What next? Is Netanyahu betting on a Hizbullah overreaction? Is he trying to open a second front and to drag the Iranians – and the Americans – into war? Are the attacks part of his effort to return Donald Trump to the White House, or is he simply trying to stay in power with a show of military force? The war in Gaza has made him more popular than ever, in spite of mass protests in favour of a ceasefire.
Brasília National Park, 16 September 2024. Photo © Eraldo Peres / AP / Alamy
Following a prolonged drought, smoke from wildfires in the Amazon basin is choking people over an enormous swath of territory in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Peru and Bolivia.
The Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury died yesterday at the age of 76. When his early book The Little Mountain (1977) was translated into English in 1988, Edward Said – contrasting him with Naguib Mahfouz – described Khoury in the LRB as a ‘politically committed, and, in his own highly mobile modes, brilliant figure’. A journalist, publisher and ‘highly perceptive critic’ as well as a novelist, Khoury ‘forged (in the Joycean sense) a national and novel, unconventional, postmodern literary career’. He had also been ‘a political militant from his early days, having grown up as a 1960s schoolboy in the turbulent world of Lebanese and Palestinian street politics.’
The question of what computers can’t do was posed in 1972 by the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus. Dreyfus’s answer – think creatively – was soon considered an error, but the problem remained. It is difficult to distinguish human from machine intelligence because we use the same underlying philosophical and psychological understandings of the mind to discuss both. We think of human beings as essentially rational, problem-solving, goal-oriented animals – an idea that long antedates neoliberalism. At the same time, we think of the computer as a problem-solving calculator, though one with access to far more data than an individual person. The main alternative to this paradigm – psychoanalysis – has long been discredited. Nonetheless, I want to propose a psychoanalytic answer to the problem Dreyfus posed. What computers can’t do is free associate.
The events of this summer, Bibi Rabbiyah Khan said, are a wake up call for the community: to overcome divisions and fear, and draw on the support of interfaith groups, local authorities and anti-racism groups. ‘That's what saved London – people stood up.’
On 28 August, Israel launched a ground and air attack on the northern West Bank, ‘the biggest of its kind since 2002’. With the military onslaught came images of medical staff rounded up, hospitals besieged, ambulances and paramedics stopped, cities and refugee camps sealed off, roads destroyed, water, fuel and electricity supplies cut. Israeli occupation forces were reported to have killed twenty Palestinians in Jenin in two days. They took over people’s homes and positioned snipers on the roofs of buildings. Mass arrests and abuse of detainees were filmed by residents. The human rights organisation al-Haq has shown footage of the destruction of the eastern part of the city by Israeli bulldozers.
It isn’t only on the economy that Labour is aping the Conservative Party. In May this year, the High Court ruled that the protest regulations enacted by Suella Braverman when she was home secretary were unlawful.