Two marches will assemble in central London tomorrow. One is championing the rights of Palestinians and commemorating 78 years of displacement and occupation; the other, organised by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, is calling on supporters to ‘unite the West’ against Islam and immigration. Yet only the former has been widely described in the British media as a ‘hate march’. According to the Nexis database, there were only 29 stories referring to ‘hate marches’ between 1 January 1994 and 7 October 2023. Since then, 3152 stories have used the term, most of them focused on pro-Palestine protests. In other words, despite regular demonstrations of racism, hate, discrimination and bigotry on the world’s streets, more than 99 per cent of stories that mention ‘hate marches’ have been published since 7 October 2023 and have focused on anti-racist protesters.
A hantavirus outbreak is extremely unexpected. Part of the confusion in press coverage has arisen from the messiness of viral classification. Although virologists do their best to categorise viruses into the traditional hierarchies of taxonomy – species, genus, family – the results are rarely satisfactory. Hantaviruses are a fairly diverse group of related viruses containing at least twenty species, only some of which can infect humans, and causing quite different diseases when they do. The natural hosts for all those viruses are thought to be rodents. After the passengers on the Hondius were informed in early May that the authorities suspected hantavirus, at least one hoped that it meant the ship was rat-infested; the alternative was that the outbreak was of the Andes virus, the only hantavirus species believed to be capable of human-to-human transmission.
The Beersheba boarding school for boys in 1935, twelve years before Salman Abu Sitta was a student there.
My life’s journey, through many countries as a foreigner, should end where it started, at Ma’in Abu Sitta. David Ben-Gurion, who led the forces that destroyed my village and sent me into exile, is buried in my hometown. And I wish to be buried in my birthplace.
To understand Walter Benjamin’s life, it is best to begin with his death. Attempting to flee Nazi-occupied France, he died by suicide on 26 September 1940, in the village of Portbou, Catalonia. Born into a wealthy Berlin family in 1892, he had been a prodigious intellectual force as a student, anti-war activist and journalist. After Hitler came to power in 1933, however, he became an impoverished and isolated exile in Paris, writing and researching at the Bibliothèque Nationale.
By now, a production of John Adams’s opera The Death of Klinghoffer presumes its own opposition. At the Teatro del Maggio Musicale in Florence last month, however, the terms of that opposition had shifted: the protesters weren’t the work’s habitual antagonists, demonstrating under the misapprehension that the opera is antisemitic or glorifies terrorism. They were activists from Firenze per la Palestina.
In the month since the ceasefire on 8 April, Trump’s rhetoric has swung erratically between talk of total victory and apocalyptic ultimatums (‘a whole civilisation will die tonight’), between broadcasting imminent peace and the sudden withdrawal of proposals. On 1 May, Trump declared the war ‘terminated’, only to announce Project Freedom on 4 May to forcibly reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Less than 24 hours later he pulled the plug.
‘The Edges V’ by Lilly Fenichel, 1984 (Gift of Joyce Fitz)
I rediscovered the power of abstract painting on a trip to New Mexico. From high above Albuquerque, the tawny, light-reflecting landscape stretched below the solarised blue, with long straight highways looking as if they’d been scratched out by a fingernail. Mountain ranges came into view, and discrete volcanic cones, and I saw the terminus of the Sangre de Cristo where it met the plain.