Bibi’s got backup: Israel’s right-wing government

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. In London, I'm Jason Palmer.

And in New York, I'm John Fassman. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

From Kenya to Ghana to Congo, thousands of Africans die each year after being accused of witchcraft. It's not all about superstition, though. After all, excommunicating or killing alleged witches is an easy way to get their assets.

And in America's craft beer scene, there are by now a staggering number of brews, so many that you need a kind of tour guide to navigate them. There is in fact such a thing. We meet the highly trained cicerones helping to sort the wheat from the barley. First up, though, One week ago, Benjamin Netanyahu was sworn in as leader of the most right wing administration in Israel's history. Some Israelis worry about the future of their democracy. Palestinians are fearful their hopes for an independent state may be dashed. Those fears were underscored this week. Just days after entering cabinet, the new National Security Minister, Itamar Ben gvir, made a highly provocative visit to Jerusalem's most volatile flashpoint. Walking in the shadow of the Temple Mount, no known to Muslims as the al Aqsa Mosque, Mr. Ben Gvir said the new government would not give in to what he called terrorists and murderers and called for the contested holy site to be open to all. This week, the White House called for calm and a continuation of the status quo. But many neighboring Arab countries have stayed silent. Mr. Netanyahu says he's determined to deepen existing peace agreements in the region, even though he'd be doing so as the head of a cabinet stocked with ultranationalists and far right radicals.

This was a dramatic week for Israel's new governing coalition. And the incident that drew the most attention was the visit of a far right minister to the most contentious bit of real estate in Jerusalem, the site known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary.

Greg Karlstrom is the economist Middle east correspondent.

It's been governed for decades by a very uneasy status quo whereby Jews are allowed to visit, but only at certain times and they're not meant to pray there. This is not the first time a sitting Israeli minister has visited, but the fact that the minister who undertook it, Itamar Ben gvir, is one of the most extreme right characters in this new government made it particularly controversial. And it really served to underscore the delicate balancing act for some Arab governments, which you could imagine in decades past would have reacted in quite a fiery way to this. Not so much this time. They were forced to issue statements of condemnation, but not the sort of rallying cry for the Palestinian cause that you would have imagined from decades past.

And why is that?

Until 2020, Israel only had official ties with two Arab states, Egypt and Jordan. That, of course, changed in 2020 with the Abraham Accords, which saw Israel agree to establish new relations with Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates. And some of those relationships, unlike the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, have really become full fledged relationships, not just political or diplomatic, but tourism. There have been half a million Israelis who have visited the UAE over the past two years. Those two countries struck a free TR trade agreement last summer. Economic activity has been booming in everything from agriculture to high tech. And this was seen by many Israelis, particularly right wing Israelis, as a sign that the Palestinian cause had lost its salience in the region, that Arab governments, if not Arab publics, had grown tired of supporting the Palestinian cause. You heard something different from Arab governments, particularly the uae, which argued that having relations with Israel would allow them to help the Palestinians. It would give them a way to sort of soften the worst policies of any Israeli government. And what we're seeing now is an opportunity to test those two theories. Is this a way for Arab governments to pressure Israel or is this a sign that Arab governments have no interest in doing so?

And you mentioned earlier that this is a right wing government that's taken power in Israel. Tell us more about that. What makes it right wing?

It's right wing both in terms of personalities and the stated priorities of the government. So you take the former. You have ministers like Ben gvir, who is the National Security Minister. He has previously been convicted for supporting a terror group for inciting racism. He used to work as a lawyer and defended extremist Israeli Jews who were accused of attacks against Palestinians. This is the man who is now as National Security Minister in charge of the police in Israel. You also have people like Betsalal Smotrich, the Finance minister who once called for segregating Israeli maternity wards between Jews and Arabs because he said he didn't want his wife to be forced to give birth next to what he called an enemy. So you have these sorts of personalities in the government, then you look at what this government has promised to do. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister, says a top priority will be expanding Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. He also promised in his coalition agreements with his partners that he would work towards annexing the west bank, which of course, is meant to be the heart of a future Palestinian state. This is the first time that an Israeli prime minister, in his coalition agreements, has promised to work towards annexation.

Now, you said earlier that Israel's neighbors were surprisingly quiet about Ben Kvir's visit to the Temple Mount. How have its neighbors reacted to these stated policies we just discussed?

So far, few of them seem keen to apply pressure on Israel, at least in public. We saw in the days after Netanyahu was sworn in as Prime Minister, he took congratulatory phone calls from the rulers of both Egypt and the uae. Last month, the Foreign Minister of Bahrain said he thinks Netanyahu, quote, unquote, firmly believes in peace. The Prime Minister has also let it be known that he hopes his first foreign trip since being sworn in will be to Abu Dhabi, that he wants to make an official visit to the UAE as his first trip abroad. And of course, before all of this, in years past, he's met with a host of Arab leaders, including the Crown Prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman. So Israel at this point has all of these extensive and growing relationships around the region, and none of its newfound partners in the region seem that interested in publicly criticizing the makeup of this new government.

So it has a pretty broad reservoir of governmental support. How deep is its support? What do people in the region think of Israel?

I would say it's not very deep. Of course, it's always hard to say things authoritatively in this region because polling tends to be so difficult and governments tend to be so repressive. But I think it is certainly safe to say that many Arabs still support the Palestinian cause. We saw that at the World cup in Qatar last month, with all of the very overt displays of sympathy for the Palestinians. I hear that in conversations all the time across the region. And even the Abraham Accords have lost support over the past couple of years. So broadly, yes, I would say there's still a lot of support for the Palestinians, but it's not monolithic support, particularly amongst political or economic elites in the region. I would say, especially in the Gulf, there is a sense that ties with Israel do offer economic opportunities, strategic benefits, while support for the Palestinian cause offers little beyond trouble.

Setting those elite views aside, though, how long do you think governments in the region can afford to stay reticent toward criticizing Israel?

I think what's really going to govern the reaction in this region is policies and actions, what this government does. So you look at something like Ben Gvir's visit that did force even the government of the uae, which I would say has been the most pro Israel government. Of the four that signed the Abraham Accords. Even the UAE was forced to issue a statement condemning his visit. And you talk to people around the region who also think that the makeup of this new government delay possible normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, that the Saudis are going to wait and see exactly how inflammatory this government proves to be. Having said all that, you've heard some commentary in recent weeks suggesting that this far right government might scuttle the Abraham Accords, and I don't think that to be the case.

Do you think we'll see an expansion of ties between Israel and Arab governments during Netanyahu's tenure?

Netanyahu himself suggested as much. In an interview with a Saudi news channel last month, he said that there would be peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia and that this would represent a quantum leap for Israel's relations with the Arab world. I think he's overstating the case a bit. There are not many other Arab countries that are queuing up to join the Abraham Accords. I don't think there is a long line waiting. I do think the Saudis are waiting. Mohammed bin Salman has met with Netanyahu, doesn't really have the sort of emotional attachment to the Palestinian cause that older Saudi leaders have or had. And of course he sees strategic reasons to establish ties with Israel. They share a hostility towards Iran. They also share a sense that America, their longtime security guarantor, is no longer a reliable guarantor. And so they might have to fend for themselves. And so for the Saudi leadership, overt ties with Israel offer them a partnership against Iran brings in economic benefits as well. And for a crown prince who's had a very fraught relationship with America over the past few years, it also gives him a chance to boost his political standing in Washington. So I think in the end, at least for the Saudis, these benefits are quite likely to outweigh any sense of solidarity between the Arab world and Palestinians.

All right, Greg, thanks very Much for your time today.

Thank you.

I met Jawbottoto in the Marani region of Kenya.

Azania Patel has been writing about Africa for the Economist.

He was an individual I was particularly interested in meeting because over a year ago his mother had been brutally murdered, lynched after being accused of being a witch. And he had been on site seeing his own mother be like, viciously taken by mobs and crowds. So I spoke to Mr. Ototo through a translator.

He says that his mother was accused of being a witch, having bewitched a schoolboy, which was not true because his mother was not a witch. She always had a mental health problem, so she was killed unjustly.

And what more do we know then about the circumstances of her death?

I met Mr. Ototo through an NGO that had helped provide support for her burial. And this NGO also works on tackling witchcraft allegations within the community. They told me that Mr. Ototo's mother had been known to have mental health issues. And the community knew this, knew that she was prone to somewhat irrational behavior on occasions, and yet brutally murdered her. And she wasn't the only victim to this 10 years crime. There were three other women saying it.

Was a Sunday, October 17, 2021. One morning there was someone blew a whistle to call community members together and made claims that there's a boy who had been bewitched. And there are witches in the community. They need to identify who's the witch. So they called everyone, members of this.

Community, this village came together and sort of started spitting on this boy who was lying prone and unresponsive.

People started that he was lying down and they were told to spit on him. Apparently there's a ritual, apparently we're supposed to spit if you are the witch. If you spit on him and you are the witch, he'll spit, speak and name you and say that you did it. But people spat on him and nothing happened. So that really was the beginning of this whole.

And the idea behind this is that it's sort of traditional knowledge that if the boy reacts to someone spitting on him, this person's the witch.

So he's saying since the spitting ritual did not work, identify who the witch was and the prayers did not identify the person. Some of the clan elders said that now people have to shake the boy one by one by hand. And when the people started shaking him, when his mother shook the hand, he held her hand tightly and said that she was one of the people that bewitched me. And then she was attacked and burnt, like right there.

That is a remarkable Story, how often does this kind of thing happen in this region?

Unfortunately, this is something that's all too common. Thousands of people, if reports are to be believed, are killed in Kenya each year, accused of witchcraft. And people often dismiss these witch hunts as these backward cultural practices. But in reality, a lot of these have very tangible material causes. So in my reporting in Kenya, I actually came across numerous cases where people were accused of witchcraft as a way for their family members to snatch property for them or for people to be pushed out of polygynous households where you have more than one wife to a single man.

And are all of these accusations of witchcraft and the like limited to Kenya?

Unfortunately, no. This is a problem that's fairly widespread. I mean, just to go on with some examples, there are over six camps in Ghana that house over a thousand people who've been accused of witchcraft and thrown out of their own homes. Street children in Kinshasa, in Congo are often held in churches and beaten up after being branded witches. And in Gambia, claims by the former president Yahya Jameha that he'd been bewitched led to the detention and torture of over a thousand people. And this isn't just hearsay, right? There's solid numbers to back this up. Almost 10% of the 1300 human rights violations in the Central African Republic recorded by the UN between 2015 and 2016 were witch hunt related. To be fair, this is not just an African issue. This also happens in parts of South Asia, in the Middle east, and in Latin America. Unfortunately, this does seem to be the most prevalent within the African region.

So what is it that makes these kinds of accusations so credible, though, for them to lead to abuse and death?

So being called a witch marks a person as a sort of public menace and like a danger to their society. And very often the people around these accusers will believe the fact that this person's a witch. And it's not just that. It's also this major role that religion plays, and crowds really do get riled up. So during my reporting, actually, I chanced upon this sermon by Dr. Sony Badu, a Ghanaian deliverance preacher. And he is speaking in the identification tutorial called how to Identify the Spirit.

Of Witchcraft Destroy the Future.

So the struggling, you're struggling is not because God wants to, but a witch has cast a spell somewhere.

But tonight, where's the mic? Tonight, any name that has been nominated.

On an evil altar, it is catching fire.

So this video has hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. And as recently as the 1970s, members of all the pentecostal and charismatic churches combined, which is this church group that Mr. Peru belongs to, were less than 5% of Africa's population. However, by 2006, Pentecostal Christians represented 12% of Africa's population, which is roughly 107 million people.

Where does the law stand on witchcraft and trying to address it?

There is no single law that dictates this within the African region. Each country, of course, has their own take on it. Witch hunts are extremely hard to police. So even if you have a case where someone is accused of being a witch, taking them to the cops is unlikely to do much because the courts don't have a way of proving if someone's a witch. Similarly, when it comes to witch hunts, police officers or law enforcers find it quite difficult to stop raging mobs. Sometimes the officers themselves believe in the accusations. During my reporting, I saw some instances where the officers were just bystanders to a furious mob.

So what's to be done then, if there is this mishmash of laws, of superstitions, of cultural practices to stop what amounts to simply murders?

I mean, of course, that's a very difficult question, and I'm not sure if I have all the answers. But I think what is definitely required is a sort of strong coordination between the governments, international organizations, and local activists. So there has to be more ways to reintegrate the accused people back into the society. Because even if someone does survive a witchcraft accusation, it's quite difficult for them to be accepted into their communities and neighborhoods again. So one of the examples is Kayagodoma, which is a witch camp in the Kenyan forest land. And they invite these sort of neighborhoods to bring accused witches to them and ritually cleanse these said witches. Which means that these people are free to go home. Because if a community believes in witchcraft, they're also likely to believe that spiritual healers can de ju these groups of people. And that's a way of resolving superstition with superstition.

Azania, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you so much, Jason.

In America, the craft beer industry just keeps growing. Breweries continue to pop up across the country, and with them come all kinds of new or rediscovered beer styles, often given ridiculous or inscrutable trade names. Oyster stouts and milkshake IPAs and beers that feature just about every fruit in the world. It's bewildering. Helpfully, for the uninitiated, there's a growing network of trusted beer experts to help them.

40 years ago, in 1982, there were just 82 breweries in America. And while people drank a lot more beer then overall they tended to drink basically a few beers, predictable generic lagers like Coors or Miller or Budweiser. And what's happened since this expansion of craft breweries and there's now over 9,000 brewers in America.

Daniel Knowles, our Midwest correspondent, has been drinking it all in.

There are states which have more brewers than the entire country used to have. And as beer has got more and more popular and complicated, there's more demand for people to understand it and have qualifications.

Qualifications. You've met someone who's gone to beer college.

I spoke to Neil Witt from Kansas City, Missouri, and he's a Master Cicerone, one of only about 20 odd in the world. That makes him basically a global expert on beer, essentially equivalent to a master sommelier with wine.

In the late 2000s, the Cicerone certification program began and I worked my way through eventually passing the highest level of examination, the Master cicerone level, in 2012. And so I.

The Cicerone exam is organized by a firm in Chicago. It's a four level thing. The final level involves a three hour written essay question, a multiple choice test, a blind tasting test, and a kind of oral examination. So it's quite a process.

There was a lot of studying, lots of reading books, lots of poring over beer styles, and there was a lot of tasting beer.

So Mr. Woods is one of only a couple of dozen fully qualified Master Cicerones. That's the highest level they have. But there are around 4,500 qualified Cicerones and something like 150,000 qualified beer servers, which is the lowest level of qualification they provide.

And I guess the craft beer scene is throwing up all kinds of examples and outlandish things that these cicerones have to know about.

Craft beer has been kind of going for 30 odd years, but in recent years, brewers have really kind of lent into that. They've tried to make not just kind of better tasting beers, but more interesting, more serious beers that are trying to compete with spirits or fine wines even. So you have Sam Adams, which is one of the kind of original craft brewers from Boston, sells this beer called Utopias. And I don't know if I'd really call it a beer. It's aged for 30 years in bourbon casks and it's 28% alcohol. I tasted some and it tastes less like a beer, it's more a sort of sherry and it goes for $400 a bottle. That's really the high end. But you have Goose island, which is another craft brewer in Chicago, sells a Beer aged in bourbon barrels too for about $50. And people queue up at its taproom to buy it. So there's been this kind of recent expansion of really very high end beers targeting people who want to take beer extremely seriously.

I mean, you might argue it's getting on towards being as fancy as wine.

Yeah, there's a hint of that. If you speak to the people who do these cicerone programs, they'd say it's never going to be quite the same as wine because for one thing, you can buy wine, store it for years and years, so people buy it as an investment. Whereas even the sort of fanciest beer you do sort of want to drink before it expires. But there are restaurants that are doing things like beer tastings with particular pairing beers with particular foods, that sort of thing. And restaurants want people who know about the beer that they sell and customers want beer that's good, but they also want things like draft lines and bars to be kept properly clean. They're more aware of what makes a good beer and they're more demanding. So that requires kind of distributors and the kind of people who are selling beer to know a lot more about it than they perhaps used to.

All this talk of fancy beers made me frankly a little bit thirsty. So I decided to have a cicerone experience myself.

So we're going to do our Pilsner first, then our German wheat beer, then our hazy ipa, our chocolate stout.

Let me start with a long standing beer question I have.

Sure.

I don't think I like Belgian style beers. There is a taste common to a lot of them in both Belgian beers of the classic sort and Belgian style. What is it that I'm tasting and what is it I don't like?

I'm going to assume it's the phenols.

Natalia Watson is a cicerone from Northern Ireland who spent many years developing her craft in America.

So phenols are a flavor compound that's a little spicy, comes across as clove, black pepper, nutmeg, kind of can be interpreted differently. It also has a lot of alcohol in most Belgian beers.

Together we went on a beer flight tasting everything from a good old fashioned lager to a seriously strong stout.

Give this one a go because the.

Rest are sort of emergent fruit notes. This is right on the nose for this real fruit.

Yes, exactly.

Okay. I have perhaps an unexpected thought as to how this one smells. I get a little bit of butterscotch out of that.

So it's very cherry forward butterscotch. Another note that you may find is a marzipan note, and that's because they use the whole cherry. And so the pit, when that ages, introduces a little bit of an almondy or marzipan character. So it could be that contributing that sort of butterscotch note as well.

I'm very much on board with this one.

Oh, good. And the wonderful thing about this one is because it doesn't taste like what most people expect beer to taste like, it's a really great way to bring people into beer and show them that it doesn't all taste bitter. It doesn't all look like the beer emoji. We've got different colors, different flavors, different levels of acidity, et cetera. So I love bringing people in through the world of sour or mixed fermentation beers and then kind of encouraging them to try other flavors from there.

As we reached the end of our tasting, Natalia explained to me what makes being a cicerone so special.

I think sharing the knowledge and passion of beer with other people, because beer is this mystery to a lot of people. Most people understand that wine comes from grapes and cider comes from apples. Very few people understand what beer comes from. And I totally get it. It's a bit complex. It's a bit confusing. Beer has four ingredients. There's not just one thing that we can press and ferment and turn into beer. So looking at beer's four different ingredients and explaining what they do and what flavors they can introduce, it unlocks these little puzzle pieces. So then, you know, when we choose a certain ingredient, this is how a brewer makes hundreds of different beer styles. Because it has to do with the choices that they make, the flavors it will introduce, and then ultimately what to expect.

Natalia, thanks very much for the many lessons I learned today. Very grateful.

You are very welcome.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Marguerite Howell and Chris Impey. Our sound engineer is Will Rowe. Our senior producers are Sam Westren, Jack Gill, John Jo Devlin, and Rory Galloway. Our creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Alize Jean Baptiste and Kevin Kaners, with extra production help this week from Emily Elias. Our assistant producer is Barbara Barkley. Bram, we'll all see you back here on Monday.