Newsletter: Amid the Israel-Gaza war, good opinion journalism promotes empathy for innocents

Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, and it is Saturday, Dec. 2, 2023. Let’s look back at the week in Opinion.

An informed, lucid argument doesn’t change minds the way it used to, and that’s especially true of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack didn’t change this, and as The Times’ letters editor, I have a pretty good view of trends in argumentation.

So, in this era of calcified opinions, how useful is it for a publication such as the Los Angeles Times to publish opinion pieces on a topic when they’re destined not to move the needle much? That depends. If the goal is always to show why one side is wrong and the other is correct, then you have your work cut out for you. If, however, you set out to elicit empathy for the very real people caught in the conflict who had no choice in the matter, you can do a lot of good. In that regard, I feel The Times’ opinion section has done important work during this war.

Consider the op-ed piece this week by Ghassan Bisharat, a former Cal State Los Angeles political scientist, who wrote of the lessons his parents imparted as Palestinians made refugees by Israel in 1948. Their experiences, he said, forced him to see through the ideology foisted upon his family by oppression and view all other people, even Israeli soldiers, as humans deserving of kindness.

Also consider another op-ed piece this week by educational anthropologist Rosalie Metro, who relays her experience teaching young Palestinian children in a refugee camp in Lebanon who had been conditioned to want to fight Israelis. Her time there helped teach her the importance of using nuance and history to break dangerous “us versus them” narratives.

Also recall the piece last month by a former tech worker in the Gaza Strip expressing anguish over the deaths of her former colleagues and the destruction of what they had built before Oct. 7 under a crushing Israeli embargo. Or the op-ed article from October by a rabbi with young children forced to explain the horror of Hamas’ attack and what life will be like for relatives and other loved ones in Israel.

These opinion pieces don’t ask you to take a side or dramatically alter your thinking; what they do require is your empathy for innocents caught in this madness. I hope you will continue reading.

The Black Los Angeles she grew up with is slipping away. L. Lo Sontag was raised in a part of L.A. inhabited mostly by African Americans who lived in tidy, middle-class neighborhoods. This was an area of nurses, clerks and mail carriers who earned enough to own their homes, Sontag writes. Things have changed: “Now, the Black poor in L.A. either must take their Section 8 vouchers and live in the desert, where affordable housing can be found, or fall further into poverty, or leave.”

Who gets to live in L.A? A bold plan to create affordable housing has a serious flaw. Mayor Karen Bass’ initiative to streamline approvals for new multifamily housing has boosted the construction of affordable homes in Los Angeles. But housing policy advocate Maria Patiño Gutierrez notes a major discrepancy in the implementation: More than a third of the applications filed have been in South L.A., and many of those developments require the demolition of existing affordable units. Meanwhile, single-family neighborhoods, which tend to be wealthier, are exempt from the streamlined approvals process.

Why does Israel have so many Palestinians in detention and available to swap? The release of hostages held by Hamas has rightly been hailed around the world, but much less attention has been paid to the 180 Palestinians freed by Israel. Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, points out that Israel holds more than 7,000 Palestinians in its custody, most of whom have never been convicted of a crime. That’s because of an Israeli military justice system that applies to Palestinians in occupied territories, which is thoroughly different from the civil system that oversees Israeli settlers in those same areas.

OpenAI’s drama marks a new and scary era in artificial intelligence. Read this from MIT professors Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson and weep — or at least start planning for the (very grim) future: “Sam Altman’s dismissal and rapid reinstatement as CEO of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, confirms that the future of AI is firmly in the hands of people focused on speed and profits, at the expense of all else. This elite will now impose their vision for technology on the rest of humanity. Most of us will not enjoy the consequences.”

Trump’s plan to subvert American democracy is on the record. Will Republican voters care? The former president is talking about illegal immigration as “poisoning the blood of our country” and his opponents as “vermin.” Journalists have rightly sounded the alarm over a man using Nazi language closing in on the 2024 Republican nomination, but columnist Robin Abcarian says there may be a problem with that: Many people might actually “think a strongman with protectionist impulses, racist policies and contempt for the rule of law is just what America needs.”

More from this week in opinion

From our columnists

• Jonah Goldberg: Has the Democratic Party been led astray by progressive activists?
• Jean Guerrero: I stayed off social media for just one week and rediscovered awe
• LZ Granderson: How do you get to an NCAA bowl game? Not just practice, practice, practice

From the Op-Ed desk

• Here are seven ways the U.S. can push Israel toward a cease-fire in Gaza
• Can Hollywood’s new SAG-AFTRA contract hold AI at bay?
• Saying goodbye to Kissinger the criminal

From the editorial board

• The demise of liberal arts? Students lose when colleges trade humanities for STEM
• L.A. needs a better plan to crack down on illegal Airbnbs and short-term rentals
• Derek Chauvin’s stabbing is an indictment of the U.S. prison system

Letters to the Editor

• Is Israel committing genocide? Most of these readers emphatically say no
• USC’s indefensible suspension of a professor who spoke out against Hamas
• Not all e-bikes are alike. Electric motorbikes don’t belong on beach paths