A real work of peace? An Israel-Hamas deal

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The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the I'm Rosie Blore.

And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Right wing authors have long accused the New York Times bestseller list of political bias, claiming that some conservative writers are omitted despite high sales. The Economist examined the data to find out the truth.

And as with lots of other places, here in Britain there's a boom going on in non alcoholic like beers, wines and spirits. Both demand and supply are shooting up. But regulations that leave consumers confused are also holding the market back. First up though, For Israel and Hamas, a peace deal is on the table, and on the table it might stay. You'd be forgiven for thinking that progress toward peace was being made. On Tuesday, the UN Security Council backed the plan and urged Hamas to agree to it.

The draft resolution has been adopted as Resolution 2735.

America's Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been in Qatar, which is acting as a peace broker. He said yesterday that the gaps between the parties could be bridged.

We are going to continue to push on an urgent basis with our partners with Qatar, with Egypt to try to close this deal because we know it's in the interests of Israelis, Palestinians, the region, indeed the entire world.

Yet all this might be false hope. Those gaps between the parties are enormous. It has seemed, too, that the shape of the story was changing. Four Israeli hostages were rescued over the weekend. And two moderate members of Israel's war cabinet resigned in protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's dithering on ending the war. Mr. Netanyahu, for his part, and true to long established form, isn't going anywhere. Maybe, though, just maybe, this peace deal can change the narrative.

What makes this Israeli proposal a step forward, even though the prospects still are grim, is that this is the first time there is a proposal from Israel actually mentioning the possibility of a full ceasefire.

Anshelfer is our Israel correspondent.

The fact that Israel is even contemplating this in an official proposal is a step forward. And that's the reason why I think President Biden two weeks ago almost now presented it in public as the way forward. It's the reason why Blinken is now in the region trying to push it.

So, aside from the notable mention of a full ceasefire, what does the peace plan entail?

Basically, it's a framework with three stages. The first stage is an interim truce or short term ceasefire of six weeks in which there would be an exchange of hostages. Hamas would release some of the Israeli hostages it's now been holding for over eight months. Israel would release a significant number of Palestinian prisoners, and in that period, the Israeli forces would withdraw from the main urban areas within the Gaza Strip. But most crucially, that first stage would also be a period during which further talks would be held for a possible full ceasefire, when the rest of the hostages would be released and Israel would withdraw from almost most of Gaza. And most crucially, that would be the point where the two sides would work on the terms for that full ceasefire.

And what chances do you give it of getting anywhere this time?

Well, the main problem here is the transition from that first to second stage. Israel has more of an interest in the first stage because these hostages, as I said, have been for eight months already in captivity. We know that many of them, if not over half of them, are already dead. And Israel wants to get its people back alive, as many as possible. So Israel has a much more urgent need there. Hamas want guarantees from Israel. They want guarantees from the Americans and other major players in the region that there'll be a full ceasefire. Israel's less eager to grant that when they haven't yet destroyed more of Hamas's military and governing capabilities. So the move from the first to the second stage, from the temporary to the full ceasefire, that really is the weakest point here in the agreement, with Israel holding out and saying, well, we'll discuss that after the first stage. And Hamas say, no, we want guarantees. We want. This is a precondition.

And you mentioned the hostages there. There was this rescue operation with four of them now having been freed. How does that figure into the calculus here?

Well, I think that affects certainly the atmosphere and also perhaps the calculations on both sides. On the Israeli side, the fact that four hostages were rescued through a military operation creates the impression both in the Israeli public and strengthens those on the right in the government who say, well, this can be done through military operations. Why do we need an agreement with Hamas where Israel will be releasing thousands of prisoners and basically accepting that the war hasn't reached the objectives that were set out at the beginning? So that has fueled the debate in Israel over what's the best way to try and get as many of the hostages back. I have to mention at this point that the Israeli security establishment, while they're very proud of this operation which brought four hostages back alive, are also saying that they think that it's not possible to carry out that many of these operations and that most of the hostages will still have to be released through a deal rather than through another operation like this. On the Palestinian side, it has created some pressure, especially on Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza who's on the Hamas side. He's the more hard line element. He's the one who's been driving for a tougher deal and in that sense, been postponing the prospects of a deal on him. There's now more pressure because he seems to be losing some of his bargaining power. The less hostages that he controls, the more hostages which are back in Israeli hands, that he has less to bargain with. And also there's a growing criticism of the way in which he isn't allowing any kind of pause in the war. He was the mastermind of October 7th attack, and he has to show that he has achieved something for all this suffering that he's brought down upon Gaza.

And so you're giving us a sense there of what the politics is like on the Palestinian side. What about the Israeli side, though? We saw the resignation of Benny Gantz over the weekend. How are things changing for the war cabinet and Mr. Netanyahu's sort of closest coterie?

So one of the things that we have to say about this agreement is it has been proposed by Israel, but It was proposed a couple of weeks by the Israeli War Cabinet, which is a smaller decision making forum within the government. Netanyahu's far right partners are not part of the war cabinet. They weren't even aware of this proposal and they're fighting tooth and nail against it. And they have a lot that they can do against Netanyahu. They basically hold his majority and they hold his political fate. Whereas Benny Gantz, who was in favor, is still in favor of the deal. His pragmatic wing in the war cabinet were very much pushing for this deal. And one of the reasons why they finally left is that they don't think that Netanyahu is serious about actually going all the way with this. He agreed to issue the proposal, but he wouldn't finally bring the government around because of his fear of the far right, who ultimately are part of the government, which needs to authorize such a deal if it's ever reached with Hamas. So Gantz's departure doesn't necessarily spell the end of this government. It actually gives the far right more power and it indicates that some people in the Israeli government don't think that the agreement is possible. Not because an agreement can't be reached with Hamas, but on the Israeli side, there isn't enough unity. There's enough political will to see this deal through.

It sounds as if you think that this deal and any we can easily imagine isn't going to make it passed. Then the government as it's now composed.

Well, it hasn't even reached that stage yet because it still hasn't been agreed with Hamas. There isn't yet a full deal. Even if Hamas accepted the main components of this deal, there still is a lot of details which need to be hashed out in a further round of talks. So we're not yet at that stage, but you could say that there's already a major political obstacle on the Israeli side where Netanyahu is still confirming that he is behind the Israeli proposal, is basically only making it for negotiating purposes. He hasn't yet brought his government to accept.

Doesn't sound as if there are a whole lot of grounds for optimism here.

I agree. The fact that we don't have either of the sides yet behind the agreement, the Israelis very half heartedly are behind the agreement that they propose. Hamas are demanding so many changes to the agreement. It does look pretty bleak. On the other side, there is some room for optimism. The proposal is still out there. The Americans are still up and running with it. Israel hasn't retreated from it, at least officially. Israel is still saying this is our position. And within Hamas we are seeing voices, we are seeing parts of the organization's leadership who are more open to the plan. And we are seeing pressure on Sinwar, the hardliner who controls the hostages fate, to accept the plan in principle. So I think the fact that it's still out there, that it's still the plan which is being talked about and which the sides are responding to, I think that does give us a small bit of optimism that this may be something that can still work. I don't see the Americans certainly giving up on it quite yet. For them, it's really the only way forward. And you know, we've seen both President Biden and Secretary Blinken and the rest of the administration put a lot into it. We're seeing the Egyptians and the Qataris still very much committed to it. And on both sides, both amongst the Israelis and in Hamas, there are certainly significant parts of the leadership in Israel, the security establishment, which do think that they can somehow find a way to work with it. So with everything stacked up against it, the plan still has some chance, I think.

Anshul, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you for having me. Jason.

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If you're an author, few words look better on your book cover than New York Times bestseller The New York Times tally of book sales has been running since 1931. It's featured the towering writers of the 20th century, including Ernest Hemingway, Muriel Spark, John Steinbeck and Virginia Woolf. But one group of writers has long complained about its omission from the list.

American conservatives frequently complain that the New York Times bestseller list is biased against right wing authors.

Max Norman is a culture correspondent for the Economist.

We wanted to test this claim through statistical analysis of the bestseller list and we actually found that the conservatives might have a point.

Before we get onto the analysis, can you give me some examples of snubs which authors have actually been omitted?

The most recent round of this debate, which recurs every few years, was an author called Rob Henderson. He wrote a book called Troubled about the hypocrisy of America's elite. And it was excluded from the hardcover nonfiction list despite selling around 4,000 copies in its first week, which would have placed it near the top. This ignited a Twitter war in March. Even Elon Musk himself got involved. And many were convinced that this was an example of the Times political bias. Complaints about the list are not new. The most famous example was William Blatty, the author of the Exorcist, who actually filed a lawsuit against the Times in 1983. It was dismissed. In more recent years, famous Republicans like Ted Cruz have been snubbed. These questions are really difficult to investigate because the Times keeps its methodology under wraps. So we had to do everything from the outside, using publicly available information.

Tell us about your research. How did you test it?

The Economist compiled 12 years of BookScan data, which we scraped from the Publisher's Weekly Bestseller list. And then in that Corpus, we identified 12 publishers which identify themselves as right of center politically. These include things like Broadside books and Regnery Publishing, which bills itself as America's, quote, leading publisher of conservative books. Our search of Books between June 2012 and June 2024 yielded 250 titles from Conservative publishers. That's out of a total of 4,169 that made it onto the publisher's weekly Top 25 Nonfiction Bestsellers list in at least one week. Our fabulous colleagues on the data team built a statistical model. We looked at which of those books should have made it onto the New York Times Bestseller list, but didn't. And there are a fair few that did not make the list, despite sales that suggest they should have. And then for the ones that did make the New York Times list, we compared their sales to the sales of the other books on the Times list and saw how they sat, and if they sat lower or higher than where their sales would suggest.

I love the idea of applying complex maths to the reading or selling of books. Tell me what you actually found.

On average, books by conservative publishers are 7 percentage points less likely to make it onto the New York Times Weekly bestseller lists than books by other publishers with similar sales figures. It does not tend to affect the leading conservative bestsellers. So an example that's often pointed to is Bill O'Reilly, who is the best sellingest nonfiction author around. He still appears very prominently. And in general, if you have a undeniable bestseller, you will make it on the list, and you'll probably be high up. What was interesting was that the bias was really concentrated in the lower rungs of the list. So among titles that sell fewer than 5,000 copies per week, books from conservative imprints have a much worse chance of making the list than those from other publishers selling similar amounts. Those that place in the bottom 10 of the 25 slots in the publisher's weekly nonfiction list are 22 percentage points less likely to make it onto the New York Times list. And the conservative books that do become New York times bestsellers rank 2.3 notches lower on average on the nonfiction list than those published by other presses with similar sales.

Couldn't it just be that conservatives are publishing books about politics and that political books aren't that popular?

Absolutely possible. So to test for that possibility, my colleagues on the data team matched our data set with data from a database called isbndb.com and this archive contains a subject field for about 40% of our books, enabling us to categorize them as political if the subjects include things like the word politics or president. For the remaining books that weren't covered by the database, my data colleagues trained a machine learning algorithm based on their titles, authors and publishers, and also, when available, the New York Times own descriptive blurb to the books to identify which ones could be comfortably called political. So then we repeated the test for bias on this smaller set of political books and found that the effect wasn't just robust and constant, but it was even greater.

I should say here that we did reach out to the New York Times and they didn't dispute or confirm our analysis on the record, but they did say that the political views of authors or their publishers have absolutely no bearings on our rankings and are not a factor in how books are ranked on the lists. They also said there are a number of organizations with bestseller lists, each with different methodologies, so it's normal to see different rankings on each. So with that in mind, I'm interested in what you think explains conservative books. Potential disadvantage.

It's a really hard question to answer, and I should be clear that we can't know. It's really hard to say without understanding the precise methodology behind the lists. A lot of people I spoke to thought that it came down to politics on some level, that there had to be some. Some sort of ideological line being drawn. It also could be due to the Times adjusting for so called bulk buying by conservative groups. These would be sort of non organic sales. This is not people going into the bookstore. This is a political organization, a campaign, a company buying up a lot of books to intentionally boost the book's place on the bestseller list. But my data colleagues adjusted for that and found that our effects was still there. Nonetheless. The other explanation which came up often in my conversations was it is thought, although of course it cannot be known, that the times essentially overvalues or overweights the sales from independent booksellers over online retailers like Amazon, for example, indie retailers, reflect a certain sort of book culture. These may not be the places where conservatives go and buy books. The same could be said also for Christian books. And that there may be a kind of cultural bias intrinsic to the way that data is gathered and processed.

So is this all just sour grapes or is it actually important culturally for the New York Times list to be as accurate as possible?

Well, for one, it's not just a question of politics. Bestseller status can change an author's career. It helps sell more books. It can help them boost their public profile and therefore generate speaking engagements and also through higher sales, help negotiate better contracts and future book deals. But also there's a broader question here about the function of the list. In general, it's important for authors, but it's also important for readers and the public to understand what's being read, what's being bought and sold. And transparency there makes a list more useful. If, for example, the right wing conspiracist Alex Jones was one of the best selling authors in America, as he was towards the end of August 2022, then that's news. That's something that readers should be aware of, perhaps particularly readers who don't already follow Alex Jones. So I think the final point is that there's also a question here about trust in the media, which is at historic lows, and the mystery behind the Times list, which I should say is there. The Times says in order to prevent people from manipulating the list, that mystery gives people yet another opportunity to wonder what's going on. Is there bias here?

Max, thank you so much.

Thank you.

Right now we're sitting in the middle of Covent Garden in a sort of very colorful, very fun, non alcoholic bar.

Venjiru Nkandawire is a Britain correspondent for the Economist.

There are so many options, so many wine bottles. You've got sparkling wine, you've got gin. We also have shots on the table, all non alcoholic. Rosie. Jason, should we try some?

Let's do It.

Bring it. I'll take a Manhattan.

Manhattan.

I go for the berry blush as well.

I better try a Manhattan then, please. So, two Manhattans. Oh, hang on, hang on. Can I just an amaretti sour? Yeah, let's do it. That'd be amazing. Thank you.

Cheers.

Cheers all.

Cheers.

The, the standard issue version of this drink is one of my favorite cocktails in all the world. That is interesting. More citrusy than I expected, I gotta say, but really interesting.

Definitely very fruity. Not as sweet as I was expecting. Something you definitely drink slowly. You could take your time.

Jerry, what sparked your interest in this story?

I went to an evening event and I was pregnant at the time, and they offered me a non alcoholic cocktail. It was, I think it was a mojito. And I said sure. I tried it, it was delicious. But I went up to the bar about three times to just make sure that this had no alcohol in it because it just tasted so realistic that I suppose got me interested in the industry and the different products. It does feel like it's come a long way. So not long ago, ordering a non alcoholic drink in the UK would have been quite a surprising choice. Less so now. Alcohol consumption is falling among the young, the wealthy and the health conscious. And better brewing techniques have introduced a range of options for consumers.

So part of the story is simply that the non alcoholic wedge of the market is getting bigger.

Exactly. It's growing fairly fast. Sales of alcohol free beer grew by about 26% in 2022. But even so, the market is still tiny. Non alcoholic beverages make up about 3% of the market in the UK, whereas it's closer to 16% in Germany and about 11% in Spain. But sales growth of alcohol free drinks would need to exceed something like 40% each year to come close to even having a 10% market share in Britain by 2030. That's according to the Social Market Foundation.

So growing fast, but as you say, not fast enough to make a big dent in the existing market. I mean, how could Britain get to where, say, Germany is?

Well, wider availability and better products will naturally help the market grow, but so would ironing out a speed specific wrinkle in the British market. So according to standards set by the Department of Health and Social Care, drinks need to contain less than 0.05% alcohol by volume or ABV to be considered alcohol free in Britain. That's less alcohol, to put that into context, than a burger roll or a very ripe banana. And it's much less than in comparable markets in most developed countries. Germany, the USA, it's 0.5%. Beers made by Big Drop, which is a British craft brewer, are officially deemed non alcoholic in these other countries, such as America, Australia and Germany, but not at home.

And that, you think, is why the market is so tiny in Britain?

Well, it's made it harder for the market to grow. I think one consequence of the stricter thresholds in Britain is that complying with guidance is harder for smaller brands because it requires expensive equipment to extract the alcohol and some don't even bother trying. So according to the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, nearly one third of drinks sold and labeled as alcohol free in Britain actually ignore the official guidance. Part of that is imports, but a lot of it is just brewers that have decided to call their drinks alcohol free anyway.

So you really think the overall size of the market is down to this regulatory concern rather than some revealed preference of the British drinker, non drinker.

So part of it is preference, but it also leads to a lot of confusion among consumers. So more than half of respondents in a poll by opinium said that there was a lack of clarity over the suitability of non alcoholic products for pregnant women or drivers and people who don't drink for religious reasons. So people aren't quite sure what's in these products. They're not sure if 0.5% means alcohol free or does it actually have alcohol in it and can they drink it?

So given that confusion in particular, is anything being done to change the rule to harmonize the thresholds?

So the government is launching a consultation that might bring the UK in line with other countries. And changing the labels of alcohol free drinks might not make the market go crazy, but it would take away some of that confusion and that might even make it easier to order a drink the next time you're at a bar.

Thanks very much for your time.

Thank you for having me.

You want me to sniff harder? Once more with feeling?

Yeah.

Jason snorting alcohol free wine. There are worse things. That's what I'm going to be known as. Rosie the Slurper. Great. Can't wait.

Sort of a downgrade from Riveter, isn't it?

It is a little bit of a downgrade. Rosie the Riveter. Exactly. That was last century.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

Sam.