Evan Vucci/AP

President Joe Biden signs executive orders on the economy Jan. 22, 2021, in Washington, as Vice President Kamala Harris looks on. The presidency has come to dominate the branches of government in a way the framers did not intend.

Joe Biden made his first public speech as president last week with his inaugural address. He will be expected to make many more.

George Washington made just nine public speeches in his first term. Through Andrew Jackson, the president averaged about three per year – just one indicator of how the presidency of today is a less humble office than in the country’s early years.

From steering trade and environmental policy to waging war, the executive branch has gradually expanded its powers far beyond what the founders intended. As the country has grown more polarized and gridlocked, a cultural fixation with the White House has developed, and America’s once-modest executive has come to be viewed as a hybrid savior-celebrity on whom the fate of the nation rests.

“I alone can fix it,” Donald Trump declared when he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. Four years later, hundreds of people stormed the U.S. Capitol – some clad in Trump regalia and carrying Trump flags – in an attempt to delay the certification of an election that he lost but many other Republicans won.

The past few weeks have crystallized the extent to which the presidency has come to dominate both America’s delicate balance of powers and, perhaps more importantly, the hopes and fears of the American people. Scholars disagree over the degree to which this is a problem, but if it is, the next two years – with one party controlling Congress and the presidency – may be as good an opportunity as any to try to address it.

“The founders of our republic did not want to put that much [power] in the hands of a single leader,” says Mark Rozell, a professor at George Mason University and an expert on presidential power. “America’s addiction to executive power has become dangerous for this country.”

“President Biden has a unique opportunity,” he adds, “to put forward a process that will establish the presidency as a more modest power in our system of separated powers.”

Give and take

Former President Trump’s demagogic tendencies pushed the presidency’s institutional and cultural power further than ever before, but President Biden has already been flexing his executive muscles, signing 17 executive orders, memorandums, and proclamations within hours of his inauguration.

This is what America’s founders, fresh from monarchical rule, feared. Suspicious of centralized power, they distributed it throughout the government and the states.

The country has grown a lot since then, evolving from an insignificant international player into a superpower both militarily and in a globalized, fast-paced economy. Amid this general evolution, and stimulated by crisis, the executive branch has taken – and been given – more power.

Presidents have taken a more active role in the American economy, highlighted by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies during the Great Depression, which created agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP/File

President George W. Bush declares the end of major combat in Iraq as he speaks aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast on May 2, 2003. The war authorization Mr. Bush secured from Congress right after the 9/11 terrorist attacks has been used to justify the majority of U.S. military actions in the Middle East ever since.

Presidents have also taken charge of initiating foreign wars. Congress hasn’t declared war on anyone since World War II. The war authorization George W. Bush secured from Congress right after 9/11 has been used to justify the majority of U.S. military actions in the Middle East ever since. Barack Obama and Mr. Trump used executive orders to advance much of their policy agendas around a deadlocked Congress – and Mr. Trump did so even during his first two years, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress.

Indeed Congress – specifically the two-party system – has done as much as presidents themselves to enable presidential power to grow. As polarization has intensified, members of the president’s party in Congress have frustrated the legislature’s ability to check the executive, says Kermit Roosevelt, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

“So long as Congress is relatively evenly divided, and the executive is unified, Congress is going to be at a disadvantage,” he adds.

Why “you had the mobs”

But what the Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol manifested, in striking fashion, was an intangible product of the decades of expanding president power: its cultural effect.

Through technological advancements, presidents have been able to communicate with the public with greater frequency and intimacy than in the past. Roosevelt had “fireside chats” over the radio, later presidents had television, and until recently, Mr. Trump had Twitter.

With the 24-hour news cycle, the president has become almost omnipresent, and, in some cases, a celebrity. Of the 45 former presidents, only the most recent 14 are enshrining their legacies in presidential libraries.

And as the presidency has assumed more power and publicity, the public has invested in the Oval Office more of its hopes and fears.

“That’s why I think you had the mobs” on Jan. 6, says Dana Nelson, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

“People have become so focused on controlling federal power that it was an act of desperation completely keyed around the presidency.”

Just look at midterm elections. Since 2000, turnout has been 60% lower on average than in presidential election years. Two important exceptions: 2010 and 2018, when the largest number of midterm voters since the 1960s turned out to switch the House away from the party of a president the opposition viewed as overreaching his powers.

Voters have a “fantasy ... that if they get the right person in office they’ll fix everything,” says Dr. Nelson, author of “Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People.”

“That fantasy,” she adds, “keeps getting more and more powerful with each iteration of the presidential cycle.”

A Goldilocks moment?

It’s important to note that, in some respects, the growth of executive power has been necessary and beneficial. A president can act with more speed and flexibility than a legislature that needs a majority consensus – a necessity in a globalized, modern world.

“We need a much more powerful president than the framers anticipated,” says Professor Michael Klarman, a legal historian at Harvard Law School, “but we may have moved too far in that direction.”

There have been small signs that the United States could see movement in the other direction. The Trump years, ironically, have witnessed “a reorientation of some of the presidency’s important powers and responsibilities,” wrote Jack Goldsmith and Samuel Moyn – law professors at Harvard and Yale Law schools, respectively – for The Atlantic.

The Senate voted across party lines in 2019 to end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen (though Mr. Trump vetoed it). And in December 2020, Congress overrode his veto to approve an annual defense budget that included provisions cracking down on his use of emergency powers to divert military funds to a border wall and, over his objection, renaming bases named after the Confederacy.

President Biden has pledged to end “the forever wars” in the Middle East and U.S. support for the war in Yemen.

A more challenging shift on executive power, however, may be getting the American public to shed what Dr. Rozell describes as the country’s “infatuation” with presidential power.

“It was only going to happen when people turned their attention away from the federal, and specifically the executive stage,” says Dr. Nelson. “People just seem unable to do that.”

Dr. Rozell is a bit more optimistic, however, that we may now be in a Goldilocks zone for reducing executive power, where conditions are just right. Democrats control the White House and (narrowly) Congress, President Biden has long-term relationships with some Republican leaders, and there is “the strong likelihood” that Mr. Biden only serves one term, and can operate free of the pressure of reelection. And there is the memory of fanatical supporters of a president storming the Capitol.

“Scholars have been warning about the dangers of the rise of a too-powerful presidency. ... Many members of Congress have talked about these issues,” he adds. “If not now, when?”

It’s hard for Becky Levi to pick a favorite memory of her uncle Rodney.

In the years he lived with her family in northern New Brunswick, Rodney Levi – who they called “Buck” – regularly babysat her two children and acted as a cheerleader after her long days at work with at-risk youth. “He was my biggest supporter,” she says. “You couldn’t meet a nicer guy.”

It’s not hard for Ms. Levi to pick a worst memory. It was June 12, 2020, when they received a call that Buck, a member of the Metepenagiag Mi’kmaq First Nation, had been shot by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). He later died of his injuries.

They still don’t know exactly why or how. More than six months later, the Levi family awaits a watchdog report on the events of the day and is pushing to make it public.

The RCMP told local media at the time that they were called to a home to respond to an “unwanted man” and found Mr. Levi with knives and uncooperative. They said they used a taser without effect before fatally shooting him. For the family, there is at least one clear explanation. “Definitely systemic racism – just, you know, he was a native,” says his niece.

Her uncle’s death came 18 days after George Floyd was killed by a white officer in the United States, generating anti-racism protests across the globe. It was eight days after another Indigenous resident of New Brunswick, Chantel Moore, was shot and killed by local police during a wellness check. And it was two days since the commissioner of the RCMP told Canadians there wasn’t systemic racism in her force, generating swift backlash.

As questions over racism in the U.S. dominate global attention, Indigenous and minority families like the Levis seek justice for the discrimination they say they face at the hands of the RCMP, clashing with a popular notion they are guardians of a “peaceable kingdom,” as RCMP historian Steve Hewitt puts it.

The law-and-order West

The RCMP originated as a colonial police force to clear the prairies and settle the West. It has enforced some of Canada’s most violent policies, from driving Indigenous peoples off their land and onto reserves to ripping children from their families to place in residential schools.

Yet the Mounties stand as one of Canada’s strongest national symbols, celebrated in early Hollywood films, says Dr. Hewitt, a historian at the University of Birmingham in England. “There’s a whole mythic cultural aspect to it that also fits with this ‘pat on your back’ notion that some Canadians have of Canada ... and so much of that is constructed in opposition to the United States as a lawless, violent West, while Canada is law-and-order West.”

That comparison has long made it hard for Canadians to confront racism, both in the police and society at large, says Kojo Damptey, a musician and executive director at the Hamilton Centre for Civic Inclusion in Ontario. During the siege on the U.S. Capitol, many Canadians looked with horror at its southern neighbor. “Folks on Twitter were saying, ‘Thank God we live in Canada,’” he says, “and they shrug off what happens here.” Yet white supremacy resonates here – the Proud Boys, whose founder is Canadian, have members in the country – including inside police institutions, he says.

Between 2007 and 2017, Indigenous peoples represented a third of victims shot to death by the RCMP, but are only 5% of the Canadian population. Various provincial studies have shown disproportional force against Black communities too. “So when the head of the RCMP says there is no systemic racism, that’s a huge, huge problem,” Mr. Damptey says.

Today the RCMP is the main police force in the northern, western, and Maritime provinces, and often the only law enforcement in rural and remote communities. And while they have faced scandals for decades, they’ve been under intense pressure in recent months, first for their handling of Canada’s worst-ever massacre in Nova Scotia in April, and then as the international protests over police discrimination increased. Ms. Moore’s and Mr. Levi’s deaths became emblematic in the Black Lives Matter protests across Canada.

So when Brenda Lucki, the RCMP commissioner, denied systemic racism in the force, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stepped in. “Systemic racism is an issue right across the country, in all of our institutions, including in all of our police forces, including in the RCMP,” he said.

Ms. Lucki was forced to backpedal. A majority of Canadians agree with Mr. Trudeau. In an Angus Reid poll from the fall, 63% say that systemic racism is a serious problem for the RCMP.

This discussion has troubled retired RCMP Superintendent E.C. MacAulay, who served from 1965 to 2001, especially when he thinks of under-resourced members in the field. He says he never witnessed systemic racism, in the sense of one that permeates an entire organization. He acknowledges a problem with excessive use of force in some cases and that minorities are overrepresented in the correctional system.

But Mr. MacAulay does not trace this back to Canada’s colonial roots. “The RCMP and other police are just responding to whatever the situations are and whoever is there, but it’s nothing to do with what [Canada’s first prime minister] Sir John A. Macdonald did,” he says.

“Justice is being able to talk about what happened”

For years, advocates have raised concerns about the structure of the RCMP. Officers rotate through Indigenous communities, with little training on culturally sensitive policing. Advocates say that contributes to dangerous situations, particularly given high rates of mental illness and addiction in these communities, rates that are themselves a legacy of colonialism.

In Buck’s life, these factors played out to tragic effect.

Mr. Levi had struggled with both mental health issues and substance abuse. In June 2020, he relapsed and was struggling. He had just found out he was accepted into a treatment program, but because of the pandemic it was online only. He was worried it wouldn’t be enough support, his niece says. When she heard he was shot, her first instinct was to scold him for getting hurt. “I was just thinking, ‘When he gets out, I’m going to be so mad at him,’” says Ms. Levi, her voice cracking.

That the RCMP is ill-equipped to deal with these situations is not unique to Mr. Levi’s case, says Chief George Ginnish of Natoaganeg First Nation, a Mi’kmaq community in northern New Brunswick. “The RCMP force that is here is understaffed, is underfunded, there’s a lot of really young, green recruits where there’s cultural divides and lack of understanding.”

The New Brunswick RCMP declined to comment on the incident since the Public Prosecution Service is still reviewing a report prepared by the oversight body.

The shootings have fueled a call by First Nations chiefs in New Brunswick for an inquiry into systemic racism in the justice system. They also want more funding for their own resources to lessen dependence on the RCMP, Mr. Ginnish says. “We’ve been fighting with New Brunswick and Canada, about the need for community-based not only policing, but peacekeeping, for mental wellness,” he says.

These are many of the same demands expressed by the larger #DefundThePolice movement, and they hit home in many minority communities. Mr. Levi’s cousin Lisa Levi says she was at the beach with her 7-year-old when she heard about the shooting. Her daughter wanted to go home and barricade herself in their bedroom, telling Lisa, “We’re not going to come out because we have brown skin and the police are going to shoot us.” While non-Indigenous Canadians can choose to acknowledge the problems with the RCMP, Lisa says, “my 7-year-old has to live it – she has to have that fear.”

Lisa says her family’s long wait for even basic answers is emblematic of the gaping divide in front of them. “When you look at justice from a First Nations perspective, justice isn’t locking someone away and throwing away the key. Justice is being able to sit down with a person and talk about what happened.

“And I feel if the RCMP had done that with our family – if they would have sat down with us and explained to us what happened, and why it happened, just to see, is [the officer] sorry? Did he mean to? – it wouldn’t be so difficult. But it’s the not knowing that makes it so hard.”

Bryan Chan/County of Los Angeles/AP

Incoming Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón speaks after he was sworn in during a mostly virtual ceremony in Los Angeles on Dec. 7, 2020. Mr. Gascón has promised reforms to keep low-level offenders, drug users, and those who are mentally ill out of jail.

George Gascón’s honeymoon period as Los Angeles County’s district attorney lasted all of 24 hours. 

On the day of his swearing-in last month, he announced several new policies for the office, eliminating the use of cash bail for nonviolent offenses and banning prosecutors from seeking sentencing enhancements in most cases. He declared that the office would no longer pursue the death penalty or try juveniles as adults, and he launched a review of thousands of cases to consider potential resentencing and to look for wrongful convictions.

The criticism began the following day and shows little sign of abating. He has taken verbal fire from multiple directions, including staff prosecutors, police union officials, judges, fellow district attorneys, and victims’ rights advocates.

Mr. Gascón, a former LA beat cop who later served as San Francisco’s police chief and its top prosecutor, remains undaunted. He won election in November on the strength of his reform agenda – defeating a more traditional, “tough-on-crime” incumbent – and belongs to the growing ranks of progressive prosecutors who have vowed to reimagine criminal justice in America.

The Monitor spoke with Mr. Gascón about the human and financial costs of mass incarceration, the effect of George Floyd’s death on reform efforts, and his quest to “raise the integrity” of the criminal justice system. This interview has been edited and condensed.

You campaigned on a platform of change across a range of issues. What principles inform your overall philosophy?

The direction I want the office to take is deeply rooted in the belief that people can be rehabilitated and redemption is possible. Offering people a path to redemption is not only the humane thing to do but it’s the right thing to do for our public safety.

We have a system that – especially in the last few decades – has been very heavily leaning on the punitive side of criminal justice, and we have seen over and over again very high rates of recidivism, which creates more crime and more victims. We’ve also seen this punishment-based approach take funding and resources away from all the other services that create more sustainable, more livable communities – public health, education, public housing, social services. All those areas have suffered the consequences of our very heavy-handed, very punitive, very carceral approach to our work.

What was the impact of George Floyd’s death and the ensuing racial justice protests last year on the political fortunes of progressive prosecutors?

There’s no question that the message that myself and others have been talking about for years started all of a sudden to resonate with a broader segment of our population. George Floyd’s murder shocked the conscience of this country, including in many places where people perhaps were not thinking about these issues. And Black Lives Matter has crystallized the inequities and the inherent racism in so many parts of our community, and has made those issues a mainstream conversational item. The movement for progressive prosecutors has certainly benefited from this moment in history.

The emphasis on victims’ rights in recent decades has contributed to longer prison sentences. Are you trying to reset the balance in weighing the rights of defendants?

District attorneys are the people’s lawyers. We’re not the lawyer for one group over another. When we’re talking about victims, yes, we are there to represent the victim, but we’re not there to effect vengeance in the name of one victim.

So it’s really having that very deep conversation with yourself as a prosecutor and as an office, and understanding that we’re the people’s lawyers. That means the people, plural, not one single individual or one class of people. We’re impacting our entire community – including, frankly, the person who is being accused. We have a responsibility to that person as well as his or her family in the community.

That brings up something you mentioned during your swearing-in – your desire to “reinvigorate the presumption of innocence.” What do you mean by that?

The single-dimensional approach to quote-unquote “protecting the victim’s rights” often ignores our obligation to due process and the constitutional concept of presumed innocence. We often have thrown that out the door as prosecutors and basically said, “That’s not our work, that’s the work of the defense.” And we know that [public] defense in this country is thoroughly underfunded, and that’s why we have so many wrongful convictions.

We need to start thinking clearly that, as the people’s lawyer, we’re supposed to be protecting everybody – not only the victim that is here with you but also future victims as well as the person that is accused and the rest of our community. We have a moral imperative to represent the entire community.

The estimated cost of mass incarceration in the US exceeds $180 billion a year, and LA’s public protection budget is $9.3 billion. How might the reforms you’re pursuing reduce that spending?

The biggest problem in the criminal justice system is that most people only see the front-end costs – the budget of the DA’s office or the police department, which are high enough as they are. But what is often not seen are the downstream consequences of our work.

When the district attorney seeks to send someone to prison for five or 10 or 20 years, there are financial and resource costs for every year of that sentence. If you can fix the problem in five years but you send someone to prison for 15 or 20, what you’re doing is extending the financial impact. In a county like LA, you’re dealing with thousands and thousands of people – we have over 100,000 cases every year – and when you start sending thousands of people to prison, you are actually writing billion-dollar checks for future generations to pay.

What’s the purpose of the case review you ordered beyond the possible effect on individual inmates?

One of the problems we’ve seen is the lack of legitimacy of the criminal justice system in many parts of our communities, for many good reasons: the excesses of policing, especially in African American communities and other communities of color; the impact of over-incarceration in some parts of our population that clearly has racial overtones.

So for us to take a step back and say, “We’re going to see whether we got it right, and if we didn’t, we’re going to admit it” – it starts to bring a new level of credibility in communities that, quite frankly, believe that we’re not there for them. It also offers an opportunity for us as prosecutors and as a criminal justice system to open up to our communities and say, “We’re willing to rethink what we did before.” And whether we may have been right or perhaps in some cases wrong – either way, we’re willing to reconsider and reevaluate. When you do that, you raise the integrity of the system overall.

Omer Himi was raised a die-hard Beitar Jerusalem soccer fan from a working-class Jewish family in a border town. As a teen, he would drive hours to matches and chant anti-Arab songs – part of the weekly repertoire of stadium cheers by the Beitar faithful.

“I used to sit in the stands and yell, ‘Death to Arabs,’” says Mr. Himi, a marketing executive. “I was a fan in a soccer stadium, thousands of fans are singing, and you’re a part of it. You didn’t take it seriously,” he says, by way of explanation.

“When I grew up,” he adds, however, “I understood that yelling ‘Death to Arabs’ is something that shouldn’t be uttered, especially in a country like Israel [living in the aftermath of] the Holocaust.”

Yet for Beitar, a team linked to the forebears of the right-wing Likud party, defiant racist fan culture in recent decades has been part of its brand. Hard-line fans have ensured Beitar has never fielded an Arab player, and they rebelled against the signing of a pair of Muslim Chechen players eight years ago.

“All soccer is political in Israel,” says Maya Zinshtein, who made a documentary film on how Beitar’s notorious racist fan group, La Familia, destroyed the season for the club and eventually pushed the Chechens out. “In a strange way, this club made this idea of being a non-Arab, or a non-Muslim club part of their identity.”

So when team owner Moshe Hogeg announced a deal last month for an Emirati businessman to buy a 50% stake – a fruit of the newly normalized ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates that were part of the U.S.-brokered “Abraham Accords” – the focus turned to the Beitar faithful and whether they would lead another uprising like in 2013.

Struggle for team’s soul

However, much has changed since then; 2013 was both a low point, and a turning point. Even as anti-Arab racism has flourished among Israel’s dominant political right wing, Israeli soccer and an increasingly visible portion of Beitar fans have been trying to break the racist traditions. It’s a struggle for the soul of the sports club that touts itself as “Israel’s team,” many of whose fans come from a milieu that blends nationalist politics, bigotry, and socioeconomic and ethnic resentments.

Israel has tried to follow the anti-racism campaigns of the English Premier League and the Union of European Football Associations. Its soccer association now penalizes clubs for racist incidents in the stands. Team owners have tried to crack down by confiscating stadium paraphernalia of misbehaving fans.

“There’s been more of a spotlight on racism in soccer than ever, and there’s been more denunciations,” says Gal Karpel, who directs an anti-racism stadium monitoring project at the New Israel Fund, a progressive Israeli nongovernmental organization.

After buying Beitar in 2018, Mr. Hogeg promised to put the club on “a new path” and finally sign an Arab player. Though he has yet to do so, he and Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Nahyan touted their new partnership as the embodiment of Israel-Arab normalization. The sale was embraced by Israeli President Reuven Rivlin in a public letter of congratulations to Sheikh Hamad.

“The deal is to show the nations that Jews and Muslims can work together, and be friends and live in peace and harmony,” Sheikh Hamad told Israeli television soon after the agreement was announced. Beitar’s anti-Arab fans, he said, had been “brainwashed.”

In the weeks following the deal, Mr. Himi attended demonstrations and posted on Facebook fan forums to push back against those who have lobbied against the partnership.

Ariel Schalit/AP

Moshe Hogeg, co-owner of the Beitar Jerusalem soccer club, at the team training ground in Jerusalem, Dec. 27, 2020. After bringing in a wealthy Emirati investor as co-owner, Mr. Hogeg says he is determined to remove the stain of racism from his team. Beitar is the only major Israeli team never to have signed an Arab player.

La Familia and others have mounted their own demonstrations. Interviewed on Israeli television, Eli Garbi, a longtime fan opposed to the deal, accused the UAE of trying to plant a “stake” in Jerusalem. Beitar’s symbols – the candelabra from the ancient Jewish Temple and the Lion of Judah – are the same as Israel’s, he said.

“Not everything comes down to money,” he said. “I’m not ready for them to sell Jewish values, Jewish symbols, and the symbols of the state.”

Mr. Himi says the argument is an anti-Arab dog whistle.

“The Beitar fans against this deal say, ‘What about our values?’ But if the new owner was named Philip from France, they would never speak like that,” he says. “But because it’s Hamad, so suddenly, they say, ‘What about values?’ and ‘What about tradition?’ Beitar Jerusalem will always be Beitar Jerusalem.”

Bar Karamani, a supporter of the UAE deal, posting on the Facebook fan forum Beitar.net, argued: “We need to welcome them with love. It seems both theirs and our goals are for the team.”

Tribal loyalties

Unlike sports fandom in the United States, Israel’s soccer loyalties reflect the country’s tribal political divisions. Beitar is the name of the youth movement associated with Herut, the political forerunner of Likud, which formed Israel’s parliamentary opposition for the first three decades of statehood.

The team became a favorite of the Middle Eastern Jewish working class, or mizrahim, who mostly came to Israel after its establishment and were sent by the European Ashkenazi Labor Party establishment to far-off development towns referred to as “the periphery.”

“Beitar symbolized a lot of anger and resentment,” says Anshel Pfeffer, a journalist at the liberal Haaretz newspaper. “Beitar represented the underdogs, and the outsiders.”

It was a birthright for Mr. Himi, who grew up in a “Beitarist” household.

“You grow up as a Beitar Jerusalem fan, you are a mizrahi from the periphery, and your ‘enemy’ are ... the Ashkenazi elites,” he says.

Turning point

The turning point came in 2013, when La Familia set out to expel the Chechens – harassing the players, burning the team clubhouse, and filling the stands with racist slogans.

Droves of fans like Mr. Himi stayed home for a time. Beitar’s would-be integration moment boomeranged. Instead, La Familia and other extremist fans took center stage. Fans like Mr. Himi realized they needed to make a break with the club’s racist traditions.

“That was a red line. Every fan needed to confront the question, ‘What side are you on?’ Are you a racist or not a racist. There’s no middle,” Mr. Himi says. “Because until then, many fans were in the middle.”

Fans began shouting down racist chants in the stands and on social media forums. Confrontations erupted in the stadium within the Beitar section. “In the last four years, when they would sing racist songs, most fans would respond with boos,” says Mr. Himi.

According to the New Israel Fund’s monitoring effort, during the 2018-19 season, racist incidents at Beitar games plummeted to nearly zero. 

“Racism hasn’t ended, but it has declined significantly,” says Mr. Karpel.

However, years of incendiary chants have made the change hard to perceive for some Arab fans.

“Sometimes a small group ruins the beautiful picture of sports. Not all of Beitar fans are this way,” says Ehsan Khalily, an Israeli-Arab sports educator and a fan who has been on the receiving end of the chants at games. “It’s not easy. It’s very difficult. It hurts the feeling of connection to society. The racism directed at us strikes us in our hearts.”

The power of success

Despite the excitement over integrating Beitar through an Emirati partnership, the fate of the sale is unclear. The deal might be rejected by Israel’s football association, which wants to get more transparency about Sheikh Hamad’s finances.

If the Emirati co-owner can help make the team into a title contender, it might go a long way to help turn the tide to push Beitar’s racist constituency to the margins, says Mr. Pfeffer at Haaretz. That would weaken resistance to integrating the squad with an Arab player.

Mr. Hini says such a decision will inevitably face pushback from Beitar’s extremist supporters. Old prejudices die hard.

“I guess [hard-liners] will curse him, and use racist songs. Hopefully, it will not descend into violence, but I hope that the majority of fans will stand against them. This time we won’t leave the field.”

Spending 24/7 at home has acquainted me not only with the everyday wonder of light, but also with myself and my thoughts. Pre-pandemic, my mind was crammed too full, too focused on the next activity, on who had said what to whom. But now I not only look forward to these empty, quiet moments, I actually crave them.

The gift of time, like the gift of light, is something worth contemplating and training myself to notice, as an artist hones her awareness of shapes, colors, and the light itself. Staying so close to home, I am attuned to the slightest shifts in my interior life. The long list of preoccupations I had 10 months ago has dwindled down to the essentials: family, health, gratitude. Everything else is merely shadow.

The effort to find beauty, structure, and meaning in everyday life often makes it necessary to dig deeply into one’s inner life. When artist Amedeo Modigliani unveiled a portrait of a painter friend, the friend asked why he had been depicted with one eye open and the other closed. Modigliani replied, “With one eye you are looking at the outside world, while with the other you are looking within yourself.” – April Austin

The play of light

By Elena Terife, Instagram @eterife

SANTIAGO, CHILE – I am a graphic designer. I use an iPad mini to collect these instants. I love looking at the world in a playful way, mainly when the light produces new scenes especially for me. During the lockdown, I was completely alone with my cat, but with the companionship of the amazing winter light that turned our home into an almost infinite world. Somehow, capturing these images (and sharing them) helped me forget I was confined.

Elena Terife

Elena Terife

Elena Terife

Elena Terife

Elena Terife

Quiet transformations

By Vivian Poey, Instagram @vivipoey

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS – I live in a small space. The extensive time at home during quarantine made me notice the space in new ways: the light, the imperfections, the kitchen table. I saw light shift through the day and land in new places as seasons change. The space constantly transforms over time in both quiet and spectacular ways that I had never noticed before. I photograph some part of it every day; I could do it endlessly.

Vivian Poey

Vivian Poey

Vivian Poey

Vivian Poey

Vivian Poey

Vivian Poey

This photo essay first appeared in the Jan. 25, 2021 issue of The Christian Science Monitor Weekly magazine.

Reuters

Ethiopian refugees who fled fighting in the Tigray region line up to receive food aid in Sudan.

In the arid Horn of Africa, where political instability can easily bring food insecurity, sometimes the coincidence is deliberate. In Ethiopia, drought led to famine in 1984 but the impact was disproportionate. The government diverted food aid from the areas dominated by its rivals. In Somalia a few years later, warring factions weaponized grain relief in the wake of the government’s collapse.

A similar exploitation of hunger may be happening again. As a conflict in Ethiopia between the government and the northern state of Tigray heads into a fourth month, Western diplomats and aid groups warn of widespread starvation. The region is closed to journalists. Phone and internet connections are rare. But reports have nonetheless trickled out that crops have been burned, forced displacement has left unharvested fields to rot, and trucks carrying vital supplies have been detained.

More than 2 million people – a third of the region’s population – have already fled, according to the government. An agreement signed two months ago between Ethiopia and the United Nations allowing access for aid groups remains unobserved. The conflict has drawn in forces from neighboring Eritrea and threatens to derail Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s attempt to evolve Ethiopia’s fragile federation of ethnic states into a united democracy.

As the humanitarian crisis catches the world’s attention, it is also being seen by the European Union, the U.N., and others as an opportunity to force the warring factions to negotiate. Mr. Abiy himself, a retired lieutenant colonial, rose to political power two years vowing to prioritize “the dignity of the country and the country’s national interests in a manner that can set precedence for our continent.” A year after assuming office he won the Nobel Peace Prize for ending Ethiopia’s 20-year stalled war with Eritrea. He has espoused the tools of mediation, such as empathy, calm, and a respect for different perspectives that can lead to compromise.

His project of renewing Ethiopian democracy, however, has not gone well. He failed to appease the bitterness and fears of ethnic Tigrayan leaders who held power for three decades until being forced to accept a minority status. Their resentment led to an attack last November on a federal army installation in the state. Mr. Abiy replied with force.

Other civil wars have ended when warring sides acknowledged the harm inflicted on people caught in a conflict. Talks to end Colombia’s 50-year war, for example, were made easier when victims were given a seat at the negotiating table. Perhaps a shared compassion in Ethiopia toward noncombatants in Tigray can be a starting point for talks. A humanitarian pause can be a cause for peace.