TUCSON – Flying from Paris bound for America, I ended up in a strange land besieged by Gulliver’s Lilliputians, smug and small-minded, who slavishly follow a mad tyrant toward a nightmare beyond even Jonathan Swift’s fertile imagination.

Is that a little over the top?

Donald Trump’s worst crime is not even among 91 indictments involving everything from fraud to a violent coup attempt. He allowed needless Covid-19 deaths – almost certainly well above 200,000 – for his own selfish purposes. American law calls that depraved-heart murder.

Yet so many sensible people do little more than wring hands – or simply tune out. Talking politics is bad form. Democrats cast about for an untested leader to replace one of the most effective presidents since World War II because he is beyond an arbitrary sell-by date.

Trump’s pandering led Putin to invade Ukraine. His support for Netanyahu’s subjugation of Palestine helped incite Hamas terror; the riposte sparks virulent global antisemitism. His assault on truth undercut faith in even reliable news media. And there is so much more.

In another term, he wants something akin to martial law to repress “vermin,” a Nazi catchword, and slashed taxes yet again for a wealthy few. Even if the 14th Amendment bars his return, the Grand Old Party he trashed ignores climate chaos, which is fast making Earth uninhabitable.

Where in the hell am I?

MORE

DRAGUIGNAN, France — In 1982, I followed lead tanks into Lebanon and first saw Israel’s approach to Palestinian militants who dig in – and under – refugee camps, hospitals or densely populated neighborhoods: blast away at a safe distance.

Up the road, I watched jets swoop in to bomb Ain al-Hilweh, a camp of 70,000 people, mostly women, children and elders. Before long, I realized it was Israel’s standard approach to what you might call the subway conundrum.

Suppose cameras spot a terrorist cluster in Times Square Station at rush hour. Police can seal exits, lob in explosives and express regret for “unavoidable” collateral damage. To retain their old nickname — New York’s Finest — there are better ways.

Over the decades, extremists studied Israeli tactics and shaped a strategy. Hamas, oblivious to hapless victims, has a long-term plan for Gaza and the West Bank. The harder Israel hits, the more world opinion turns against it. And bitter teenagers swell terrorist ranks.

Hamas must be crippled. But while stateless militias can ignore international conventions and human decency, Israel cannot. If it does, Jews everywhere, even those who want a separate Palestinian state, are in increasing peril.

No other place evokes such deep passions in a smoldering world where truth is now a moving target. A High-Noon Armageddon between good and evil is unlikely. Instead, consider T.S. Eliot: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”

Time remains to find a workable solution, but it is running out fast.

PARIS – Joe Biden defined the war in Gaza with a line from Yeats: “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.” He threw American might behind Israel but also declared nothing can resolve Holy Land strife unless a livable Palestine emerges from an unholy war.

He recalled a meeting with Golda Meir during the Yom Kippur War, 50 years ago. Don’t worry, she told him, Jews have a secret weapon: they have no place to go. But neither do the Palestinians.

Ground truth is buried under pent-up hatreds, hidebound bias, distorted history, prostituted faux-news and manipulation. Solid reporting competes with so much well-meant but misleading speed-of-light coverage that peace seems an impossible dream.

Still, Jonathan Dekel-Chen — at 60, a warm-hearted history professor – exemplifies hope despite it all. His son Sagui hid his wife and their two young daughters, then tried to fight off Hamas killers. Now he awaits a miracle in the bowels of Gaza, a captive of zealots with nothing to lose.

PARIS — When the unthinkable burst onto TV screens Saturday, I flashed back to Hebron in 1996. My AP dispatch began: “After four deadly days, Jews and Arabs have forced down the lid on Pandora’s Box, but few Palestinians speak of the ‘peace process’ without a sneer or a sigh.”

And now this.

Reporters who have watched Holy Land horror over generations were stunned, like everyone else, at Hamas’ cruel coordinated onslaught that caught Israeli intelligence off guard. But few were surprised that smoldering hatreds had finally flamed into a likely unwinnable war.

A thundering artillery prelude killed 700 men, women and children in Gaza by Tuesday as the death toll in Israel reached 900. Armored columns amassed at the border to roll in.

Israel might cripple Hamas, but the fallout could be worse. Across the world, people are befuddled by contradictory sources, mistaken impressions and unshakeable bias at opposing extremes. The threat of Middle East war — and spiking antisemitism — is hard to exaggerate.

The need to fight back hard unites fractious Israeli parties. But in Washington, self-serving Republicans and a speaker-less House hamstring a road-tested president who pledges support to a close ally while trying to push it toward lasting coexistence with Palestine.

MORE

PARIS — I lost it not long ago when some blowhard academic, writing in the Atlantic, twisted Cicero’s ancient wisdom to say old people should butt out of politics and tend their daffodils. Cicero, like others before and after, wrote the exact opposite.

Most “ism” epithets are hurtful if not downright dangerous. Ageism is just idiocy. All bodies age, but dementia is not inevitable. And statecraft is not rugby. Jimmy Carter, the most sensible president in my own Biden-long lifetime, remains shiv-sharp in hospice care at 99.

Those old Romans pegged it. Evil leaders get eviler with age, lusting for power and driven by greed. Good ones, free of envy with no more left to prove, serve the people. Nothing matches their experience and respect earned over time. Today, that has never mattered more.

Is Donald Trump more “dynamic” than Biden? Yes, like the mad queen down Alice’s rabbit hole screaming “Off with their heads.” He let Covid kill en masse, torpedoed the economy, savaged truth, pushed China toward potential war, egged on Russia and led a deadly coup d’etat.

A Trump-trashed nation is now symbolized less by that flag atop the Capitol than a viral photo of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert on the House floor, heckling a State of the Union speech like game-park baboons on a Land Rover hood flinging feces at the windshield.

MORE