On this episode of Start Making Sense, John Nichols analyzes Tuesday’s elections, and Fintan O’Toole considers Gaza’s past and future.
Voting signage outside a polling location in Toledo, Ohio, on Tuesday, November 7, 2023. Ohioans are considering a proposed amendment, called Issue 1, to prevent the state from interfering with reproductive decisions, including contraception, while allowing abortion bans with exceptions after fetal viability. (Photographer: Emily Elconin / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Tuesday’s vote tested the potency of abortion rights as an issue for Democrats, with a referendum in Ohio and the election of a new state legislature in Virginia. John Nichols has our analysis of those elections, and some others.
Also on this episode: What is Israel’s endgame in its war with Hamas? Over the past 50 years, it has tried two radically different strategies in Gaza, and neither succeeded. Fintan O’Toole explains that history. He teaches at Princeton and is an advising editor at The New York Review of Books, where he’s been writing about Israel, Hamas, and Gaza.
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Lots of pro-Palestine encampments on college campuses have been attacked by local police, but UCLA was different: a pro-Israel mob attacked the encampment on April 30. The attack continued for three hours before police stepped in, and they didn’t arrest any of the attackers. The next night, the police themselves attacked and shut down the encampment. UCLA Professor and Chair in Jewish History, David Myers has our report.
Also on this episode: There’s no doubt that Israeli women and girls were raped during the Hamas attack on Oct. 7; but there is little evidence to support Israel’s charge that rape was a “premeditated, systematic” strategy by Hamas—offered as a justification for Israel's destruction of Gaza and killing of 35,000 civilians. At the same time, evidence is growing of sexual abuse of Palestinian women held in detention by Israel. Azadeh Moaveni reports on the findings of her reporting for the London Review of Books.
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Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.