Moments in Love is a radically progressive departure for the series — held back by its too-rigid filmmaking.
Master of None has always been about co-creator and lead actor Aziz Ansari’s enthusiasms. From his love of great food to his love of New York, the show lets him articulate his passions beautifully, through his writing, direction, and performance.
The show also wound up being a way for Ansari to demonstrate his enjoyment of classic arthouse cinema. He directed more and more episodes across its first two seasons, incorporating more classicist techniques from famed European films of the mid-20th century, and season two actually featured a shot of the Criterion editions of classic films early in its run. (Among those films was Vittorio de Sica’s famed Italian masterpiece Bicycle Thieves — and, fittingly, Master of None’s season two premiere was about Ansari’s character, Dev, having his bicycle stolen.)
At first blush, the show’s third season, its first new season in just over four years, would seem to go against this tendency of its (now former) star. Ansari barely appears in season three, and he’s one of just two men with roles of any prominence. The story focuses, instead, on the marriage between Denise (Lena Waithe), a supporting character in the first two seasons, and new character Alicia (Naomi Ackie). Over the course of the season’s five episodes (which range from 20 minutes to 55 minutes long), the two navigate relationship strife, much of which stems from attempts to have a baby, first via artificial insemination and later via IVF.
I want to say here that this season is very intentionally not a comedy. I think I laughed once. Master of None was never a laugh-a-second show, but it did have jokes throughout its first two seasons. These five episodes peer into some very difficult moments in two women’s lives; as such, even when the tone is lighter, there are almost no intentional jokes. For me, that was fine. Your mileage may vary.
In theory, as a queer woman who’s exploring options to have a baby with her wife, when both of us are well past our years of peak fertility, I should be an easy mark for this narrative. But I felt constantly distanced from Master of None’s third season — which is technically called Master of None Presents Moments in Love, but good luck getting people to call it anything other than “season three” — and the reasons for that distancing largely boil down to Ansari’s direction.
Master of None’s visual aesthetic is too often at odds with the story it’s telling
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Courtesy of Netflix
Ansari directed all five episodes, all of which he also co-wrote with Waithe. His direction of the season consists of static wide shots, only cutting in for an extreme, intimate close-up at a key emotional moment. The frames are perfectly composed, each and every element within them placed with exactitude. Ansari holds these shots for long periods of time, letting his camera stay fixed while his actors move into and out of the frame, rather than, say, following Denise when she goes into the kitchen from the dining room. We’ll hear her voice from off-camera instead.
(Here is where I will note that Ansari was accused in early 2018 of being too sexually forward on a date. Ansari said he thought what happened on the date was consensual; the woman accusing him did not. As Me Too-spurred allegations against famous men went, the one against Ansari was comparatively mild, but it’s easy to wonder if the allegations spurred him to work more behind the scenes on Master of None’s third season. Yet back when season two launched in spring 2017, Ansari was already saying that he thought season three would take years to arrive, so a long gap between seasons was always planned. Season three’s stripped-down story was further affected from being produced during the Covid-19 pandemic.)
Because Ansari shoots Moments in Love in a narrower, slightly boxier aspect ratio than we’re used to seeing on modern television — a 4:3 aspect ratio, which was dominant for most of the medium’s history, up until widescreen TVs became more prevalent in the 2000s — scenes often look a little crowded, especially when there are more than two people in them (and, honestly, sometimes when there are only two people in them).
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach, and at times, Moments in Love benefits from it. But the overall effect holds viewers at arm’s length throughout the season’s 4.5-hour running time, and that works to Master of None’s detriment.
It took me a bit to figure out what Ansari’s direction was nodding toward most often, but after rewatching several key sequences, I realized the director is paying homage to Scenes From a Marriage, a 1973 TV miniseries from the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. (Scenes From a Marriage was re-edited into a shorter feature film version for its initial release in the US in 1974; both versions are now available via Criterion.) Moments in Love has a similar aspect ratio as Scenes From a Marriage, and both projects rely on static shots held for long lengths of time, as the actors move within those shots.
Bergman is not the only great director to have used a “fly on the wall” approach to telling a realistic story, but Ansari seems to have Scenes From a Marriage in mind when filming, say, Denise and Alicia in bed together. Bergman’s detachment from his central married couple in that film reflected both their distance from each other (because the camera was so far away) and how trapped they felt (because of the slightly more confining shape of the frame). But as you’ll see in this scene, Bergman would cut in for close-ups on his actors when they were feeling particularly passionate. Ansari doesn’t do this.
On the one hand, Moments in Love’s overall approach, beyond its visuals, is a radical one, and it shows the hand of Waithe both at the writing and at the performance stage. Taking the work of Bergman — one of the greatest directors of the Western canon, but whose work was only ever subtextually queer and was always about people of European descent — and transforming his ideas so that they now center a Black queer couple is transgressive on at least some level. What does a story about the ups and downs of a marriage mean when you make it about two Black women? What stays the same, and what changes, if anything?
Automatically, the process of having a baby becomes more fraught, and some of the best sequences of Moments in Love are about the difficulties of pursuing fertility treatments as a lesbian couple. In a perhaps too-didactic scene, a doctor informs Alicia that there just isn’t an insurance code for a lesbian couple (or a single woman) to have a child via IVF in the same way there is for a straight couple. It’s the kind of quietly devastating moment that Ansari’s direction was designed to capture perfectly, and it feels clearly informed by Waithe, a lesbian, telling this particular story.
The season’s fourth episode — which is all about the ups and downs of fertility care — is its best single installment, and it honestly might stand on its own for the curious. When the camera enters the operating room for embryo transplants or egg harvesting, the cool, clinically detached approach that Ansari favors feels as if it dissociates from the characters entirely, to the scene’s benefit. In order to become pregnant this way, a certain distance from the body must occur.
But the season struck me as too artistically conservative in many places. In particular, Moments in Love requires you to be all in on Denise and Alicia’s marriage early on for the later strife they face throughout the fertility treatment process to land. But pulling the camera back from them as a default and placing them within a narrow, boxy frame creates the subconscious sense that they’re already trapped in their relationship. We’re longing for them to escape it long before we should be.
Again, this “fly on the wall” style can be effective. The way the series uses the house Denise and Alicia share as a symbol of the state of their relationship at any given time is wonderfully effective (pay attention to scenes where the two do laundry), and the series’ only significant close-up is tremendous when it finally arrives. It packs a wallop.
Maybe we are supposed to think Denise and Alicia are trapped from frame one. Yet if that’s the case, I’m not sure this series knows what they’re trapped by.
Master of None tries to escape the aesthetics of affluence in season three, but it doesn’t go far enough
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Courtesy of Netflix
Broadly speaking, Master of None belongs to a TV comedy subgenre we might call the “short film sitcom.” The core idea of this type of series means that every episode is its own short film, often centered on the perspective of a singular auteur, who often directs, writes, and stars in the series. Examples would include FX’s Louie and Atlanta and HBO’s Girls and Insecure, but there are many more than just those few. (Remember TV Land’s The Jim Gaffigan Show?)
Central to many of these series is an idea that the characters don’t particularly have to worry about money. Girls may have opened with a scene where Hannah’s parents told her she could no longer rely on them to fund her adventures, but she had parents who funded her adventures. Sam Fox on FX’s Better Things stresses about money sometimes, but she also owns a house in Los Angeles and works intermittently as an actor. Money is a fleeting concern in these shows, not a constant one.
Not every show in this format can be so blasé about economic matters. Atlanta is one of the best TV series ever made about the ways that people in poverty organize their lives to stretch every last dollar they have (and about the horrible structures that keep impoverished people impoverished). But typically, this style of storytelling carries within it an assumption of wealth and power and privilege.
Yet the fact remains: Not having to constantly worry about money is a privilege, and the short-film sitcom, whose stylistic roots lie in highbrow film comedies that center on characters who spend most of their time pursuing pure aesthetic pleasures and pondering the deeper mysteries of the universe, is too often rooted in that privilege. There is nothing wrong with telling a story focused on these issues. Many great films and TV shows tackle characters who are economically comfortable.
Yet Moments in Love seems, fitfully, to want to look at this question of economic privilege. An assumption of economic comfort certainly animated the first two seasons of Master of None. The characters’ affluence, particularly in season two, was mostly presented matter of factly. Though the show was able to step outside the affluent bubble of its central character, its portrayal of New York could never quite leave the perspective of the people paying service-industry employees; it failed to explore the perspective of the service-industry employees themselves, even when it explicitly tried. (To its credit, Master of None tries much harder to shift its economic perspective than other comparable shows, as Andrew Karpan at Film School Rejects points out.)
In its early going, Moments in Love has the same vague “lifestyles section of the New York Times” visual aesthetic of Master of None’s other two seasons. The house Denise and Alicia share is almost aggressively cozy, and it feels isolated from the rest of the world, like the couple lives inside of Taylor Swift’s photoshoot for her cottagecore album folklore. In later episodes, the series complicates its own affluent coziness, and we do learn that some characters from the first two seasons are having economic troubles. Master of None is interested in the ways that its characters’ blinkered perspectives shift with their economic rise and fall, and its examinations of how expensive it is to pursue IVF treatments help to ground this consideration.
But no matter how much Master of None explores questions about the way its characters’ access to wealth (or their lack of access) paints their view of the world, it is unwilling to push too far. The season finale still features a lengthy vacation that suggests the characters remain fairly well off when all is said and done.
If we’re meant, on some level, to see Denise and Alicia as imprisoned by their circumstances in those early episodes but also to see them as being deeply in love (at least for a little while), then the obvious question is what is holding them in place. The series feints toward the idea that it’s financial and social success — that Denise and Alicia are so unable to imagine a life outside of the one we see early in the season that they make choices out of a fear of losing it, but that doesn’t track with much of what actually happens in the season.
Instead, what imprisons Denise and Alicia is a question that Master of None doesn’t really bother to consider: Why?
Many of us who are queer in America in 2021 are actively considering all of the ways in which the cisheteronormative ideals that most pop culture indulges in blind us to the ways in which those systems are not necessarily the way things have to be.
Master of None builds Moments in Love atop the assumption that the happiest life for Denise and Alicia is one of monogamous bliss in a beautiful cabin in the woods, and that having a baby might very well add to that bliss (though on that question, at least, Denise and Alicia don’t immediately agree). But what if it isn’t? What if there are other ways to organize a life, to raise a child, to consider oneself successful? Moments in Love flirts with those questions, but it never really engages with them, because it ultimately can’t think of another way to see the world. The tight frames of this season don’t imprison the characters. They imprison the show itself.
Master of None Presents Moments in Love (phew) debuts Sunday, May 23 on Netflix. It’s five episodes long and around 4.5 hours in running time.
For more on Master of None season three, listen to Peter Kafka’s conversation with co-creator Alan Yang on the Recode Media podcast.
Democrats are weighing the costs of negotiating with Republicans on infrastructure.
As the Biden administration’s infrastructure negotiations with Senate Republicans picked up with a $1.7 trillion counteroffer on Friday, some congressional Democrats are getting antsy.
“We move as quickly as we can on going big, we move as quickly as we can on negotiations,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) told Vox on Wednesday. “At some point, if they won’t go where we believe the country needs to go and where the country seems to want to go, then we take off.”
President Biden issued his opening bid last month — the $2.25 trillion American Jobs Plan — and the GOP responded with a $568 billion infrastructure counteroffer a few weeks ago. (Separately, the White House also introduced a $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, focusing on child care and education.)
The new $1.7 trillion White House counteroffer settles for the $65 billion Republicans floated for broadband funding, and pares back the amount of funding for roads and bridges from Biden’s initial proposal of $159 billion to $120 billion in new investment. It also cuts research and development from a proposed package, vowing to put it in other congressional bills going forward. But the president’s counter keeps funding for clean energy, removing lead pipes from America’s drinking water systems, and boosting long-term care workers.
“We recognize that still leaves us far apart,” a White House memo to Republicans obtained by Vox reads. “However, in service of trying to advance these negotiations, the President has asked us to respond with changes to his American Jobs Plan, in hopes that these changes will spur further bipartisan cooperation and progress.”
For their part, Republicans don’t seem all that happy. A statement released by a spokesperson for Senate Republicans Friday said, “based on today’s meeting, the groups seem further apart after two meetings with White House staff than they were after one meeting with President Biden.”
Democrats on the Hill say they support the White House actively talking to Republicans. But some are also anxious that negotiating with Republicans just won’t meet the needs of the moment — whether it’s on climate change or jobs.
“I don’t think it’s our job to pass something just so that we can say, ‘Well, that piece over there is bipartisan,’ and wait for the pat on the back,” moderate Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) told reporters recently. “I think people want us to get big things done.”
Democrats’ other option is budget reconciliation, a mechanism that would allow them to pass a massive budget bill with just 51 votes rather than the required 60 — mostly likely on party lines. This is what Democrats did for Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package, and they have at least one more opportunity to do it again before the 2022 midterms.
The Biden administration is caught between two promises: working with Republicans on Capitol Hill, and vowing to pass an ambitious economic agenda that reroutes the American economy toward clean energy and passes billions to make child care and long-term care more affordable.
Some progressive climate groups are arguing that a bipartisan deal could significantly hurt the president’s climate agenda. They argue Biden needs to invest heavily in electric charging stations, and to pass a clean electricity standard to get to his goal of 100 percent clean electricity by 2035. Biden’s counteroffer largely leaves his environmental provisions intact but would forgo a $180 billion investment into research and development — money that could be key for the Energy Department’s development of new technology to combat climate change.
“If you spend money on roads without making major investments in either mileage standards or deployment of EVs or investing in putting in new standards to ensure clean electricity by 2030 or 2035, you’ll be going backward on climate,” said Jamal Raad, co-founder of the climate group Evergreen Action and a former top staffer for Washington Gov. Jay Inslee.
Still, as much as some Democrats worry that negotiating with Republicans wastes valuable time, some of Biden’s closest allies on Capitol Hill say it is simply part of a process that could make moderate Democrats accept reconciliation, if and when that happens.
“When the president announced a big and bold proposal, the American Jobs Plan, several Democrats promptly said, ‘I will not vote for this — for reconciliation, a Democrat-only bill — unless there is a serious and determined effort first for bipartisanship,’” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) told Vox. “It seems to me the issue isn’t the White House not going bold; the issue is one of order and timing.”
Bipartisan negotiations on infrastructure are ongoing
The main Republican negotiator is Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. Capito is the ranking Republican member on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which has purview over five-year reauthorization bills for surface and water infrastructure.
Capito and other Republicans who are ranking members on key committees had a nearly two-hour meeting with Biden at the White House earlier this month. The senators have also had subsequent conversations with members of Biden’s Cabinet and senior staff including White House counselor Steve Ricchetti, director of legislative affairs Louisa Terrell, National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.
While the main difference between Republicans and Democrats is over proposed corporate tax hikes to pay for the projects, there are other areas of disagreement. In staff-level negotiations between Senate Democrats and Republicans on the five-year surface transportation bill, Republicans have been pushing back on climate resilience provisions, a Democratic Senate staffer told Vox. Democrats see infrastructure as a key way to make progress on cutting down on fossil fuel emissions in the transportation sector — investing in 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations across the nation’s roadways to encourage more people to switch to cleaner cars.
“I’m wary of anything that has Capito’s fingerprints,” said Raad, the co-founder of Evergreen Action. “It would not just hurt our ability to hit our NDC [the US target to limit its carbon emissions], it would take us backward.”
Sen. Brown says he thinks the Biden administration should be trying to find common ground with Republicans at least to prove they tried. But Brown clearly believes that shouldn’t entail significant concessions, especially on climate.
“I assume they’ll obstruct on climate,” he told Vox. “We’ll try to come to bipartisan agreement; I don’t expect it [to happen]. We move forward in a big way.”
Negotiations take time — and that’s a risk
Biden has said he wants to see significant progress on bipartisan talks by Memorial Day, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has outlined July 4 as when she’d like to see an infrastructure bill get a vote in Congress, but that date could also be pushed if necessary.
It’s possible that Democrats were padding extra time with those initial deadlines, expecting negotiations would move it back. Still, a razor-thin majority in the House and Senate makes the risk of taking additional time a high-stakes strategy. When they will introduce the first draft of a bill is still unclear.
“I can’t give you a specific answer because I don’t know the answer,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told Vox, adding that appropriations work in the House will begin in earnest in July. “We’re going to have some time available to do the work of the Jobs Plan and the Families Plan in that time frame if, in fact, we can get agreement. And, if we can’t get agreement, work with the administration on how we’ll move forward.”
House Budget Committee Chair John Yarmuth (D-KY), who will be overseeing the budget reconciliation process in the House if Democrats do indeed pursue budget reconciliation as an option to pass their infrastructure bill, told reporters, “I think they want to give a reasonable chance for there to be a bipartisan bill. I think probably, sooner rather than later there will be a decision.”
Even if Democrats do decide to do reconciliation rather than move a bipartisan bill through regular order, there’s still a lot to be decided, including whether they’ll move one massive bill containing both the American Jobs Plan and Biden’s American Families Plan that deals with affordable child care and education, or split them into separate bills.
“I think it would be difficult to do two. I know there’s this idea about just doing physical infrastructure in one smaller bipartisan bill, but I don’t like that idea,” said Casey, who is shepherding the American Families Plan portion of Biden’s package through the Senate and wants to see both planks of Biden’s economic package passed through reconciliation.
The next week will be pivotal for Biden’s big shot on the economy. But the clock is ticking.
What the Israel-Hamas ceasefire means (and doesn’t) for the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The ceasefire announced Thursday between Israel and Hamas will hopefully end the worst of the violence that in the course of 11 days killed well over 200 people, the vast majority of them Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
In the narrowest sense, Hamas and Israel have both accomplished their immediate goals. Hamas got to portray itself as the defender of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, where much of the unrest began in recent weeks, and prove its capacity to hit most of Israel with its rockets. Israel, meanwhile, can say it has degraded Hamas’s military capabilities, in particular the underground network of tunnels from which it operates.
Yet the ceasefire does nothing to address the underlying conditions that have fueled the decade-and-a-half standoff between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, nor the issues that sparked this latest round of fighting.
Living conditions in Gaza, long grim, will continue to deteriorate absent a dramatic change to the blockade that restricts most freedom of movement and goods; it has been in place in its current form, imposed by Israel and Egypt, since 2006.
Beyond Gaza, Palestinians continue to face a deeply fragmented, restricted political situation. Those in the West Bank live under a patchwork of authorities — the Palestinian Authority in urban enclaves, a mixed regime in other populated areas, and direct Israeli military control in about 60 percent of the territory where Israeli settlers also live.
In East Jerusalem, Palestinians are legal residents of the city — which Israel considers united under its sovereignty — but generally lack full citizenship. Inside Israel, Palestinian citizens, who make up about 21 percent of the country’s population, face structural inequalities and political marginalization.
And Israel, whose civilians remain under the threat of Hamas rockets and fearful of the group’s advances in weaponry, is no less likely to respond harshly in the future to rocket fire than it was at the beginning of May. The vast majority of Israelis view Hamas as an unrepentant enemy with no intention of pursuing peace with Israel, and believe it would use any easing of the blockade to further arm itself and threaten Israeli civilians.
With these conditions still in place, the series of events that led to this latest flare-up, though extreme, could easily repeat itself in some variation in the future.
It’s therefore worth taking a closer look at those specific events, and the conditions that produced them, in order to understand where the conflict might go after the ceasefire, and what the prospects are for some kind of resolution to the seemingly endless cycle of violence.
Three Jerusalem flashpoints converge
The city of Jerusalem has for decades been a major focal point of the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and both Israelis and Palestinians claim it as their capital.
But three specific sites in and around the old city of Jerusalem emerged as flashpoints in the weeks leading up to the recent outbreak of hostilities: Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem; the Damascus Gate, a northern entrance in the wall of the old city; and al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third-holiest site, located on what is known as Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary) to Muslims and to Jews as the Temple Mount (Har HaBayit), the site of the biblical Jewish temples.
Sheikh Jarrah
Sheikh Jarrah is an East Jerusalem neighborhood located just outside the old city that for weeks has been the site of mass demonstrations by Palestinians protesting the imminent evictions of six Arab families from their homes by Israeli courts, to make way for Jewish activists who claim ownership of the land.
The homes in question were built by the Jordanian government in the 1950s for Palestinian refugees from Israel, after Jewish residents fled the neighborhood during the 1948 war and found refuge in Israel.
Israeli law provides Jewish Israelis the chance to reclaim property lost during that conflict — including in Sheikh Jarrah. But it offers no reciprocal right to Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, who lost their homes. In general, Israeli authorities and right-wing NGOs have been working for years to change the demographic balance of the city in favor of Jewish Israelis.
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Emmanuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images
Aryeh King, a far-right activist who is currently deputy mayor of Jerusalem, told the New York Times last week that installing “layers of Jews” throughout East Jerusalem is specifically aimed at making its division impossible. “If we will not be in big numbers and if we will not be at the right places in strategic areas in East Jerusalem,” he said, then future peace negotiators “will try to divide Jerusalem and to give part of Jerusalem to our enemy.”
Naturally, the Palestinians who have lived there since the 1950s strongly oppose these attempts to evict them. The Sheikh Jarrah case has gone all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court, which was originally scheduled to announce its ruling on May 10.
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Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
That these looming evictions could spark wider unrest was entirely foreseeable. On May 4, Daniel Seidemann observed on Twitter that the two “radioactive” issues of Jerusalem and displacement, which are combined in Sheikh Jarrah, “go to the core of Palestinians and Israelis identity,” and warned they could prove explosive.
And sure enough, they did.
To avoid further inflaming the situation, the Supreme Court delayed its ruling the day before it was scheduled, but by that point it was too late. Demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah already included violent clashes with police and extreme right-wing Israeli activists had come to provoke the clashes further.
Damascus Gate
Meanwhile, Damascus Gate, at the northern end of the old city, also became the site of recurrent protests and police crackdowns in recent weeks. During the month of Ramadan, Muslims in Jerusalem often gather on the steps surrounding the Damascus Gate plaza in the evenings as they break their fast.
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Amir Levy/Getty Images
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Amir Levy/Getty Images
But Israeli police limited such gatherings this year for fear of unrest, erecting barriers on the steps to prevent large gatherings. Many came anyway, and on successive nights throughout Ramadan, Israeli police drove them away using stun grenades and other heavy-handed tactics. The police then made an about-face, removing the barriers, but the images of ongoing clashes had already fueled tensions.
Al-Aqsa Mosque
The tension reached its apex in and around al-Aqsa Mosque. Starting in particular during Laylat al-Qadr, one of the holiest nights of Ramadan, and increasing in the following two days, Palestinian demonstrations there had joined those in Sheikh Jarrah and Damascus Gate, and amassed rocks and other simple projectiles in the mosque, in part in preparation for expected confrontations with right-wing Jewish activists who were scheduled to visit Temple Mount.
Israeli police, in a remarkable move — seen by many Israelis as an astounding error and by many Palestinians as a deliberate provocation — entered the mosque itself, during Ramadan, throwing stun grenades and making arrests. More than 200 Palestinians were reportedly injured along with 17 Israeli police officers, in images that reverberated across the Muslim world.
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Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
On their own, the Sheikh Jarrah evictions touched on fundamental Palestinian fears, evoking the legacy of the Nakba, the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the 1948 war.
Combined with the simmering tensions fueled by the Damascus Gate crackdowns and then images of a violent police raid on al-Aqsa, a central religious and national symbol, Palestinians across the West Bank, Jerusalem, Israel, and Gaza shared a sense of national and religious outrage.
And then Hamas got involved.
Unrest in Jerusalem turns into a war in Gaza
On the evening of May 10, Hamas issued an ultimatum to Israel to withdraw, by 6 pm, all police from Haram al-Sharif. This was a brazen move, meant as a show of force toward its far stronger enemy. And just after 6 pm, Hamas followed through on its threat, launching six rockets toward Jerusalem.
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Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Up to that point, the younger, grassroots demonstrators in Jerusalem had dominated events, with the main Palestinian political factions — Fatah, the secular party that, through the Palestinian Authority, governs enclaves in the West Bank (though Israel remains in control of most of the territory) and Hamas — noticeably absent.
By launching these rockets, Hamas placed itself back at the center of events, attempting to co-opt Palestinians’ anger and portray itself as the defender of al-Aqsa, a Muslim symbol that Hamas, an Islamist movement, is keen to highlight.
Hamas’s rivalry with Fatah may have also played a role here. In January, the Palestinian Authority announced it would hold elections this summer for the first time since 2006. These would have included both Fatah, led by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, and Hamas, as well as other smaller Palestinian factions.
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Hazem Bader/AFP via Getty Images
But on April 26, Abbas, fearing he would lose, canceled the elections. That left Hamas no political process through which it could gain power in the West Bank, and may have pushed it to seek other means to capture attention on the Palestinian national stage, showing its relevance and the irrelevance of Fatah.
Israel then responded to those rockets with more than 100 airstrikes on Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (another Islamist militant group active in Gaza) targets. Twenty-four Palestinians were killed, including nine children, though Israel claims that six of the children were killed by rockets fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad that fell short of their target.
The following night, Hamas surprised Israel with its ability to launch large numbers of rockets to far greater effective range than in the past, putting most of the Israeli population under fire. A few rockets got through Israel’s Iron Dome defense system and hit Israeli cities.
The Israeli response was been massive and overwhelming, killing more than 200 Palestinians, including many civilians and more than two dozen children, in Gaza, where residents have little refuge; 13 Israelis were killed by rockets and missiles fired from Gaza.
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Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images
This violence all takes place against the backdrop of a longer conflict that has seethed between Israel and Hamas.
In 2005, Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip, as part of its “Disengagement” from Gaza and the Northern West Bank. Hamas subsequently won the Palestinian elections in 2006 and took sole control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, expelling forces of the Fateh-led Palestinian Authority. Israel placed intense restrictions on the movement of people and goods in and out of the territory, and Egypt, which borders Gaza from the south, followed suit.
Since then, three devastating wars between Israel and Hamas and the crushing blockade have left Gaza in a state of deep humanitarian crisis (for more on the situation in Gaza, see this report we co-authored with Hady Amr and Ilan Goldenberg in 2018). The crisis was deepened further this year by the coronavirus pandemic.
The past year has seen efforts to improve the economic situation, especially in the energy sector, with support from the Palestinian Authority and Qatar, and with Israel’s and Hamas’s tacit cooperation, but the humanitarian situation and the prospects for about 2 million Gazans remained very grim even before the latest fighting began.
None of this will be solved by the ceasefire.
What happens now?
Recent weeks have blurred the lines used for decades to delineate this conflict.
Some aspects of the violence are horrifyingly familiar, of course: This is the fourth major conflict between Israel and Hamas since 2006, with Israeli strikes causing mass devastation in Gaza each time.
But in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Israel itself, Palestinians who have long been divided by their physical geography and by the specific circumstances experienced in those different places are mobilizing in ways not seen in decades, including in a general strike on Tuesday that took place across all these territories.
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Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images
The international perception of Israel’s role in this violence has also shifted, as solidarity with Palestinians grows among Democratic leaders and constituencies in the United States.
These changes mark a departure from previous conflicts, but they do not, in and of themselves, alter the fundamental dynamics between the main players.
Hamas remains entrenched in the Gaza Strip, in full control of the area but with little prospect of extending its power to the West Bank. Israel remains adamant, and is even emboldened, in its desire to block Hamas’s ability to arm itself — meaning that its blockade of the Gaza Strip will likely continue. And Palestinians continue to face varied forms of political fragmentation and discrimination in Jerusalem, in the West Bank, and within Israel, though in very different ways.
So while the fire may cease, the underlying conditions that sparked it remain unsolved.
There are no easy fixes in the short term, but a lot can still be done. The Israel-Hamas stalemate is deeply entrenched, but as we argued with colleagues in 2018, there is a chance to change it, modestly but meaningfully, through tacit understandings among Israel, the PA, and Hamas, with support from the US, Israel, Egypt, and the UN Special Representative in Jerusalem.
The broader context, detailed above, would require much more: a real shift of Israeli policy on the Palestinian issue writ large, and a Palestinian leadership able and willing to put its own affairs in order and to deal with Israel productively.
Kevin Huggard is a senior research assistant at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Natan Sachs is the director of the center.