We are living through an age of extraordinarily rapid transformation—driven both by technology and by the changing nature of human relationships. More people are now moving from the place where they were born to somewhere else than at any other time in modern history. Never before have so many people found themselves in close, even intimate, contact with strangers.
In Europe, the largest flows come from sub-Saharan Africa, though certainly not only from there. In the United States, they come from across Latin America. But look closely at the southern border of Texas and you will also see Chinese immigrants, even Afghans, arriving there. This is an entirely new reality. Most of these people are climate or economic migrants, suddenly coming face to face—in ever greater numbers—with people very different from themselves.
I was born in Minnesota. I grew up in Willmar, a town of about 20,000 people just outside Minneapolis. For years, it was the place I always returned to visit my family. Until the early 2000s, when I lost both my parents, its population was 99.8 percent white, mostly Catholics of German or Scandinavian descent, along with a couple of Jewish families, including two of my uncles and aunts.
At a family gathering in Minneapolis in the late 1970s, one of my aunts took me aside to tell me something that must have seemed enormously important to her. She had been shopping at her usual grocery store when, for the first time in her life, she heard someone speaking Spanish. It was her first encounter with “the other.” She never forgot it. Neither did I.
I returned to Willmar a few years ago and wrote a long report after my aunt and uncle had died. By then, 50 percent of the population was Hispanic or Somali. Not 5 percent. Not 15 percent. Exactly half the community.
The number of profoundly different people now sharing the same space has grown exponentially. What happened in Willmar can be seen in thousands of small towns across the Western world. And that brings me to Itamar Ben-Gvir’s 2022 election campaign in Israel, when the future cabinet minister had his most powerful slogan displayed on buses across the country: “Who is the landlord here?”
That is the question many people around the world are now asking: Who does this country really belong to?
Is America a white Christian nation? It is hardly a coincidence that these social upheavals are occurring just as the United States is making the transition from a white Christian majority to a majority-minority country. When that happens, societies begin to experience a loss of trust. And as the traditional social structure weakens, social media platforms rush in to fill the vacuum—amplifying anger to its maximum intensity and generating an astonishing number of conspiracy theories, almost all of them centered on “the other.”
It is a volatile and dangerous mixture. And today it has become the fuel of political discourse.
Given the pressures already building in America—and elsewhere—we might well have found ourselves inside a pressure cooker even without social media. But Mark Zuckerberg played a decisive role in this social transformation. He was the cook who, at a certain point, turned the heat all the way up.
Then Donald Trump arrived. He took the lid off the pressure cooker and made it possible, legitimate and even profitable to say and do things to other people that no one before him had dared to say or do. His strategy became a kind of handbook for Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage and Viktor Orbán while he was in power.
Transparency and trust are the two pillars on which every democracy rests. Without transparency, we cannot know where we are going. Without trust, we cannot move in that direction together.
Today we urgently need to make consequential and courageous choices. But unless we can make them together, we will be defeated before we even begin. The challenge is to repair and restore both transparency and trust. That will not be easy in the current climate. Social media are not going away, and I doubt that Facebook will suddenly decide to take responsibility for its actions.
We need a fundamentally different approach. We need to identify the antibodies that can protect people from these dynamics and give citizens a kind of cognitive immunity. Because we cannot simply wait for a world in which social media eventually disappear.
That is why it is essential to start teaching civics again: the history of our institutions, how the justice system works, how politics works and what powers a president does—and does not—possess. We must also restore an emphasis on ethics, wherever people develop their moral framework. Synagogue, church, mosque or temple—every faith has its own version of the Golden Rule, and each revolves around an ethical understanding of how we should treat one another.
We need to recover a strong set of shared values. And I say this with the challenge of artificial intelligence very much in mind.
Ultimately, it comes down to a simple formula: we must build a world in which people can live in communities where they feel connected, respected and protected. That is where people come to understand their own value while also learning to respect the rules.
Trump has established entirely new standards. Politicians today are divided into two categories: Donald Trump, who is allowed to get away with anything, and everyone who is not Donald Trump.
The good news is that God made only one of him.
I have followed Israeli politics very closely for many years, and it often reminds me of the relationship between Off-Broadway and Broadway. A political idea is first tested on a small stage, in an Off-Broadway theater, before being presented to the larger Broadway audience.
These experiments have ranged from hijacking airplanes to building walls. If we look at recent history, we can see many trends first appearing in miniature in Israel before being reproduced elsewhere on a much larger scale.
The latest is the way democratically elected parties use democracy itself to subvert democracy’s basic rules. That is what has been happening in Israel since the end of 2022, when the country’s right joined forces with its ultranationalist far right to form a governing coalition. That alliance established an agenda without precedent in Israel’s history.
If we go back to the Zionist movement of the 1920s, we find that it still took for granted the possibility of a genuine partner—the Palestinians—with whom the land would ultimately be shared. From the Balfour Declaration in 1917 through the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, the idea of sharing the land ran through the history of the relationship between these two peoples. It endured many shocks and setbacks, of course. But the fundamental premise—that Israel was one partner within a territory that would somehow have to be shared—never entirely disappeared.
The agreement drawn up by the coalition that came to power in 2022 marked the end of that premise. Its goal was to extend Israeli sovereignty or control from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
But achieving an objective with no real precedent in Israel’s history required removing the one institution standing between ambition and implementation: the Supreme Court. And that was merely the first local step toward the messianic, nationalist agenda whose global implications we are now witnessing.
Several forces, each of which began with a different agenda, converged inside this coalition.
For Benjamin Netanyahu, the most urgent objective was to stay out of prison. He was desperate enough to form a coalition with people who had never before been considered suitable for positions of such enormous power. Giving control over the police and key national security portfolios to figures such as Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich was the price he was prepared to pay to avoid a corruption conviction.
Then there is the ideological wing of Netanyahu’s party, supported by a movement of far-right American Jews and connected to a broader global libertarian movement. It believes that executive power should not be constrained by the courts or, more generally, by the rule of law.
The third force is the messianic movement: Jewish supremacists who had never held real power and who can now indulge their dream of controlling all the land between the river and the sea.
How can democracy be used to overturn the very foundations of democracy—not only in Israel, but also in the United States and Europe? That question demands an immense amount of reflection. It may even be impossible to answer fully.
There are now many entrepreneurs who are furious about the direction of the United States. They belong to a group we might call “wound collectors”: people waiting for any pretext to spread anger, resentment and abuse. Many people are losing their jobs as a result of this movement. Many are being excluded, ostracized or canceled. This entrepreneurship of outrage has become enormously powerful, and it inflicts real damage on real people.
Nature has always provided me with useful models for understanding society. There is something I learned in Brazil that has since become one of my central metaphors. It is the story of the mangroves.
Mangroves grow along coastlines, between land and sea. They filter toxins and help protect communities against storms. In Indonesia, the towns that preserved their mangrove forests were among those partially shielded from the full fury of the tsunami.
Mangroves also provide an ideal nursery for fish, including larger species that can enter their protected waters to feed. And they help bind the land together.
The worst thing that can happen to a society is for it to lose its mangroves.
And we must admit that many of the mangroves in our social ecosystem have disappeared.
Shame was once a mangrove. There was a time when, if you were running for president of the United States and had unprotected sex with a porn star while your wife was at home with your newborn son, you would have had only one option: hide somewhere and withdraw from the presidential race.
Shame as a mangrove.
Accountability is another mangrove. If you have the honor of serving as a justice on the United States Supreme Court while your wife publicly flies an upside-down American flag in support of those who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the responsible thing to do is resign.
Local newspapers were mangroves as well. They filtered information coming from major national outlets such as Fox News or MSNBC, helping to protect their communities from the toxins of propaganda. But that precious network of local journalism has largely vanished.
The norms governing coexistence were also mangroves: the shared understanding of what we are allowed to do, what we should do and how we are expected to behave toward one another.
And finally, truth itself was a fundamental mangrove. It was once much harder for someone to wake up one morning and tell an outrageous lie without being discredited.
One of the most striking examples I can recall involved an American football player who nearly died on the field after a violent collision caused him to suffer cardiac arrest. He had not even reached the hospital before the internet was flooded with reports claiming, with absolute certainty and no evidence whatsoever, that the incident had been caused by his Covid vaccination.
That is insane.
We once had mangroves capable of filtering these toxins and contaminants. They prevented the formation of media storms that feed the ugliest forms of populism. They created safe spaces where young people could grow up with some protection from these threats.
We have lost too many of those mangroves, and that is very bad news.
The good news is that mangroves can be restored. It is extremely difficult, but it is possible. In nature, it requires careful planting that respects the surrounding ecosystem. The same can be done in society.
But there is one essential condition: the political incentives must be right.
As we sometimes say, you have to put the cheese back in the center. Today the cheese has been placed on the far right or the far left. If you move the cheese back to the center, the mouse will have to move with it. The widening gulf between the far right and the far left is not accidental. It is intentional.
We must therefore be prepared to confront the social media problem. We must be determined to rebuild an economic agenda from the bottom up and bring it back to the political center. And we must be clear and serious in confronting climate change, because if we lose control of that challenge, we will be swept away.
There are many ways to rebuild society’s mangroves. But we must ensure that the political incentives are healthy and that there is a deep, sustained commitment to doing the work. Change the incentives and you will change the behavior.
At the moment, we have created an overwhelming number of incentives pushing people toward the extremes. We should not be surprised that this is where they go.
It may already be too late to restore the mangroves in Israel. Perhaps too many Palestinians have died. Perhaps Israel has suffered too many attacks. Perhaps too much blood has been shed. Perhaps too many illegal settlements have been built. Perhaps it really is too late to achieve reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.
I honestly do not know.
But I do know one thing: if that is the case, we must prepare ourselves for an endless war.
Looking ahead, I see only two possible paths. Either we enter a new phase with radically new and unprecedented ideas, or we return to the conditions of 1947—this time armed with extraordinarily efficient modern weapons capable of annihilating the enemy.
Anyone who believes there is a stable equilibrium in which each side can obtain everything it dreams of is living in a fantasy. At this point, that fantasy may even include the two-state solution.
But if the two-state solution retains even a 5 percent chance of becoming reality—and I cannot pretend to know how—then we have a duty to invest 100 percent of our energy in turning that 5 percent possibility into something real.
The alternative is eternal war. A war that will not only destroy both peoples, but will eventually drag the entire region down with them. And as we are already seeing, it could very easily trigger a much larger conflict extending far beyond the Middle East.
At the moment, even suggesting such a conversation can seem unrealistic. But I am old enough to have witnessed situations that appeared every bit as hopeless, and then to have witnessed the Oslo Accords.
It ultimately comes down to decisions. It requires people willing to bring the issue back into the realm of negotiation and to overturn the first rule of Middle Eastern politics: “The extremists go all the way, and the moderates go away.”
We must become fanatics for moderation—at least as fanatical about it as I am. We must be prepared to do whatever it takes to ensure that this time it is the moderates who go all the way.
Remember the millions of Israelis who took to the streets to protest against Netanyahu. They did so with extraordinary passion, and in the end they achieved meaningful results. What we need now is a massive, irrepressible wave of moderation. But the same must also happen among Palestinians.
Otherwise, there will be war until the end of time.
I am no longer interested in endlessly describing the problem. We should talk only about solutions. Hamas and Netanyahu are accomplices in perpetuating this catastrophe.
If the conflict ended now, the outrage industry would be deprived of its oxygen and many of these tensions would begin to dissipate. Antisemitism has become fashionable again because it feeds on a climate of hatred. It is an ancient phenomenon returning in a familiar form, through slogans suggesting that Jews are terrible people committing genocide.
End the war and watch how quickly much of that rhetoric begins to fade.
This war is terrible for everyone manning the barricades. Once you become part of that ecosystem, you become one of its victims. It does not matter whether you are Jewish, Palestinian or a progressive political leader. Faced with a human tragedy involving so many civilian casualties, the only genuine turning point is to end the war.
Once the war ends, 95 percent of the surrounding noise will disappear.
I strongly support protests denouncing civilian casualties. But we must keep things in perspective. Hamas committed a horrific act and triggered Israel’s response. Does what happened on October 7 justify Israel killing all those civilians?
Of course not.
But protesters must also be clear-eyed and realistic about the solution they are advocating. Do they want a Palestine “from the river to the sea”? What does that mean? Does it mean refusing to recognize Israel?
Protesters often respond that “from the river to the sea” does not imply denying Israel’s rights. My advice is simple: if a protest slogan requires 15 minutes to explain, you probably need a different slogan.
Here is one you can have for free: Two states for two peoples.
It is simpler, more direct and much less vulnerable to dangerous misinterpretation.
I support pro-Palestinian protests. But we must be serious. That means, among other things, giving Gazans a voice. We must listen to their stories and understand how many of them hate Hamas and how much they have suffered because of Hamas.
That would be another important step.
But if you ask me how all this is going to end, I do not have the slightest idea.
