Turned on my phone after the holiday and was overwhelmed by the images of death and horror. My partner and I frantically text friends and loved ones to make sure they're okay. Everyone seems to have lost someone or knows someone who has. The loss, the tragedy—incomprehensible. 1/ There's also a deep sense that the left abroad has lost the values it was supposed to stand for. I thought we were leftists because we wanted a world without war, torture, the killing of families & children in their beds 2/

A few thoughts on the protests in Israel as they appear poised on the cusp of a new stage: The mobilizations are impressive, almost certainly the largest since 2011 social protests. Those drew from frustrated young middle-class people; these protests have brought in their parents, so to speak.

Talking with an activist friend in Jerusalem, they said they had never seen, in their years of activism, such numbers of far-right youth, some of them armed, storming the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah tonight. 1/ Jerusalem, of course, has always been a “flashpoint,” but over the last several years the street politics have changed for the worst in perceptible ways. An example…2/