abraham Accords and the wrecking of the Iranian terror regime’s economy were bold tacks and the correct course for one day resolving the Middle East conflict. So yes, I have no problem giving the pirate some credit where credit is due. 

However, while necessary, this outside-in approach is insufficient for getting the Middle East to the promised land of peace. It must be coupled with an inside-out approach that brings the non-jihadist and nonviolent Palestinian leadership into the process. This should be a clear and obvious 10/7 learning for whoever leads the US next. It is doubtful that Capt. Bibi will capitulate.

So why should our favorite pirate politician be disqualified?

It’s not that the pirate could care less about school shootings, the climate crisis, and the liberties of the fairer sex to choose what to do with their own bodies. It’s not that he skyrocketed our debt with his corporate tax cuts and irresponsible spending. It’s not that he denied, covered up, and lied about Covid until he couldn’t do it any longer, costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Remember, Trump 1.0 was so bad that he lost to Biden. He was fired from his job for cause.

But it’s not any of this that disqualifies him. What disqualifies him is that when he lost the 2020 election, he incited a mob and manufactured a constitutional crisis in which he tried to make his own VP walk the plank. This is it.

His biggest fib is the one that spouts out more than any other, that he cares for others, the American people, or anyone but himself. 

The vast majority of his non-pirate crew members, 4-star generals, chiefs of staff, and the most patriotic Republicans that have ever lived, have provided us the damning character reference that any former President has ever received. This is not a character reference about him as a man, about his lifelong pursuit of hanky panky, belching of conspiracies, and mismanagement of businesses. 

I don’t care that he’s known to crack Jenny’s Tea Cup or brag about grabbing them by the feline. That’s the character we’ve come to expect from a president, Republicans and Democrats alike.

This is not what Kelly, McMaasters, Milly, Mattis, Esper, Mcrystal, Bolton, and Mullen, are referring to.

No, this is about his Presidential character. It’s about how fit he is to be captain of our national proverbial boat. And what they are saying is that they have never in their days seen a scallywag of this order. They are saying that this is a unique situation. They are firing a warning shot that is not personally helpful to them in any way. They are true patriots, putting their country first.

The deeper capital (T) Truth they are communicating is that they saw the real Trump behind closed doors and came independently to the conclusion that he is a pirate so full of himself and so uninterested in history or facts or morality that foreign leaders can turn him into a pawn.

They are saying that this is not the honorable captain who fights alongside his men and women and goes down with this ship. No, this is a pirate willing to sink the whole ship to save himself. And this is exactly what Trump proved with his own words and inactions after the 2020 elections. 

I’m not sure that Trump 2.0 will become a fascist regime, but I’ve been to enough fascist/communist countries to know the recipe for fomenting one. An egomaniacal wannabe tyrant swimming in a broth of lies, a worn out, fractured populace on the decks, control over all the branches of government, and a sprinkle of sycophants should do the trick.

This election for me is about presidential character. How can we trust Trump in a crisis if he has so clearly failed in a Covid crisis already, not to mention manufacturing a self-serving, anti-constitutional crisis of his own making?

But there’s something else for me that makes this election so critical. Perhaps the worst part of having this pirate dominating marketing and media budgets for all television, digital print, and audio these last 6 months is that it’s sucked all the oxygen out of the room and pillaged our collective brains. Who do we end up talking about and writing about instead of issues that matter? The legend of Donald Trump. The best part about his loss would be that we might get to talk about the issues again. The climate crisis, for example, was not even a topic in the Presidential debate. This may end up being the most important moral issue of this century. In its role as the largest emitter of carbon in world history, the US is responsible for leading on this issue. Our leadership, or lack thereof, will shape the future of humanity and the natural world. Instead, we’re talking about the Access Hollywood tapes.

We need a re-framing of the discourse back towards substance. And yes, I’m old enough to remember that we once had a meaningful and civil discourse on the issues that mattered based on a shared understanding of reality.

How can we navigate back there? The truth is I’m not sure we can. But certainly not by electing the pirate who most reaps the spoils of the split-screen reality he seems to effortlessly prop up. Certainly not by giving this pirate, who loots the attention economy every time his lips move, back the bully pulpit.

I view this election as a choice between a boring politician who will certainly make some stupid policy decisions, or a pirate, who will make a different set of stupid policy decisions and is more likely to continue to divide our society or capsize our democracy in shark-infested waters.

So vote wisely.

And Ahoy Mate!

Regardless of which plank you choose to walk down, the most important thing to remember is that we will all end up in Davy Jones's locker one day. If humanity is so fortunate to last another 10,000 years, the great United States of America could one day be a forgotten empire. Even Captain Orange himself could one day be wiped from the history books. Everything about our existence is ephemeral, especially these wretched elections. So here’s some parting, pirate wisdom for you my dear reader from none other than Captain Sparrow, “Mate, if you chose to lock your heart away, you’ll lose her for certain.” Politics is a bad facsimile of life. Don’t obsess over it. Don’t judge people because of it. Resist tribalism. Open Mind. Open Heart. Open Seas. Argh!

But now thanks to Hamas and their Go Pros we don’t need to imagine what a 21st-century pogrom looks like. They proudly filmed it for the whole world to see. Knowing the rhetoric and past behavior of Hamas, the atrocities of 10/7 did not surprise me. What surprised me were the IDF's failure to prevent it and the world’s failure to unequivocally condemn it.

The blood-stained concrete walls of Kibbutz Kfar Azza and the blood-soaked dance floor of the Nova music festival turned out to be a real-world Rorschach test for antisemitism. So many so-called liberal institutions and individuals dismally failed, and continue failing. Instead of condemning the criminals, they blamed the victims for their rape, kidnapping, or murder.

When a person is not willing or able to condemn entire families getting burned alive, or the rape, mutilation, and murder of a young woman dancing at a music festival, there is something else going on besides moral confusion.

Antisemitism has always been this weird shape-shifting virus that followed the Jews wherever they went. They hated us because we were communists and capitalists, too powerful and too weak, superhuman and sub-human. They invented blood libels and conspiracies to justify their viral hatred.

Today’s anti-Semitic gospel on the right is the Great Replacement Theory, which tells the fake narrative that holocaust survivor George Soros and his fellow “globalists” (read: Jews) have formed a cabal whose primary goal is to control the world and open the flood gates to immigrants who are coming to replace the real (read: white) Americans or Europeans.

And now gaining traction at an alarming rate since 10/7 is the newest blood libel from the left that I’ll call the Israel Mini Evil Empire Theory (need a more catchy name), which spreads the bogus story that Israel is the big bad wolf of the Middle East, a colonial presence spilling innocent Arab and Muslim blood to conquer more and more land, backed by a larger evil empire, the United States.

This conspiracy is what has taken hold of the minds of college students and freelance bigots around the US, spread on social media like a contagion. This has been a tough year for the truth.

Now I don’t consider Israel perfect before or after 10/7. I believe the Netanyahu government was complicit in the growth of Hamas by allowing millions of dollars into Gaza from Qatar which was used to buy the weapons and build the infrastructure used by Hamas. I am critical of the Israeli government’s condoning of settler expansion and violence in the West Bank for the last two decades. I question the Israeli government’s heavy heavy-handed military response that has killed so many innocent Gazans. I’m weary of the Israeli government’s apparent prioritization of a miraculous total military victory at the expense of a diplomatic solution that would save the hostages’ lives, as well as countless innocent Palestinian civilians’ lives. As I’ve said in the past, we are living in a 1 state-solution world with a right-wing Israeli government in charge and no exit strategy in sight.

These critiques I believe are fair and legitimate, and of course debatable.

But what is not up for debate is that Israel didn’t want or ask for this war in the first place. It was attacked preemptively and relentlessly from all sides by vicious enemies with an explicit goal to destroy the world’s only Jewish state and everyone in it. And in case 10/7 wasn’t enough proof, Hamas leaders said they would do it again and again. Israel, like any other country on Earth, has every right to defend itself.

The entire world should be clear-eyed in their understanding of this reality. But vaulted liberal institutions like the U.N., Harvard University, and countless faux intellectuals, the latest being Ta-Nehisi Coates (who spent all of 10 days in Israel/Palestine and became an Insta expert), who parrot or condone the anti-semitic narrative I spell out above. To suggest that what we all witnessed on 10/7 is rightful “resistance” is not just a perversion of truth, but a moral stain on humanity.

Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are Islamo fascists who deplore liberal values as much as they hate Israel. They hate gays, free speech, and just everything we hold dear in the civilized world. They murdered Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims that day because they were all living or working in the “Zionist (read: Jewish) entity.” They praised Allah while they butchered children.

And then they hid behind THEIR OWN children as the Israeli army sought retribution.

Hamas is in fact holding every single innocent person in the region hostage.

The Israeli government decimated Gaza because Hamas attacked Israel and then cowardly hid behind their people. If there was no Hamas, there would not have been a single Gaza War since Israel completely withdrew from the territory in 2005. Same in Lebanon. If there was no Hezbollah, there would be no need for Israel to invade Lebanon after withdrawing their forces in 2000. This is now the 3rd major war between Hamas and Israel. Ditto for Hezbollah and Israel. The root cause of all this death and destruction is Hamas, Hezbollah, and their common benefactor, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

As Rachel Goldberg Polin told me off camera when I spoke with her in Jerusalem a few months ago while her son Hersh was still alive, “I can’t tell you what I really want to say because my son is in the mouth of the dragon.” This is what this year has felt like for Israelis and Palestinians. The year of the dragon that could turn on a moments notice, fire and violence swirling all around like leaves in the wind on an autumn day.

Despite this very bleak situation, it is my nature to remain hopeful. I remain steadfast in my belief that this is a fight between fanatics and moderates, not Israelis and Palestinians. 14 million people live between the river and the sea. We are all cousins, proven by genetic studies. Neither tribe is going anywhere. We can’t keep killing each other forever, right?

The peace activist Vivian Silver, murdered by Hamas on 10/7, proves that one can be a Zionist AND pro-Palestinian. There is no contradiction here. The fact that she was murdered by a fanatic doesn’t negate the meaning of her life’s work. On the contrary, it validates her life work. The problem is that in this part of the world, there are too few Vivian Silver’s. There are very few peace activists in Israel, and there are almost none in Gaza, West Bank, or Lebanon.

The formula for peace hasn’t changed since 10/7. When I asked Liora Eilon, resident of Kibbutz Kfar Azza whose son Tal was murdered if she still believes in peace, she said, “Yes, absolutely. I have not changed my position.” She now attends an Israeli-Palestinian bereaved parents group and told me, “Re-education and change of government, on both sides, is the only way.” This is true. The question is, “How?”

It turns out that making peace is much harder and more complicated work than waging war. And it doesn’t serve the agenda of the extremists. Palestinians should not be given a state right after the atrocities of 10/7. They should earn it over time through acts of goodwill and trust-building with their neighbors. Maybe the Sunni Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, will get involved to help here. Re-education is going to be a major challenge in a Palestinian society that is not free and in which so many children have been taught to hate Israelis and Jews. What gives me some hope here is that the Saudis have been able to pull off the improbable. Their madrassas were hotbeds for extremists, producing the likes of Bin Laden and the 19 suicide bombers who perpetrated 9/11. Now the Saudis are considering a historic accord with Israel and buying golf tournaments.

Israel must rein in the violent settlers in the West Bank and stop arresting innocent Palestinians with no rights of habeas corpus. The occupation of millions of people must end, but it will only end in parallel with an end to Palestinian violence that historically only tightens the noose around their necks. Maybe Netanyahu will surprise us all and pursue a historic diplomatic solution with Saudi Arabia, setting the stage for a 2-state solution once certain milestones are met. As part of this, we will need a truth and reconciliation commission, like in South Africa, where the two sides can talk about their collective and shared traumas.

Either way, a truly strategic Israel would apply its vast resources and creativity towards ed-tech and bridge-building initiatives with its neighbors. If Israel’s public and private sectors put a few hundred million shekels a year towards creative educational initiatives with bridge-building KPI’s like # of conversations between Israelis and Palestinians or # of online games played by Israelis and Iranians, it could only do good for Israel’s place in the region, and world.

I won’t hold my breath. But I hope that 10/7 is a jolt to everyone’s senses and that even if the wars don’t deliver any meaningful diplomatic impasse, the people will come to their senses and re-claim their destiny for the sake of future generations.

In the next decades, 10/7 will either be seen as a major slide towards a death spiral for so many innocent people in the region, or a tipping point where the peoples of the region rise against Iranian-backed extremism and choose a different path. The fanatics on both sides will undoubtedly try and keep the wars going. The moderates on each side must resist their fanatics in their tracks. The world must condemn racism that comes in any shape or form, including the latest anti-Semitic narrative going viral against the world’s only Jewish state. May 10/7/23 be the last pogrom.

It was July 16, 2006, a Sunday. The 2nd Israel-Lebanon war had begun a few days earlier after Hezbollah ambushed, killed, and kidnapped Israeli soldiers. It was the first day of the Israeli workweek, and the employees of the Haifa train depot, mostly train repairmen went to work like usual. Haifa wasn’t supposed to be in the range of the Katyusha rockets at the time. But the Hezbollah rocket squad had a different idea. They sent over a more sophisticated barrage of missiles, one of which hit the depot directly, spraying shrapnel everywhere. The rocket killed 8 civilian workers, wounding a dozen more, in one of the worst terror attacks ever perpetrated by Hezbollah against Israel. There was no military target nearby. 

I was a 26-year-old video journalist working for Current TV at the time, based in Tel Aviv. I wanted to tell the story of the workers and try to understand Hezbollah’s new rocket capabilities. I pitched my producer Laura Ling on Monday, and she was understandably worried. I told her I was going to the train depot to document what had happened on the Sunday. “What are the odds that Hezbollah would attack the same place twice”, I reasoned to her and myself. She reluctantly gave me the green light.

On Tuesday morning, July 18th, 2006, I drove up to Haifa from Tel Aviv with my friend Garret who I recruited to shoot the intro scene in the car. We arrived to an eerily quiet Haifa an hour later. We got to the train depot and began our first interview that morning. We had just started the interview when we heard a rocket fall somewhere in the distance. This was pre-Iron Dome. The errant rocket likely fell into the ocean or was hit by a Patriot defense missile. We immediately stopped the interview and moved to the shelter. The second we closed the shelter door we heard the boom. Upon emerging from the shelter about ten minutes later we realized that the rocket fell in the exact spot we were standing less than 10 seconds earlier. 

Two things that we had no control over saved our lives that day. The first was the errant rocket that served as a warning of this new attack happening. Had we not heard this rocket we never would have stopped the interview and moved to the shelter. The second was the mere existence of a fortified shelter within 20 feet of where we were conducting the interview. If it wasn’t there at all or even if it was a few more feet away, I almost certainly would not be typing these words right now.

I kept the camera rolling. Millions of Americans watched “Dodging Katyushas” on cable television on Current TV (RIP) in what I believe was the most popular video in the network’s history. One of those viewers misunderstood the video and sent a message of condolences to my mom. I answered a hysterical call from my mom later that week and remember trying to convince her between sobs that i was not in fact, dead. It was a strange conversation.

So Nasrallah didn’t mean to kill me specifically. With fresh Israeli blood still on the tracks, Hezbollah just doubled down on what they viewed as a successful strike. But this time they missed. Everyone there that day, around 6 of us, made it into the shelter in time. Still not sure if there is greater meaning here but I do think about this day often. Reflecting on it, I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for my life. It’s a reminder that I’m living in the bonus round, and to make the most of every day.

And now the guy directly responsible is dead. It feels weird to celebrate the death of any human being. I don’t think I’ve ever actually felt happy to hear of anyone’s death before, but I did feel relieved to read that Nasrallah was no longer. This fundamentalist mass murderer at the very least deserved to meet the same fate that he delivered to hundreds and perhaps thousands of innocent people. I also consider the Lebanese civilians whom Hezbollah has used as human shields to be his victims.

Unfortunately, I never got to tell the story of those 8 Israeli train workers that day, so I’m completing this reporting mission now. The eight men who died were: Shmuel Ben Shimon, 41, of Yokne’am Illit; Asael Damti, 39, Dennis Lapidos, 24, and David Feldman, 28, of Kiryat Yam; Nissim Elharar, 43, and Reuven Levy, 46, of Kiryat Ata; Rafi Hazan, 30, of Haifa; and Shlomi Mansura, 35, of Nahariya.

I was happy to read in the Jerusalem Post that in 2015 these civilians and their families were honored posthumously by the State of Israel for making sure, despite the dangers they faced working in wartime while rockets were raining from the North, that the trains kept running.

Transportation Minister Israel Katz said, “They fell in service to the state,” he said. “If we can honor military heroes and victims of terror, we can certainly honor people who see it as their mission to continue working in wartime.” May their memories be a blessing for their families.

These are the 8 men who were killed on July 16, 2006, when a Hezbollah rocket struck the Haifa train depot. From top left: Rafi Hazan, Asael Damti, Shmuel Ben-Shimon and Nissim Elharrar, and from bottom left: David Feldman, Shlomi Mansoura, Dennis Lapidus and Reuven Levi.

(photo credit: ISRAEL RAILWAYS)

Quick preface: I wrote this essay almost two years ago, in May 2021, during the latest battle between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and Southern Israel. I tried to get it published during the war itself, but sadly no major media publication wanted to run it. Perhaps stories like these do not fit the tidy narrative of media organizations, or pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups for that matter, who all make a profit peddling stories of conflict. Sadly, the old adage “If it bleeds, it leads” still rings true, particularly in this part of the world. Stories that portray the conflict in a different light do not typically get distributed widely. In this way, the media plays a role in perpetuating this conflict. The truth, as you’ll read in this story, is full of nuance and, sometimes, surprises. So today, in honor of Israel’s 75th birthday, and in commemoration of the Nakba, I am releasing this essay to the public, for free.

“These men are at peace with us; let them dwell in the land and trade in it, for behold, the land is large enough for them.”

-Genesis 34:21

“If you want peace now, you need to start working on it 20 years ago.” 

-Reverend Dr. Gary Mason

For 75 years now, Israelis and Palestinians have been battling one another.  We have been taught they are fighting over territory. I lived in, and reported from this land for a decade, and here’s a fundamental truth that I learned: They are fighting over something much more important than territory. They are fighting over a story.  

Despite sharing a small parcel of land roughly the size of New Jersey, Israelis and Palestinians rarely get to hear each other’s stories. This wasn’t always the case. My Israeli-Jewish relatives wax nostalgic about the 1970s when they would drive into Gaza from the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv for the day to have lunch and go shopping. In today’s political context, this seems unimaginable. A physical barrier blocks Israelis and Palestinians from meeting each other in person in the West Bank. An airtight border prevents Gazans and Israelis from meeting. Nowadays, ordinary Israelis and Palestinians live their lives completely isolated from one another.  

But on May 17th, 2021, at 5:08 pm PST, 4 days after Israel and Hamas began firing rockets and bombs at each other (again), a kind of “miracle” happened in the Holy Land, witnessed by half a million people around the world.  

A large group of Israelis and Palestinians spoke to one another. 

Yes, you read that correctly. 

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis, Palestinians, as well as Jews and Palestinians in the Diaspora, listened to each other’s voices and stories, many for the first time.  Like long lost lovers who have been kept apart, the conversation did not want to end. It lasted for 348 hours, or 14 and a half days, straight, 5 days longer than the war itself.  More than 500,000 people in total listened to each other’s narratives

This online meeting did not make the headlines of any major newspaper at the time, even though it may be the largest collective dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians in history.

The so-called “miracle room” was possible thanks to the social media application, Clubhouse, designed for deep listening, and a group of moderators, or “mods” that learned on the fly how to foster genuine understanding by focusing on personal narratives

"Israelis and Palestinians have so much in common, but also so many differences. We can barely agree on terminology, and that's what makes this room such a miracle,”  said  Majed Oathman, 32, the Palestinian founder of the room who grew up in East Jerusalem and whose family lives in the Arab-Israeli village of Abu Gosh, known for Israeli-Palestinian coexistence and hummus everyone can agree is delicious. 

Peaceful coexistence on social media between Israelis and Palestinians, particularly during a war, is no easy feat.  The mods often have to de-escalate conversations and step in to “reset the room” after a heated conversation ignites. Majed says the goal of the room “is not to create a completely safe space, or tone police anyone, but to create a space that ordinary Israelis and Palestinians can simply “tolerate.”

In start-up parlance, it’s a “Minimum Viable Product” for Israeli-Palestinian dialogue.

And based on the conversations I eavesdropped on, it worked.  

The room was a non-stop, flowing conversation of personal stories about their relationship to the land. Despite the size of the room, it felt intimate and family-like. There were recurring arguments about the meaning of words like “colonialism,” “Zionism” and “occupation.” I even heard the occasional “I love you.” 

Before this room, I’d heard Israelis and Palestinian say many things to each other, but never that. 

Meaningful listening is something that Israeli and Palestinian leaders have not done in more than two decades. There has not been an official dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian leadership since the Camp David peace talks ended in the year 2000.  

Not surprisingly, the communication breakdown has correlated with a drastic increase in bloodshed.

An estimated 4,000 Israelis and Palestinians were killed in the 2nd Intifada from 2000-2005. The 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, killed more than a thousand Lebanese and Israeli civilians. The 2008-2009 Gaza war between Israel and Hamas, killed at least 1166 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.  The next Gaza war, in 2014, killed at least 2125 Palestinians and 73 Israelis. This latest round of violence in Israel and Gaza killed 248 Palestinians and 12 Israelis. Between each one of these gruesome wars, thousands of people were killed or wounded in violent flare-ups that don’t get classified as “wars.” 

Each cycle of violence follows the same patterns. Rockets, bombs. Rockets, bombs. Rockets, bombs. Eventually, a ceasefire or tahdia, a lull as it’s called in Arabic, is declared. Social media quiets down. The international media goes home.  Both sides go back to their respective echo chambers, blame the other side for starting the violence, and then claim to be the “winners.” 

What they won exactly is not clear. 

In reality, with each round of violence, both sides only lose. Israel does not win lasting peace or security. Palestinians do not win land or freedom. On the contrary, war begets war. Militants become more militant and more popular.  With each round of violence, a brand new generation of children is traumatized, adding to the generational trauma they inherited from their parents and grandparents. In the Israeli town of Sderot near the Gaza border, a study showed more than 75% of children exhibited symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In Gaza, 91% of children have PTSD.  

Economic and military power have disincentivized Israeli leadership from focusing on the conflict, despite the clear moral and strategic reasons for doing so.  Israel’s new, broad government is unlikely to change anything vis-a-vis the Palestinians because it will fragment the shaky coalition. The  Palestinians, meanwhile, are physically and politically divided between Hamas rule over Gaza (blockaded by Israel and Egypt) and Fatah rule over the occupied West Bank.  They haven’t had a democratic election since 2006.

How can ordinary Israelis and Palestinians try to break the cycle of violence when their leaders seem perfectly ready to drag on the conflict for another 73 years?

There’s only one way. They need first to hear, and then listen to, each other’s stories.

As an international journalist, I had two privileges Israelis and Palestinians did not have. 

The first was that I could travel back and forth freely all over “the Land”. (For simplicity and inclusivity, this is how I’ll label what some call “Israel” and others call “Palestine”. Everything here, you see, has two names. 

I remember spending so many days walking in the Judean Mountains as they’re known in Hebrew, or Hebron Mountains, as they’re known in Arabic. They are mostly gently verdant rolling hills with large patches of brownish-orange dirt. In the spring, bright red anemone wildflowers called “calaneet” in Hebrew or “Shaqa'iq An-Nu'man” in Arabic sprout up among the olive groves.  The brisk, sweet air invites you to find your path and stroll. Wherever I ended up, I was offered a strong black Turkish coffee or sugary nana (mint) tea from tiny plastic cups. (Hospitality was never up for debate)

Walk here and you’ll discover an enchanted, sublime landscape that has long been a canvas for human imagination and storytelling.  The Old Testament refers to it countless times as “the land flowing with milk and honey.” This is the earliest known description of the Land that became “holy” to so many.  These hills are the setting of humanity’s most popular stories, recounted in the Torah, New Testament, and Quran. In the Land, these myths are the tapestry on which these two cultures weave their modern narratives.

I often went from Israeli settlements on the top of the hill to Palestinian villages in the wadi, or valley, below, in search of these modern stories.  I could hike from village to village, since they were often within spitting distance of each other. The gap between the narratives, however, was worlds apart.  

On the hill, I heard that the Jews were the original rulers of the Land. In the wadi, I heard that the Jews took the Land from the Palestinians. 

On the hill, I heard that the holy site in Jerusalem is called the Temple Mount. In the wadi, I heard that the holy site in Jerusalem is called Al Aqsa.

On the hill, I heard that Zionism gave Jews back their homeland. In the wadi, I heard that Zionism exiled the Palestinians from theirs.

On the hill, I heard that today is Independence Day. In the wadi, I heard that today marks the “Nakba” the Catastrophe.

On the hill, I was in Judea and Samaria, Israel. In the wadi, I was in the Occupied West Bank, Palestine.

On the hill, slicing through the land was the “Security Fence.” In the wadi, slicing through the land was the “Apartheid Separation Wall.” 

On the hill, Hamas started the war by firing the first rocket. In the wadi, Israel started the war by kicking out another Palestinian from their house.

Over a decade, I shot thousands of hours of video interviews in the Land. Sometimes I tried to challenge each side with the narrative of the other side, but ultimately it didn’t register. They could hear the words of the other side but seemed deaf to the possibility of truth or sentiment behind them. Like the M.C. Escher lithograph “Relativity” featuring two parallel staircases that never meet and appear to be governed by two different gravity sources, it felt like Israelis and Palestinians are doomed to share the same house, but never intersect. They walk and talk over and under each other, and as a result, live in a perpetual state of misunderstanding. 

Ultimately, it was my job to listen, not to get Israelis and Palestinians to listen to each other. I begrudgingly became the messenger of the West, bringing to the comfort of their living rooms two wholly incompatible narratives, often weaving them together in post-production. When I was accused of bias by hard-liners from each tribe, I knew that I had achieved balance. 

After ten years, I felt like I was spinning my wheels. Hopeless, tired of the cycles of violence, and probably a bit traumatized by it myself, I exercised my 2nd privilege as an international journalist. I left the region in 2012.

I started a technology company in the United States, called Storyhunter, to help freelance filmmakers and journalists connect with global publishers and tried to put the conflict behind me. Even though I was thousands of miles away now from the region, my subconscious mind still felt like a hostage to the conflict. I devour any news about it, usually with a sense of dread. When will the next round of violence begin?  It happened in 2012. And then again in 2014.  In early May 2021, it happened again.  A new war, the same pattern. I can’t help but get sucked right back in.

When violence erupts in the Land, the narrative on the news media, with few exceptions, is an oversimplified melodrama with caricatures of good and evil, right and wrong, oppressed and oppressor, depending on the media outlet and what side they perceive their audience to be on. The media typically reinforces the polarization of the two warring tribes, Israelis vs. Palestinians as if they are fighters in a Las Vegas title fight. It pits them against one another and then profits generously from the melee. 

Social media is infinitely worse. On FB, IG, and Twitter, I don’t hear about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for 7 years, and then as soon as the rockets fly, I’m getting blasted by my “pro-Israel” friends (most of whom have never lived in Israel) whose basic message is to “Defend Israel from Jihadi terrorists who shoot rockets for no reason” and by my “Pro-Palestinian” friends (most of whom have never lived in Palestine) whose basic message is to “Defend Palestine from IDF soldiers who kill innocent Palestinian children for no reason.”

During the escalations, social media becomes a virtual minefield of one-sided histories, false narratives, and misinformation.   

There is this knee-jerk, fear-based reaction for each side to get entrenched back in their camp. They get defensive. They stop listening and start accusing. They seem to say: “I am a proud X.  Here’s our history of the X people. We are clearly on the side of righteousness and good. I don’t need to hear your story.”

These were exactly the same messages I got three wars ago.  

The difference in the latest war was that now the messages come from influential celebrities and pundits who have not done their homework.  The propaganda is more visual, more manipulative, and more scalable -- going to a less informed audience. Because of social media algorithms that lead its victims, aka “users,” into rabbit holes of biased and false information, with your side pre-selected for you. 

I was ready to write off all social media entirely until my wife invited me to this Clubhouse room entitled Balance: Meet Israelis and Palestinians.  At first, I was skeptical.  I had used the Clubhouse app before, but never really saw it as anything more than another corporate marketing tool. But once inside, I found something quite different from anything else I’ve seen on social media, or in the real world: 

An actual dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians.

The main rule of the Clubhouse room is that each side, according to ethnicity, would take turns.  Moderators made sure that after an Israeli or Jewish voice speaks, a Palestinian or Muslim voice speaks next. Men and women get equal time on the mic. They drew a diverse group of people onto the “stage.” In a given hour on this chat, you might hear from a twenty-something Palestinian man from the Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem who wants a 2 state solution, a hardline Israeli woman who works as a translator from Rishon Letzion, a Hamas sympathizer in the U.S., a queer, formerly ultra-orthodox Jew from NYC, an IDF commando turned activist supporting a 1 state solution, a human rights worker and Yogi from Gaza, or an Iranian Muslim who had never left Iran. This is just one hour. Sometimes it felt like a whirlwind of disparate stories. Other times, it felt like the most gripping, voyeuristic window into human trauma imaginable. In these moments, not a single soul left the room.

For many, just coming to the room was difficult, and potentially dangerous.  A Gazan man came on stage with a trembling voice, “How can I meet with you if you refuse to give us any justice and human rights?” 

Guy, a silky-voiced, 13th-generation Israeli film director turned sourdough bread maker turned Clubhouse moderator, sensed that this man needed some reassurance, “My brother, I am a 47-year-old Israeli. We have never met before and I suspect that is by design. I don’t expect your trust right now. But I would like to earn it.” 

On occasion, the room feels like a group therapy session.

In the middle of the night (Holy Land Time), an Israeli woman told the group about her post-traumatic stress from losing a loved one to a suicide bomber during the 2nd Intifadah. Two decades later, she panics every time she sees a public bus.

The following morning, a Palestinian woman spoke about the humiliation she felt once at a checkpoint. IDF soldiers forced her to strip naked along with a group of other women. After the exhaustive strip search, she couldn’t find her shoes. She eventually discovered a pile of Palestinian shoes - and dug through them to find her pair.

Palestinians heard Jews talk about the horrors of the Holocaust, with no detail spared about the death marches and gas chambers designed to annihilate a people.

Israelis heard Palestinians talk about the horrors of the Nakba, including the murders of innocent civilians and the rape of Palestinian women, designed to banish a people from the Land.

Palestinians learned that not all Jews want or support the occupation.

Israelis learned that not all Palestinians support Hamas or a 1-state solution.

Moderators tried to steer the conversation away from what they call “the oppression Olympics” where each side tries to compete for how much historical injustice they’ve faced. They’re all medalists.

Loaded, trigger words like “Terrorist” or “Apartheid” were often sidestepped to keep people in the room. Instead of trying to fit labels on these concepts or debate terminology, the mods re-directed people to share their personal narratives instead.

“We’ve debated these words a thousand times, and where have they gotten us? The goal of the group is not to win points, but for us all to share our traumas. Through that shared pain, we will come closer together,” says Guy.

A sniffling former IDF soldier came into the room one night and told his story. “I stood in the homes of Palestinians while my fellow soldiers searched a house. I made sure not to point my M-16 at the children. I taught them how to count in English to try and distract them from what was happening. But I know all they saw was my M-16.”  Between sobs, he muttered, “No one should have to live in fear like that. I want you to know that I’m sorry.”

Suddenly a female voice came out and said, “I was that little girl.” 

She went on to recount the sensation of standing in her living room in the middle of the night in Ramallah as a small child, petrified and confused, as she stared at the barrel of an M-16 belonging to an Israeli soldier.  Eventually, she said to the ex-soldier, “Thank you for being vulnerable. I can hear the pain in your voice. I am 31 now and I still feel my pain.” 

My wife and I huddled over the single phone that still had battery life, a world away in Miami Beach, both of us with gooseflesh, totally gripped.

The next night, the Israeli soldier came back into the room, still sounding weepy, and asked in earnest to any Palestinian in the audience, “If we accept your narrative and provide you freedom, are you saying the violence will stop? Are there enough Palestinians who will say chalas (stop it) ?”

The same little girl from Ramallah, now a woman, exclaimed “Yes! We will stop all violence the day you provide us with dignity and human rights. Your transformation gives me hope that it can happen.”

Majed, who goes by “Maj” is a self-identified Palestinian-Israeli, 33, who started the group along with his friend Moshe Markovich, 32, a self-identified Jewish American. The two met 12 years prior in a Jerusalem gym, while Moshe was living in Israel attending Yeshivah. They were each going through their own separate personal dramas at the time and found in each other someone they could talk to without any judgment. They ate together, traveled together, and brought each other into their respective worlds. Majed would take Moshe to Bethlehem and Ramallah, and Moshe invited Majed to meet some of his fellow Yeshiva bochurs.

 “My friends could not believe I had a Palestinian best friend,” said Moshe.

Majed and Moshe started chatting on Clubhouse a few months before the war with a small group of 5 friends. It expanded. Majed received death threats and left Clubhouse for two months.

He told me in an interview, “The more these anti-dialogue people came at me the more I realized this room needed to happen. As a gay Palestinian man, people have always tried to silence me for my identity. This has made me even more audacious to tell my story.”

Many of the Palestinian mods have received death threats from hardliners who are against dialogue with Jews or Israelis since they believe it “normalizes oppression.” Some of the Jewish mods have been called “self-hating Jews” or “Israel bashers” because they are willing to talk with Palestinians or criticize Israeli policies.  There are online trolls gaining access to the room with fake accounts who then try to block the dialogue.  Hamza Khan, a so-called “3rd party neutral mod” from Maryland who has never been to the Land, received a death threat. He wasn’t fazed. “This guy threatened me. I invited him over to my house for a kebab.”

Majed has received the majority of the death threats, some via Instagram direct messages. He was asked to join other rooms in Clubhouse in which he was “cornered by other activists” who accused him of having a “colonized mind” and then threatened him for “speaking with the enemy.”

As Maj explains “ Dialogue is sometimes the most radical thing you can do. I reject the idea that we can't talk until there's justice and peace.”

On Day 3 of the war, Majed and Moshe decided to open a private chat with about 60 people. They called the new room Balance: Meet Palestinians and Israelis. More people wanted in. On Day 4 they opened it up to the public. They soon found themselves in a room with more than 1,000 people.

The mods learned on the fly how to channel the extremist voices into the conversation, rather than force them out.  They brought on dozens of mods with some more training in conflict resolution, psychology, politics, and religion.  

Guy, now living in LA, stumbled upon the room, even though he was initially skeptical of both Clubhouse and the group itself.  He told me in an interview, “Hearing Maj’s voice and story pierced my heart.”  

He stuck around and became a mod, prioritizing this Clubhouse room over basic human needs. “I was in and out of sleep for 14.5 days, listening for my name so I knew it was my turn to speak.” 

He was instrumental in helping Israelis feel safe enough to join the conversation 

A self-described “right-wing” 55-year-old Israeli woman from Rishon Letzion came into the room on May 17th. According to Guy “She came in hot and articulately defended the most extreme Israeli position in an aggressive way. I was afraid she would turn people away from the room,” Guy said.  She got out what she needed to say, and eventually stayed and listened to Palestinian stories.  A couple of days later, her opinions of the Palestinians changed.  “My views changed more in 48 hours than in 55 years,” she said “All my life I’ve been right wing, but through what I heard here, I discovered my left wing, and understood that my whole life I've been flying in circles.“ 

She is now a mod of the group, recruiting Israeli friends to join. 

“Witnessing these genuine transformations happen showed me that we are onto something. For the first time since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, I have some hope,” Guy told me. 

One night, a Palestinian doctor from a village outside Hebron told his personal story about the occupation and at the end of his 8-minute monologue said, “I want to tell all my Jewish brothers and sisters that suicide bombers do not represent me, the Palestinian people, or Islam.” A Jewish American halfway across the world in Los Angeles listened to the whole story and told me in a private Clubhouse chat, “I spent more than 50 hours in the room and this is the thing that sticks out to me. I’ve never heard a Palestinian say those words.” They connected through DM and now Facetime regularly.  “I now have my first Palestinian friend, “ he told me. 

Clubhouse was founded in 2020 by Paul Davison and Rohan Seth who told me via email they created it “with the goal of helping people connect.” It is designed for longer form, audio storytelling, and deep listening. According to Clubhouse CEO Paul Davison, “We have been astonished and humbled by this room.”   

Like all social media apps, Clubhouse has been used for spreading vile messages and fake news too. But what is unique is its ability to be used for exactly the opposite of that. As Paul puts it, “Through the power of direct person-to-person conversation, hundreds of thousands of people have found common ground. Clubhouse’s focus on the listening part is what differentiates it from its social media competitors. 

As Guy puts it, “Clubhouse made us listen for hours before anyone gives you a chance to talk back - and in those hours, something magical can happen.”

Could listening and personal storytelling be the “killer features” for sectarian conflict resolution?

Two 20th-century examples suggest that may be the case.

The first one is South Africa, the country my great grandparents presciently fled to from Lithuania before WWII.  As a 5-year-old boy visiting my grandparents in Cape Town in the mid-1980s’, I remember learning how to read through the racist signs of apartheid. “Whites only Beach,” “Black, Colored, and Asian Toilet.” My parents didn’t believe those absurd signs would come down in their lifetime. 

But, in 1995, they did, largely because of the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Listening to this Clubhouse group transported me back to this era when I remember hearing some of the darkest, most painful personal stories of South Africans during Apartheid.

The TRC was arguably the most important component of the political agreement between Nelson Mandela, leader of the African National Congress (ANC), and the leader of the ruling white Nationalist party, FW DeKlerk.  Mandela understood the deep trauma of his people and the complex feelings of his white counterparts. He knew that, after four decades of trauma and fear of the other side, true reconciliation was not going to happen by just signing some paperwork. Trust would take time to build. But how to start the process?  

The brilliance of the South African TRC was its focus on the personal narrative of the victims, not on politics or jargon. This made every testimony relatable. I remember hearing heinous testimonies of torture, killings, and abductions, at the hands not only of the White nationalist apartheid regime, but also by members and leaders of the African liberation movements themselves.

The second key feature of the commission was its transparency. These stories were told in public hearings. You could hear the accents, pitch, and tone of each voice. The audience of the stories was not the court, but rather the entire country. It was a national airing out of dirty laundry.  

In total, 22,000 victims told their most horrendous, personal stories publicly.  

The TRC gave the victims a powerful public platform.  They felt “heard”. Their trauma was acknowledged. Once the victims told the stories — only then — could they forgive the perpetrators. These stories were patched into the collective patchwork of South African history, allowing the two sides to move on and write the next chapters together. The TRC, under the leadership of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, granted 1,500 amnesties for thousands of crimes committed during the apartheid years. Most importantly, it provided the emotional cement necessary for the political agreement to stick. As Nelson Mandela put it, “In the end, reconciliation is a spiritual process, which requires more than just a legal framework. It has to happen in the hearts and minds of people.”

The “miracle”  Clubhouse room, on many nights, felt like a virtual truth and reconciliation commission with Middle Eastern accents.  As in South Africa, there is no shortage of Israeli and Palestinian victims. As Maj expressed one night after a traumatic story was revealed, “Your pain is someone else’s shame. Just by saying this story, both sides can now heal.”

Unlike South Africa, it appears that Israeli and Palestinian leadership do not currently have the will or power to settle this conflict politically.  The founders and moderators of this Clubhouse group do not care. “We are bypassing our leaders and the fences and the rockets and the bombs to meet. We are trying to hack that system,” said Guy.  They are trying to amass a groundswell of understanding that may one day turn into a tsunami, forcing their leaders to reach a political agreement.

In this sense, the model is closer to the second sectarian conflict that ended in the late 90s.  This was the bitter, sectarian conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles.  Many years before the Good Friday agreement was signed in 1998, peace activists laid the groundwork for negotiation by fostering dialogue between the combatants themselves.

Reverend Dr. Gary Mason, a self-described “bigot”, spent 28 years as a clergyperson in Belfast, which allowed him to listen to people. Hearing their stories transformed him. He then built a grassroots movement over decades to try and transform others through physical meetups along with personal storytelling.

“To be without memory would be to be without a life and a world,” he wrote.

After almost 35 years of fighting in a bitter sectarian conflict that killed thousands of people, mostly civilians, two of the loyalist paramilitaries groups - the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Red Hand Commando - turned over their weapons statement in Gary’s church. 

The Irish model is proof that solving long-running, deadly tribal conflicts can happen through a bottoms-up approach with dialogue as a key tenet. It also shows that it doesn’t happen overnight.

As Dr. Gary Mason, puts it, “If you want peace now, you need to start working on it 20 years ago.

The hard work he’s referring to, when it comes to resolving bitter conflicts, is moving more people toward empathy, rather than extremism.  Memories don’t go away, but the pain associated with trauma can actually be shed. This ain’t easy.  As trauma compiles on top of trauma, hardline attitudes eventually become the norm. The other tribe gets vilified so much in their stories that they are often unwilling to engage in dialogue with them. By refusing to “normalize” the so-called “enemy” in conversation, they remain ignorant of their narrative.

Empaths, on the other hand, are willing to listen to and empathize with their so-called "enemy”. They are capable of listening to the stories of the other side and feeling the pain of others. For hardliners, there is only one history that matters.  For empaths, there can be multiple histories. 

A new genetic study on empathy, the largest one ever done, with 46,000 participants, led by a team of scientists at the University of Cambridge team, working with the genetics company 23andMe, found that genetics was not the dominant factor in determining empathy. We already knew from prior research that on average, women are slightly more empathetic than men. What we learned in this new study is that women are not born that way. They develop it throughout their lives, through socialization or their gender-specific experiences.

This is good news for peace workers.  It means that one can develop more, or less empathy, as a result of one’s experiences.  Hardliners can become empaths, and vice versa. In this regard, we are more fluid than we think.  

Back in the Land, there are hundreds of groups on the ground working tirelessly towards peace for many years with very limited success. They face many physical, political, and cultural obstacles. While this Clubhouse group is not immune to some of these challenges, its accessibility makes it novel. In a land that is divided, where checkpoints and fear prevent physical meetings, this app is transcendent. With a click of a button, you can hear the personal stories of a person you may have been taught to hate or fear. 

The magic of listening to the narrative of the other is that sometimes, just that very act, can transform your opinions about the other side.  It reveals blind spots in your narrative. It teaches you about your indoctrination. Learning multiple histories gives the listener the gift of awareness of their specific cultural orientation. History is a bit like a puzzle, it’s an amalgamation of many stories about reality that sometimes fit together and sometimes do not.  Gathering more puzzle pieces gives one a better ability to approximate the truth.

The Jewish and Palestinian narratives happen to fit quite nicely with one another because as it turns out, we were one people living on the Land longer than they were two separate nations fighting over it. Jews and Palestinians share the same genetic roots. The Land feels familiar to both peoples because it is in our bones and blood.  At a certain point, the cultural narratives, religious affinities, and footsteps simply diverged.  The Land, this shared canvas and memory, was abruptly fractured. 

Could it be that the stories I learned on the hill and in the wadi are both true?

Yes.

Could it be a “Security Fence” AND a “Separation Wall?” The Temple Mount AND the Al Aqsa Mosque? A shared homeland for Jews AND Palestinians?

Yes, yes, and yes!

Listening to the other side’s narrative allows one to see the perspective and truth of an “enemy” you thought you knew.  It forges a genuine understanding you cannot glean from any other form of learning.  It softens hardliners and turns them into empaths with remarkable efficiency. Clubhouse’s software, combined with a special community of moderators, offers a platform for building empathy, and potentially, for scaling it. 

Perhaps if this room can get enough personal stories shared, as in South Africa, it can heal the hearts of enough Israelis and Palestinians to focus on the future, rather than fight about the past.

Perhaps if this small Clubhouse room can grow big enough, empathy will replace extremism in the hearts of so many that their leaders will be able to settle this conflict, as it did in Northern Ireland.  

Perhaps we can then build a model to solve all other sectarian conflicts around the world.

I recognize this may all seem like pie in the sky. But the alternative for Israelis and Palestinians is a never-ending story of war.  Why not try something new? 

The Clubhouse group is not naive. They know they face an uphill battle. They witnessed how effective the room was, but the question remains how will this huge population of hardliners change if they are unwilling to even enter it?  As Guy says, the “real challenge is reaching people before they reach this space.”

After more than two weeks of continuous dialogue the “miracle room” winded itself down. The team is planning on figuring out how to get more people to a new room and is organizing themselves to see how they can take this project to the next level.

They are now meeting once a week for only 12 hours, but the plan is to reach many more Israelis and Palestinians, with spinoff groups embracing the methodology that worked in the Balance room. 

Majed’s hope is for “many millions of Israelis and Palestinians to go through this sacred space.”

This may not be so crazy considering the scale of social media today. If Clubhouse can grow as a platform and become a new model for a healthier type of social media consumption, then this pipe dream may just come true. (Facebook, Twitter, and Spotify have all launched Clubhouse copycats of their own).

In the meantime, my challenge to all my Israeli and Palestinian friends is this:  If you care to break the cycle of violence, if you love the Land and wish for peace for your children, do the most radical thing imaginable. Meet halfway between the hill and the wadi, or in a virtual room on Clubhouse, and just listen.

This was me just before I made the decision to move back to the U.S. to found Storyhunter. I was working on an assignment as a freelancer for the New York Times along with one of my own journalist heroes, the columnist Nicholas Kristof. We were covering the chaotic streets of Cairo as the Arab Spring was unfolding before our eyes. Little did I know this would be my last photo in the field for a while.

I was at the top of my game and in love with my job as a roaming freelance video journalist / documentary filmmaker more than you can ever imagine. It ticked every single box for me. Global affairs, politics, conflict, culture, the environment, creativity, journalism…I got to learn from some of the smartest people in the world about all of these domains in my 20’s and early 30’s.

As much as I felt in my bones and heart that I was in the right place as a journalist/filmmaker, I have always been an entrepreneur. As a kid, and throughout my career as a freelancer, I have always found my own opportunities and worked for myself. Freelancing is the ultimate training ground for entrepreneurship, mainly because IT IS entrepreneurship, albeit for a company of 1. You have to ruthlessly prioritize and hustle your ass off. Many years later, I understand that my dual passions stem from the same place. They come from a deep curiosity about people and systems. And an even deeper desire to fundamentally change the world for the better. 

Over and over again over countless projects in many countries, I experienced firsthand the difficulties of getting gigs and getting paid on time. I also experienced the challenges companies had finding journalists and filmmakers all over the world to collaborate with. The system was so obviously broken. I spoke about this with every freelancer and executive I knew for 2 years or so, and everyone kind of shrugged their shoulders and said, well, that’s the way it is. This was hard for me to accept.

Back in Cairo in 2012, I wanted to continue covering the aftermath of the Revolution. But, I ran out of work, not because I wasn’t needed there by somebody, but because I only had 3-4 contacts with editors.  As I was leaving Cairo airport, I saw all these filmmakers getting flown in to do the same work I was doing. This inefficiency infuriated me. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

On the very short plane ride that night back to my former home in Tel Aviv, I decided to start what became Storyhunter. Instead of sending more pitches to more editors, I wrote a very basic business plan. Our original, placeholder name was actually, Sabaqa, a derivation of the word for “network” in Arabic. We later changed it to after learning that Sabaka meant “dog” in Russian ;)

Since I loved my career so much as a video journalist, starting Storyhunter was the toughest career decision I’ve ever made. On the one hand, I felt fortunate to have two things I cared about so much. On the other hand, it felt like a curse. If I chose one path, I knew I had to give up on the other. But ultimately, the choice became clear. The entrepreneurial fire would not extinguish itself. And if I could tackle the big, systemic problems facing the media industry, I could potentially impact so many more people than just me. 

I had never spent more than a day or two in NYC before I dropped everything to move there. My co-founder Alex Ragir joined from Brazil and we hosted our first big community event in Dumbo, Brooklyn on May 3, 2012. Coincidentally, it happened to be World Press Freedom Day. Since then, May 3 is the date in which we celebrate our birthday. 

As I reflect on our 10 years as a business, I can’t help but think about how the world has changed. Because of the dominance of social, storytelling platforms like TikTok and LinkedIn, all businesses and non-profits have been forced to transform themselves into media companies. Because of the Covid pandemic and other factors, companies are choosing the agile, remote workforce, especially when it comes to the marketing and storytelling functions. Because of the risks of climate change to our planet, companies prefer to hire locals rather than fly in crews from all over the world. These trends are all tailwinds propelling Storyhunter into the future.

A decade later, Storyhunter has the chance to become the most prolific platform in the world for on demand, freelance creative services. Every project is a totally unique story or a critical component of a story, made from scratch by a person or team of people: a DP for hire to get the documentary interview, a photo of a new skincare product, an edit for a branded content series about environmental heroes, a creative director plus animation team for a new B2b explainer for a software company, or a domino artist making custom builds for brands like Google and Disney. The stories originate from the front lines of the war in Ukraine to the front lines of human consciousness. It is truly exciting to get a front row seat to witness the latest evolution of human storytelling, which is arguably as powerful and ubiquitous as it has ever been. The Storyhunter platform will power tens of thousands of such projects this year. We believe we can grow far beyond that.

Storyhunter is not just connecting people. It is truly fostering lasting professional, business relationships within and across borders. Each of our projects is a unique, creative collaboration. Often, the collaborators live in different countries. More than 60% of our projects are between the same two collaborators. It’s good that several members of our engineering team came from the dating site, Zoosk. In the last 10 years, Storyhunter has been credited with at least one actual marriage, and so many more, long lasting creative partnerships.

This is all only possible thanks to our amazing team of engineers, sales people, product designers, marketers, investors, and of course, the creators who put everything into the stories they create.

The thing that motivates me more than anything is hearing the personal stories of our freelancers from around the world. Every once in a while, a freelancer reaches out to thank us with a completely unsolicited note, or request to visit our office. They usually tell us how we helped them meet their first few big clients which then helped them grow their careers. People from Kathmandu to Honolulu to small towns in Ohio, have all thanked us for helping them do what they love. 

What I’m most proud of is that through these ten years we have not changed who we are or what we believe in. Freedom of expression for journalists, artists, filmmakers, creators of all stripes in all countries is still our most core, cherished value. Our mission remains to inspire and empower creators around the world. This is the reason I wrote a business plan for Sabaqa on that short lonely, nighttime flight from Cairo. And it's the reason we continue building each and every day. 

Happy Birthday, Storyhunter!

The global reaction to this war has been equally unprecedented. 141 countries voted to condemn Russia’s invasion and called for  immediate withdrawal from Ukraine. The U.S., European Union, and their allies, including Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and the UK have joined forces in an attempt to cut Russia off from the global economy. Their sweeping set of collective sanctions have embargoed most trade with Russia, cut 7 Russian banks out of the SWIFT transaction network, and frozen the assets of financial institutions and oligarchs connected to Russia.

The US raised the bar on anti-Russia sanctions, prohibiting Russian oil from entering U.S. markets, as well as banning Russia’s largest financial institution, Sberbank. 

"We will limit Russia's ability to do business in dollars, euros, pounds, and yen," US President Joe Biden said on day 1 of the war, "We're going to stop the ability to finance and grow the Russian military. We're going to impair their ability to compete in a high-tech 21st-century economy."

At least 300 US-based corporations followed suit. Companies like Disney, Apple, McDonalds, Starbucks, Coke, Pepsi, Hilton, and even Goldman Sachs have stopped doing business in Russia. They cited moral reasons but of course this was largely a fait accompli. For all US businesses, except media companies protected by the Berman amendment, business in Russia was no longer legal, or viable, due to the sweeping set of OFAC sanctions. 

This speed and scale of this economic untangling of Russia from the West is like nothing we’ve ever witnessed in human history.

It is entirely reasonable to argue that these multilateral, coordinated economic salvos being lobbied against Russia are justified given the level of human suffering we’ve already witnessed in Ukraine. Sanctions, like war, are a tool of diplomacy. They do not always lead to the desired political change (ie. Iran, Iraq, Cuba) and when effective can take many years (ie. South Africa). That said, there is a sound logic that these measures will weaken Russia’s economy and therefore mitigate Russia’s ability to wage war in Ukraine, sparing countless lives and protecting the sovereignty of an independent, democratic nation. 

What makes less sense is why the West has unleashed such outrage and condemnation against Russia, in support of the Ukrainian people, while an equally heinous war in a different part of the world received virtually no Western condemnation, and on the contrary - received plenty of Western support.

This war, like Russia’s war against Ukraine, pitted a strong, energy rich country armed to the teeth against a considerably weaker, poorer neighboring country.  

This war, like Russia’s war against Ukraine, was a war of aggression designed to meddle in and influence the internal politics of a sovereign country.

This war, like Russia’s war against Ukraine, featured an aggressor that was willing to win by any means necessary, including by targeting innocent civilians and children. 

This war, like Russia’s war against Ukraine, was led by a regime that regularly violates the rights of citizens, imprisons and murders political opponents, dissidents, and journalists.

This war, like Russia’s war against Ukraine, was partly paid for by you and me, with every trip to the gas station, or cheap flight, or Amazon purchase that indirectly funnels money to the OPEC cartel.

This war, like Russia’s war against Ukraine, directly benefited U.S. weapons manufacturers, by deploying U.S. made weapons and military equipment in the battlefield, leading to lucrative, new purchase orders. 

The war is, of course, the Saudi-led war against Yemen, which started in 2015, and has continued for more than 7 years, through early 2022. The exact numbers are hard to come by, due to the lack of coverage or focus on this war, but a U.N. panel presenting to the Human Rights Council estimated that the Saudis have killed or wounded more than 18,000 civilians in Yemen since March 2015.  Notably, half of all civilian casualties in this war were children.  According to the UNHCR, the UN agency for refugees, 1 in 8 Yemenis have been displaced by the war. That’s more than 3 million people. 

Notably, the U.S. and UK’s reaction to this war was completely different from their reaction to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. No sanctions were leveled against Saudi Arabia. No freezing of Saudi assets. No moral outrage from politicians or corporations.  

On the contrary, the U.S. and UK both supported the war effort by providing arms and critical intelligence to the Saudi-led coalition that regularly murdered children using American or British made bombs and drones. We know, that in August 2018, a laser-guided Mark 82 bomb sold by the U.S. and built by Lockheed Martin was used in the Saudi-led coalition airstrike on a school bus in Yemen, which killed 51 people, including 40 children. In another incident resembling the recent Russian strike on the maternity hospital in Mariopol Ukraine, which killed 3 people, the Saudis bombed the Abs hospital run by Doctors Without Borders, which killed at least 15 people and destroyed the only modern health care facility in Northern Yemen.

It gets worse.

The Saudis have used highly controversial weapons that are banned by most countries in the world, but are made in the U.S. and sold to the Saudis. They used American-made cluster bombs at least twice, harming civilians. Photographs from the scenes of these attacks show that they were CBU-105 Sensor Fuzed Weapons, manufactured by the Textron Systems Corporation in the United States. Additionally, the Washington Post reported that Saudi Arabia used American-supplied white phosphorus on Yemen in 2016, though it is unclear whether they used it against civilians.

It gets even worse.

Since the Saudis controlled the Yemeni government and central bank, they were able to print hundreds of millions of Yemeni rial, effectively devaluing the currency and wiping out the savings of the Yemeni middle class in one fell swoop. They then blockaded the entire country from receiving food and medicine, leading to a food crisis and a cholera outbreak. The Saudi blockade on Yemen, already one of the poorest countries on earth, pushed more than ten million innocent Yemenis to the brink of famine, causing 85,000 Yemeni children under age 5 to starve to death between 2015 and 2018. 

The volume and severity of the war crimes committed by the Saudis - aided and abetted by the US and UK - over the course of their 7+ year campaign in Yemen should be crystal clear.  

Why then would the Americans and British actively support one morally heinous war and condemn another ?

The answer is as complex as war itself. It's important to note that no two wars are the same, and we have no idea what will happen in Russia and Ukraine over the next few months or years.

The purpose of analyzing Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen is not to draw a perfect comparison or model, but rather to use it as a prism to reveal some fundamental truths about how foreign policy decisions get made and the nature of our biases. 

To that end, let's examine some of the reasons why the West, and the US and UK in particular, have had such polar opposite political reactions to these two wars. 

Russia is more than simply a U.S. competitor, but, we have been conditioned to believe, a beast we should fear.  American foreign policy wonks referred to Russia during the post Cold War glasnost era as a sleeping bear.  This time of Western optimism about Russia, which in theory would lead to the building of open and transparent democratic institutions after the U.S.S.R. collapsed, did not go according to plan. Under the former Soviet KGB boss Vladimir Putin, Russia moved farther and farther away from democracy. And that “sleeping bear” is now awake and angry, with a large arsenal of nuclear weapons embedded in its claws. 

Saudi Arabia, in contrast, is a curiosity, a desert kingdom of nomadic Bedouins that had the blessing (or curse) of settling on top of one of the world’s largest oil reserves. Saudi Arabia has since become one of the most important business clients for large American companies, who sell the Saudis hundreds of billions of dollars worth of American made military vehicles, weapons and spy craft lessons from the NSA. The United States is the largest exporter of weapons in the world, with the largest weapons manufacturing industry in the world, and Saudi Arabia is typically the U.S.’s biggest client. 

Saudi Arabia is also, of course, a vendor in its own right, selling approximately 555,000 barrels per day to the United States, about the same as Russia. In recent years the U.S. drastically reduced dependencies on Saudi and Russian oil, getting most of its oil from Canada and from domestic production, so this is likely less of a factor.

The state department and the foreign policy blob’s justification for our involvement in Saudi Arabia is that the U.S. needs to support the Saudis because they are a counterbalance against Iran. The trouble with that argument is that we’ve seen some strong evidence that the Houthi rebels fighting Saudi Arabia are not actually an Iranian proxy. There is no evidence to suggest that this war in Yemen hurt Iran.

This leads us back to the main driving force behind our differing position on these two 

countries: Money. The US values Saudi money far more than it values anything Russia can produce. Additionally, Russia, as the #2 arms dealer in the world, is a top U.S. competitor for future arms deals.

Realpolitik, the idea that nations will always prioritize their own narrow interests rather than ideologies like humanitarianism, has shaped American foreign policy since at least WWII. America’s version of realpolitik has been driven less by territorial ambitions than by commercial ones. As long as the United States functions as a military with a government attached to it (see pie chart below), we will see the military and its network of contractors and subcontractors, with disproportionate control over U.S. foreign policy.

Supporting U.S. corporate interests with ethically questionable arms deals is a unifying principle for both Republicans and Democrats.

President George W. Bush sold $20B worth of American weapons to Saudi Arabia, but this was a drop in the bucket compared to domestic weapon purchases during his presidency.  Bush’s “war on terror” was a boon for weapons orders and military equipment paid for and used by the U.S. government, which funneled tens of billions of dollars into the balance sheets of Carlyle Group, Halliburton (former company of VP Dick Cheney), Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and others, to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

In 2016, President Obama approved the most lucrative arms deal in US history with Saudi Arabia, worth $115B, in weapons, military equipment, and equipment, presumably used for the war in Yemen. Obama, of course, deployed his own weapons on Yemen too, with no approval from Congress. Obama ordered countless drone attacks on the country, supposedly targeting Al-Qaeda terrorists but in many cases, killing innocent civilians.  In what is now seen as one of the first indicators of a new Cold War, Obama armed the Syrian rebels who were fighting against the Russians directly, in a failed effort to depose Bashar Al Assad.

Not to be outdone by Obama, on his first trip abroad as President, Donald Trump visited Saudi Arabia to lock in his own $350b arms deal, despite the fact that Saudi Arabia had just murdered the journalist Jamal Khashogghi. In typical Trump fashion, after the murder, he refuted the findings of a CIA report and defended Mohammed Bin Salman, shaking hands with the murderer during their next meeting. He later bragged to Bob Woodward that he “saved MBS’s ass”.

By the time Biden took office, the CIA declassified the Khashogghi file and the Saudis began winding down their brutal war in Yemen.

Interestingly, while campaigning for President, Biden blamed MBS directly for the murder of Khashoggi, calling the Saudis a “pariah” with “no redeeming social value.” These statements scored political points from liberals, but ultimately were just political rhetoric. In his first true foreign policy test as President, he made the same decision as his predecessor, President Trump -- to let MBS off scot free. For the crime of bone sawing and dismembering a prominent member of the American press corp, MBS did not get even a slap on the wrist from an American president.

Joe Biden eventually went on the record saying that would be stopping U.S aid to Saudi Arabia for their war in Yemen, banning “offensive” weapons deals. It was a convenient thing to say during a ceasefire, supposedly due to COVID.  

But now the war is picking up again, with devastating airstrikes in January 2022 on a Sanaa detention center that killed 90 more people.  Last year, Biden appeared to go back on his word, approving a $500m deal for Chinook, Blackhawks and Apache helicopters, including 2 years of training from 350 U.S. contractors to advise the Kingdom on how to use them. Will the US actually turn down another $100B+ deal to Saudi Arabia should the war pick up again ? 

We shall see.

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Since it began, the Russian war in Ukraine has been dominating the airwaves and newsmedia. In this sense, the contrast to the Saudi war in Yemen, labeled the “Forgotten War” by Amnesty International, could not be starker.  The idea that this was a “Forgotten War”  is a misnomer. You can’t forget something you never knew about in the first place. 

This war was more like “The Invisible War” in how it played out in the West. 

It was very real, but the corporate media essentially acted as if it was not happening. Even the most popular liberal cable news network, MSNBC, according to an analysis on media bias by FAIR, only mentioned the US-backed Saudi war in Yemen once in the entire year of 2017. It  failed to mention even a single time Yemen’s cholera epidemic, which infected more than 1 million Yemenis in the largest outbreak in recorded history.

So why is Russia's invasion of Ukraine such a massive story in the West while the brutal 6-year Saudi war in Yemen barely got any coverage? 

It’s an important question, but tricky to answer.

In its coverage of Russia, some members of the corporate media have provided some helpful context for understanding the discrepancy.

CBS News senior correspondent in Kyiv Charlie D’Agata said in the early days of the war: “This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully, too – city where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.”

This is essentially a nice, liberal person’s smug way of talking about “shithole countries.” He was essentially saying that in the Middle East, mass murder is a feature, not a bug, whereas in civilized Europe, it's the inverse. It’s not necessarily a racist comment, but is rooted in a very backwards, short sighted understanding of history. Remember, it was Europe, not the Middle East that earned the 21st century the ignominious title of “bloodiest century in human history.”

He later apologized after getting skewered on Twitter.

In another interview, Ukraine’s former deputy general prosecutor, David Sakvarelidze, said on the BBC:

“It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blonde hair and blue eyes being killed every day with Putin’s missiles and his helicopters and his rockets,” Sakvarelidze said.

The BBC presenter responded: “I understand and of course respect the emotion.”

This tacit acceptance by a state broadcaster of the idea that non-blonde haired, blue eyed European people are somehow more acceptable to be killed is chilling and as racist as it comes. 

Clearly, for some Western journalists and pundits, white, Christian kids getting murdered in Europe is a surprising, gripping story. Whereas brown skinned, Muslim kids getting murdered in the Middle East is a mundane non-story.

 There is a colonel of truth about the implicit biases in the Western media stemming from pure and utter racism.

But is this abundance of coverage and attention for Ukraine just racially motivated ? 

Citing “race”  as the only, or even primary, reason would be too simplistic an interpretation. 

Again, examining these two wars in parallel can help.

Do Americans feel the need to defend Ukraine more than Yemen because it is more democratic ? Maybe. There is no question that shared norms could be a factor. 

This is true for cultural ties like Christianity as well. 

What about the economic integration factor? Do Americans care more about Ukraine because we have more trading relationships with Ukraine than Yemen? The U.S. buys hundreds of millions of dollars worth of iron and steel from Ukraine every year. Ukrainian software engineers develop some of our favorite apps. Certainly business relationships compel countries to pay attention when their suppliers or vendors are under attack. This is another compelling factor.

Is Zelensky more marketable than Yemeni Houthi rebel leader Abdul-Malik Al-Houthi? No doubt. There will certainly be some “Great Man” theories to follow this war should David continue to upset Goliath.

Another factor to consider is that foreign journalism is hard, and expensive. Foreign bureaus shut down all over the world in the early aughts, leaving networks of freelancers to pick up the slack. Mechanically, producing news in these places has still proved difficult, particularly in chaotic war zones like Yemen. Ukraine is a much easier place for journalists to parachute into.

Timing is another consideration. During the Yemen war, the U.S. was distracted by fighting in not one or two, but three wars in the same region at the same time, thousands of miles from the United States, packaged as “nation building exercises” in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

Who had the bandwidth to even think about a 4th war in the Middle East? Yemen was that 4th war.

There is also the question of Saudi influence over U.S. media. The Saudi Kingdom had a significant ownership stake in Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp from 1987-2015. One can only imagine what that meant in terms of Fox news coverage of significant Saudi events like 9/11 leading all the way until the Yemen War.  Years later, two Twitter employees were caught spying for Saudi Arabia, which has a significant ownership stake in the company.

As Afrah Nasser, an independent Yemeni journalist, told DW, 

“Yemenis' blood means nothing when Saudi's cash is on the table and if you're a foreign journalist, some big media outlets won't buy your story because they don't want to annoy the Saudis." 

There could be some truth to this given the corroding influence of money on all things, including journalism.

The media business is still a business at the end of the day. Just as Trump brings in controversy, eyeballs, and revenue, so does Russia. In that same year of 2017, when Yemen did not get mentioned more than once, MSNBC, the same network analyzed by FAIR, was caught up in Donald Trump impeachment fervor. Since Russia was a protagonist in this drama, it was a ratings bonanza. We know that MSNBC mentioned Russia or Russians, 1385 times in 2017 

Let’s face it. Dead, brown kids in far away countries don’t sell papers like stories of celebrity presidents being extorted with pee pee tapes by the Russians. 

To say that the mainstream media has failed in its most fundamental mission is a gross understatement.  Even if there is a strong bias in society towards Europe in American society, shouldn’t media organizations whose missions are purportedly to tell the truth actually do so?  

And now, these same media executives are chomping at the bit to bring us a war they know people will pay to see and understand.

For US media executives, Russia and the prospects of a second Cold War has the potential to be very profitable. Putin’s war is kind of like the return of Darth Vader in Star Wars. It’s a familiar trope that is known to bring drama and suspense to the masses. The characters and plot are essentially the same.  The story is the same. The weapons and technology are more advanced. Substitute Putin for Gorbachev, Biden for Reagan, introduce a new David-like figure in Volodymir Zelensky, fighting the Russian Goliath, and we’ve got ourselves quite a sequel.

Joe Biden, who has been unable to rally Americans for the first two years as president, has finally found a bipartisan theme to potentially bolster his presidency. If we can’t fight a new war ourselves, then let's at least unite around our hatred and fear of Putin and Russia. Oddly, the Ukrainian flag is bringing Americans together in a way nothing else has in recent memory. Biden is ready to play his role. He will use the corporate media to position the U.S. as a humanitarian force for good, casting himself as the archetypal Hans Solo character doing what he can to save Ukraine.

Regardless of the packaging of this effort and the true motivations of the US foreign policy machine, in this war at least, the U.S. is on the right side of history for staunchly opposing this violent, Russian invasion.

But as the world realigns in its wake, with the US and Europe on one side, and Russia and China, presumably, on the other side, it is critical that US citizens, and everyone in the world for that matter, see US foreign policy actions and media bias for what it is. 

The Saudi-Yemen war should serve as  a reminder that even in the 21st century, human rights abuses can be committed in plain sight by Western superpowers with no mention of them in the nightly news.

Westerners today marvel at the fact that Russians inside Russia know so little about a war their country is waging. Yet, for 6 years, Americans knew practically nothing about a war in which the U.S. was actively engaged.

Which is why we need to question our media, our foreign policy decisions, our arms deals, everything. 

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The shameful pattern of American fixation on European wars while ignoring atrocities elsewhere is not a new thing. 

Look what happened under Bill Clinton’s watch. Two genocides that happened almost at the same time. One in Europe in 1995 and the other in Africa in 1994. 

In Europe, President Clinton backed the first military operation in the history of NATO, launching aerial attacks and creating a no-fly-zone to stop the Serbian Army of Republika Srpska (VPS) from committing greater atrocities to the Bosnian Muslim population in the country formerly called Yugoslavia. In July, the VPS killed about 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica what is still considered the worst genocide in Europe since the Holocaust. 

In Africa, over 100 days, armed Hutu militias killed more than half a million Tutsis in the former Belgian colony of Rwanda, mostly with daggers and swords. President Bill Clinton, and all other world leaders unanimously and infamously, ignored it.

Regardless of their rationales, American wars abroad and American hypocrisy about those wars are the stated reasons for the formation of Al Qaeda, as well as the justification used by Russian President Vladimir Putin when the U.S. publicly condemned his first invasion of Ukraine back  in 2014.

In that year, after Obama spoke out against Russia’s violent conquering and annexation of Crimea, Putin responded by saying. "Our Western partners headed by the United States prefer not to be guided by international law in their practical policies, but by the rule of the gun."   

Unfortunately, Putin’s use of the old “pot calling the kettle black” argument is hard to refute.

Gratuitous violence outside their borders has become the trademark for both of the world's two largest militaries, arms dealers, and on again, off again rivals. For the U.S. and Russia, the world is a battleground for business and geopolitical interests. Weapons need to get made, sold, and ultimately, deployed. Wars keep the revenue flowing and the cycle going. Despite the fact that the world is heating up to unsustainable levels, because of the burning of fossil fuels, Russia and the U.S. will wage war to protect their rights to burn them. 

For the U.S., the cycle has been as vicious as it has been pointless. Looking back on the U.S. wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and our support of the war in Yemen, what strategic goals did they actually achieve? It’s not clear.  

Russia, on the other hand, has used force to successfully win territory in Georgia, Chechnya, and Crimea -- without paying much of a price militarily or politically -- which is likely why Putin felt that he would be successful again in Ukraine. 

It appears Putin may have overplayed his hand militarily against a motivated and well armed Ukraine, locked and loaded with $1b worth of US made weapons. Ukrainians are pulverizing  Russian tanks with Javelin anti-tank missiles, manufactured in the US by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Technologies.. They are shooting Russian fighter jets out of the sky with US-made Raytheon’s anti-aircraft Stinger missiles. The US earmarked another $3.5b to Ukraine, with Zelensky going to Congress virtually to ask for more.

With Germany and just about every single European country about to go on a massive military shopping spree, the U.S. defense industry stands to be the biggest, and perhaps, only winner from the Russia-Ukraine war.

The question is how do we break the cycle.

The en vogue political dogma of “isolationism” didn’t translate into any meaningful changes in military spending or weapons trade abroad during the Trump or Biden administrations. Even in the unlikely event that “isolationism” will endure in a very tumultuous nation-state system with so many known fault lines, it is doubtful our weapons will ever be “isolated” in any sense of the word. While we may not send in our own troops to fight wars overseas, we are still more than happy to send our F-15’s and anti-aircraft weapons to the theater of war on our behalf.

The clear and obvious solution is that the American people should have oversight into where these weapons are sent and for what purpose. There needs to be a set of policies in place that creates qualifications for countries to be sold any kind of weapon, military hardware or software, including cyber weapons and surveillance tools. 

Then if a country wants to buy some more weapons or surveillance software after a mass execution of 81 people, which happened on March 12, 2022  in Saudi Arabia, we should debate that rather than just letting DoD approve the deal with zero oversight. The end goal here is creating standards and a level of public oversight into our support of wars abroad. Perhaps the public will decide it’s important that military trading partners reflect a certain baseline set of American values. Perhaps not. The point is that just as the Constitution mandates that only Congress has the power to wage war, where we send our weapons of war should ideally be held to similar scrutiny. The powerful triumvirate of the defense lobby, large corporations, and the DoD, deciding in the shadows which wars the U.S. supports, is wholly un-democratic. 

When the U.S.S.R. disbanded, we had an opportunity to influence them in building democratic institutions. Those efforts failed, partly because a small group of oligarchs managed to seize massive wealth and industries essentially overnight. We failed, partly because we placated the oligarchs and welcomed their money despite the fact that many of them facilitated the gutting of the country’s institutions by a KGB spymaster named Putin. 

This resurgent, dictatorial, repressive Russian regime, this new version of the bear, is proof that we lost the Cold War as well. A communist dictatorship has simply been replaced by a capitalistic one, with a deep pocketed client in China, and an EU too dependent on Russian oil to quit.

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All wars are wholly grotesque and shameful. If one is ever to be so unlucky as to experience a war firsthand, between the moments of terror, there is this feeling of how weird and wrong it is. There is a sense of shame that, for all we are able to accomplish as human beings, we still murder each other at scale for power or money - under the guise of some absurd cultural, national, or ethnically motivated rationale. 

America was founded precisely as a protection against such absurdities. It was founded for religious freedom, and other basic freedoms, regardless of creed, race, or national origin.

We need to figure out a way for American ideals to once again permeate through our foreign policy. We must create a new process that would restrict our weapons manufacturers from dealing with countries who are likely to use those weapons to repress people, commit war crimes, or ethnically “cleanse”, regardless of the race, location, or rationale for such crimes. We must treat the instruments of war as we do our own soldiers' lives. A US-bomb can destroy thousands of lives in an instant. We should be very deliberate about who gets to purchase that kind of power.

If such a process were hypothetically in place today, I have no doubt that this very visible war between Russia and Ukraine would lead to continued military support for Ukraine. The question is what would happen to our other military trading partners, in situations where we have clear economic opportunities weighing against American values. This is the question that we never get the opportunity to debate. That must change. Voters should get the ultimate opportunity to decide if Saudi Arabia, who used US weapons to murder and exile entire families, at a scale that Russia hopefully never will reach, should receive more weapons. Debating these deals publicly would have another added benefit. They would bring even the least visible wars into the light of day.

Limited, congressional attempts to stop the war in Yemen have failed. A bipartisan majority in the House of Representatives for the third time in as many years, voted to end US support for the Saudi-led coalition through the National Defense Authorization Act—only to have the provision stripped out of the final bill. A new Yemen War Powers Resolution, sponsored by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, from Washington and Rep. Peter DeFazio, from Oregon, is getting pushed through the House again. Will the 4th time be a charm ? I doubt it.

There is still something exceptional about the idea of America. It is the thing that draws so many immigrants to our cities. It is the thing that Saudi Arabia and Russia and China do not have -- this idea that although we are far from perfect, we are in a shared struggle to build a more free and just society that is not under the thumb of a group of thugs.

But despite the lies we tell ourselves as Americans, any exceptionalism that we may have on the domestic level has been lost in our foreign policy. If we continue to go down the path of protecting only the interests of corporate arms dealers and their clients, we are perceived no differently from Russia, China, or any other country on Earth. Even though we may have different domestic values on the inside, our brand gets tarnished with each American made bomb that gets dropped on civilians. 

The role of journalistic institutions in a democracy is to confront any hypocrisy between perceived values and actual policies. It is not a mirror reflecting back to us our own emotional landscape, biases, and comforting storylines. It is not an echo chamber for the deeply entrenched Machiavellian impulses of society. It is not entertainment.

On the contrary, the media must elevate the discourse through a dispassionate, honest search for information, particularly stories of human rights abuses, regardless of where they occur and who is responsible.  It is the information itself, rather than the agreed upon narrative of the messengers of this information, that should play a role in training society about whom we should fear or love.  

An aggressive, nuclear armed Russia on the doorstep of Europe certainly may indeed be something to fear. But the idea that millions of Americans can remain ignorant to the slaughtering of children using American weapons in some far, dark corner of the globe, seems like a far scarier notion. 

In case it’s not clear, or you just skipped to this final paragraph, I’m not arguing here that the war in Ukraine should be less visible or demand a less severe international reaction. I’m arguing that it should be the benchmark. Race, geography, religion, cultural kinship, politics, and  economics should not determine how the world responds to genocide or other atrocities. This is why we call them crimes against humanity. Humanity means all of us. 

The United States is running a very cruel experiment in Afghanistan right now. I’ll explain it in a minute, but first here’s some context.

Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on Earth, a mountainous, battle-scarred territory of 40 million people.  It is a “failed state.”  About 90% of the people are destitute, surviving on less than two dollars per day. International aid in Afghanistan is not a nice to have, it's a need to have for more than 50% of the population. There are 3.5 million internally displaced people in the country due to the 20 year war with the U.S. Toss in a Covid-19 pandemic. Throw in the worst drought seen in decades. Now, add in another 500,000 displaced people, uprooted after the Taliban takeover. Mix this all up and then put the entire country in the freezer for the bitterly cold Afghan winter.

Based on just these factors alone, the World Food Program projected back in August that 14 million Afghans were “facing food insecurity” this winter, which is a fancy way of saying that 14 million people would likely starve as the weather got colder across the country.

Ready for the experiment now ?

Imagine if, on top of all these tragic circumstances, you suddenly and permanently froze the vast majority of cash, humanitarian aid and financial services in Afghanistan.

What might happen next? 

Well, you don’t have to be Nostradamus to answer the question. That’s because the United States government is running this experiment in real time, right now, as you read these words.

The devastating results of the experiment are already coming in. Emaciated, starving, and sick 11 year olds weighing 28 pounds are already fleeing the provinces for Kabuls in a desperate, last minute scramble to avoid death. 12 year old girls are being sold off as child brides in order for families to put bread on the table. Children are so malnourished that their skin is peeling off and they do not have enough nourishment in their bodies to cry. According to UNICEF, At least 1m children are projected to starve in the coming months. 

 The World Food Program, winners of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020 for their humanitarian efforts around the globe, now predict that approximately 23 million people will be facing food insecurity over the winter. 

This is a staggering increase of 9 million people from their original projection. 

I chatted to Shelley Thakral, WFP Spokesperson for Afghanistan based in Kabul, to try and understand why this increase has occurred. She told me over a Zoom chat,

“Back in August millions of very innocent Afghans were already at risk of dying. Because of the freezing of assets, the withdrawals of international aid, you had cash shortages, job losses, unpaid salaries -- and now we’re seeing a much larger scale of suffering” 

I learned about the dire economic situation in Afghanistan back in early September only because my company, Storyhunter, suddenly was unable to find any bank who would process our transactions to our freelancers working inside the country.  We are a global marketplace for local creators to access work opportunities, and have bee doing business in the country since 2014. We had never had a problem paying our journalists or videographers in Afghanistan until late August, when our payments suddenly got stuck somewhere in transit. 

Here’s why:

Just as the Taliban were on the verge of taking over the country in mid-August, the United States froze around $9 billion, the majority of Afghanistan's foreign reserves , which is cash belonging to the Afghan government and Afghan business owners. The Afghan banks who were storing their capital in in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for security purposes and preferred interest rates, literally lost their most vital asset practically overnight. 

Removing cash from a barely functioning economy is kind of like removing oil from a barely functioning car engine. It will sputter along for a bit but will ultimately seize itself.

And this is exactly what happened.

This single policy act caused an immediate liquidity crisis in an already crippled economy. Banks no longer did the most basic thing that banks do, which is distribute cash. Afghan businesses and individuals could no longer pull any of their own money from their own bank accounts. Imagine the outrage if that were to happen in the U.S.A! The lucky Afghans who have been able to pull out cash have been capped at 20,000 Afghanis, roughly $200, per week. 

What’s unique about this economic attack on Afghanistan’s financial institutions is how it affects people who were once productive members of society. Business owners, freelancers, and salaried employees who depended on a functioning financial system are now struggling to put bread on the table. Their dependents and employees are then fall into this chain reaction of debts and IOUs. As a result, it’s not just rural or poor people who are on the verge of starvation in Afghanistan. The entire nation is suddenly at risk. 

 “For the first time urban residents of Kabul and other cities who have never experienced food insecurity now do,” Thakral told me. “They’ve lost their jobs and livelihoods. They have limited access to money, and are suffering at similar rates to rural communities.” 

I’ve been in touch with one of the freelancers we've been trying to pay in Kabul with little success to see how he was doing.

“I am much more afraid about what’s happening to the economy, than of the Taliban,” M told me with a tremor in his voice. “There is no cash in the country, no way to buy wheat and vegetables.”

For safety purposes, we decided not to reveal his identity. But what I can tell you is that he is a hardworking, professional journalist who is a regular contributor to large media organizations.

Before August, M had four working people in his family, supporting a total of 15 people in the household, including parents, uncles, aunts, and his own two children. Now, he is the only one working, trying to support all of them. And he is unsure how, or whether, he will get paid.

Without cash, M tells me that things are so bad in the capital that many residents from Kabul are fleeing to the provinces. “There are not many services, facilities, and the hospitals are running out of medicine, and so many people are moving to the countryside,” he told me.

M himself used to live very comfortably in Kabul in a large home.  As a result of the cash crunch, he had to move his family to a smaller house because they could no longer afford the rent.  He describes the living situation as “small and congested.” They have limited purchases to just the essentials. 

“No luxury items, no shopping, no new clothes, the only thing we buy now is food,” he told me.

Despite the cutbacks, M’s family has blown through their savings and have had to take loans from friends outside the country to get by.  But even those loans are hard to get because they have to go through multiple countries to get into Afghanistan.  Even if the money does reach his bank account, his bank is fickle about what they release. Sometimes it’s nothing. Sometimes it’s only the equivalent of $200. 

“20,000 Afghanis [$200] is not nearly enough to support a family of 15 in Kabul,” he said. 

Especially these days. As a result of the financial crisis, the Afghani has tanked in value. Due to the scarcity of goods, prices on just about every commodity have gone up.  M has been tracking the price increases himself so his family can prioritize what to buy. He says that everything is up 20-30% since August.

After months of failed attempts, we eventually found a way to pay M.

We went through some intermediaries in Turkey, who are operators in what’s known as the Hawala network, a traditional, offline payment system that has operated in the Middle East and Asia for many decades. It is typically used by drug and weapons traffickers and is now filling the void for the nearly defunct banking system. (Hello, Bitcoin?)

In this particular chain of the Hawala network, Storyhunter transfers funds to intermediaries in Turkey, who hold M’s money in their bank accounts in Turkish Lira, until it reaches a large enough amount that it makes sense to transfer. Sadly, it has depreciated in transit, since the Lira has plummeted in value against the dollar. The money eventually gets converted back to Dollars, and then, because the Taliban has decreed it illegal to trade in foreign currencies, into Afghanis that M can use to buy groceries. When you factor in exchange rates and commissions, M estimates he’s lost $500 in his earnings over the last couple months.  We are now going to try paying him through Germany. 

The United States government clearly has some unfinished business in Afghanistan. We may have withdrawn our troops from the country, but we refuse to leave Afghanistan alone.

After freezing the cash and financial services in Afghanistan, the U.S.’s next economic strike was to block monies that were slated to go to reconstruction and humanitarian aid. The World Bank, administered by the US, froze its 1.5 billion Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF). The Europeans also got in the game, directing the International Monetary Fund to block $460 million in humanitarian and medical aid. This means that a population that suddenly had no cash were also deprived of the aid that millions needed for their survival. Teachers, medical workers, and caregivers were among the service providers left penniless. Without foreign aid, the hospital and entire healthcare system are now on the brink of collapse. 

Finally, the U.S. Department of Treasury and the UN Security Council  maintained air tight sanctions against the Taliban, which, after they came to power, meant that any trade with the Afghan government is also now by default illegal. 

These actions are felt even more acutely in Afghanistan considering the outsized role of the United States in the Afghan economy prior to August. Occupations are rarely discussed in economic terms, but this is often their most enduring legacy.  For two decades, the American occupation of Afghanistan WAS the Afghanistan economy.  The war and the military-industrial complex supporting it was by far the largest sector of the Afghan economy. Over twenty years, the U.S. spent nearly $1 trillion dollars in Afghanistan in  a country whose GDP in 2020 was less than $20b. 

Under U.S. occupation there was no functional, independent Afghan economy. There was a faux Afghan economy that the U.S. artificially propped up through a network of contractors and sub-contractors. What we built over 20 years was a large house of cards, or in this case 500 military bases, which has been toppled. This money did not build a nation, but did enrich many Americans who invested in companies like Lockheed Martin and Halliburton.  It also paid for the salaries of the 400,000 members of the Afghan army, plus a slew of contractors and subcontractors employed by the Americans. The Afghan contingent, an estimated millions of people, are now suddenly unemployed, in an economy with no cash and zero job prospects.

This is how you turn a “failed state” into the humanity’s most severe humanitarian crisis. It is an unprecedented economic stranglehold.

I desperately wanted to talk to someone from the private sector of Afghanistan to gain some perspective on how this financial crisis is affecting the main industry still standing in Afghanistan, agriculture. An estimated 70 percent of Afghans live and work in rural areas, mostly on farms, and 61 percent of all households derive income from agriculture. Partly because of the work of USAID and American NGO’s like Roots of Peace, Afghan agricultural exports have increased in recent years. These organizations work to educate Afghan farmers about higher value crops like pomegranates, grapes, and peaches, and provide support for the marketing of these products abroad.

I wondered how some of these entrepreneurs were faring amidst the cash crunch, and ended up connecting with an entrepreneur who runs a juice company out of Kandahar. To protect his identity, I will refer to him as “A.”

A is literally crushing it. He buys 100 metric tons of pomegranates/day which his factories crush into natural, nutritious pomegranate juice. He employs over 300 people and works directly with the farmers growing pomegranates and grapes in the farmlands surrounding Kandahar city. His company packages and sells juice all over the world, with distributors in Saudi Arabia, India, Dubai, Canada, the UK and Europe. For the last 3 years, he has supplied a major multinational corporation with a line of pomegranate juice. In exchange they wired money to his bank account. But now due to the financial crisis he can’t receive money from this company or any other customers. He also cannot pay the salaries of his employees.

“We don't know politics. We are farmers and laborers, with our money stuck in bank --- What we hope and request from the Americans is that they release the people’s money -- it directly affects the normal people here. “ A told me over a Whatsapp call.

Despite the cash crisis, the orders for his 100% natural pomegranate juice keep rolling in. 

“We have customer trust that we have built over 8 years. We are not going to tell them no. Our customers need our product.”

In Kandahar, a medium-sized pomegranate goes for the equivalent of about 15 US cents, but by the time the fruit reach Kabul they cost about three times that. (AFP)

So he’s sending the juice to his customers anyways and is scrambling to open an affiliate office and bank account in Dubai so he can get paid somehow, even though that still won't solve the problem of getting the money to Afghanistan.

“Everywhere we are blocked, from left to right, east to west. This is really hurting us.”

While there is no cash in the country, there is plenty of fruit in the trees. A few weeks ago, a record amount of pomegranates were harvested. Despite the drought it ended up being a bumper crop for pomegranates because of some of the innovations in water management in recent years. Normally in this harvest season, the farmers and laborers reap what they sowed many months ago.

But this year is different.

“Poor people work every day like laborers. They work the whole year and are waiting for it [harvest time] and the season comes and they turn it into cash.  Now they are getting paid partly in cash, but mostly in I.O.U.’s. A is struggling to keep the operation running. He says that he is paying his 300 employees in dribs and drabs.

“We’re trying to pay as much as we can. We’re trying to our best.” he said.

In a sense, Afghanistan has gone from a country of IED’s to a country of IOU’s. But IOU’s can’t be used for food or fuel. A fears the worst for his employees, their families, and all his countrymen.

A told me,

“There is no food, no fire. Many poor people will be dead this winter. ” 

Starving businesses leads to starving people. It is particularly hypocritical for a country like the U.S. to do this, considering that the value so many Americans place on entrepreneurship. How will Afghanistan ever break the cycle of poverty, aid, and terror, if we won’t allow businesses to succeed ?  

So what is the end game for the United States ? Are policy makers thinking that a total collapse of Afghanistan will flush out the Taliban ? Maybe, but I doubt it. If we’ve learned anything from history, it’s that total collapses are exactly the right conditions for terrorist groups to thrive. The Taliban will simply resort to more opium dealing, weapon smuggling and extortion to make their money. The economic attacks will then serve as a scapegoat to help blame the U.S. for all the ills of society, giving the Taliban a free pass to err without culpability. This is a very tired playbook. 

The United States clearly still hasn’t learned several of its most important post 9/11 lessons.

Here’s another one: Don’t provide terrorists a new recruitment base by depriving Muslims of resources and opportunity.

This is precisely what we’re doing in Afghanistan. As we’ve seen time and again in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and even France, poor people are often the most susceptible recruits for jihad. The US is doing a fine job at making Muslims poorer in Afghanistan. This will only make the Taliban stronger. These policies will lead to renewed and more widespread anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world. If that happens, the war on terror will persist for at least another generation.

So the question is, why? Why is the U.S., supposedly the most powerful country in the world, making this calculation in Afghanistan that once again seems likely to backfire? Do policy makers really think the Taliban, a ragtag army of roughly 100,000 men that resisted the U.S. military for 20 years for ideological reasons, are going to suddenly buckle because of some starving children? Is this an act of vengeance? Is it an attempt to restore the perception of American strength after a shameful withdrawal? Or is this simply a horrific lapse of judgement stemming from group think?

We don’t have the answer to any of these questions, yet, but we deserve them.

Here’s another question: Why can’t we let Afghanistan be an independent country, left to succeed or fail on its own merit ? If the Taliban then harm the U.S. or American interests, we will then have every right to use force or measured economic attacks against them. 

I pitched this idea to both A and M. Interestingly, each one said versions of the same thing. They don't want the United States to leave. They also don't resent the United States or the Taliban -- yet. Their ideal outcome is actually for the United States to work with the Taliban as a partner. Their dream is for them to work together. The Taliban have the street credibility and authority to rule Afghanistan, but lack the procedural know-how in running a government and developing the country. They view the U.S. as the ideal advisers for the Taliban in reforming themselves and building their own nation.

As one of them said to me,

“Uneducated people don't know how to run the country. The Americans need to work with the Taliban and show them the right way to run the government. If they stay with us, it will be helpful.  If they leave us in this way, everything will shut down. We will go backwards.”  

I have my doubts about the U.S. and Taliban ever working together, but it’s important for people to understand that this is a popular position of many intelligent and patriotic Afghans. They fear the sovereign rule of either group left to their own devices, and are praying that the U.S. and Taliban can reach some kind of an accord.

Will this economic pressure lead to the Taliban working with the US in a mutually agreeable way to rebuild the country ?

Again, I doubt it. But even if it does somehow work out this way, at what cost ?

Explaining the logic for the freezing of the funds, Marcela Sanchez-Bender, a World Bank spokesperson provided a moral argument, saying, “We are deeply concerned about the situation in Afghanistan and the impact on the country’s development prospects, especially for women.” 

I share her concern. The Taliban are a violent, terrorist organization that has historically deprived Afghans, especially female Afghans of any rights, let alone prospects of development. But the immediate, net effect of the World Bank’s policy is that women will starve on equal footing with men. This is not the kind of equality anyone wants.  

The World Bank’s logic of choosing “development prospects” over meeting the basic nutritional and medical needs of an aid dependent country like Afghanistan --  is twisted and perverse. Development is a long term game, but aid is necessary in the short run in order to reach the stage where meaningful development can occur.  

After 20 years of physical war, “U.S. values” are once again being trumpeted as a front for wholly misguided and amoral U.S. foreign policy calculations in this economic war. This time, we’ve given up the post 9/11 war time slogans of “nation building” and “spreading democracy” and replaced them with “Women’s rights” and “development prospects” as the reasons for risking the lives of innocent Afghans.

The moral case against the United States policies in Afghanistan should be self-evident to any person with a beating heart. 

The gory, visible war of bullets and bombs between the U.S. and the Taliban has been replaced by an invisible economic war that may be even more barbaric. This new phase of war pits the U.S. and the wealthiest countries on Earth against the entire population of Afghanistan, 40 million people.

The old weapons of war, bullets, grenades, and drone strikes, have been replaced by salvos of sanctions, asset seizures, and reduction of humanitarian and medical aid.  These are economic weapons of mass destruction, designed not for precision but for collective punishment.

The simultaneous, orchestrated deployment of these policies against a dysfunctional, aid dependent economy with an already critically vulnerable population, has the potential to be far more disastrous for than 20 years of battle, which took the lives of about 176,000 people. In this war, people don’t die quickly and suddenly from trauma, IED’s, and/or drone strikes, but slowly, from malnutrition, famine and/or disease. 

Setting in motion a set of policies that starves millions of people, regardless of the policy’s purpose, is wrong. 

This U.S. is stooping down to the level of a terrorist organization, playing a sinister geopolitical chess match where all the pawns can get sacrificed if it leads to “victory.” 

It feels absurd to type this, but Afghans are not pawns. They are living, breathing human beings like you and me, with dreams, fears and aspirations for their lives. All of this is on the line right now. 

Certainly President Joe Biden should be held accountable for this economic assault. If the government has a rationale for this that they are not stating, now is the time for transparency. Biden should explain that withdrawal was a smokescreen for our most brutal campaign on Afghanistan to date. Americans need to know the war did not end. In many ways, it got worse.

The news media in the U.S. also needs to do a better job of covering Afghanistan whilst explaining the U.S.’s responsibility in the total breakdown of the country. The American people deserve at the very least the opportunity to judge the potential efficacy and ethics of our policies vis-a-vis Afghanistan. If we don’t change course, this must become a campaign issue for every national political race in 2022 and beyond.

In a welcome sign that this issue is finally getting some attention, 40 House democrats yesterday signed a letter to President Biden and the Treasury department urging them to unfreeze Afghanistan’s funds.

For those Americans hoping to put Afghanistan in the rear view mirror, sorry to disappoint. The poor country thousands of miles away is once again in our path of destruction, and we don’t have a lot of time to change course. For some Afghans too malnourished or sick to survive this winter, it is already too little, too late. But there is still time to save many others by mitigating or reversing our economic assault on the country ASAP. So if you’re an American privileged enough to be able to eat a warm meal with your family this holiday season, first know that you are blessed with tremendous fortune. Then you may want to take a moment to deliver this message to Joe Biden and your elected leaders: Unfreeze Afghanistan.

Many observers noted the obvious parallels to the American departure from Vietnam, particularly the frantic evacuations from Kabul airport which mirrored the Fall of Saigon.

I don’t think anyone has mentioned some of the parallels between Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in August, 2005, which is in some ways, may end up being more of a lesson for the United States in terms of what will come next in Afghanistan.

Visually, many of the scenes of jubilant Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters Gaza in 2005 looked a lot like August 15, 2021 in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan and Gaza are in different world regions with a very unique set of geopolitical forces shaping them. The Gaza Strip is tiny, flat, relatively homogenous compared to the enormous, mountainous, multi-ethnic Afghanistan. However, there are some parallels worth exploring between the way Israel and the U.S. withdrew from these lands, and particularly the groups who filled the vacuum. Here we go:

1. Just like the U.S. in Afghanistan, Israel was losing treasure and lives securing Gaza settlements from constant Hamas attacks. (The obvious difference is that Israel is next door to Gaza, whereas the U.S. is thousands of miles from Afghanistan)

2. Israel decided to withdraw after 38 years occupying the territory. The US did so in Afghanistan after 20 years.

3. These were both unilateral withdrawals. While the U.S. did have an agreement with the Taliban, this was not a land-for-peace deal with a sovereign nation. Historically, these are the only types of withdrawals that have ever led to lasting peace (ie. Israel withdrawing from the Sinai peninsula in to Egypt in exchange for peace).

4. Both Israel and the U.S. knew that the corrupt bureaucrats and unmotivated security forces they trained and installed would not be able to defend the territory for long after withdrawal.

5. More specifically, both the U.S. and Israel knew these lands would fall into the hands of their Jihadi enemies. The only question decision makers wondered was how long it would take. (It appears the U.S. was caught by surprise at how quickly the Taliban managed to take over so much of Afghanistan. Israel was less surprised when Hamas took complete control over Gaza in 2007).

   The final parallels remain to be seen.

   If Afghanistan follows Gaza, what will come next will be a particularly brutal and gruesome battle for total control of the reins of government and the economy. I sincerely hope the Taliban will be open to some kind of a power sharing agreement, but I am skeptical.

   Hamas waited patiently and politely for Israel to close the gates on Gaza, which we see the Taliban doing now. As soon as the last Israeli soldier left, the civil war began. Hamas targeted Fatah fighters who they believed were complicit in the occupation, throwing them off of buildings or shooting their kneecaps. I produced a video about this brutal campaign for Time, which you can view here. The fighting peaked in June 2007, when more than 100 Palestinians were killed with more than 500 wounded in what became known as the “Battle for Gaza.”

   Hamas won the battle and replaced the security state under Israeli/Fatah control with an Islamofascist state, under total Hamas control. They instituted an extreme version of Shariah law. Women lost many basic rights, journalists lost their freedom to speak, dissidents lost their ability to protest, homosexuals lost their ability to love freely, and religious minorities lost their ability to worship. Many liberal-minded people with means fled Gaza. Many of those who remain live in a state of fear, anxiety, and depression. Suicide rates have risen sharply. The wars with Israel continue. In each war, civilians and children pay the worst price. According to one study, 91% of children in Gaza are suffering from PTSD. There has not been a democratic election in 15 years.

What will the future be for Afghanistan under the Taliban for those who do not support Islamic fundamentalism ?

Will the U.S. be fighting the Taliban again ?

If Gaza under Hamas is any indication, the answers to the above questions are “bleak” and “yes.”

The clear lesson here is that nations with vastly more powerful armies and ample resources should not occupy lands with guerrilla forces unless they either have a clear exit plan, or the will to permanently govern it.

The U.S. should have learned this lesson in Vietnam. But we didn’t. And now we’re back at square one.

George W. Bush’s first of two ill conceived wars, escalated by Obama, abandoned by Trump, is now winding down thanks to Biden.

American partisans and pundits will undoubtedly seek to pin this catastrophe on Biden or Trump. The truth is that neither of them are responsible. This was an inherited mess, initiated by George W. Bush, made worse by Barack Obama. The war was lost the minute the U.S. decided we can nation build in a nation that looks nothing like a Western democracy.

What should the U.S. have done on September 12th, 2001 ?

Something different, clearly. First, we needed to clearly define the problem. Remember, the enemy is not a person or group, but an ideology. The majority of the Taliban fighters who just marched into Kabul were born after 2001. They are 18, 19, 20 years old. The Taliban knows how to reach, inspire and educate the youth. This is the original problem. Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban are more effective recruiters than the U.S. army.

So what is the solution? Surgical strikes against known terrorists, mitigating collateral damage. No ground troops, no nation building. Less military force in general, and much, much more soft power. A different type of propaganda that can travel at the speed and in the language of the internet. Mobile video, memes, and social media is the more important battleground. Soft power that speaks all 40 different Afghan languages and can relate to Muslims. No support for corrupt, puppet governments or armies. More support of education, local businesses, and moderate Islamic social programs and institutions.

We should have deployed some version of these tools 20 years ago. These are also the tools we will still need moving forward, assuming the Taliban of 2021 act like the Taliban of the 1990’s, or Hamas of 2007.

Our foreign policy in Central Asia and the Middle East has largely failed, and the truth is that both parties are to blame. Our 8 year-long war in Iraq brought ISIS into the world, destabilized Iraq and Syria, and bolstered Iran. Our 20 year-long war in Afghanistan emboldened the Taliban, while empowering Russia and China. The principle lesson should be crystal clear. Military occupation is fertile ground for Islamic fundamentalism. The U.S. could have just consulted with Israel.

To see how it all went down in Gaza, here is that updated link to my film, Disengagement. It was removed last month from Amazon Prime for no apparent reason, with very short notice. I have since put the entire 90 minute film on Youtube, where you can watch it in its entirety for free.

This is the dark, grainy image I can’t seem to get out of my head. It depicts the long, skinny outstretched arm of Jonah Handler draped over the shoulder of a a fire rescue worker. Jonah is the 15 year old, Champlain South Tower resident and high school baseball player who was buried underneath concrete and rebar from his own apartment building. Bystanders heard him screaming, “Don’t leave me, don’t leave me.” They alerted rescuers who pulled him out, astonishingly, with no serious injuries.

Like the biblical parable of the reluctant Hebrew prophet Jonah, who emerged alive from the belly of the large fish on the shores of Nineveh, Jonah Handler was pulled from the bowels of his own building on the shores of Miami.  His mother, Stacey Fang, tragically did not survive and became the first known casualty of the Champlain disaster.  How Jonah Handler survived and emerged unscathed after a ten story drop from a building that pancaked into itself is probably the closest thing I’ve seen to a miracle in my lifetime.  

97 other people, tragically, were not so lucky, when the beach-facing half of the Champlain South Building on 88th and Collins in Surfside collapsed at 1:30am on June 25th, 2021. Many of its inhabitants, I imagine, were sleeping just before their building entombed them under 13 floors of concrete. Investigators are still putting the puzzle pieces together to figure out how and why this horrific calamity happened.

Dying in your home, in your bed, under your covers, in your sleep because your building collapsed is not the way anyone should die in the wealthiest country on Earth. In an era where Covid-19 has ravished so many communities across the world, it is as unjust as it gets. It was also an unimaginable fate. With a thunderous crash, that changed. A new fear, a new nightmare, penetrated our collective psyches. For those of us who call Miami home, this incident became an overnight trauma. For those who had friends or had loved ones that perished that night, it is hard to conceive of a more unfair ending.

Death from building collapse is extremely rare, but there are places in the world where it is more common. Very little publicly available data exists on the subject. I found an incomplete list of building collapses in the world on Wikipedia, which includes those buildings who collapsed due to an extreme weather event or act of war.

I remember while reporting in Egypt I was told that I shouldn’t trust old apartment buildings or elevators. It turns out this was no urban legend. A day after the Champlain fell, a building collapsed in the coastal city of Alexandria, Egypt, that killed 5 women and injuring a 70 year old woman. Just a couple months earlier, on March 27th, a nine-story residential building collapsed in Cairo, killing 25 people. Somehow, a 6 month old baby survived. Building collapses are common enough in Egypt that someone built the website, Egyptianbuildingcollapses.org, which has sourced data on 392 building collapses since 2012, resulting in 824 homeless families, 379 injured people, and 192 deaths. All are attributed to either bad planning or poor government regulation, or both.

Clearly there is a common set of variables which have led to a pattern of dangerous building collapses in Egypt. The question I’m grappling with is whether a similar set of variables are also at play in Miami. In one singular event, Miami-Dade (population 2.7m) already has nearly half the number of deaths from building collapses as Egypt (population = 100m) had in a decade.

Now that the bodies have been recovered, the important question is: How do we prevent the next one? We hope to learn more as the forensic engineers complete their investigation, which may take months. But we can learn sooner from the glaring human errors on the part of the Condo association and Town of Surfside that needlessly endangered the lives of residents, regardless of whether these missteps were the main contributing factor that led to the collapse.  We should also immediately delve into the existing systems and incentives for keeping buildings structurally safe in Miami, which appear to be as rotten as the bowels of so many of our buildings. 

Some people assume that the Champlain collapse was a “black swan” event that will likely not reoccur in our lifetimes. This is a dangerous, flawed assumption. In order for the Champlain collapse to be a true anomaly, there must have been something extraordinary about this particular building. Thus far into the investigation, there is scant evidence to support this belief.

There certainly may have been a special factor or factors that contributed to the demise of the Champlain. Perhaps it was the gradual sinking of the building due to land subsidence, the construction happening next door at 87 Park, a potential construction flaw, or the deferred maintenance of the building? It could be that a “perfect storm” of multiple factors led to this catastrophe.

What is significant and troublesome for Miami building dwellers is that none of these known potential factors are unique to the Champlain South. There are sinkholes underneath other Miami buildings. There is construction happening all over Miami. There are many poorly constructed and neglected buildings all over Miami.

This incorrect assumption flies in the face of Miami’s history of building collapses. It also ignores the mounting evidence coming to light about so many other buildings in South Florida whose structural integrity is currently deemed questionable by professional engineers. Just 22 days after the Champlain catastrophe, an apartment building’s roof partially collapsed in Miami Dade county. Fortunately, nobody was killed. Miami-Dade’s own courthouse was shut down for safety concerns after inspectors found structural issues on several floors. There were 3 other condo buildings evacuated in Miami Dade County since the Champlain fell. There were another 14 buildings on the docket of the Miami-Dade Unsafe Structures Board meeting in July. The Miami Herald reported that there was a backlog of more than 1,000 unsafe structure cases in Miami Dade that had still not evaluated at the time of the Champlain’s collapse.

The reality is that the Champlain South was the weakest link in a long chain of corroded, potentially dangerous buildings in Miami Dade.

Since the collapse of the Champlain one month ago, I’ve spoken to dozens of residents, condo board members, engineers, and city officials in Surfside, Bal Harbour, and Miami Beach who provide some of the background information I used in writing this piece. Some sources and information must remain anonymous. My goal in writing this is not to point fingers but rather frame the debate we need to have as a society to better protect human lives. I may be prescriptive at times about solutions, but they are not necessarily correct and are certainly no panacea. My main message here is that it’s not enough to say “Never Again.” In order to truly honor the memories of those whose lives were lost, protect the lives of millions of people, we need to ask the right questions, hold negligent parties accountable, and make swift changes.  

THE CHAMPLAIN SOUTH

As a starting point, let’s dive in to what we know about the Champlain South.

The Champlain South Tower was developed in 1981 by Nathan Reiber, Canadian lawyer who fled to Florida after he was charged for tax evasion from his coin-operated laundry business. According to several sources, Reiber paid off Surfside government officials in exchange for code exemptions, like building a 12th floor which was above the building height restriction at the time.  The engineering firm hired to inspect and certify the Champlain South was Breiterman, Jurado & Associates, the same firm who certified a Coral Gables parking garage that “leaked” and “developed cracks due to a dangerous construction flaw.” In 2001, a tenant sued the Champlain South condo association over water damage in her unit, which she alleged was coming in through a cracked outside wall.  In 2015, another resident sued the association for leaks coming through her “lanai unit” on the pool level of the building. The association settled with the tenant in 2018. 

In October of that year, an engineering consultant named Frank Morabito, inspected the Champlain South building and produced a report on the state of the building. He documented “major structural damage” to the concrete slab below the pool deck and “abundant” cracking and crumbling of the columns, beams and walls under the building.  This is what is known as  concrete spalling, or “concrete cancer,” which is an erosion of concrete and rebar that is prevalent in seaside construction. Morabito wrote that “most of the concrete deterioration needs to be repaired in a timely fashion.”

This report was delivered to the board of the Champlain South Condo Association on October 8, 2018. A month later, on November 13, 2018, they submitted the report to the Town of Surfside. Two days after that, on November 15, 2018, the Champlain board met. They invited a guest speaker to the meeting, a man by the name of Ross Prieto, Building Official of the Town of Surfside.  

What we know about this board meeting based on the publicly released minutes can be described at best, as a stunning level of incompetence. At worst, it amounts to a shocking cover up. The board stated that Morabito’s report had been reviewed by Mr. Prieto who according to the minutes, “determined the necessary data was collected and it appears the building is in very good shape.”

Very good shape, huh?

The board then went on to approve their 2019 annual budget of $1,329,431.00.  This figure was way short of the estimated $9m needed to fix the structural problems in the building.  It is not clear how these funds were allocated.  

It is not clear if any of the residents of the Champlain South were made aware of the details of Morabito’s report at any point before April 2021, when the new board president Jean Wodnicki sent a letter to residents referencing it and warning residents that “concrete deterioration is accelerating.”   Wodnicki actually seems like a highly effective board member. She was transparent about the 2018 report, the current state of the building, and the plan to remedy the structural problems. The next challenge for the Champlain Towers was how to pay for these necessary repairs, which had ballooned from $9m in 2018 to more than $16m in 2021. The building had only $707,003 in cash on hand.  They were looking into financing at the time of the collapse.  

Unfortunately, it was too little, too late.

Why did the Condo association board bury the 2018 Morabito report? Did they misread the engineering report or did they just not want to foot the bill ?

Why did the Town of Surfside assist in this burial ?

As the lawsuits fly in, these answers may become apparent.

NONSENSICAL, IMAGINARY REGULATIONS

Miami-Dade County Section 8-11 (f) is a county statute that "requires buildings at age 40 with 11 or more tenants to be inspected structurally for the first time, and then it requires recertification every 10 years after that. What typically happens is that buildings get notified by the county at some point AFTER their 40th anniversary, and then they technically have 90 days for a professional engineer to certify in writing that the building is structurally and electrically safe.  Then, if something is found to be unsafe, they have to fix it within 150 days.

The truth is that nothing about this code is actually grounded in reality.  It’s a make-believe law with make-believe timelines. Sources in several municipalities have told me that a “shockingly high percentage” of buildings over 40 in Miami Dade County still have not been re-certified. This happens for several reasons. Buildings typically wait for their notice to begin the process of inspecting their buildings. Sometimes the county sends out the notices late. 90 days is a reasonable window to get the written assessment back, but if the building is in bad shape, which is the case for so many Miami-Dade buildings, it is impossible to raise the money, get the permits, and then bring the buildings up to code with a “full remediation” within 150 days.  So what ends up happening is that buildings drag their feet well beyond 40 years, exposing their residents to potential risk along the way.  It is a logical first step that political leaders like Mayor Daniela Cava Levine of Miami-Dade are auditing the re-certification process for buildings 40 and over to make sure the buildings are compliant and safe.  But this is just the county doing its actual, damn job.  It’s a shame that it took nearly 100 dead for the city and county to think code compliance around building safety mattered.

Americans typically get to see a doctor for check ups every year. Buildings inspect elevators every year.  Why do our buildings only get inspected for “concrete cancer” and other life threatening ailments every 40 years ?

40 years is a great amount of time for the aging of a fine wine or for the ancient Hebrews to wander the Sinai desert. I’m no engineer, but 40 years strikes me as an absurdly long amount of time for a building on the beach to get its first inspection.   I’m not sure what the new limit should be, but if we’re optimizing for saving human lives rather than property values, it should be a very conservative number. 10 years feels much more appropriate than 40 years. Imagine if the Champlain was required to be inspected and fully re-certified in 1991, 2001, and 2011. Would it still have collapsed in 2021?

I posed this question in an interview with an actual civil engineer. Ben Messerschmidt, P.E., is a native South Floridian who operates Epic Forensics and Engineering, which specializes in the structural certifications of buildings in Florida. He told me,

“Buildings don’t have voices but they like to tell you what’s going on. Cracks can be innocent, or more telling that there is a structural loss.”

If buildings cracks can tell you about the health of a building, shouldn’t we examine them more often? Bear in mind that the cost of the inspection of the Champlain South would have cost less than $20,000 in today’s market. In 1991, it would have cost significantly less. There’s no good financial reason for these buildings to wait 40 years to get their first inspection. Paying the hefty repair bills that could follow such an inspection is another story. It seems like that is the reason the condo associations defer the inspections. Knowing the truth means that money will have to go out of pockets. So the idea is to kick the can as far down the road as possible.

Furthermore and most alarmingly, the 40- year recertification statute does nothing to ensure the safety of those living in older buildings that were constructed prior to the strengthening of the building codes in 1992 after Hurricane Andrew, that are not yet 40. In other words, buildings aged 30-39, essentially any building constructed during Miami’s drug fueled construction boom, are probably in the highest risk category right now because they may have been built using the same standards as the Champlain and may never have had any meaningful inspections. They need to be inspected and re-certified for safety immediately. The Champlain, built in 1981, had known “major structural damage” at the age of 37. It was technically still compliant with the 40 year code when it crumbled before its 41st birthday.  That fact alone should be the nail in the coffin for this ridiculous, rotten statute.

CORRUPTION

The challenge is that even if we emerge with a more reasonable statute, we need to appoint officials that enforce it.  Laws are only as good as the politicians and city officials are incorruptible. In the Banana Republic of Miami, corrupt and government go together like rice and beans. 

This is particularly true in the construction industry, where bribery and kickbacks are the norm.  The former top building official in Miami Beach, Mariano Fernandez was sentenced to two years of house arrest after striking a plea deal for accepting handouts from hoteliers. Fernandez was not the exception. He was the rule.  Andres Villareal, another building official from Miami Beach went to prison for 18 months after pleading guilt to two counts of unlawful compensation.  He was one of 3 separate Miami Beach building officials admitted to accepting bribes in exchange for permits in a 3 year period.

The construction company Munilla Construction Management, or MCM, has received nearly $150 million in government contracts since 2011, despite the fact that former Miami mayor, Carlos Gimenez, who oversaw many of those contracts, has two sons who have worked for the firm, and his wife Lourdes is a cousin of the owners, the Munilla brothers.  MCM contributed to Gimenez’s campaigns and then his son worked to lobby his government for contracts, which were often (surprise) won by MCM.  This overt and shameless racket resulted in an ethics commission which was effectively a slap on the wrist for Gimenez who is now a Republican representative of Florida’s 26th district in the House. MCM was also the firm who oversaw the construction of the pedestrian bridge at FIU that collapsed and killed 6 people. The firm was fined for its role in the collapse, filed for bankruptcy protection, yet (surprise, again), emerged from the ashes to win more lucrative government contracts, including a Miami International Airport job worth $70m. 

The construction of the top floors of the Champlain South and North that were built in violation of code, yet somehow became legal, is par for the course in Miami.

Remember, Ross Prieto, the building official who certified the Champlain South to be “in very good shape” ? He worked in Miami Beach for a stint, and has bounced around to many different Miami municipalities.  In 1997, he was the assistant director of building and zoning in Miami Shores when the Biscayne Kennel Club prematurely collapsed on workers during a demolition project, killing two brothers. 

Somehow, he also kept getting jobs. See the pattern here?

Most recently, Prieto worked as a private contractor for C.A.P. Government, a private firm that appointed him the building official in Doral, where he is currently taking a leave of absence. Did you read that carefully ? It turns out the government doesn’t even do its own inspections in Miami. They outsource it to private firms, who then hire contractors like Prieto and pay them $77.50/hour, according to public records, to inspect our buildings for safety. This means that the public interest of safety is being outsourced to private firms whose main agenda is profit. It’s easy to see how this can lead to conflicts of interest. 

Should our safety be outsourced to incompetent contractors that seem to never be held accountable for failing? Should building officials who serve the public be hired guns from private for-profit firms? If municipalities can’t afford to hire a qualified inspector for $77/hour to protect their residents, it seems like there may be a bigger problem here.

If government cannot be trusted to keep condo residents safe, who can be? 

CONDO ASSOCIATION (MIS)MANAGEMENT

Half of all Floridians, nearly 11 million people, live in in a condo. There are nearly 50,000 registered condo or homeowners associations in the state that was largely built by strip mall and condo developers.  We need to better protect residents from incompetent, negligent, or dangerously frugal condominium associations. 

Condos are also not what they used to be.  I remember as a teenager, one of my first summer hustles was trying to do maintenance work for people who were out of town most of the year. I printed thousands of flyers and put them up on condos between Xmas and New Years trying to get customers. I got one phone call from those thousand flyers. The person told me they don’t need my services. Any problems they have they will deal with when they get back to the condo next December. 

This is how it was. Florida condos were nearly completely empty in summer. Suddenly around Thanksgiving you start to see the Quebec, Ontario, and New York license plates and you know that the  “snowbirds” are in town.  This means lots of traffic, lobster-pink sunburns, and no early reservations left at most restaurants. “Snowbirds” are typically wealthy individuals who often spend just a few weeks per year in their unit, which is their 2nd, 3rd, or 4th home.  

What’s changed is that there are native Floridian and Latin American birds co-mingling with the “snowbirds” in condos now.  Partially due to the housing crunch in South Florida, which has led to astronomically high prices for single family homes in Miami, you see more and more young families choosing to buy condos and live in them year round. But many Florida condos are still controlled by the legacy owners who only live in Florida a few weeks a year.  These are often the people making decisions that affect the lives of people who live in the condo year round.  The problem is that “Snowbirds”, who view the condo more as an investment than a home, do not share the same incentives as people who sleep in their unit every night of the year.  If you view a condo as an investment property your decision-making framework will be financially motivated, and will not be as focused on quality of life or safety considerations.  Decision makers who are not on site are also less likely to understand the day to day problems occurring in the building.

I met up with a couple residents of a Bal Harbour condo, both middle aged dads with wives and young children living year round in a building just about a mile up the street from the Champlain South. 6 days after the Champlain fell, no engineer had come by to inspect their building, and they had some concerns about disrepair in their garage. They had at that point no information about the safety of their structure from the city, or our own association. So they invited me to see the garage. They don’t wish to reveal the name of the building since, in his words of one of them, “I don’t like to shit where I eat.” The other resident said, “It will kill the property values if this goes public.”

What we saw in the garage shocked us. There is widespread concrete corrosion, exposed rebar, giant cracks, leaks, flooded areas, damp spots in concrete, mysterious condensation in concrete, and rusted pipes throughout. Some of the worst areas were right underneath the pool deck, the place believed to be the first point of failure at the Champlain. 

Bear in mind that this condo, like many buildings in the area, has a mandatory valet service.  Residents are not allowed to park their own cars, which means they never actually get to see their own underground garages. Some of the most vital structural components of these massive buildings are hidden from plain sight. It is likely that most residents had no idea that this is the state of their own building.

According to numerous building employees I spoke with, including the property manager, these issues have been prevalent for years. It is not clear if anyone on the board was aware of the issues. The president and vice-president of the board both live in Canada and as of July 21, 2021, had not stepped foot in the building in at least 18 months. As this resident said to me,

"These guys are managing this building from thousands of miles away. How can they be responsible for the safety of my children when they don’t even sleep in the building?”

Absentee board members, with different incentives, running their condos from a distance, certainly seems like recipe for mismanagement and negligence.  To ensure better outcomes for these buildings, perhaps government should require condominium owners to reside at least 6 months per year in the condominium in order to serve as a director in a condo association.

We also need to drastically improve the transparency for residents about the state of their buildings and all inspection reports that pertain to safety. The law should require structural, mechanical, and electrical inspection reports be publicly available data, regardless of whether they are submitted to the city. That will protect residents, owners, tenants, and potential buyers from living in or purchasing condos in derelict buildings.  It will also prevent the obfuscation of relevant information from residents to save money on needed maintenance or to artificially prop up the value of their properties, at the expense of new buyers or renters.  Disclosure of information about human safety should be available to all.

Finally, we should be questioning whether we should put complex, life or death engineering decisions in the hands of volunteer condo boards with no requisite background in engineering and, often no willingness or ability to shell out money.  Should volunteer boards with financial motives and no engineering experience be responsible for overseeing engineering plans that pertain to public safety ?

Perhaps cities should consider requiring an oversight committee of certified engineers with no financial interests in these buildings to advise them on making engineering hires and analyze engineering reports professionally. 

Some additional protections for residents could be provided by the private sector.  Insurance companies are already demanding tougher inspections, and hopefully this will also lead to inspections that come before the fifth decade of a building’s life.  It would be great to see a real estate marketplace app that not only lists condos for sale, but also provides historical inspection reports and independent, verified reviews of the associations by owners.  That way a potential buyer or tenant can see for themselves how trustworthy and competent an association is before they put their lives in their hands. (Yes, this was a free business idea for all the recent arrivals to Miami’s start up scene, or maybe just a new feature on Zillow).

The honeymoon for associations and corrupt government officials operating in cahoots with one another, producing fictitious board meeting minutes that hide the dangerous reality from residents, must end now.

TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS

In its listing on Condos.com, the Champlain South Tower was described as “an idyllic location directly on the pristine beach, with a gorgeous vista of the Atlantic Ocean”.   The marketing language boasts “light-filled open floor plans”, “over-sized balconies,” and a “luxury high-rise lifestyle”.  It mentions the shared perks like a swimming pool, a fitness center, a spa, a sauna, a business center, and of course, access to a private beach.  It is sold the same way Miami Beach has always been sold. A private paradise. An escape. A warm place in the sun.

But owning a slice of paradise on the barrier island of Miami Beach comes with costs and risks that don’t make it into the ad copy. A building may be in violation of code, structurally unsafe, or have special assessments due that make the actual price much larger than you see on Condos.com. Shared fiduciary responsibilities are swept under the rug or perpetually deferred.

What is happened in the Champlain appears to be a tragedy of the commons.  This is the root problem underlying many of the greatest conflicts facing humanity, including the environmental crisis. The definition, according to Wikipedia, is as follows: “If there is a common area, individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, will act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action.”  It is the moral lesson at the heart of the prescient Dr. Seuss book, The Lorax.  Individuals or nation states tend to act in their own self interests, at the expense of the greater good, until there is no greater good left.  

The tragedy of the commons is the reason that our shared seas are overfished and our shared lands are overdeveloped. It is also the primary reason condos fall into disrepair and neglect. Everyone wants to receive the public benefits of their condo life, the beautiful shared views and amenities like the pool, spa, and beach. But nobody wants to personally foot the bill themselves. The dreaded “special assessments,” the additional charges to pay for repairs or renovations of the condos, compile as nobody wants to pay for things that benefit everybody. It’s a perplexing aspect of human nature, much more akin to our primate cousins than an intelligent, rational creature that prioritizes long term survival. But it is hard to deny that this part of the way humans are wired. Given that humans will take, take, take until there is nothing left, shouldn’t we protect ourselves from our own nature? Shouldn’t there be a stricter set of laws governing these associations that so often repeat this dangerous behavior pattern?

We know that once the truth about the repair costs came to light at the Champlain South, residents could not all agree to pay $80-$200K in fees per unit owner.

Shouldn’t condos be required to maintain reserves ? Perhaps the amount can be commensurate with the age of the building, or the time that has lapsed since an inspection, with a larger factor if the building is on the beach ? Alternatively, there could be a statute requiring any structural or safety related  “special assessments” be automatically prioritized and paid for in a timely fashion (less than 3 months?). If not, entire buildings should be condemned. Work it out, or everybody loses. Some, hopefully non-corrupt government body can step in to seize the assets of any bad apples who refuse to pay for required maintenance.  Banks and financial services companies can of course get in on the action to finance “special assessments” for those who cannot afford them. Opportunity can come out of this crisis.

THE REAL PRICE TAG OF LIVING WITH MOTHER NATURE

The silent, unnamed accomplice of the Champlain tragedy is Mother Nature herself. For a building to exist in Miami Beach it must commit to a long term, war of attrition against a truly formidable foe, Mother Nature.  She is fierce, relentless, and has many different weapons in her arsenal.  Salty air, rain, wind, and seawater corrode ultimately consume everything in their path.  Every single day that you don’t maintain your structure is another day you are losing in this war.  

“You’re getting blasted with chlorides from the salt laden air every single day. Anything that’s rubber will start to get more brittle sooner. Concrete is porous, so you’re going to get the chlorides interacting with that embedded steel sooner rather than later, which leads to cracks and steel expansion and spalling,” Ben Messerschmidt, P.E. told me in an interview.

Messerschmidt is a structural and forensic engineer who regularly inspects these buildings by the beach, recommends a more regular maintenance regimen for coastal buildings.

“I consider these properties on the Beach to be, essentially, marinas with condos on top of it. In a marine environment, as cracks widen, the amount of water that gets in increases. Remember that over time, water carves through mountains. In this environment, structural loss grows exponentially if nothing is done.”

People often assume Miami Beach, including Surfside and Bal Harbour, is a contiguous part of Miami, but if you look at it from above you see that it is not geographically connected to the continental U.S. It is a barrier island designed by nature to absorb large volumes of sea water from tidal surges, in order protect the mainland, the city of Miami, from storms and waves.  Historically, it did so with large sand dunes, native grasses, and porous limestone rock called oolite on the eastern side. On the western side of the island, you have wetlands and swampy mangroves which are filled with sinkholes. To make way for condos and hotels, the natural design of the barrier island was decimated. Concrete and cement do not provide much protective functionality for the rest of the city.  It was a questionable long term decision to develop Miami Beach in this way, but alas, Miami followed the money. 

Here’s a little secret realtors will not tell you: Miami Beach is constantly, dangerously eroding. Yes, that’s right. The giant mound of sand that props up the entire barrier island is losing its own foundation. Over the years, I’ve witnessed the land disappear in certain stretches until there’s barely any beach left and the tide starts smacking into the outer walls of buildings. Eventually, the US Army Corps of Engineers get called in to dredge. In their last big project, they poured enough sand to fill 800,000 cubic yards of land where the beach used to be.  According to Elizabeth Wheaton, assistant director of environment sustainability for the City of Miami Beach, “we’ll always need to re-nourish our beaches.”  “Re-nourish” is a euphemism for “artificially re-construct”.  In order for Miami Beach to continue to exist, it will need constant reconstructive surgery.

The bigger, related problem for Miami Beach is that the “marine environment” is only getting more marine. Flooding, the most costly weather event for Americans, costing on average $4.6 billion per year, is getting worse and more frequent in Miami Beach. Flooding can happen from rain water, high tides, and/or storms. Miami Beach has already invested $500m to retrofit pumps and build sea walls, but is far from solving the issue.

Miami, and particularly Miami Beach, is extremely vulnerable. We have more capital and infrastructure at risk from climate change than any city on Earth.  With each passing day, the war against Mother Nature becomes less winnable, and more costly.  Given what scientists claim will happen to the shoreline of Miami over the next twenty years, with roughly another foot of sea water swallowing the land, how much money will have to be spent to keep Miami Beach inhabitable ?

Imagine if sea levels continue to rise at the same, or greater rate. What will the price tag be to keep people living safely in Miami Beach be over the next 100 years ?

We’ve probably invested too much to quit the cash cow that is Miami Beach, but we need to understand the effects of the decision to keep investing here. Clearly, engineers will continue to profit. According to Messerschmidt, “This is the kind of stuff engineers dream about. Whether there are levees like in New Orleans or perhaps even building another barrier island, we’re going to have to engineer something to keep people here 100 years from now.”

WHO IS LOSING ?

As the Florida’s coastal population surges, developers and engineers are clearly winning. The question is, who is losing in this equation? Here’s a clue. It’s not the insurance companies.

Insurance companies are been bailing on Florida since Hurricane Irma. The Champlain catastrophe is only making them more squeamish. As Adam Lopatin, senior vice president at USI Insurance Services, told the New York Times, “It all comes down to profitability for the insurance companies. And right now, writing business in Florida is not profitable.” Unless premiums skyrocket, it will never be profitable to insure coastal Florida.

The only insurance company still writing homeowners in many parts of Florida, including Miami Beach and most of coastal Miami, is Citizens, the state insurance company supported by Florida tax payers, who step in when private companies refuse to write policies in a specific area. This “insurance company of last resort” is now the only option in much of coastal Florida. Citizens is now writing more policies in Florida than any other private carrier.

Let’s break this down in simple English: Insurance companies, which specialize in risk assessment, have looked at historic data and used it to infer future projection models, which unanimously deem it too risky to write policies in much of Florida.

Citizens is not a real, private insurance company. It is the Florida state government posing as an insurance company. This means that Florida taxpayers are the backstop in case of catastrophic events. In other words, any poor decisions made by this generation have the potential to bankrupt our own children and grandchildren. Future Florida taxpayers are effectively writing our own pseudo insurance policies now. It’s a gamble that no private companies are willing to take, but is forced on Florida tax payers. This too should be up for debate.

Why should future Florida tax payers foot the insurance bill for private developers and wealthy snowbirds to profit off of our shared resources now?

We can’t turn back the clock on the decisions made in the past, but there should be a public state-wide debate about any future development in flood zones given the rising seas, the rising costs, and the uninsurability of these buildings. It’s a financial disaster waiting to happen, with a ton of risk and no upside for average Floridians. This is how disaster capitalism works, preying on poor and middle class with no meaningful exposure for the smaller demographic of wealthy people who can afford to own properties in coastal Florida.

REDEMPTION

“Look at the castles!” my 4 year old son exclaimed, peering out the window from his car seat, as we drove up Collins Avenue. After returning back to civilization after 5 months living in an Airstream in national and state parks, he marveled at the 16, 20, 25, 30, floor condominiums that stretch for miles from South Beach all the way up to Sunny Isles, like a row of tightly packed dominos. Growing up in North Miami Beach in the 1980’s, I watched these buildings sprout up before my eyes, with names like Bellini, Acqualina, and Trump Towers, blocking the sight of one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world. My son had no idea there was even a beach behind these buildings. All he could think of were Elsa’s gigantic ice castles from the animated film, “Frozen.”

After stints in NYC and San Francisco, my family and I moved back to Miami in late 2020 and temporarily moved into a “castle” in Bal Harbour while we are renovating our house. This is my first time living in a condo. I jog past the Champlain often and we are connected to several people who either escaped from, or who perished in the building that night.

Like our whole community, we are feeling the trauma of this event. We were shocked to see a building we’ve known for years turned into a smoldering heap of rubble. Seeing the yellow emergency tape and the media scrum from all over the world in our local beach felt surreal.

Living on the 11th floor of an older building a mile away from the Champlain has certainly added a source of anxiety that we’ve never known before. We inspected our own garage and are actively pushing our association to fix any potential structural issues. It seems that progress is being made but we are still admittedly uneasy about building life. For a couple weeks, we didn’t hear our wind chimes or the ocean breezes at night. Every creak of the building or bolt of thunder jolted us out of bed. Immediately after the tragedy, all we heard were sirens; hundreds of ambulances, fire rescue, police, emergency vehicles, and eventually, President Biden’s motorcade whizzed by on Collins Avenue just below us. From our balcony at dawn we watched the fleets of dump trucks driving south empty.  They drove back north at sunset, filled to the brim with debris from the Champlain. For so many nights, we prayed for miracles for the families of our neighbors who had loved ones missing. Now we pray for their comfort.

I keep thinking about Jonah Handler. How did he survive? How is he doing? What will he make of this event once he grows up ? I think about the story of his namesake, Jonah the prophet, read by Jews on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The story focuses on the city of Nineveh, which is described as a large and corrupt city. G-d asks Jonah to warn them to change their ways and save the city from his wrath. Jonah initially resists his mission, tries to escape by boat, when ultimately G-d steps in with a big storm. Jonah resists again and tries to commit suicide by jumping in the water.

“And the LORD prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” - Maftir Yonah (The Bible) 

G-d eventually sends in the big guns, or in this case, a big fish to swallow Jonah and escort him to Nineveh.  Inside the dark, belly of the sea creature, Jonah ultimately accepts his fate as a prophet. He is spit up on the shores of Nineveh, where he warns the people that G-d will destroy their city if they don’t change their ways in 40 days or less.

Miami, in some ways, is Nineveh. We are a large city plagued by corruption.  We myopically developed land needed to protect people from Mother Nature.  We greedily sold it at a price that hides the true cost.  We selfishly refused to pay for our own neighbors to live safely. We optimized for short term gains over human safety.

But Miami, in some ways, is not Niniveh. We put everything on hold to find people in the rubble, calling in the best teams in the world to try and help. We rallied together as one community after this tragedy, raising millions of dollars for the survivors and families of the victims.  We all knew someone who knew someone in the building that night. We honored them in large and small ways.

The question, for Miami’s future, is which version of our city will prevail. Will we be a city that prioritizes safety and the common good ? Or will we continue to allow corruption and private interests to continue to threaten us all ?

In the biblical story of Jonah, G-d says, “Should not I have pity on Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand?”

Miami, after the Champlain, can no longer depend on G-d’s pity.

For Jonah Handler, for the families of the men, women, or children whose lives were tragically cut short, and for the millions of people who continue to live and work and dream in Miami, we must redeem ourselves at the speed of Nineveh.

Watching the film was no let down. On the contrary, it was a much needed injection of cinematic bliss. In a year of pandemic, lockdowns, police shootings, and riots in the US, this film provided an escape to a different world, one that exists apart from news cycles. Like all great films, it is quite hard to categorize and operates on a couple different levels. On the one hand, it’s the soulful portrait of a man searching for fulfillment. It then morphs into a kind of cross-species love story, set in a fragile, enchanted place, the Great African Sea Forest.

The film is an ode to this otherworldly place. This literal forest under the sea. An octopus garden patrolled by pyjama sharks and translucent jellyfish. A place of magic, shrouded in mystery. Where the sunlight pierces through the icy waters, revealing dancing drapes of emerald green kelp. To me, the place felt foreign, yet familiar. The coast off of Cape Town inhabits a special place in my heart. My late grandparents’ home was a block from the sea in Sea Point. I spent large chunks of my childhood within the range of that ocean spray and mist that covers Cape Town like a wet blanket. I can still remember the briny, fishy smell of it. In the days before Ipads and Ipods, my brothers and I played for hours in the rocky tide pools near Saunders Rocks, our imaginations ablaze. We climbed Lion’s Head and Table Mountain so many times, looking down on that intersection of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, wondering about the creatures below.

For Craig Foster, this place was a sanctuary.

In it, he befriended a single, solitary sentient being, an octopus. I couldn’t believe the actual relationship he was able to form with a cephalopod. I’ve been diving since age 14 and have seen many octopuses in the wild, but the encounters never lasted very long. This was like no octopus I’ve seen before.

The encounters between Foster and the octopus will change the way you think about these intelligent and emotional 8-armed magicians. I watched the film in the evening on a Friday night. On Saturday morning, I watched it again with my 4 year old son because I didn’t fully believe what I had seen the night before.

“My Octopus Teacher” made me remember why the medium of documentary filmmaking is so powerful. The main character is a small solitary octopus, a tiny creature relative to the size of the ocean, living this ephemeral life (just one year or so) off the southern tip of Africa. What were the odds that this octopus would share the stage with folks like Anthony Hopkins at a lavish awards ceremony thousands of miles away from his underwater lair? If this one creature’s story from the edge of the world can be found, told, and shared to millions of viewers, there truly is no limit to the reach, and potential, of the documentary medium.

This is indeed what all great storytelling is about. Finding something seemingly unremarkable in the great, dark beyond, shining a light on it, and showing why this thing, this totally missable, normal thing, is actually extraordinary.

This octopus has a lesson for us all. Take an ocean swim, open your eyes, open your heart, and see the world differently.

Congratulations to Directors Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed and Craig Foster on making such a wonderful film. And please take the time to learn more about the threats facing Great African Seaforest, and why it needs our help.

The jury obviously got it right. Derek Chauvin is a murderer. Anyone who watched any of the videos from any angle, knows it. But at the end of this trial I’m left wondering what would have happened if there was no video recording of the murder as it happened ? In this case, without the preponderance of video evidence, I believe the police’s fictitious story most likely would have prevailed as the official narrative. Derek Chauvin would likely be a free man today.

While most of us, and especially those in the African-American community, are extremely relieved that Chauvin will be held accountable for his crime, the question I’m wondering is how many murderous or criminally violent cops walk free every year because their crimes are NOT caught on video ? In a visual culture in which we are taught to believe that things not caught on video are somehow less real, I wonder why 21st century jurors are still having to decide cases involving police officers based on witness testimony alone.

The clear lesson for me from the George Floyd case is that we need body cameras on every police officer in the United States.

The data supporting this is clear. In a test run by the Mesa (Arizona) Police Department, eight months after deployment, there were nearly 3x more complaints against officers without cameras, 40 percent fewer total complaints for officers with cameras, and 75 percent fewer use of force complaints for officers with cameras.

Yet most police officers in the United States still do not wear body cameras in the field.

With video technology and storage costs as cheap as they are, this strikes me as absurd.

I believe that every police/citizen interaction should be recorded on video with the video immediately uploaded and available on a publicly owned database. The video should immediately become a publicly owned asset. In the event that an investigation becomes necessary, the video could be downloaded by investigators or lawyers. In the event of a trial by jury, we the people have the best evidence available at our fingertips.

This way there could be no possibility of police manipulation.

This would also protect police officers who could potentially be falsely accused of crimes they did not in fact commit.

We need a federal law mandating body cameras on every police officer in the United States.

On the eve of the 2020 Presidential election, I wanted to share my views on the conventional wisdom that Trump has been the “best President for Israel.”

Spoiler alert. He wasn’t.

I’ll lay out my five arguments in italics below, but first I think it’s important to note that if you’re an American citizen voting in the United States in this election solely or primarily because you have a view on how an American president will behave towards Israel, I would encourage you to recuse yourself from voting in the US, give up your American citizenship, and make aliyah ASAP. You clearly do not have dual loyalty, but rather only have single loyalty — — to Israel. If you choose to live in the U.S., enjoy its benefits, and participate in its democracy, you should vote for how a President will affect the lives of his/her constituents, not Israel. Isn’t that the definition of America first ? Please don’t mess up the United States because you believe that an American president is going to better serve the interests of a foreign country. This is anti-democratic and extremely unfair to your fellow citizens.

In normal times, with two normal candidates, I can understand why policy towards Israel might be a deciding factor in a U.S. presidential election.

But these are not normal times.

Trump’s Presidency can best be categorized as a three-headed monster of mismanagement, deception and chaos. Trump turned the Covid-19 crisis into a national tragedy. His incompetence and lies cost human lives, and will cost many more if he gets re-elected. Many other, less public, but equally significant crises and opportunities were bungled, from the environment to domestic terrorism to health care to gun violence to press freedom to immigration.

How could our President separate hundreds of small children from their migrant parents ?

How could our President allow nearly 1 million American children to lose their health care in just 3.5 years ?

How could our President not recognize basic climate science and sell off our public lands in national monuments to private interests ?

How could our President not condemn the Saudi government for brutally murdering Jamal Khashoggi, a US-based journalist, on their soil ?

How could our President embolden white supremacists over and over again while cutting funding to combat domestic terrorism ?

This list goes on.

For con men like Trump, the Presidency is not a morality play, it is a self help scheme. There is no moral compass. The compass always points one way, to the Donald.

His own former chief of staff, General Kelly, called him the most “flawed human being” he’d ever come across.

I don’t doubt this statement.

Misinformation has been the currency of a morally bankrupt Presidency. According to those journalists assigned to the Trump Pinocchio beat, he lied and/or mislead nearly 50 times/day as President. This is a barrage of more than 20,000 lies since his inauguration. This must be some kind of deranged Guinness Record. He is the embodiment of a con man; the more you learn about him, the more you understand that lies aren’t just the things that come out of his mouth; everything about him is a total lie, from his business affairs, to his taxes, to his mistresses. This fraudulent nature would be fine if it were limited to the realm of reality TV, but as President, Donald Trump became a very real threat to everything I hold dear about this country.

Trump does not simply skew the evidence to match an absurd belief system. His goal is more sinister. It is to break down all trust of anyone in society. Don’t trust doctors, scientists, journalists, anyone, not even me, Donald Trump. Don’t even believe my words. This is rule #1 in the dictator’s playbook. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, in Egypt, in Cuba, in North Korea. To control the masses one must first erode the very notion of truth.

As a result of mismanagement and deception, we are left in chaos, domestically and internationally. Trump’s divisive and erratic rhetoric and policies has brought disorder to our society. It’s tearing the social fabric. But like usual, the disorder is not where Trump says it is. His re-election narrative is to make white voters believe that cities are in chaos, and soon the suburbs will be too. And that Trump alone will maintain law and order. Don’t believe the hype. Yes, large cities have crime problems. But after four years of Trump, America’s greatest challenges and threats are elsewhere. Our standing in the world is at an all time low. Our allies no longer recognize us. We are the Divided States of America. This, ultimately, will be the legacy of Donald Trump.

With all this context in mind, I want to write something to conservative minded voters who may be leaning towards voting for Trump because of Israel. Undoubtedly you’ve had to swallow lots of your principles to support Trump. Even though I’m not typically in the conservative camp on the majority of issues, I would love for a principled conservative party to emerge from the debris of this Republican Party whose ideals have been so shattered. A fact based and principled conservative party is good for our democracy.

So with this context in mind, we really shouldn’t be debating Trump’s policy’s towards Israel. There’s too much at stake in this election for America.

But in case you are voting for Trump because you think he is most likely to guarantee a secure, Jewish, and democratic state, in perpetuity in the Middle East, here are four reasons why you’re sorely mistaken.

Trump’s legitimization and emboldening of anti-semites in the United States has increased the threat to Jews in the United States, which decreases their ability to wield power effectively for the Jewish state.

I imagine that for many Jewish readers, Zionism and Israel are important because of our history of dealing with anti-semitism for more than two millennia. To vote for any leader who emboldens anti semites because he/she is also “pro-Israel” is hypocritical and self-defeating. Anti semitism is the entire reason for Israel’s existence. If anti-semitism ramps up in the US and around the world in an extreme way, that will increase the need for Israel as a sanctuary for Jews. But what happens if the anti-semites continue to gain power in the US? This is not a hypothetical question given Trump’s rhetoric and growing audience of bigots. The Department of Homeland Security has declared white supremacists the greatest terrorist threat to the United States, yet Trump de-funded a program combating it. Imagine if these trends continue and the vast majority of American Jews were no longer as safe in the U.S. Would Israel be more secure ? No. To phrase this argument more succinctly, one cannot embolden anti-semites AND be Pro- Israel. It just doesn’t hold water.

Joe Biden, on the other hand, has a flawless track record of speaking out against anti-semitism. He got into the race because of Charlottesville. Read his oped that he drafted on the two-year anniversary of the Tree of Life shooting. Obviously, we will need to hold him accountable like any politician, but at this point Biden is signaling that he will take anti semitism and domestic terrorism much more seriously than what we already know about Donald Trump.

Trump’s domestic culture wars and unilateral foreign policy weakened Israel’s greatest ally.

Domestically, Trump has been the tip of the spear on an information war against the American people for 4 years, stoking the culture wars to rally a largely uneducated White male voter base to vote against their own economic interests. This has destroyed belief in the very idea of truth, American democracy, and has divided the United States into two camps that are increasingly violent and polarized. Trump gutted the EPA, FDA and CDC to advance the interests of corporations. The administration’s incompetence turned the COVID-19 crisis into a national tragedy, with more deaths on a gross basis and per capita in U.S. than any other country in the world.

Internationally, by destroying just about all of our most important international partnerships and trade deals (Paris Climate Accord, TPP, WTO, WHO, Iran Nuclear Deal) without replacing them, questioning the value of NATO, he has isolated the United States from the majority of our allies and made us weaker. Trump claims that our biggest strategic threat is coming from China, yet he pulled us out of the TPP, a 12-country pact designed precisely to contain the economic and geopolitical threats coming from China. He pulled us out of the World Health Organization in the middle of a global pandemic, ceding power in dealing with global pandemics to China. This, and so many of Trump’s decisions, were illogical and erratic; the result of an instinct to blow it up first and then ask questions later. Trump has been cozying up to ruthless despots like Putin and Kim Jong Il while burning bridges with our natural democratic allies like Germany and Australia. The one virtue of Trump’s foreign policy is that it has avoided war in the short term, but it’s clear he has made the U.S. far weaker against current and future threats, pandemics, climate change, domestic terrorism, cyber attacks, and election interference.

Here are some data points about what the world thinks of America before a potential Trump second term. Even before collapsing further due to Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic, confidence in him to “do the right thing” in international affairs stood at just 29 percent in a poll of 32 countries— down from 74 percent in former President Barack Obama’s final year in office. Global confidence in Trump is significantly lower than in German Chancellor Angela Merkel (46 percent), French President Emmanuel Macron (41 percent), and Russian President Vladimir Putin (33 percent) — and just one point higher than in Chinese leader Xi Jinping (28 percent). Germans are now equally divided on whether the United States (37 percent) or China (36 percent) is their closest partner, while just 28 percent of Britons trust the United States to act responsibly. Confidence in Trump is only 36 percent in Japan, 32 percent in the United Kingdom, 28 percent in Canada, 28 percent in Brazil, 20 percent in France, 13 percent in Germany, and a mere 8 percent in Mexico, while favorable views of the United States have fallen from 64 percent in 2016 to 53 percent in 2019.

If America is on its way to becoming a pariah among nations, where will that leave Israel?

As former Israeli PM Levi Eshkol said, “When America sneezes, Israel catches the flu.” Well, the US is pretty sick right now.

Trump (and the GOP) is doing the bidding of Christian evangelicals who are not aligned with Jews at the end of the day (or shall I say, End of Days)

In my 10 years of reporting from Israel and the Palestinian territories, one of the most surprising things I learned was just how influential Christian evangelicals from the United States are on Israeli politics. I reported for Time magazine on former Arkansas governor, Republican Presidential candidate, and evangelical minister Mike Huckabee (father of Trump’s former press spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders).

Hanging out on his bus for 3 days while touring Israel and the West Bank, I was struck by how gracious Mike Huckabee was as a host. So gracious in fact, that it took countless hours of beating around the bush before he finally revealed his true beliefs to me; that the overarching goal of his policies towards Israel is to lay the groundwork for Armageddon.

I also learned that there are many, many more Christian Zionists than Jewish Zionists in the United States. Those Christian Zionists are the evangelicals, arguably the most organized and largest faction of the Republican Party today. They wield enormous influence over the Republican politics on topics ranging from abortion to guns to Israel.

When Trump moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, he said, “That’s for the evangelicals. You know, it’s amazing with that — the evangelicals are more excited by that than Jewish people.”

This quote is evidence that Trump’s foreign policy vis-a-vis Israel does not represent the interests of American Jews who are a tiny, mainly liberal group that mainly doesn’t vote for him. In contrast, the Christian evangelicals deliver millions of votes to him across America, many in critical swing states. 8 out of 10 Christian evangelicals voted Republican in 2016.

This begs the question, are Christian evangelicals aligned with the Jewish dream of democratic, Jewish state, living peacefully in perpetuity in the land of Israel?

The answer is no.

In order to understand why, we must dive into evangelical theology.

Unlike Jews who pray for a lasting peace in Jerusalem, evangelical Christians do not envision a lasting peace between religions in the Middle East. On the contrary, they want only one religion in the world at the End of Days. What they pray for weekly in Church services across the United States and the world, is for World War 3. This war is known as the “End of Days” or Gog and Magog war, which they believe will usher in the second coming of Christ. This is not some wacky or loose vision held by a few. This is a basic, agreed upon tenet of evangelical Christianity theology. The prophecy is actually very precise about where this war will take place, the epicenter will be in or near the current location of Kibbutz Megiddo, Israel. The word “Armageddon” is based off this prophesied location. They believe the war will be worse than all previous wars combined.

According to the prophecy, there are the 3 stages required to get to Armageddon. The first stage is for the Jews to return to Israel (presumably as a result of anti-semitism abroad). This is the primary reason fundamentalist Christians are so supportive of Jews settling in the land of Israel. The second stage is for tensions to rise between Islamic countries (a country like Iran) and global, Christian-led superpowers (a country like the USA). The third stage is that the Jews who are living in Israel during this war will then either have the option of accepting Jesus Christ as their lord and savior — — or face eternal damnation. This theological vision embraced by evangelicals is not one of peace, but of holy war in which the Jews lose big time.

Their vision is not just some high in the sky fantasy — the Evangelicals put their dollars, energy, and votes in droves to make it happen. Yes, this theology actually has real ramifications on US politics, and notably, policy in the Middle East. Evangelicals, through their influence on AIPAC, arguably the most powerful lobby, are influencing American politicians to make decisions that are most likely to deliver Armageddon, rather than lasting peace in the Middle East.

So they support the idea of settling the West Bank, even though that threatens a potential two-state solution with the Palestinians. They also support the most radical Jewish fundamentalists and politicians like Bibi Netanyahu who placate them. They certainly supported blowing up the Iran deal.

In order to deliver Armageddon, a huge fault line must exist. Trump has deepened the fault line.

This is a nice segue to the topics security and nuclear weapons.

Obama and Biden did far more for Israel’s actual security than Donald Trump.

President Obama and VP Biden delivered a $38 billion military assistance package to Israel. This was the largest military aid package ever given to any foreign country in the history of the US. It was given to Israel in order to upgrade most of its fighter aircraft, improve its ground forces’ mobility and strengthen its missile defense systems.

Israel’s two main enemies today are Hamas and Hezbollah, which are both funded and armed by Iran. Given that the U.S. is funding and arming Israel, it is fair to say that the US and Iran are fighting one another through these proxies.

The Iran nuclear deal was such a landmark and historic act of diplomacy. It was President Obama and former Sec of State John Kerry who were able to orchestrate the multilateral peace deal to rein in a potential nuclear power and funder of terrorism worldwide. The U.S., Germany, France, Britain, China, Russia and Iran ALL signed on the deal and agreed to its terms. Known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, it lifted sanctions on Iran in exchange for limiting their stockpile of low enriched uranium to 202.8 kilograms (447 pounds). It also gave the signatories inspection rights and visibility into Iran’s underground nuclear facilities.

It wasn’t a perfect deal, but was a very hard earned first step of a fragile peace, the beginning of trust building between enemies of 40 years. This path could have prevented nuclear war, stopped the proxy wars, unlocked the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and ushered in a lasting peace in the region. It wasn’t all going to happen over night, but this was the path we were on.

Instead of trying to tighten or expand the agreement, Trump blew it up, and focused his attention on photo ops with the Dear Leader of North Korea. We don’t know exactly why Trump did it. We have yet to see evidence of a violation of the deal by Tehran. We only have the word of a Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who suggested that Iran was in violation without providing any actual proof. If this was an intelligence issue and he didn’t want to reveal exactly what he knew, he could have spoken generally about it. But instead we got nothing. Bibi was rightfully upset that Obama didn’t consult with them enough on a deal that didn’t do anything to curb the power of the Iranian proxies of Hamas and Hezbollah.

But here’s what a shrewder President would have done. He/she would have ignored Bibi and stayed in the deal, which was a monumental achievement of trust building, and then use the open line of communication to threaten further sanctions to pressure Iran to stop funding and arming Hamas and Hezbollah. We didn’t need to leave the deal and give an excuse for Iran to then violate it. We could instead have used sanctions as a lever to get the perfect deal over time.

And what happened as a result of the U.S. leaving? Iran is back at work building the bomb. The only difference now is that we no longer have visibility into it. We’re now back in the nightmarish tit-for-tat where sanctions are crippling Iran’s economy, but not enough to stop their enriching of uranium and funding of Hamas/Hezbolla. We can try and wait for their society to implode but this may not happen before a real nuclear showdown between the US and Iran. Or perhaps it will continue a nuclear dirty bomb deliver it to their allies Hezbollah ? These are scary possibilities that could have been dealt with at the negotiating table.

The fact remains that only Obama’s deal changed Iran’s behavior in a favorable way. Under Trump, Iran got back into the nuclear bomb making game. So which administration was better for Israel’s security, again?

Americans and Israelis should demand accountability for Trump and Netanyahu’s reckless endangerment of millions of people in the Middle East living under Iran’s potential nuclear umbrella.

So what has Donald Trump actually done for Middle East peace?

A whole lot of ribbon cutting and public relations.

Fake peace deals between Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan. These were all business deals — not hard earned peace treaties. No blood has been shed between these nations. They had nothing to do with security and everything to do with Trump creating a mirage to show his evangelical base how “Pro-Israel” he is.

I don’t think they were necessarily bad for Israel, but the symbolic gestures of friendship are another example of Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner refusing to do the hard, perplexing work required to get big things done in the the Middle East. The fact is that they failed like all others before them to make a real peace deal between Israel and Palestine. The only difference is that they were the first administration in a long time that didn’t even try. They did cut a lot of symbolic things, which Trump loves as much as big, gilded towers with his name on them. Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognized Israel’s control of the Golan Heights, which were both major PR wins for Trump amongst conservative Jews and evangelicals — but will not change the facts on the ground. Peace will not ensue in the Middle East until the Gordian knot gets untied between Israel and Palestine.

Or a deal that ties in Tehran (which is what we had in the works with Obama). Tough knots just don’t get untangled from rubber stamps.

Real friends tell each other when they’re on the wrong path

My final argument is that Israel, under the leadership of Bibi Netanyahu, is on the wrong path. Putting aside Netanyahu’s corruption scandals, I would argue Bibi’s biggest flaw as a leader is that he lacks all the ingenuity, creativity, and vision that characterize the start up nation. Donald Trump, rather than pushing back on Bibi’s gradual Jewish take over of the West Bank, has effectively written him a blank check to do what he wishes. Nobody in Israel, or the world, really knows if Bibi has a long term strategy for peace.

Bibi’s ultimate legacy will be moving in more than 50,000 Jewish settlers into the West Bank (an 18% increase since he became P.M. in 2009) , while keeping Israel secure in the short term. In doing so, he is extinguishing any hope of a two state solution between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. This leaves only four other possibilities for Israel:

1. Israel will be in a perpetual state of war with the Palestinians and Iran.

2. Israel absorbs 3 million+ Palestinian refugees and makes them equal (no longer a Jewish state)

3. Israel absorbs 3 million+ Palestinian refugees and does not grant them equal rights (no longer a democratic state)

4. Israel convinces some other Arab country to re-settle the Palestinians (this will never happen)

For me, none of the above are good, or realistic outcomes. Here is some quick commentary on each.

#1 — While Israel does have military superiority over their enemies today, we have no idea what will happen in the future. Iran may get the bomb. The Saudi alliance will grow weaker over time as the world moves away from oil. The Palestinian population is growing far faster than the Israeli population. In this scenario, (which appears to be Bibi’s strategy) time is not on Israel’s side.

#2 — Palestinians will outnumber Israelis in the next 2 or 3 generations under current demographic growth rates.

#3- This is the “Apartheid” path that will ruin Israel’s moral standing in the world

#4 — This is the least possible scenario that underestimates the resolve of Palestinians to have their own state in their actual homeland. It also assumes some other country will take in millions of refugees out of goodwill. This is the scenario I have seen so many ignorant, right-wing Jews embrace. If there’s another thing I learned while reporting in the Palestinian territories, it’s that Palestinian nationalism is just as strong as Zionism. The genie is out of the bottle.. Neither side will give up until they get rights to their land.

Even though the two-state solution has not worked in the past, that doesn’t guarantee it won’t work in the future. It is still the least bad, and most possible outcome to ensure a Jewish, democratic state living in peace on the Jews ancestral homeland.

It will of course require a lot of work on the Palestinian side as well. The Palestinians are still stuck between a rock and a hard place. They have Hamas, the religious fundamentalists running Gaza, and the hopelessly corrupt Fatah leadership running the West Bank. They are bitter enemies with a brutal history of infighting. Yet, despite this, a Palestinian leader can emerge that can unify the Palestinians. A visionary Israeli and US leader would make it a top priority to identify and bolster such a leader on the Palestinian side. This is the only way we will ever achieve a real and lasting peace. For better or worse, Israeli and Palestinian rights and security will be forever intertwined.

Under Bibi’s leadership, it is the ideology of extremists like Yigal Amir (the Jewish terrorist who assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin) that is prevailing. That is the Jewish fundamentalist ideology that does not recognize the existence of the Palestinians and will never give one inch of land to the Palestinians. This is the ideology of perpetual war, or moving to a one state solution that will bring apartheid to the land of Israel. We need a U.S. president who can push back against Israeli Prime Ministers like Netanyahu who are moving Israel in this direction. In this way, there is a parallel to the United States. If the ideology of Jewish extremists like Amir win out, it will be as devastating as letting white supremacist ideology win out in the United States. Maybe this explains the bond of Bibi and Trump. In short order, if their leadership remain under the influence of extremists, both countries will be unrecognizable. And a peaceful Jewish, democratic state, in the land of Israel will be impossible.

The one group he seems unwilling to demonize, or even condemn, are white supremacists.

The question I keep wondering is, why?

The more important question is: Has our President actually emboldened the most dangerous white supremacist, hate groups in the United States ?

Based on the facts on the ground today, I believe the answer is clearly, yes.

Four years ago I wrote a piece to my not-yet-born son, warning him (and you all) about this renaissance of racism in U.S. presidential politics. For the first time in my lifetime, while Trump was running in 2016, I heard blatant racist dog whistles in his rhetoric and saw overtly anti-semitic tropes being used as campaign symbols. When I read that former KKK grandmaster David Duke endorsed Trump, I was mortified that this man could become President of the United States. I tried to describe to my child why the idea of white supremacy is so abhorrent to me as a Jew, and a human being. I feared the numerous ways a potential Trump presidency could impact us as citizens of the United States.

As a candidate, Trump welcomed white supremacists back into the Republican tent. I hoped that he would do a 180-degree turn as President.

But instead, Trump looked Americans in the eye, and told the white supremacists to “stand by.”

His dog whistling as a candidate turned into full blown hate speech as President.

As a result, President Donald Trump emboldened the greatest terrorist threat to our nation, far-right white supremacist groups.

Trump’s constant spouting of vitriol against minorities, countries, and religions has been a central motif of his Presidency. The goal of his propaganda is to vilify non-white people and con Americans into thinking that non-White, non-Christian people are groups that we should fear. His typical tactics are drawing false associations, re-tweeting racist content, and supporting insular policies that target certain non-white groups to further demonize them in the name of faux security.

Trump even utilized the most foundational principle of Nazi and Apartheid ideology, eugenics, to spread white supremacy. Eugenics is a set of beliefs that one race, or set of genes, is superior to others. Just listen to this recent speech he gave in Bemidji, Minnesota, on September 18, 2020 in which he praised the mostly white crowd, for simply being white.

“You have good genes, you know that, right?” Trump said. “You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

That language would have made Joseph Mengele proud.

Trump went on to smear Somali refugees, including Somali-American Congresswomen Ilhan Omar, baselessly associating them with “Jihadi Islamic terrorists”.

There are so many other examples of Trump’s racist rhetoric and acts as President. You can read a collection of his lowest hits in this actual Top 15 Donald Trump Racism List published by Newsweek.

Some didn’t catch our attention, like when he-retweeted anti-Muslim videos put out by a far-right group in the U.K.

Others are emblazoned in our national psyche.

When a neo-Nazi mob got together for a “Unite the Right” rally, walking down the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia clutching Home Depot tiki torches while chanting “Jews will not replace us,” Trump did not find any discernible moral difference between the neo-Nazis and those who opposed them.

One of the neo-Nazis drove a car into the crowd of protesters, murdering an innocent, unarmed 32 year old woman named Heather Heyer. Still, our President, declared there to be “fine people on both sides.” One of those “fine people,” Heather’s murderer, is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder. At his trial, it was revealed that he had a long history of anti-Semitism, acting like a “kid in Disney World” while visiting a concentration camp.

Real “fine people.”

Another fine person, David Duke, announced he is wholeheartedly endorsing Trump yet again in 2020.

In an October 23, 2020 Trump campaign speech in a retirement community in Florida, one of is supporters is clearly shown in the background, flashing a hand gesture that looks like the “OK” symbol but for racists is code for, “white power.”

Trump’s failure to condemn violent hate groups does not just attract America’s most despicable bigots to his political tent.

It has far more dangerous implications. Donald Trump’s racism has been a ray of sunlight for the feeble, fertile minds of racists, conspiracy theorists, and quacks across this country. He has given them the comfort to move from the dark corners of the internet to the political mainstream. As a result, we’ve seen an explosion of hate speech both online and in physical spaces. Some of that hate speech is directly associated with Trump’s own campaign, which has led Twitch to suspend his account. Reddit shut down an unofficial forum of Trump supporters for violating it’s hate speech policy. We can only imagine what was said there.

In the first 2020 debate with Joe Biden, he had another chance to condemn white supremacists in front of 70m viewers — — but he didn’t take it. Instead he spoke directly to a group that glorifies violence and has direct ties to the neo-nazis who marched in Charlottesville. the Proud Boys, and told them to “stand by.”

Now, according to the Proud Boys’ chairman, thanks to our President, recruitment for this particular white supremacist group is “through the roof.”

Not surprisingly, race motivated violence in the United States is also going through the roof.

According to the FBI, personal attacks motivated by bias or prejudice reached a 16 year high in 2018.

During Trump’s presidency, we witnessed the worst terrorist attack against Jews in the history of the United States. After years of anti semitic rants online, Robert Gregory Bowers took his guns to the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue and opened fire, murdering 11 worshippers in cold blood. It turns out that Bowers had, like our President, expressed support for the Proud Boys.

How could it be that this raging anti semite, a monster in human form, shares this affinity with our President ?

It’s hard, of course, to point a direct line from Trump’s inability to repudiate white supremacists to any single historical attack.

But it should be very clear based on Trump’s own public words and actions, that he does endorse white supremacist groups and their core ideology — which in extreme cases manifests into the worst kind of violence.

The Tree of Life murderer Robert Bowers had a particular hatred towards the HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), a Jewish non-profit that provides assistance and support to refugees and immigrants. Many people fail to understand the ideological kinship between radical anti-immigrant positions and anti-semitism in the deluded mind of a white supremacist. This is why the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville stated, “Jews will not replace us.” They believe Jews are secretly plotting for the take over of America by immigrants. This idea is what so frightened Bowers, and what ultimately motivated him to storm the synagogue.

Did Trump’s nasty and false rhetoric about Central American migrants push Bowers over the edge ? We’ll never know for certain. But we can assume that Bowers won’t be the last white supremacist terrorist to commit some heinous crime in the name of “protecting” America from immigrants and Jews.

According to a new report from the independent think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, white supremacist groups were responsible for the majority of the terrorist attacks in the United States this year. Roughly 2 out of every 3 (41 out of 61), “terrorist plots and attacks” in the first eight months of this year were from white supremacist groups. There is also a strong and frightening connection between these groups and guns. According to the gun safety advocacy group, Everytown, one of 3 of the deadliest gun shootings in the past decade in the US were motivated by white supremacy. The Department of Homeland Security has recently declared white supremacy the greatest terrorist threat facing our nation.

How absurd is it that we have a sitting U.S. president emboldening the very groups his own Department of Homeland Security deem to be our greatest terrorist threat ?

Imagine Obama telling a violent, Islamic fundamentalist group to “Stand by”?

Would Republicans be calling him a traitor ?

It goes beyond that.

Trump is also intentionally sabotaging efforts to defeat white supremacist terror by blocking resources and firing experts in his own government. In late 2018, Trump cut off funding for programs to combat white supremacist terror, including $10 million authorized by President Obama for the Countering Violent Extremism Grant Program.

Sound familiar?

Trump is treating white supremacist terrorism like the Pandemic. Ignore experts, don’t talk about it and it’ll just go away.

And like the Pandemic, white supremacist terror has the potential to kill many thousands of Americans.

Instead of taking the actual terrorist threat seriously, Trump cons Americans into believing the greatest threat to our nation are a group of mainly peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors or a ragtag group of impoverished, unarmed Central American immigrants. He pulls money away from an FBI fighting white supremacists in order to build his wall to “protect” us from innocent people desperately fleeing a land of nightmares in order to chase the American dream.

Why isn’t Donald Trump listening to his own government experts and taking the actual threat of white terrorism seriously ?

Could it be that he views these groups as political allies, and that’s why he’s giving them a pass ?

If that’s true, is that really the kind of President we want?

Could Trump be a white supremacist himself ?

Many apologists for Trump claim that he can’t be a white supremacist himself because of his Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, or Trump’s Jewish grandkids.

That is an utterly bogus argument. There were plenty of Jews, including relatives of Jews, who collaborated with the Nazis during WWII. The fact that Trump has a Jewish son-in-law and relatives does not make his neo-Nazi pandering any less real, or dangerous. While we’re on the subject of Trump’s personal views, it’s interesting to note that he has an extremely long record of racist comments and actions. He is also on the record making blatantly anti-semitic comments, like when he referred to Jews in real estate as “brutal killers” and “not nice people at all.”

The truth is that I couldn’t care less what his private views are. Whether he is the most — or least — racist person on earth in private, does not matter nearly as much as what he says in public. As President, he is the leader of our nation. When a US President can’t figure out — and clearly call out — the difference between Nazis and anti-Nazis, there is a good chance that many others will follow suit.

It is in this fashion that the President of the United States has emboldened the biggest racists in this country and put every person of color, every Black person, every Jew, every Muslim, in more emotional and physical danger than they were before.

His failure to listen to the experts at Homeland Security, while cutting off resources meant to combat white supremacist terror, will make him culpable for future attacks that may have otherwise been prevented.

Just after the Tree of Life murders, more than 70,000 people signed a letter to prevent Trump from visiting Pittsburgh until he fully denounced white supremacy.

He did not denounce white supremacy. He ignored the petition, visited the synagogue and got his photo-op.

As the Former Tree of Life synagogue president Lynette Lederman said in her opposition to Trump’s visit, “We have people who stand by us who believe in values, not just Jewish values, but believe in values, and those are not the values of this president, and I do not welcome him to Pittsburgh.”

The values she is referring to are the values that make America truly great. Diversity, respect for human life, and the concept of E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One).

After four years, Trump has made it abundantly clear that these values are meaningless to him.

As I wrote in 2016, Make America Great Again is code for something else entirely.

I still do not know “why” Trump refuses to condemn white supremacy.

It is a mystery we can only speculate about.

What I do know is that this is not what America needs in a President.

At the very least, America needs an unequivocal anti-racist as a President.

One who can not only find the moral clarity and conviction to condemn the racists walking among us, but also teach us it’s wretched history.

We need to learn why it’s wrong, and anti-American.

We need someone wise, sensitive, and moral as President.

A peacemaker, not a warmonger.

Someone who can help us navigate through all these really hard, racially-infused policy questions we so desperately need to tackle as a society.

What do we do about caravans of migrants emanating from Central America ?

Should we remove the statues of slaveowners in Black majority cities?

How do we improve policing in the black neighborhoods of the United States ?

These are hard problems. I don’t expect a President to solve every one of them, but I do expect a President to provide a framework for thinking about them in a way that can lead to resolution.

Instead of settling these tough issues, helping our society mend, and move forward, Trump is taking extreme positions and deliberately fanning the flames of a cultural war that is spiraling more and more out of control.

Instead of leading us forward to a post-racial United States, he is sending us backwards to the race wars of the 1960’s.

The thing that I keep coming back to is the irony of Trump’s false and shameful smear of these poor Central American migrants.

The majority were not “criminals”, but rather men, women and children coming to this country for a better life, fleeing horrific levels of violence in their home countries. They were not criminals themselves, but were fleeing from criminals.

The storyline was not so different to what happened off the coast of Miami in 1939.

Remember the MS St Louis? The ship that was full of Jews who were fleeing Nazi controlled Europe after Kristalnacht. After being denied entry into Canada, Cuba, and the United States, the ship returned back into the waiting hands of Adolf Hitler, where an estimated 254 passengers would perish.

“We were not wanted,” St. Louis survivor Susan Schleger told a Miami Herald reporter in 1989. “Abandoned by the world.”

Trump, in 2018, like Roosevelt in 1939, made it clear that refugees seeking political asylum are not welcome in the U.S. Unlike Roosevelt, Trump added insult to injury.

We can only wonder what happened to those migrants who went back to the gang-infested streets of Honduras and Guatemala.

I hope they fared better than the Jews of the St. Louis.

Meanwhile, the “fine people” who marched in Charlottesville and their cronies, the latest iteration of the Nazis, who eat cheeseburgers and speak with American accents, make new murderous plots as our President still cannot find the courage to call them what they are.

We should all feel abandoned.

When I started Storyhunter I imagined one buzzing office in NYC with employees chatting, meeting, and plotting to dent the universe around some hipper version of a water cooler, perhaps an iced latte cooler. As it turned out, we now drink what we want when we want since we’re made up of several remote teams spread across various cities; NYC, San Francisco, Austin, and London, with no central headquarters or beverage station. We did this to be closer to key markets, take advantage of economic incentives, and cater to the lifestyles of our employees who wanted to maximize their own personal fulfillment. What’s crazy is that this has made our company more profitable, our team happier, and has also prepared us reasonably well for this pandemic.

For the interests of public health and economic prosperity, I believe it’s essential for all companies to learn how to be productive remotely right now. This may be a scary transition, but it will likely benefit your company, and the global economy in the long run.

Let me explain.

For generations, the corporate world was a 9 to 5, office bound experience for employees. With the advent of the internet, digital communications technologies, and the flattening distribution of the global talent market, the “office” is no longer confined by walls, ceilings, and a specific zip code. 9 to 5 has been replaced by flexible schedules across time zones. Employees are now a dynamic mix of staffers, permalancers, and freelancers who are mobile, flexible, and can work from just about anywhere.

This is not the future of work. This is the present.

Working from home is now an acronym (WFH) while the freelance economy continues to skyrocket. The gig economy as a whole is expected to nearly double to a whopping $455B in 2023. Industries like transportation (Uber, Lyft) and asset sharing (Airbnb,Turo) have been the most obvious and quickest ones to change. However, professional services as a category is now going freelance in massive numbers as well, with 45% of American freelancers providing services like marketing, IT and business consultingThis will have huge implications on just about everyone’s jobs, with more and more companies moving core functions and knowledge work towards freelancers.

The reason savvy companies, large and small, are taking advantage of on-demand remote, freelance teams for all kinds of functions, from marketing to engineering to content production has typically been economic. If you don’t have to pay a full time salary for a job you need part time, why do it? If you can hire someone in a cheaper market than the one you operate in, why do it? While economic incentives may have been the most clear advantage, amidst the Coronavirus outbreak, the other advantages of flexible, on demand labor have become self-evident. Now, more than ever, freelancers are in a unique position to be a saving grace for companies looking to continue business as usual.

The trap here is to think about freelancers as a temporary fix for the era of Coronavirus. Freelancers should be a permanent fix to make companies more productive, efficient, and happy. We are living in a different economic age than the one that shaped many of the largest organizations still on the planet today. When General Motors started in 1908, for instance, the telephone was a recent invention and most people did not have one. It was impossible for one engineer to Slack another engineer to get on a quick Zoom call and discuss a design feature for a car. Those engineers had to be in the same room together to solve a problem.

Companies today must design themselves differently. Assets like real estate, land, and labor matter less than brand values, a culture of learning, and ability to hire effectively. The reality is that a large percentage of manual, blue collar labor will be outsourced to robots over the next 20 years. Knowledge work, which I define broadly as “thinking for a living”” will be the only thing left for humans to do in the future. This shift will have massive implications on all aspects of society, and we need to prepare now.

How do we prepare?

1. Start hiring the best person for the job, regardless of geography.

Effective immediately, companies should outsource their knowledge work to the best thinker for the job, regardless of where they are on the planet or how they classify themselves as a worker. If the knowledge worker prefers the autonomy of freelance, work with them anyways. They can always come on board full time later. Imagine, if you have a problem to solve at your company, and there is someone on the opposite side of the planet who can solve it faster than anyone else, why would you hire someone locally who will solve it more slowly or not solve it at all? This is essentially the blunder that companies make when they bias themselves to hiring locally.

2. Adopt a freelancer-first hiring mentality

Hiring the right full time employees is one of the hardest things companies do. Even the best companies make mistakes. Hiring freelancers offer so many advantages. Firstly, it enables you to see what it’s like to work with someone before hiring them full time. They save you money since you don’t have to cover payroll taxes and benefits. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they offer you specialized skills when you need them. Freelancers are the ultimate, and nearly infinite, Swiss Army tool.

3. Let work happen anywhere

Obviously, if you are producing poultry or airplanes, this is not applicable. If you are not in an industry that requires people in the same room, consider letting people work from anywhere. For most industries, offices certainly should no longer be the primary place where work happens. You may also want to save some money and close yours for good. I know this is a tough decision and goes against many of the things we’ve been taught about corporate life. (If this is a hard decision for you, I highly recommend listening to this conversation between Sam Harris and Matt Mullenweg.)

I know that I personally think better and clearer when I’m out of an office environment. Since late 2019, I have been a CEO who mainly works from my home office in San Francisco. I spend some mornings surfing, playing with my kids, or biking across the Golden Gate Bridge, and often have my best ideas and clearest thoughts while doing these things. This is true for many people I know. Programmers, doctors, architects, designers, marketers and video producers, all are capable of doing their best work outside of an office, and if they prefer more autonomy, in a freelance capacity.

When people are doing their best work, companies benefit with more productivity and better morale. If companies are hiring freelancers for short term, on demand projects rather than hiring full time employees that are under optimized, companies benefit with more productivity and increased profit. When you aggregate the effect of just these two changes, what you see is a more efficient, productive, and faster-growing global economy.

Despite the Coronavirus’s devastating short term impact on our economic order, I am optimistic that we will re-build the economy in a way that’s more anti-fragile, or at least better suited to the future. The beauty of capitalism is that we don’t really have a choice. Those companies who adopt the new way of working will do more than just build economic immunity to future public health and environmental calamities. They will gain a more productive and happier workforce right now.

We’re in the middle of a public health crisis. Schools are closed. Major sports have been postponed. This is unprecedented in modern human history. We’ve been reaching out to members of our community to make sure that they and their loved ones have been able to stay healthy while COVID-19 has been spreading. We’ve also provided guidelines for our freelancer community to remain safe. This is a time when all of us need to prioritize health above all else.

That being said, Storyhunter will continue to operate and be a resource for our clients and community members. Here’s why: media companies have an urgent obligation to provide the latest news about COVID-19, there is burgeoning demand for informational content as more people get quarantined, and of course freelance media professionals need to feed their families. We’re now all working with smaller budgets, travel restrictions and anxiety about our loved ones. But even during crazy viral outbreaks like the one were going through, for the sake of humanity, storytelling and Storyhunter must go on.

In times like these, where politicians and governments are occasionally obfuscating information, we need a strong, independent media to know what’s actually happening on the ground. Moreover, we, as humans, need stories. They help us make sense of the world,especially in times like these. It’s up to us to ensure that alongside this horrific virus, truth goes viral alongside it.

Here are some ways Storyhunter can help you continue telling stories that matter:

Hire Freelancers in Wuhan, Wyoming, and Wherever this Darn Virus Spreads

Leverage our network of 30,000 world-class filmmakers, animators, writers and livestreamers in 192 countries. Whether you need someone to interview lawmakers on the latest outbreak, or want to talk about precautions being made in an area that hasn’t been hit yet, there’s a freelancer ready to help you out.

Minimize Unnecessary Travel

Fortunately, you don’t have to send your in-house crew to the shooting location. With planes departing less, and travel proving dangerous to individuals and the general public, working with local freelance teams is the only way to go right now.

Tap Into Local Intelligence

The unique knowledge that freelancers have of their own areas can often manifest into a full story just waiting to be told. On Storyhunter, you can post what we’ve dubbed a “Call For Pitches”, where freelancers can pitch you stories that fit exactly what you’re looking for. If you want a story about a local doing extraordinary things to help their community combat COVID-19, odds are one of our freelancers has an inside scoop.

Save Time With A Local Expert

Hiring locally means that you have someone already familiar with the area, so they’ll be able to get around as quickly as anyone because, well, they know how! Local freelancers also mitigate the need to do extensive research on the area, or hiring a fixer, because of their expertise and language skills.

Show Your Customers or Audience That You Care

There’s a lot of misinformation about coronavirus making the rounds right now, and this is a time where the more informed and cared for the public is, the better off we will all be.. Be a genuine source of news for them, and build a relationship based on trust: they can trust you to be honest and insightful, and you can trust them to tune in.

Co-authored with Jake Watkins (Storyhunter Head of Stories)

“Such is the passage of time too fast to fold” — Eddie Vedder’s “Rise”

“It’s too late to turn back now, I believe, I believe, I believe I’m falling in love.” — The Cornelius Brothers

When a baby is born, you measure their life in days. After twenty-something days, the days become too numerous, and you move to weeks. After fifteen or so weeks, you move to months. Our baby is now 23 months old, and I’m sensing that soon we will move to the next temporal measurement unit, years.

I am writing this in a futile attempt to just take a pause.

My child is in the middle of his midday nap and I actually have a moment to sit at my dining room table, stare out at the blue Pacific Ocean, and write. It’s a Sunday.

In the incessant, exhausting first stage of fatherhood, I want to to savor this fleeting moment of reflection that will end the second my boy wakes up. You see, as a relatively new dad, time — for me — is now measured between naps; the 1–3 hours in which our son is in his crib; cooing, cackling, singing, sleeping, and growing. I am on the clock now, listening to him serenade himself with a rendition of “Yellow Submarine” on the baby monitor.

Physicists tell us that time moves slower by the ocean than on top of a mountain. That may be true. However, this split second difference will hardly be enough time to help me finish this piece before my son’s nap ends. This will take me a few Sundays to complete. Time is indeed very different now.

I, too, am different.

The last 712 days have been the most draining, daunting, and joyous days of my life. I slept far less, laughed far more, played more enthusiastically, and loved more deeply than I can ever remember. My transition to fatherhood was not like any other change I’ve experienced. It was fundamental — and fast. It felt less like a new chapter than an entirely new book, less like a software upgrade and more like a new operating system. One minute, I’m a dude. The next minute, I’m a dad. My core being, my purpose, my focus, my title — all of it — changed in a single moment.

A doctor, midwife, two nurses, a doula, two mothers, a sister, a couple medical students, and I (11 people total) witnessed my heroic wife Dana push out our son at 10:04pm on a clear, chilly night in late January 2017 in UCSF hospital in San Francisco. For the prior 49 hours my wife was in labor. I was focused on helping in any way possible, which mainly meant filling baths, massaging shoulders, and offering words of encouragement. I wore my old Kibbutz work uniform, a drab, navy blue sweatsuit to remind myself that I was not a spectator — I was on the job. It’s called “labor” after all.

Little did I know that most of labor is actually kind of slow and boring — for me at least. The actual pushing part was only the last hour or so — when suddenly the energy in the room shifted. It seemed like the entire Sunday evening faculty of UCSF had suddenly joined us in the delivery room. While my wife was getting mentally prepared to push, we placed bets on whether it was going to be a boy or a girl. 6 picked boy, 5 picked girl. Finally, it was go-time. The midwife told me to be the “pushing time-keeper”. I counted the only way I know how to count seconds accurately, “1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi, 4, Mississippi, 5 Mississippi, 6 Mississippi, 7, Mississippi, 8 Mississippi, 9 Mississippi, PUSH!!!”

After about 5 sets of Mississippi’s, our baby’s warm and slimy body slipped out of my wife’s body and into my hands. It felt completely surreal. His/her skin’s texture felt more amphibian than human. He/she finally let out a deep, long winded cry. I felt a rush of ecstasy and blood flow through my body. I was in love. Moments later, I handed the baby off to the midwife. She flipped him over and said, “It’s a boy!” I had forgotten to check.

On Day 3 of our son’s life, we drove out of the hospital for the first time as parents. My wife and I were both in a dreamlike state. Trying to snap us out of it, I put on the soundtrack we listened to for comfort following Donald Trump’s inauguration. In the course of labor I recalled joking to the midwife Kate that maybe she will be delivering a future President of the United States. “God Forbid, ” was her reply.

Eddie Vedder’s ukulele album “Into the Wild” felt appropriate for my son’s first car ride on planet Earth. Dana and I simultaneously looked back at our shiny, black new Britax car seat we never really imagined would contain an actual infant. And sure enough he was there, brown eyes wide open, taking it all in. Our then unnamed baby was inside a car seat, inside a Subaru Forrester vehicle, listening to the song “Rise” on Spotify with his brand new ears.

“Such is the way of the world.

You can never know

Just where to put all your faith

And how will it grow”

We burst into tears, overwhelmed by happiness, from the relief that we were all healthy, and from disbelief — — that this new person, this new consciousness that never ever before existed, was real, and ours. He is now our son. We are now his parents. It’s a new relationship that never before existed. It instantly became the most important relationship we’ve ever had.

They say a baby comes with a loaf of bread. The new axiom should be that a baby comes with an Amazon.com gift card. We brought him home to a room full of things we had purchased for him, his crib, onesies, bassinet (which I must admit I initially thought was a musical instrument), pacifiers, rattles, mirrors, lotions, creams, oils, travel systems, camera and monitor sets with detachable lenses, swaddles, diaper bags, diaper pail, diaper trash bags, diapers and wipes — it goes on. Companies with names like Uppababy, DiaperGenie, Aden and Anais, Huggies, Nati, that I had managed to completely ignore for 38 years were suddenly filling up my online shopping cart and conscious mind. I found myself waiting on line somewhere reading a heated online debates on whether the Yoyo or Uppababy Cruz stroller had better wheel mobility and traction on cobblestone streets. Once I realized how deep into the absurd minutia I had dived, I put down my phone and looked up to make sure nobody was watching. But this thought process is now unavoidable. I am often thinking about baby business ideas and have no shortage of really terrible ones. Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll join “the baby racket,” as I describe it — an imaginary conglomerate of savvy toddlers and parents, managed by protagonist in the film “Boss Baby,” marketing newer, better, shinier, baby products to suckers like myself, ensuring a trade deficit with China for generations to come.

Having a new baby also means incorporating a brand new set of tasks designed for it’s wellbeing: things like breastfeeding (always her job), carrying the baby up staircases (usually my job), clipping toenails (her job), to changing all form of diapers (usually my job). What I didn’t know is that this diaper job gets harder over time. At first we dealt with partially-soiled, odorless, breast milk diapers which ultimately graduated to heavily-soiled, pungent, too-much-pasta-in-a-hot-car-on-the-side-of-the-road-in-Puglia-diapers. I am proud to say I now handle them all; quickly, cleanly, and accurately. A few weeks ago I actually caught myself in another strange corner of the internet after googling “Diaper changing speed competition”. The top two links were a Youtube video of an actual diaper-changing competition held in York County and an article where Mark Zuckerberg brags about being able to change a diaper in 20 seconds. Bring it, Mark !

Every day, regardless of where we are in the world, we repeat the same rituals, wake up, play, eat, diapers, story time, sleeping, REPEAT. I imagine this is the same day-to-day routine for billions of children across the planet. When you’re in it, they feel so mundane (and exhausting), yet reflecting on the experience as a whole, from Day 1 to now, observing my son’s mind, body and personality blossom as a function of this time spent together, it actually feels like nothing short of a miracle.

As time passes, the miracle reveals itself more fully. The love gets deeper. The parenting gets harder. My feelings for him are primal, instinctual, automatic. I think if my son were adopted I would feel exactly the same way. Parent love feels different than romantic love. It feels boundless. If there are edges to it, they are smooth. It is a love replete with responsibility, a nurturing kind of love.

It also changes the romantic love between the parents. With baby related tasks taking up the majority of our waking hours, romance doesn’t randomly occur with the same frequency. We now share and confirm potential date nights via Google calendar, which is the least romantic thing possible. But our bond is stronger than ever. Our last waking minutes of the day are usually spent reviewing each other’s photos of our son before posting them on our family Whatsapp.

During her long labor my wife had visions of starlight and the cosmos. On his 8th day, at his bris milah circumcision ritual, we named our son Orion, and nicknamed him Ori, for short. In Hebrew, it means “My Light.” As someone who struggles with the superstitions and laws of organized religion, the bris was tough for me to rationalize at first. I felt my son to be perfect and could not bring myself to do what we were about to do to him. But ultimately i did rationalize it. It marginally decreases risks of STD’s and infection. It made his look like mine. It made his grandparents happy. If he wanted to get one later, this would be much harder to do at an older age. In that fateful moment, I turned away as the mohel used a metal tool to clamp and snip off my son’s foreskin. He cried hysterically for a minute. I made sure he had enough wine. He stopped crying. I exhaled.

On Day 18 of Ori’s life, while putting him down for his evening sleep, he suddenly stopped breathing, lost all his color, and was not responsive. I shook him vigorously for what felt like an eternity but was probably closer to 20 seconds, and then screamed to my wife to call 911. I put him on the bed and was about to begin CPR when i noticed his fingers and toes finally start moving. By the time the paramedics were walking in our nursery a few minutes later, Ori was back to his normal self. Dana and I spent the night at the hospital with our tiny infant for observation. We didn’t sleep and instead watched Lady and the Tramp on the hospital TV while we nervously awaited news from the doctors. Thankfully, there was nothing wrong with our son. He had a B.R.U.E. (Brief Resolved Unexplained Event), perhaps the most unsatisfying medical diagnosis, if you can even call it that. Doctors aren’t sure why they occur but they belief that the electrical impulses in the brain are still sorting themselves out at that early age. We took him home from the hospital again. Cue Eddie Vedder and the tears, again.

Fatherhood has shifted my center of gravity and shuffled my priorities. Before Orion, I would spend the maximum amount of time at the office, always trying to get more and more done. Now I make sure to finish the most critical work so that I don’t miss that last couple hours of my son’s day. I race my bike 5.5 miles up the San Francisco hills from SOMA to the Inner Sunset on the bike path known as the “Wiggle” to get home on time. My excitement can only be matched by that of my squealing boy who races down the hallway to greet me, grabbing a hold of my leg while saying “Dada” over and over again. The second I see his sparkly eyed, 6-tooth smile, I pick him up, and am in heaven.

Fatherhood also marked the official end of my private life. Suddenly there’s this laser sharp, sensitive being that is watching me at all times like a hawk, observing and then mimicking everything I do, from subconscious habits to more significant behaviors. After my ride home, I typically head to the fridge and make my favorite cold beverage, ¼ Martinelli’s apple juice mixed with ¾ soda water. Ori usually follows me. After I took a sip of the beverage one evening, at 10 months old, my son opened his mouth wide and muttered the guttural “Ahhhh” sound one makes after quenching thirst. I wasn’t really aware that I even did this, but for my son, it was very clear, and so interesting to him that from then on, he was going to imitate it every time he took a sip of his little juice cup, regardless of his actual thirst level. The moment he made that Ahhh sound, I felt the way mobsters must feel when they discover they had an FBI wiretap in their living room for God knows how long. Holy shit, how long has he been watching me ?

Once I realized I could teach my son anything I wanted, I started talking to him differently, in regular colloquial English, explaining to him everything I know about the natural world. We spend most weekends exploring the idyllic, rugged, Northern California coast, walking on windswept beaches with names like Muir and Moss, wading through tide pools with fluorescent purple urchin and black mussels, following sun-kissed dirt trails contracting and expanding until you reach the grand, beating ocean like veins leading to a wide, open heart. I carried Orion in a front facing baby carrier so that he could see all the wondrous beauty for himself first, pointing out out every animal, plant, and object that I could identify. Now he usually prefers hiking on his own. He is a baby after my own heart.

Like all babies, Ori’s world is a haptic one. He smacks walls and surfaces. Once he picks something up there are basically two paths. He will either eat it or throw it. My cell phone’s main functionality is now to serve as a projectile. Please don’t make fun of those bulky, rubber, atrocious-looking Iphone protective cases. They are actually a product every dad needs. When he’s not slinging my cell phone, we are playing peek-a-boo, banging on a drum (sorry, neighbors),wrestling in our sheep skin rug, reading books with names like “Baby Beluga or “Kuma Kuma Chan”. His favorite book of late is called “Together.” It’s about a baby Otter describing the perfect day with his parent in which they watch the sunrise, learn how to develop Otter skills such as shucking oysters, and then go to sleep. Every good baby book is engineered to end with the young character going to sleep. Very smart.

When Orion was 13-months old, we took him to Oaxaca and Chiapas in Southern Mexico. He couldn’t yet walk with much confidence. In the market of Tlacolula, while my wife was searching for new textiles, Ori was crawling on all fours while roosters, 3-legged dogs, mariachi singers, and countless microscopic, Mexican microbes past him by. I followed just behind him to make sure nothing trampled him and to prevent him from eating some of the typical porquerias he may discover on the floor of a rural Oaxacan market. If I followed too far behind, I’d suddenly find him in the arms of Zapotec-speaking grandmothers who couldn’t resist lifting and kissing him. He was gracious enough to indulge each one with a besito of his own. Eventually I was able to pry him away from the most besotted of the señoras only by purchasing her palm straw mats. We went to eat one of my favorite Oaxacan foods, quesadillas de calabazas, squash blossom quesadillas, and my son scarfed down an entire one by himself. Later on in the trip, we tested my son’s palate once again. In San Cristobal, the capital of Chiapas, we stopped at a local street taqueria and asked them what their specialty was. It was a cow brain taco. Once again, Ori ate it with gusto. My wife and I both got a serious stomach bug from something we ate on that trip. Our boy, miraculously, was fine. I knew at that moment that we had a fantastic travel companion on our hands.

As the months go by, we are getting more and more glimpses into his personality. Ori typically prefers sprinting from Point A to Point B instead of walking. He is outgoing and friendly, offering hugs and smiles to just about any human or dog that crosses his path. Like his mom, who once prostrated herself on the sidewalk with a random Newfoundland for two hours on the corner Amsterdam and 95th Street in NYC, Ori can spend hours with a dog he loves. Like his dad, he loves soccer and being in the water. He already has a cracker of a left foot and has swum, or at least dipped his toes, in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, the Yuba River, Hudson River, Ionian Sea, Black Sea, Adriatic Sea, Pammukale, Hierve el Agua, the Big Deep, Grotto de la Poesia, Orr Hot Springs, the Intracoastal, and the lake behind my childhood home in Miami. He’s an adventurous and sunny little boy, rambunctious, funny, and happy.

When Ori was 19 months old, we had to take him back to the hospital again. This time, it was for a well known illness, pneumonia. He got a cold that ended up going to the lungs. His breathing became so strained that he was admitted and kept in the ICU for 4 days. This time, we watched the film Coco and the Premier League over and over again until he recuperated fully. Walking through the children’s ICU every day humbled me to the core.

With fatherhood has also come a whole new set of anxieties to deal with. I think (and worry) about my kid a lot. He is on my mind first thing in morning and before going to sleep. After two ER visits before 20 months, how can he not be? We still sleep with the baby monitor next to our bed. While still quite agnostic, I find myself saying prayers, and expressing gratitude, every night for our boy as we put him to bed. I am not sure who or what I’m talking to but it just feels like the right thing to do. Gratitude is the most overwhelming emotion that I associate with this new chapter in my life. My wife and I feel in our bones that we’ve received the greatest of gifts.

The axiom I’ve heard over and over again is that having kids is the only decision you can’t really reverse. I would call this only a partially true statement. It’s certainly true that you can’t put the baby back in the womb. But what’s not true is that this was ever a decision in the first place. Having kids to me at least felt more like a biological impulse than a rational decision to go to the store to buy milk or not. The impulse is of course designed for the proliferation of our species.

The question I often wrestle with is whether more people will necessarily lead to our betterment of our species? Of our planet ? When I do force myself to rationalize my own procreation, I look at having babies not as an act of selfishness, but rather a statement of belief in your own genetic materials, or at least your ability to educate an individual who is likely to improve the quality of the world based on your own subjective standards.

The timing of Orion’s birth, coinciding with one of the most morally vapid Americans getting elected president, highlighted this for me like a clear ultrasound. With my wife 9.5 months pregnant, we marched at the Women’s March. There is no doubt our baby heard the sound of the drums and protest songs. Forging this new life and bringing him into the world — particularly at this time — — felt to us like an act replete with hope in a world devoid of it. While humanity as a whole, as a system, appears to be fatally flawed to the point that we are on a path of destroying the entire planet with nuclear weapons or fossil fuels , on the individual level, all human babies that I’ve ever met are the essence of purity, intelligence and goodness. It’s a strange contradiction.

Remember when you were amazed by a single leaf, a dog’s fur, or the sound of a fire truck? One of the virtues of having children is that one gets to relive their own childhood and experience the world again as if for the first time. Adulthood has the tendency to deplete many of us of our sense of wonder. Having a child reconnects us with our baby spirit. It reinforces the awesomeness we often lose as we age and reminds us that we were all babies once. And we can all be babies again. Perhaps at the next Davos conference or Middle East Peace Accords, we should have a 1 to 1 baby:adult ratio to remind these adults to a. loosen up and b. remember that they future generation that they are about to screw up is actually sitting in the room right now? What a childish idea.

If you’re paying attention as a parent, you notice how the world itself changes when you are with a baby. I remember traveling in Turkey as a single journalist in my mid-twenties and was never really blown away by the warmth or generosity of Turkish male strangers. On the contrary, I had some rather tense and hostile encounters. Boy, did that change walking around the Blue Mosque with a cute little 18 month old. Here’s a journal entry I wrote in Istanbul, “The men of Turkey have gone absolutely crazy for Ori, and who am I to intervene ? There’s a very specific, two-sided cheek grab they do when he reveals his face to just about every random Turk we’ve encountered. Random waiters, corn vendors, and cab drivers have all pinched our boys cheeks and muttered Turkish sweet nothings to him as if he understood. I’ve witnessed the baddest dudes on the block melt into smiling gobs of silly putty, stopping in their tracks to kiss him and hand him candy. Language does not matter. Only love.”

Time changes too. I think the reason time speeds up with a baby is that you notice the changes happening so quickly in them. The rate of change is remarkable; From crawling to walking in 3 months. From babbling to talking in 9 months. Adults do not change as fast — which leads us to perceive that life is moving slower. I asked my own Dad, father of 4, and a medical doctor about this theory. His answer was, “Who knows…that’s life, there’s nothing you can do to slow time. You must just relish every second with your family.” I knew my Dad would say something to this effect. I guess I know him well after 39 years.

In thinking about this some more, I understood that time itself is not like a cheeseburger; it is not innately relishable. The moments WITHIN time are what is relishable. Time is simply the continuum. It is the vacant hall that steams up with the warm breath of consciousness, the blank canvas to paint a yellow submarine, a sparkling white dutch oven to braise a lamb shank in a red wine sauce, a mirror to walk past in your Superman shirt.

In other words, time is the empty vessel of all moments and experiences. You can even think of it like tupperware containers. A year is the larger container. The month is a medium container. The day is the small one. The second is the really tiny one.

Soon, we will count Orion’s life in the larger containers; years, instead of months, weeks, or days. I am totally fine with this. The passage of time is, after all, inevitable and wondrous to behold. If we must use the larger tupperwares, then all the more potential to store precious delights.

There are more than 300 million guns in the hands of Americans. These guns are killing on average 100 people per day in this country. Is this not the real crisis ? So instead of another gaudy, flashy Trump construction project, let’s work on solving an issue that is actually killing and wounding tens of thousands of innocent Americans every year. If you are raising children in this country, I believe this should be on the top of your agenda.

Here’s an idea of how we could spend this same amount of money to solve an actual problem. Let’s spend $1B on implementing and managing a tracking system for guns that will associate each weapon with a person through their social security number. Then, let’s criminalize illegal gun ownership federally. We can recoup this money over time by charging fees for anyone who wishes to purchase a gun license. Gun licenses should cost $100 and only be issued to Americans over age 26 who have completed a mental evaluation and gun safety course. (26 is the age where the male brain actually is full formed, and a more scientific benchmark for maturity than 18.) Citizens should not be allowed to own more than 1 gun/household. Next, let’s spend $1B on mental health programs targeting young, vulnerable men in the United States. Finally let’s spend $3B on a federal gun buyback program. If we offer $50/gun, we could remove 60 million lethal weapons (20% of the total) from our streets. We can then monitor the data. Did these measures reduce gun deaths/injuries in the United States ? I believe they will.

Most illegal immigrants in the United States are not in fact dangerous. On the contrary, they are good, hard working people that contribute to the economy. Most illegal immigrants in the United States do not come in via the Southern border illegally. More than 2/3 come in legally, and then overstay their visa. Illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crimes, including dangerous crimes, than people born in the US. These are the facts.

Trump, once again, is pushing the fiction that swallows up the news media. His fear-driven, false narrative is designed to rally his base, satiate his ego and distract attention from his criminal investigation. It’s the same playbook that has worked over and over again for him. We should not take the bait. Now, I’m not saying our immigration system is perfect. It isn’t. But the data suggests the problem is not exactly the one Trump is describing, and therefore the solution will be very different from the one Trump is proposing. Even if our President doesn’t, we need to live in a fact-based world. Somehow, we need to try and steer the agenda away from the Trump P.R. machine that can manufacture any crisis it can conjure up. Should we fix our broken immigration and asylum system ? Yes. Should we do it in a data-driven and holistic way ? Absolutely. Should we do it before we solve our national gun violence crisis ? NO.

The former Grand Wizard of the KKK, David Duke, and neo-Nazi propagandist Andrew Anglin, endorsed Donald Trump for President of the United States in 2016. I described their reasoning for doing so in an essay I wrote to my unborn son exactly two years ago. Sadly, on the eve of another general election, it is clear that Donald Trump’s rhetoric and policies, as President of the United States, have emboldened his most hateful constituents and are a contributing factor for the recent surge in anti-Semitic incidents in the United States.

Donald Trump’s words are like tinder in the twisted, fiery mind of a hateful racist. He regularly stereotypes Mexican migrants, calling them “rapists and drug dealers and criminals.” His false allegation that Middle Easterners are among those trying to get across the Southern border implies that there is something inherently bad about people from the Middle East. His blanket travel ban on majority Muslim countries backed up the statements he made as a candidate advocating for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims” entering the United States.

When neo-Nazis marched with their tiki torches and swastika flags in Charlottesville last year, chanting “Jews will not replace us,” our President did not miss a beat, declaring that there were “fine people” among that crowd. Even after one of the neo-Nazis rammed his car into the crowd, murdering Heather Heyer, and injuring many more peaceful protestors, the President refused to condemn the group. While he was right to call out the initial violence on both sides, he was wrong to suggest the possibility of a “fine” neo-Nazi. The deafening silence we heard from the Oval Office in the wake of Heather’s murder provided the racists what they so desperately crave, legitimacy. Silence from moral leaders in the face of such an atrocity acts like oxygen in a brushfire, fanning the flames of anti-Semitism.

What Trump is clearly communicating to the world is actually quite simple. In Trump’s America, neo-Nazis are more welcome than brown people or Muslims. And Trump will literally do anything it takes to win.

Jab, jab, hook, uppercut was the combo that worked for Mike Tyson to knock out his opponents.

Fear, fear, hoax, hate, is the combo Donald Trump uses to defeat his.

When Donald Trump needs to win an election, he doubles down on his 1–2 punch. The most interesting part of this playbook for me is the “hoax” part, which requires Donald Trump to use anti-Semitic code and visual cues that communicate a message to racists that goes right over the heads of a normal viewer. This code comes in the form of linguistic and narrative elements that reinforce the most twisted of world views.

Take a look at this video. It was the last campaign ad Trump ran before the 2016 election. To a normal viewer, there is no sign of overt racism at all. But if a conspiracy theorist watches it, it clearly conjures up the most dominant anti-Semitic trope today. It is the today’s version of the old blood libel conspiracy of Medieval Europe.

The anti-Semitic conspiracy, of course, suggests that Jews run the world economy and are responsible for illegal immigration. The Jews built the global financial system designed only to make them rich. They ruined every country they enter and now they are ruining the United States. They are the reason the country is being overrun by brown skinned immigrants who take white peoples’ jobs .

This is the distorted narrative playing out in the minds of poor, lonely, White, and uneducated males desperate for a scapegoat to blame for their misery. Our President, by showing strong visuals of prominent Jewish figures in the financial world, with a voice-over blaming all the troubles of the United States squarely on them and their minions, creates a film that would have impressed the infamous Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl herself.

The video features three prominent Jews, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Former Chair of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellin, and billionaire investor George Soros, who are depicted as the archetypes of globalist (read: Jewish) greed and dominance. The narration goes, “For those who control the levers of power in Washington (cut to Soros), and for the global special interests (cut to Yellin), they partner with these people (cut to financial leaders, quick cut to Hillary Clinton) that don’t have your good in mind.” The pronoun “They” of course, in the twisted mind of an anti-Semite refers directly to “Jews.”

This is the classic anti-Semitic double-speak. To a sane mind, it appears innocuous, but to an anti-Semite, it is loaded language that speaks directly to their cause. It is validation not only that they are right, but that they are also becoming mainstream. Before this video came out, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories spread only in the darkest corners of the web and at KKK rallies. In 2016, it was the closing argument of the man who would become the 45th president of the United States. And for Donald Trump, why not stoop this low? His first racist hoax about the Central Park 5 got him plenty of national attention in 1989. His Obama’s birth certificate hoax is what catapulted him to front runner on the Republican ticket. The playbook, sadly, works.

Cut to October, 2018. Another election. Trump seizes upon the so-called “caravan” story to stoke fears about the mob of immigrants taking over our country (even though by the time they reach the border they will be less than .5% the annual total of migrants).

Now comes the hoax.

Trump knows exactly how to provide the right context for his most hateful supporters. “People are saying George Soros is funding the migrant caravan,” Trump said. This turn of phrase is how Fox News has been spreading conspiracy theories for years. When you start a sentence with “People are saying…” what typically follows is at best an unsubstantiated fact, but 99 times out of 100, it is a lie. In this case, it is a lie designed to corroborate a false narrative held largely by anti-Semites. What Trump is doing here is communicating directly to his neo-Nazi constituents, legitimizing their upside-down belief system, and validating their greatest fears. There go the Jews running the world again. The genius of course, is that to a normal person, none of this is detectable.

One day last week, a crazy white guy from my hometown in Florida sent pipe bombs to every individual Trump has castigated as the “enemy of the people,” including George Soros. The next day, another crazy white guy savagely murdered 11 Jews with an AR-15 in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in the worst anti-semitic attack in the US history. The first guy, Cesar Sayoc, loved Trump and was deranged enough to take Trump’s rhetoric as marching orders, attacking many of those Trump labeled “enemies of the people.” The despicable murderer, Robert Bowers, was a hardcore neo-Nazi who seemed to most detest the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a Jewish nonprofit that aids refugees, writing on Saturday before the murder that the group was bringing “invaders in that kill our people.” He actually didn’t love Trump (perhaps because of his Jewish daughter and son-in-law or his Goldman Sachs-filled cabinet) but that doesn’t mean that Trump’s propaganda did not motivate him to murder. By miscategorizing migrants as “criminals and rapists” coming across the border, by depicting hordes of illegal immigrants flooding U.S. streets in 0:38 in his campaign video, it is highly likely that Trump did sow fear in this warped, psychopathic mind. Is it what pushed him over the edge? We’ll probably never know.

What we do know is that Anti-semitic incidents have already surged 57% since Trump took office in 2017.

Make no mistake. Donald Trump did not invent hate crime or anti-semitism. It has existed as long as there have been Jews and Muslims. Also, I doubt he is actually anti-Jewish. He has a Jewish daughter, grandchildren, friends, and colleagues. But I do strongly believe that he is the most morally vapid human being ever to occupy the White House. He is willing to do anything it takes to win, including welcoming a vocal, exceedingly dangerous, minority of neo-Nazis into the Republican tent.

The byproduct of this shrewd calculus is that anti-semitism grows and America loses.

Fear, fear, hoax, hate.

Trump’s conspiracy-coded rhetorical bullets have already reached the fearful hearts of his target audience. If he continues fear mongering, race baiting, and doesn’t permanently remove the words “George Soros” from his vocabulary, unless it’s in the context of a speech about Hungarian holocaust survivors, things will get much worse here.

He is energizing a dangerous crowd that really needs no more encouragement. White supremacists and right wing terrorists have killed more people than any other category of domestic extremist, since September 11, 2001, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. With Trump now sounding the national alarm on a couple thousand poverty stricken, Hispanic refugees walking hundreds of miles for the chance at a better life, I worry that the domestic terrorists living among us are getting a free pass. Our security focus needs to be as sharp on places like Squirrel Hill as it is on our southern border. We need to monitor Gab posts from lone wolf anti-semites as closely as Trump’s twitter account. We need a President as tough on neo-Nazis as he is on poor migrants.

Sadly, it is too late for those who lost their lives and loved ones at the Tree of Life Synagogue, which, as a result of the attack, was the only Jewish congregation around the world that did not get to recite their weekly Torah reading last Shabbat.

I honestly have not read the Torah in a very long time, but in honor of them I decided to study the parsha myself this week.

The parsha on that fateful Shabbat was “Vayera” from the Book of Genesis, where Abraham interrupts God himself to greet a a few nomadic strangers who suddenly appear before him. According to the Talmud, Abraham was right to ignore God for a moment since those strangers turned out to be angels. The takeaway from this story is that all of humanity are children of God, and that even strangers, regardless of national origin or skin color, should be treated as if you are talking to God himself. This humanistic principle lies at the core of both Jewish AND American values. It is linked to the U.S. motto, E Pluribus Unim, Out of Many, One, which is the core tenet of a pluralist democracy.

This is the value that, as a Jewish American, I hold sacred. This is the value that, when upheld, makes America great. This is the value that Donald Trump couldn’t find the words to defend after the murder at Charlottesville.

It is this value the neo-Nazis most deplore, and in their fantasy world, believe they can extinguish through mass murder. This is what gets in the way of their white, Christian ethnostate.

This is why, to me, this election is not about conservatism versus liberalism. It is not even about policy. We’ve regressed too much, too quickly. This election is a referendum on right versus wrong.

I recognize that the vast majority of registered Republican voters are not racists themselves and are good people. Some of my closest friends and relatives vote Republican. I imagine that if they vote Republican on Tuesday, they will do so not because of Trump’s dangerous words, but despite them.

But I believe this is a huge mistake.

The Republicans, in supporting Trump and his racist rhetoric, are tacitly welcoming into their fold the most vile of Americans, neo-Nazis. So will Republican voters stand behind a President and party that has stooped so low ? This is the key question all Republicans should be asking themselves today.

Does my reason(s) for supporting Trump and the Republicans outweigh the consequences of emboldening anti-Semites and spawning bigotry in this country ?

Please ask yourself this honestly.

If the answer is yes, you better have a damn good reason. For me, personally, nothing is worth that price.

If we’ve learned anything in history, when politicians and anti-Semites become bedfellows, typically the story doesn’t end well for the Jews and other minority groups. Which is why this election, I urge my friends, family, and readers to vote based on one simple Judeo-Christian value, tolerance of others.

This is the value that Bowers most wanted to destroy last Shabbat in Pittsburgh.

For all the fine people voting tomorrow, let this value be your guiding light.

#Votefortolerance #Voteouthatred