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<title>12 December, 2023</title>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-down" id="covid-19-sentry">Covid-19 Sentry</h1>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" data-aos-anchor-placement="top-bottom" id="contents">Contents</h1>
<ul>
<li><a href="#from-preprints">From Preprints</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-clinical-trials">From Clinical Trials</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-pubmed">From PubMed</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-patent-search">From Patent Search</a></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-preprints">From Preprints</h1>
<ul>
<li><strong>CITY LEADERSHIP IN PARA-DIPLOMACY: DRIVERS OF JAKARTA’S INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENT IN ADDRESSING COVID-19 PANDEMIC</strong> -
<div>
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all the world’s aspects, including the interactions among governments. While some either chose to conflict with others or overlooked the pandemic, the rest attempted to collaborate in addressing the new global threat. Mega-cities in many countries were the most suffering regions due to the enormous virus-confirmed cases, deaths, and economic declines, intertwining with other urban issues. As the largest city in Southeast Asia and Indonesia, Jakarta also experienced an unprecedented crisis. However, apart from the efforts to tackle the crisis at home, the city showed its international engagement in addressing the issue together with other world cities as its para-diplomacy. This research aimed to answer the driving factors encouraging the city for such engagement. This research employed the qualitative method with descriptive analysis and the city leadership theory proposed by Rapoport, Acuto, and Grcheva. This research found that Jakarta’s international engagement in addressing the pandemic as the city leadership action was driven by the role of city leader, decentralization and global city networking, and the regional COVID-19 policies and internet representing three elements in the theory: actor, structures, and tools. This paper argues that cities within the global city networking have demonstrated their stronger role during the pandemic, providing opportunities for nation branding by regional initiatives in handling the pandemic in addition to state foreign policy. As cities have been more consolidated within the networks, seeing the city leadership in responding to global issues merits attention among scholars.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://osf.io/6f3j5/" target="_blank">CITY LEADERSHIP IN PARA-DIPLOMACY: DRIVERS OF JAKARTA’S INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENT IN ADDRESSING COVID-19 PANDEMIC</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Restoring Protein Glycosylation with GlycoShape</strong> -
<div>
During the past few years we have been witnessing a revolution in structural biology. Leveraging on technological and computational advances, scientists can now resolve biomolecular structures at the atomistic level of detail by cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and predict 3D structures from sequence alone by machine learning (ML). One technique often supports the other to provide the view of atoms in molecules required to capture the function of molecular machines. An example of the extraordinary impact of these advances on scientific discovery and on public health is given by how structural information supported the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines based on the SARS-CoV-2 spike (S) glycoprotein. Yet, none of these new technologies can capture the details of the dense coat of glycans covering S, which is responsible for its natural, biologically active structure and function and ultimately for viral evasion. Indeed, glycosylation, the most abundant post-translational modification of proteins, is largely invisible through experimental structural biology and in turn it cannot be reproduced by ML, because of the lack of data to learn from. Molecular simulations through high-performance computing (HPC) can fill this crucial information gap, yet the computational resources, the users skills and the long timescales involved limit applications of molecular modelling to single study cases. To broaden access to structural information on glycans, here we introduce GlycoShape (https://glycoshape.org) an open access (OA) glycan structure database and toolbox designed to restore glycoproteins to their native functional form by supplementing the structural information available on proteins in public repositories, such as the RCSB PDB (www.rcsb.org) and AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/), with the missing glycans derived from over 1 ms of cumulative sampling from molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The GlycoShape Glycan Database (GDB) currently counts over 435 unique glycans principally covering the human glycome and with additional structures, fragments and epitopes from other eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms. The GDB feeds into Re-Glyco, a bespoke algorithm in GlycoShape designed to rapidly restore the natural glycosylation to protein 3D structures and to predict N-glycosylation occupancy, where unknown. Ultimately, integration of GlycoShape with other OA protein structure databases can provide a much needed step-change in scientific discovery, from the structural and functional characterization of the active form of biomolecules, all the way down to pharmacological applications and drug discovery.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.12.11.571101v1" target="_blank">Restoring Protein Glycosylation with GlycoShape</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Online holistic program to foster health amongst students: a pilot study in a Portuguese University during COVID-19 pandemic</strong> -
<div>
During the COVID-19 pandemic, several preventive mental health interventions took place to increase the psychological well-being of university students due to the high levels of stress, anxiety and negative emotions experienced in that period. This context reinforced the role of universities in supporting students and preventing the mental health risk factors they faced. In this context a multidisciplinary team of professionals (psychologists, nurses, nutritionists, and artists) in the Portuguese Catholic University, gathered efforts and developed an holistic intervention program for university students based on a mind and body integrated approach. This program of 8 online sessions aims to improve students’ resilience to the psychosocial consequences of COVID-19 pandemic and promote their wellbeing. The twenty university students that participated in this pilot study reported that this intervention improved their emotional self-awareness, their ability to apply self-care strategies, as well as they believed it promoted healthier lifestyle changes. These findings suggest that this program consists in an innovative approach with the potential to promote the psychological health and well-being of university students in adverse circumstances.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://osf.io/a2f5y/" target="_blank">Online holistic program to foster health amongst students: a pilot study in a Portuguese University during COVID-19 pandemic</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Virological characteristics of the SARS-CoV-2 JN.1 variant</strong> -
<div>
The SARS-CoV-2 BA.2.86 lineage, first identified in August 2023, is phylogenetically distinct from the currently circulating SARS-CoV-2 Omicron XBB lineages, including EG.5.1 and HK.3. Comparing to XBB and BA.2, BA.2.86 carries more than 30 mutations in the spike (S) protein, indicating a high potential for immune evasion. BA.2.86 has evolved and its descendant, JN.1 (BA.2.86.1.1), emerged in late 2023. JN.1 harbors S:L455S and three mutations in non-S proteins. S:L455S is a hallmark mutation of JN.1: we have recently shown that HK.3 and other "FLip" variants carry S:L455F, which contributes to increased transmissibility and immune escape ability compared to the parental EG.5.1 variant. Here, we investigated the virological properties of JN.1.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.12.08.570782v1" target="_blank">Virological characteristics of the SARS-CoV-2 JN.1 variant</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Distance to Vaccine Sites is Associated with Lower COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake</strong> -
<div>
COVID-19 remains a leading cause of mortality in the U.S., despite widespread availability of vaccines. Conventional wisdom ties failure to vaccinate primarily to vaccine-skeptic beliefs (e.g., conspiracy theories, partisanship). Yet in this research, we find that vaccination is also hindered by travel distance to vaccine sites (a form of friction, or structural barriers). In study 1, Californians living farther from vaccine sites had lower vaccination rates, and this effect held regardless of partisanship. In study 2, Chicago zip codes saw an uptick in vaccination following vaccine site opening. These results proved robust in multiverse analyses accounting for a wide range of covariates, outcomes, and distance indicators. COVID-19 vaccination is hampered not just by vaccine hesitancy, but also structural barriers like distance. Efforts to boost vaccination could benefit from minimizing friction.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/mux5s/" target="_blank">Distance to Vaccine Sites is Associated with Lower COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>SARS-CoV-2 infection is associated with intestinal permeability, systemic inflammation, and microbial dysbiosis in hospitalized COVID-19 patients</strong> -
<div>
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and associated severity has been linked to uncontrolled inflammation and may be associated with changes in the microbiome of mucosal sites including the gastrointestinal tract and oral cavity. These sites play an important role in host-microbe homeostasis and disruption of epithelial barrier integrity during COVID-19 may potentially lead to exacerbated inflammation and immune dysfunction. Outcomes in COVID-19 are highly disparate, ranging from asymptomatic to fatal, and the impact of microbial dysbiosis on disease severity is unclear. Here, we obtained plasma, rectal swabs, oropharyngeal swabs, and nasal swabs from 86 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 and 12 healthy volunteers. We performed 16S rRNA sequencing to characterize the microbial communities in the mucosal swabs and measured circulating cytokines, markers of gut barrier integrity, and fatty acids in the plasma samples. We compared these plasma concentrations and microbiomes between healthy volunteers and the COVID-19 patients who had survived or unfortunately died by the end of study enrollment, and between severe disease and healthy controls, as well as performed a correlation analysis between plasma variables and bacterial abundances. The rectal swabs of COVID-19 patients had reduced abundances of several commensal bacteria including Faecalibacterium prausnitsii, and an increased abundance of the opportunistic pathogens Eggerthella lenta and Hungatella hathewayi. Furthermore, the oral pathogen Scardovia wiggsiae was more abundant in the oropharyngeal swabs of COVID-19 patients who died. The abundance of both H. hathewayi and S. wiggsiae correlated with circulating inflammatory markers including IL-6, highlighting the possible role of the microbiome in COVID-19 severity, and providing potential therapeutic targets for managing COVID-19.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.12.07.570670v1" target="_blank">SARS-CoV-2 infection is associated with intestinal permeability, systemic inflammation, and microbial dysbiosis in hospitalized COVID-19 patients</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Effects of remote work on population distribution across cities: US evidence from a QSE model</strong> -
<div>
This study investigates the impact of remote work adoption on the size and competitiveness of cities in the United States. As a contribution to the ongoing debate sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic, the research initially establishes city-specific upper-bound measures of potential remote work adoption, utilizing the share of employment in remotely-performable occupations for each city. Subsequently, it employs a Quantitative Spatial Economic model, incorporating shipping and commuting costs, to assess the counterfactual effects that these potential levels of remote work adoption would have on population distribution across US cities. Model predictions indicate that upon full remote-work adoption, only select highly productive cities would grow in size and productivity, tothe detriment of the majority of locations. Nevertheless, the emerging spatial equilibrium yields generalized welfare gains characterized by reduced markups in larger cities, extending even to shrinking cities through the pro-competitive effect of trade. The findings suggest a policy-relevant dual role of remote work, concurrently enhancing welfare while reinforcing agglomeration and inequality across cities.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/krnzq/" target="_blank">Effects of remote work on population distribution across cities: US evidence from a QSE model</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Prediction of mental well-being from individual characteristics and circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic</strong> -
<div>
The “Mental Health Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on NIMH Patients and Volunteers” study was a longitudinal study launched in spring 2020 by researchers at NIMH, to investigate the effect of the emerging COVID-19 pandemic on mental health. For each participant, the study collected personal characteristics, such as demographics, psychological traits, and clinical history, together with personal circumstances at regular intervals during their enrollment in the study. In this paper, we examine the degree to which a variety of mental health outcomes over time for an individual can be predicted from personal characteristics and their changing circumstances, using regression models trained on other study participants. We find that it is possible to predict the variation of a participant’s mental health outcomes from time point to time point, for most of the outcomes we consider. This capability is dominated by information about the primary outcome measures that were collected at the time of study enrollment but can be improved by considering personal characteristics and circumstances.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/7enqw/" target="_blank">Prediction of mental well-being from individual characteristics and circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Verification Theatre at Borders and in Pockets</strong> -
<div>
To appear in: Colleen M. Flood, Y.Y. Brandon Chen, Raywat Deonandan, Sam Halabi, and Sophie Thériault (eds.) Pandemics, Public Health, and the Regulation of Borders: Lessons from COVID-19 (Routledge, forthcoming). This version: August 2023. Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic saw the creation of a wide array of digital infrastructures, underpinning both digital and paper systems, for proving attributes such as vaccination, test results or recovery. These systems were hotly debated. Yet this debate often failed to connect their social, technical and legal aspects, focussing on one area to the exclusion of the others. In this paper, I seek to bring them together. I argue that fraud-free “vaccination certificate” systems were a technical and social pipe-dream, but one that was primarily advantageous to organisations wishing to establish and own infrastructure for future ambitions as verification platforms. Furthermore, attempts to include features to ostensibly reduce fraud had, and risks further, broader knock-on effects on local digital infrastructures around the world, particularly in countries with low IT capacities easily captured by large firms and de facto excluded from and by global standardisation processes. The paper further reflects on the role of privacy in these debates, and how privacy, and more specifically confidentiality, was misconstrued as a main design aim of these systems, when the main social problems could manifest even in a system built with state of the art privacy-enhancing technologies. The COVID-19 pandemic should sharpen our senses towards the importance of infrastructures, and more broadly, how to use technologies in societies in crises.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/h24uv/" target="_blank">Verification Theatre at Borders and in Pockets</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Biosafety, Biosecurity, and Bioethics</strong> -
<div>
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of biosafety in the biomedical sciences. While it is often assumed that biosafety is purely technical matter that has little to do with philosophy or the humanities, biosafety raises important ethical issues that have not been adequately examined in the scientific or bioethics literature. This article reviews some pivotal events in the history of biosafety and biosecurity and explores three different biosafety topics that generate significant ethical concerns, i.e., risk assessment, risk management, and risk distribution. The article also discusses the role of democratic governance in the oversight of biosafety and offers some suggestions for incorporating bioethics into biosafety practice, education, and policy.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/cjf2u/" target="_blank">Biosafety, Biosecurity, and Bioethics</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>COVID-19 Lockdowns and Children’s Access to Justice: An Interrupted Time Series Analysis of Moroccan Family court filings</strong> -
<div>
The COVID-19 is a social disaster that has affected the operation of judicial systems globally. Access to justice is a vital right that ensures all other rights can be upheld. This study investigates how national lockdown affected the operation of family courts and children’s access to justice in Morocco. National lockdowns were enforced between March 21th and June 10th 2020 in response to the spread of coronavirus. The general closure of civil society was not extended to the judicial system and family courts were expected to continue operating and provide access to protection and justice. How well the court system mentioned to function under the constraints of stay-at-home orders is an open question. To investigate the impact of the national COVID-19 lockdown on family court systems and access to justice for children in Morocco this study used publicly available court filings (N= 77,335) pertaining to child abuse and neglect from 1st January 2020 to 30th December 2020 spanning the pre-lockdown, lockdown, and post-lockdown periods. Interrupted time series analysis was conducted to assess the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on court filing outcomes across different case types including penal, civil, complaints, and reports at the national, regional, and court level, controlling for time trends and regional fixed effects. National lockdowns were associated with decrease in cases filed and an increase in the percentages of cases with delays. Average case length differed by case type. Post-lockdown, case numbers recovered however there was large weekly variation likely due to rolling regional lockdowns. Evidence suggests that national lockdowns had a significant adverse impact on the judicial systems ability to provide access to justice for children.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/bf8vt/" target="_blank">COVID-19 Lockdowns and Children’s Access to Justice: An Interrupted Time Series Analysis of Moroccan Family court filings</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>From Viral Infections to Alzheimer’s Disease: Unveiling the Mechanistic Links Through Systems Bioinformatics</strong> -
<div>
Emerging evidence suggests that certain microorganisms, including viral infections, may contribute to the onset and/or progression of Alzheimer's Disease (AD), a neurodegenerative condition characterized by memory impairment and cognitive decline. However, the precise extent of their involvement and the underlying mechanisms through which specific viruses increase AD susceptibility risk remain elusive. We used an integrative systems bioinformatics approach to identity viral-mediated pathogenic mechanisms by which specific viral species, namely Herpes Simplex Virus 1 (HSV-1), Human Cytomegalovirus (HCMV), Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV), Kaposi Sarcoma-associated Herpesvirus (KSHV), Hepatitis B Virus (HBV), Hepatitis C Virus (HCV), Influenza A virus (IAV) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), could facilitate the pathogenesis of AD via virus-host protein-protein interactions (PPIs). We also sought to uncover potential synergistic pathogenic effects resulting from the reactivation of specific herpesviruses (HSV-1, HCMV and EBV) during acute SARS-CoV-2 infection, potentially increasing AD susceptibility. Our findings show that Herpesviridae Family members (HSV-1, EBV, KSHV, HCMV) impact AD-related processes like amyloid-beta formation, neuronal death, and autophagy. Hepatitis viruses (HBV, HCV) influence processes crucial for cellular homeostasis and dysfunction. Importantly, hepatitis viruses affect microglia activation via virus-host PPIs. Reactivation of HCMV during SARS-CoV-2 infection could potentially foster a lethal interplay of neurodegeneration, via synergistic pathogenic effects on AD-related processes like response to unfolded protein, regulation of autophagy, response to oxidative stress and amyloid-beta formation. Collectively, these findings underscore the complex link between viral infections and AD development. Perturbations in AD-related processes by viruses can arise from both shared and distinct mechanisms among viral species in different categories, potentially influencing variations in AD susceptibility.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.12.05.570187v1" target="_blank">From Viral Infections to Alzheimer’s Disease: Unveiling the Mechanistic Links Through Systems Bioinformatics</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>In Silico Therapeutic Intervention on Cytokine Storm in COVID-19</strong> -
<div>
The recent global COVID-19 outbreak, attributed by the World Health Organization to the rapid spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), underscores the need for an extensive exploration of virological intricacies, fundamental pathophysiology, and immune responses. This investigation is vital to unearth potential therapeutic avenues and preventive strategies. Our study delves into the intricate interaction between SARS-CoV-2 and the immune system, coupled with exploring therapeutic interventions to counteract dysfunctional immune responses like the 'cytokine storm' (CS), a driver of disease progression. Understanding these immunological dimensions informs the design of precise multiepitope-targeted peptide vaccines using advanced immunoinformatics and equips us with tools to confront the cytokine storm. Employing a control theory-based approach, we scrutinize the perturbed behavior of key proteins associated with cytokine storm during COVID-19 infection. Our findings support ACE2 activation as a potential drug target for CS control and confirm AT1R inhibition as an alternative strategy. Leveraging deep learning, we identify potential drugs to individually target ACE2 and AT1R, with Lomefloxacin and Fostamatinib emerging as standout options due to their close interaction with ACE2. Their stability within the protein-drug complex suggests superior efficacy among many drugs from our deep-learning analysis. Moreover, there is a significant scope for optimization in fine-tuning protein-drug interactions. Strong binding alone may not be the sole determining factor for potential drugs; precise adjustments are essential. The application of advanced computational power offers novel solutions, circumventing time-consuming lab work. In scenarios necessitating both ACE2 and AT1R targeting, optimal drug combinations can be derived from our analysis of drug-drug interactions, as detailed in the manuscript.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.12.05.570280v1" target="_blank">In Silico Therapeutic Intervention on Cytokine Storm in COVID-19</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>COVID-19-related conspiracy beliefs and their relationship with perceived stress and pre-existing conspiracy beliefs in a Prolific Academic sample: A replication and extension of Georgiou et al. (2020)</strong> -
<div>
The authors reanalyzed the data and conducted a close replication of a study by Georgiou et al. (2020), who found amongst 660 (reported in abstract) or 640 (reported in participant section) participants that 1) COVID-19 related conspiracy theory beliefs were strongly related to broader conspiracy theory beliefs, that 2) COVID-19 related conspiracy beliefs were higher in those with lower levels of education, and that 3) COVID-19 related conspiracy beliefs were positively (although weakly) correlated with more negative attitudes towards different individual items measuring the government’s response. Finally, Georgiou et al. (2020) found that 4) COVID-19 beliefs were unrelated to self-reported stress. Reanalyzing their data and adjusting the analytical framework, the authors only found that an average of attitudes towards the appropriateness of the government response towards the pandemic was negatively related to conspiracy beliefs in general (not just COVID-19). In the present replication and extension study, random forest analyses show that attitude towards government responses (like the original study), stress (unlike the original study), and attachment avoidance towards the partner (unlike the original study) are the most important predictors of conspiracy beliefs. However, the explained variance of the whole random forest model (3.5-7.5%) was low and model fit of the presently and widely used conspiracy belief inventories was poor. Measurement error is a likely explanation for the differences between the original and replication study and independent development-validation studies therefore need to be conducted to better measure conspiracy beliefs.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/t62s7/" target="_blank">COVID-19-related conspiracy beliefs and their relationship with perceived stress and pre-existing conspiracy beliefs in a Prolific Academic sample: A replication and extension of Georgiou et al. (2020)</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Algorithm for selecting potential SARS-CoV-2 dominant variants based on POS-NT frequency</strong> -
<div>
COVID-19, currently prevalent worldwide, is caused by a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Similar to other RNA viruses, SARS-CoV-2 continues to evolve through random mutations, creating numerous variants, such as Alpha, Beta, and Delta. It is, therefore, necessary to predict the mutations constituting the dominant variant before they are generated. This can be achieved by continuously monitoring the mutation trends and patterns. Hence, in the current study, we sought to design a dominant variant candidate (DVC) selection algorithm. To this end, we obtained COVID-19 sequence data from GISAID and extracted position-nucleotide (POS-NT) frequency ratio data by country and date through data preprocessing. We then defined the dominant dates for each variant in the USA and developed a frequency ratio prediction model for each POS-NT. Based on this model, we applied DVC criteria to develop the selection algorithm, verified for Delta and Omicron. Using Condition 3 as the DVC criterion, 69 and 102 DVC POS-NTs were identified for Delta and Omicron an average of 47 and 82 days before the dominant dates, respectively. Moreover, 13 and 44 Delta- and Omicron-defining POS-NTs were recognized 18 and 25 days before the dominant dates, respectively. We identified all DVC POS-NTs before the dominant dates, including soaring and gently increasing POS-NTs. Considering that we successfully defined all POS-NT mutations for Delta and Omicron, the DVC algorithm may represent a valuable tool for providing early predictions regarding future variants, helping improve global health.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.12.05.570216v1" target="_blank">Algorithm for selecting potential SARS-CoV-2 dominant variants based on POS-NT frequency</a>
</div></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-clinical-trials">From Clinical Trials</h1>
<ul>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Ensitrelvir for Viral Persistence and Inflammation in People Experiencing Long COVID</strong> - <b>Conditions</b>: Long COVID; Post Acute Sequelae of COVID-19; Post-Acute COVID-19 <br/><b>Interventions</b>: Drug: Ensitrelvir; Other: Placebo <br/><b>Sponsors</b>: Timothy Henrich; Shionogi Inc. <br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Low-intensity Aerobic Training Associated With Global Muscle Strengthening in Post-COVID-19</strong> - <b>Conditions</b>: COVID-19 <br/><b>Interventions</b>: Procedure: muscle strengthening <br/><b>Sponsors</b>: Centro Universitário Augusto Motta <br/><b>Completed</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Intravenous Immunoglobulin Replacement Therapy for Persistent COVID-19 in Patients With B-cell Impairment</strong> - <b>Conditions</b>: COVID-19 <br/><b>Interventions</b>: Drug: Immunoglobulins <br/><b>Sponsors</b>: Jaehoon Ko <br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Effect of Inhaled Hydroxy Gas on Long COVID Symptoms</strong> - <b>Conditions</b>: Post-Acute COVID-19 Syndrome <br/><b>Interventions</b>: Device: Hydroxy gas <br/><b>Sponsors</b>: Oxford Brookes University <br/><b>Recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Community Care Intervention to Decrease COVID-19 Vaccination Inequities</strong> - <b>Conditions</b>: COVID-19 Vaccination <br/><b>Interventions</b>: Behavioral: Community Health Worker Intervention to Enhance Vaccination Behavior (CHW-VB) <br/><b>Sponsors</b>: RAND; Clinical Directors Network; National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) <br/><b>Recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>PROmotion of COVID-19 BOOSTer VA(X)Ccination in the Emergency Department - PROBOOSTVAXED</strong> - <b>Conditions</b>: COVID-19 <br/><b>Interventions</b>: Behavioral: Vaccine Messaging; Behavioral: Vaccine Acceptance Question <br/><b>Sponsors</b>: University of California, San Francisco; National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID); Pfizer; Duke University; Baylor College of Medicine; Thomas Jefferson University <br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Evaluating a Comprehensive Multimodal Outpatient Rehabilitation Program for PASC Program to Improve Functioning of Persons Suffering From Post-COVID Syndrome: A Randomized Controlled Trial</strong> - <b>Conditions</b>: Post-Acute COVID-19; Post-Acute COVID-19 Syndrome; Post-Acute COVID-19 Infection; Long COVID; Long Covid19; Dyspnea; Orthostasis; Cognitive Impairment <br/><b>Interventions</b>: Other: Comprehensive Rehabilitation; Other: Augmented Usual Care <br/><b>Sponsors</b>: University of Pennsylvania; Medical College of Wisconsin; National Institutes of Health (NIH) <br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Stem Cell Study for Long COVID-19 Neurological Symptoms</strong> - <b>Conditions</b>: Post-Acute COVID-19 Syndrome <br/><b>Interventions</b>: Biological: Stem Cell <br/><b>Sponsors</b>: Charles Cox; CBR Systems, Inc. <br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Multilevel Intervention of COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake Among Latinos</strong> - <b>Conditions</b>: Vaccine Hesitancy <br/><b>Interventions</b>: Behavioral: Multilevel Intervention <br/><b>Sponsors</b>: San Diego State University <br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Pursuing Reduction in Fatigue After COVID-19 Via Exercise and Rehabilitation (PREFACER): A Randomized Feasibility Trial</strong> - <b>Conditions</b>: Long-COVID; Long Covid19; Post-COVID-19 Syndrome; Post-COVID Syndrome; Fatigue <br/><b>Interventions</b>: Other: COVIDEx <br/><b>Sponsors</b>: Lawson Health Research Institute; Western University <br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-pubmed">From PubMed</h1>
<ul>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Molybdenum Nanodots for Acute Lung Injury Therapy</strong> - Acute respiratory disease syndrome (ARDS) is a common critical disease with high morbidity and mortality rates, yet specific and effective treatments for it are currently lacking. ARDS was especially apparent and rampant during the COVID-19 pandemic. Excess reactive oxygen species (ROS) production and an uncontrolled inflammatory response play a critical role in the disease progression of ARDS. Herein, we developed molybdenum nanodots (MNDs) as a functional nanomaterial with ultrasmall size,…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Levocetrizine attenuates cyclophosphamide-induced lung injury through inhibition of TNF-α, IL-1β, TGF-β and MMP-9</strong> - Cyclophosphamide (CP) is an antineoplastic drug commonly used worldwide. Despite its spread, it causes fatal organ toxicity. Lung toxicity is a serious side effect of CP. Actually, in the past three years the world has been facing an un-predicted crisis following COVID-19 pandemic and the associated high-mortality rates attributed to respiratory distress. Accordingly; this study aimed to probe the potential prophylactic role of levocetrizine against CP-induced lung injury. Animals were allocated…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Peroxides Derivatives as SARS-CoV-2 Entry Inhibitors</strong> - Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the cause of the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Host cell invasion is mediated by the interaction of the viral spike protein (S) with human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) through the receptor-binding domain (RBD). In this work, bio-layer interferometry (BLI) was used to screen a series of fifty-two peroxides, including aminoperoxides and bridged 1,2,4 - trioxolanes (ozonides) classes, with the aim of…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Bile acids and bile acid activated receptors in the treatment of Covid-19</strong> - Since its first outbreak in 2020, the pandemic caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) has caused the death of almost 7 million people worldwide. Vaccines have been fundamental in disease prevention and to reduce disease severity especially in patients with comorbidities. Nevertheless, treatment of COVID-19 has been proven difficult and several approaches have failed to prevent disease onset or disease progression, particularly in patients with comorbidities….</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Antimicrobial activity of silver-copper coating against aerosols containing surrogate respiratory viruses and bacteria</strong> - The transmission of bacteria and respiratory viruses through expelled saliva microdroplets and aerosols is a significant concern for healthcare workers, further highlighted during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. To address this issue, the development of nanomaterials with antimicrobial properties for use as nanolayers in respiratory protection equipment, such as facemasks or respirators, has emerged as a potential solution. In this study, a silver and copper nanolayer called SakCu® was deposited on one…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>An ACE2 decamer viral trap as a durable intervention solution for current and future SARS-CoV</strong> - The capacity of SARS-CoV-2 to evolve poses challenges to conventional prevention and treatment options such as vaccination and monoclonal antibodies, as they rely on viral receptor binding domain (RBD) sequences from previous strains. Additionally, animal CoVs, especially those of the SARS family, are now appreciated as a constant pandemic threat. We present here a new antiviral approach featuring inhalation delivery of a recombinant viral trap composed of ten copies of angiotensin-converting…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 Variant-Specific Serum Antibody Post-Vaccination Utilizing Immortalized Human Hepatocyte-Like Cells (HLC) to Assess Development of Immunity</strong> - CONCLUSION: HLC, along with AT-2 cells, provides a useful platform to study the development of neutralizing antibodies post-vaccination. Vaccination with the 3 available vaccines all elicited neutralizing serum antibodies that inhibited binding of each of the variant spike proteins to both AT-2 and HLC cells. This study suggests that inhibition of spike binding to target cells may be a more useful technique to assess immunity than gross quantitation of antibody.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Quercetin improves and protects Calu-3 airway epithelial barrier function</strong> - Introduction: In light of the impact of airway barrier leaks in COVID-19 and the significance of vitamin D in COVID-19 outcomes, including airway barrier protection, we investigated whether the very common dietary flavonoid quercetin could also be efficacious in supporting airway barrier function. Methods: To address this question, we utilized the widely used airway epithelial cell culture model, Calu-3. Results: We observed that treating Calu-3 cell layers with quercetin increased…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Main and papain-like proteases as prospective targets for pharmacological treatment of coronavirus SARS-CoV-2</strong> - The pandemic caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 led to a global crisis in the world healthcare system. Despite some progress in the creation of antiviral vaccines and mass vaccination of the population, the number of patients continues to grow because of the spread of new SARS-CoV-2 mutations. There is an urgent need for direct-acting drugs capable of suppressing or stopping the main mechanisms of reproduction of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Several studies have shown that the successful…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Novel mechanism of the COVID-19 associated coagulopathy (CAC) and vascular thromboembolism</strong> - Previous studies from our laboratory revealed that SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (SP) administration to a genetically engineered model expressing the human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2; ACE2 receptor (i.e., hACE2 humanized mouse) mimicked the coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pathology. In humans the cause of high morbidity, and mortality is due to ‘cytokine-storm’ led thromboembolism; however, the exact mechanisms of COVID-19 associated coagulopathy (CAC) have yet to be discovered. Current…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Successful Treatment of Post COVID-19 Neurogenic Dysphagia with Botulinum Toxin</strong> - CONCLUSION: We suggest that electrophysiology is a valid tool for the diagnosis and follow-up of patients with oropharyngeal dysphagia.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Impact of an exergame intervention on cognitive-motor functions and training experience in young team sports athletes: a non-randomized controlled trial</strong> - CONCLUSION: The ExerCube training yielded positive effects on concentration, flexibility, and divided attention indicating that exergaming can be an innovative training approach for team sports athletes.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Design of SARS-CoV-2 papain-like protease inhibitor with antiviral efficacy in a mouse model</strong> - The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants and drug-resistant mutants calls for additional oral antivirals. The SARS-CoV-2 papain-like protease (PL ^(pro) ) is a promising but challenging drug target. In this study, we designed and synthesized 85 noncovalent PL ^(pro) inhibitors that bind to the newly discovered Val70 ^(Ub) site and the known BL2 groove pocket. Potent compounds inhibited PL ^(pro) with inhibitory constant K (i) values from 13.2 to 88.2 nM. The co-crystal structures of PL ^(pro) with…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Outcomes of COVID-19 amongst patients with ongoing use of inhaled corticosteroids - a systematic review &amp; meta-analysis</strong> - CONCLUSION: ICS is associated with increased mortality and risk for hospitalization in patients with COVID-19 as compared to standard non-steroid-based COVID-19 therapy. It is crucial for healthcare providers to carefully evaluate the potential risks and benefits of ICS usage in the context of COVID-19 management to optimize patient outcomes and safety.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>The relationship between the number of COVID-19 vaccines and infection with Omicron ACE2 inhibition at 18-months post initial vaccination in an adult cohort of Canadian paramedics</strong> - The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has rapidly evolved since late 2019, due to highly transmissible Omicron variants. While most Canadian paramedics have received COVID-19 vaccination, the optimal ongoing vaccination strategy is unclear. We investigated neutralizing antibody (NtAb) response against wild-type (WT) Wuhan Hu-1 and Omicron BA.4/5 lineages based on the number of doses and past SARS-CoV-2 infection, at 18 months post-initial vaccination…</p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-patent-search">From Patent Search</h1>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-down" id="daily-dose">Daily-Dose</h1>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" data-aos-anchor-placement="top-bottom" id="contents">Contents</h1>
<ul>
<li><a href="#from-new-yorker">From New Yorker</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-vox">From Vox</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-the-hindu-sports">From The Hindu: Sports</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-the-hindu-national-news">From The Hindu: National News</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-bbc-europe">From BBC: Europe</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-ars-technica">From Ars Technica</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-jokes-subreddit">From Jokes Subreddit</a></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-new-yorker">From New Yorker</h1>
<ul>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>How Hamas Used Sexual Violence on October 7th</strong> - Physicians for Human Rights Israel issued a report collecting evidence of sexual and gender-based violence. One of its authors lays out their findings. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-hamas-used-sexual-violence-on-october-7th">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>The Israel-Hamas Prisoner Swap, from the West Bank</strong> - Outside a prison where detained Palestinians were released, celebration and chaos. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-west-bank/the-israel-hamas-prisoner-swap">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Are We Sleepwalking Into Dictatorship?</strong> - Liz Cheney has not ceased ringing the alarm. She now contends that, if Trump wins back the White House in November, his election could be our last election. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/18/are-we-sleepwalking-into-dictatorship">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Looking for a Greener Way to Fly</strong> - The Treasury Department is about to announce tax credits for sustainable aviation fuel, which raises the question: What fuels are actually “sustainable”? - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/looking-for-a-greener-way-to-fly">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>In the Shadow of the Holocaust</strong> - How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust">link</a></p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-vox">From Vox</h1>
<ul>
<li><strong>In Malawi, a blueprint for recovery from climate disaster</strong> -
<figure>
<img alt="An illustration shows a deep crevasse ripped through a road (due to Cyclone Freddy). A woman stands helplessly on one side of the solid ground and a bucket of cash sits on the other side." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/QGkv6Wq4dX9Ytw3JwkdIlHQb0Xo=/240x0:1680x1080/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72954886/malawi_2.0.jpg"/>
<figcaption>
Karlotta Freier for Vox
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
Cyclone Freddy destroyed the small East African country. Targeted reparations can alleviate poverty and help communities recover. 
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="FN2WHr">
For several days in March, the record-breaking <a href="https://www.vox.com/climate/23971356/thanksgiving-2023-food-steak-olive-oil-record-heat-climate-change">Tropical Cyclone Freddy</a> poured heavy rains onto the city of Blantyre in <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/11/3/23436548/tuberculosis-tb-malawai-africa-human-challenge-trials-vaccine">Malawi</a>, a country in southeastern Africa no bigger than Pennsylvania. Freddy roared in the Indian Ocean for over a month, <a href="https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14312">longer than any other</a> recorded tropical cyclone, while also becoming the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/03/12/cyclone-freddy-records-ace-longevity/">most energetic</a> storm in the planet’s recorded history. The cyclone <a href="https://www.mlw.mw/news_and_events/rebuilding-health-care-facilities-after-the-bitter-fruits-of-tropical-cyclone-freddy/">displaced</a> over half a million and killed more than 1,400 people across Malawi, making it one of the deadliest in Africa’s history.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ea6hEC">
Christina Mphepo, a 42-year-old mother living in an affected neighborhood at the foot of Mount Soche in southern Malawi, barely got out alive on March 13 when a mudslide unleashed a river of sludge and boulders into the village. The day of the landslide, Mphepo was washing clothes when she heard the rumble above — and then the shouting. After realizing she couldn’t make it to her house in time, she ran to shelter in a nearby home. Soon, a landslide struck, crumbling the house with mud and stones. Seven women died from the impact of the slide as Mphehpo narrowly escaped with her life. When she fled to another house, a giant rock killed the man who had helped her.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="TX3Nc8">
“I escaped death twice,” she said in Chichewa through a translator. She frantically scurried uphill to avoid another rainstorm hurtling the neighborhood’s way. “I thought the world was ending.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="zStpU1">
Mphepo told me she’s still struggling, nine months after the disaster. Every day, she climbs up the steep mountain behind the village to illegally cut down trees to sell firewood, risking a beating or a fine from authorities if she’s caught. “When I’m chased off the mountain, that means my family cannot eat or my kids cannot go to school that day,” said Mphepo, whose attire was donated to her after the storm, including a pink patterned scarf she wore on her head. “This is how I survive.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="P5c621">
Ironically, deforestation caused in part by such illegal tree clearing had worsened the mudslide. The loss of tree roots eroded the soil, weakening its ability to retain water. This is a dilemma nations across the Global South face: To make a living, or simply survive, people cut down trees, but doing so makes their communities more vulnerable to the extreme weather events that climate change is intensifying.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="qdeEoE">
Malawi loses an estimated 33,000 hectares of forest a year — that’s enough to cover over 61,000 American football fields. This loss is, in part, due to people like Mphepo who cut down trees to sell: 97 percent of the population relies on biomass — mainly wood — for cooking and heating. There are stands everywhere in Blantyre selling firewood or the charcoal locals convert it into when they bury it underground with leaves and a soft fire.
</p>
<div class="c-float-right">
<aside id="9EOOZF">
<q>“When I’m chased off the mountain, that means my family cannot eat or my kids cannot go to school that day. This is how I survive.” </q>
</aside>
</div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="oQmeuC">
The 28th annual <a href="https://www.vox.com/2023/11/27/23959446/cop28-united-nations-climate-crisis">UN climate negotiations</a> (COP28) are wrapping up this week, and after decades of agonizing inaction, policymakers have finally passed a possible solution to this dilemma: a bucket of money wealthy countries pay into that lower-income countries can pull from when they need financial assistance after or in preparation for climate-fueled disasters. Formally known as <a href="https://www.vox.com/climate/2023/11/27/23970847/climate-change-glossary-net-zero-carbon-capture-finance-cop28">loss and damage</a>, this fund will act as an insurance policy of sorts to keep countries from going broke amid the rising cost of emergencies.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="PiAmKG">
The justice of such a fund isn’t hard to see. After all, it is chiefly developed nations like the US and UK that have heated the planet with their industrialization — not developing countries like Malawi, where only 11 percent of the general population has access to electricity.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="sct7lM">
This $656 million fund could offer a lifeline to communities like Blantyre that urgently need resources to rebuild homes, restore forests and farm soil, or even relocate entirely in the face of climate disasters. And access to such money could help prevent the worst of those catastrophes by addressing deforestation’s true root cause in Malawi: poverty.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="MqOqWE">
If officials were to use the funds to build programs that financially reward restoring forests or leaving them alone, communities could find a new source of income and develop stronger protections from future storms. Plus, everyone wins when soils and flora are healthy enough to store some of the carbon dioxide that’s driving climate change in the first place.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="89dXU5">
“Loss and damage has to look at how livelihoods and the welfare of the people have been affected,” said Sosten Chiotha, regional program director for Leadership for Environment and Development Southern and Eastern Africa, a Malawi-based community-focused research organization. “In the long term, you have to look at the infrastructure that has been damaged: the roads, the hospitals, the schools.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="j4yyhe">
At COP28, world leaders agreed to house the fund in the World Bank, which will have four years to meet its mandate of assisting countries in need. However, the World Bank wasn’t the first choice for vulnerable nations that worry the bank will charge hefty fees for its hosting duties or struggle to issue funds directly.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="pphGKW">
The process to formalize the fund has been long and tense, but many negotiators representing developing nations have been fighting to ensure their constituents will have easy access to money when a crisis unfolds, as well as to plan for disasters that happen over time such as erosion due to sea level rise or desertification. Whether countries prioritize locally led adaptation will determine how much families on the ground feel the fund’s impact, explained Nisha Krishnan, the Africa climate director for the World Resources Institute, a global nonprofit that studies climate and energy.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="zU5US2">
“How are communities included in this?” she said. “There is evidence also showing that the more communities are included and empowered, the longer you have more sustainable impact and outcomes for whatever intervention you do.”
</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="A town on the lower slope of a green mountain." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/t7_-9CBZYCNnPSIcSV5SvAEs6qU=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25153117/1252309055.jpg"/> <cite>Joseph Mizere/Xinhua via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>
A residential area hit by a mudslide during Tropical Cyclone Freddy in Blantyre, Malawi. Cyclone Freddy hit the southern part of Malawi starting from March 12, affecting 14 districts where floods and mudslides left more than 1,200 deaths (679 confirmed deaths and 537 people missing and presumed dead) and 2,178 injuries.
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="pRZCxN">
These concerns are why the policy- and research-focused International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) has advocated for the fund to use grants that can quickly reach local grassroots groups rather than dollars that trickle down slowly from government or institutions that decide where they go. The World Bank is now challenged with exploring how to make something like this possible.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="jEhaaQ">
“We want to make sure it’s effective and fit for purpose and does not just replicate business-as-usual models of finance,” said Nora Nisi, a climate change researcher with IIED who co-authored a May 2023 <a href="https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/s41559-023-02088-8.pdf">paper</a> arguing that loss and damage should cover biodiversity loss, such as deforestation.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="pbRYBR">
For her part, Mphepo welcomes financial assistance from the countries that created climate change, but she doesn’t want to see world leaders build a fund that only sends money to government officials. Last year, Malawi’s vice president was arrested for allegedly taking private money and gifts. In 2013, Malawi President Joyce Banda was forced to fire her entire cabinet in the aftermath of a corruption scandal that involved officials stealing an estimated $100 million to buy cars and estates.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="FXrCUy">
“I don’t trust the government,” Mphepo said. “The money will come, but it won’t reach us.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="N0DJkJ">
She’d much rather see help go directly to community groups based in Blantyre — like the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100091874637622">Better World Charitable Organization</a> run by Tamara Nyahoda. Nyahoda has been helping women like Mphepo set up small farming businesses with donations she receives from friends, contacts, or even her own wallet. That way, they can stop cutting down trees to sell for firewood or charcoal. Nyahoda has lived in the community for 20 years. Her work in emergency response kicked off after learning how to offer mental health resources, something her neighbors need more of in light of Cyclone Freddy. The amount of money her organization handles is pennies compared to the potential millions of a loss and damage fund, but survivors feel the benefits immediately.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="b9SSPA">
Money can’t solve everything, but it can do a lot. A loss and damage fund may help Mphepo and her children move somewhere new. She doesn’t feel safe anymore in her neighborhood, which remains covered in monstrous boulders and the skeletons of former homes. Brown and gray grime splotch the walls of houses still standing. What’s most glaring is the landslide’s scar. It cuts through the middle of Soche and, in some areas, runs several feet deep. Inside, foundations are still protruding from the dirt, as are isolated tree roots left abandoned by their trunks.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="yR5zxH">
Climate change is <a href="https://news.sciencebrief.org/cyclones-mar2021/">increasing the intensity</a> of extreme storms. And Mphepo knows it’s only a matter of time until the rains explode the mountain into a deadly mix of mud and rocks again.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="orNVlH">
“With climate change, I know this place is risky,” she said. “A long time ago, it wasn’t like this. I wish the government could move us somewhere safer.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="kJ0KuR">
<em>Funding for travel expenses was provided by the Meliore Foundation.</em>
</p></li>
<li><strong>The return of liberal Zionism?</strong> -
<figure>
<img alt="The Israeli flag — a blue Star of David on a white ground — is surrounded by grainy noise and abstracted protest signs." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/HBp15KUc0j90Yf5CVE5lW3CzXv0=/240x0:1680x1080/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72954802/LiberalZionism_Vox.0.png"/>
<figcaption>
Paige Vickers/Vox; Getty images
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
For many Jews, the October 7 attacks discredited both the Zionist right and the anti-Zionist left — paving the way for the resurrection of a seemingly dead political tradition.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="FDRxKi">
The massacre by <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/10/10/23911661/hamas-israel-war-gaza-palestine-explainer">Hamas</a> on October 7 and subsequent war in <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/11/20/18080046/gaza-palestine-israel">Gaza</a> has created the conditions for something surprising: a resurrection of the liberal Zionist political tradition.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="0A67lK">
Liberal Zionism is the insistence that there is no necessary contradiction between <a href="https://www.vox.com/israel">Israel</a>’s dual identity as a Jewish and democratic state: that Israel can be a national home and refuge for the Jewish people while also embodying universal democratic principles of human rights and equality. Threading this needle, for liberal Zionists, means Israel must adopt a more liberal set of <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy">policies</a> — most importantly, a two-state peace agreement with the <a href="https://www.vox.com/palestine">Palestinians</a> that allows both peoples to live with security and dignity.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="1GL2Qu">
Prior to October 7, liberal Zionism appeared defeated: broken by the failure of the 1990s peace process and subsequent collapse of the left-wing Israeli parties that stood for its ideals. And on its face, this moment seems like a poor time for a revival.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="2JYwVG">
Israel’s conduct during the war has been <a href="https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/">nothing short of horrific</a>: slaughtering <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-strikes-on-gaza-homes-killed-mostly-civilians-report-says/">entire families in Gaza</a>, enabling <a href="https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2023/11/9/23945651/west-bank-israeli-settler-palestine-gaza-war-violence">mass settler violence</a> in the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/11/20/18080034/west-bank-israel-palestinians">West Bank</a>, and <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/11/1/23941810/israel-crackdown-dissent-war-critics">cracking down on anti-war dissent at home</a>. Israel’s most strident defenders see no problem with its actions, placing the blame for <a href="https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1713587855560155524">all civilian deaths on Hamas</a>. The Jewish state’s harshest critics, by contrast, see these abuses as an expression of what Israel always was: a racist colonial enterprise that must be abolished “from the river to the sea.”
</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/KlarajOrwQ9QroBT-HLKvci_5L4=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25132452/AP23338344978127.jpg"/> <cite>Hatem Ali/AP Photo</cite>
<figcaption>
Palestinians look at the destruction by the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip in Rafah on December 4, 2023.
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="TwtC2E">
The world seems more neatly polarized than ever into pro- and anti-Israel camps. The term “liberal Zionist” is scarcely used even by those who believe in its ideals; it is more commonly deployed as a leftist slur against more Israel-sympathetic progressives.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="N4j3Hx">
But it’s precisely this polarization that has helped produce a quiet revival of liberal Zionist thinking in the Jewish world.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="9fUBXJ">
For this group, the October 7 attacks are proof positive that Jews need a strong and robust state of their own. Antisemitic groups like Hamas will stop at nothing to murder Jews, even babies and peace activists, and only a government of our own can protect us. The inability of large swaths of the global left to recognize this has profoundly alienated some Jews, in Israel and elsewhere, from some erstwhile anti-Zionist allies.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="cniyUO">
But these liberal-minded Jews have not flown to the Zionist right. Many are horrified by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)’s conduct during the war. They also blame Prime Minister <a href="https://www.vox.com/23910085/netanyahu-israel-right-hamas-gaza-war-history">Benjamin Netanyahu</a>’s illiberal Zionist government for the attack, citing policies like pulling troops away from Gaza to help colonize the West Bank and cynically strengthening Hamas to keep Palestinians divided and prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="wuepLl">
I have heard these broad liberal Zionist attitudes expressed again and again by public intellectuals and private acquaintances around the Jewish world. Post-October 7 polling of the Israeli public has shown that, at least so far, the war has not caused a lurch to the right. Rather, there’s been a clear move to the center — and even some cautious signs that liberal Zionism could make a political comeback down the line.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="2mDZ6m">
I don’t know if I would define myself as a liberal Zionist. To me, identifying as a “Zionist” of any kind feels antiquated, a 20th-century hangover pounding inside 21st-century Jewish heads. Israel today is not an aspiration but a reality: The question is not whether one supports the notion of a Jewish state, but how we should think about <em>this</em> Jewish state.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="nR74e0">
But the war has shown there’s a lot of value in the liberal Zionist tradition. Its heirs have offered a better accounting of October 7 and its bloody consequences than their rivals on either the left or the right. This intellectual success may be laying the groundwork for a liberal Zionist political revival — one of the only ways out of this increasingly bloody and terrible conflict.
</p>
<h3 id="bqrixE">
The deep roots of liberal Zionism
</h3>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang">
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/rScgiqQ_OXC1xpyz515IGrv9XKc=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25125760/GettyImages_82091882.jpg"/> <cite>Imagno/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>
Theodor Herzl at the balcony of the hotel in Basel overlooking the Rhine River, Switzerland, 1897.
</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="KwXMQL">
In 1902, the Austrian Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl — widely seen as the founding father of the Zionist movement — published a novel titled <em>Altneuland </em>(<em>Old-New Land</em>). The book laid out, in some detail, his idealized vision for what a Jewish state would look like.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="I2qVaJ">
In Herzl’s utopia, there’s universal suffrage for all residents of the land — including Arabs. One of the book’s more sympathetic characters is an Arab chemist named Reschid Bey; the leading villain is a Jewish supremacist named Dr. Geyer, who is running for political office on a platform of stripping Arabs and other minorities of rights. Geyer is ultimately defeated — so humiliated by his liberal rivals that he emigrates in shame.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="nWY7fT">
Herzl modeled the Geyer character on Dr. Karl Lueger, a vicious antisemite who became mayor of Vienna at the end of the 19th century. Some of the Geyer faction’s anti-Arab rants are, per<a href="https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/213/rereading-herzls-old-new-land/"> Israeli philosopher Shlomo Avineri</a>, virtual copy-pastes of Lueger’s antisemitic tirades with the nouns changed. Herzl foresaw that a Jewish state could contain the seeds of bigotry toward non-Jewish residents, and he urged the young Zionist movement to resist: to avoid engaging in the kind of bigotry against Arabs that Europeans had long engaged in toward Jews.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Tgfm8e">
“The message of the Geyer episode in <em>Old-New Land </em>is plain and powerful: what failed in Europe — liberalism and equal rights — will triumph in Zion,” Avineri writes in<a href="https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/213/rereading-herzls-old-new-land/"> <em>The Jewish Review of Books</em></a>.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="cYUSuk">
This message is the essence of the liberal Zionist ideal: that a Jewish state is not a divergence from ideals of universal human rights and equality, but an expression of them. Jews deserve a state because we are equal to other peoples who have their own nations — no better and no worse. Once entrusted with a state, Jews are obligated to abide by the same principles that bind every other nation: universal moral rules derived from ideals of human rights, democracy, and equality.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Sqt6PX">
Over time, this liberal vision of Zionism emerged less as a distinct political grouping — the two leading pre-state Zionist factions were socialist and conservative-nationalist, respectively — than as a current running through the entire movement. Liberal ideas were partially and to varying degrees influential on different figures across the Zionist political spectrum; the question was how influential liberalism would prove to be once Zionism willed its dream of a Jewish state into existence.
</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/CA1Sq7CWvJg92eh63G7HAQrTz2k=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25127078/GettyImages_53051673.jpg"/> <cite>Zoltan Kluger/GPO via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>
David Ben Gurion, who was to become Israel’s first prime minister, reads the Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948, at the museum in Tel Aviv, during the ceremony founding the State of Israel.
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h3 id="mgLeWx">
The rise and fall of liberal Zionism in Israel
</h3>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="H77nZ0">
Israel declared in-principle allegiance to liberal ideals from the get-go. Its Declaration of Independence announced that the new state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of <a href="https://www.vox.com/religion">religion</a>, race or sex.” Since then, Israel has consistently held free elections amid robust and contentious public debate. International databases on democracy have regularly concluded that Israel clears the bar.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="SJrcur">
But while Israel may have long been a high-quality democracy for the Jewish majority, Arabs experienced the state very differently.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="i4p1nX">
During the 1948 War of Independence, Jewish militias engaged in widespread violence that forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes — an event Palestinians call <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGVgjS98OsU">the Nakba</a>, literally “the Catastrophe.” Those Palestinians who remained in Israel were given Israeli citizenship, but also put under a separate-and-unequal military regime until 1966. The year after this military rule ended, Israel took control of an even larger Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank, imposing a new military regime over an Arab population that, this time, was denied Israeli citizenship rights.
</p>
<div class="c-float-left">
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/kp_h4q9olBjlfyZvpODz206L9I8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25125661/GettyImages_461748197.jpg"/> <cite>Alberto Roveri/Mondadori via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>
Yeshayahu Leibowitz in his home studio, 1985.
</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="cNG5Z1">
The occupation, as this regime is now known, quickly emerged as the central challenge for liberal Zionists. In 1968, the Orthodox philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz — known for pioneering arguments<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibowitz-yeshayahu/#RelStaIsr"> in favor of the separation of synagogue and state</a> — warned that continued Jewish control over the territories would “effect the liquidation of the state of Israel [and] bring about a catastrophe for the Jewish people as a whole.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="P1sm94">
Specifically, he predicted, ruling over “a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners” would require Israel “to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other.” Controlling such a population would require the creation of a “secret-police state, with all that implies for education, free speech, and democratic institutions.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="lFu993">
Preventing this dystopia would, by the end of the 20th century, emerge as the central task of liberal Zionism. Its adherents proposed the creation of a Palestinian state for the sake of Palestinians, who deserved to live in freedom and dignity, but also for Israelis, who would not be able to maintain both democracy and the Occupation simultaneously.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="6piNbU">
In this, liberal Zionism failed.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="qB3HsR">
This was not for lack of effort: In the 1990s, the spirit of liberal Zionism pervaded Israeli politics. The government passed two major new Basic Laws (the Israeli equivalent of constitutional amendments), historic protections for human rights that Supreme Court Justice Aharon Barak famously termed a “constitutional revolution.” Around the same time, Israel reached two agreements with the Palestinians — called the Oslo Accords — that created the Palestinian Authority as an interim step toward a full Palestinian state.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Xz6EuN">
But the peace process collapsed into violence, making the 2000s a decade of nearly continuous war with Palestinians. Liberal Zionism was a casualty of these conflicts.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="IM8SHJ">
The decade of violence shattered Israeli Jews’ faith in the left-wing parties that embodied liberal Zionist ideals, leading Jewish voters to shift dramatically rightward. In 2014, the New York Times published an essay declaring “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/23/opinion/sunday/israels-move-to-the-right-challenges-diaspora-jews.html?_r=0">the end of liberal Zionism</a>.” In 2020, leading American Jewish intellectual Peter Beinart<a href="https://jewishcurrents.org/yavne-a-jewish-case-for-equality-in-israel-palestine"> declared that</a> “the project to which liberal Zionists like myself have devoted ourselves for decades — a state for Palestinians separated from a state for Jews — has failed.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="5bB69P">
Today, an increasingly extreme Benjamin Netanyahu has been prime minister of Israel for 13 out of the last 14 years. In the November 2022 election that returned him to power after his single year out, the center-left Labor party won four seats in Parliament — out of a total of 120. The far-right Religious Zionism slate, whose leaders<a href="https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-744547"> openly endorse apartheid in the West Bank</a>, won 14.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="CzyALH">
By the time Netanyahu returned to the premiership on December 29, Leibowitz’s predictions had come true. Israel had engaged in endless bloody wars with Hamas in Gaza, transformed the Palestinian Authority into a collaborationist entity, ushered fascists into its cabinet, enacted the so-called “nation-state” Basic Law <a href="https://www.adalah.org/uploads/uploads/Final_2_pager_on_the_JNSL_27.11.2018%20.pdf">discriminating against non-Jewish citizens</a>, and<a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/2/27/21075868/israeli-democracy-war-netanyahu"> even attacked its vaunted democratic institutions</a>. The philosopher’s warning — that “the corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the state of Israel” if it maintained control over the Palestinian territories — had proven to be prophecy.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ftHjsn">
It appeared to many that the liberal Zionist dream of reconciling Zionism with equality was impossible: that there would need to be a choice between Zionism and equality. Those who insisted otherwise in the Jewish community appeared increasingly out of touch — living in a fantasy world where the 1990s never ended.
</p>
<h3 id="CVxHhL">
October 7 and the Jewish left’s return to Zionism
</h3>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Hlqs5B">
The events of 2023 suggest that the obituaries for liberal Zionism offered by its enemies on both the right and the left may have been premature.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="SZ07Gv">
The new Netanyahu government’s first major initiative, a radical revamping of Israel’s judiciary designed to bring it under political control, met with unprecedented resistance from the Israeli population. Protests against the overhaul became easily the largest social movement in the country’s history. For months, protesters took to the streets of Israeli towns and cities, chanting for one thing: “de-mo-cracy!” They succeeded in blocking the vast bulk of the original court overhaul package (at least for now).
</p>
<div class="c-wide-block">
<div class="c-image-grid">
<div class="c-image-grid__item">
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/qmTlkpTKcv6qjcJzxHJ4xRP7wVw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25125869/GettyImages_1249595461.jpg"/> <cite>Saeed Qaq/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>
Thousands of Israelis gather outside the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem on March 27, 2023, during a demonstration against the controversial judicial reforms.
</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<div class="c-image-grid__item">
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/p8c2Wo8ipodT19cqtw4a1lkGWII=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25125868/GettyImages_1249638929.jpg"/> <cite>Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>
Police clash with an Israeli demonstrator outside the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, in Jerusalem on March 27, 2023.
</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="41r1Sc">
The demonstrations only stopped when Israel suffered the worst tragedy in its history: Hamas’s massacre in southern Israel on October 7.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="tzpcZR">
Describing that day’s events as shattering for Israelis would vastly understate the case. Killing <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/11/11/1212458974/israel-revises-death-toll-hamas-attacks-oct-7">around 1,200 people and taking another 240</a> hostage, Hamas had perpetrated the worst killing of Jews since the Holocaust. In Israel, a country with a total population of less than 10 million, nearly everyone was directly affected by the attack or knew someone who was; so did many in the Jewish diaspora (the bulk of whom live in the United States).
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="j5tfWD">
In his comments on the tragedy, <a href="https://www.vox.com/joe-biden">President Joe Biden</a> memorably <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/10/18/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-october-7th-terrorist-attacks-and-the-resilience-of-the-state-of-israel-and-its-people-tel-aviv-israel/">compared</a> the Hamas attack to “fifteen 9/11s.” This is true not just in population-adjusted casualty terms, but also in the way that it has changed Israelis’ sense of their own political circumstances.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="v1kXSm">
“Our lives here, as Israelis, will never be the same after October 7,”<a href="https://www.972mag.com/october-war-israelis-palestinians-historic/"> writes Haggai Matar</a>, the executive director of the left-wing Israeli magazine +972.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="py1OlQ">
At this vulnerable moment, many Jews in both Israel and the diaspora who had become alienated from Zionism began rediscovering some of its virtues. In the left-liberal Jewish intellectual world, there has been a kind of quiet return to Zionism — one that has blossomed for at least two reasons.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="SnGW5l">
The first was the nature of the Hamas attack itself, which in its sheer brutality led to a renewed appreciation of the reason for having a Jewish state in the first place.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="MsioTi">
“Almost a year we’ve been fighting for our democracy. Now, in the last 10 days, many, many people feel that we’re in a fight for our existence,” Stav Shaffir, a former member of Israel’s Parliament from the center-left Labor party, told me in an October 17 interview.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="YbBO3g">
Even some on the radical left, like Matar, began playing up essential Zionist ideas about Jewish self-determination and protection in a way they didn’t beforehand. He writes:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="i1a5RX">
The new reality will require some realignments. Alongside our commitment to the full realization of all Palestinians’ rights, our progressive, anti-apartheid movement will have to be explicit about the collective rights of Jews in this land, and to ensure that their security is guaranteed in whatever solution is found. We will have to contend with Hamas and its place in this new reality, ensuring it can no longer commit such attacks on Israelis, just as we insist on the security of Palestinians and their protection from Israeli military and settler aggression. Without this, it will be impossible to move forward.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ggItnP">
But it wasn’t just the attack itself that brought Jews back to Zionism. It was the indifferent, at times even supportive, response to the massacre from elements of the international left.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="COVeag">
Hamas didn’t only slaughter innocents in their homes. They deliberately did so on territory that was one of the remaining redoubts of the embattled Israeli left. These border communities disproportionately drew Israelis who believed in coexistence with Palestinians and wanted to reach across the Gaza border to find common ground. Victims included <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-16/ty-article/.premium/thousands-attend-funeral-of-slain-canadian-israeli-peace-activist-vivian-silver/0000018b-d9cd-d423-affb-fbef6e360000">people like Vivian Silver</a>, the founder of Women Wage Peace, an organization that describes itself as “the largest grassroots peace movement in Israel today.”
</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/DhNUtsn8D0-o2y28Tc5JDKQ9qOg=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25127096/GettyImages_1796587874.jpg"/> <cite>Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>
Members of Women Wage Peace sing together while grieving for peace activist Vivian Silver, 74, who was killed during the October 7 Hamas attack on kibbutz Be’eri, during a memorial service on November 16, 2023, in Tel Gezer, Israel.
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="dJJ4yo">
For a lot of people on the Jewish left, this attack was deeply personal. Their friends, family, and comrades had just been murdered — and the response from those abroad they saw as allies was, <a href="https://www.vox.com/world-politics/23911550/israel-hamas-war-gaza-palestine-leftist-democrats">all too often</a>, ruthless support for “decolonization” or a kind of “anti-anti-Hamas’’ response that treated condemnation of Palestinian “resistance” as somehow inappropriate. They felt, as Haaretz news editor Linda Dayan puts it, “<a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/haaretz-today/2023-11-09/ty-article/.highlight/in-war-israeli-leftists-find-themselves-truly-alone/0000018b-b52b-d3c1-a39b-bfeb9d690000">truly alone</a>.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="B5qbj4">
“In Hebrew, I rage against the abusive treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank, the police’s clampdown on dissent, the calls to return to the Gaza settlements,” Dayan writes. “But the overseas messaging leaves little room for this nuance. Instead, I find myself hawkishly telling my foreign peers that the terror group next door cannot continue its reign, and that a cease-fire that does not mandate an end to Hamas and a return of the hostages is tacit approval for an October 7 redux.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="chcUf9">
She is not alone in this feeling. In mid-November, an<a href="https://ranheilbrunn.online/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Statement-on-Behalf-of-Israel-based-Progressives-and-Peace-Activists-Regarding-Debates-over-Recent-Events-in-Our-Region-9.pdf"> open letter signed by over 100 prominent Israeli leftists and liberals</a> — including two former leaders of the left-wing Meretz party and prominent intellectuals like Etgar Keret, David Grossman, and Yuval Noah Harari — condemned both the level of violence employed by the IDF against Palestinians and the callousness of many on the global left.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="B2zhVO">
“Me and many other Israelis were not invested in the concept of Zionism — it is not something that we would defend — until now,” Ran Heilbrunn, a German Israeli writer who organized the letter, tells me.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="9wlexs">
The sense of loneliness and attendant return to Zionism was, if anything, even more pronounced in the diaspora.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Rlnu7z">
Jews living abroad are always tiny minorities in our home countries and, for this reason, tend to be politically progressive. In the pre-liberal era, we were routinely slaughtered and persecuted. Today, most of us see values like tolerance and equality as not just ideals but cornerstones of our very survival.
</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang">
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Dc13vMS_mvTNHHRHXtU-c1D-9Pw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25130653/GettyImages_1813748745.jpg"/> <cite>Michael Nigro/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>
Pro-Israel supporters stage a pop-up exhibit in New York honoring the hostages held by Hamas during an action demanding the return of all those still being held hostage, on November 29, 2023.
</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="58eiDq">
When people who claimed to stand for those values <a href="https://www.vox.com/world-politics/23911550/israel-hamas-war-gaza-palestine-leftist-democrats">seemed to abandon them</a> in their response to Hamas’s attack, something in the diaspora Jewish psychology snapped. Scenes like those at an October 8 rally in Times Square promoted by the local Democratic Socialists of America, in which speakers <a href="https://news.yahoo.com/socialist-rally-in-times-square-praising-hamas-terror-attack-draws-widespread-condemnation-204123785.html">praised Hamas’s assault and mocked the Israeli dead</a>, created a profound sense of fear and alienation.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="il6yc9">
The New York Times described the community as “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/20/us/politics/progressive-jews-united-states.html">reaching a breaking point</a>” after discovering “that many of their ideological allies not only failed to perceive the same threats [to Jews] but also saw them as oppressors deserving of blame.” My own experiences suggest something similar.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="CNqhUB">
As I’m someone who writes about Israel and global politics professionally, my friends have turned to me during the current fighting to share their fears, worries, and anxieties. Among Jewish progressives, these conversations almost always come back to the way that their allies on the left have downplayed or even justified Hamas’s conduct.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="IPd0bi">
“The explosion of anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence occasioned by the war in Gaza — the stabbing of a Jewish woman in France, the shootings of Jewish day schools in Montreal, the killing of a Jewish protester near Los Angeles — has forced me to reckon with how often anti-Zionism and antisemitism are intertwined. Abhorrence of the Jewish state slips easily into abhorrence of Jews,” writes Michelle Goldberg,<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/20/opinion/adl-elon-musk-antisemitism.html"> a left-wing columnist at the New York Times</a>.
</p>
<h3 id="f2CiBV">
The Gaza war and the flight from the right
</h3>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="7ErHFX">
In theory, this return to Zionism could have led to<a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/the-day-the-delusions-died-konstantin-kisin"> a rightward shift</a> among Israeli and diaspora liberals: a sense that Palestinians were incapable of making peace, that the only language they understood was force. Historically, this has tended to be the case: Political scientists have <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/27638530">repeatedly</a> <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/43654394">documented</a> a direct link between terror attacks inside Israel and increased support for right-wing parties.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="0Q47ND">
But by and large, this hasn’t happened. Jews in Israel and abroad did not suddenly become more approving of<a href="https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2023/11/9/23945651/west-bank-israeli-settler-palestine-gaza-war-violence"> continued colonization of the West Bank</a>. Quite the opposite: What we’ve seen in the last month looks like a turn away from the right, not toward it. While there is not yet a full-blown liberal Zionist resurgence in the polls, the dissatisfaction with Netanyahu and his allies has created an opening for its political revival in a postwar reality.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="BOHWrD">
This is true even though international coverage of the war has been dominated by horrific images of Israeli slaughter of Palestinian civilians, its cutoff of water and electricity, and a series of inflammatory statements by the current Israeli leadership. When <a href="https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-live-updates-12-09-2023-e06fcf11a1e2fb864909418eab127116">nearly 18,000 Palestinians are dead</a>, killed by a government where sitting parliamentarians have called for a second Nakba and the use of nuclear weapons on Gazans, can speaking of a move away from the anti-Palestinian extreme be anything but a grotesque evasion of reality?
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="HQmw5X">
But the Israeli people are not the same as the Israeli government, and the politics of the present are not necessarily the politics of the future. Nearly every available metric shows Netanyahu and his far-right allies hemorrhaging support after the war — possibly portending a postwar realignment where the Israeli public reverses the country’s 20-plus years of right-wing political drift.
</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0vqj3rIRqipLoCAUJ4N9-AH04hM=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25130380/GettyImages_1249635150.jpg"/> <cite>Umbrella Movement of Resistance/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>
Thousands of Israelis gather outside the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem on March 27, 2023, during a demonstration against the controversial judicial reforms.
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="nwVJMY">
One<a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-finds-netanyahu-would-be-pummeled-by-gantz-were-elections-held-today/"> mid-November poll</a> of Israelis found that, were elections held tomorrow, Netanyahu’s pre-war coalition would decline from 64 seats in the Knesset to just 45 (out of a total of 120). The collapse is concentrated among Netanyahu’s Likud and the far-right Religious Zionist party, the latter of which (per another November poll) would <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/election-poll-shows-gantz-at-43-seats-netanyahus-likud-at-18-smotrich-out/">lose every seat it currently holds</a>. The opposition parties, by contrast, would surge to 79.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="usn8KZ">
These numbers reflect deep discontent with the political status quo. An Israel Democracy Institute poll found trust in the government hitting<a href="https://en.idi.org.il/articles/51147"> the lowest point in its history of gathering data on the topic</a>; a survey from Bar-Ilan University found that less than<a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-14/ty-article/.premium/as-war-rages-israelis-trust-in-netanyahu-hits-rock-bottom-polls-find/0000018b-cd86-dd11-a19f-edf6f2b00000"> 4 percent of Jewish Israelis</a> see Netanyahu as a reliable source of information on the war. A December poll found that <a href="https://themessenger.com/news/israel-benjamin-netanyahu-poll-prime-minister-resign-war-gaza-hamas">72 percent of Israelis want him to resign</a>.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="8Tq56j">
Of course, a turn against Netanyahu does not necessarily mean a turn toward liberalism.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="MwGGxJ">
Polling shows that Israeli Jews <a href="https://en.idi.org.il/articles/51431">largely approve of</a> the IDF’s performance during the war in Gaza. It also finds <a href="https://social-sciences.tau.ac.il/sites/socsci.tau.ac.il/files/media_server/social/2023/Findings-November-2023-EN.pdf">waning support for two-state negotiations</a>, seemingly reflecting despair that any such agreement could be reached during wartime. At present, the primary beneficiary of Netanyahu’s poll collapse is the National Unity party led by former Gen. Benny Gantz — a center-right faction that joined Netanyahu’s government after October 7 on an emergency wartime basis. That means that one of the leaders who has presided over the brutalization of Gaza is also the man most likely to be Israel’s next prime minister.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="FcD3dL">
But a Gantz-led government, while hardly left-wing, would be a significant improvement, from a liberal Zionist point of view. Gantz is a staunch opponent of Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul and hostile to the extreme right that Netanyahu has embraced. Moreover, his most plausible coalition partners would come from centrist and left-wing parties, pushing the political center of gravity well to the left of where it is now. Policy toward the Palestinians would likely change accordingly.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="dLZ7BQ">
“Gantz is no dove, but he’s very different from Netanyahu in terms of the Palestinian Authority and the West Bank,” says Natan Sachs, the director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="zFMFGy">
So while Gantz’s rise is not a sign that the Israeli public has returned to liberal Zionism overnight, it is clear evidence of a break with the far right that seemed ascendant prior to the war. While previous terrorist attacks pushed Israelis to the right, the worst such attack in the country’s history seems to be pushing them back to the center.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="0w7sR4">
The truth is that most Israelis are neither solidly on the ideological right nor the ideological left when it comes to the conflict. The majority — which Yehuda Shaul, president of the Israeli Center for Public Affairs, has termed “the control camp” — just wants to be able to live their lives in safety and in confidence that their government can handle whatever threats there are to Israeli lives.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="uxqB6b">
After the failure of the peace process, most of these voters felt like the right could do a better job at providing the control they crave. Indeed, Netanyahu leaned so much into this identity that he was called “Mr. Security.” In reality, his governments often subordinated Israeli security to right-wing ideology — taking actions that actually increased the risk of a <a href="https://www.vox.com/terrorism">terrorist attack</a> as part of the crusade to colonize the West Bank.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="NMC12a">
These actions included <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html">propping up Hamas’s rule in Gaza</a> by facilitating payments to Hamas from Qatar, a stratagem designed to keep Palestinians divided and negotiations unthinkable. They included shifting military resources to protect West Bank settlements: On October 7, 32 IDF battalions were deployed to protect settlements, while<a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/11/10/israel-peace-movement-politics-war-activism-ceasefire/"> just two were placed on the Gaza border</a>. They included the judicial overhaul, a policy designed partly to end court interference with settlement expansion — and one that Israel’s intelligence and military leaders<a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-21/ty-article/.premium/israeli-army-warned-netanyahu-iran-hezbollah-hamas-see-opportunity-for-perfect-storm/0000018b-f18c-d36e-a3cb-f1dfa34d0000"> repeatedly warned</a> was making Israel seem divided, weak, and vulnerable to its enemies.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="IykISz">
All of this and more has been noted by the Israeli public. In the wake of the attack, the far right’s reputation as the protectors of Israel’s safety — the muscular and pragmatic alternative to naive liberal Zionists — has been shattered. Strikingly, one poll showed <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-09/ty-article/.premium/israelis-loathe-netanyahu-but-despair-over-peace-with-palestinians-runs-even-deeper/0000018b-b3d1-d3c1-a39b-bff181c30000">a significant uptick</a> in the percentage of Israelis who believe that a center-left government would perform better at providing security for Israelis. That included a 10-point increase among self-identified right-wingers.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ACMnhB">
“After October 7 … the right doesn’t have an answer to security,” said Yossi Beilin, a leading architect of the 1990s-era Oslo peace agreements with Palestinians.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="VYREbj">
In the diaspora, long the stronghold of liberal Zionism, there has similarly been no flight to the right — and plenty of signs of a reassertion of liberal ideals.
</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/bEus1M6Wi2fJtMQzpkwbGujc4wg=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25130970/GettyImages_1794363711.jpg"/> <cite>Noam Galai/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>
Participants hold up posters of hostages as thousands of people attend the March for Israel on the National Mall on November 14, 2023, in Washington, DC.
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="FDB4MU">
In mid-November, for example, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) gave a floor speech condemning what he saw as indefensible killing of Palestinians. “The extent of civilian death and suffering in Gaza is unnecessary. It is a moral failure, and it should be unacceptable to the United States,” Ossoff, who is Jewish, said.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="s6YtES">
Wartime polling of American Jews confirms that, as in Israel, there has been no groundswell in right-wing sentiment nor any move away from traditional liberal values.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="0vOwnl">
A mid-November poll by<a href="https://www.jewishelectorateinstitute.org/november-2023-national-survey-of-jewish-voters/"> the Jewish Electorate Institute</a> found that support for <a href="https://www.vox.com/donald-trump">Donald Trump</a> among Jews has declined since its last poll (taken in 2020), falling from 30 percent to 22 percent. Ninety-one percent believed that it’s possible to be critical of the Israeli government’s policy and still be pro-Israel, while 76 percent said it’s possible to be critical of Israel’s conduct during this war specifically and still retain the “pro-Israel” label.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="G1El1X">
The Jewish return to Zionism during wartime is thus no simple shift to the right. It is, at the very least, a flight to the center: not an urgency to make peace yet, but at least a refusal to fall into the abyss of Netanyahu’s extremism.
</p>
<h3 id="OZrIAk">
Can liberal Zionism win the future?
</h3>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="fEcLEy">
If the Jewish left’s return to Zionism and the Israeli public’s flight to the center create the conditions for a liberal Zionist revival, there remains one significant barrier: the lack of a potent political vehicle.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="d8D1yc">
The traditional liberal Zionist political parties in Israel, Meretz and Labor, are still polling poorly, netting around five seats combined in the Knesset in current polling. Their recent history of electoral failure has led many to concur with the <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/israels-war-on-the-palestinians-w-amjad-iraqi/id1370561641?i=1000634122550">Palestinian writer Amjad Iraqi’s assessment </a>that “the only place where that Zionist left, or liberal Zionism, really exists is in segments of the Jewish diaspora.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="7UYODg">
But liberal Zionism has never been something that would live or die alongside a single political faction. It is a part of the Zionist ethos, one whose influence has waxed and waned throughout Israel’s history. Its institutional collapse in the 2000s and 2010s was the result of paradigm-shifting events on the ground, ones that seemingly discredited the liberal Zionist vision for the conflict. On the global left, forms of anti-Zionism seemed better equipped to explain events; in Israel and on the global right, illiberal Zionisms flourished.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="O8FKw1">
The October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza have the potential to shift the paradigm of Israeli politics once again. But this time, it’s liberal Zionism’s rivals who have been embarrassed by events. Their theories of the conflict seem, at least to many Jews, especially ill-suited to make sense of post-October 7 reality. This is the reason liberal Zionism is already making something of a comeback — one that could lead it to regain more power politically in Israel down the line.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="6WxPVS">
The process began with the pro-democracy protests earlier this year. It has quietly continued in wartime, even as the government repressed anti-war speech and protests. <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/election-poll-shows-gantz-at-43-seats-netanyahus-likud-at-18-smotrich-out/">One survey</a> found a majority of Israelis now support amending the exclusionary nation-state Basic Law to include a <a href="https://en.idi.org.il/articles/51616">provision guaranteeing full equality for non-Jewish citizens</a>, reflecting a renewed sense among Jews that the country’s Arab citizens are equal members of the polity that was attacked on October 7.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="MylPRv">
Moreover, <a href="https://twitter.com/ShibleyTelhami/status/1728042669065019593">new poles of opposition</a> to the far right have emerged — ones with real political potential.
</p>
<div class="c-float-left">
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Wa9W0f1e5nsGo1r19hMIeXwTfq8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25130394/YairGolan_AP22018535920072.png"/> <cite>Tsafrir Abayov/AP Photo</cite>
<figcaption>
Yair Golan in his office at the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, while serving as deputy minister of economy and industry, January 17, 2022.
</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Vpi4Wh">
Yair Golan, a 61-year-old retired general and former Meretz parliamentarian, threw himself into the fight on October 7 — picking up a gun, traveling to southern Israel, and rescuing countless Israelis while battling Hamas. His heroism has given him moral credibility to make the liberal Zionist case to security-minded Israelis; he is expected to lead Meretz in the next elections, possibly giving the embattled left-wing party a new lease on life.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Buu1ra">
The families of Israelis killed and taken prisoner on October 7 have also emerged as outspoken critics of the Israeli government, <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-12-02/ty-article/.premium/israeli-hostages-released-from-hamas-captivity-set-to-speak-at-tel-aviv-rally/0000018c-2b69-d04a-af9f-fbfb66e90000">headlining the largest government-critical protests during the conflict</a>. When a Likud parliamentarian called for Gaza to be “annihilated,” hostage relative Gil Dikman<a href="https://twitter.com/BenzionSanders/status/1724052701187584087"> issued a stinging rebuke to her face</a>, calling on her to recognize the plight of both Israeli captives and Palestinians suffering under Hamas rule.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="QmDX28">
“My cousin is there. My cousin’s wife is there. There are babies — Jews and Arabs, by the way — who are there,” Dikman said, in testimony that<a href="https://twitter.com/BenzionSanders/status/1724052701187584087"> went viral on Twitter</a>. “You speak in such slogans…to erase, to annihilate, to flatten. Who are you flattening? Human beings you’ve abandoned.”
</p>
<div id="R1gMt6">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" dir="ltr" lang="en">
Gil Dikman’s relatives were kidnapped and murdered by Hamas on October 7th.<br/><br/>Today he went to the Knesset and heard Likud MK <a href="https://twitter.com/GalitDistel?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"><span class="citation" data-cites="GalitDistel">@GalitDistel</span></a> call for Gaza to be annihilated.<br/><br/>Please listen to his response. <a href="https://t.co/lNRFQtjzuT">pic.twitter.com/lNRFQtjzuT</a>
</p>
— <span class="citation" data-cites="benzi.bsky.social">@benzi.bsky.social</span> (<span class="citation" data-cites="BenzionSanders">@BenzionSanders</span>) <a href="https://twitter.com/BenzionSanders/status/1724052701187584087?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 13, 2023</a>
</blockquote></div></li>
</ul>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="k5Fdfg">
Anshel Pfeffer, a prominent Israeli columnist, calls <a href="https://us18.campaign-archive.com/?e=97316d1953&amp;u=d3bceadb340d6af4daf1de00d&amp;id=cb6e07ac3b">the anti-government activity</a> “the stirrings of a nascent movement that will almost certainly evolve into something much larger when the hundreds of thousands of reservists are discharged and the existing protest movement against the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul also return to politics.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="u7Pvc7">
The foundations of Israeli politics are shifting in liberal Zionism’s favor. This kind of tectonic change takes time, but there is clear evidence that it is happening. Liberal Zionism’s reemergence in Israel will be encouraged by the many influential voices in the Jewish diaspora who have remained true to its ideals.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="nYb6Bt">
For all these reasons, you are starting to hear something rare coming from Israel’s peace camp: hope.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="fYQGd9">
“What I feel is that there is a new opening,” Beilin tells me. “The two-state solution is back in town.”
</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ZUYjtncXWeJSB3pkKjzKHMUN0GM=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25130974/GettyImages_1802272168.jpg"/> <cite>Saeed Qaq/Anadolu via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>
Israelis gather in front of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence, in protest of the Israeli government, November 25, 2023.
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="vPVnzx">
</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Pledges to slash methane pollution at COP28 are leaving out one big thing</strong> -
<figure>
<img alt="A natural gas flare burns near an oil pump jack at the New Harmony Oil Field in Grayville, Illinois, US, on Sunday, June 19, 2022." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/hxSfaLTSS6-27nQjvQW0tP8I7oc=/445x0:4000x2666/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72953199/GettyImages_1241436219.0.jpeg"/>
<figcaption>
A flare burns off methane in an oil field. Oil and gas companies meeting at COP28 agreed to end flaring to control emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. | Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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Spolier: Cows.
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Negotiators from around the world meeting at the COP28 climate conference in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) last week agreed to put more money behind pledges to cut <a href="https://www.vox.com/22613532/climate-change-methane-emissions">methane pollution</a>. If met, these commitments would avert a significant amount of warming before the end of the decade. But that’s a big ”if,” especially since countries remain reluctant to tackle the biggest source of methane emissions.
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Methane is a mighty greenhouse gas, roughly <a href="https://unece.org/challenge">30 times more powerful</a> than carbon dioxide when it comes to trapping heat in the atmosphere. About 60 percent of global methane emissions come from human activity, accounting for <a href="https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/climate-warming-likely-cause-large-increases-wetland-methane-emissions">a quarter of all warming</a>. But unlike carbon dioxide, it doesn’t linger that long in the sky, so cutting humanity’s methane output is one of the fastest ways to reduce the planet’s rate of warming.
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It also has value as a fuel, so there is a financial incentive to capture methane and burn it rather than let it escape. In addition, a lot of methane pollution tends to come from distinct sources like gas wells and landfills, so targeting these facilities for cuts can have an outsize effect.
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This all makes methane a ripe, juicy target for people hoping to curb <a href="https://www.vox.com/climate">climate change</a> — yielding greater reductions in warming and at lower costs than just limiting carbon dioxide.
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More than 150 countries to date have already signed onto the <a href="https://www.globalmethanepledge.org/">Global Methane Pledge</a>. It commits signatories to cutting methane emissions from human sources by 30 percent from 2020 levels by the end of the decade, which, if accomplished, has the potential to avert 0.2 degrees Celsius of warming by 2050 (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit).
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At COP28, several countries — including the US, <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/news/2023/12/minister-guilbeault-announces-canadas-draft-methane-regulations-to-support-cleaner-energy-and-climate-action.html">Canada</a>, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/canada-brazil-egypt-announce-new-methane-regulations-monday-us-official-2023-12-04/">Brazil</a>, and <a href="https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/cop28-egypt-develop-domestic-regulation-curb-methane-emissions-2023-12-04/">Egypt</a> — announced how they plan to meet their targets, and countries announced more than <a href="https://www.wri.org/news/statement-cop28-countries-announce-new-efforts-reduce-methane-pollution">$1 billion in new grant funding</a> to help reduce methane.
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The United States is the <a href="https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2022/overview">third-largest methane-emitting country</a> after <a href="https://www.vox.com/china">China</a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/russia">Russia</a>. The new US methane regulations on the oil and gas industry, which the <a href="https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-standards-slash-methane-pollution-combat-climate">Environmental Protection Agency</a> announced as a final rule at the conference, would avert 58 million tons of methane pollution between 2024 and 2038. The regulation also requires equipment upgrades and regular inspections of pollution control systems.
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The regulation even won praise from an oil company: “We appreciate the collaborative way EPA, NGOs and industry worked together on this rulemaking,” BP America president Orlando Alvarez said in a statement. “In the spirit of COP28, input from a broad range of stakeholders makes for more durable and effective <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy">policies</a>.”
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This year at COP, a number of businesses have also promised to cut their methane output. Under the <a href="https://www.cop28.com/en/news/2023/12/Oil-Gas-Decarbonization-Charter-launched-to--accelerate-climate-action">Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter</a>, 50 companies accounting for 40 percent of global oil production committed to eliminating their methane emissions by 2050. They also committed to ending flaring by 2030. <a href="https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/gasflaringreduction/gas-flaring-explained">Flaring</a> is a practice where oil wells burn off accumulated methane rather than capturing it due to regulations, for safety, or because it’s more cost-effective. To facilitate this, the World Bank announced the creation of a <a href="https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/gasflaringreduction/brief/ggfr-to-evolve-to-the-global-flaring-methane-reduction-partnership">$250 million trust fund</a> to help companies avoid flaring, but major oil and gas companies like <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-04/chevron-exxon-opt-out-of-funding-cop28-methane-reduction-fund?leadSource=uverify%20wall">Chevron and Exxon Mobil declined to chip in</a> for now.
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Few of the announced actions, however, include the largest driver of methane pollution: the food we eat.
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From tilling soil to planting crops, to fertilizer, livestock, manure, harvesting, shipping, and waste, food systems produce <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-021-00225-9">34 percent of overall greenhouse gas emissions</a>. Agriculture is the <a href="https://www.iea.org/reports/methane-tracker-2021/methane-and-climate-change">single-largest anthropogenic, or human-driven, source of methane</a>, and most of that is from our appetite for meat. Animals raised for food account for <a href="https://clear.ucdavis.edu/news/summary-un-fao-methane-emissions-livestock-and-rice-systems">32 percent</a> of human-driven methane.
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Just one cow can produce anywhere from <a href="https://www.epa.gov/snep/agriculture-and-aquaculture-food-thought">154 to 264 pounds of methane annually</a>, so the 1.5 billion cattle raised for beef around the world together burp up 231 billion pounds of this greenhouse gas.
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<img alt="A large group of brown, black, and white cows face the viewer through a barbed wire enclosure. Photo taken on May 31, 2021, near Harris Ranch, California." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ida1QDXl-0MzX_ar9uGVhqT1X6Y=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25152353/GettyImages_1322560885.jpeg"/> <cite>George Rose/Getty Images</cite>
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One cow can produce up to 264 pounds of methane per year.
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There were some small efforts at COP28 to address the climate impact of food, and the meeting has devoted more time to agriculture than past conferences. More than two-thirds of the menu for the conference was plant-based, which comes with far smaller land, water, and energy requirements than a more animal-heavy menu. <a href="https://apnews.com/article/cop28-meat-emissions-livestock-climate-cattle-c4153323be877da16d881ddef560815d">More than 100 countries</a> agreed to find ways to reduce emissions from food production. The US and the UAE announced that they <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/cop28-us-uae-climate-friendly-farming-effort-grows-17-bln-2023-12-08/">pooled $17 billion</a> to advance more climate-friendly farming tactics around the world. There were also a couple new announcements to deal specifically with methane. Canada introduced <a href="https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/canada-offer-incentives-cattle-farms-reduce-methane-emissions-2023-12-10/">incentives for Canadian ranchers</a> to cut methane emissions from their cattle farms. And several of the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/global-dairy-companies-announce-alliance-cut-methane-cop28-2023-12-05/">world’s largest dairy producers</a> said they will begin reporting their methane emissions next year and draft plans to ratchet them down.
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But there’s been little appetite for reducing demand for meat and dairy, particularly among the wealthy countries that consume the most animal products, <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/11/30/23981529/cop28-meat-livestock-dairy-farming-plant-based-united-nations-dubai-uae">as Vox’s Kenny Torrella explained</a>:
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<em>The disinterest from Western governments in shifting diets isn’t surprising — meat remains the third rail of climate politics. It tastes good, it’s become a mainstay of Western diets, and it’s become linked to ideals like prosperity and masculinity. Taking it off the menu to help save the planet isn’t politically popular, so even eco-minded politicians, environmental activists, and climate reporters largely avoid the issue.</em>
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According to documents obtained by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/29/plans-to-present-meat-as-sustainable-nutrition-at-cop28-revealed">DeSmog and the Guardian</a>, some lobbyists at COP28 are even making the case that more meat and dairy are beneficial to the environment. The Guardian also reported that some former officials at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said their work showing the damaging methane effects from livestock <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/20/ex-officials-at-un-farming-fao-say-work-on-methane-emissions-was-censored">was sidelined and censored</a>.
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The reluctance to even acknowledge the climate impacts from raising animals for food is troubling at the tail end of the <a href="https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-november-2023-remarkable-year-continues-warmest-boreal-autumn-2023-will-be-warmest-year">hottest year ever recorded</a>. According to the <a href="https://www.fao.org/interactive/sdg2-roadmap/en/">FAO</a>, methane emissions from livestock have to fall 25 percent by 2030 compared to 2020 in order to stay on course for the Paris climate agreement goal to limit global warming this century to less than 1.5°C or 2.7°F. Overall emissions of heat-trapping gasses are still <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/11/1143607">slated to increase</a>, putting these goals almost out of reach.
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Even with the new round of commitments at COP28, the world will likely blow past the 1.5°C goal, according to the <a href="https://www.iea.org/news/iea-assessment-of-the-evolving-pledges-at-cop28">International Energy Agency</a>, and it remains to be seen whether even these tepid promises will be fulfilled.
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<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-the-hindu-sports">From The Hindu: Sports</h1>
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<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Legendary Striker, Moriset, Queen Of Fame and Ashwa Dev work well</strong> -</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Touch Of Grey, Shamrock, Stormy Ocean, Priceless Prince and Breeze Bluster excel</strong> -</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>West Brook shines</strong> -</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Junior World Cup Hockey | India sweeps aside the Dutch to cruise to semis</strong> - Trailing 0-2 at half-time and 2-3 in the third quarter, India exhibited immense resilience to beat the Dutch in the quarterfinal and set a last four clash against Germany</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Messi, Ronaldo to face each other again as Inter Miami agree to play 2 matches in Saudi</strong> - Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami will play Al-Hilal on January 29 and Cristiano Ronaldo’s Al Nassr on February 1</p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-the-hindu-national-news">From The Hindu: National News</h1>
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<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>CBSE announces date sheet for class 10, 12 Board exams</strong> - The class 10 exams will conclude on March 13 and the class 12 exams will end on April 2.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Two killed as lorry hits autorickshaw in West Godavari</strong> -</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Innocent animals cannot be sacrificed for public comfort: Gujarat HC on deaths impounded cattle</strong> -</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Govt committed to implement Rs. 500 gas cylinder and Rs. 500 bonus to farmers within 100 days, says Uttam Kumar Reddy</strong> - The Minister accused the BRS Govt of ruining all the departments because of financial mismanagement</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Devendra Fadnavis promises thorough probe into the Lalit Patil drug kingpin case</strong> - Instagram has emerged as the drug marketplace where orders are being placed, payments are made through GPay and UPI, and deliveries are being done: Maharashtra Deputy CM</p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-bbc-europe">From BBC: Europe</h1>
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<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Referee punched: Turkish FA halts league football after club president hits Super Lig official</strong> - Referee Halil Umut Meler is knocked to the ground by a football club president following a Turkish Super Lig game, leading officials to suspend all matches.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Renaissance nude offends French school students</strong> - Several pupils reportedly refused to look at the painting by the Italian painter Giuseppe Cesari.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Emmanuel Macron’s government in crisis after migration bill defeat</strong> - In a blow to the French government, opposition parties united to reject a major immigration reform.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Donald Tusk elected as Polish prime minister</strong> - The pro-EU politician will be sworn in on Wednesday, ending the eight-year rule of the right-wing PiS party.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Alexei Navalny: Russian opposition leader ‘removed from penal colony’</strong> - Alexei Navalny’s associates say they don’t know where he is, after six days of uncertainty.</p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-ars-technica">From Ars Technica</h1>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Google’s Android app store monopoly violates antitrust law, jury finds</strong> - Epic Games scores major court win; judge will decide remedies next month. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1990262">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>The US military’s spaceplane is about to fly again—it needs a bigger rocket</strong> - SpaceX called off launch attempts Sunday and Monday. It’s now set for Tuesday night. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1990132">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>The growing abuse of QR codes in malware and payment scams prompts FTC warning</strong> - The convenience of QR codes is a double-edged sword. Follow these tips to stay safe. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1990254">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>AI companion robot helps some seniors fight loneliness, but others hate it</strong> - There’s limited evidence for health benefits so far; early work suggests no one-size-fits-all. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1990239">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Porsche gives Ars a look inside its next EV: The all-electric Macan</strong> - Porsche’s sporty SUV is about to go electric; here’s what to expect. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1990059">link</a></p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-jokes-subreddit">From Jokes Subreddit</h1>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>A porn movie studio posts an ad for male actors.</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF --></p>
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Three men arrive next day at the HR.
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<strong>First man</strong>: My dick is twelve inches long, and it stays hard for a whole hour.
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<strong>HR head</strong>: Excellent, you are hired!
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<strong>Second man</strong>: My dick is only nine inches long, but it stays hard for five hours.
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<strong>HR head</strong>: Very good, you are hired as well.
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<strong>Third man</strong>: Well, my dick is two inches long, and can only stay hard for fifteen seconds.
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<strong>HR head</strong>: Excuse me, but why would we need a guy like you?
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<strong>Third man</strong>: What, don’t your movies need antagonists?
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Omeganian"> /u/Omeganian </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/18g3qu5/a_porn_movie_studio_posts_an_ad_for_male_actors/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/18g3qu5/a_porn_movie_studio_posts_an_ad_for_male_actors/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>A man hands his wife some ibuprofen and a glass of water before bed one night.</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF --></p>
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“What’s this for?” asks the wife. “It’s for your headache,” says the husband. “But I don’t have a headache,” she replies. “Gotcha!” said the husband.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/SkyTreeSF"> /u/SkyTreeSF </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/18ggrs6/a_man_hands_his_wife_some_ibuprofen_and_a_glass/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/18ggrs6/a_man_hands_his_wife_some_ibuprofen_and_a_glass/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Utility of condoms</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF --></p>
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Two old women are sitting at a bench near a sidewalk smoking cigarettes. Suddenly it starts raining. The first woman pulls out a condom from her bag, slides it onto a her cigarette and continues to smoke. The second woman exclaims, “Whats that useful thing you pulled out from your bag?”. The first woman says, “It’s called a condom, you can get it at any drugstore.”
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The next day, the second woman goes to her local drugstore and asks for a condom. The salesboy, astonished and impressed, asks, “Any preference for any specific condom brand?”
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The woman says, “Oh, can I get one that can fit onto a camel?”
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Left_Membership2780"> /u/Left_Membership2780 </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/18gaatw/utility_of_condoms/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/18gaatw/utility_of_condoms/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>A Guy sat next to me on the train.</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF --></p>
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He pulled a out a photo of his wife and said, “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
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I said, “If you think she is beautiful, you should see my missus mate.”
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He said, “Why? Is she a stunner?”
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I said, “No, she’s an optician!”
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Buddy2269"> /u/Buddy2269 </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/18g70ra/a_guy_sat_next_to_me_on_the_train/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/18g70ra/a_guy_sat_next_to_me_on_the_train/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Grandma and Grandpa</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF --></p>
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Grandma and Grandpa are sitting on the veranda of the old folks, home rocking back and forth in their rocking chairs.
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Grandpa rocks forward in his chair and says to Grandma, “Fuck you!”
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Grandma rocks forward in her chair and says to Grandpa, “Fuck you too!”
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Grandpa becomes very much excited and shouts, “Fuck you!” swinging more forward again.
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Grandma remains graceful but leans forward and says, “Fuck you again.”
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​
</p>
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This goes on for about 10 minutes.
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Finally Grandpa says, “You know something, Grandma, this oral sex thing ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/fap_fap_fap_fapper"> /u/fap_fap_fap_fapper </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/18gahld/grandma_and_grandpa/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/18gahld/grandma_and_grandpa/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
</ul>
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