"Force-marched into immorality."

Our humanity is now on the line.

Another kind of march. New York, 2 December. (CBS Screen shot.)

3 DECEMBER—There is a long and unfortunate tradition in America—and it is fair to say throughout the West—of foreign policy as the exclusive preserve of sequestered elites. In the U.S. case, it is since the late–19^th century, when America first had a foreign policy one could speak of, that more or less remote, unelected cliques have conducted the nation’s foreign affairs without reference to the popular will. Reflecting this, I have long counted Americans fortunate that others are capable of distinguishing between the American government and the American people. 

As of 7 October this no longer holds, it seems to me. The extremity of the Israeli regime’s inhumanity as it prosecutes its barbaric campaign against the Palestinians of Gaza has altered fundamentally the dynamic at work between those in the West who fashion foreign policy and those in whose names it is executed. Let us try to understand this transformation. It is significant, and it is possibly historic in its implications.