Roger Cohen

Israel has an election on April 9. The right-wing justice minister, Ayelet Shaked, who has sought to curb the powers of the Supreme Court and portray it as a kind of liberal-elite supergovernment, has a campaign ad. It’s an interesting exercise in branding and the unbearable lightness of our times.

A piano tinkles. A flacon of Fascism appears. Shaked looks sultry, running a hand through her hair, affixing an earring, draping a white jacket on her shoulders, caressing a banister as she descends the stairs. The narration in Hebrew runs through her “judiciary revolution,” her “reducing activism” and her “restraining of the Supreme Court” in a tone of soft sensuality.

At last, she grabs her Fascism, sprays the perfume, and in a good no-nonsense gravelly Israeli tone that breaks with what has preceded it, proclaims: “Smells like democracy to me.”

OK, I’m writing about this, so it’s effective marketing. People talk about the ad, and that could benefit her New Right party. Her point, I think, is this: You Israeli liberals label me a fascist, but there’s nothing undemocratic about lambasting the Supreme Court’s powers, vowing to dismantle its oversight of the Knesset or accusing it of a “coup” against democracy.

Shaked is playing with fire. Perfumes are seductive. That’s the point of them. You sniff them and swoon. You become captive to them. What she’s intimating, even as she dismisses it, is that she’s a little fascist on the side and that’s a turn-on.

Certainly, Europe swooned to fascism once upon a time. This led to the death of 6 million Jews. Let’s be careful with words. They have meaning. Let’s be careful with facts. They have weight. Let’s not turn the stench of the Nazi crematories into a come-hither scent.

When an Israeli minister sprays herself in Fascism to make her rightist party more popular, you know that words have achieved weightlessness. Truth has no meaning any longer. It’s gone.

After all, tens of millions of Americans consider Donald Trump to be the most honest president ever because he “tells it like it is” and, as his move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem illustrates, does what he says he will do.

Representative democracy, mediated through institutions created to uphold the rule of law and protect civic discourse, is giving way to a form of social-media-driven direct democracy where the premium is on hatefulness. It’s open season on any democratic institution like the Israeli Supreme Court, or indeed a free press (aka “enemy of the people”) that is seen as standing between genuine folk outside of “elites” and their desires.

Brexit is many things, among them a train wreck caused by the clash of parliamentary democracy (which is what Britain was last time I checked) and plebiscitary democracy driven by lies or so-called fake news, which is where the world seems to be headed.

An outright disaster may be required before this wave is checked.

Smells like democracy, Shaked says. Benjamin Netanyahu, seeking a fifth term as Israeli prime minister, facing indictment on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, is campaigning for his political survival and, beyond that, his personal freedom. Let’s do a little imagining.

Imagine that Netanyahu wins. Imagine that for parties joining his coalition he sets a condition that they support passing a law in the Knesset that would prohibit the prosecution of an elected official — like the prime minister, for example. Imagine that he offers various blandishments to rightist parties like Shaked’s to secure this allegiance — annexation of part of the West Bank, for example. Imagine that the Supreme Court’s power to declare such a move unconstitutional is overturned as part of Shaked’s push to delegitimize and eviscerate one of the most important foundations of Israeli democratic life.

Smells like democracy? You tell me if the independent judiciary in Nazi Germany did not fold to Hitler, one step at a time.

But I don’t want to sound alarmist. We’re talking only about a perfume.

Let me offer a word about Trump in conclusion. The obsessive focus on him tends to obscure the fact that he may not represent the antithesis of American values but be more representative of them than people think. What if, as former Ambassador Peter Mulrean, who quit the State Department after Trump was elected, put it to me, Trump “is just an extreme version of what we’ve become, our society’s ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’?” And, Mulrean added, “I mean all of us, not just those who voted for him.”

I find that a provocative thought — and the resemblance between Trump and Netanyahu in their hold on their societies’ imaginations is striking.

We have succumbed to the weightlessness of words. Doesn’t Ivanka Trump have a line of perfumes and big political ambitions?

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/opinion/israel-perfume-fascism-ayelet-shaked.html" id="472543ea-379b-37f6-a86c-fdb92dcbc1ee">The New York Times</a>.

TEL AVIV, Israel — Let’s talk Fascism, the perfume I mean.

A Perfume Called Fascism

It’s Feb. 20, 1939. More than 20,000 Nazi sympathizers are packed into Madison Square Garden as Greenbaum attempts to silence Fritz Kuhn, Bundesführer (so-called) of the German American Bund. Greenbaum has been enraged by Kuhn’s demand that the country be delivered from Jewish clutches and “returned to the American people who founded it.”

The 26-year-old Jew is brought before a magistrate who, according to an account in The New York Times, tells him that “innocent people might have been killed.” To which Greenbaum retorts, “Do you realize that plenty of Jewish people might be killed with their persecution up there?”

“Plenty” is an inadequate word for 6 million, but that was 1939 and human beings tend not to imagine the unimaginable. The pale, dismayed face of the young Jewish boy, arms raised, being rounded up in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 is well known. Greenbaum’s expression of terrorized anguish in New York City presages it.

All this is caught in Marshall Curry’s remarkable Oscar-nominated documentary short, “A Night at the Garden,” composed of footage from the time. Attacks on the press; the take-back-our-country cry; hymns to the true American (or German): There’s not much new, as Curry notes, about fascism.

The movie brings to mind a phrase of Hannah Arendt’s that has haunted me about how most people will comply under conditions of terror but some will not: “No more is required,” she wrote, “and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”

Think the “Tank Man” of Tiananmen Square. Think Anton Schmid, the sergeant in Hitler’s army who helped Jews in the Vilnius ghetto and was executed in 1942. Think Ron Ridenhour, the helicopter gunner in Vietnam spurred by conscience to gather information that led to the official investigation into the My Lai Massacre. Think Isadore Greenbaum. It is of the essence of such gestures that they appear futile, yet have the power to redeem humanity.

Our age, too, is one of demagogues. What are we to make of our “ivory-gold colossus” — James Lasdun’s phrase in his brilliant new novel of the #MeToo era, “Afternoon of a Faun”? This colossus “at once menacing and cosmically aggrieved” who for two hours perorates before the Conservative Political Action Conference (only would-be or actual dictators afflicted with narcissistic disorders talk for that long) and declares: “I’m in love, and you’re in love. We’re all in love together.”

Who, for President Donald Trump, are his people in love? They are “our people.” Now, “our people” are not synonymous with the American people. This president, unlike his predecessors, has never seen himself as the president of all Americans.

No, they are the CPAC crowd, his fans. They are the “tough people,” the people who could make things “very bad” if necessary — police and military and bikers who, the president claimed in an interview with Breitbart News this month, support him. He needs people in his thrall, like that Madison Square Garden crowd. As Lasdun wrote, “Nothing short of dominion over the entire universe could compensate for the wrongs done to him.”

The wrongs, that is, of journalists, judges and Hollywood directors — anyone who thinks the president might just be a dangerous white nationalist charlatan. Why think that? Because Trump, from Day 1, has maligned brown people and Muslims; and, as president, he saw “very fine people on both sides” at the 2017 Charlottesville rally where white nationalists chanted “Jews will not replace us” and a woman who protested, Heather Heyer, was killed.

I am not suggesting Trump resembles Hitler. That should be obvious — but not so obvious that I will refrain from writing this column. The white nationalist mass murderer of Muslims in New Zealand was not out of his mind in seeing Trump as a symbol of “renewed white identity and common purpose.” Trump’s love affair is with revanchist white people who don’t like the demographic look of the 21st century.

Throughout the world today, from Saudi Arabia to the Philippines, from Guatemala to North Korea, bad things happen because the Trump administration winks at them. The United States as moral guardian, however flawed, has vanished.

It’s not that Trump could be dangerous. He is dangerous. People die because the worst leaders know they enjoy the American president’s connivance. The debate on whether Trump is harmless, whether we should laugh away his grotesquerie, is misplaced. I have no doubt that the worst is yet to come. In his own mind, whatever the Mueller report contains, Trump cannot lose.

Greenbaum and his wife moved to Southern California. A fisherman at Newport Pier, Greenbaum died in 1997. There was, as Philip Bump observed in The Washington Post, “a brief mention of his passing in the local news.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/opinion/trump-white-nationalism-violence.html" id="53d231f1-c759-3b8c-a57b-cd47f6360d3f">The New York Times</a>.

His name is Isadore Greenbaum. He’s a Jew, a plumber’s helper from Brooklyn. He rushes onto the stage, beneath a portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas. He tries to accost the Nazi who is denouncing the “Jewish-controlled press” and calling for a “white gentile-ruled” United States. Uniformed storm troopers beat him. Police officers drag him from the stage, pants ripped, arms raised in desperate entreaty. The mob howls in delight.

Trump and Conscience in the Age of Demagogues

The bad news is we’re only in Act 4, if that. This British disaster has legs.

It’s chaos out there with two weeks to go until the March 29 deadline for Britain to leave the European Union. This is what happens when English public school boys, nostalgic for Empire, dream up a scheme for the resurrection of British glory based on foisting every little-England frustration on their neighbors across the Channel who started or lost the war.

Delusion is the mother of debacle. Jon Snow, the Channel 4 presenter, lost it with the health secretary Matt Hancock as he tried to express some pious hope. Snow pronounced Britain “completely asunder.” He said that “nobody in the country knows what’s going on,” and that Hancock knew “nothing.”

His verdict on Britain after a week of parliamentary debate that went some way toward indicating what Britain doesn’t want but offered no clue as to what Britain does want: “We are a laughingstock.”

The Brexit vote of 2016 was a fantasy, a case of what’s known in psychotherapy as transference. Somebody called a Brussels bureaucrat, a faceless schemer intent on ensnaring Britannia in his Continental rules, became the feckless foreigner onto whom every irritation — from waiting for help from the National Health Service to all the Polish kids in the local school — was transferred. Lies fed this process. The outcome was self-harm.

All the parliamentary wrangling has amounted to an attempt to turn fantasy into reality — to reconcile a plebiscite with parliamentary democracy (which is what Britain is) and somehow kick the disaster that is Brexit into the long grass. The result was predictable: Even 650 MPs cannot force a square peg into a round hole.

Parliament did reject a no-deal Brexit, the over-a-cliff solution that could see chaos at Dover; all the Brits with their pads in Provence and the Costa Brava and Chiantishire thrust into limbo and forced into the “other passports” line at European borders; and the severing of the multinational supply chains on which British industry depends.

It also voted to postpone beyond March 29 Britain’s departure from the European Union.

Neither of these votes, however, is “meaningful,” if meaningful is taken to mean that the outcomes they stipulate will happen.

May will resurface next week in Parliament in a third attempt to get her “deal” (really a fudge postponing all major decisions) through. She will deploy dire warnings to try to get Tory hard-liners and the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party on board. In essence, she will say: It’s my deal or a long extension beyond March 29. And a long extension could well mean no Brexit.

The vote will certainly be closer as maximalist pro-Brexit zealots within her Conservative Party, who want no accommodation with the European Union, realize their insanity could end up delivering the sanity of Britain remaining. It’s still more likely, however, that a deal twice defeated will be defeated a third time — unless May tries this desperate gambit: “Vote for the deal and I will resign March 30.” She won’t do that.

If her deal finally dies an irrevocable death, May will have to negotiate an extension with the European Union. The union will want to know what the extension beyond March 29 is for. It will probably favor a long extension because a short one is likely to be useless, given that nearly three years of negotiation have produced only mayhem.

Personally, I think an indefinite extension might be the solution lurking in the long grass. That way Britain could remain in the European Union forever while professing to want to leave. Brexit could be Britain’s Godot. Everyone would be happy.

That won’t happen in this dour age. But I suspect a long extension will be granted with the reason for it getting fudged. If it’s not, no-deal Brexit looms again as imminent (in fact, it looms anyway as one possible outcome at the end of any long extension).

Once this whole mess goes beyond March 29 (many Brits would now prefer summary execution to more talk of Brexit), all bets are off. Britain could find itself voting in the European Parliament election in May, a surreal exercise. In June, three years will have passed since the Brexit vote. Polls suggest opinion has shifted in favor of remaining. I can’t imagine a long extension without either a general election or a second referendum: This will have to go back to the people.

I told you we are in Act 4, if that. Oh, yes, the Malthouse Compromise: You don’t need to worry, dear reader. It was a fantasy. What’s real is that Britain is better off with more than a half-billion other people in the borderless European miracle that is the union.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/opinion/brexit-vote-extension-parliament-may.html" id="4bcaac20-c574-3c4c-a2a7-d0b70dcad08f">The New York Times</a>.

First, here’s the good news on Brexit. The Malthouse Compromise is dead. Britain has signed a post-Brexit free trade agreement with Fiji and Papua New Guinea. The irritating phrase “meaningful vote” has lost all meaning. Prime Minister Theresa May, who increasingly resembles one of those characters that just won’t die in a TV series, is running out of time to pop up again with her so-called “deal.”

Brexit, Act 4, Scene 1

Retribution? Johnson has played with his country, treating it like one of his many dalliances, with a sloppiness and fecklessness no wit or charm can excuse. He backed a British exit from the European Union on a whim — in the expectation it would be rejected — and has since become a pawn of the Brexit ultras, the crazed little-England monomaniacs who have now delivered him to 10 Downing Street.

It is a moment of perfect symbolism: a man without a conviction for a country without a direction, a man of self-destructive tendencies for a country in the vise of a crippling decision. The gods, when they are most cruel, also laugh.

In Donald Trump, consuming vanity is coupled with consuming ignorance. Johnson is equally vain but not equally ignorant. Trump’s wacko meets Johnson’s eccentricity.

Johnson has lied, pandered and guffawed his disheveled way to the highest office in the land, aping the bumbling buffoon and doing great damage. But he’s no fool. He knows his comeuppance is upon him.

Unless Johnson, who once penned a book called “The Churchill Factor,” is suddenly inhabited by an access of statesmanship, he could well become the shortest-lived prime minister in British history.

A single issue awaits him: Brexit. (Well, Iran may raise its head.) His deadline for British extrication is Oct. 31. By then he must pull off the do-or-die miracle he’s likened to a moon landing.

Mr. Can-Do — on a good day, maybe, when the emptiness at his core is not gnawing — either pulls a rabbit out of his hat in the form of a new Brexit deal better than his predecessor’s, which was rejected three times by Parliament; or he embraces, as pledged, the après-moi-le-déluge option of a no-deal Brexit with its accompanying economic and administrative mayhem — a course that would further batter the pound, sever essential supply chains, maroon Boris’s pals in Chiantishire, and face stern parliamentary opposition.

Johnson’s three months and change are in fact more like two. Europe goes AWOL in August. The patience of the European Union with the British farce is about exhausted.

Yet the incoming prime minister believes he can, in such short order, secure meaningful changes to Theresa May’s deal, including in the “backstop,” an insurance policy to preserve an open border between the Irish Republic (remains in the European Union) and Northern Ireland (which leaves with Brexit). The backstop has enraged hard-line Brexiteers, who see it as a Trojan horse for keeping Britain in the customs union forever.

The Brexit question is also an Irish question. The peace agreement of 1998 yielded an open border. It’s a United Kingdom question. Why should a pro-European Scotland not favor independence over association with England?

It’s a Boris question. “Brexit means Brexit” is all Theresa May was able to muster. Is Johnson prepared to lay out why he actually believes in this folly?

Does he really want to be Trump’s poodle begging for some trade accord to offset Brexit’s cost to British commerce? Does he really want to cozy up to an American president who says he could, if he chose, wipe Afghanistan “off the face of the earth,” killing “10 million people”; portrays himself as a potential mediator in the Kashmir conflict with an outright lie; and resorts to a racist outburst repudiated by the German chancellor?

Or will Johnson, at the last, listen to reason? Brexit has proved undeliverable because it is. As John Major, the former prime minister, put it, Johnson “must choose whether to be the spokesman for an ultra-Brexit faction, or the servant of the nation he leads. He cannot be both.”

Johnson has many enemies, a paper-thin parliamentary majority, and the tightest of deadlines. His chances of getting a new deal through Parliament by Oct. 31, or actually propelling Britain over the cliff of a no-deal Brexit, are slim to nonexistent.

So what then? He can call an election, but a Tory victory looks unlikely with the electorate split between Nigel Farage’s jingoistic Brexit Party, Jeremy Corbyn’s awful Labour Party, the resurgent pro-Europe Liberal Democrats and Johnson’s Tories. It would, in any event, be a leave-or-remain election, so why not call a second referendum? After three years of inconclusive chaos, with all Johnson’s lies in 2016 now exposed, Britons deserve a chance to say if they really want to leave.

As Fintan O’Toole has pointed out in The New York Review of Books, Johnson is a self-styled “akratic” — that is, per Aristotle, “a person who knows the right thing to do but can’t help doing the opposite.”

If Johnson remains in character, his nemesis will likely be swift and bloody. Or, just possibly, he could choose to be remembered not for his manifold faults but for a single act of bravery. He once wrote a book about that.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/opinion/boris-johnson-england-brexit.html" id="e8fe4cfe-e5fc-3acf-af42-88047efeb269">The New York Times</a>.

Boris Johnson, the incoming British prime minister, is a classical scholar. So he will understand: after hubris, nemesis. The gods are watching. The moment of retribution is upon him. Nemesis comes much as Hemingway described the onset of bankruptcy: first slowly, then suddenly.

Boris Johnson Faces a Swift and Bloody Nemesis

His piece flanked a photograph of a crowd in central Milan holding aloft with one arm a banner saying, “Honor to Benito Mussolini,” their other arms outstretched in a fascist salute. The gathering this week took place not far from Piazzale Loreto, where the fascist dictator was hung upside down at a gas station after being executed by Italy’s partisan liberators on April 28, 1945.

The crowd was composed mainly of supporters of the Lazio soccer club, whose so-called “ultras” form an extreme-rightist stronghold. It was not a large crowd. Their display of fascist allegiance will have little practical effect beyond demonstrating again that the unsayable has become legitimate discourse in the age of Trump, and that a white supremacist message has renewed global resonance.

Still, on the eve of Italy’s April 25 national holiday marking the country’s liberation, those raised right arms were shocking. “Honor to Benito Mussolini” is not quite “Honor to Adolf Hitler,” but it is not a million miles from it either.

“Indifference” is the word engraved at the entrance to Milan’s Holocaust Memorial, housed beneath the central railway station where, between 1943 and 1945, Jews were deported to their deaths in Nazi camps. Indifference, in any age, is all it takes for a child to be ripped from its parents.

On the national holiday itself, Matteo Salvini, Italy’s rightist anti-immigrant deputy prime minister and interior minister, chose not to participate in the commemoration, dismissing it as a “Fascist-Communist derby,” a meaningless confrontation of the right and left. He opted instead to go to Corleone in Sicily to open a new police station, declaring that the important thing today is Italy’s “liberation” from the Mafia.

Liberation is a poor word to devalue, especially when hundreds of thousands have died for it.

Salvini, the leader of the League party and a central figure in the pan-European rightist resurgence, did a disservice to history and honor that will delight his followers. Italy’s liberation by the Allies and partisan resistance forces was not some debatable “derby” devoid of moral significance, but a victory that laid the foundation for Italy’s postwar re-emergence as a decent, democratic country.

All that, however, took place in the faraway 20th century. Words that marked that century’s course — fascism, communism, totalitarianism, Holocaust — have become weightless in the 21st century, fungible elements in a furious fake-news theater.

In Israel, “fascism” becomes a perfume for a rightist minister’s election-campaign ads. In the United States, the “Jews will not replace us” cry of white supremacists does not, for President Donald Trump, constitute unequivocal moral iniquity. In Italy, liberation from fascism becomes a squalid “derby” for the most powerful figure in the government. Ideas that were solemn, or even sacred, become dog whistles.

Italy abandoned running the world, or a wide swath of it, a long time ago. It’s an exhausting business, as a United States that will hand the mantle to China sometime in the second half of the 21st century has found. When you get out of that line of work, the need to maximize efficiency, rationalize effort, raise productivity, modernize relentlessly, is diminished. Other pursuits, like that of beauty or pleasure, tend to take their place, or at least assume greater importance.

Perhaps in such a context, a Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s showman precursor to Trump, or a Matteo Salvini, should be viewed more as theatrical sideshow than anything else. The world needs a country where relief from modernity is still at hand. In Italy, the human gesture, the consoling word, remain everyday currency, whatever Salvini’s machinations.

Yet it is not harmless to raise a banner to Mussolini or dismiss the Liberation. Salvini has emerged in a different context to Berlusconi, one where anti-democratic, illiberal, racist forces are on the rise in Europe and beyond, encouraged by the moral abdication of Trump’s United States.

The ground has become fertile again for different iterations of 20th-century scourges. This month, Salvini announced the formation of a new European alliance of rightist parties, backed by French politician Marine Le Pen’s National Gathering (formerly the National Front) and including the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD. Their immediate goal is victory in European Parliament elections next month.

Seeing that banner in Milan, I could not help thinking of my late uncle Bert Cohen — “plain-routine, rut-living Bertie Cohen of Johannesburg,” as he put it in his war diary — who, as a young man came all the way from South Africa to join the Allied war effort in Europe, fighting his way across the length of Italy, south to north, and risking his life for Salvini’s “derby.” He would have been incredulous at those fascist salutes and the minister’s choice of words. He would have been disgusted.

The risk is that a weightless world is indifferent.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/opinion/italy-banner-mussolini-salvini.html" id="1d11c3e5-837e-32be-aa4e-c0d5777d3509">The New York Times</a>.

MILAN — “A banner is a banner, nothing more” wrote Giovanni Bianconi on the front page of Corriere della Sera, the leading Italian daily. “But also nothing less.”

Mussolini Resurfaces in Milan

Of all the hallucinogenic moments chronicled in Robert Mueller’s report, this is one of the most dizzying. McGahn has been summoned to the White House in February 2018 because a livid Trump wants him to deny something truthful. McGahn explains that he can’t “correct” an accurate report in The Times that the president had instructed him to have Mueller “fired.” He takes notes because he’s a “real lawyer.”

In fact McGahn, like many sucked into Trump’s corrupting White House orbit, takes notes in the same way people try to get themselves inoculated when they enter a zone of contagion. He wants a contemporaneous record of the truth to protect himself and — God knows — the Republic against Trump’s lies. He knows what an oath to uphold the Constitution means. If there is one overwhelming conclusion of the Mueller report it is that Trump, aka, “boss man,” holds the law and truth in utter contempt. That this is unsurprising only makes it more appalling.

“I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn,” Trump tells McGahn. “He did not take notes.” You don’t take notes when you want no record of your dereliction. Of course, Cohn is Trump’s role model: In New York, Cohn, McCarthyism’s ruthless enforcer, was disbarred for misconduct including dishonesty and fraud.

The Mueller report won’t move the political needle. Trump’s tens of millions of supporters know all this. They knew he was a scam artist before they voted for him in 2016. One of the reasons the report is devastating is that its portrait of an iniquitous presidency once again begs a question of all Americans: How did we put this man in the Oval Office?

It’s a question for everyone. To deflect responsibility is too easy. The mirror Trump holds up is to America in its entirety, from Hudson Yards to the death of Main Street, from the Kardashians to the opioid crisis, from the financiers doing the rigging to those left out or left behind, from callow Republicans to compromised Democrats.

The idea of America as a land of unbound self-invention is not new — F. Scott Fitzgerald captured that in “The Great Gatsby.” America is about forgetting, hence the extravagance of its creations. Still, Trump’s self-invention is remarkable for its scale and depravity — the way he grasped how hyper-individualism, the money culture, simmering anger, and the collapse of the line between truth and falsehood could be channeled into a victorious presidential campaign. How, in short, he could become the orange icon of the Age of the Unicorn.

The great parable of our age is John Carreyrou’s “Bad Blood,” a remarkable account of how a 20-something Stanford dropout, Elizabeth Holmes, built a company called Theranos that fooled everyone with a supposedly transformational method to test blood. Holmes’ pinprick testing that would do away with the hypodermic needle never worked. It was fakery.

There was no there there in Theranos, ever. There was only Holmes with her strange baritone parlaying zilch into a company once valued at an estimated $9 billion. She entranced a kind of American Who’s Who — including George Shultz, Jim Mattis and Henry Kissinger. Theranos was the ultimate “unicorn” — the term coined in 2013 by the venture capitalist Aileen Lee to describe the several dozen software startups launched since 2003 and valued at $1 billion or more, companies that avoid the scrutiny of going public while raising vast sums.

Belief in the Theranos unicorn split families. Shultz clashed with his grandson, Tyler Shultz, who became a whistleblower after working at Theranos. It also crossed party lines: President Barack Obama appointed Holmes as a presidential ambassador for global entrepreneurship. Joe Biden called Theranos “the laboratory of the future.” Holmes spoke — with Chelsea Clinton beside her — at a 2016 fundraiser for the Clinton campaign.

Myth and manipulation turned Holmes into a billionaire. She incarnated America’s collective hallucination and corruption, its vertiginous loss of bearings.

Theranos collapsed thanks to Carreyrou’s Wall Street Journal reporting. The Security and Exchange Commission charged Holmes with “massive fraud” (she settled), and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California indicted her on federal wire fraud and other charges.

So much for that unicorn. Brexit, another, endures for now.

The unicorn, let’s recall, is a legendary creature believed over centuries to exert miraculous powers, particularly through its horn that — as amulet or powdered — was thought to work as a prophylactic or antidote. Leonardo da Vinci wrote that only “fair maidens” could appease the unicorn’s ferocity. The unicorn never existed. It was collective fantasy. That did not make belief in it less tenacious.

We now have a full accounting of the unicorn-in-chief’s world. I fear he still has America in his thrall.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/opinion/mueller-trump-russia-report.html" id="3e9dc842-2dda-3835-ad14-7b741c73f587">The New York Times</a>.

“What about these notes?” President Donald Trump demands of Don McGahn, then his White House counsel. “Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes.”

Robert Mueller in the Age of the Unicorn

His victory contains a warning for any Democrat still imagining that the 2020 election will bring an easy victory over President Donald Trump. The Netanyahu playbook will be Trump’s next year. Gather nationalist and religious voters in your camp, add in a strong economy, dose with fear, sprinkle with strongman appeal, inject a dash of racism and victory is yours — whatever indictments are looming.

It’s not that this could happen. It will happen, absent some decisive factor to upend the logic of it. Netanyahu is savvier than Trump, but they share a shrewd assessment of how to control and manipulate the politics of spectacle, as well as a fierce determination to stay out of jail. They campaign ugly.

Exactly a century ago, Ben-Gurion said, “Everyone sees the difficulty of relations between Jews and Arabs, but not everyone sees there is no solution to that question.” Netanyahu’s solution is by now clear. He is a true believer in Greater Israel and will not give up 1 inch of the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. There will be no Palestinian state on his watch. Period.

Many Israelis, weary of the chimera of a two-state peace, thank him for that — as they thank him for a strong economy, Trump’s support and a sense of stability. Netanyahu is a formidable politician adept in using hate and fear, the strongest currency in contemporary politics.

His victory was personal, but it was also structural. Israel now has a structural majority of the right. This will almost certainly enable Netanyahu to form a right-wing government, even though his Likud party appeared tied with the Blue and White party of his upstart challenger, Benny Gantz, each winning 35 seats.

The Gantz performance was remarkable. It demonstrated the deep disquiet of liberal Israel over Netanyahu the King. But in the end Gantz took more votes from the left — the Labor Party and Meretz — than from the right. As Avi Scharf, editor of the English edition of the liberal daily Haaretz, put it to me, “Israel’s founding left is totally obliterated.”

The structural majority of the right is composed of the ultra-Orthodox, the settler movement, Mizrahi Jews of North African and Middle Eastern descent, nationalists of various stripes and Russian immigrants like the one who recently told my friend Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist, “I don’t want to live under Putin, but I want my leader to be like Putin.”

Netanyahu never passes up a photo-op with Vladimir Putin, any more than he does with Trump. “A different league,” one of his campaign ads said. Netanyahu was able to project presence among the superpowers. His base loved it. Trump’s base loves him, unswervingly. The president is not structurally assured of victory in 2020, but he is structurally within sight of it.

That Netanyahu is facing indictment on bribery and other charges proved no obstacle to Likud increasing its seats to 35 from 30 in 2015. In the near term, Israeli politics — and its democracy — will hinge on Netanyahu’s attempts to secure immunity from prosecution while in office. He may make acquiescence to such legislation a condition for coalition partners joining the government. It will not be pretty.

“We could see a coup d’état against democracy, something very dangerous,” Tom Segev, a prominent historian, told me.

For now, Israelis seem prepared to shrug. The not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper conclusion to the Mueller report reinforced a feeling that the cloud of corruption that has hung around Netanyahu for years should not be taken as proof of it.

In the longer term, Israeli politics will turn to the question of annexation. At the last minute, to shore up the right, Netanyahu promised to start annexing the West Bank if he won another term. The United Right and other extreme parties will not let him forget it.

Still, there is no reason to take Netanyahu at his word. He made himself kosher with the Obama administration through his Bar Ilan speech of a decade ago supporting a Palestinian state, only to do nothing to favor one and everything to block one.

Annexation could see the same fate because it’s problematic. Netanyahu is happiest in the gray zone where Israel controls millions of Palestinians without having to confront the question of whether they vote or are granted Israeli citizenship. He does not want to jeopardize good relations with Egypt and the Saudis. He’s quite happy with a Palestinian Authority in the West Bank that once saw itself in the role of leading the way to a Palestinian state but has become the feeble enabler of Israel’s gray-zone domination.

Netanyahu’s annexation decision may hinge in the end on the long-incubated Trump plan for Israel-Palestine. It’s said to exist. Maybe it really does. God knows. The fact that strong pushback from the United States on partial annexation is no longer assured says it all: The rightist nationalist wave has yet to crest.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/opinion/israel-election-benjamin-netanyahu.html" id="b76e26f4-6b88-37ca-ad4e-e5961288e978">The New York Times</a>.

TEL AVIV, Israel — It was a referendum on him, and he nailed it. Nobody can take that away from Benjamin Netanyahu. This summer, in his fifth term, he will surpass David Ben-Gurion as the longest-serving Israel prime minister. Enough said.

Israel's Lesson for Democrats in 2020

That became obvious as he took a few questions. The Biden I’ve observed over the years is garrulous, expansive, engaging — a glad-handing, old-school Democratic politician in whom sentiment always overrode precision. Here, however, was another man. Biden read his answers from cards of typed notes. He tiptoed. He was running in an unforgiving age, and he was already scared. If he got it wrong, the thought police might airbrush him from history.

It’s mean out there in this America of the culture, gender and race wars. A phrase misspoken, a hand misplaced, and all hell breaks loose. Social media is instantaneous judge and executioner. Pariah is a life sentence. There is no margin for error; retrospective judgment makes no allowance for changed mores or expectations. Sensibility of an exquisitely indignant strain often trumps sense.

Sure enough, even before Biden makes a formal decision to run, along comes Lucy Flores, a former candidate for lieutenant governor of Nevada, to say Biden planted “a big slow kiss on the back of my head” at a campaign rally nearly five years ago. Other women have followed, saying Biden had touched them inappropriately — that what he viewed as expressions of encouragement, affection, solidarity were received as plain creepy, or worse. There will be more.

A friend told me the stories had revived in her a vague memory of meeting Biden at some event where he shook her hand and, in doing so, gave her “a weird tickle.” She laughed.

Biden is a 76-year-old white male, with decades of public exposure, operating in the era of #MeToo. That this would happen to him was of course not inevitable, but nor was it improbable. Behavior was socially tolerated in the past that should not have been. As he said in a video that stopped short of an apology but was a mea culpa, “social norms have begun to change.” This was a towering understatement. It’s a different world.

To watch the Creepy Uncle Joe clips compiled by people who wish him ill is a discomfiting experience. When it comes to an image, the prism it’s seen through is everything. Today’s prism is rigid and absolutist.

In his I-get-it video, Biden said he would be more “mindful and respectful of people’s personal space,” whose boundaries had been “reset.” He suggested his touchy world had given way to a selfie world — and he would adjust accordingly. The performance was mildly excruciating, like watching Gramps straining to be hip.

Meanwhile, the “I just start kissing them,” “Grab them by the pussy” Republican president, accused by more than a dozen women of harassment, groping and worse, and held accountable by no one, could not resist preening. Donald Trump mocked Biden with a doctored video showing a cartoonish image of the former vice president nuzzling from behind his penitent self. Democrats tied in virtuous politically correct knots meet Republicans unbound in their vile and unrepentant grossness: Welcome to the 2020 campaign. It won’t be pretty.

Where Biden was tongue-tied in Munich, Trump vaunts his coarse spontaneity. As he told the Conservative Political Action Conference last month, “You know I’m totally off script now. And this is how I got elected, by being off script. And if we don’t go off script, our country is in big trouble, folks.”

Our country is in big trouble. Period. Never mind the script. Watching Trump I am reminded of the words of John Randolph on a political opponent: “He shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight.”

I like Biden. I don’t think anything that has emerged so far about his behavior is disqualifying. He’s made mistakes, as people do, not least his handling of the Anita Hill hearings. He’s experienced, a conciliator in a time of division, a passionate believer in America as a force for good in the world and in the indivisibility of the rule of law and the American idea.

Still, unless he’s a glutton for punishment, Biden should not run. The times have changed more than he can grasp. The issues around women that have come up will not go away. He will suffer. He will be judged harshly for his faults rather than forgiven for his human fallibility. That is the nature of the zeitgeist.

It will be painful to watch. As a beneficiary of old-white-male privilege, Biden will be suspect. The energy in the Democratic Party is not in the center, but left of that, and I doubt Biden can redirect the current. The only issue for Democrats must be beating Trump. Whether a man older than the president, tainted by support for the Iraq War, can embody renewal is doubtful.

Napoleon is said to have remarked that if he had been killed in 1812 as he entered Moscow in triumph, he would have gone down in history as the greatest general ever. Timing is everything, not least in leaving the stage. Biden, honorable patriot, should side with restraint.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/opinion/joe-biden.html" id="d0a16445-b418-3d75-a8bc-0a930b543726">The New York Times</a>.

I watched Joe Biden at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year. “We will be back; we will be back,” he declared. He meant the United States after the moral abdication of the Trump years. He also meant himself, the president-in-waiting who would wait no longer to reach the Oval Office.

Biden, Honorable Patriot, Should Side With Restraint

France has one of the world’s most elaborate social protection systems. The ratio of tax revenue to gross domestic product, at 46.2 percent, is the highest of all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries. In the United States, that ratio is 27.1 percent. Look no further to grasp Franco-American differences.

This French tax revenue is spent on programs — universal health care, lengthy paid maternity leave, unemployment benefits — designed to render society more cohesive and capitalism less cutthroat. Of the French Revolution’s three-pronged cry — “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” — the first has proved most problematic, freedom being but a short step, in the French view, from the “Anglo-Saxon” free-market jungle. Socialist presidents have governed France for half the past 38 years.

The country has paid a price for its social solidarity, particularly in high unemployment. But France has prospered. It has a vibrant private sector. It is a capitalist economy, among the world’s seven largest. Its socialism is no European exception. The Continent decided after World War II that cushioning capitalism was a price worth paying to avoid the social fragmentation that had fed violence.

The parties that produced Europe’s welfare states had different names, but they all embraced the balances — of the free market and the public sector, of enterprise and equity, of profit and protection — that socialism or its cousin social democracy (as opposed to communism) stood for. Socialism, a word reborn, has none of the Red Scare potency in Europe that it carries in the United States. It’s part of life. It’s not Venezuelan misery.

A 21st-century American election is about to be fought over socialism. Amazing! When the Berlin Wall fell beneath communism’s weight three decades ago, capitalism unbridled strode forth over the rubble in search of global opportunity. Ideological struggle seemed over.

But growing inequality and marginalization — byproducts of financial globalization — have thrust socialism center stage. Grace Blakeley, an economist and self-styled democratic socialist in London, told me, “For most people today, socialism is freedom from a lousy warehouse job or working 80 hours a week in a job you detest for people you detest.”

Right. The charismatic voice of such sentiment in the United States is Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the lightning rod of a new American politics. “The definition of democratic socialism to me, again, is the fact that in a modern, moral and wealthy society, no American should be too poor to live,” Ocasio-Cortez tells NBC’s Chuck Todd. Like Britain’s leftist Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, she favors significant state intervention in the economy. President Donald Trump, unerring in his instinct for the jugular, declares, “We believe in the American dream, not the socialist nightmare.”

Europe demonstrates, however, that socialism and the free market are compatible. The basic issue before the Democratic Party is how far left to go. Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist. Kamala Harris calls herself a progressive. John Hickenlooper, conciliator, says he can “get stuff done.”

The notion that U.S. elections are won in the center was buried by Trump. The energy in the Democratic Party lies in the progressive camp. It stems from anger at a skewed economy and millennial disgust at the elitist turn that cost the Democrats their working-class base and much of small-town America. This opened the way for Trump. My own inclinations are centrist, but not a “centrism” that cares more for Goldman Sachs than the opioid crisis. I don’t see how the Democrats can eschew a new era’s left-leaning energy and win.

A word of caution: The United States was founded in contradistinction to, not as an extension of, Europe. Self-reliance is to America what fraternity is to France: part of its core. American space — so immense, so un-European — conjures in Americans a bristling independence of spirit that wants government out of their lives.

Nations do not cast off their cultural essence. I don’t think soaking the rich — Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed 70 percent wealth tax — is going to get a Democrat to the Oval Office. Nor are the accusations of “worker exploitation” that chased Amazon and 25,000 jobs out of New York — a stupid waste.

The dirty secret of European welfare states is that they tend to be business-friendly. As Monica Prasad, a sociology professor at Northwestern University has pointed out, Sweden has a lower corporate tax rate than the United States. The sweet spot for Democrats is getting business to buy in to progressive reform. America can be nudged in a French direction without losing its self-renewing essence.

France is also home to the yellow-vest protests from the marginalized. So much for social cohesion, you might say. But there’s a lesson. As James McAuley observed in The New York Review of Books, those vests reflect, above all, a “material demand to be seen.” Socialism is no silver bullet. The basic requirement of any Democratic candidate is to make the forgotten, the struggling and the invisible of American society feel visible again.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/opinion/socialism-and-the-2020-american-election.html" id="cba1a44c-6ebf-3694-a332-e6f7e9e86062">The New York Times</a>.

Two of my children were born in socialist France. They survived. In fact, their births were great experiences: excellent medical care, wonderful postnatal follow-up, near-zero cost. My son’s bris, in a Paris deserted through the August exodus, was another story, but I won’t get into that.

Socialism and the 2020 American Election

Right. The charismatic voice of such sentiment in the United States is Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the lightning rod of a new American politics. “The definition of democratic socialism to me, again, is the fact that in a modern, moral and wealthy society, no American should be too poor to live,” Ocasio-Cortez tells NBC’s Chuck Todd. Like Britain’s leftist Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, she favors significant state intervention in the economy. Trump, unerring in his instinct for the jugular, declares, “We believe in the American dream, not the socialist nightmare.”

To paraphrase Churchill, much invoked by Brexiteers as a symbol of the rule-Britannia greatness they believe will return once Britain is freed from its European shackles: Never was so little known by so many about so much.

Britain is in a funk. “Just get this over with,” is a plea I heard often from Brexit-battered Brits, as if they were waiting to have a limb amputated. After nearly three years, they’re done. All the oxygen has been sucked from the room by the Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May’s floundering attempt to end the country’s 46-year membership in the European Union.

It’s not easy to make an egg from an omelet, as Pascal Lamy, the former head of the World Trade Organization, has observed. I grew up in a Britain where “the Continent,” a faintly distasteful geographical mass associated with rabies and garlic, was far away. The EU changed that. Now, through finance, trade, law and culture, Britain is mixed into a borderless market of 28 nations and more than a half-billion people that has brought peace, stability and an unprecedented, if uneven, prosperity to Europe. Britain’s decision to break from that is a curious act of self-harm, linked, like the election of Donald Trump, to the desperation of our times.

The country’s main political parties, the Conservatives and Labour, buffeted by the Brexit maelstrom, are in crisis — beset by desertions, insurrections and division. As elsewhere in Western democracies shaken by the failings of liberalism, hard-line factions to the left and right have gained sway. They offer rekindled socialism or make-Britain-great-again nationalism as the answer to inequality and ennui. The center looks weak, even if defectors from Labour and the Conservative Parties last month formed an Independent Group to try to resurrect it. Parliamentary democracy, which is what Britain is, and democracy-by-plebiscite, which is what the 2016 vote was, are in a standoff: A sovereign Parliament has rejected May’s proposal, while advocates of Brexit, on time and at any cost, bay about the sacred irreversible “will of the people.” Britain today poses the question of what 21st-century democracy is.

May and Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader, have both made desperate concessions in the past week. They did so from weakness. May’s acknowledgment that Brexit could be delayed (the union would have to agree to that and would want to know why) and Corbyn’s support for a second referendum (a grudging move from a lifelong Euroskeptic heading a pro-EU party) added to the mayhem.

Anything is possible. That’s now official. Britain could approve an amended May deal (essentially a fudge preserving British participation in the single market and customs union for now); crash out of the union like a lemming over a cliff; defer a decision; hold a second vote; or some weird combination.

I met with David Renard, the Tory leader of Swindon’s borough council. He’s getting impatient. He says he wants British sovereignty back, rescued from a web of European Union regulations. He thinks Britain should get out, even without a deal. “The British people voted to leave. It would be an affront to democracy if we do not on March 29,” he told me. “Let’s get on with it! A lot of people would see a delay as the liberal elite establishment trying to find a way to stay in the EU.”

As a paid-up member of that establishment, I would see a delay and a second vote (one does not necessarily follow from the other) as an act of very British common sense.

By focusing the zeitgeist’s every frustration on Brussels, the “Take Back Control” campaign in 2016 was a brilliant exercise in emotional transference. “Remain” equaled the status quo. To many people, for reasons that had little or nothing to do with the union, that was an unattractive proposition.

As a practical matter, however, the decision to leave has been a disaster. “Fantasy Brexit,” was based on lies, like the imminent invasion of 80 million Turks. (Turkey joining the EU is about as likely as Saudi Arabia becoming a democracy.) Now Britain has had a three-year crash course in “Reality Brexit.” This has involved slower growth, lower investment and the collapse of the illusory idyll. Some 40 free trade deals were promised to replace free trade arrangements Britain benefits from as a union member. The government has concluded a handful, one of them with the Faroe Islands.

Trump is not forever. Brexit is. Britain’s youth oppose it. A decision of this import should be grounded in reality.

I sat for a while outside the Debenhams department store in downtown Swindon. The scene was not a happy one: stores for rent, people struggling to get by. Swindon is an hour by train from central London, the purring hub of pro-EU sentiment. It might as well be on another planet — and it’s still far better off than many towns in Britain. No wonder, I thought, that a majority here did not want to “remain.”

Last month Honda, Swindon’s second-largest employer, announced the closure of its plant, with the loss of 3,500 jobs. There were various factors, including a free trade agreement Japan has concluded with the European Union (making manufacture in Japan more attractive). Honda did not cite the elephant on its production line: Brexit.

Imagine you’re in a board meeting in Tokyo looking at fathomless uncertainty in Britain for the foreseeable future: What would you decide? One angry Honda worker, with 24 years at the Swindon factory, had no doubt about the real culprit for his job loss: “The government’s completely incompetent handling of the whole thing doesn’t help either, does it?” he said in a Channel 4 interview that went viral. “They can’t even decide for themselves what Brexit means. This is idiocy of epic proportions.”

Idiocy aside, it’s not easy to execute a decision based on mass delusion. As Robert Smith, a Swindon-based marketing director for a law firm, told me: “The gig economy is not Europe’s fault.” Nor is the migrant crisis, billionaire-favoring taxes and stagnant wages.

“The European Union is our national scapegoat,” Sam Gyimah, a Tory MP who quit May’s government last November, told me. As minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation, Gyimah labored hard to make Brexit work. The more he labored, the less it seemed to make sense. “We get 1.5 pounds from the EU for every pound we put in,” he told me. “The University of Cambridge gets more than all of Romania.” Britain had invested heavily in Galileo, a global navigation satellite system created by the European Union. Now it has been shut out.

When May produced her “deal” — in fact a proposal to defer for at least two years all the difficult decisions — Gyimah quit. “There’s no majority for any option in Parliament,” he told me. “This has to go back to the people.”

The people are restive. Renard told me the Swindon council is “making plans for civil unrest as a precaution,” should Brexit be delayed.

Liberalism worked well for a while. It was good at freeing people from bigotry, sexism, racism, nationalism and prejudice. It was less good at providing people with meaning to their lives, beyond hedonism and materialism. In 2008, with the financial crisis, the wheels came off. Those responsible walked away. A lot of people felt empty, and were drowning in debt. What had the elite ever done for them? Bigotry and nationalism made a storming comeback. That’s Brexit in a nutshell.

The reality, however, is that Brexit only compounds the problems. Will Dry, a student, was 18 when he voted for Brexit. All his family toldhim Europe meant unemployment and refugees. Now Dry has taken time off from Oxford University to fight Brexit in London. He came, he told me, to “the realization we did not have a plan.” His new view is that “it’s far better to cooperate with neighbors and allies than ditch them.”

With Lara Spirit, another student on leave from college, Dry is a co-president of OFOC (Our Future Our Choice — don’t try to pronounce the acronym), a youth movement that has sent a blue bus around Britain emblazoned with the words “Please stand up for our futures. Signed, young people.” The bus is a rebuke to the Brexiteers’ notorious red bus that, in 2016, spread the lie that more than $462 million a week going to the EU would be spent post-Brexit on the National Health Service. “I’m confident there will be a second vote,” Spirit said.

Polls suggest Britain would now vote to stay in the European Union, perhaps by a 54-46 percent margin. Hugo Dixon, the deputy chairman of a grass-roots movement for a second referendum, suggested this slogan: “Fix it. Not Brexit.”

That’s good. Liberal democracy has failed too many of its citizens. Brexit and Trump prove that. Elites have to acknowledge their arrogant inattention. The answer is to fix problems — in education, the health service, taxation and uncontrolled immigration, to name a few.

To return to Churchill, he declared in 1936 at another moment of British wavering: “So they go in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.” Three years into its agonizing Brexit odyssey, Britain is finally realizing that scapegoating Brussels has gotten it nowhere. It’s going to have to fix its national problems — and the European Union could help.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/opinion/brexit-may-deadline-deal.html" id="cabbbff8-4371-3f64-a0a6-ce23a6c33a4e">The New York Times</a>.

SWINDON, England — Mr. and Mrs. Average are said to live in this southwestern English town better known as a political bellwether than for any charm. Its 54.7 percent vote for Brexit in 2016 was one of the first results announced, an early indicator of upheaval. Now, with less than a month until the March 29 deadline for Britain to leave the European Union, it’s again aligned with most of the country, this time in its cluelessness as to what is about to happen.

The Official British Policy? Mayhem

Imagine, to gauge the import of this statement, Bernie Sanders suggesting the same thing of the Democrats.

Jew hatred has re-entered the European mainstream through a toxic amalgam of spillover from vilification of Israel, the return of the Jewish plutocrat as hated symbol of the 1 percent, and the resurgence of the Jewish “cosmopolitan” as the target of ascendant nationalists convinced a cabal of Jews runs the world.

The British politician was Luciana Berger, who is Jewish and has been MP for Liverpool and Wavertree since 2010. She has watched, with dismay, as Jeremy Corbyn has allowed a demonological view of Israel to foster Jew hatred in the Labour Party since taking over its leadership in 2015.

So, I asked in an interview, is Corbyn an anti-Semite? “Well,” she said, “he’s certainly been responsible for sharing platforms with anti-Semites and saying things that are highly offensive and anti-Semitic.”

Corbyn, Berger suggested, has contrived to make British Jews different in some way, a process she called “othering.” She’s had to endure “pictures of Stars of David superimposed on my forehead, and my face imposed on a rat, or many rats. There are pornographic images, violent images, oversize features like a witch. You name it, they’ve done it.” Nine months pregnant, the mother of a small child, she’s faced death threats and has to take security measures “a lot more now than I did before.”

Not all the anti-Semitic slurs have come from within the party, but the volume of attacks from the left has convinced Berger she had to quit Labour. “I didn’t make that decision lightly,” she told me, having always believed that Labour was Britain’s anti-racist party par excellence.

Corbyn, who has taken the party sharply leftward from the now reviled Blairite center, and whose anti-Zionism has long been apparent, has insisted, “I’m not an anti-Semite in any form.” He has promised (and promised and promised) to rid the Labour Party of any such poison.

There’s nothing anti-Semitic about sympathy for the Palestinian cause or support of Palestinian statehood or disdain for the rightist government of the now indicted prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and its kick-the-can policies to prolong or eternize the occupation of the West Bank. That should be obvious.

But where anti-Zionism crosses into anti-Semitism should also be obvious: dehumanizing or demonizing Jews and propagating the myth of their sinister omnipotence; accusing Jews of double loyalties as a means to suggest their national belonging is of lesser worth; denying the Jewish people’s right to self-determination; blaming through conflation all Jews for the policies of the Israeli government; pursuing the systematic “Nazification” of Israel; turning Zionism into a synonym of racism.

LONDON — Europe’s gathering Jewish question came into sharp focus this month when a British MP declared that she had come to the “sickening conclusion” that one of the country’s two main political parties, Labour, is now “institutionally anti-Semitic.”

Roger Cohen

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Biden, Honorable Patriot, Should Side With Restraint

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