Hundreds of Palestinians have taken to the streets from Beit Lahiiya to Jabaliya in Gaza in recent days. It was an encouraging sign that long-simmering opposition to Hamas may be breaking out into the open. But, as always, Palestinian protest against Gaza’s overlords comes with a price.
Last week, the 22-year-old protest leader Oday Nasser Al Raby was kidnapped, tortured and executed, and his body was dumped outside his home over the weekend.
In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is facing an uprising against his increasingly tyrannical rule. It’s one of the most formidable Turkish revolts in the 22 years since he took power. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered for a mass rally in Istanbul on Saturday after Republican People's Party (CHP) leader Ekrem Imamoglu, Istanbul’s popular mayor, was arrested on trumped-up corruption and terrorism charges.
Before the October 7, 2023 Hamas pogrom, Israel was being rocked by historic protests that were drawing hundreds of thousands of people opposed to Benjamin Netanyahu’s weakening of the judiciary’s independence. The protests are back in full swing.
Chanting “Israel is not Turkey, Israel is not Iran,” tens of thousands of Israelis have been blocking key highways and clogging the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Led mostly by the Brothers in Arms group, the protest movement suspended its actions after the October 7 catastrophe, transforming itself into a kind of civil defence and humanitarian effort. But now it’s back, and it’s gathering “momentum and energy” against Bibi’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies.
Democracy’s eclipse did not begin with Donald Trump
Last month, the Freedom House Organization registered 60 countries with declines in political rights and liberties, with improvements in only 34 countries, marking the 19th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index registers an historic drop in its gradings as well, with 130 countries out of 167 either showing a decline or no improvement.
Nearly four in ten people around the world live in strongman regimes and police states. The greatest deterioriation since 2008 shows up in indices for electoral processes and pluralism, and civil liberties.
What the hell is happening in Serbia?
Intersecting Moscow’s orbit and Europe’s orbit and indulging in an increasingly entrenched relationship with Beijing, Serbia is a tangle of contradictions at the fault line between democracy and its most powerful enemies.
It’s never easy to comprehend the mess of geopolitical and neo-tribal politics in the Balkans, let alone what to make of the “news” from the region. So it was a mystery two weeks ago in Belgrade, the Serbian Republic’s capital, when police used some sort of sonic cannon against demonstrators at one of the largest of a series of anti-corruption protests that have shaken the government since last November.
The authorities first denied possessing such a weapon, then admitted to having one, but then denied using it. "It was like a plane or a huge truck was coming at you, but you had no idea where it was coming from or how to escape it," said one of the roughly 300,000 people attending the March 15 protest.
President Aleksandar Vučić is hanging on even though officially his government has resigned; Prime Minister Miloš Vučević has already packed it in. There may or may not be elections in June.
The cause of clarity hasn’t been helped lately by the Trump administration’s descent into authoritarianism and its shuttering of American windows on the world. Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Voice of America, Radio Marti, Radio Free Asia and an array of longstanding journalism portals connecting the unfree world with the rest of us have ended up Trump lieutenant Elon Musk’s kill list.
There may be some hope in the courts and Congress, but it’s looking pretty grim. All on its own, Musk’s X is now a titanic disinformation machine.
So, with all that background, this weekend’s Real Story is a conversation with my colleague Adam Zivo, whose reports from and about Ukraine have been terrific, and whose interests converge with my own. Lately he’s been spending time in Serbia, to chronicle the upheavals there, and how they fit into the tectonic shudderings everywhere else around the world.
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