Gaza updates; About the weakness of free speech

1. The NYT reports that Netanyahu undermined efforts to get a ceasefire:

For weeks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has denied that he is trying to block a cease-fire deal in Gaza by hardening Israel’s negotiating position. Mr. Netanyahu has consistently placed all blame for the deadlocked negotiations on Hamas, even as senior members of the Israeli security establishment accused him of slowing the process himself.

But in private, Mr. Netanyahu has, in fact, added new conditions to Israel’s demands, additions that his own negotiators fear have created extra obstacles to a deal. According to unpublished documents reviewed by The New York Times that detail Israel’s negotiating positions, Israel relayed a list of new stipulations in late July to American, Egyptian and Qatari mediators that added less flexible conditions to a set of principles it had made in late May.

Doubts have also been raised about Hamas’s willingness to compromise on key issues, and the group also requested its own extensive revisions throughout the process, while ceding some smaller points in July. But the documents reviewed by The Times make clear that the behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the Netanyahu government has been extensive — and suggest that agreement may be elusive at a new round of negotiations set to begin on Thursday.

Now that Israel assassinated the lead Palestinian negotiator and he has been replaced by a hard line Hamas operative, the chances of a ceasefire seem to be fairly low, maybe 10% in the next 6 months. Chances of a two-state peace solution in the next 2 years seems to be about nil, maybe 0.1% chance.

2. The NYT reports about the humanitarian situation in Gaza:

An area that Israel has designated as a humanitarian zone and has ordered hundreds of thousands of civilians to go to has become an overcrowded “hell,” where food and water are scarce and safety is not guaranteed, according to some of the displaced Palestinians there.

“The truth is that this area is anything but humanitarian,” said Kamel Mohammed, a 36-year-old sheltering in a tent with nine family members. He added, “Our life in these camps is like hell.”

Mr. Mohammed described the humanitarian zone, a once-vacant strip of coastal land known as Al-Mawasi, as a “barren sand desert” crammed with displaced families that offers “no sense of safety.” The high cost of materials and the lack of assistance have forced many families to share tents, he said.

It is beyond me how Palestinians can afford to pay for anything. Their country and economy have both been blown to smithereens. Where do they get any money at all?

3. The US-built humanitarian aid pier for Gaza relief has faced numerous challenges, and failed to deliver nearly as much aid as had been planned. The US military announced that the pier will "soon cease operations," less than two months after its installation. So much for that effort.

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The greatest weakness of secular democracy arguably is the intractable, unsolvable free speech problem, i.e., dark free speech (lies, slanders, crackpottery, etc.) vs honest speech. We have trouble even talking honestly about free speech.[1] Over the millennia, no one has found an effective way to neuter dark free speech without empowering authoritarian demagogues from rising to power. The best that humans can manage is to limit the constant damage and threat. The problem can never go completely away as long as humans are human. 

 

A Vox article discusses the weakness of free speech rights in the US:

For most of American history, free speech did not exist in the United States.

Dissidents were commonly thrown in prison, often for many years, when the government disagreed with their views. Near the end of World War I, the great union leader Eugene Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison for giving a speech opposing the draft, and his conviction was upheld by a unanimous Supreme Court. In 1951, as Sen. Joseph McCarthy was ramping up his witch hunts against suspected communists, the Supreme Court blessed his and similar efforts by upholding the convictions of several individuals who did nothing more than try to organize a (wildly unsuccessful) Communist Party in the United States.

This suppression of free expression wasn’t restricted to unpopular political ideas. Under the federal Comstock Act — which made it a crime to mail any “thing” for “any indecent or immoral purpose” — and similar state laws, anti-sex crusaders prosecuted authors, artists, booksellers, and art gallery owners alike for distributing pretty much anything that touched on the topic of sex.

All of that is to say the kind of First Amendment freedoms that most Americans take for granted, and especially freedom of speech and the press, aren’t as baked into the law as one might think — and are actually quite fragile. The Supreme Court didn’t meaningfully enforce that amendment until the 1960s, when it handed down a pair of decisions protecting political agitators and guaranteeing freedom of the press. And the protections enshrined in those decisions could easily disappear overnight if the Court loses its current, pro-free speech majority [apparently, 6 of the 9 are pro-free speech at present, while Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch are anti-free speech].

So, if Trump wins, and if he gets to fill just two more seats on the Supreme Court, Americans could swiftly lose First Amendment rights that have been secure for nearly six decades.

Looming over all of this is the Federalist Society, the powerful association of right-leaning and far-right lawyers that played an enormous role in selecting Trump’s first term judges — and that is likely to play a similar role in any future Republican administration.

For many years, the legal right embraced the Holmesian view of the First Amendment. Indeed, if anything, Republican lawyers and judges tended to view the First Amendment even more expansively than their Democratic counterparts, because they often used the First Amendment to attack campaign finance laws.

Since Trump left office, however, many of the Federalist Society’s conferences and events have descended into increasingly paranoid complaint sessions about “cancel culture” and “wokeness.” In 2022, the society’s annual lawyer’s convention featured no less than four panels complaining about the fact that Federalist Society members sometimes feel unwelcome at law schools and in various institutions within the legal profession due to their conservative views.

The Vox article is quite long and goes into a lot of interesting history and analysis. This is just one more thing to be aware of as part of the stakes in the 2024 election.

Footnote:

1. This essay includes discussion about good vs bad free speech and why we have a hard time just talking about this so far unsolved problem:

Our usual debate over the extent of free speech takes for granted the value of free speech. We argue over the boundaries or limits of what can be said but pass over the importance of what is said within those bounds. This leaves us with a peculiar sense of why speech matters: We imply that it's valuable because its restraint would undermine our freedom, which is a way of avoiding the question more than of answering it.

This disinterest in the value of free speech, sometimes amounting to a refusal to define it, appears to be rooted in the principles of our liberalism, which enshrines free speech as one right, perhaps the principal right, among the rights that deserve protection in a liberal society. To guard such a right, it seems, one must not specify the value of how it will normally be used lest by such definition society destroy what it wants to protect. For by discussing the value of free speech one would expose less-valued or valueless speech to disdain, or worse, prohibition.

A society that understands itself in terms of rights must above all protect its boundaries in the definition of rights rather than concern itself too much, or at all, with what is within the protected territory. Thus, the protection of unlimited, or nearly unlimited, speech eclipses our view of worthy speech. To recover some idea of worthy speech, and therefore also of why free speech matters, we will need to challenge our liberalism for its own good, and to expose its more-than-simply-liberal aims and character. And to see these is ultimately also to grasp what speech is for, and why it is important.  

Two questionable consequences can be seen to emerge from Justice Jackson's Barnette opinion. First, he denied that there is any constitutional fixed star of political orthodoxy in the very act of declaring the political orthodoxy of free speech. The "very purpose of a Bill of Rights," he said, "was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy." Are not those subjects declared to be beyond controversy thereby made orthodox? The implication is that free speech must be regarded as sacred and hence has no value that can or needs to be disputed. This is a proposition I am disputing here. [that is my point about the value of honest vs dark speech -- the value of something here needs to be disputed, and it is dark free speech] 

.... But all free speech does not have equal value; speech that attacks free speech has less value than speech that explains it, endorses it, and practices it. Free speech needs to define itself in order to address its enemies.

This raises questions. What is the value of dark free speech?** Why does it get just as much legal protection as honest speech? When it is normalized for some people, why to they often respect comforting dark free speech more than discomforting honest speech?  In view of plagues like essentially contested concepts, tribalism, self-interest and clashing moral values, is there any reasonably objective way to at least mostly distinguish the honest from the dark? For example, can objectively provable facts be used at least sometimes to distinguish truth from lies? (I think so, at least sometimes)

** Dark free speech explicitly excludes defamation, child pornography, false advertising, etc., because that kind of speech is not free and can be banned or punished by law.