Late last month, after a Palestinian gunman opened fire on worshippers leaving Friday night prayers in a Jerusalem synagogue, Israel’s new national security minister hurriedly left his Sabbath dinner table and rushed to the site.

The security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a key far-right figure in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s month-old coalition government, was for years a regular visitor to scenes of grisly terror attacks. Inevitably he would slam the Israeli authorities for being weak, demand harsher measures be taken, and generally fan the flames of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Yet this time was different. Mr. Ben-Gvir, head of the ultranationalist Jewish Power party, was now the authority.

“This happened on your watch! Let’s see you now! Jewish blood isn’t cheap!” the crowd yelled angrily at the politician who has built his political career on promises of forcefully putting down Palestinian terror.

“I hear you. You’re right, you’re right,” Mr. Ben-Gvir responded to the crowd. “The burden of proof is on us, and we need to act now and respond, because it can’t go on like this.”

The Jan. 27 attack in northern East Jerusalem, which killed seven people, was the country’s deadliest since 2011. It came a day after a particularly lethal raid by the Israeli military in the West Bank city of Jenin that claimed the lives of 10 Palestinians, including an older woman. Israeli authorities say most of those killed were armed militants.

In the past year more than 200 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank – around 40 since the start of 2023 – in what has been a marked escalation on both sides that began with a wave of Palestinian attacks last spring that claimed the lives of more than 30 Israelis.

It was all supposed to be different under this new government, widely considered the most right-wing in Israeli history. Mr. Netanyahu and his ultranationalist allies, especially Mr. Ben-Gvir and the pro-settler Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, prevailed in the November election by slamming the previous government for purportedly failing to protect the citizenry and being beholden to left-wing and Arab-Israeli parties. They promised they could do much better.

Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

Israel's Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir is escorted by Israeli security personnel near the scene of a shooting attack outside a synagogue in which seven people were killed, in East Jerusalem, Jan. 27, 2023. Responding to angry calls from the crowed, he said, “The burden of proof is on us.”

“When terrorism meets weakness, it raises its head,” Mr. Netanyahu said last May, demanding that the government resign. “Hamas [the Palestinian militant group] sees a weak government that depends on supporters of terrorism and is unable to fight terrorism, strike Hamas officials, and restore peace and security to the citizens of Israel,” Mr. Netanyahu complained.

An unyielding reality

Yet the attacks have continued even on Mr. Netanyahu’s watch. And despite the heightened rhetoric and bold campaign pledges, analysts and former officials point out that the current government’s policies have not – as of yet – deviated greatly from what has been tried in the past.

In recent weeks, not least due to pressure from the Biden administration, Mr. Netanyahu has also managed to keep at bay his more radical senior ministers.

“This may be a ‘fully fully’ right-wing government, but reality [of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] doesn’t change,” says Col. Michael Milshtein, a former senior Israeli military adviser on Palestinian affairs and a current lecturer at both Tel Aviv and Reichman universities. “The government on the whole doesn’t want a complete explosion – although perhaps Ben-Gvir and Smotrich may want it – and they also don’t want to get into a clash with the U.S.”

In the wake of the Jerusalem attack and two shooting attacks the following day, which wounded two more Israelis, the Israeli Cabinet announced a series of steps, some predictable and others (so far) merely words:

• Security forces nationally were put on the highest alert, and military patrols were increased in both Jerusalem and the West Bank.
• The family homes of two Palestinian perpetrators in East Jerusalem were quickly sealed ahead of expected demolition – a controversial and long-standing Israeli practice meant to deter future attacks. The international legal community considers such demolitions a form of illegal collective punishment; Israeli security officials are split on whether they are a deterrent, or simply perpetuate a cycle of enmity and violence.
• In the West Bank, a major Israeli military operation continued, as it has since last year, with near daily arrest raids into Palestinian towns and refugee camps. One such operation over the weekend, near Jericho, claimed the lives of five Hamas militants who Israel alleges were behind a recent shooting attack.
• Mr. Ben-Gvir, in his role overseeing both the police and prisons, proudly announced that he had removed fresh pita bread baking privileges from Palestinian security prisoners, among other smaller steps meant to harden conditions for those jailed on terrorism charges.

The moves, according to Israeli intelligence officials, partly explained renewed rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel. Like its predecessor, the Netanyahu government responded narrowly, by bombing a few Hamas military installations. No casualties were reported on either side.

Mahmoud Illean/AP

A general view of the West Bank Jewish settlement of Efrat, Jan. 30, 2023. Israel's new ultranationalist government has vowed to build new settlements in reaction to recent violence, but has yet to act.

“They’re doing a lot of what we were doing, just attaching to it destructive extremist rhetoric,” says one senior Israeli official from the previous government. “In other words, they’re paying all the cost of their rhetoric, especially internationally and among Palestinians, but with zero security benefits or even a significant change in policy.”

Practical constraints

The heightened rhetoric in recent weeks has included vows to loosen gun permit laws for Israeli civilians, a move that so far has been stymied by government bureaucracy (to say nothing of security establishment fears about flooding the country with weapons).

Promises to deny residency status or social security benefits to families of Palestinian attackers in East Jerusalem have so far not moved ahead and are in any event legally dubious.

Plans to demolish Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank that Israeli authorities claim were built without legal permits – nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain – have been postponed due to international pressure and fears that it would only escalate tensions. 

And most tellingly, government promises of increased settlement construction in the West Bank – cast as an “appropriate Zionist response” to the recent attacks – have yet to move ahead. Last month Mr. Netanyahu sided with the military against his hard-line ministers and approved the removal of a wildcat settlement outpost hastily erected by far-right settlers.

Part of the Israeli restraint, or at least hesitation, according to analysts, was due to the presence in the region last week of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who urged both Israel and the Palestinian Authority to “take urgent steps to restore calm, to de-escalate.” Mr. Blinken made clear that the Biden administration opposed settlement expansion, the legalization of illegal outposts, and demolitions and evictions.

Yet the mere existence of this far-right Israeli government, combined with its hard-line words, is itself a major obstacle to any real easing of tensions, according to Ibrahim Dalalsha, director of the Horizon Center, a Ramallah-based Palestinian think tank.

“For the Palestinian Authority, Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir are an impediment. The Palestinian public believes this Israeli government needs to be confronted and so [the PA leadership] can’t be seen to do their bidding,” Mr. Dalalsha says, alluding to a proposed Palestinian security crackdown on West Bank militants. “Under the current circumstances, it would be political suicide.”

Mahmoud Illean/AP

Girls from the Matar family sit near the rubble of their home that housed 11 people before it was demolished by Israeli authorities who said it was built illegally, in the Jabal Mukaber neighborhood of East Jerusalem, Jan. 29, 2023. Israeli policy responses to recent violence, including the threat of more demolitions, are unchanged under the new government.

Netanyahu’s balancing act

A question remains as to whether Mr. Netanyahu’s reluctance to incur U.S. opprobrium will continue to outweigh the right-wing political pressure he is under.

Already, coalition backbenchers and local officials are grumbling about the gap between the Netanyahu ministers’ rhetoric while in opposition and their actions now in government. Mr. Ben-Gvir himself has felt the need to say publicly that if he saw he wasn’t having any influence on policy he would resign. Mr. Smotrich, for his part, is adamant that settlements will soon be expanded.

According to Colonel Milshtein there are two conflicting agendas on the Palestinian issue within the new Israeli government: one led by religious ultranationalists like Messrs. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, and the other led by the more pragmatic Mr. Netanyahu and his Likud party. 

“Netanyahu’s primary goal is to keep things as they were, to not bring about the collapse of the PA, to get to Ramadan and Passover [in late March, a period traditionally marked by escalated violence] with things on the ground calmer – and also not to destabilize the government from within,” says Colonel Milshtein. “It’s not easy. The first group’s agenda could still lead to a conflagration.”

Much will likely depend on events beyond the control of Mr. Netanyahu, his ministers, the PA, or even the Biden administration. According to Mr. Dalalsha, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has its own uniquely tragic and often bloody logic.

“With or without U.S. intervention, violence goes up and down. It’s a matter of luck and almost irrelevant,” Mr. Dalalsha says. “These are deep-rooted problems.”

Joeal Calupitan/AP

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin (left) shakes hands with his Philippine counterpart, Carlito Galvez Jr., at a joint press conference in Camp Aguinaldo in Metro Manila, Philippines, Feb. 2, 2023. The United States and the Philippines announced an agreement to expand the American military presence in the Southeast Asian country, where U.S. forces would be granted access to four more Philippine military camps.

When an American four-star general warned his commanders in a leaked letter last month that, while he hoped he was wrong, his “gut” told him the United States will be at war with China in a couple of years, Pentagon officials publicly insisted the comments do not represent their view of the matter.

That said, they also announced an increase in the U.S. military’s footprint in Asia last week, with more troops headed to the Philippines as part of a new basing agreement – a handy setup should Beijing, say, try to invade Taiwan.  

Chinese officials called the move “selfish,” adding that it “endangers regional peace” and “escalates tensions.” From the Pentagon’s perspective – particularly on the heels of scrambling to shoot down a suspected spy balloon loitering over U.S. nuclear silos – that’s Beijing’s forte.

Stationing some U.S. forces at Philippine military bases, about three decades after large American bases there closed, is widely viewed as an effort to contain Chinese aggression in the region by projecting U.S. power. It will better allow U.S. forces to launch operations in the event of a crisis in Taiwan or the South China Sea.  

Yet as Beijing ramps up its saber rattling toward Taiwan, the move has raised questions about how best to manage the risk of superpower conflict in the region.

While it’s not hard to see why the new announcement on bases seems hostile to Beijing, “we’re not talking about putting intermediate-range ballistic missiles there, which would look like an ability to attack targets in China,” says Eugene Gholz, associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.  

Gong Yulong/Xinhua/AP/File

Fighter jets of the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army conduct training exercises around the Taiwan island, Aug. 7, 2022. China blasted an annual U.S. defense spending bill for hyping the “China threat" while Taiwan welcomed the legislation, saying it demonstrated U.S. support for the self-governing island that China says must come under its rule.

Should China become an implacable aggressor, however, the Pentagon does have war plans in place to attack China’s defensive bubble. The current U.S. footprint in the region fishhooks from Japan through Guam to the coming presence in the Philippines, creating the capability to launch airstrikes to destroy thousands of communications systems, missile launchers, and radars. As China’s military isn’t currently built for power projection, Beijing could easily interpret these plans as U.S. intent to destroy China’s defenses in a first strike. 

This all creates a “spiral of hostility” that has the potential to create a “downright dangerous, use-it-or-lose-it” situation when it comes to Beijing’s nuclear arsenal, Dr. Gholz says.

Should they fear a U.S. first strike, Chinese leaders may decide to launch one of their own while they still have control of their weapons, he notes. 

For this reason, analysts say, China is ramping up its production of nuclear warheads. It now has more intercontinental ballistic missile launchers than the U.S., according to a U.S. military report to Congress released this week, prompting Republican leaders to call for “higher numbers and new capabilities” in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. 

Still, the Biden administration has largely continued the tough stance that the Trump administration took before it, approving Pentagon moves that have been called everything from a cynical play for more defense dollars to smart power projection in a bid to curb Beijing’s aggression. 

The question, analysts say, is what might these moves achieve, and whether there is a way forward that combines strategic restraint with cleareyed realism in an effort to temper the dangerous and often outrageous expense of escalation. 

Aaron Favila/AP

Vehicles pass by a gate in what used to be America's largest overseas naval base at the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, Zambales province, northwest of Manila, Philippines, Feb. 6, 2023. The U.S. is rebuilding its military might in the Philippines and reinforcing an arc of military alliances in Asia.

Chinese self-assessments

High up on the list of Pentagon concerns is that although China advocates for peaceful unification with Taiwan, it has never renounced the use of military force despite clear indications that invasion would come with an enormous price. 

President Joe Biden has pledged that U.S. forces would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion. A war game conducted last year by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) concluded that the U.S. would win, but with losses that “would damage the U.S. global position for many years.” China would fare worse, with its navy “in shambles” and tens of thousands of troops taken prisoners of war.

The question, analysts say, is whether China takes these sorts of lessons to heart. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, after all, has shown that leaders can have an outsize view of what their militaries can easily accomplish. 

“I have a lot of concerns about the Chinese military, but the big question is, what do the Chinese think about their prospects themselves?” says Mike Sweeney, a fellow at the Defense Priorities think tank in Washington who has served as rapporteur for the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. 

“This notion that the Russians believed the Ukraine war would be over in weeks – do the Chinese have the same delusions about Taiwan? Does the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] have the gumption to go to senior leadership and say how difficult this is?” he adds.

It is a concern shared by top U.S. officials as well. “If the political leadership turned to the [PLA] today and said, ‘Can you invade right now?’ it’s my assessment that the answer would be a firm yes,” Lonnie Henley, a former intelligence officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in a 2021 congressional hearing. 

But, as with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it would not occur without warning. While Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said that he “did not dismiss at all” that the PLA has a goal of developing the capability to invade Taiwan by 2027, he added, “I don’t see it happening right out of the blue.”

Geography constraints

That’s in large part because the basic facts of geography naturally constrain Beijing’s potential efforts to project power.

Its ships and submarines must sail through relatively shallow waters and distinct choke points to reach the broader Pacific, which means that even East Asian nations “with extremely limited military capabilities” can create highly effective defensive networks with anti-access weaponry like missiles and mines, backed up by sophisticated networks of sensors, Dr. Gholz says. 

Given these constraints, the Pentagon has been charged with threat inflation for its tendency to, as Dr. Gholz puts it, “equate security with total military dominance.”

Accustomed to being the premier naval presence in the Pacific, “U.S. defense planners tend to see any diminution of military advantage as a disaster” – including China’s heightened ability to defend itself against the U.S., he adds.

Mark Schiefelbein/AP/File

A Chinese nuclear submarine participates in a naval parade in the sea near Qingdao in eastern China's Shandong province. The U.S. Navy has many more nuclear submarines than China does.

China’s military capabilities

To this end, it’s helpful to soberly assess the capabilities of China’s military, analysts say – including its status, for example, as home to the world’s largest navy, which might seem reasonably alarming at first glance. 

“But you don’t even have to scratch the surface very much before you realize, ‘Wait a minute – China isn’t building a military to invade the West Coast of the U.S. They’re building a military to keep us out of China,’” says Dan Grazier, senior defense policy fellow at the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) and a former Marine Corps captain.

What the U.S. fleet lacks in total numbers it makes up for in tonnage, which is more than double that of China’s ships, he points out in a POGO analysis published in December. This means that the Pentagon’s ships are literal heavyweights, able to make longer voyages, carry more fuel and munitions, and project power in a way that Chinese vessels simply cannot.

China’s two aircraft carriers, in particular, are frequently invoked as a sign of the ascendance of its military might, since it’s often assumed they are roughly equivalent to their U.S. counterparts, Mr. Sweeney says.

They’re not. The carriers aren’t nuclear-powered, nor do they have steam catapult technology, which is what allows U.S. fighter jets to fly, slingshot-style, off the deck. Based on a 40-year-old Soviet design, China’s carriers instead have curved, ski-jump fronts. 

These two traits are important: Without nuclear power, carriers are limited in their range, and without catapults, the aircraft on board are limited in the amount of fuel and ordnance they can carry. 

So while “it would be wrong to call China’s aircraft carriers mere status symbols without any combat function at all,” Beijing is “more likely to deploy their fighters in an air defense role rather than strike deep into an opponent’s territory,” Mr. Sweeney writes in a 2020 Defense Priorities analysis.

Beneath the surface, the Chinese submarine force is about the size of America’s, but only six of its 66 submarines are nuclear-powered. All of the U.S. Navy’s subs are nuclear-powered, which, among other things, gives them far greater range. 

Chinese submarines also make a lot of noise compared with the U.S. fleet, which makes them easier to detect with the Pentagon’s substantial network of undersea sensors.

At the lower-tech end of the spectrum, it is “baffling” – but encouraging – to many military analysts that China “simply has not built enough basic transport ships to ferry a sufficient number of troops” to Taiwan should it decide to invade its shores, he adds. “The math simply does not work.”

Constructive engagement

That is not to say that there haven’t been troubling developments. In the CSIS war game, China simply commandeered commercial vessels to ferry its troops when it decided to invade Taiwan. 

China is also building a third aircraft carrier that promises to be “much larger” than the first two and what analysts call “decent destroyer ships” to escort their carriers. 

At the same time, the PLA has increased provocative actions in and near the Taiwan Strait.

“The PLA’s not 20-feet tall, but they’re not 4-feet tall, either,” Mr. Sweeney says.

Though nuclear uncertainties, coupled with China’s gray-zone activities and “ham-fisted bullying” of its neighbors, tend to discourage constructive engagement, the two nations should continue to work toward engagement anyway, Mr. Sweeney says.

This could include military-to-military exchanges and other confidence-building measures that could “create a pathway for deescalating a crisis if one begins,” Mr. Sweeney says. “I’d still very much like us to have perspective – and for us not to go too far down the road into unnecessary confrontation.” 

Conflict with China, he adds, need not be a foregone conclusion.

Editor's note: The description of Mike Sweeney has been corrected in regard to his role (as the rapporteur) with the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board.

Petros Giannakouris/AP

Mehmet Nasir Duran sits on a chair as heavy machines remove debris from a building where five of his family members are trapped in Nurdagi, in southeastern Turkey, Feb. 9, 2023.

The earthquakes that hit Turkey and Syria this week have caused heart-wrenching devastation – and also inspired an international campaign to rush help to the stricken areas.

Yet this month’s grim second anniversary of a different disaster, caused not by nature, but by a military coup in the Southeast Asian democracy of Myanmar, suggests a cautionary lesson that applies to the earthquake response – and a lesson for the world’s news media as well.

It is this: The true test of our engagement, empathy, and dedication will come not in the next few days, but in the next few months and beyond.

The initial response matters. The scope for effective action is greatest early on, whether to right a political injustice or help people struck down by a force of nature. In earthquakes, it is especially critical. Very rarely are trapped survivors rescued after the first few days.

Yet in the media, and among governments, attention spans are short. Their focus soon shifts elsewhere and returns only fleetingly, in response to some new tragedy, or the simple dictate of the calendar on anniversaries of the original “headline” event. 

That fickleness matters because of what happens – and what does not happen – when world attention fades.

Displaced Syrians hit by the earthquake, who need not just rescue but ongoing help to rebuild their lives, know this all too well.

They live in the northwest of the country, the sole area still under rebel control, and they were already struggling to feed their families and stay warm during a harsh winter.

In recent years, they’ve endured wanton artillery and air attacks on their homes, schools, hospitals, and aid facilities by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his Russian military backers. These assaults initially made the news, and prompted political outrage, in the West. Yet before long, they disappeared from the headlines.

Sakchai Lalit/AP

Myanmar citizens living in Thailand hold a picture of former Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi during a protest in Bangkok on Feb. 1, 2023, marking the two-year anniversary of the military takeover that ousted her government.

And what of Myanmar?

It has, in fact, been receiving fresh attention in recent days.

There have been newspaper and broadcast commentaries, and a declaration by nearly two dozen governments including the United States, Britain, the European Union, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

There was even a rare U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a return to democracy – facilitated by an equally rare event: Russia and China abstained, rather than casting a veto.

But all that was because of the calendar.

It is now two years since Gen. Min Aung Hlaing quashed the landslide reelection victory of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy; seized power; arrested the leader and her key supporters, along with social activists and journalists; and began a violent crackdown on protests.

In the intervening 24 months since the initial press coverage and international condemnation passed, the dictatorial general has arrested nearly 20,000 more opponents, some of whom have been executed. Around 3,000 civilians have been killed.

The junta has also slapped a series of jail sentences on Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, now totaling 33 years, and launched indiscriminate air attacks in what has become a full-scale civil war with opposition activists who retreated to the countryside after the coup.

The coup leader has been lucky to have the neighbors he does. Key trading partners China, India, and Thailand have kept trading and looked the other way. So has Russia, which, along with China, has been providing the junta with arms and other military equipment.

In Myanmar, as in Syria during the Russian-backed bombing of civilians, some people have not stopped paying attention. Human rights groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners have doggedly documented abuses.

Washington and its allies have, at least, responded with economic sanctions, tightened by Britain and Canada this month to cover aviation fuel, in the hope of curbing air attacks on opposition groups.

Even had the media spotlight remained on Myanmar, or on the Syrian war, there’s no guarantee the situations would have turned out differently.

Virginia Mayo/AP

From left, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and European Council President Charles Michel walk together at an EU summit in Brussels to discuss Ukraine and migration on Feb. 9, 2023.

Sustained media attention does, however, serve important functions. It assures the vulnerable they have not been forgotten. And, critically, it forces governments to reckon with the political cost, in the eyes of international public opinion, of failing to act in their defense.

It was that consideration, most likely, that led China and Russia not to block the Security Council’s anniversary criticism of Myanmar’s junta.

The most powerful reminder of how much difference persistent engagement makes is a major crisis where the West has stayed the course, so far.

In Ukraine, foreign eyes have not turned away. There are multiple explanations: the advocacy of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the raw courage of Ukrainians, the leadership of U.S. President Joe Biden. And the breadth and brutality of Russia’s invasion.

But central to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calculations from the outset has been an assumption – no doubt encouraged by the West’s short-lived outrage over Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 – that outsiders would soon stop caring much about Ukraine.

And central to Ukrainians’ fears is the prospect that he could yet prove correct.

Courtesy of Taher Fakhruddin

Taher Fakhruddin claims he is the rightful leader of the Dawoodi Bohras, a Muslim sect which migrated to the Indian subcontinent several centuries ago from the Middle East. Unlike the current leader, who he's challenging in court, Mr. Fakhruddin believes female circumcision, or khafz, should be optional.

Masooma Ranalvi was in her thirties when she came across an article on female genital mutilation (FGM). The practice is most prevalent in Africa, but as Ms. Ranalvi read about it, a painful memory resurfaced from her own childhood in Mumbai, India. 

When she was barely 7, her grandmother, on the pretext of taking her out for a sweet treat, brought her to a dingy building. A woman there asked the young Ms. Ranalvi to lie down, took off her pants, and proceeded to cut her. 

“I felt the resemblance so stark – what happens [in Africa] and what had happened to me,” says Ms. Ranalvi, now in her 50s. “It made me feel angry and frustrated.”

Ms. Ranalvi is part of the Dawoodi Bohra community, a Muslim sect with roots in the Middle East which migrated to the Indian subcontinent several centuries ago. Today, there are about 1 million Dawoodi Bohras worldwide, with half residing in India. It is the only community in India known to widely practice a form of female genital cutting, which Bohras generally refer to as female circumcision or khafz, though the practice often falls under the general public’s radar.

Courtesy of Masooma Ranalvi

Masooma Ranalvi is a member of the Dawoodi Bohra community and was cut when she was seven years old. The traumatic experience drove her to become an anti-FGM activist and push to ban the practice in India.

Anti-FGM campaigners say that efforts to ban the custom in India have been stalled due to lack of recognition from the government, as well as issues regarding freedom of religion. Indeed, there is debate among Bohra women about the importance of khafz to their faith, or whether it should be considered FGM at all. However, many agree that an ongoing lawsuit to install a new spiritual leader – with more lenient attitudes toward khafz – could pave the way for greater freedom and safety. 

Having a more liberal syedna, or spiritual head, would be a “very big deal” for the fight against FGM in India, says Ms. Ranalvi, who runs an anti-FGM advocacy group called We Speak Out. “If you remove the social and religious compulsion … the elimination of the practice would happen faster.”

What Bohra leaders say about khafz

In a sermon in Mumbai in 2016, Syedna Mufaddal Saifuddin, the current spiritual leader of the Dawoodi Bohras, told a congregation that circumcision “must be done” and that for women it must be done discreetly. His words, which were widely criticized by anti-FGM campaigners, hold considerable weight over his followers. 

But so could the words of challenger Taher Fakhruddin. 

Mr. Fakhruddin, who happens to be Mr. Saifuddin’s half-cousin, wants to make khafz optional. “It should be a woman’s individual decision” and carried out “once she reaches adulthood,” Mr. Fakhruddin told the Monitor in an email.

The Bombay high court is hearing final arguments to decide who will be the rightful leader of the global Bohra community. Mr. Saifuddin assumed the role in 2014 after his father’s death, but Mr. Fakhruddin says his own father – who passed away in 2016 and was the former syedna’s second-in-command – had been secretly named heir back in 1965. A verdict is expected in a few months.

Rajanish Kakade/AP/File

Spiritual leader Mufaddal Saifuddin arrives during the final prayer ceremony in Mumbai, India, Feb. 26, 2014 after the death of his father, the previous head of the Dawoodi Bohra community. Mr. Saifuddin has said that khafz – a form of female genital mutilation – “must be done."

A decision favoring Mr. Fakhruddin won’t be the end of khafz. Some in the community, including Mr. Fakhruddin, say khafz has been “erroneously equated” with FGM. “The purpose,” he says, “is to improve a woman’s sexual health.” 

The World Health Organization defines FGM as the partial or total removal of girls' external genitalia, and deems any form of FGM a violation of human rights with no health benefits. Gynecologists who’ve examined Bohra women report that khafz can lead to medical complications later in life. 

A 2017 study by Sahiyo, another anti-FGM advocacy group led by Bohra women, found that decreasing sexual arousal to discourage promiscuity was the second most common explanation for khafz after religion, and in a similar study by We Speak Out, the vast majority of the women surveyed remembered the procedure as a painful experience. We Speak Out also found that India is becoming a hub for the procedure, attracting Bohra expats from countries like the United States and Australia which have been tightening their laws against FGM. 

Religious freedom or human rights violation?

Still, not all Bohra women are in favor of ending khafz or see it as problematic. 

The Dawoodi Bohra Women’s association for Religious Freedom, which claims to have nearly 75,000 supporters, insists that khafz is an essential part of their faith and hence protected under the Indian constitution. A petition to ban FGM in India has been lumped together with cases about women’s entry into temples and mosques and is waiting to be heard by a special bench of the supreme court. 

Sakina, a 28-year-old psychology professor in Mumbai who wished to be identified only by her first name out of fear of backlash, remembers khafz as being no more painful than an injection. She had the procedure in a clinic when she was seven and says it has not harmed her emotionally or physically, though she realizes that that may not be true for other Bohra women. 

“What happened with them was wrong and I completely sympathize,” she says about those who’ve been traumatized by the experience. But banning the practice altogether, she adds, would also take away women’s agency, and could have unintended consequences when it comes to women’s safety. 

“There is a very high possibility that it will be done at houses where the conditions might not be very sanitary and the people might not be as skilled,” she says.

If she has a daughter in the future, she plans to wait until the girl reaches adulthood and only do it with her consent. 

Many anti-FGM activists decry attempts to reframe khafz as a religious freedom issue, and believe that banning the practice should be straightforward. “There is no need to alter the genitals of a child,” says Ms. Ranalvi. “Full stop.”

Awareness-raising campaigns have been instrumental in reducing at FGM in Africa and the Middle East, but India has seen little progress. Activists say that’s largely because the Indian government fails to acknowledge that FGM exists in the country.

In a 2018 press release defending its record on women’s safety, the Indian government said that “female genital mutilation … is not practiced in India.” These sorts of statements frustrate activists like Ms. Ranalvi, who meets often with government officials and hands them studies and surveys containing victim testimonies.

“We are stuck at stage one where there is no recognition,” she says. 

While FGM may only affect a fraction of India’s women, Ms. Ranalvi says it echoes the broader struggle for gender equality in India.

“Why are girls not allowed mobile phones in some places? Why are girls not allowed to wear the clothes they want to wear?” she says. “All these are reflections of how you control a woman.”

The cover photo of the new Black Belt Eagle Scout album is of a woman waist-deep in Washington’s Puget Sound. The seawater behind her ripples in paisley patterns. A flotilla of clouds looks as if it’s slipped free of gravity’s last grasp. It’s meant to be evocative.

“There’s waterways and beaches of beautiful rocks and shells,” says Katherine Paul, the Native American indie rocker who records as Black Belt Eagle Scout, of the area. “And then there’s our people. Our people are here, too.”

The album, her third, debuts Friday with the title “The Land, the Water, the Sky.” Ms. Paul is the woman on the cover, which depicts her connection to the ancestral lands where she grew up. The album was inspired by her move from Portland, Oregon, to the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community in Washington state during the pandemic. It’s an extended meditation on what constitutes true home. 

“I love how sparse the music is. There’s this quiet confidence in it,” says Sterlin Harjo, showrunner for the hit TV series “Reservation Dogs,” describing the artist’s style. The show, set on an Indigenous reservation, has featured several Black Belt Eagle Scout songs. “She’s a very humble person,” he adds.

Black Belt Eagle Scout’s music is often serene. But her guitar can also roar like a logger’s chainsaw. She first taught herself to play by studying bootleg video tapes of Nirvana. Following her graduation from college in Portland, Ms. Paul remained in the city where she was employed by local music venues who valued her great organizational skills. She also developed her song craft. Her first two albums, “Mother of My Children” (2017) and “At the Party With My Brown Friends” (2019), catapulted her toward indie-rock acclaim. Then her momentum came to an abrupt halt. The pandemic scuppered her first U.S. headline tour plus shows in Europe. 

Black Belt Eagle Scout is on the cover of her latest album. The scene depicts the musician's connection to the area in Washington where she grew up.

“It was devastating, to be honest,” she says via Zoom. But her career woes were supplanted by worries about her parents’ poor health. She was also newly married to her drummer Camas Logue, who has two kids. Unable to perform live, money was scarce. “I had to think about my family and think about what it is that was important to me,” she says. “A sort of shift.”

So, in July 2020, Ms. Paul, her husband, and the children relocated to the reservation.

“The hard element was moving back in the pandemic when we couldn’t really come together,” she says. “My tribe generally likes to have a lot of events. ... And those weren’t happening. So the challenging part was just being alone a lot and not having that sense of community.”

Ms. Paul’s family were members of a drum group, the Skagit Valley Singers, and her father, a carver of totem poles, had sung traditional melodies to her when she was a baby. 

“One of the teachings that Dad had passed down to him from my grandfather is, ‘When you sing, you sing from your heart. You sing in a good way and you bring good medicine,’” she says, adding that her parents are doing fine now. “Strength and healing, I think that’s always something that I try and put into my music.”

Her father sings backing vocals on a softly strummed song called “Spaces.” 

“He does it in his style. If you were to cut out everything of that song and just have him singing those notes, and maybe there is like a drum, it would sound like a Coast Salish song,” says Ms. Paul. “But because I do my own form of indie-rock music, there is this way in which it can fit together sometimes, too.”

Most of the songs on the album are about her yearning for connection and finding solace in her natural surroundings.

“Because I couldn’t be close to physical people and bodies, I went to nature,” she explains. “I went to my other relatives. I went to the plants. I went to the trees, I went to the water. And I found those forms of relationships.” 

A key song on the album, “Salmon Stinta,” expresses how the challenges of moving home made Ms. Paul want to “scream into the sea.” It’s also a song of healing. Ms. Paul wrote the song on a classical acoustic guitar with an open D tuning that she seldom used. While she was playing, she became fixated on a painting in the room titled “Salmon Stinta” that her husband had made for her. 

“Then this melody came to me and I started singing what I saw in the painting,” says the songwriter. “I was singing to it because I love that painting. Here’s my offering to this painting that was created for me.” 

When Mr. Harjo heard the song, he featured it at the end of Season Two of “Reservation Dogs.”

“There’s something about the elements that are great with her music,” says Mr. Harjo, who first discovered Black Belt Eagle Scout when he filmed the documentary “Love and Fury” (available on Netflix) about Native Americans expressing themselves through art. “It’s something that just marries so well together between her music and a really emotional scene that happens at the water, the ocean. Just a really beautiful coming together of visuals and music.”

This spring, Ms. Paul will tour Europe and parts of North America. And then she’ll return to the land of Douglas firs, verdant camas, and bushes of salmonberries, huckleberries, and thimbleberries. It’s where she feels grounded.

“Home is just another word for connection and love and, you know, family,” says Ms. Paul. “This place, it’s where I belong.”

Reuters

People wait in front of the logo of the Adani Group in Ahmedabad, India.

More than two weeks after a New York-based financial research firm accused one of India’s largest business conglomerates of “a brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades,” the country’s major stock exchanges are still seeking balance. 

Markets, like horses, scare easily. They need distance to assess what made them bolt. India’s financial regulators have opened at least one new probe into the allegations against the Adani Group, a large-scale infrastructure developer with close ties to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The group shed roughly $120 billion – half its value – after the report went public on Jan. 24.

But what is already apparent is that the claims against Adani have sent a fresh impulse of integrity through India’s public institutions and civil society. “The lesson for everyone is that we should believe in top class governance and we should open our books and records to everyone in the world,” Amitabh Kant, Mr. Modi’s chief representative to the G-20 group of nations, told Bloomberg.

The two-year forensic study of Adani’s practices by Hindenburg Research comes at a time when international investors regard India, now the world’s most populous country, as a promising alternative to China for its business environment. The report’s conclusions raise new concerns about Mr. Modi’s economic model, which has consolidated lucrative public contracts in a small group of wealthy developers at the expense of local competition and foreign investment.

Those practices may be one reason why public perceptions of corruption are so high in India. The latest Transparency International index, released last month, shows that 89% of Indians say government corruption is a big problem.

The Adani Group and Mr. Modi vehemently deny the claims, and Mr. Modi’s party adjourned Parliament three days in a row amid opposition demands to debate the report. But India’s most important financial institutions have been less dismissive. The heads of the Securities and Exchange Board of India and the Reserve Bank of India have reiterated their commitment to public integrity. Two local stock exchanges have put three Adani Group companies under trading surveillance. The Supreme Court is expected to hear two “public interest litigations” on the report.

The ripples have spread offshore. Norway’s sovereign fund announced it was disinvesting from the Adani Group. The global stock index MSCI, meanwhile, said today it was reevaluating the proportion of Adani Group stocks open to international investors in public markets.

In its most recent assessment of India as a destination for foreign investment, the U.S. State Department noted that “Indian-specific standards not aligned with international standards [have] effectively ... restricted the expansion in bilateral trade and investment.” The scrutiny of the Adani Group casts uncertainty over a broad range of critical infrastructure projects in India.

Yet by casting a light on public integrity, it already had a salutary effect. As Mr. Kant noted in an opinion essay on Feb. 5, “Good governance ... is about empowering people with the tools that will enable them to grow individually and as a community. This requires a capacious and humane public administration.”