Vox Sentences - Can the Israeli left be revived?

Tuesday, December 12, 2023

Good afternoon,

Here’s the agenda today:

UP FIRST: An unexpected opening for liberal Zionism

CATCH UP: The lives wasted by factory farming

— Dylan Scott, senior correspondent

A revival of liberal Zionism

Paige Vickers/Vox; Getty images

Paradoxically, the war in Gaza being carried out by a right-wing Israeli government could create the conditions for the revival of a long-dormant liberal Zionism.

With some distance, the October 7 attacks and Israel’s war against Hamas could galvanize a liberal branch of Israel politics that has been out of the mainstream since the 1990s peace talks fell apart, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp writes. There is polling evidence of a shift toward the middle, rather than the right, among Israelis during the current conflict — and even small signs of the Israeli left being reanimated.

This may seem like an unlikely development. Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has been brutal, yet the country’s conservative defenders see no problem with its actions, viewing them as a proportionate response to the terror of October 7. On the other hand, many of Israel’s harshest critics have viewed the war as a confirmation of all their worst beliefs about the Jewish state, arguing it proves Israel is a racist colonial occupier with little regard for the lives of Palestinians.

But liberal Israelis could find a renewed sense of purpose, and a more receptive public, as the conflict drags on.

• Liberal Zionism provides a middle path during the present war. Zack argues liberal Zionism provides the best paradigm for understanding the current crisis. Liberal Zionists advocate for a Jewish state, while also critiquing Israel’s ruthless conduct during its campaign in Gaza.
• The liberal Zionist tradition dates back to Zionism’s founding. I learned from Zack’s reporting that Theodor Herzl, widely credited as the founder of modern Zionism, could best be described as a liberal. He argued for a more inclusive democratic state that eschewed the kind of discrimination against Arabs that Jews have experienced themselves.
• Liberals lost their influence in the 1990s and 2000s. Ever since, the right wing led by Bibi Netanyahu has held power and their approach to Palestinian relations (which has included at times cynical support for Hamas itself) helped to lead to the tragedy of October 7 and what followed.
• Many Israelis blame the conservative government for the current instability, opening a window for liberals. Netanyahu’s party is losing support based on the available polling. Now the Israeli government finds itself at odds with US President Joe Biden, the center-left leader of the country’s most important foreign ally.
• While Israel’s political future is far from settled, some liberals see glimmers of hope. “What I feel is that there is a new opening,” Yossi Beilin, a leading architect of the 1990s-era Oslo peace agreements with Palestinians, told Zack. “The two-state solution is back in town.”

Read the rest of Zack’s thought-provoking essay here.

The unthinkable waste of life in factory farming

Katrina Wittkamp/Getty Images

Fresh horrors from the factory farming world: It turns out many of the animals who die don’t ever make it to a person’s dinner plate. 

According to a new study published in the journal Sustainable Production and Consumption, nearly one in four of the animals raised on factory farms are never eaten. That means 18 billion animals end up dying, after living in often horrific and inhumane conditions, for nothing.

Vox’s Kenny Torrella breaks down the data in his latest story on the sorry state of animal welfare and the consequences of factory farming:

• Nearly 17 million chickens die from factory farming and are never eaten. They make up the vast majority of this needless loss of life, according to the study. The researchers were not able to include wasted seafood in their analysis, though it is estimated that hundreds of billions of fish and shrimp also die in industrial farm settings without being eaten.
• What’s driving all this waste? Manipulative breeding, improper storage, transport issues, and more.
• Most of the waste is concentrated in a few countries. Ten nations account for the majority of these animals lost to factory farming, including China, Brazil, and Russia. The US is the world “leader,” however, with 7.1 animals wasted per person.
• Aspirations for cutting food waste don’t seem to be making progress. In 2015, world leaders attending the UN General Assembly meeting committed to cutting food waste in half by 2030. But instead, the problem has been getting worse.
• We could be doing more to reduce food waste. Changing how we breed farm animals would be one strategy: Currently, chicken farming (to give one example) is dominated by fast-growing breeds that are more susceptible to health problems. Switching to breeds that grow more slowly (i.e., naturally) could lead to fewer unnecessary deaths. So could more humane transportation and better storage at grocery stores and restaurants.

• “Extremely productive” researchers give other scientists pause. The number of scholars publishing more than 60 papers per year has quadrupled in the past decade, a spike in productivity that is making academia uneasy. Some of these authors are producing a new paper once a week, leading to questions about their rigor and accuracy. [Nature]
• What it means to choose pregnancy in post-Roe America. Some of the most vulnerable patients in a world without guaranteed abortion rights — Black people in the South, transmasculine people, older people — explain their decisions to see their pregnancy through in spite of the risks. [19th News]
• Millennial women experience first decline in well-being in generations. A measure of American women’s well-being, created by the Population Reference Bureau, shows that women today are the first to see declines on the index’s various metrics (poverty, education, incarceration, physical and mental health, economics prospects) since the Silent Generation of the mid-20th century. [CNN]

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Today’s crossword

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