What Should Israel Do?

Like many Americans, I’ve spent much of the last six months arguing about Israel and Palestine online. In doing so, I’ve found myself perennially frustrated by how abstract the discussions always seem to be. No matter what, we end up arguing about the philosophical basis on Zionism or the minutiae of historical atrocities, or whether or not specific slogans are antisemitic or not. To me, this is mostly besides the point. The central question of “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is whether or not there is a legitimate justification for a state to indefinitely maintain a third of its population under military rule without self-government, self-determination, or political rights. Everything else is commentary. Arguing about the hypothetical benefits of a speculative One State Solution versus the potential problems of a theoretical Two State Solution is essentially pointless, given the actual situation on the ground.

I find this particularly frustrating when arguing with people who would probably describe themselves as Liberal Zionists; people who I think broadly share my values and my vision of what the future could look like, but who end up on the opposite “side” of so many of these debates from me. What I want to do today is try and bring this back to Earth. I want to try and ground this argument in reality, and articulate a practical path forward for people who genuinely want to see peace and equality between the River and the Sea.

The Age of Queens is Over: Star vs the Forces of Evil

Last weekend I fractured my elbow, which is not something I recommend doing. It’s no fun! But it meant that I’ve had a lot of time on my hands, which I decided to put to productive use by binge-watching the entirety of the 2015-2019 Disney animated show Star vs the Forces of Evil. Unlike fracturing your elbow, this is very fun, and I really enjoyed it! Star is a wacky, entertaining ride, with enjoyable characters and very funny jokes. It also, like a lot of other cartoons, develops over the course of its runtime from an episodic, gag-a-day series, to one with a deep Lore and ongoing plot. In doing so, Star falls short of some of its contemporaries, in terms of coherency and structure. But it still manages to explore some really interesting themes, and make some choices that I haven’t seen made before.

(SPOILERS FOR EVERYTHING)

1. Star vs the Forces of Evil has a pretty basic premise; it’s an American take on a Magical Girl show, where Star Butterfly is a princess from the realm of Mewni, sent to Earth to learn to control her powers in a safe(r) environment. Here, she meets Marco Diaz, an ordinary kid with a hidden taste for excitement, and together they fight monsters, go on adventures, and learn to navigate adolescence. Like a lot of the cartoons I write about here, it’s a simple idea with a lot of potential. Star needs to master her magic powers, learn about the strange ways of “Earth”, and protect her wand from those who would steal it, all while making friends and going to school. It provides a lot of great hooks to hang plots off of, and the first season especially feels like the kind of show that could run more-or-less indefinitely.

BOOK REVIEW: Forever Peace

TITLE: Forever Peace

AUTHOR: Joe Haldeman

PUBLISHER: Ace Books

DATE: 1997

The author Joe Haldeman is undoubtedly best-known for his 1976 novel The Forever War, a hugely-influential, Hugo Award-winning book grappling with the author’s experiences in the Vietnam War. I didn’t actually like it that much. I don’t know why! Maybe I was just too young, maybe I’m just the wrong generation to appreciate it. I should probably give it another shot at some point. But the Haldeman book that really made an impression on me was Forever Peace, a “spiritual sequel” that he wrote twenty years later that seemed to be accurately and presciently capture the zeitgeist of the coming new millennium. Forever Peace isn’t a great novel, in a lot of ways. It’s kind of a mess, with way too much going on. But it’s a fascinating exploration of war and peace and America from someone who spent his whole life studying that, and I think it deserves to be better known.

(BTW: SPOILERS FOR EVERYTHING)

BACKGROUND:

It’s 2043, and America–and most of the First World–has reached a level of post-scarcity subsistence, fueled by the development of fusion power and “nanoforges” that can manufacture almost anything imaginable. But everything has a cost. The resources to fuel this economic miracle are wrenched from the Global South, and for years now, America and its allies have been locked in an endless, grinding counterinsurgency across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asians. For most Americans, the “Ngumi War” is an abstraction, fought primarily by drones, and broadcast nightly as entertainment. For Julian Class, it’s an unending nightmare. But what can an ordinary man do about it? Nothing, so he thinks, until a series of discoveries forces him to reevaluate everything he thought he knew about the world, and tests just how much he’d be willing to pay for peace.