Phase transition? Gaza’s shaky peace

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The economist. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The Trump administration's mission to trim America's federal workforce has been slashing and burning its way through the country's science institutions. We take stock of what's on the chopping block and assess how self defeating it all is. And for lots of reasons, Brazil never really reckoned with the horrors of its 20 year dictatorship, not as much as its neighbors Chile, Uruguay and Argentina did. Now an Oscar nominated film is making Brazilians sit up and look to that past. First up, though, In Gaza almost six weeks ago, a temporary truce between Israel and Hamas began. Hostages were freed, the bombs stopped. At last, Palestinians returned to what was left of their homes. No one expected the progression to peace to be straightforward, and it hasn't been. Just this morning, Israel agreed to restart hostage exchanges after delaying them on Saturday in protest over the treatment of its detainees. Despite all these bumps in the road, a shaky peace has somehow endured. But the threat of renewed violence has never been far away. Now the two sides are approaching a far more significant turning point. Without much of a plan in place.

The first phase of the truce between Israel and Hamas is meant to expire on Saturday, but the negotiations over the second phase haven't even started yet.

Greg Karlstrom is a Middle east correspondent for the Economist.

Add to that some violations of the deal by both sides and increasingly strident rhetoric, and I think we're in a very precarious situation where it's not at all clear that this deal is going to hold up for much longer.

And Greg, it feels like we've actually heard relatively little out of Gaza about Gaza since the ceasefire began. Bring us up to date.

Start with what has gone well in the ceasefire it has largely held for the past five and a half weeks. Gaza has been comparatively calm. The fighting has stopped. Hamas has released all of the living hostages who were meant to be freed in the first phase of this agreement, along with the bodies of some Israeli hostages who died in captivity. There's also been a lot more humanitarian aid going into Gaza since the truce took hold. That being said, we've also seen some issues in the deal over the past five and a half weeks. One of them is these rather grotesque rallies that Hamas has insisted on holding every time it releases hostages, parading them in front of crowds, making them thank their captors, kiss their captors on the head. This has understandably caused a lot of anger amongst Israelis. Another issue last week when Hamas handed over the bodies of an Israeli mother, Shiri Bibas, and her two children, it later turned out that the woman's body was not Shiri Bibas at all. It was an unidentified Palestinian woman. That, too caused a lot of outrage in Israel and then violations on the Israeli side as well. Palestinians in Gaza say they have not received the caravans, the temporary homes that they expected to receive in phase one that so many people need, especially in the middle of what is a very cold winter in Gaza right now. So that brings us to where we are now, to this very tense situation at the end of phase one.

And you mentioned that the first phase expires on Saturday, but the second phase very much still to be worked out. What do you expect to see between now and then?

I think you can imagine three different scenarios, only one of which I think is realistic. The first scenario is that the negotiators somehow manage to figure out phase two between now and Saturday. I think that's all but impossible. Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump's Middle east envoy, not even expected to come back to the region until Sunday. So good luck getting anything done by Saturday. The second option is that this all falls Apart in the next few days. There's a return to war over the weekend once the deal lapses. I think that's unlikely as well. It's not impossible. Which brings us to the most realistic option, which is an extension of phase one. What Israel is pushing for, what I think the Americans are pushing for as well, is an extension of at least a few weeks. Hamas might release a few more tranches of hostages in that time in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. The hope is that that would at least buy some time for negotiators to start working on phase two.

And let's sort of game this out. If we could. If we do get to phase two, what does that look like on the ground? What comes after that?

That will start with an Israeli withdrawal from what's known as the Philadelphia Corridor. It's a strip of land on the border between Egypt and Gaza that is meant to happen on March 9th. And then from there, the hopeful scenario is that you have a permanent end to the war in Gaza, a release of all of the remaining hostages in Hamas captivity, and then you talk about phase three, which is reconstruction, rebuilding of Gaza. Now, there are various plans floating around for that. There were Arab states who met in Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia on Friday. They are hashing out a plan which should be presented at an Arab league summit on March 4, which would see a committee of Palestinian technocrats overseeing reconstruction in Gaza. Egyptian firms would do a lot of the work. Gazans would supply the labor. Gulf states would pay for it. Broadly, that is the Arab proposal, and it's being billed as an alternative to Donald Trump's wild plan to depopulate Gaza and build a resort there. We also heard Yair Lapid, the Israeli opposition leader, speaking on Tuesday at a think tank in Washington, suggesting his version of a plan which would be Egypt taken control of Gaza for a period of at least eight years in exchange for its foreign debts being written off. He said he didn't talk to the Egyptians about this plan. I'm not sure they would be on board with it. Also not sure he spoke to Egypt's creditors. But there are all of these proposals circulating for what the future of Gaza is going to look like. All of them have problems, all of them in their own ways, a bit unrealistic.

You were hinting there that the Americans have been fairly crucial in this stage of negotiations, is that right?

They've been instrumental throughout the whole process. Donald Trump has been. But when you listen to the messages coming out of Washington now, the Americans are somewhat all over the place. Trump Says he wants the deal to hold, he wants to get to phase two, but he also says he's okay with whatever Netanyahu and the Israelis decide to do. You listen to Steve Witkoff, the President's Middle east envoy. He says he's confident about getting a deal, but he also says that as part of phase two, Hamas needs to be exiled from Gaza, which is going to be a non starter with Hamas. Some of this, you can look at it and say this is the Americans trying to build leverage, trying to put pressure on Hamas, but it might also be representative of genuine confusion on the part of a very chaotic administration. So I think whether we get to phase two or not really is going to come down to whether Trump is willing to put pressure on Netanyahu to get the Israelis to phase two. And it's not entirely clear right now if Trump is willing and able to do that.

So in the scene of confusion that you've painted here, there is still very much some chance that things could get back to war. I suppose it's worth thinking about what that might look like.

There was a lot of talk last year about something called the General's Plan, which was drawn up by a group of retired Israeli generals. And it was basically a proposal to lay siege to northern Gaza, cut off the flow of humanitarian aid entirely, and declare anyone who was living there to be a valid military target. The rhetoric coming out of Israel over the past few weeks is that if the war resumes, they are going to put that plan into effect. They are going to go back into Gaza even more aggressively than they did over the previous 15 months. They are going to lay waste to large parts of the territory, and they are going to impose even more onerous restrictions on the flow of humanitarian aid into the territory. Basically a scorched earth plan for Gaza. That is the rhetoric coming out of Israel. Now, we've seen over the past 15 months that laying waste to Gaza hasn't actually achieved Israel's strategic goal of removing Hamas from power in the territory. But nonetheless, the messaging right now is that however bad things were in the first phase of the war, they can still get much worse.

Greg, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

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I feel like we keep bringing up America's so called Department of Government Efficiency or doge, but it has effects way beyond the stated goal of trimming the federal workforce. See, to an economist, the word efficiency suggests something scarce resources being used optimally in America. One such resource is scientific talent. Now that the bean counting bros have come for science institutions, suboptimal use of the resource is coming.

We're going to see, I believe, talent moving overseas from the United States and we're going to see less contribution to our global understanding of science.

All this looks like a failure to run the numbers on what America actually gets out of its science. Never mind the fact that it's nabbed more Nobel Prizes than the next five countries combined, or that it puts out nearly a quarter of the world's most cited papers. Simplifying a bit Science becomes technology becomes business becomes growth.

America has long put a lot more money into science than a lot of its competitors, and that has had huge returns on investment for the country as a whole.

Rachel Dobbs is the Economist's Environment editor.

It is thought to be responsible for a quarter of the country's productivity growth since the end of the Second World War. And one economic analysis found that for every dollar of government spending on scientific research, the return was between 150 and 300%. But science funding now looks like it's on the chopping block because of some of the changes being made by the new Trump administration.

Well, talk me through those how big are the cuts? Where are they being cut?

As part of Elon Musk's goal to get $2 trillion annually out of America's federal budget, agencies like the national oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA or the nsf, which is the National Science foundation, have been told to prepare for cuts of their budget of up to 50% and downsizing of their staff of up to 30%. You've already seen mass layoffs start across a lot of federal agencies, including scientific ones.

Is this just high level trying to cut everybody in equal fashion, or is there a focus here?

It does look as if some of the things being cut are specifically targeted. One of the things that was announced as part of the Trump administration's push against dei, which is diversity, equity and inclusion, was that all NSF grants had to be reviewed on that basis. And Ted Cruz, who's a Republican senator, recently released a database of over 3,000 NSF grants, which is roughly 10% of the grants that were allocated during the Biden Harris administration administration that he said had been flagged for funding the radical left's woke. Nonsense. And if you look through that data set, which I did, it is incredibly stark because you've got thousands and thousands of grants which have been flagged and they are just colour coded as being flagged. Race, race, race, gender, gender, gender. Environmental justice, environmental justice, social justice. So not only are quite a lot of the ones flagged not to do with those topics at all, you've got some really ludicrous ones in there, which are words to do with bias, which obviously has a specific scientific meaning. The phrase trans has been flagged at certain points, but it has a specific scientific meaning, like stuff happening across tectonic plates. But also a lot of the stuff that has been flagged is really important crucial scientific work, like trying to work out how drugs are metabolised in people of different genders.

And this isn't just sort of stopping the research in its tracks, it's also putting some of America's scientific talent out on their ear.

Yeah, it is, because these kind of cuts will mean that less scientific research can be done and that there will be less positions available to do it in. And it also has made the whole situation feel much more uncertain, and that will likely lead to people looking elsewhere. The deepest cuts currently proposed are to the grants allocated by the National Institutes of Health, which run to roughly 43 billion a year and are most of what that organization does. It's about 94% of their budget.

And these cuts are already underway, or will be soon.

Some of them are already underway. You've seen mass firings of probationary employees across federal agencies. Got about 5000 have gone across the Department of Health and Human Services. More are slated for noaa, more are slated for NASA. And the Economist actually spoke to Monica Bertinelli, who is the former head of the nih, who has defined what she thinks those kind of cuts will mean.

It is my understanding, although it remains to be seen whether this definitely occurs, that the people losing their positions are not only people who've been recently hired, but also critical leaders who've been at NIH for a long time. But were recently promoted. So this just frankly seems to me not any approach I've ever seen to organizing an agency to do the best it can for the American people.

And so what I think Monica is trying to say there is that these kind of cuts are actually a terrible business decision and will leave these agencies in chaos. It is not just a case of kind of trimming the fat. This is going to have long running and possibly irreversible effects. And that obviously is coming on top of the proposed cuts to how the NIH funds what's known as indirect costs costs.

So what do you mean by indirect costs?

Indirect costs are stuff that does not go towards a specific project with a really exact or commercial application or to an individual researcher. It's more stuff that goes towards the shared resources that all of a faculty might use. That's stuff like a mass spectrometer or lab benches. That's stuff that then each individual grant doesn't have to be funding on its own. And it's also the stuff that allows what's known as basic research to really take place, which is kind of research that is done for the sake of expanding scientific knowledge. And often that lays the really, really crucial building blocks of what then becomes the kind of really notable scientific discoveries. But for that to happen, there has to be this building block underneath. And private grants, which are often for applied research, typically don't cover that. So you need the ability for that research to be going on at the faculty level underneath it. And that is what a lot of these indirect costs are put towards. They have been characterized by the Trump administration, particularly by Elon Musk, as just completely egregious overheads. And that these universities with huge endowments are just siphoning off these funds kind of just because they can. And that really is definitely untrue.

And this is a betrayal of the social contract that has existed in the United States since the end of World War II for the institutions and the federal government to co build the infrastructure for American science that's carried out at universities.

Holdenthorpe is the editor in chief of the science family of journals.

And if you suddenly pull the plug, the bill can be hundreds of millions of dollars at wealthy institutions, but it also is a large bill at smaller institutions that are just getting to the point where they can do research in places where the United States really needs them to be done. So I would encourage people, it's eye popping to see that Yale's going to have to come up with $200 million or Stanford. But just think about what that means if the University of Rhode island has to come up with $10 million, and.

So smaller universities and hospitals will be hit particularly hard, particularly in places or states that have a very high concentration of medical research and are known for doing it, many of whom are Republican states. And you've actually seen a couple of Republican senators come out very strongly on this basis, like Susan Collins in Maine or Bill in Louisiana. And they have said, you know, these cuts will be incredibly damaging for our constituents.

But as for the economic motivations, such as they are, will it work? Will it save money in the long term?

I think definitely no, because of the kind of return of investment that we see on this kind of science in the short term, I think realistically probably no. It may show up in an immediate cut in the budget, but will do very little to meaningfully save money.

Rachel, thanks very much for walking us through that.

Thanks, Jason.

I'm Still Here is a Brazilian film set during the country's military degree dictatorship which ruled from 1964 to 1985.

Ana Lancas is our Brazil bureau chief.

And there's one scene towards the end that really struck me. A photographer is trying to take a picture of a woman and her five children and the father of the family has been disappeared by the dictatorship. They're all smiling and the photographer says, can you please look a little sadder? The editor asked for a suitably unhappy photo and they defy his orders and they flash these toothy grins. NAJ VAN we saw here it shows the resilience of the family, but I also thought that on a broader level it kind of reflects how Brazil dealt with the legacy of its dictatorship. I used to live in Argentina, and in Argentina the history of the dictatorship is still incredibly present. But when I moved to Brazil last year, I was shocked because there hasn't been the same level of reckoning. And I'm Still Here is now finally spurring a reckoning with Brazil's violent past. The film came out in November and it's already one of the most watched films in Brazilian history and it's competing in three categories in the Oscars for best picture, best international film, and its lead stoical actress Fernanda Torres, is competing for best actress. The film follows the family of Jubens Paiva as they deal with his disappearance. Paiva was a left leaning congressman who was immediately ousted after the coup of 1964. But for several years the dictatorship was fairly calm. And then in the 1970s it really tightened its grip and in 1971, regime thugs knocked on Paiva's door in Rio de Janeiro and took him in for questioning. He never came out. For decades, the army pushed a really implausible and convoluted story that Paiva had basically escaped their grip and joined a guerrilla group. But in 2014, a national truth commission, which interviewed thousands of people, published evidence that he had actually been tortured and he died during his interrogation. Five retired officers were charged with killing him and with hiding his body. But so far, none of those officers has been tried, and three have already died of old age. The fact that nobody in Brazil is in jail for crimes committed during the dictatorship is pretty unusual. Across South America, military leaders were in power during the 70s and 80s, and in most countries, they negotiated transition to democracy only after securing amnesties for themselves and their underlings. In Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, though, those pardons were basically annulled. And where they weren't entirely annulled, courts went after the worst offenders. But in Brazil, things were different. Brazil's Supreme Court upheld its amnesty, and civil society, by and large, went along with it. The military returned to the barracks after 1985, and it let a budding left wing movement thrive. The differences in these outcomes comes down to the relative brutality of the regimes and also to the popularity and power of the militaries at the point of transition to democracy. So if you put them on a spectrum, Argentina's dictatorship was by far the most brutal. So after the dictatorship, a really powerful human rights movement emerged, and over 1,000 people are in jail in Argentina for crimes committed during the dictatorship. Chile comes after Argentina. Its regime was also very bloody. Uruguay's regime preferred imprisoning opponents rather than murdering them. And Brazil's regime on that spectrum was the least savage. The army killed at least 434 people and tortured thousands more. But at the beginning of the dictatorship, Brazil won the football World cup.

And there it is.

Brazil become the first team to ever.

Win the World cup three times.

And for the first few years, the economy was booming. All of that means that Brazil does not have the same traumatic memory that Argentina, Chile and Uruguay did. But now the success of I'm Still Here is making a lot of Brazilians rethink their clemency. So in January, registry offices started updating death certificates for people disappeared during the dictatorship to reflect the real causes of their death. And then on February 14, an official commission that looks into political killings said that it might reexamine the death of Juselino Kovicek, who's a former president, who died in suspicious circumstances in 1976 along with another former president and a very important politician. And on the same day, Brazil's Supreme Court started deliberating on whether the amnesty should apply in the case of Jubens Paiva and two other disappeared dissidents. It's very rare that a single film spurs such profound discussion in a country. The film feels newly relevant. In November, when it came out, I came on the show to talk about a report that the Federal Police had just released that Jair Bolsonaro, a former far right president, basically tried to stage a coup to stay in power after the 2022 election, and a lot of people in the army supported him. Bolsonaro denies wrongdoing, and he says that he's being politically persecuted. So there was a sense among a lot of people when this film came out that Brazil's military hadn't quite learned the lesson that it needed to stay in the barracks and hand over power to civilians. On February 18, Brazil's Attorney General basically confirmed the findings of the Federal Police. And that means that Bolsonaro will now be tried by the Supreme Court. But there is an interesting twist to all of this, which is that Bolsonaro also has personal beef with the Paiva family. He grew up in the same town as them. In 2014, when the National Truth Commission confirmed that Rubens Paiva had been killed by the military, a bust of him was brought into Congress. The family of Rubens Paiva was there, and Bolsonaro spat on the bust in front of the family and set the whole. Spiva got what he deserved. So I think I'm Still Here has resonated particularly strongly in Brazil right now because it's not just a film about its past, it's also about the present.

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