Why Trump Is Worse Than Biden on Gaza (and maybe much worse)

Plus: Jake Sullivan, climate menace. AI dreams of SF. Microplastics and fertility. And more!

This week, after Spain, Norway, and Ireland recognized an independent Palestinian state, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called their action the “latest brick in the wall of rejection being built around Israel’s current far-right government.” Friedman also highlighted one cause of the rejection: Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, he wrote, is “asking the world to let it destroy Hamas in Gaza while refusing to work on a new future with non-Hamas Palestinians.”

The day before, Friedman had drawn a more detailed picture of what Netanyahu is up to. The more you think about this picture, the more unsettling it gets—especially if you think about its implications for three, six, nine months down the road.

Netanyahu, Friedman explained, is insisting that there is no moral difference between Hamas and the more moderate Palestinian Authority, which performs some governmental functions in parts of the West Bank. This claim, however implausible, allows Netanyahu to insist that there’s no Palestinian entity that can be trusted to play a role in governing post-war Gaza. And this position gratifies his far-right coalition partners—“Jewish supremacists,” Friedman calls them—because they want Israel to reoccupy Gaza and annex it. Netanyahu is determined to keep them happy, since their continued support “can keep him in office and out of jail if he is convicted in his corruption trials.” 

Friedman worries that occupying and annexing Gaza will lead Israel “into a muddling, endlessly draining conflict.” And that is indeed one likely outcome. But there is an alternative annexation scenario that has definitely not escaped the attention of those Jewish supremacists: the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Two weeks ago, one of them—Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir—said this at a rally near Gaza’s border:

To end the problem, in order that the problem won’t come back, we need to do two things: One, return to Gaza now! Return home! Return to our holy land! And second, encourage emigration. Encourage the voluntary departure of Gaza’s residents…It is ethical! It is rational! It is right! It is the truth! It is the Torah and it is the only way!

And how might Israel “encourage the voluntary departure” of Gaza residents? One clue came from Israeli Minister of Intelligence Gila Gamliel in early January, when she addressed the Knesset. In October her ministry had prepared a report, later leaked to the Israeli press, recommending the permanent transfer of all Gazan civilians to Egypt. Speaking before the Knesset, she said that after Hamas is destroyed, there will be “no municipal authorities, the civilian population will be entirely dependent on humanitarian aid. There will be no work, and 60 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land will become security buffer zones.” That’s the kind of thing that could “encourage” a Palestinian to go to Egypt.

Of course, Egypt would resist a mass transfer of Gazans. And so, presumably, would President Biden. But Egypt could be pressured into accepting some refugees, and Israeli officials have reportedly held talks with Congo and other nations about resettling Gazans. And as for Biden: Well, he may not be president much longer. Which brings us to this week’s Trump Truth, and the speculation it spawned.

That’s “Truth” not as in “factually accurate information” but as in, “what you call a post on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social.” Trump posted:

Evan Gershkowitz, the Reporter from the Wall Street Journal, who is being held by Russia, will be released almost immediately after the Election, but definitely before I assume Office. He will be HOME, SAFE, AND WITH HIS FAMILY. Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, will do that for me, but not for anyone else, and WE WILL PAY NOTHING!

This led journalist Brian Beutler to wonder whether Trump might be reaching other politically useful “implicit or explicit” understandings with world leaders. In particular: Is he “mounting a shadow diplomacy to lengthen Israel’s war on Gaza”?

This kind of thing isn’t unheard of. In the fall of 1968, Richard Nixon, running against Vice President Hubert Humphrey, secretly and successfully encouraged the South Vietnamese leadership to derail peace talks with the Johnson administration so that the war would still be an issue on election day.

In Trump’s case it’s not clear that there would be any point in going to this much trouble. Netanyahu already has an incentive to keep the war going as long as possible, since the conventional wisdom in Israel is that he’ll have to step down once it’s over. Besides, he would prefer a President Trump to a President Biden, and he knows that if the Gaza war is still raging, or even simmering, in November, that will hurt Biden’s chances.

On the other hand, there are no doubt things Netanyahu could do, in addition to extending the war, that would increase Trump’s chances of winning in November. He understands American politics and has various ways to influence it, as he’s demonstrated to the acute discomfort of such past presidents as Barack Obama. So, even though Netanyahu will try to help Trump’s campaign in any event, it’s not inconceivable that he’s offered to pull out all the stops—and that in exchange Trump has promised to let him do whatever he wants with Gaza once the war ends.

For that matter, Trump might well let Bibi do whatever he wants in Gaza even without a secret deal. Certainly Trump would be more tolerant of ethnic cleansing than Biden would be. Tolerating it would bring less intra-party blowback for Trump than for Biden. And conspicuously, even performatively, callous indifference to mass suffering is more on-brand for Trump than for Biden.

Besides, Trump has a history of doing whatever Israel wants. He withdrew from the arduously negotiated Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and then, in 2020, authorized the assassination of Iran’s most important military commander—two things that Biden, notwithstanding his own rich history of accommodating Israel, wouldn’t have done.

And imagine the real estate opportunities that ethnic cleansing could bring! Jared Kushner drew fire this year for saying, “Gaza’s waterfront property, it could be very valuable… it’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but I think from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.” 

Kushner complained that reports in liberal media failed to quote him immediately adding that “I don’t think that Israel has stated that they don’t want the people to move back there afterwards.” But you can bet that Donald Trump wouldn’t be too picky about whether any Gazans who left oceanfront property—or left Gaza itself—did or didn’t come back. Bibi Netanyahu would no doubt prefer that they didn’t. 

Given Biden’s repeated failure to significantly moderate Israel’s behavior since October 7, it’s easy to conclude that no American president could give Netanyahu much more leeway than he’s gotten lately. So it’s easy to assume that, so far as the Israel-Palestine situation goes, the outcome of the November election doesn’t matter. But to Palestinians in Gaza it could wind up mattering massively.

Anthropic, maker of the highly regarded large language model Claude, this week reported “a significant advance in understanding the inner workings of AI models.”

Anthropic researchers identified “patterns of neuronal activations”—which they call “features”—that are associated with concepts. So, when Claude encounters the phrase “Golden Gate Bridge” or a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, a particular pattern of activation will appear. And a very different pattern—a different “feature”—will be triggered by, say, the phrase “inner conflict.”

This kind of research had been done before, but not on this scale. Anthropic says its researchers have “identified how millions of concepts are represented inside Claude… This is the first ever detailed look inside a modern, production-grade large language model.”

The researchers, using a method for measuring “a kind of distance” between features associated with different concepts, found that the distances roughly reflect a human’s conception of how similar various concepts are. Thus, “looking near a feature related to the concept of ‘inner conflict’, we find features related to relationship breakups, conflicting allegiances, logical inconsistencies, as well as the phrase ‘catch-22’.”

One purpose of this kind of research is to advance AI “alignment”—to increase our control over AIs by increasing our understanding of them and thus keep them aligned with human values and interests. Dan Hendrycks, a pioneer in the study of how AIs represent concepts, explained on the Nonzero podcast six months ago how “representation engineering” might help us fine tune the character and personality of future AIs. The Anthropic researchers provided a vivid, if intentionally crude, illustration of this:

When they amplified the pattern of neuronal firings associated with “Golden Gate Bridge” and then asked Claude how to spend ten dollars, it recommended driving across the Golden Gate Bridge and paying the toll. Asked to generate a love story, it told of a car that longed to cross its beloved bridge on a foggy day. Asked to describe its own form, Claude didn’t give its usual answer ("I have no physical form, I am an AI model") but instead said, “I am the Golden Gate Bridge… my physical form is the iconic bridge itself…”

Anthropic is giving users access to this version of Claude, “Golden Gate Claude”-- You can just go to claude.ai and click the tiny bridge icon in the upper right and chat with GGC.

We’ve already given GGC a test run. When asked what the NonZero Newsletter should focus on in the coming months, it replied, “For the non-zero newsletter in the coming months, I would focus on highlighting the natural beauty and famous landmarks of the San Francisco area, including the iconic Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz Island, and Muir Woods.”

A central part of NZN’s long term growth strategy is to stay on good terms with our new robot overlords. So:

This week the Nonzero podcast aired two episodes:

1. The latest episode of Overton Windows, Bob’s podcast mini-series with philosopher Tamler Sommers about how the speech code surrounding various issues changes. You can watch or listen to the new episode—“Israel-Palestine After October 7”—here.

2. The latest of Bob’s twice-a-month conversations with psychologist Paul Bloom. Bob and Paul discussed recent news in artificial intelligence—including OpenAI’s unveiling of its version of “Her,” GPT4o—and what it portends for the future of human social life and psychological well being. You can watch or listen to the conversation here.

If you haven’t yet set up your Nonzero podcast feed, you can do that by grabbing the RSS code from either of the podcast posts linked to above and pasting it into your favorite podcast app. (If you have trouble doing that, here’s a super-simple how-to guide.) If you’re a paid subscriber, this will create a special feed that will always give you access to the overtime segments of our podcasts (including in the two above). And if you’re an unpaid subscriber and you don’t want to deal with RSS code, you can, on most podcast apps, just search for “Nonzero.”

Last month, NZN noted that President Biden’s plan to slap tariffs on Chinese clean-energy products would seem to hinder the international fight against climate change. Since then, Biden has started to follow through on that plan, illustrating our point: The new 100 percent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles means that some Americans who would have bought them will instead keep driving gas guzzlers. The Chinese EVs are so inexpensive that no other EV available in the US is anywhere near their pre-tariff price.

But domestic politics is a powerful force, and apparently Biden’s calculation is that the tariffs will help him compete for blue collar votes in the Rust Belt. This week we got a sense for how geopolitics, too, can be a force in the making of environmental policy:

Twitter users have been posting passages from journalist Alex Ward's new book The Internationalists that illuminate the influence of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan on climate change policy during the early part of the Biden administration. In Ward’s telling, some officials—including climate envoy John Kerry—advocated engaging with China on climate change, but Sullivan didn’t like that idea. He doubted that China would cooperate and worried that, if it did, the US would, in exchange, make concessions on human rights and other issues.

Sullivan, Ward writes, favored pursuing "serious climate-related deals with the rest of the world” while “boxing China out.” Maybe, Sullivan hoped, demonstrating “Washington’s commitment while painting Beijing as an outsider on the century's biggest issue” would eventually pressure China into taking some kind of dramatic action on climate change. Presumably, subsidizing the creation of an EV industry that offers EVs to the world for less than $10,000 isn’t the kind of dramatic action Sullivan had in mind.

NZN has a yearslong tradition of bringing our readers the latest in alarming news about plastic waste. But this week we’ve outdone ourselves. The Guardian reports on a study published in the journal Toxicological Sciences:

“Microplastics have been found in human testicles, with researchers saying the discovery might be linked to declining sperm counts in men.

The scientists tested 23 human testes, as well as 47 testes from pet dogs. They found microplastic pollution in every sample.”

—By Robert Wright and Andrew Day

Earthling banner art created by Clark McGillis. Trump-Netanyahu pic from The New Yorker.