March 18, 2015

So What’s Next For Israel and Palestine?

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I thought all along that Benjamin Netanyahu was going to win this week’s election in Israel. I never wrote about it, but Mark Kleiman is my witness. My reasoning was simplistic: the polls were pretty close, and Netanyahu is a survivor. In a close race, he’d somehow figure out a way to pull out a win.

But yikes! I know Israeli politics is tough stuff, but I sure wasn’t prepared for the sheer ugliness of Netanyahu’s closing run. His speech before Congress turned out to be just a wan little warmup act. When things got down to the wire he flatly promised to keep the West Bank an occupied territory forever, and followed that up with dire warnings of Arabs “coming out in droves” to the polls. Even by Israeli standards this is sordid stuff.

I don’t follow Israeli-Palestinian politics closely anymore, having long since given up hope that either side is willing to make the compromises necessary for peace. But even to my unpracticed eye, this election seems to change things. Sure, no one ever believed Netanyahu was truly dedicated to a two-state solution in the first place, but at least it hung out there as a possibility. Now it’s gone. This will almost certainly strengthen Hamas and other hardline elements within the Palestinian movement, which in turn will justify ever tighter crackdowns by Israel. Is there any way this doesn’t end badly?

I just don’t see the endgame here for either side. Can someone enlighten me?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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