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First of all, I’m very eager to read the brand new Equator magazine. It’s the product of several brilliant minds, including Pankaj Mishra, Mohsin Hamid, Nesrine Malik, Samanth Subramanian, and Suzy Hansen, with editing by former Guardian long reads creator Jonathan Shainin. Here is a portion of the journal’s opening manifesto:
In the winter of 2023, watching the images coming out of Gaza, many of us felt we were quietly going mad. Nothing, it seemed, could be done to stop the atrocity whose death toll mounted every day. Western leaders embraced the perpetrators of this unfolding genocide, while forcefully repressing their own citizens’ peaceful protests against starvation and ethnic cleansing.
It was during this moment of moral despair that a small group of writers and editors came together. We did so, initially, to preserve our own sanity by seeking a temporary refuge from the regime of censorship and equivocation at so many prestigious periodicals. We began to imagine a new cultural venture, one that rejects the nihilistic idea that the powerful do what they please, and success is the only measure of moral virtue.
The genocide in Gaza has destroyed what remains of the illusion that the West should determine the future for the rest of the world. The United States and its satellites, having taken the centre stage of history to great fanfare after the fall of the Soviet Union, are now exiting in disgrace. A profound disorientation is the fate of the intellectual class that was created and sustained by the ‘American Century’. A legacy media whose authority to narrate the world depends on Western assumptions of omniscience is now lost in a ruin of shattered concepts.
After years spent working as editors and writers in these institutions, we have witnessed their accelerating moral and intellectual decline firsthand. They have met an increasingly globalised and interconnected world with boilerplate journalism, facile binaries, and an invincible ignorance of other societies and cultures. Equator is founded on our conviction that these storied titles of the Anglophone West cannot be internally reformed, nor redeemed by their periodic U-turns and belated mea culpas. The time has come to create something new.
As an American, I hope they are wrong that our civilization belongs entirely to the past, but I’m very interested to see what they will have to say.
The world breathes a sigh of relief and then holds its breath again as the ceasefire takes hold in Gaza. All people of conscience sincerely hope this is the end of one of the greatest catastrophes of our lifetimes. It is also only the beginning: Israel has left so much of Gaza virtually uninhabitable, and rebuilding will be arduous; Hamas is apparently trying to reassert control among the rubble. The intense moment of war and massacre may have passed, but the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza and on the West Bank is not over. One thing I feel fairly certain of is that Israel’s standing in the world, including its perception among Americans, will never be the same: its image is forever stained. I also regret to say that antisemitism has likely returned as a major political force in world affairs. I think we will look back at this chapter of human history and note that the really dark times began with October 7th and the destruction of Gaza: It has broken something in the world.
We are still learning about the circumstances in which the ceasefire was negotiated, but one report from NBC cites the Israeli strikes on Qatar as the turning point for the Trump administration. No one seems to have remarked on how perverse this is. The IDF could massacre and starve Palestinian civilians every day for two years, but that was never a red line. Only when the interests of this fat little Gulf ally, who, by the way, is quite generous in Washington DC, came into question, did it finally end. At the point when the strikes on Qatar came, they looked like just another Israeli outrage, another piece of unhinged aggression from a country gone mad. But attempting to kill Hamas’s leadership, without inflicting massive suffering on civilians, was actually the more moral course the war could have taken. The assassination of prominent Hamas officials who planned or had knowledge of the October 7th attacks does not seem unjust to me. Revoking the de facto legitimacy of Hamas seems like part of a reasonable response to October 7th. But that’s not what Israel did; by slaughtering countless Palestinians and then negotiating with Hamas, they accepted and, in fact, cemented Hamas’s status as legitimate leaders of the Palestinian people. Imagine if Israel had taken a more limited and restrained campaign? But it wasn’t possible considering what Israeli society has become. It was clear what this war would be from the moment it started. The only consolation is that it fell short of my worst fears, which involved the wholesale ethnic cleansing of the strip.