What's Eating Our Kids?

The belief that the young need to toughen up has been around since Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden. In every generation we find society's elders bemoaning how the kids have got it easy. There are a number of reasons for this, from evolutionary psychology (the desire to see your offspring overcome obstacles and thrive) to the nostalgia of childhood, but the dominant factor, in terms of how it colours the narrative, is material. The steady improvement in standards of living over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has provided both the anecdotal frame and a ready explanation: the decadence of civilisation. The latter has an obviously reactionary timbre, hence youth is associated with a declining respect for both religious and secular authority and a general disregard for hierarchies of esteem (they even killed off Top of the Pops). But there is also a progressive variant of this that admonishes youth for its easy attraction to fashionable radicalism and utopian solutions (the Pied Piper of Islington North), insisting that the young must be properly educated before they can assume their civic responsibilities (i.e. moulded into ideological conformity).

In recent decades, this relational structure between the generations has started to break down, largely because the material basis has been eroded. The young can no longer expect to be better off than their parents at a similar age so the traditional deal - put up with the sermonising now for independence and bragging rights later - no longer seems acceptable. Interestingly, the response hasn't been open revolt by the young (yet) but anxiety among the older generations that a reckoning is coming. This is exhibited not only in the usual moral panics over antisocial behaviour, from loitering in parks to smoking weed in a built-up area, but in the historically unusual desire to infantilise young adults (there was an earlier vogue for this in late Victorian Britain that reflected the impact of early modernity). I reckon the reason why smashed avocado became a metonym for irresponsible youth is because it looks like baby food (and not just baby food but food that will toughen you up). Tropes such as the snowflake and boomerang kids suggest a regression to the hyper-emotionalism and physical security of childhood, but these are the product of a parental sensibility, not that of the child.

"Boomers don't want you to grow up because they fear payback" is a pretty useful thumbnail sketch for the present moment that in turn helps to explain the assumption of politicians that older voters want more crackdowns directed at the young. It also explains the liberal commentariat's belief that the political "youthquake" that raised its head in 2017 has been successfully sealed in its tomb by Labour's "adults". Obviously there's a class and race dimension to the nonsense over cannabis aromas, but the dominant theme is a creeping fear that the young may finally turn on their elders for robbing them of a future. So, who ya gonna call? Certainly not the Metropolitan Police. It might seem odd that at a time when policing has once more been shown to be a welcoming environment for racists, misogynists and murderous thugs that the rightwing press are concerned that it is becoming too "woke", but this is understandable if you look at the members of the force and think they appear to be getting younger.

Faced with this looming generational friction there is a ready appetite for morality tales that pin the blame not on political economy or selfish voters but on external factors. One particularly popular culprit is social media. After early panics about polarisation and filter bubbles, the focus has now shifted to the mental health of teenagers and the continuing perils of radicalisation (these days more about violent misogyny than Islamism, though you can never say that Michael Gove is not tenacious in his prejudices). If in the early days of social media the archetypal victim was a senior citizen sucked down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory by Facebook, the current icon is a teenage girl driven to self-harm by Instagram or TikTok. Just as that elderly relative had probably been listenting to shock-jocks and watching Fox News for years beforehand, so that teenage girl is probably a lot more savvy than you give her credit for.

There's something slightly weird in the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt obsessing about the mental health of teenage girls, particularly when he doubles down in the face of extensive critique of his method and interpretations. My point is not that he's being creepy, but that you wouldn't expect someone who made his name with a theory of moral foundations that was definitionally cross-generational to think social media should be assessed and judged purely through this one, narrow demographic. But Haidt's latest sally should be seen in the context of his last major work, 2018's The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, which was a much broader attack on what "wokeness" has subsequently become shorthand for, from safe spaces and trigger warnings to a general disregard for the wisdom of the ancients. In the view of Haidt and his co-author Greg Lukianoff, American campuses are producing ill-formed young adults. 

The liberal critique of infantilism might appear at odds with the conservative critique of feral youth, but what they share is a belief that the young have been insufficiently socialised. What neither is willing to acknowledge is that this apparent malfunctioning of a process that is as old as humanity can only be blamed on the older generation, given that it is they who do the socialising. Either parents have failed in their duties (and you will get this in a minor key from conservatives, though heavily class-inflected), or the state, as the agent that we collectively depute to manage that socialisation, has failed in its functions (again, another conservative minor key). But what isn't credible is the claim that the young themselves have an intrinsic deficiency that has either seen them balk at graduation to adulthood or made them particularly vulnerable to malign actors such as social media companies. If anything, the evidence points the other way. The young are frustrated that they can't get well-paid jobs or mortgages and they generally manage their use of new technology better than those who came to it late in life.

The idea that the young have gone bad also colours the current (very stupid) debates over so-called "artifical intelligence" (AI). On the one hand, large language models (LLMs) mean that anyone can now generate a high-quality essay or dissertation, so undermining the whole purpose of education as a selection mechanism. On the other hand, AI is going to automate all of those cognitive and service jobs that the young were being trained for. Even if both were true (they're not), it would simply shift further education to a reliance on in-person tutorials and oral exams, if only to reflect that the jobs of the future would necessarily be based on in-person interactions rather than writing. As ever, the anxiety here has two layers: the worry that the youth of tomorrow are going to be economically disempowered in a tech-driven dystopia, which might prompt a future revolution; and the suspicion that they might have it easy once all the boring jobs have been automated in a tech-driven utopia, which prompts a present resentment. 

What's eating our kids is capitalism. The good news is that capitalism's dynamism and volatility means that the current arrangements will not persist for long. The bad news is that our politics is geared to maintaining those arrangements, notably in respect of the rights of property and the privileging of business as a guide to the state. The tension between the two is obvious, and where that tension is most visible is not among the younger generation but among the older cohorts whose material self-interest is in maintenance but who see the effects on their children and grandchildren only too clearly. The natural response is for older people to try and secure their own children's futures, whether through inheritance or nepotism, though clearly both of these simply exacerbate generational inequality at the level of society. We have, in other words, a classic collective action problem: how do we reset our political economy? But just as the green transition is characterised by excessive talk and insufficient action, so addressing the social failings of capitalism is diverted into the distractions of social media and wokery.

Who Remembers the War?

The twentieth anniversary of the Iraq War has come round with neither George W Bush nor Tony Blair appearing in the dock of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. There's no statute of limitations on war crimes, a point that has been forcefully made to Vladimir Putin recently, but I think it's safe to say that "Dubya" and Tony aren't going to face charges this side of the grave. That the ICC's issue of an arrest warrant against the Russian President should occur within a week of the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq might appear like ironic timing, or just bad taste, but I think what it really emphasises is how that famous briefing attributed to Karl Rove still applies: "'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out." Or to put it in simpler terms, We'll do what we want and whatever we do is by definition legal. Judiciously ignoring Rove's point, the media has been full of lessons learned and advice on what the US and its allies should do to avoid similar misadventures in future, as if this were some corporate plus-delta exercise.

Stephen Wertheim, who has made a name for himself as an advocate of progressive realism, reckons that "the United States should disentangle itself from the Middle East, shift defense burdens to European allies, and seek competitive coexistence with China." But it won't do so because "Washington is still in thrall to primacy", a failing that he traces to the search for a new posture after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Writing of the authors of the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, he says: "The key, they reasoned, was to think and act preventively. Lacking challengers to balance against, the United States should keep new ones from emerging. It must work to dissuade “potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” To this end, the United States would maintain a massive military, sized to dwarf all others and capable of fighting two large wars at once. It would retain alliances and garrison troops in every region of the world that Washington considered to be strategically significant. It would, in short, replace balances of power with an American preponderance of power." 

The problem with this picture is that the network of garrison troops and the preponderance of military might had long been established. It wasn't a pivot towards a new post-Cold War strategy but a doubling-down on the global policing role formally pursued since 1945. Wertheim himself traces this strategy to 1940 in his book, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (you can read his original dissertation here), though even this shows the recurrent desire to identify a rupture in American foreign policy brought about by external factors, rather than the inexorable development of the logic of hegemony arising from the USA's geographical advantages and the rapid expansion of industrialisation after the Civil War. When viewed from the perspective of the economy and global finance, as in Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin's The Making of Global Capitalism, it becomes clearer that the hegemonic strategy in foreign policy goes back much further than World War II to the first era of globalisation which coincided with the USA's early experiments in imperialism during the Spanish-American War.

Wertheim noted in the Guardian recently that when President Biden spoke in support of Ukraine in Warsaw earlier this year, he declared: "The idea that over 100,000 forces would invade another country – since world war II, nothing like that has happened." As Wertheim inquired, "Did the Iraq war even happen?" This is a knowing reference to Jean Baudrillard's now famous provocation "The Gulf War Didn't Happen", in which the French philosophe noted that the one-sided reporting of that conflict and the reliance on the simulacra of modern media meant that we could have no meaningful understanding of the reality (a rapid massacre of Iraqi troops). According to Wertheim, "While Washington forgets, much more of the world remembers. The flagrant illegality of bypassing the United Nations: this happened. The attempt to legitimize “pre-emption” (really prevention, a warrant to invade countries that have no plans to attack anyone): this mattered, including by handing the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, a pretext he has used." Yet what the rest of the world remembers is not some exceptional abuse of authority by the US, that "flagrant illegality", but simply the normal exercise of power by the hegemon. After all, that was at the root of the contemporary scepticism.

Biden wasn't alone in mentally erasing Iraq. In calling for Vladimir Putin to be arraigned for war crimes Gordon Brown conveniently forgets his own role in voting for an illegal war (the very definition of a war crime). But outrage at this hypocrisy is as misplaced as questioning Churchill's endorsement of the RAF's nightime bomber raids over Germany in the Second World War, which had limited military utility but spread terror among the civilian population, or Truman's decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which probably spared US casualties from an invasion of the mainland but at the cost of the mass murder of Japanese civilians. This is what great powers do. Among the US foreign policy commentariat, for whom Thucydides is a touchstone, you can always find a parallel in the Greek's history of the Peloponnesian War, whether the "reckless audacity" of the Iraq invasion or the "trap" of  rising US-China competition, but the most useful quote remains his imagined retort in the Melian Dialogue: "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must".

I'm of the view that the reason why political leaders in the West have been so forgetful of the Iraq War is not because of any sense of shame or regret but because the episode went according to plan, and that plan was to turn the area centred on the Tigris and Euphrates into a de facto no-man's land between Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Iraq had proved an unreliable buffer against the first of these regional powers and its invasion of Kuwait had threatened the second. Likewise, the descent of Syria into civil war following the Arab Spring wasn't because that state was less resilient in the face of popular demands than Egypt and Bahrain but because of foreign interference, notably by those three regional powers (Lebanon obviously faces the same problem). The collapse of Iraq into a fragmented state subject to competing militias wasn't some novel strategy. This was pretty much the playbook of foreign powers across much of Africa and Asia in the nineteenth century (and into the twentieth, in the case of China). Iraq and Syria themselves were the remnants of the collapse of the Ottoman state in the region, split up between Britain and France by the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

Why didn't the US and its allies plant the evidence of WMD after they arrived in 2003? It surely wasn't because of any ethical scruples: they had invaded on a lie, after all. The simplest explanation is that they didn't feel they needed to. They'd got away with the invasion - no one was ever going to stop them - and while they would be criticised for the mess they made of the country, they weren't going to face any consequences internationally or personally. George W Bush and Tony Blair are both lauded as elder statesmen today. In the UK, the establishment attitude towards the Iraq misadventure can best be characterised as a shrug (much as the reaction to the Chilcot report was an ironic "whatever"). While the usual suspects among the commentariat wring their hands over the betrayal of liberal values, or try and spread the blame as widely as possible while regretting that this episode has undermined the popularity of military intervention, some are more concerned that the memory of opposition to the war might provide the left with renewed credibility and thus delay its conclusive political burial. Somewhere between 300 and 600,000 dead Iraqi civilians pales into comparison with the risk to Wes Streeting's career.

So, what does this mean for Ukraine? You might think the parallel with Iraq is strained, not least because Russia, the Iran in this equation, did the invading and the West clearly has no intention of putting boots on the ground, but if you think the mess of post-invasion Iraq was actually the objective then similarities start to obtrude. Russia is now bogged-down in a military and economic morass, its great power aspirations shown to be laughable. For all the claims that the Iraq War and Syrian Civil War emboldened and strengthened Iran, the reality is the country remains regionally weak, its expanded influence limited to literal bombsites in Lebanon and Yemen. The sanctions regime against Russia hasn't proved effective in stopping the war, but sanctions should be seen as a form of permanent discipline rather than a lever of diplomacy, something that Iran is only too familiar with. Meanwhile, the civilian population of Ukraine can expect to continue to suffer as their government pursues a maximalist line that precludes negotiations while Western arms and materiel guarantee that the war will grind on.

On Enshittification

A century ago we would have been living through the Roaring Twenties. Well, in fact "we" wouldn't, unless you could be confident you'd be an American, and even then the roaring would be geographically patchy. As William Gibson noted much later, "The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed", and that applies to the past as well. The 1920s might have been a decade of remarkable growth bookended by depression in the USA, but they were years of warlordism and foreign occupation in a still semi-feudal China. If there is a notable difference to be drawn between then and now it is the extent to which experience has become globally more homogenised. For all the ostensible political and cultural differences of the USA and China today, everyday life is remarkably similar in the two countries. Contra Gibson, the future is increasingly evenly distributed. 

This is most evident in technological commodities such as the smartphone whose utility, and that of the apps it gives access to, ultimately depends on general adoption. But while the penetration rate of the smartphone has been spectacular, what's also notable is the geographic distribution, which actually reflected the failure of earlier technologies, specifically fixed-line telephony and Internet access, to spread extensively in less developed regions of the world. It is the smartphone, on the back of the GSM network, that has delivered the Internet to most of the global population, and crucial to this has been the commercial model in which users pay a rental fee, allowing the less well-off access on a roughly equvalent basis to the rich. While you can still find social conservatives in the UK and elsewhere who will harrumph at the very idea that a family on benefits should have a flatscreen TV, few would seriously suggest that a smartphone is not a social necessity in this day and age. We have already reached the stage in developed countries where the lack of one is a severe hindrance. 

The rapid decline in the use of cash in the UK in the last few years is less the product of the ubiquity of bank cards, which have been around for decades, than of the evolution of the smartphone into a secure payment device. Similarly, the closure of bank branches owes less to Internet banking, which has also existed for decades, than the spread of banking apps on phones. While the "cashless society" provides an easy story for shallow journalism, it still remains remarkable that a technology as systemically important as physical money might be about to disappear from common use. The impact of the smartphone is not just limited to money, of course. As the centrality of social media to "the news" indicates, the very warp and weft of society is increasingly embedded in our phones. I raise this point not to marvel at how society has been changed by this one tool (technological determinism) but to wonder about the impact that general adoption has had on the technology itself (feedback). 

Cory Doctorow has popularised the term "enshittification" to describe the process by which popular Internet platforms (he specifically uses the example of TikTok) get worse due to the strategy of owners. In brief: "Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die." There's a lot of self-evident truth in this, but it's also worth thinking about whether this may be driven by circumstance as well as a coherent commercial strategy. In other words, how much of this is down to the manner in which society has employed the platform rather than to capitalist imperatives. For example, Doctorow notes the same process at Facebook, Twitter and Google, but does this mean that all three companies independently alighted upon the same "monetisation" strategy or are they simply following the path of least resistance? 

Central to Doctorow's critique is the idea that the platforms will push you content that suits their commercial interests, rather than what you actually want. But, to pick one example, this is easy to avoid on Twitter. The point is that most users don't bother to change their feed from the algorithmically-curated "For you" to the user-curated "Following" because they are perfectly happy with the former. The snobbish view is that most users are dumb and do not realise what they are getting, and if they enjoy the content provided then they are being brainwashed. The liberal critique of social media platforms in particular emphasises this latter point, with liberal old media falling over themselves to publicise any evidence, however tenuous, of manipulation or addiction, while avoiding any admission of their own censorship and flagrant bias. This snobbishness is also evident among the tech-literate (who may not be liberal), a recent example being the "Why I'm off to Mastodon" genre of perfomative flouncing.

Many of the complaints about the decline of the platforms come from early adopters and expert users. In other words, the people who were required to popularise the platforms so they could reach a critical mass. Once that mass was achieved, their interests became less of a priority for the platforms as the "common user" became the focus. This has led to a degree of nostalgia for "frontier life", the heady days when technology seemed an endless cornucopia of the novel and useful but also displayed an integrity in its fruits (i.e. ad-free and unbiased, which obviously ignored the structural and social biases inherent in the technology). It has also produced the meme of the Internet's decline, of which enshittification is a specific form. Consider this claim: "Tech hasn’t improved most people’s lives in a noteworthy way in over a decade, and has made an awful lot of people’s much worse." It's easy to ridicule this by pointing to the experience of people in Africa who only got access to the Internet in the last ten years, but you could as easily just remember how often you used to go to an ATM in the US or UK a decade ago. 

The theme of the Internet's decline has fed into a wider pessimism about politics and society: the idea that democracy is failing because of bad actors or that there is insufficient public will to arrest climate change. Where once it was common to imagine that technology would both improve democracy, by enabling the deliberative commons, and accelerate the greening of industry, that belief is now limited to incorrigible techno-optimists like Kevin Kelly. But one useful distinction Kelly makes is that between the growth of stuff (everyone getting a smartphone) and betterment (our utility improving through more useful smartphone apps). There's an obvious thread here back to Benthamite Utilitarianism but there's also a hint of the older philosophical idea of refinement, or what the Greeks called arete: the pursuit of excellence. Ironically, it is the elitist conception of excellence that underpins the Californian ideology: that excellence is to be attained by the heroic individual not by society's collective efforts. 

All technologies exhibit early variety followed by commodification, standardisation and then continuous tweaking. Invariably, that standardisation encourages monopolies or cartels, while the tweaking encourages a culture of lament ("It's not as good as it used to be", "It liked it better when it was called Marathon"). What we're seeing with enshittification is both that maturation process and that cultural response. How might this play out? Well history would suggest a combination of market design (e.g. trust-busting or breaking up monopolies) and regulation, with the latter inevitably being heavily influenced by industry incumbents. In the case of the Internet platforms, there is limited scope for market design because of their supra-national nature and because the formal barriers to entry remain low. Regulation seems more likely, but the way that early initiatives like GDPR have been implemented suggests that this will be more of a burden for users than for the platform. 

You don't have to buy into Kevin Kelly's idea of the "technium" to see that technology has become more globalised over the last century, by which I mean both that its geographical spread has become greater and that its settled form has come to reflect a blended global public. Advanced medical devices are to be found in almost every country, even if in many they are the exclusive preserve of the rich. The recent Oscars were dominated by Everything Everywhere All at Once, a film that employed the multiverse setting of superhero films and featured a mainly Asian cast, indicating how Hollywood is reconciling itself to that global public. The greater (and faster) geographical spread of technology is partly down to the ease of replication, particularly in the case of digital goods, but its is also a reflection of the cumulative impact of prior technologies on that global public. Absent language and cultural differences, our societies are becoming more homogenised and that is having a profound effect on the design and adoption of technology.

Historical Inevitability

Back when it was funny in the 1980s, Spitting Image had a song called I've Never Met a Nice South African. What was unstated in the title and lyrics was the adjective "white", a point emphasised by the one named exception, the exiled writer Breyten Breytenbach. Though presumably unintentional, this elision gave the impression that black and coloured South Africans were not part of the nation: that South Africa was at best a melting pot of the English ("arrogant bastards who hate black people") and Dutch Boers ("talentless murderers who smell like baboons"). Ironically, this was the very essence of apartheid, the spurious claim of distinct nations or cultures that simply stood proxy for an equally spurious taxonomy of race. I raise this example of a telling absence because it offers a useful way of thinking about what is going on in Israel at the moment. 

The protests against the current government's plans to limit judicial powers and allow supreme court decisions to be over-turned by a simple Knesset majority have been impeccably liberal in their rhetoric and decorum, pitting a civil society with placards against an arrogant government that seeks to undermine the constitution of the state. But they have also been distinguished by the protestors reluctance to find common cause with Palestinians and the distrust of Israeli Arabs, all against the backdrop of escalating settler violence on the West Bank. Abroad, liberal opinion has decided that Israeli Arabs have to be brought into the argument, but only as voters who will help preserve the status quo and then meekly exit stage left. In the case of Jonathan Freedland this intrumentality has even led him to issue veiled threats: "the losers of the changes now afoot will include dissenting Israeli Jews, to be sure, but among those to suffer most directly will, inevitably, be Palestinians." 

However the key absence here is not that of the Palestinians themselves, nor is their marginalisation as electoral spear-carriers a direct parallel with the thoughtless marginalisation of black South Africans in British satire of the 1980s. The absence is the constitution: Israel doesn't have one. In its place are the various basic laws, originally intended as the building blocks of a constitutional framework but which have failed to cohere as such, leading to the development of a state system that has been deliberately ambiguous both in its geographical scope and in its attitude towards the rights of minorities within its jurisdiction. The latest  basic law (the thirteenth), passed in 2018 by a previous government, states that Israel is the Nation State of the Jewish People, rather than the state of all its citizens. It was on the back of this blunt admission that much of international opinion finally conceded that Israel is an apartheid state.

Liberals reluctant to use that word have been obliged to present recent developments as exceptional, when they are anything but. Simon Schama has spoken of Israel's shift to the far right and the danger of it becoming a nationalist theocracy. But this ignores both that the rightward shift of Israeli politics started over 50 years ago following the occupation of the West Bank in 1967, and that it has been a nationalist state with an ethnic and religious particularity since 1948. He gets round the absence of the constitution by elevating the declaration of independence of that year: "a noble document, which promised equal civil rights to all religious and ethnic groups". It also promised a constitution. Schama's focus on the nobility of the declaration ignores that it was little more than a propaganda tool at the time (one that the right today are happy to interpret as justification for a nationalist theocracy) and that there was a deliberate policy, led by David Ben Gurion, to avoid enshrining its pious hopes in a formal constitution. That policy was motivated by the need to avoid granting equal rights to the 700,000 Palestinians evicted or otherwise displaced in the 1948 war (the Nakba, or disaster, in Arabic). 

The demand to defend Israeli democracy is essentially a demand to defend the partiality of the institutions of the state, which have consistently enabled settler encroachment on the West Bank and curtailed the rights of Israeli Arabs as second-class citizens. As Reuven Ziegler, quoted in the Schama article, says: "The demonstrations are a very patriotic act because they are an attempt to save Israel from making substantive mistakes that would ultimately change its character. They are anything but hostile to the Israeli state." In other words, this is a conservative movement that seeks to defend the status quo and thus the existing religious and ethnic hierarchies of the state. It should be no surprise then that the liberal media have framed the government's actions in terms of populism and extremism, even going so far as to talk about Netanyahu's "assault from the top", personalising the politics in the way seen with Trump, Orban and Putin. The new government has offended liberal Israeli and disapora opinion by going too far and by appearing ugly on the world stage. 

As Dahlia Scheindlin guilelessly puts it elsewhere: "Earlier rightwing governments merely wanted to expand settlements or annex parts of the West Bank, deepen the hold of Jewish religious law over Israeli public and private life, harangue and intimidate Israel’s Palestinian-Arab citizens ... The new government is no longer testing the illiberal waters; it is going for the jugular in its assault on the institutions of democratic governance." You have to wonder what the point of these institutions was if they could not prevent those previous acts of dispossession and intimidation. The myth of Israeli democracy, much like the myth of socialist or liberal Zionism, which retained its grip until the undeniable reality of settler colonialism buried the romance of the kibbutzim, has obscured that the state was imbued with a theocratic nationalism from its foundation. The "shift" has simply been the gradual dropping of the pretence of secular democracy and it's clear that the right's offence in liberal eyes is to have embarrassed the country before world opinion.

Central to this longstanding liberal pretence has been the promise of a two-state solution, which, like the constitution, has been long talked about but never gets any closer to realisation. This produces regret rather than a frank admission of its impossibility, which only serves to preserve the ideal. For example, Margaret Hodge tells us that: "I have always supported the untrammelled right of Israel to exist and, like many others, have advocated for a two-state solution, ensuring a stable and secure home for Palestinians and Israelis alike. But the two-state solution seems a fantasy at this moment, with little prospect of it developing into a political reality." The key word here is "untrammelled". This is not simply the usual "Do you deny the right of Israel to exist?" gambit. Rather it is an insistence that the state of Israel as currently constituted must be accepted, warts and all. This means supporting a theocratic nationalism that precludes the possibility of a two-state solution. The fantasy here is the idea that keeping the state within the bounds of liberal propriety will eventually deliver justice to both sides.

Hodge is unable to contain her anxiety: "Netanyahu secured his mandate in democratic elections, so many might question the right of others to comment, let alone intervene. But this is a very dangerous moment for Israel that could easily tip into a third intifada." In other words, by exposing the reality of the state the Israeli right risks delegitimising it in the eyes of the West and so encouraging an uprising by Palestinians. Accusations of apartheid from the left and international NGOs can be dismissed as hyperbole or even antisemitism, but only so long as the fictions of the state - from the legal equality of minorities to the future resuscitation of a two-state solution - can be maintained. Thus Hodge can close with the claim: "A two-state solution seems politically impossible for now, but I believe it is historically inevitable". The only thing that was historically inevitable was that the nature of the state of Israel would become more apparent over time as settler colonialism expanded and the liberal conception of civil rights was mocked by legislative apartheid.

The reason I raise this as a topic is not to berate Jewish liberals for their naivety or hypocrisy but because the state of Israel is unusual but not unique. In its refusal to enact a formal constitution, while insisting that one exists informally, it shares the characteristics of a much more antique polity, namely the United Kingdom. The cognitive dissonance of Margaret Hodge, in which the state of Israel must remain untrammeled but a two-state solution is historically inevitable, is easy to maintain if you have grown up in a political tradition that imagines monarchy and equality to be complementary. What this suggests is that the UK will probably be the last country to criticise Israel's apartheid, much as it was one of the last to accept the need for sanctions against South Africa in the 1980s. The assumption that the US is Israel's staunchest ally misunderstands the instrumental nature of American imperialism (the "permanent interests" of the hegemon, in Palmerston's phrase). It is the former mandate power in Palestine that instinctively sympathises with a state that obscures it's nature behind myth and depends upon selective liberal blindness.

So Far, So Good

We're two-thirds of the way through the season so now is a good time to review Arsenal's progress. Broken into thirds, we managed 31 points over the first 12 games and 29 over the next 13. That might suggest a slight dropping off, but it's worth noting that the latter haul suffered from 2 points denied due to a VAR error in the home game against Brentford plus the inexplicable but entirely predictable defeat away at Everton. If justice had been served in that home game, and if we had managed to at least draw at Goodison Park, then we'd be on 32 points and 8 points ahead of Manchester City rather than 5. While losing to Sean Dyche in his first game in charge of the otherwise hapless Toffees always seemed fated, a feature of the season to date is that we've avoided some of the calamities against lower-half teams that have dogged us in recent years, such as at Southampton and Wolves. It's also worth noting that we won away at Brighton and Brentford, both very much upper-half teams now but tricky customers in the not-too-distant past, and of course we did the double over Spurs, who for all their obvious flaws are still fourth in the table.

Though we have the second-highest goals scored, after City, the more telling statistic is that we have the second-best goals conceded, after Newcastle United. 23 against is our best at this stage since the 2015-16 season when we finished second to Leicester City. If there's an augury in that, it is that the Foxes won the Premier League on a total of only 81 points. Since then, the title has been won on under 90 points only once. The reason I mention it is that after 25 games last season Manchester City had 63 points. Their current tally of 55 suggests that this will be a season in which the title will probably be won by a total of around 90. If City win all of their remaining games (including the one against us), they'll finish on 94. If we win 12 of our remaining 13 games, we'll finish on 96. Their erratic progress this season, plus Guardiola's focus on the Champions League, suggests they're unlikely to achieve that perfect run, so I think they'll finish in the high 80s. Arsenal's aim is therefore 10 wins from 13 games.

It's clear that the club's original target for the season was Champions League qualification, though they may have revised that upwards. Based on previous years, ending in fourth will probably take 67-70 points. As we now have 60, I think we can be confident that a placing finish is within our grasp. The Europa League will almost certainly be downgraded in strategic terms, given that the real prize in that competition is progress to the more prestigious UEFA league and the silverware hardly compares to the Premiership. I suspect most Arsenal fans will be perfectly happy if we exit in the round of 16 against Sporting Lisbon. The real danger of the Europa League is not fatigue but the possibility of a season-ending injury to a key player. In terms of who those players are, it's worth noting that you could probably list most of the first 11 now, so much have they excelled as a team. It's also worth noting how well the backups have performed. When Garbiel Jesus picked up his injury at the World Cup, many assumed Arsenal's season would nosedive, but Eddie Nketiah proved an impressive deputy in December and January. 

Equally impressive is that as other teams adapted to Arsenal's change in approach, with Nketiah's more box-poaching style allowing them to double-up on Saka and Martinelli, Mikel Arteta has tweaked the system by swapping Eddie with Leandro Trossard as a false 9, recreating the uncertainty for defenders that Jesus provided. This in turn emphasises how critical the transfer dealings over the January period were. Jorginho has already proven a bargain both by providing a decent if limited deputy for Thomas Partey (a crisper passer than Elneny but nowhere near as physically dominating as the Ghanaian international) and by banging in that crucial goal away at Villa Park off Emi Martinez's head, and Trossard looks like he will contribute a useful number of goals between now and the end of the season. Going further back, the summer arrivals of Jesus and Oleksandr Zinchenko were obviously crucial, as much for the injection of a winning mentality as for their tactical value. But the latter shouldn't be underestimated. After two seasons of relative tactical rigidity as Arteta and Edu sorted out the squad, we're now seeing an Arsenal who are not only fluid in their play but highly flexible in their positioning and rotation on the pitch. 

It should be no surprise that this has coincided with greater on-field discipline. So far, we have 39 yellows (14th highest) and are the only club to have not picked up a red card. To put this in context, we had the second highest number of reds last season (4) and ended with 60 yellows (13th highest). In other words, we're not committing fewers fouls but we are committing fewer stupid ones. That said, we are conceding more penalties than we're winning, 4 to 2 so far, but that appears to be more down to the reluctance of referees to penalise defenders taking out Bukayo Saka than anything else. The tactical and positional changes have also steered some of our card-magnets away from danger, for example by pushing Granit Xhaka into a more advanced midfield role where his lack of pace on the turn is less of a liability and his accurate passing can be more dangerous. This has been made possible by improvements in defence where the addition of William Saliba, Takehiro Tomiyasu and Zinchenko has given us genuine depth.

For me the standout player of the season so far has been Martin Ødegaard. The youthful captain has provided goals, assists and energy, but most of all he has speeded-up the team's passing. Arsenal are at their best when the ball is moved slickly. While the "low block" has become de rigeur for most teams defending against the Gunners, it has rarely proved wholly effective. The notorious goalless home draw against Newcastle United was down to time-wasting as much as solid defending, and Arsenal have only failed to score in two games: the game against the Magpies and the loss at Everton. While some of the goals scored by Arsenal have come from incisive wing play, many of the match-winners have been the result of incisive passing into the box. The midweek 4-0 defeat of Everton at the Emirates Stadium was illustrative, with Saka's opener coming from a short forward pass into a channel of space, before a second was snaffled by the winger with a smart tackle that teed up Martinelli for a routine finish. The two goals in the second half came from the wings once Everton tired, Arsenal ending with 73% possession.

What this highlights is that Arsenal have enough tools in the box (plan Bs, if you prefer) to usually find a way of scoring, and that is down to the variety and quality of their approach players, not only Ødegaard, Saka and Martinelli but Xhaka and Zinchenko as well. And with 11 clean sheets (second only to Newcastle's 12), that means they usually win the game. Interestingly, most of those clean sheets have come away from home, and three of them featured classic 1-0 wins, at Leeds, Chelsea and Leicester. What stands out in that sequence of results is Arsenal's growing ability to control the game. It started off with some good fortune at Elland Road in October, as Patrick Bamford missed a penalty and another spot-kick (and a red card for Gabriel) was overturned by VAR. But that was a pretty even game: 4 shots on target each and Arsenal shading possession at 53%. Against Chelsea in November, Arsenal had 56% possession and allowed the Blues only two shots (one on target). Against Leicester City it was 66% possession and the home side managed only 1 shot, which was off-target.

Can Arsenal win the league? Of course they can. Will they? Who knows. In previous years I'd have said that this was in the lap of the injury gods, though as we saw last season, the petering out of form can also afflict a relatively young side at the business end of the season. This year I'm more optimistic because I think we can cope with injuries better, even if the solutions may necessarily be a little makeshift, and because I suspect the adrenaline and momentum of a positive season to date should be enough to get us over the finishing line in good shape. While the 5 points in the bag at this stage are very useful, the decisive factors come May could turn out to be Manchester City's distractions in Europe and the FA Cup, and the Arsenal squad's hunger. Even if they fall short, their youth and steady improvement bodes well for the coming years. The one fly in the ointment is that while other large clubs are clearly in transition (Liverpool and Chelsea, but maybe also City if Guardiola leaves after winning the Champions' League), it looks like Manchester United may be ahead of schedule and are still in with a shout this season.