#Eyal Press

[gatheringbones]

[“One author of the Clinical Psychology Review article was Shira Maguen, a researcher who began to think about the moral burdens of warfare while counseling veterans at a PTSD clinic in Boston.

Like most Veterans Affairs psychologists, Maguen had been trained to focus on the aftershocks of fear-based trauma—IED blasts that ripped through soldiers’ Humvees, skirmishes that killed members of their unit. The link between PTSD and such “life-threat” events was firmly established. Yet in many of the cases she observed, the source of distress seemed to lie elsewhere: not in attacks by the enemy that veterans had survived, but in acts they had observed or carried out that crossed their own ethical lines.

Soldiers were not, of course, the only people who risked committing such transgressions. All of the counselors I interviewed at the Dade Correctional Institution struggled with inner conflicts related to horrifying things they’d witnessed but failed to prevent. What kind of person was she? Lovita Richardson wondered after seeing a prisoner bound to a chair get bludgeoned and not intervening to help him. “Why didn’t I do more?” Harriet Krzykowski asked herself after learning about the “shower treatment.” Many of the prison guards I’d interviewed had alluded to incidents where they’d done things they knew they shouldn’t, as when Bill Curtis slammed a man to the ground, nearly fracturing his skull. Moral injuries were an occupational hazard for anyone whose job involved “perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs.” For most dirty workers, that is.

Among the veterans she counseled, Maguen grew particularly interested in the emotional toll of killing, which was sanctioned in the military but not when defenseless civilians were involved. “I was hearing about experiences where people killed and they thought they were making the right decision,” she told me, “and then they found out there was a family in the car.” To find out how heavy the burden of killing was, Maguen began combing through the databases in which veterans of conflicts dating back to the Vietnam War were asked if they had killed someone while in uniform. In some cases, veterans were also asked whom they killed—combatants, prisoners of war, civilians. Maguen wanted to see if there might be a relationship between taking another life and debilitating consequences like alcohol abuse, relationship problems, outbursts of violence, PTSD. The results were striking: even when controlling for different experiences in combat, she found, killing was a “significant, independent predictor of multiple mental health symptoms” and of social dysfunction.

Later, when she started directing a mental health clinic at a VA hospital in San Francisco, Maguen convened groups where veterans came together and talked about the killing they had done. In the VA no less than in the military, this was a taboo subject, so much so that clinicians often referred to it euphemistically, if at all. To ease the tension, a scene from a documentary was shown at the beginning of each session in which a veteran said, “Out there, it’s either kill or be killed. Nothing can really prepare you for war.” Afterward, Maguen would ask the veterans in the room a series of questions about how killing had impacted their lives. Some reacted angrily. Others fell silent. But many seized the opportunity to talk about experiences they later told Maguen they had never spoken about with anyone, not even their spouses and family members, for fear of being judged.

The veterans in Maguen’s groups didn’t talk a lot about fear and hyperarousal, emotions linked to PTSD. Mostly, they expressed self-condemnation and guilt. “You feel ashamed of what you did,” one said. Others described feeling unworthy of forgiveness and love. The passage of time did little to diminish the depth of these feelings, Maguen found. Geographic distance didn’t lessen them much either. Maguen recounted the story of a pilot who was haunted by the bombs he had dropped on victims far below. What troubled him was, in fact, precisely his distance from them—that instead of squaring off against the enemy in a fair fight, he had killed in a way that lacked valor. Obviously not all pilots felt this way. But the story underscored the significance of something Maguen had come to regard as more important than proximity or distance in shaping moral injury—namely, how veterans made sense of what they had done. “How you conceptualize what you did and what happened makes such a big difference,” she said. “It makes all the difference.”

Unlike PTSD, moral injury was not a medical diagnosis. It was an attempt to capture what could happen to a person’s identity and soul in the crucible of war, which is why it struck a chord among veterans who did not feel their wounds could be reduced to a medical disorder. “PTSD as a diagnosis has a tendency to depoliticize a veteran’s disquietude and turn it into a mental disorder,” observed Tyler Boudreau, a marine officer who served in Iraq and came back haunted by doubts about the war’s morality. “What’s most useful about the term ‘moral injury’ is that it takes the problem out of the hands of the mental health profession and the military and attempts to place it where it belongs—in society, in the community, and in the family—precisely where moral questions should be posed and wrangled with. It transforms ‘patients’ back into citizens and ‘diagnoses’ into dialogue.”]

eyal press, from dirty work: essential labor and the hidden toll of inequality in america, 2021

[whatdoeschronicevenmean]

Cont. to read Dirty Work

Ch. 3 Prisons have always been geographically isolated and visually lackluster, I assumed after these visits, the better to avoid attracting unwanted attention from outsiders. As I subsequently learned, this assumption was wrong. During the Jacksonian era, “Americans took enormous pride in their prisons, were eager to show them off to European visitors, and boasted that the United States had ushered in a new era in the history of crime and punishment,” notes the historian David Rothman.

Among the visitors invited to see the early prisons of the new republic was Charles Dickens, who toured the grounds of Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary in 1842, chatting freely with convicts as he passed from cell to cell. “Nothing was concealed or hidden from my view,” Dickens wrote in his American Notes, “and every piece of information that I sought, was openly and frankly given.” In both America and England, prisons in the nineteenth century tended to be built in prominent places that were exposed to the public. Some boasted soaring turrets and stone arcades and were likened to palaces.

At the time, America’s penal system was shaped by a belief that prisons could be designed to foster moral uplift and turn chastened offenders into law-abiding citizens. By the 1980s, a more punitive philosophy had taken hold, which made prison administrators and public officials all the more inclined to limit access to their grounds.

But the shift to the margins of society could also be attributed to something else. In Pratt’s view, it reflected the triumph of “civilized punishment”—civilized not in the conventional meaning of the term, but in the sense that Norbert Elias described, whereby distasteful and disturbing events were removed from sight and pushed “behind the scenes of social life.”

...In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault argued that the transition to the more refined technologies of punishment in the modern era—most notably, the prison—was driven by the desire to control and observe the bodies of criminals, rendering them docile and obedient. Criminologists influenced by Elias have emphasized another rationale, arguing that the shift was propelled by a desire to hide these bodies from respectable citizens who no longer wanted to glimpse the sordid business of punishment with their own eyes.

The fact that corporal punishment came to be viewed as sordid was, in theory, a sign of progress. Yet as Elias’s disciples have noted, the “civilizing process” he outlined did not suggest that brutal violence would cease, only that it would be relegated to more private spaces. According to the scholar David Garland, who introduced Elias’s work to the sociology of punishment, violence would not offend civilized sensibilities so long as it unfolded behind closed doors or could be sanitized.

...Flogging prisoners clearly violated the “threshold of repugnance” among modern Americans. But caging them in hidden, segregated “isolation units” did not. The fact that solitary confinement’s “ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye,” as Dickens had observed in 1842, was precisely why so many people failed to find it offensive. “Routine violence and suffering can be tolerated on condition that it is discreet, disguised, or somehow removed from view,” observed Garland. What mattered was not the level of brutality, but its visibility and form. Viewed in this light, the remoteness of Florida’s prisons was not an accident. Throughout the Western world, “the civilized prison became the invisible prison,” Pratt observed, hiding the system’s violence and making it that much easier for “good people” to ignore or forget about what was happening behind the walls.

[cafehopping]

Work till you drop

Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in AmericaBy Eyal Press270 pp. Farrar, Straus Giroux. $28. A deep dive into what capitalism has wrought in America and its labor force today. You know the truth — a lot of the work that’s deemed “essential” in this country, and throughout much of the West, is work that’s heavily stigmatized. By the same token, many of those who are…

[dipnotski]

Eyal Press – Pis İşler (2023)

Toplu olarak yaşamanın parçası olan çeşitli “pis işler” var. Sadece ağır ve zor değil aynı zamanda adı kötüye çıkmış, yani saygınlıktan uzak sayılan işler. Geleneksel toplumlarda bu tür işleri yapanlara yönelik bariz dışlama mekanizmaları vardı. Bugünkü toplumlarımızda açıktan açığa böyle bir işleyiş olmasa da “pis işleri” yapanların toplumsal konumları daha iyi değil. Eskiden toplumların en…

[shipping-isnt-morality]

I don’t feel like I have anything to say to Zionists anymore except “this is what it sounds like to defend genocide.”

I just - can you hear yourself? I know many of you have studied fascism and the rise of genocidal attitudes. Do you think you’re immune? Do you think being Jewish, or educated, or the descendant of genocide survivors makes you immune? You know better.

My god, if the 20th century can teach us one thing, let it be that humans are great at justifying genocide to themselves and each other when motivated to. No education can inoculate against it. Every excuse had been used before. Every feeling of righteous justification for slaughter has already been invoked.

It is undeniable that there are tens of thousands of dead. So many thousands upon tens upon hundreds of thousands of children dead maimed orphaned traumatized by bombs that Israel dropped, shells that Israel fired, targets chosen by software Israel made.

This is undeniable; I can see it with my own eyes. You can say, this is the reality of war, and I will say: this is the reality of your choices. How Israel wages “war” is a choice. How they go about statecraft is a choice. We cannot and should never accept their justifications that some action of the enemy necessitated this response; they still chose the response.

There was a euphemism in some death camps in Poland: “dirty work”. It was often literally true - there’s horrific stories about the smell and texture of industrial amounts of human ash - but also figuratively; the work of mass executions is more often seen as a necessary evil for the accomplishment of a greater good. It’s rarely celebrated or acknowledged openly for what it is at the time. All of this is very normal in genocide.

I look at my timeline in the past months, at the choices Israel has made for its “greater good”, I have listened to the justifications. What I see is Israelis making the same old tired weak excuses for their own dirty work.

And all I have to say anymore is: this is what it sounds like when you defend genocide. You have not invented a new thought in all of it. “They’re not a real group, they’re monsters, we don’t want to kill them but we have to, we just want them to leave before they kill us all and they’ll try to exterminate us the second we stop killing them” - save it.

Do some fucking reading on other genocides - the Armenian one is particularly relevant - and read arguments from genocide deniers and you will quickly see it is all the same shit. Check out Facebook posts from Myanmar during the genocide and it’s basically indistinguishable from tweets from Zionists today. It’s the same shit, over and over and over again.

Literally billions of people with eyes can see what Israel is doing and call it what it is, because it’s been done before, and all the defensive answers and excuses have been done before too.

This is what it looks like when people defend genocide. Always just like this.

[zvaigzdelasas]

[Calcalist is Private Israeli Media]

"We have a huge deficit of ammunition not just in Ukraine but all over the world. We understand we should produce this here in Ukraine because all around the world it’s finished, it’s depleted. All the warehouses are empty," said Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal to the "Financial Times" in October of last year, addressing the ammunition situation of the Ukrainian army, which is interconnected with the challenges faced by the IDF.

The increased ammunition usage in the wars in Gaza and Ukraine has led to an unprecedented global shortage of ammunition of all types. While the IDF tries not to address the issue publicly, Major General Eliezer Toledano admitted last month that the IDF is reducing air attacks, emphasizing the necessity to "manage the economy of armaments" because the war will last a long time. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also commented on the matter, stating that "we need three things from the U.S.: armaments, armaments, armaments." At a press conference two weeks ago, Netanyahu announced that Israel is preparing the Israeli defense industries to "cut off dependence on the world," a goal that is not realistic in any way.[...]

[L]ast week the Director General of the Ministry of Defense Eyal Zamir concluded a huge deal with the American government for the supply of aerial ammunition in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and so far over 25,000 tons of weapons have been sent to Israel since the beginning of the war in about 280 aircraft and about 40 ships. The Israeli defense industry is also tasked with filling the IDF's stocks. About two weeks ago it was published in Calcalist that the Israeli companies postponed the supply of weapons worth more than $1.5 billion to their customers across the world to divert resources for the IDF's combat needs and that in the last three months, the Ministry of Defense ordered more than NIS 10 billion ($2.7 million) worth of weapons from them. It should be noted that the shortage does not stem from a lack of budget but from a lack of supply, and the Treasury does not restrict the IDF from purchasing ammunition of any kind.

The tremendous need for armaments stems from the unusual amount of bombings that the IDF has carried out in Gaza since the outbreak of the war. Two weeks ago, the army announced that 30,000 targets had been attacked in Gaza. A security source told Calcalist that the rate of fire the IDF is using in the current war is similar to that of a "superpower," is comparable only to the capabilities demonstrated by the U.S., and probably also exceeds the number of armaments of the Russians in the campaign against Ukraine.[...]

Another reason [for the increase in targets bombed] is that in the current war, the IDF adopted a policy of a lighter finger on the trigger [sic] regarding damage to infrastructure and Hamas operatives who are in a civilian environment, thus increasing the ability to hit targets that were not previously attacked. In addition to these reasons, there is also the added pressure from the political level, as well as from the [Israeli] public, who demand an increase in air force bombing to prevent as much as possible a risk to the forces on the ground.[...]

[O]ne should ask whether, considering the existing ammunition stockpile, this policy may not harm the IDF's readiness to carry out future missions, especially given the existing security challenges and the probable scenario in which the IDF will be forced to [sic] carry out an attack in southern Lebanon as well. The IDF may be forced to better clarify its limitations to the politicians to avoid reaching an extreme scenario of an ammunition shortage, or in the words of General Toledano: "There is no infinite army."

28 Jan 24

[bitegore]

Check it out - Haymarket Books has a free collection of essays about Gaza. Description from the site:

In the final months of 2023, as this ebook is published, Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. Israeli officials have repeatedly made their intentions to do so extremely clear; talking of collective punishment, mass murder, and ethnic cleansing in newspapers, at press conferences, and on television. All the while, European and American states have continued to support Israel, to claim its murderous campaign is justified self-defense, and to send weapons, troops, war boats, and spy planes. While Western governments have supported the unjustifiable, or spoken inane words of condemnation while failing to take any concrete action, millions around the world have poured into the streets to denounce their complicity, to demand a ceasefire and a free Palestine. From the River to the Sea collects personal testimonies from within Gaza and the West Bank, along with essays and interviews that collectively provide crucial histories and analyses to help us understand how we got to the nightmarish present. They place Israel’s genocidal campaign within the longer history of settler colonialism in Palestine, and Hamas within the longer histories of Palestinian resistance and the so-called “peace process.” They explore the complex history of Palestine’s relationship to Jordan, Egypt, and the broader Middle East, the eruption of unprecedented anti-Zionist Jewish protest in the US, the alarming escalation in state repression of Palestine solidarity in Britain and Europe, and more. Taken together, the essays comprising this collection provide important grounding for the urgent discussions taking place across the Palestine solidarity movement. With contributions from: Reda Abu Assi, Asmaa Abu Mezied, Tawfiq Abu Shomer, Khalil Abu Yahia, Dunia Aburahma, Spencer Ackerman, Hil Aked, Yousef Al-Akkad, Jamie Allinson, Hammam Alloh, Riya Al’Sanah, Soheir Asaad, Tareq Baconi, Rana Barakat, Omar Barghouti, Sara Besaiso, Ashley Bohrer, Haim Bresheeth-Zabner, Nihal El Aasar, Mohammed El-Kurd, Sai Englert, Noura Erakat, Samera Esmeir, Rebecca Ruth Gould, Toufic Haddad, Adam Hanieh, Khaled Hroub, Rashid Khalidi, Noah Kulwin, Saree Makdisi, Ghassan Najjar, Samar Saeed, Reema Saleh, Alberto Toscano, and Eyal Weizman, alongside a number of Palestinian writers published pseudonymously. Published in collaboration with Verso Books Cover design: Tom Greenwood

[knuckleduster]

"The study of the Middle East has been a national priority in Israel from its inception, a priority extending far beyond the university gates. In Israel, this form of expertise is termed Mizrahanut (Orientalism, literally translated).141 Orientalism, Edward Said argued, is the system of knowledge production about the “Orient” through which the power of the European and US empires operate. It reflects Western ideas and imaginations about the “Orient” articulated through its production as distinct from the “Occident.”142 Building on Said’s theorization, Israeli sociologist Gil Eyal argues that Mizrahanut is a generic name for the complex of Israelis’ encounter with their geographic environment. It is a mechanism that draws and polices boundaries and examines phenomena from what the Israeli state defines as “the other side.”143 Mizrahanim (Orientalists) in Israel therefore include not only academics, but government and military officials, journalists, and others engaged in monitoring the Palestinian population and neighboring Arab countries and participating in public debates on Middle Eastern affairs.144

Israeli Middle East Studies indeed developed at the intersection of Israeli academia, the military, and the state. Mizrahanut was central to the establishment of Israeli academia itself, with the Institute for Orient Studies developed as one of the first three schools of Hebrew University.145 In a study of the foundational generations of Israeli Middle East studies scholars, Eyal Clyne shows that many saw no distinction between their scholarly and national commitments.146 In the 1930s and 1940s, the Institute for Oriental Studies at Hebrew University trained entire cohorts of advisors and officials serving the Zionist movement leadership, who joined the “Arab branch” of the Haganah paramilitary and the departments for Arab affairs and politics of the Jewish Agency. They worked to monitor the Arab press, catalogue and index intelligence data collected on Palestinians, and survey actions, attitudes, and social relations in Palestine and neighboring Arab countries. Having served roles in political intelligence and hasbara in the prestate years, roughly half of these Mizrahanim returned to Hebrew University after the state’s establishment to found the contemporary Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies.147

Following the Institute for Oriental Studies, the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies was formed as a node of the Israeli state network of intelligence expertise. First called the Shiloah Institute, the center was established by the Israeli military, the Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs, and Hebrew University in 1959. It was annexed to Tel Aviv University in 1966 and was renamed after Moshe Dayan, former Israeli chief of staff and minister of defense, in 1983.148 At its inception, the Dayan Center was founded to serve as a bridge between the Israeli Intelligence Division and academia. It was staffed by both academics and representatives from Israel’s Foreign Office, and regularly published articles by military and state officials and hosted them at conferences.149 At Tel Aviv University, it continued to invite military leaders as guest researchers to publish their own work and to contribute to the institute’s publications. Many of its researchers—who formerly or continuously served in the Israeli Intelligence Corps—received classified military information for their studies, while intelligence officers and state officials staffed the institute’s committee to select research projects and award research grants.150 The institute operated within Tel Aviv University as a semi-secret enclave, barring access to Palestinian citizens of Israel and those without state security clearance, including access to master’s and doctoral theses that drew on classified data.151 As such, the center’s knowledge production was structured like the Israeli Intelligence Corps and served as the military’s auxiliary research arm.

This entanglement of university, military, and state expertise shaped the discipline in its early years. Many of the founding Israeli Middle East studies scholars moved between or held parallel roles in academia and the security establishment or were otherwise bound by loyalty and secrecy commitments to state apparatuses.152 Prominent examples include Meir Kister, Israel Prize laureate and founder of the Arabic language departments at Hebrew University and the University of Haifa, who also worked for the Haganah’s intelligence agency. Also at Hebrew University, Israel Prize laureate for Mizrahanut Yaakov Landau supplied research on Palestinian citizens of Israel to the Prime Minister’s Office Advisor on Arab Affairs, from which he received materials and proposed research topics. At Tel Aviv University, Yaakov Shimoni contributed his expertise in Arabic and Arab politics to the Israeli military, as well as to Israel’s decision to institutionally prevent the return of Palestinian refugees between 1947 and 1949, in direct violation of UN resolution 194.153

With Israel’s establishment of a military government in the Occupied Palestinian Territory in 1967 came renewed opportunities for academic cooperation with the state. Hebrew University professors Menachem Milson, Amnon Cohen, Moshe Sharon, and Moshe Maoz served as Arab Affairs advisors to the Israeli military and government. Milson also served as the inaugural head of the Civil Administration, Israel’s military administration in the OPT, and oversaw the forced closure of the Palestinian Birzeit University beginning in 1981; Cohen, Sharon, and Maoz served as colonels and worked with the military throughout their academic careers. At Tel Aviv University, professor Zvi Elpeleg drew on his expertise as a scholar of Palestinian history while repeatedly serving as military governor over various regions of the OPT, including the Gaza Strip and Nablus.154

Leading Middle East studies scholars maintain ties to security apparatuses to this day. Some serve in senior positions in the Intelligence Corps or other elite military units throughout their academic tenure, others secure data or funding from state agencies for their research, and others still are officially or in a classified manner employed by state and military institutions as researchers or instructors.155 Though they no longer officially operate under the Israeli security state, the leading Middle East studies departments and institutes continue to conduct research and offer expertise in its service."

Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, Verso (2024) (p. 59-63)

141 Eyal Clyne, Orientalism, Zionism, and Academic Practice: Middle East and Islam Studies in Israeli Universities (New York: Routledge, 2019), 527. 142 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Nadia Abu El-Haj, “Edward Said and the Political Present,” American Ethnologist 32, no. 4 (2005): 538–55. 143 Said, Orientalism; Gil Eyal, Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab Affairs and the Israeli State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 22–3. 144 Eyal, Disenchantment of the Orient. All major Israeli news media employ one or more full-time experts under the job title of “commentator/correspondent on Arab affairs.” Diverse government agencies such as intelligence and security bodies, the Ministries of Justice, Education, and Religions, and diplomatic offices employ officially titled Mizrahanim in advisory positions, as do independent think tanks, research institutions, and NGOs. Clyne, Orientalism, Zionism, and Academic Practice, 550. 145 Clyne, Orientalism, Zionism, and Academic Practice; Eyal, Disenchantment of the Orient. 146 Clyne, Orientalism, Zionism, and Academic Practice. 147 Ibid. 148 Ibid.; Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, “About Moshe Dayan Center” [in Hebrew], dayan.org.149 Ibid.; Eyal, Disenchantment of the Orient. 150 Eyal, Disenchantment of the Orient. 151 Ibid.

[drsonnet]

From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine

Edited by Sai Englert, Michal Schatz and Rosie Warren

In the final months of 2023, as this ebook is published, Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. Israeli officials have repeatedly made their intentions to do so extremely clear; talking of collective punishment, mass murder, and ethnic cleansing in newspapers, at press conferences and on television. All the while, European and American states have continued to support Israel, to claim its murderous campaign is justified self-defence, and to send weapons, troops, war boats and spy planes in support. While Western governments have supported the unjustifiable, or spoken inane words of condemnation while failing to take any concrete action, millions around the world have poured into the streets to denounce their complicity, to demand a ceasefire and a free Palestine. From the River to the Sea collects personal testimonies from within Gaza and the West Bank, along with essays and interviews that collectively provide crucial histories and analyses to help us understand how we got to the nightmarish present. They place Israel’s genocidal campaign within the longer history of settler colonialism in Palestine, and Hamas within the longer histories of Palestinian resistance and the so-called ‘peace process’. They explore the complex history of Palestine’s relationship to Jordan, Egypt, and the broader Middle East, the eruption of unprecedented anti-Zionist Jewish protest in the US, the alarming escalation in state repression of Palestine solidarity in Britain and Europe, and more. Taken together, the essays comprising this collection provide important grounding for the urgent discussions taking place across the Palestine solidarity movement.

With contributions from: Dr. Reda Abu Assi, Asmaa Abu Mezied, Tawfiq Abu Shomer, Khalil Abu Yahia, Dunia Aburahma, Spencer Ackerman, Hil Aked, Dr. Yousef Al-Akkad, Jamie Allinson, Dr. Hammam Alloh, Riya Al’Sanah, Soheir Asaad, Tareq Baconi, Rana Barakat, Omar Barghouti, Sara Besaiso, Ashley Bohrer, Haim Bresheeth-Žabner, Nihal El Aasar, Mohammed El-Kurd, Sai Englert, Noura Erakat, Samera Esmeir, Rebecca Ruth Gould, Toufic Haddad, Adam Hanieh, Khaled Hroub, Rashid Khalidi, Noah Kulwin, Saree Makdisi, Ghassan Najjar, Samar Saeed, Reema Saleh, Alberto Toscano and Eyal Weizman, alongside a number of Palestinian writers published pseudonymously. Published in collaboration with Haymarket Books. Cover design: Tom Greenwood.

[mariluphoto]

(via. rosypirani)

IDF Chief Rabbi says Israeli soldiers are allowed to rap€ non-jewish women during war to boost morale. I am terrified for the women in Gaza right now. This is sick and evil.

Caption: This is from a 2016 article published by mintpress, Rabbi Col. Eyal Karim said:

"Although intercourse with a female gentiles very grave, it was permitted during wartime (under the conditions it stipulated) out of consideration for the soldiers' difficulty," he wrote. "And since our concern is the success of the collective in the war, the Torah permitted [soldiers] to satisfy the evil urge under the conditions it stipulated for the sake of the collective's success."

In other words, soldiers can rap€ innocent women during times of war in order to keep their morale up.

Please note: This is his interpretation. I have not read the Torah but I know Judaism is a peaceful religion; his interpretation is the problem.

Mint Press News 2016 article:

Times of Israel 2016 article:

[gatheringbones]

[“The belief that the troubling circumstances we have come to tolerate are impervious to change can itself become an excuse for resignation. It can fuel the kind of apathy that prevailed among the “passive democrats” that Everett Hughes described in his Frankfurt diary. The resignation is unwarranted, because, like most aspects of the social order, dirty work is not immutable. It is a function of laws and policies, of funding decisions, and of other collective choices we have made that reflect our values and priorities. Among these choices is whether to recognize the immense harm it causes, not only to innocent people and the environment but also to the people who carry it out.

The anguish such workers experience may elicit little sympathy from those who feel that anyone who participates in a cruel or violent system must be held accountable for the suffering they cause, even if, afterward, they harbor shame or regret about what they have done. As Primo Levi affirmed in “The Gray Zone,” doubts and discomfort expressed after the fact by oppressors are “not enough to enroll them among the victims.” But Levi also called for judgment of the low-ranking functionaries in oppressive systems to be tempered by awareness of how susceptible we all are to collaborating with power, and by an appreciation of the circumstances that lead relatively powerless people to be pushed into such roles. In contemporary America, the chief circumstance to consider, I have suggested, is inequality, which has shaped the delegation of dirty work no less than the distribution of wealth and income. More privileged Americans are spared from any involvement in such work, knowing it can be outsourced and allotted to people with fewer choices and opportunities. The result of this moral inequality is to ensure that an array of hidden injuries—stigma, shame, trauma, moral injury—are concentrated among those who are comparatively disadvantaged. These moral and emotional burdens have barely factored into the debate about inequality, perhaps because economists cannot measure and quantify them. But their effects can be equally pernicious and debilitating, shaping people’s sense of self-worth, their place in the social order, and their capacity to hold on to their dignity and pride.

Inequality also shapes the geography of dirty work and who is held responsible for it. As we’ve seen, the blame is rarely directed at the companies that profit from it or the public officials who have passed laws and policies that perpetuate it. More typically, it falls on the least powerful people in the system, “bad apples” who are singled out after the periodic “scandals” that shock the public—the same public that spent the preceding months or years ignoring what was being done.

In fairness, one can hardly expect the public to register concern about conditions it rarely sees. Dirty work is obscured by structural invisibility: the walls and barriers that keep what happens inside prisons and industrial slaughterhouses hidden; the secrecy that envelops the drone program; the nondisclosure agreements that the middlemen overseeing the cobalt supply chain are required to sign. These arrangements have had a “civilizing” effect, pushing disturbing events “behind the scenes of social life.” Yet there are limits to what even the most elaborate mechanisms of concealment can hide. In spite of the isolation and impenetrability of institutions like prisons and industrial slaughterhouses, plenty of information about what transpires within them leaks out. The secrecy cloaking the drone campaign has not stopped writers and documentary filmmakers from producing illuminating work about it, nor have nondisclosure agreements prevented NGOs from issuing detailed reports about the cobalt supply chain. The problem is not a dearth of information but the fact that many choose to avert their eyes, not only from dirty work but also from those who get stuck doing it, people with whom they almost never interact and find easy to judge.

What do we owe these workers?”]

eyal press, from dirty work: essential labor and the hidden toll of inequality in america, 2021

[usafphantom2]

Israel is close to acquiring more F-35I, F-15IA fighters and Apache helicopters

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 01/27/2024 - 18:05 in Military

According to reports from the Israeli press, the Israeli military announced the intention to soon conclude a major multibilion-dollar arms agreement with the United States, which includes the sale of 25 additional F-35I "Adir" fighters and 25 more F-15IA fighters, along with at least 12 additional AH-64D Apache attack helicopters and a continuous supply of ammunition.

This agreement has been ongoing since last year, with initial deliveries scheduled for 2027. However, the Israeli government hopes that, in the middle of the war in Gaza and the fight against Iranian-backed groups, some deliveries can be accelerated and begin in the coming months. The subscription is scheduled for the next few weeks.

Last week, on the 25th, the Director General of the Ministry of Defense, Eyal Zamir, ended a working visit to Washington, during which he met with senior officials from the Pentagon and the State Department, as well as executives of leading U.S. defense companies to discuss the advance agreements for additional F-35, F-15 and Apaches for Israel

Defense sources would have told the Times of Israel that Israel's plans to acquire a new squadron of 25 F-35I stealth combat aircraft, a squadron of 25 F-15IA combat aircraft and a squad of 12 Apache combat helicopters, would have advanced during discussions with the United States. Last year, Israel made formal requests to the United States regarding the purchase of F-35 fighters and F-15 jets.

The number of new aircraft ordered is quite significant. Tel Aviv is trying to expand and upgrade its current F-15IA fleet, which can carry the kind of heavy weapons that Israel would need to attack Iranian nuclear facilities, most of which are buried underground. While the 50% increase in F-35Is will increase Lightning's stealth capabilities to attack strategic targets in the Middle East at any time and with absolute discretion.

This was also the case in November 2023, when Damascus airport in Syria was bombed by Israeli F-35s, which are also used for air-to-air missions, as demonstrated by the slaughter, again in November 2023, of a cruise ship with missiles launched into Israeli airspace by Houthi rebels.

The acquisition of Apache helicopters would instead follow the lessons learned from the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, during which about 3,000 Hamas-led terrorists attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 253 hostages, mostly civilians, and the fighting in the Gaza Strip. Today Israel operates 26 AH-64A Apaches and 17 more modern AH-64D Apaches. Although the AH-64As have undergone some improvements and modernizations, the purchase order for 12 additional helicopters perhaps represents Israel's desire to replace some of its older Apaches.

There is still no immediate schedule for the delivery of fighters and helicopters, but Israel is expected to press for faster delivery. In addition, as part of the discussions with the United States, the Ministry of Defense delegation would also work to promote the continued supply of American ammunition to deal with the war in Gaza. Since the beginning of the war, at least 250 cargo planes and more than 20 ships have delivered more than 10,000 tons of weapons and military equipment to Israel.

For the agreements to be carried out and signed by Israel, government approval is required, a measure that defense sources say could happen in the coming weeks. Remember that Israel had already agreed to buy 50 F-35 fighters from Lockheed Martin, whose deliveries will continue until 2024.

Tags: AH-64 ApacheMilitary AviationF-15XF-35I 'Adir'IAF - Israeli Air Force/Israel Air Force

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Fernando Valduga

Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, he has participated in several events and air operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Dayton Airshow and FIDAE. He has works published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. He uses Canon equipment during his photographic work in the world of aviation.

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[ophelia-thinks]

3, 4, 5, 9, 25!

3. What were your top five books of the year?

collected nonfiction by joan didion - i spent a week in january in the sacramento valley working my way through this book. i'd read stuff by her before, but this year some switch flipped in my brain and i Got it, i understood the obsession, the veneration... it's the details for me, the odd little turns of phrase, like "a little japanese on the horizon" describing the oilfields outside of LA, or the dress the color of the sac delta "for a few days in spring, when the rice first showed." didion would have snubbed me, descendant of okies and japanese immigrants, but i love seeing the landscape i was born and raised in refracted through her exacting, conservative mirror.

dear friend, from my life i write to you in your life by yiyun li - utterly obsessed with this. i can't describe the feeling it gives me, the quiet passage through a singularly strange and perfect mind. "had i been more disciplined, i would have written nothing and lost nothing." this is a book about being unable to convincingly describe a chrysanthemum.

the lover by marguerite duras - having a weird psychic moment with this book. "and it really was unto death. it has been unto death."

dispatches by michael herr - he mostly stopped writing after this. he saw that there was something basically fucked-up and evil about it, it being language, and especially the pathetic human use of it to conceal and protect. even worse, images; photos that appear to prove the existence of evil but communicate nothing behind it. which wasn't at all true of me, herr writes, father of all motherfuckers; i was here to watch.

dirty work by eyal press - i want everyone to read this book. it gave me a way to understand my world, a path to compassion, a path to forgiveness. i think about it constantly when i'm at my day job in the [redacted] world, and i want to make everyone i come into contact with read it too. we all follow orders; we all injure and are injured; we are all going to hell so that someone more fortunate doesn't have to.

4. Did you discover any new authors that you love this year?

CAN XUE!!!!!!!!! vertical motion blew my mind. also kind of getting into richard brautigan, i love his poems which are like haiku with bombs strapped inside of them.

5. What genre did you read the most of?

hard to say because i'll read anything... i did read a lot of nonfiction this year, plus my usual sci-fi detours.

9. Did you get into any new genres?

nah. i did have an intense philip k. dick moment though, does that count as a sci-fi subgenre?

25. What reading goals do you have for next year?

i want to get deeper into a few authors whose books i've loved recently but haven't read all of (robert walser, anna kavan, can xue); i want to read more poetry, and read poetry more adventurously; and i have a stack of hyperspecific nonfiction/history stuff on my shelf that i haven't cracked yet.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

32 for the ask game?

#32 is Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America by Eyal Press, which I learned about when I was trying to actually read all of the articles I have saved in my twitter likes. it didn't work, but I did scoop some interesting new books to read!

[xtruss]

Can State Supreme Courts Preserve—or Expand—Rights?

With a Lopsided Conservative Majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, Progressive Activists are Seeking Legal Opportunities in State Constitutions.

When it comes to expanding citizens’ rights, the current U.S. Supreme Court appears to be a dead end—and it could stay that way for years. Yet, for lawyers, activists, and scholars looking to eke out gains in areas such as reproductive rights and criminal-justice reform, there may be reason for hope. As Eyal Press explores in this week’s issue, state courts, “with their freedom to experiment,” are increasingly viewed as the most vital legal venues in the country. Here are a few reasons for that:

State courts offer freedoms beyond federal protections. “Although the Constitution’s supremacy clause forbids states from violating federal rights,” Press notes, “nothing bars them from amplifying those rights.” The high courts of eleven states have identified in state constitutions the right to an abortion. And various state constitutions protect more novel concepts, including “social welfare,” the power to grow and harvest food, and access to “a clean and healthful environment”—positive rights that have no federal analogue.

State courts support democracy. The current Supreme Court can be seen as both an embodiment and a perpetuator of minority rule, which some argue is embedded in the U.S. Constitution. But state constitutions reflect what some legal scholars call “the democracy principle”: “a commitment to popular sovereignty that is reflected in language vesting power in the people and in explicit assurances of the right to vote.” State courts can also better reflect the needs of local residents, by crafting “remedies without imposing a one-size-fits-all rule on the entire country.”

State courts can be catalysts for national change. The Supreme Court’s decision in favor of marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges, for example, came after a decade in which same-sex union and marriage rights were enshrined in places such as Vermont and Massachusetts. Scholars argue that the current fight to reëstablish reproductive rights could follow a similar path.

— By Eyal Press | June 3, 2024

State constitutions explicitly affirm rights that are not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. Montana’s invokes a right to “a clean and healthful environment.” New York’s includes a right to “social welfare.” Photo Illustration By Adam Maida; Source Photograph From Getty Images

In November, 2020, Lauren McLane, a Professor at the University of Wyoming College of Law, was forwarded a letter from Christopher Hicks, an incarcerated man who’d been sentenced to life without parole for his role in a murder. The letter was part of a petition, prepared by Hicks, laying out “all the pertinent information, charges and reasons” that he deserved consideration for a pardon. The murder, he wrote, had been carried out fifteen years earlier by another man, who entered the victim’s house while Hicks remained in the back seat of a car, intoxicated. Noting that he was a teen-ager at the time, Hicks claimed that he’d been pressured into participating in the crime by a third, older man, who lived in the trailer where Hicks had been residing.

McLane runs a clinic that regularly helps indigent clients in Wyoming file motions to reduce their sentences. Yet, when she finished Hicks’s petition, she said to herself, “This is an absolute lost cause.” In part, she felt this way because of the notorious reputation of Kent Proffit, Sr., the older man who’d orchestrated the murder: Proffit, an alleged child molester, had wanted to prevent the victim, a sixteen-year-old boy, from testifying against him in a sexual-assault trial. Another problem was that Hicks had been nineteen when the crime occurred. In a 2012 Supreme Court case, Miller v. Alabama, the Justices had barred judges from sentencing juveniles to mandatory life without parole, on the ground that doing so violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote the majority opinion, argued that children’s “diminished culpability and heightened capacity for change” required judges to consider their age when determining their punishments. But, as McLane knew, the Miller decision applied only to defendants who were younger than eighteen when they’d committed crimes. Because Hicks had been a little older than this, McLane assumed that no judge would deem his age a mitigating factor.

A few months later, however, she learned about a case that made her reconsider. The case, In re Monschke, came before the Supreme Court of Washington State, which, in a 4–3 decision, ruled that Miller should be extended to two petitioners who’d committed homicides when they were nineteen and twenty years old, respectively. The justices noted the prohibition on “cruel punishment” in Washington’s state constitution, and cited neuroscientific research, presented in court, showing that the brains of young adults were still developing, leaving them susceptible to the same impulsive behavior as juveniles.

One lawyer involved in the Monschke case was Jeffrey Ellis, who taught a seminar on capital punishment that McLane had taken in law school, at Seattle University. She began to wonder whether a similar case might be brought in her home state. McLane recognized the vast differences between the political climates of Washington, which had one of the most liberal supreme courts in the country, and Wyoming, where Donald Trump won nearly seventy per cent of the vote in 2020. But she also knew that Wyoming, like much of the rest of the Mountain West, prided itself on not taking directives from the federal government.

McLane combed through recent Eighth Amendment cases that had come before the Wyoming Supreme Court and spotted evidence of this independent spirit. In a 2014 case, Bear Cloud v. State, the justices noted that the plaintiff, who sought an itemized sentencing hearing for an aggregate punishment he’d been given for a series of crimes committed when he was sixteen, had made “no more than a passing reference to the protections that might be afforded by our state constitution.” They added, “Our state constitution need not necessarily be analyzed by ‘blindly follow[ing] the United States Supreme Court’s interpretation.’ ”

Wyoming’s constitution, like those of several other states, contains an analogue to the Eighth Amendment that prohibits cruel or unusual punishment—a minor but potentially important textual difference. After weighing these factors, McLane called Christopher Hicks. She mentioned the Monschke decision and said, “I think this is something we can do.”

In 1976, Justice William Brennan delivered a speech at the annual convention of the New Jersey State Bar Association. In the previous two decades, Brennan, who had served on the New Jersey Supreme Court for five years before Dwight Eisenhower appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court, had written, or joined, dozens of influential opinions that broadened the rights of criminal defendants, women, Black people, and indigent Americans. Many of these decisions invalidated state laws that sanctioned racial discrimination, by augmenting the authority of the federal government. But Brennan, in his speech, endorsed an idea that seemed to move in the opposite direction, making an impassioned case for state courts to issue rulings that pushed beyond protections enshrined in federal law. “State courts cannot rest when they have afforded their citizens the full protections of the federal Constitution,” he said. “State constitutions, too, are a font of individual liberties, their protections often extending beyond those required by the Supreme Court’s interpretation of federal law.”

As Brennan peered around the ballroom where the conventioneers were gathered, he saw the crowd thinning, and became convinced that his speech was flopping—so much so that he walked offstage before finishing it. But, the following year, his full address was published in the Harvard Law Review, and it became one of the most widely cited law-review articles ever written, inspiring what legal scholars have called “the new judicial federalism”—a movement in which state courts, citing provisions in their own constitutions, issued a flurry of decisions widening the scope of rights. Among them was State v. Novembrino, a 1987 case in which the New Jersey Supreme Court endorsed protections against unreasonable searches and seizures that were more robust than those in federal law, siding with a suspect who had been charged with possession of illegal drugs on the basis of evidence obtained through a nonconsensual search. (The decision rejected the “good-faith exception” endorsed by the Supreme Court, which critics have argued gives the police too much latitude to engage in misconduct.) Although the Constitution’s supremacy clause forbids states from violating federal rights, nothing bars them from amplifying those rights. In the decade after Brennan’s article appeared, state courts handed down more than two hundred such rulings, on issues ranging from free speech to the death penalty—a tenfold increase from the previous ten years.

Brennan’s article had a major impact because of his stature, and because, by the late seventies, the Supreme Court was no longer engaged in the expansion of rights that had unfolded under Chief Justice Earl Warren, who retired in 1969. The subsequent appointment of four Justices who were nominated by Richard Nixon—including Warren Burger, who succeeded Warren as Chief Justice—had left Brennan increasingly isolated and dismayed, a feeling that he didn’t hide in his speech. The Supreme Court was failing to protect rights, he complained, including in cases involving the equal-protection clause—a retreat that “constitutes a clear call to state courts to step into the breach.”

As necessary as such interventions may have seemed to Brennan nearly half a century ago, a growing number of advocates and legal scholars believe that they are far more urgent today. In February, I heard this view expressed repeatedly at a two-day symposium on state constitutions held at New York University School of Law and organized by the Brennan Center for Justice. (The center is named for Brennan himself.) A decade ago, a conference on such a subject likely would have been a modest gathering. This year, the turnout was so heavy that many attendees had to sit outside the main room and watch the proceedings on a simulcast.

“Justice Brennan’s call to action has never been more salient,” Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center, declared in the opening address. If the symposium owed a debt to Brennan, it owed no less of one to Senator Mitch McConnell and to President Trump, who helped to entrench a lopsided 6–3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Recent Court rulings—from Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, to Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, which weakened the Clean Water Act—have left many progressive analysts convinced that, for at least a generation, trying to expand federal rights will be a hopeless cause. (A notable exception is the rights of gun owners, toward whom the Justices have been solicitous.) State litigation offers far more opportunities, the speakers at the symposium affirmed. Forty-nine states “have stronger protections for voting rights than the U.S. Constitution does,” Waldman noted in his address. State constitutions are also much easier to change: whereas a federal constitutional amendment must be ratified by three-quarters of state legislatures, a process that can take decades, amending the constitutions of most states requires a single referendum. For this reason, pro-choice advocates in numerous states have lately pushed to place amendments legalizing abortion on the ballot. (So far, four states have amended their constitutions to protect abortion rights, and in November there could be referendums on the matter in as many as fourteen states.)

In Dobbs, the Supreme Court left it to states to fashion their own laws and policies on abortion. Fourteen states have bans in effect which criminalize the procedure in nearly all circumstances. But the high courts of eleven others have recognized that their constitutions protect abortion rights independently from the federal Constitution. Some states have also framed abortion access in novel ways—for example, as a matter of equality rather than privacy, an argument that many feminist scholars have long considered superior. Shortly before the N.Y.U. symposium, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ruled that a state ban on Medicaid coverage for abortion was “presumptively unconstitutional” because it violated both the Equal Rights Amendment, which Pennsylvania has ratified, and the equal-protection clause in the state’s constitution. At the symposium, Mary Ziegler, a legal historian, speculated that, in fifty years, when scholars write the story of Dobbs’s reversal, “many of the early chapters are going to be about what occurs in state courts.”

One Criticism of the Call For State Courts to play a more prominent role in protecting rights is that the underlying motive is ideological; in Brennan’s case, he was openly trying to counter the Burger Court’s rightward shift. At the N.Y.U. symposium, Goodwin Liu, a justice of the Supreme Court of California and a strong proponent of judicial federalism, said that such concerns were likely why many of his peers “look a little bit askance at this project,” dismissing it as an attempt to preserve only liberal rights.

But not everyone who is sympathetic to judicial federalism leans left. At the symposium, Clint Bolick, a self-described “textualist” who served in the Reagan Administration and is now a justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, said, of state jurists, “U.S. Supreme Court Justices do not take oaths to the state constitution, but we do.” In Bolick’s view, state courts that reflexively follow the Supreme Court are shirking their duty to protect the rights enshrined in their own constitutions.

The best-known recent book on state-constitutional law is “51 Imperfect Solutions,” by Jeffrey S. Sutton, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and a former clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia. Sutton writes, “For too long, we have lived in a top-down constitutional world, in which the U.S. Supreme Court announces a ruling, and the state supreme courts move in lockstep in construing the counterpart guarantees of their own constitutions.” In a diverse democracy, Sutton argues, it is preferable for state courts to exercise independence, spurring the kind of experimentation that America’s federalist system was designed to cultivate. Because state courts preside over smaller jurisdictions, he notes, they can craft remedies without imposing a one-size-fits-all rule on the entire country. One example that Sutton cites is San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, a 1973 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that inequalities in Texas’s public-education system did not violate the Constitution. (The lawsuit was brought by a parents’ association in an underfunded school district.) In response, numerous lawsuits were filed in state courts, many of them invoking the right to a public education—something that all state constitutions explicitly affirm. In 1989, the Texas Supreme Court ordered officials to create a more equitable system, citing the state constitution’s guarantee that the “general diffusion of knowledge” will be fostered. By 2004, the school district in the Rodriguez case was spending more per pupil than Alamo Heights, an affluent neighborhood that the plaintiffs had highlighted in their original lawsuit.

A skeptic might note that granting states more leeway to work out constitutional questions has sometimes had pernicious effects, particularly in the Jim Crow South. Sutton acknowledges this, but argues that the dynamic has changed. On many issues, he writes, “the state courts in recent years have gone from being civil-rights followers to leaders.”

This shift has been especially evident with gay rights. I recently spoke with Mary Bonauto, the senior director of civil-rights and legal strategies at G.L.B.T.Q. Legal Advocates & Defenders (glad). In 1997, glad, along with two Vermont lawyers, filed a lawsuit on behalf of three same-sex couples in the state who’d been denied marriage licenses. Same-sex marriage was then illegal throughout the United States. Bonauto drew inspiration from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s formulation, in 1996, that “the history of our Constitution . . . is the story of the extension of constitutional rights and protections to people once ignored or excluded.” Bonauto was also motivated by a personal longing, she told me—the desire to marry the woman she loved.

The case was brought in Vermont’s state-court system, Bonauto said, in part because in the U.S. marriage is regulated by state law. But the choice of venue was also strategic. She and her co-counsellors didn’t want to file a federal case that might eventually come before the Supreme Court, knowing that it could issue a decision that would set back their cause. In 1986, the Justices had ruled, in Bowers v. Hardwick, that a Georgia law criminalizing sodomy did not violate the Constitution. A decade earlier, it had dismissed an appeal from two men in Minnesota who’d been denied the right to marry; the Court rejected their petition “for want of a substantial federal question.” Bonauto told me, “I don’t think any of us who were working on this wanted to have premature Supreme Court review, because we were very confident that we would lose.”

Given that states have the final say when interpreting their own constitutions, glad’s lawsuit in Vermont—one of the first states to pass a nondiscrimination law protecting gays and lesbians—avoided the risk of federal intervention. In 1999, the Vermont Supreme Court, citing a clause in the state constitution that prohibits bestowing favoritism on any particular “set of persons,” ruled that same-sex couples were entitled to “the same benefits and protections” afforded to married couples. Bonauto was thrilled, even though the decision left the remedy to the legislature, which passed a civil-union law instead of legalizing same-sex marriage.

glad soon filed a similar lawsuit in Massachusetts, on behalf of seven same-sex couples. In 2003, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor. The decision cited the Massachusetts constitution, particularly its Declaration of Rights, which the justices pointedly described as “more protective of individual liberty and equality than the Federal Constitution.” Same-sex couples started getting married in Massachusetts more than a decade before the Supreme Court eventually ruled, in Obergefell v. Hodges, that all Americans had the right to do so.

The triumph of marriage equality might seem inevitable today. Bonauto doesn’t see it that way, recalling how much fear pervaded the L.G.B.T.Q. community when the first cases were filed. “I find it hard to imagine that we would be where we are today without Vermont and Massachusetts,” she told me. By the time the Obergefell decision was issued, in 2015, popular attitudes had shifted, she acknowledged. The U.S. Supreme Court acted as a “consensus confirmer,” she said. But state courts, with their freedom to experiment, had helped to bring about that social change. “They can have a catalytic effect,” she told me.

Photo Illustration By Adam Maida; Source Photograph From Getty Images

Between Sessions at the N.Y.U. Symposium, I went to a café to meet Kyle Barry, an advocate who hopes that a similar pattern might play out in the movement for criminal-justice reform. Barry came to the conference from San Francisco, where he directs the State Law Research Initiative, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to limit extreme sentences and address inhumane prison conditions by strengthening state-constitutional rights. Criminal-justice scholars have traditionally framed mass incarceration as a national phenomenon driven by such harsh federal legislation as the 1994 crime bill. But, as the authors of a recent Iowa Law Review article note, “ninety percent of people confined in U.S. prisons are confined under state laws.” Given this, the authors ask why state courts have been “missing from the debate” about how to curb excessive punishment regimes.

Barry’s organization hopes to address this gap. He told me that state litigation was especially urgent because the Supreme Court has “completely abdicated” enforcing constitutional rights in the criminal-justice system, rubber-stamping extreme sentences that many other countries prohibit. In most of Europe, he noted, the sentence of life without parole is unheard of. In 2022, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled unanimously that such sentences were cruel and unconstitutional for offenders of any age. In the U.S., as of 2020, sixty thousand people were serving what Barry calls “death in prison” sentences—more than in the rest of the world combined. Although the Miller ruling forbade mandatory impositions of life without parole for juveniles, it didn’t ban them altogether. And a more recent Supreme Court opinion, Jones v. Mississippi, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, relieved judges of having to establish that a juvenile is “permanently incorrigible” before issuing such a sentence.

In a scathing op-ed in the Washington Post, the legal scholar John Pfaff argued that the Jones ruling demonstrated that America was willing “to throw lives away.” Yet Barry told me that he felt optimistic about the possibilities for state reform, naming Michigan, in addition to Washington, as a place where a high court had recently extended Miller to young adults. Lauren McLane, the law professor fighting to reduce the sentence of Christopher Hicks, joined us at the café, dressed in a gray University of Wyoming sweatshirt. McLane and Barry had first communicated a few weeks earlier, after she’d read comments that he’d made on a Listserv about Commonwealth v. Mattis, a case in which the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts banned life without parole for “emerging adults”—defined as anyone between eighteen and twenty-one. The ruling, which was made in January, cited the ban on “cruel or unusual punishment” in the Massachusetts constitution, and also the principle that Eighth Amendment jurisprudence should be informed by “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society”—a standard that the U.S. Supreme Court itself has endorsed.

McLane informed Barry of her plans to file a lawsuit challenging mandatory life without parole for young adults in Wyoming. She discussed Hicks’s case, and talked about how she’d got to know him, learning more about his teen-age years—he’d endured extensive abuse—and about his determination to make amends for what he’d done. (At the Wyoming State Penitentiary, Hicks helped to run a mentoring program for incarcerated youth.) McLane acknowledged that, in a conservative state like Wyoming, the odds of securing a new sentencing hearing for Hicks might be long. But, she said, “I’ve been telling my students, ‘If we can do this here, we can do it anywhere.’ ”

McLane wanted her lawsuit to highlight the commitment to reform that permeates Wyoming’s constitution, something its high court had alluded to in several rulings she’d come across. A core tenet of judicial federalism is that state constitutions contain provisions reflecting states’ distinctive values and history. In Wyoming, Article 1, Section 15, says, “The penal code shall be framed on the humane principles of reformation and prevention.” McLane planned to cite this language in her lawsuit. She also intended to quote an 1898 ruling by the Wyoming Supreme Court which declared that “the modern prison system, at every stage of its evolution, revolves around one central thought—the possibility of reformation. . . . The reformation of the prisoner is its one animating purpose.”

McLane told me, “I’ll be submitting a motion to challenge Chris’s sentence this summer, and I am hopeful that he and other similarly situated young adults in Wyoming will be granted the same grace, dignity, and justice that those emerging adults in states like Washington and Massachusetts have been extended.”

Any Excitement at the N.Y.U. Symposium was qualified by an acknowledgment that a victory in a state supreme court has much more limited effects than winning a U.S. Supreme Court case. It’s “a second-best alternative,” Robert Williams, the director of the Center for State Constitutional Studies, at Rutgers, said on one panel. The Mattis ruling underscored this: the decision made more than two hundred incarcerated people in Massachusetts serving life-without-parole sentences eligible for new hearings, but it did nothing for the tens of thousands of people serving similar sentences outside the state.

Williams has been writing about state-constitutional law since 1980. In 2000, Bonauto sought his guidance about the Massachusetts lawsuit that glad filed, for which he submitted an amicus brief. As a distinguished figure in a marginalized specialty, he is delighted that his area of expertise is finally generating wider interest. One indication of this change is the A.C.L.U.’s decision, a year ago, to launch a State Supreme Court Initiative. Among the effort’s leaders is Matthew Segal, a senior staff attorney at the organization. Segal was given the job in part because he’d had a string of successes with civil-rights cases while serving as the legal director of the A.C.L.U. of Massachusetts. In 2020, he secured the release of five thousand people from state prisons and jails because of health risks related to covid-19. He was the lead A.C.L.U. counsel in two cases that ended with more than sixty thousand drug charges being overturned on the ground that state-run labs had engaged in misconduct and relied on fabricated evidence. According to the A.C.L.U., this is the largest dismissal of wrongful convictions in U.S. history. These victories stood in stark contrast to Segal’s experiences in federal court, which, he told me, had often been frustrating. In 2017, for example, a federal judge declined to extend a temporary restraining order that Segal and several colleagues had obtained to block Trump’s travel ban, which excluded people from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S. (The Supreme Court later upheld a revised version of the ban.) When the opportunity to run the State Supreme Court Initiative arose, Segal immediately said yes. In the past thirteen months, the project has filed amicus briefs or served as co-counsel in twenty-five cases in eighteen states, on issues ranging from abortion to election reform.

Segal attended Yale Law School, where, he said, he received little training for such work. “The focus at a lot of law schools that are highly regarded has been federal law,” he said. “There’s been no real teaching in state-constitutional law.” But, last fall, Yale did offer a seminar on the subject—one that Segal co-taught with Julie Murray, another senior A.C.L.U. attorney. Segal told me that he saw the class as a complement to his advocacy work—he is now teaching a similar course at Tufts—and that he hoped to get the next generation of activist lawyers to rethink their priorities. “If there are going to be advances in civil rights and civil liberties in the near term—and maybe even the medium and long terms—they’ll have to come from state courts,” he said.

One Yale student in the seminar was Pragya Malik. The previous year, she’d taken two classes that reflected her passion for social justice: “Litigating Civil Rights, Policing, and Imprisonment,” and “Law and Inequality.” The courses left her deflated, she said, in part because they focussed on federal law, where the barriers to effecting change seemed so daunting. “You’re jumping through all these hoops,” she said. Malik learned that, in addition to the obstacles posed by the Supreme Court’s conservative super-majority, there were legal hurdles such as qualified immunity, which shields law-enforcement officials from liability for abuses unless a violation of specific civil rights is “clearly established.”

Last summer, Malik worked at a public-defender service in Washington, D.C., where she overheard a peer talking about a mass-exoneration case in Massachusetts. She consulted the A.C.L.U.’s Web site to learn more, and saw that the leading force behind the suit, Segal, would be teaching a course at Yale that fall. She signed up. After taking the seminar, she came away excited about the power that lawyers could have to “affect people’s lives” through state courts. Segal told me that, in his class, he emphasizes that state supreme courts, far more than federal courts, viewed themselves as “problem solvers.” The wrongful-conviction cases that he’d litigated came about when the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts invoked its “superintendence authority” over lower courts where tainted evidence had been used, forcing the state to clear thousands of people’s records and enabling the victims to recover millions of dollars in fines and fees. Federal courts also possess this authority, but rarely exercise it. Segal said, “The world of state courts allows for more creativity and inventiveness than you see in federal court.”

One Potential Barrier to Litigating Civil-rights Cases in State Courts is that, unlike at the federal level, lawyers are generally not entitled to recover attorneys’ fees if they win. At the N.Y.U. symposium, Julie Murray, of the A.C.L.U., recalled that, when she was employed at another nonprofit, she worked on a civil-rights lawsuit in Iowa that dragged on for more than a year. The organization won in trial court, but recouped only three hundred dollars in costs.

James A. Gardner, a professor of law at the University at Buffalo who has written extensively about judicial federalism, has raised other caveats. He is skeptical that state courts can spearhead a meaningful expansion of rights, because of heightened partisanship and “the politicization of constitutional law,” which has eroded the independence of state courts, particularly where Republicans wield power. As Gardner documents in a forthcoming law-review article, in recent years Republicans in places such as Georgia have packed state supreme courts to insure rulings favorable to their agenda. In 2017, Georgia’s Supreme Court expanded from seven justices to nine.

Judges in Republican-controlled states who have made expansive rulings in favor of rights have also been attacked politically, and even threatened with impeachment. For judicial federalism to flourish, “state judiciaries must enjoy genuine independence from transitory political winds,” Gardner argues. “Judges who are tethered tightly to trends in state and national politics, and thus fearful of partisan retaliation for decisions they make, are unlikely to enjoy the independence necessary to forge a state constitutional jurisprudence of any organic distinctiveness.”

State courts are significantly less insulated from political pressure than their federal counterparts. In 2022, the North Carolina Supreme Court struck down a voter-I.D. law that it concluded was racially discriminatory. The next year, the decision was reversed—after Republicans elected two new conservatives to the bench. This shift in the balance of power occurred after Republicans in the state legislature eliminated public funding for appellate judicial elections and changed the law so that party labels could be affixed to candidates. Douglas Keith, a scholar who tracks the role of dark money in judicial campaigns, told me that before these changes judicial elections in North Carolina had been quiet, nonpartisan affairs. They have now become hyperpartisan battles in which candidates bankrolled by the Republican State Leadership Committee—the nation’s largest spender on state-supreme-court elections—have largely prevailed.

A related trend in American politics is politicians’ declining commitment to democracy itself. The journalist Ari Berman, in a new book, “Minority Rule,” examines how tactics such as voter suppression and gerrymandering have undermined the popular will. The Supreme Court has not seemed terribly troubled by this, issuing rulings that have weakened voting rights and, in May, determining that Republicans in South Carolina did not unlawfully consider race when they drew a congressional district in a way that removed thirty thousand Black voters, overriding a lower court that had ordered legislators to redraw the district. A case can be made that the U.S. Constitution was designed to sustain minority rule, protecting white male property owners from the so-called tyranny of the majority. Indeed, as Berman points out, the current Supreme Court is itself a product of minority rule: five of the six conservative Justices—including Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion in the South Carolina case—were appointed by Presidents who had assumed office after losing the popular vote.

State Constitutions Offer a Potential Counterweight to These Trends. They embody what the law professors Miriam Seifter and Jessica Bulman-Pozen have termed “the democracy principle”—a commitment to popular sovereignty that is reflected in language vesting power in the people and in explicit assurances of the right to vote. Seifter co-directs the State Democracy Research Initiative, at the University of Wisconsin Law School, in Madison, which she launched, in 2021, with her husband, Robert Yablon, a professor who specializes in election law. One of their goals is to advance research and dialogue about state courts, thereby strengthening democracy. In Seifter’s state, progressives recently scored a major victory in this arena. Starting in 2011, creatively designed legislative maps enabled Republicans to retain power in the state legislature even after losing the popular vote. Janet Protasiewicz, a circuit-court judge, decried these maps, calling them “rigged.” Her outspokenness on the issue helped her to win election to the state supreme court in 2023. Republicans threatened to impeach Protasiewicz unless she agreed to recuse herself from any cases involving the maps, but the effort failed, and a case challenging partisan gerrymandering soon came before the justices. In December, they ruled that more than half of the legislative districts in Wisconsin violated a provision of the constitution requiring them to be composed of “contiguous territory,” and ordered that new maps be drawn.

Another state in which the “democracy principle” has been tested is Montana, where, in 2021, a coalition of Native American tribes challenged voting restrictions, including the elimination of Election Day registration, which they claimed had a disproportionate impact on them. In recent years, federal courts have rarely taken exception to such measures, applying strict scrutiny only to a law that “severely burdens” the right to vote. In an amicus brief, ten constitutional-law scholars, among them Miriam Seifter and Robert Williams, argued that upholding the voting restrictions would “erase Montana’s distinctive constitutional language, structure, and tradition,” all of which warranted a more exacting standard. (The Montana constitution mandates that all elections “be free and open,” and that no power “shall at any time interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage.”) In March, the Montana Supreme Court struck down the restrictions, and warned that it would view skeptically any state law that “impermissibly interferes” with the right to vote.

Not only do state constitutions generally express a stronger commitment to democracy than the U.S. Constitution does; they enumerate many rights and protections that have no federal analogue. In several states, for example, a person in custody cannot be treated with “unnecessary rigor.” I discussed this concept recently with Daniel Greenfield, who helps to run the Prisoners’ Rights Clinic at U.C.L.A. Last year, Greenfield petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case of Michael Johnson, a mentally ill man in Illinois who’d been caged in a filthy solitary-confinement cell for nearly three years, without access to exercise or fresh air. The Court denied the petition, overriding a strong dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who noted the “unusually severe” conditions that he’d endured. The decision, Greenfield told me, left him “with the unshakable feeling that it was time to turn to state courts and state constitutions.” He’s now working with law students to identify state courts where incarcerated clients can get relief. One of the places they are eying is Oregon, whose constitution has an “unnecessary rigor” clause, which has recently been invoked to hold prison officials accountable for inhumane conditions.

Many state constitutions also affirm positive rights absent from the U.S. Constitution, including a right to “social welfare,” which New York recognizes, and a right to grow and harvest food, which was incorporated into Maine’s constitution in 2021, after voters approved an amendment, propelled by concerns about the growing power of agribusiness. The amendment asserts that individuals have the right to “produce and consume the food of their own choosing.” Some scholars contend that the mutability of state constitutions is a flaw. But the comparative ease of amending them also means that many of their provisions “are quite recent, and often reflect contemporary concerns,” Alicia Bannon, a scholar at the Brennan Center who edits State Court Report, a new online publication that tracks state-constitutional developments across the country, told me.

Among the contemporary concerns that state courts have begun addressing is climate change. Held v. Montana, a lawsuit filed in 2020, invokes an inalienable right to “a clean and healthful environment.” This phrase doesn’t appear in the U.S. Constitution, of course, but it’s enshrined in Montana’s constitution, which was rewritten in 1972—two years after the first Earth Day took place. When the Held lawsuit was filed, the plaintiffs ranged in age from two to eighteen, reflecting the fact that, as the complaint noted, “children are uniquely vulnerable to the consequences of the climate crisis.” Among those named in the lawsuit are Rikki Held, who grew up on a ranch that has recently been ravaged by floods and wildfires, which have threatened her family’s livelihood, and Olivia Vesovich, a teen-ager who has repeatedly had to leave the state in the summer because smoke-filled air exacerbated her asthma. The complaint quotes the preamble of Montana’s constitution, which celebrates “the quiet beauty of our state, the grandeur of our mountains, the vastness of our rolling plains . . . for this and future generations.”

Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit public-interest law firm, filed the case. It also litigates in federal court, and in 2015 it submitted a complaint in U.S. District Court on behalf of young people in Oregon. For years, that case stalled as the U.S. Department of Justice filed motion after motion to delay it. The tactic felt particularly egregious, Andrea Rodgers, a lawyer with Our Children’s Trust, told me, because mitigating climate change requires immediate action. In May, a U.S. circuit court of appeals finally weighed in on the case and, to the dismay of the plaintiffs, dismissed it. “I have been pleading for my government to hear our case since I was ten years old, and I am now nearly nineteen,” one of the plaintiffs said. “A functioning democracy would not make a child beg for their rights to be protected in the courts, just to be ignored.”

In Held v. Montana, a very different scenario played out. There were few delays in the case, and last year it went to trial, enabling Held and her fellow-petitioners to testify. A state district court ruled that their rights had been violated. Addressing the plaintiffs’ injuries imposes “an affirmative duty upon their government to take active steps,” the district court declared, striking down a Montana provision that had allowed state agencies to ignore greenhouse-gas emissions when approving energy projects. State officials immediately appealed to the Montana Supreme Court, which, in January, declined to stay judgment in the case. Oral arguments are scheduled to begin in Helena on July 10th.

Our Children’s Trust has since filed another lawsuit challenging inaction on climate change, in Hawaii; the case will go to trial in June. Like Montana, Hawaii recognizes the right to a clean and healthful environment in its constitution. If the Hawaii Supreme Court ends up invoking this provision, it will not mark the first such occasion. Last year, the court ruled unanimously that a state agency had the power to block an energy company from building a tree-burning facility on the Big Island which, in three decades, would have emitted eight million tons of carbon dioxide. In a concurring opinion, Justice Michael Wilson observed that Hawaii was “constitutionally mandated” to address the climate crisis because it was a “sui generis” emergency. (Deadly wildfires engulfed a town on Maui last summer, killing a hundred and one people.) Addressing global warming was also necessary because of the “stark failure of the federal judiciary to grant redress to present and future generations alleging knowing destruction of a life-sustaining climate system,” he went on. Among the examples he cited was West Virginia v. E.P.A., a 6–3 decision, issued in 2022, in which the Supreme Court curtailed the agency’s latitude to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. The federal courts were abdicating their responsibility “to leave future generations a habitable planet,” Justice Wilson wrote. Unlike those courts, “the Hawai‘i Supreme Court does not choose to ‘throw up our hands.’ ” ♦

— Published in the Print Edition of the June 10, 2024, Issue, with the Headline “States of Play.” — Eyal Press has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2014 and became a contributing writer in 2023.

[thxnews]

US-Israel Defense Talks Focus on Regional Stability

Readout of Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Ms. Sasha Baker and Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Dr. William A. LaPlante's Meeting With Israeli Ministry of Defense Director General Eyal Zamir  

Strengthening U.S.-Israel Defense Ties

High-Level Pentagon Meeting In a significant meeting at the Pentagon on January 24, key U.S. defense leaders, Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Ms. Sasha Baker and Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition & Sustainment Dr. William A. LaPlante, met with Israeli Ministry of Defense Director General Eyal Zamir. This encounter underlined the robust U.S.-Israel defense relationship and their shared strategic priorities.   Reaffirming U.S. Commitment to Israel's Security The discussions reaffirmed the United States' unwavering commitment to Israel's security. The leaders explored various aspects of defense cooperation, reflecting a deep and enduring partnership between the two nations.  

Addressing the Humanitarian Situation in Gaza

Focusing on Civilian Protection A critical part of the dialogue involved the situation in Gaza. A/USDP Baker and DG Zamir reviewed Israel's targeted operations while emphasizing the need to protect civilians and ensure the provision of increased humanitarian assistance. This approach underscores the importance of balancing military actions with the well-being of civilian populations.   The Dire Situation of Children in Gaza The meeting also highlighted the alarming conditions facing children in Gaza. Nearly 20,000 babies have been born into the conflict's recent escalation, facing immense challenges. UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Ted Chaiban's visit to Gaza brought attention to the children's lack of basic necessities and the constant fear and trauma they endure.  

Addressing Regional Security and Tensions

Tackling Destabilizing Activities A/USDP Baker and DG Zamir exchanged views on escalating regional tensions, particularly the destabilizing activities of Lebanese Hizballah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. The leaders agreed on the critical importance of preventing regional escalation, showcasing a joint commitment to maintaining stability in the Middle East.   Collaborative Approach to Middle East Security The meeting highlighted the need for a cooperative approach to address security challenges in the Middle East. This involves not only military strategies but also diplomatic and humanitarian efforts to ensure long-term regional stability.  

The Impact of the Gaza Conflict

Humanitarian Crisis and Response The discussions acknowledged the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, with reports from UNICEF and other organizations emphasizing the urgent need for action. Furthermore, there are severe limitations in essential services like healthcare, water, and sanitation, which are compounded by the ongoing conflict.   Balancing Perspectives In addressing the Gaza situation, it's crucial to maintain a balanced perspective. This includes considering the complex historical context and different narratives. Moreover, the meeting underscored the importance of fact-based discussions and the inclusion of various stakeholders' viewpoints. This includes humanitarian organizations and human rights groups.  

In Conclusion

The Pentagon meeting between U.S. and Israeli defense leaders marked a significant step in reinforcing the U.S.-Israel defense relationship and addressing pressing regional issues. The talks emphasized the U.S. commitment to Israel's security, the need for humanitarian assistance in Gaza, and strategies to tackle regional tensions. This meeting illustrates the continued collaboration and joint efforts to ensure stability and security in the Middle East, while being mindful of the humanitarian challenges, especially in conflict zones like Gaza.   Sources: THX News & US Department of Defense. Read the full article