Mohammed strolls down the corridor, stopping to gaze at glassed-in panels marking milestones in the life of Yasser Arafat and modern Palestinian history: the first intifada, the Oslo Accords, a Nobel Peace Prize, the second intifada.

The Chilean Palestinian, who asks that his full name not be used, lingers at the final panel on the 2004 death and funeral of Mr. Arafat, the longtime chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and first president of the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Mohammed says every time he visits his family in the West Bank village of Turmus Ayya, he comes to the Yasser Arafat Museum and Mausoleum, a pilgrimage to what he considers symbols of Palestinian identity and yearned-for statehood, to “feel connected to my nation and my roots.”

“All of this is our story,” he says, motioning to the display cases. On this weekday afternoon he seems puzzled to be the only visitor.

A few yards away, the Mukataa presidential compound, which buzzed with life under President Arafat, is nearly just as empty.

It’s no coincidence. Mr. Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, whose elected mandate ended 14 years ago, has shut off the Mukataa and PA, the institutional embodiments of Palestinian autonomy, to everyone but himself and his inner circle.

Amr Nabil/AP

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas addresses a conference at Arab League headquarters in Cairo, Feb. 12, 2023.

And while the succession process triggered by the passing of Mr. Arafat was an orderly affair that followed a nascent constitution and political consensus, plans for succeeding the 87-year-old Mr. Abbas are far from clear.

This vagueness is by design – and aimed at self-preservation.

Over the past 12 years, the president, also known as Abu Mazen, has ousted and exiled potential rivals, detained opposition figures, and quashed dissent, both within his Fatah movement that dominates the PA and across the West Bank.

With the Palestinian parliament dissolved, judiciary sidelined, and his party hollowed out, Mr. Abbas and a handful of allies now rule the West Bank alone.

The result, observers and Palestinians say, is a self-inflicted leadership crisis: The PA commands little popular support, its control over territory is diminishing rapidly, and the one man holding together the PA – a legacy of the 1993 Oslo Accords with Israel – may soon be responsible for unraveling it.

For Palestinians, uncertainty over the succession process comes amid a whirl of public apathy, rising settler violence under a far-right Israeli government, spiraling crime, and the emergence of militias targeting Israelis and clashing with PA security services.

With the United States and the West preoccupied with Ukraine, Israel consumed with internal divisions, and the Palestinian cause a lower priority for many Arab states, the brewing crisis is one that many countries and Palestinians themselves see coming, but are unable – or unwilling – to avert.

“All my family tell me that this isn’t the Palestine that I knew, that they knew,” Mohammed says of the uncertainty swirling in Ramallah. “Everyone is anxious and has no idea where we are going, who will lead us.” 

Taylor Luck

Jassir Ghafri, a former Fatah youth member, poses at his cafe on the outskirts of Ramallah, West Bank, June 21, 2023. He says after Mahmoud Abbas, “there will be chaos. There will be a collapse of Fatah and the PA. But instead of offering solutions to prevent the chaos, we are forced to be spectators.”

Stability vs. democracy

Who will take over from Mr. Abbas has become a guessing game among the few Palestinians still invested in a leadership that many say “does not represent us.”

Marwan Barghouti, a Fatah rival to Mr. Abbas jailed in Israel, consistently polls as Palestinians’ preferred successor – double that of Hamas’ Ismael Haniya. In a June poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, Mr. Barghouti beats Mr. Haniya in a head-to-head matchup 57% to 38%.

Leading contenders among Mr. Abbas’ inner circle and the Fatah old guard include PLO Secretary-General Hussein al-Sheikh, the PA’s key liaison with Israel; Majed Farraj, head of Palestinian intelligence; Mohammed Shtayyeh, the technocrat prime minister; Fatah veteran Mahmoud al-Aloul; and Fatah Secretary-General Jibril Rajoub.

One scenario discussed in Ramallah, Jordan, and Egypt is a triumvirate of three senior PA officials, each managing a separate portfolio: administrative affairs, security, and diplomacy. Israeli officials consider the rule-by-committee scenario likely.

Members of Mr. Abbas’ inner circle say continuity in leadership is “crucial” for Palestinians to keep the PA alive, maintain critical health and education services, cooperate with the international community, and safeguard against encroaching settlers and annexation attempts by Israel.

Those goals, they argue, supersede the need for elections.

“Continuity and the process will be respected,” says Social Development Minister Ahmad Majdalani, a PLO Executive Committee member and Abbas ally. He dismisses succession worries: “Right now, policy is more important.”

Yet few Palestinians believe the PA can survive a transfer of power without elections or transparency.

“Post-Abu Mazen, there will be chaos. There will be a collapse of Fatah and the PA. But instead of offering solutions to prevent the chaos, we are forced to be spectators,” says Jassir Ghafri, one of hundreds of young Palestinians who have been driven from Fatah in recent years.

“We have a crisis in leadership and a crisis of ideas. There are no visions on where to go from here or how to improve our lives,” he says. Thanks to Mr. Abbas’ crackdowns, “we have no national project, no vision, no direction. Only arms.”

The disillusioned 27-year-old runs an upscale Ramallah cafe and now avoids politics.

Taylor Luck

Abdullah Rafidi, outside his family’s bakery in Al Bireh, West Bank, June 21, 2023, says he expects a civil war when President Mahmoud Abbas dies.

“You can plan two months ahead, but planning for a year is impossible,” says Abdullah Rafidi, a 23-year-old baker in Al Bireh, adjacent to Ramallah, who cites rising crime. “I expect a civil war when the president dies.”

Gaith al-Omari, an analyst and former PA official who worked with both Mr. Arafat and Mr. Abbas as a negotiating team adviser, sees the PA as weakened.

“Whoever comes after Abbas needs political support. In times of crisis, you need your public to rally around you, but he has pushed them away,” he says.

“Today Palestinians are checking out; they feel they have no voice and that a small clique controls everything,” he says. “There is a widespread sense of, ‘This is not ours; why should we bother?’”

Stateless, institutionless

Indeed, Mr. Abbas’ consolidation of power has come at the expense of Palestinian institutions, hailed as important safeguards that eased the leadership transition in 2005.

One, the Palestinian Legislative Council, or parliament, has been shuttered since 2007, after fighting erupted between Fatah and its main rival, Hamas, which then held a majority.  

Today, pigeons have taken roost in the council’s domed entrance. Exposed wires poke out from the ceiling, and bits of broken drywall and concrete litter the floor as if a bomb had gone off 16 years ago.

In an adjacent building, Ibrahim Khreisheh, secretary-general of the council, watches over the shuttered parliament from his smoke-filled, third-floor office.

Like many, he believes democracy is the only path out of Palestinians’ current crisis.

“The four of us in this room are Fatah,” he says, pointing to himself and three colleagues. “Not even two of us can agree on the same [successor]. That is why you need general elections.”

Yet they do agree that a prolonged interim period without elections would be “chaos.”

“The Palestinian Authority would lose all legitimacy,” says Mr. Khreisheh. “These institutions will be no more. We will be in a post-Oslo era and a post-Authority era. We are afraid that this will only lead to a vacuum and violence.”

Taylor Luck

Ayman Daraghmeh, a Hamas member and former member of the Palestinian parliament, sits at a cafe in Ramallah, West Bank, June 21, 2023.

Political opportunities?

Watching and waiting is the Islamist militant Hamas, the target of protests in Gaza even as it enjoys a resurgence of support among West Bank residents who have never experienced its rule.

Reconciling Fatah and Hamas is a priority for many Palestinians, who blame the schism in part for their leadership woes. The latest efforts at reconciliation – by Turkey and Egypt in late July – made no headway.

Hamas is urging officials to follow the Palestinian Constitution’s rules for succession, in which the speaker of parliament serves as interim president for 60 days during which presidential elections “shall take place.” The last speaker was Hamas member Aziz Dweik.

“We are worried about the day after,” says Ayman Daraghmeh, a former Hamas member of parliament in Ramallah. “Clashes within Fatah may happen.”

A unilateral declaration of a Fatah president will prompt Hamas to name its own, he warns, leading to competing figures assuming the mantle of leader.

“I am afraid we are heading in this direction, because Abu Mazen refuses to even discuss succession.”

Mustafa Barghouti, a physician and MP – and the last person to challenge Mr. Abbas for the presidency in the 2005 election – says the crisis offers a rare opportunity for Palestinians to reset their priorities and reorient their national movement.

“The question that should be asked is not who will be there, but what will be there” after Mr. Abbas departs, Dr. Barghouti says. 

“The whole Authority is based on the peace process and was established to implement the peace process,” he says. “This was the product of a project, but that project is not there anymore.”

Dr. Barghouti, who leads the Palestine National Initiative, a centrist political party, says political factions can ask the Palestinian people to choose the way forward.

“Hamas thinks they have the best line. Islamic Jihad, Fatah, us, we all think we have the best line. The only way is to go back to the people and say to them, ‘Please elect your leadership.’”

He calls for elections in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem for president, parliament, and the PLO.

Such elections, he says, could enable Palestinians to “shrink the security apparatus,” boost spending on health care and education, and allow Palestinians to update their strategy on statehood, which has been unchanged since Oslo.

“We should have elections now,” not wait for Mr. Abbas to die, he warns.

Majdi Mohammed/AP

Residents of the Jenin refugee camp flee their homes during an Israeli military operation in the area, July 4, 2023. This month, Palestinian security forces attempting to regain control of the camp, a militia stronghold, were met with armed resistance.

Infighting, violence

As uncertainty clouds the PA’s future, it is rapidly losing influence in the present. According to polls, 80% of Palestinians want Mr. Abbas to resign, and 50% say the PA’s dissolution is in their interest.

In protests against the PA, demonstrators now ignore Mr. Abbas and chant against potential successors instead – such as the PLO’s Mr. Sheikh.

PA security services attempting to regain control of the Jenin refugee camp, a militia stronghold, were met this month with armed resistance.

Even in Ramallah – a gentrified suburbia of shopping malls and chic cafes and the PA seat of power since Oslo – its grip is rapidly loosening.

The PA has been unable to pay full salaries to its 130,000 state employees for 20 months. With just 70% to 80% of their salaries, many disgruntled employees are sinking into debt or are abandoning their posts to work in Israel.

Economic recovery from the pandemic has been sluggish, with strikes affecting even schools and hospitals.

And now crime and vendetta killings are on the rise in the West Bank, which is awash with guns, many smuggled from Israel and Jordan. Criminal gangs are reaching Ramallah as Mr. Abbas trains his security services on political opponents.

Expressing a common concern, Ghaidah, a Ramallah fitness instructor, says, “We are afraid of infighting that will not be among Palestinian people but officials who will fight over who will get to rule over us.” 

The Egyptian Presidency/Reuters

From left, Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit, Jordan's King Abdullah, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi attend a Jerusalem resilience and development conference at Arab League headquarters in Cairo, Feb. 12, 2023.

An anxious region

A flurry of summits among Arab leaders and Mr. Abbas – the most recent on Monday with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Jordan’s King Abdullah – is seen to indicate rising anxiety over Palestinian succession in the region.

Particularly in Israel, where Palestinian succession has been a topic of concern ever since Mr. Abbas was elected president at the spry age of 70.

Succession is “a heavy issue with strategic implications,” explains retired Col. Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli military adviser on Palestinian affairs and a lecturer at Tel Aviv University. “Israel prepares for it all the time.”

Israel prefers continuity in the PA and figures who will carry on Mr. Abbas’ policies: opposing armed resistance, upholding security coordination with Israel, and maintaining the PA as a governing entity. Israel views Mr. Sheikh and Mr. Farraj as most likely to continue this posture.

While the Israeli security establishment views a Fatah-Hamas unity government as less ideal, the worst-case scenario would be the post-Abbas fragmentation or outright collapse of the PA, prompting clashes between militias loyal to political rivals.

According to Dr. Milshtein, a hard-learned Israeli lesson that “we don’t get involved in crowning kings in the Arab world” is offset by concerns about chaos spilling over into Israeli territory, which could spur military actions.

Even the current government, the most far-right in Israel’s history, has expressed concern over the PA and the financial and political crises gripping the West Bank. The Cabinet decided in July to “work to avoid the collapse of the Palestinian Authority.”

Yet so far, no proposal has materialized.

Israeli extremists

Some Israeli officials and analysts fear that extremists in key government posts are undermining efforts to bolster the PA and seeking to use the leadership crisis to accelerate its collapse.

One particular figure is Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister also entrusted with administering the West Bank, who has openly called for Israel to annex the territory and favors the PA’s demise.

“The PA’s existence is not worth the diplomatic damage it causes us,” he said in 2019. “It is better for Israel to work towards its collapse.”

Warns Dr. Milshtein: “A right-wing government may see an opportunity” to use chaos over succession to undermine the PA.

The outside actor with potentially the most leverage in the West Bank is Jordan. King Abdullah regularly hosts Mr. Abbas, and Jordanian intelligence maintains ties with West Bank communities.  

Yet Amman’s desire to prevent instability in the West Bank is tempered by its unwillingness to allow the Israeli government to “absolve itself from its responsibility in aiding the Authority’s collapse,” an official source says.

Distrust toward Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is high, and Jordan fears its direct involvement in the Palestinian leadership transition will aid “far-right Israeli government attempts to make Jordan the de facto homeland and sovereign state for Palestinians,” a source close to the palace says.

“It is almost like we see this train wreck coming and we wring our hands,” says Mr. Omari, the analyst, “but no one is doing the necessary political and diplomatic heavy lifting to deal with it.”

America is facing a new China conundrum.

And the latest challenge isn’t from an assertive show of strength by Beijing. It has come, instead, from an unexpected source, at a potentially critical moment – just as the world’s two main rival powers have appeared to be edging toward the kind of diplomatic
reengagement that U.S. President Joe Biden has been seeking, with little success, for the past few years.

It’s the growing signs in recent weeks that China’s seemingly inexorable economic rise is running into head winds: slowing growth, flagging consumer demand, debt problems in the troubled construction sector, and rising unemployment, especially among the young. And the signs, too, of some homegrown irritants for Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

First, late last month, came the sudden dismissal of Foreign Minister Qin Gang, a Xi protégé appointed to the post only months earlier. Then, barely two weeks ago, Mr. Xi replaced the top commanders in China’s elite nuclear missile force.

On one level, none of that is necessarily bad news for Washington. Mr. Biden has centered his increasingly assertive posture toward China on those two areas: economy and security. More specifically, his policy has been aimed at ensuring the United States can outpace China in cutting-edge technology, and, alongside U.S. allies, can constrain an increasingly assertive Chinese military posture.

This week, Mr. Biden is welcoming the leaders of Japan and South Korea for summit talks at Camp David – the latest in a series of moves to strengthen economic, political, and security ties among allies on China’s Indo-Pacific doorstep.

Still, the Biden administration knows that China’s economy, the world’s second-largest, is not about to crater suddenly as a result of its current challenges. Nor is the missile-force shakeup likely to influence the main thrust of Mr. Xi’s security policy: a major military buildup as part of an ever-more-assertive projection of China’s power beyond its borders.

The deeper concern is how Mr. Xi – who has amassed greater personal authority than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, on the promise of China displacing the U.S. as the world’s preeminent power – will respond politically to his homegrown difficulties.

The worry is that he could now be doubly keen to project China’s, and his own, strength abroad, and that he’ll view any move toward a diplomatic thaw with America as a sign of weakness.

Mr. Biden himself gave voice to this concern at a fundraising event in Utah last week. Citing China’s economic slowdown, he said, “They’ve got some problems. That’s not good, because when bad folks have problems, they do bad things."

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

U.S. President Joe Biden boards Air Force One for travel to Utah from Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Aug. 9, 2023.

Dim the glimmers of hope?

The reference appeared to be to the risk that China might ratchet up pressure on the island democracy of Taiwan, which Mr. Xi has vowed at some point to “reunite” with the mainland. But the more immediate concern is that China’s domestic difficulties could derail the first real glimmers of hope in many months for diplomatic reengagement.

Alongside a toughened economic and security stance toward China, the Biden administration has repeatedly stressed the need to keep the U.S.-China rivalry from breeding across-the-board hostility, preventing cooperation even on issues of common concern, and even leading to head-on conflict.

American officials have gone to great lengths to emphasize to Beijing that Washington’s tightened trade rules – including an executive order signed last week by Mr. Biden banning U.S. investments in Chinese high-tech firms – are not aimed at affecting China’s economy more broadly, or impeding its growth.

That’s a point Mr. Biden also stressed during his appearance in Utah. And although Mr. Xi has long been signaling skepticism about such assurances – accusing the U.S. earlier this year of seeking the “all-out encirclement” of China – there have been some recent indications he was becoming more receptive to improving the diplomatic atmosphere.

Mr. Xi and Mr. Biden met at last November’s G20 summit on the Indonesian island of Bali – their first face-to-face talks since Mr. Biden’s inauguration as president. Since then, a trio of American Cabinet secretaries, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have held talks with their Chinese counterparts.

And in what could prove a key test of Mr. Biden’s success in keeping open a U.S.-China dialogue even on issues of contention, like high-tech trade, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is due to travel to Beijing later this month. Assuming her visit goes ahead without a hitch, the focus will then shift back to presidential diplomacy: Both Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi are due to attend this year’s G20 summit, scheduled for next month in India.

Yet with a number of Chinese government ministers due to travel to the U.S. after that summit, the main measure of any sustained improvement may well come in November – in an expected Biden-Xi meeting at an Asia-Pacific economic summit due to be held in San Francisco.

Still, as Mr. Biden’s forceful, if undiplomatic, remarks in Utah suggested, Washington and its allies may first have to convince a newly reluctant Chinese leader that renewed diplomatic engagement is, far from a reflection of weakness on either rival’s part, in the fundamental interests of both of them.

Kim Chandler/AP/File

The Harriott II riverboat sits docked in Montgomery, Alabama, on Aug. 8.

When Derryn Moten saw a group of white men fight a group of Black men at the docks in his hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, his first thought was: Have these people lost their minds?

His second thought was a question about his late father, who lived through Jim Crow segregation. What would he have done had a racial epithet been thrown his way? “He would’ve cleaned their clock.”

Those competing instincts – incivility and how to deal with it – played out in the Aug. 5 brawl and its aftermath. Viral videos show white boaters fistfighting with a group of Black deckhands over the boaters’ refusal to make way for a city-owned ship.

The racial elements are inescapable. One eyewitness account cited in a court document says racial epithets were used toward one of the Black crewmembers before the start of the fight. At a time when bystander videos have often captured scenes of police violence against people of color, the videos hold disturbing echoes.

Yet the videos also say something important about the state of incivility in America. The riverboat captain told The Daily Beast that the brawl, once it started, was not a “Black and white” thing. He added to WACV radio: “This was our crew upset about these idiots.”

Cultural commentators point to rising concern about fights and violence from schoolhouses to Waffle Houses. An Instagram video of an American Airlines pilot chiding passengers for being “selfish and rude” has 4.6 million views, reports People magazine.

On one hand, the videos point to something that, in a way, went right. The white boaters were clearly in the wrong, and people came to the aid of the Black deckhands, both during the fight and since.

“There’s something cathartic about the video,” says Dr. Moten, a historian at Alabama State University in Montgomery. “We can’t remain silent. We can’t live in harmony if we allow people to vent their abuse on someone in language or otherwise because they’re angry or frustrated.”

Curiously, amid this catharsis, there have also been online memes and humor. One man who jumped into the water to get to the brawl has been dubbed “Scuba Gooding, Jr.” The jokes aren’t just because no one was seriously injured. They point to a nation seeking ways to dispel what, for many, has become a pervasive pall of bad behavior.

“These kinds of videos mean a lot to people at a time when they are feeling these kinds of tensions around the country on a bigger level,” says Joel Penney, a social media expert at Montclair State University and author of “Pop Culture, Politics, and the News: Entertainment Journalism in the Polarized Media Landscape.” “They are little morality plays that become a way to talk about this larger set of issues that’s more complicated and abstract.”

Mickey Welsh/The Montgomery Advertiser/AP

Mayor Steven Reed (left) listens as Police Chief Darryl Albert speaks at a news conference at City Hall in Montgomery, Alabama, on Aug. 8 to discuss a riverfront brawl.

These concerns have intensified in recent years. In 2018, shortly after a deadly shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue, 80% of Americans worried that negativity and incivility would lead to violence, or even acts of terror, according to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.

Among 846 public schools, 56% saw a rise in classroom disruptions from student misconduct during the 2021-22 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Some 48% also saw an increase in acts of disrespect toward teachers and staff. At Waffle House, workers have insisted that the corporation adds security, given the prevalence of late-night fights.

The acrimony can play out on the biggest stages and in small towns. Social media titans Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, of X and Meta, respectively, bantered about meeting in a cage match.

Meanwhile, the Discovery Museum in Acton, Massachusetts, recently posted rules about patrons acting civilly after a series of problems. “Creating these rules is a response to the current state of the world around us,” the museum’s director wrote recently. “A world where civility, empathy, respect for others, how we treat each other – a.k.a. the golden rule – have deteriorated.”

What happened in Montgomery

The confrontation in Montgomery began when the Harriott II riverboat, carrying more than 200 passengers waiting to disembark, needed a smaller boat to move. The captain spent 45 minutes hailing the boaters, asking them to move their craft. After being told off, a senior crew member from the riverboat hitched a ride to the dock and loosened the smaller boat’s mooring lines to slide it down the dock from its reserved spot.

At that point, he was attacked by a white man, who was soon joined by several others. One of the deckhands jumped in the water to swim to his colleague’s defense. When the ferry docked, a second, larger brawl ensued, with one man wielding a deck chair.

Mayor Steven Reed, elected in 2019 as the city’s first Black mayor, said no fighting is acceptable. But he said the boaters’ sense of entitlement and willingness to gang up on a man trying to do his job went beyond the pale.

“[My] perspective as a Black man in Montgomery differs from my perspective as mayor,” he said at a press conference. “From what we’ve seen from the history of our city – a place tied to both the pain and the progress of this nation – it seems to meet the moral definition, and this kind of violence cannot go unchecked.”

Much of the online commentary has been around the fact that many Black bystanders rushed in to defend the riverboat crew. At a time of heightened tensions, race can be a powerful driver of events like the Montgomery fight.

“The racial animus is so whipped up that it doesn’t take much to provoke people,” says Dr. Moten, who wrote the introduction to “Crusader Without Violence,” a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. “Sadly, there is something like what happened in Montgomery happening almost on a daily basis at a bar, at a baseball field, in a football arena – there’s just too many of these incidents.”

The light-hearted online banter seems to be at least in part an attempt to defuse that. “To take a step back, one of the things that strikes me about the reaction to the videos, especially given that it was such a racially loaded incident, is that people find it funny,” says David Schmid, author of “Natural Born Celebrities.” “It becomes a kind of comic relief in part for all the other things that are happening” in the country.

Is there a solution?

Holding people accountable is part of the solution. The Black riverboat senior crew member was clearly “doing his job,” says Mr. Schmid, a professor at the University at Buffalo in New York. It’s “a no-brainer for law enforcement. It’s a perfect opportunity for them to be seen doing the right thing.”

In the riverboat case, 13 people were detained and four people were charged with third-degree assault, while another person was charged with disorderly conduct. These are all misdemeanor offenses.

More broadly, there are some signs of improvement. Incidents of unruly behavior by airline passengers peaked in 2021 at 5,973. As of Aug. 6, the number for this year is 1,177, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Encouraging civility means building a communal case for it, says Joan McGregor, a philosophy professor at Arizona State University in Tempe. That can include giving people skills and habits to be considerate and helping people behave in ways that make others feel included.

“We’re seeing this web of social norms which go from clear incivility or even to harm, but also just to good manners,” says Dr. McGregor. “When we think about how we live in a complex society with lots of people who may be different from us, we have to share these norms and values and ideals.

“But it does require us to put our selfishness and our narcissism – our sense of entitlement – to the side,” she adds. “We all are in a lot of ways very vulnerable creatures and require people to extend us kindness, not just because it’s something we deserve, but that’s the way civilized societies work.”

The first exhibit inside the National Infantry Museum, in Columbus, Georgia, is a long aisle of life-size battlefield scenes from Yorktown, Omaha Beach, Desert Storm. The exhibit is a march through the Army Infantry’s history. So too are the soldiers it depicts. 

The scene from Antietam shows Henry Benning, a Civil War Confederate general and native here in Columbus, Georgia, aiming a rifle past a short bridge. 

Farther forward, inside the open cab of a helicopter, a projector plays black-and-white footage from the Vietnam War. In the film, Harold “Hal” Moore, who retired a lieutenant general and whose memoir became the movie “We Were Soldiers,” waves off a chopper. 

It’s a fitting cast. Beside the museum is one of the country’s largest Army bases, which trains America’s infantry. Up until this May, its name was Fort Benning. Now it’s Fort Moore, having been renamed for Hal and his wife, Julia – one of nine posts once named for Confederate soldiers being re-designated this year. 

That change was required in the defense bill passed by Congress in 2020, the kind of Washington mandate that could have easily rent a Deep South town and its beloved Army base over the politics of memory. Instead, Fort Benning became Fort Moore with no protest and few complaints. 

“I don’t think anybody who looks at it logically and fairly will ever say it was imposed on us,” says Pastor Jimmy Elder of Columbus’ First Baptist Church, who participated in the renaming process.

Since May, the fort’s brass has repeated how the new name better matches Army values. Perhaps just as important but less trumpeted is how the fort was renamed – guided by Washington but carried out by locals. Months after the renaming ceremony took place, the fort and the city have come to take pride in that process almost as much as the new name itself.

Denise Mosley/Courtesy of Maneuver Center of Excellence/U.S. Army

Cavalry soldiers assigned to the 316th Cavalry Brigade attend the re-designation ceremony May 11, 2023, at Doughboy Stadium at Fort Moore.

A city’s connection to its base

This is not the first time Columbus led the naming of its military base – nor even the first time Mr. Elder’s church was involved.

In the early 1900s, its former head pastor helped found the local Rotary Club, which in 1918 campaigned to locate a new Army training camp nearby – and then to name it after Henry Benning. 

It was an unusual amount of activism, even around the heyday of support for the Lost Cause myth. Five other surviving camps from World War I were named for a Confederate. But none involved such a high level of local input. 

That in part reflected Columbus’ Confederate resume. It hosted one of the last land battles of the Civil War on the rapids of the Chattahoochee, the same river that made the city Richmond’s second-largest wartime port. Henry Benning, a Confederate general and former state supreme court justice, was Confederate royalty. He’s buried in the city cemetery. 

Such Confederate ties have since loosened as Columbus has grown. It’s now the second-largest city in Georgia, hosting multiple Fortune 500 companies, including Aflac and Pratt & Whitney. Modish apartment buildings are under construction downtown. The Chattahoochee’s rapids are now used for white water rafting. In 2020, the county voted 61% for Joe Biden.

What hasn’t loosened is the city’s connection to its military base. 

The fort now supports more than 120,000 active duty personnel, along with families, reserves, retirees, and civilian employees. It’s the largest single-site employer in the state of Georgia, responsible for some $4.5 billion in annual income for the surrounding area, says retired Maj. Gen. Patrick Donahoe, the fort’s former commanding general. 

“The post is central to the economic life of the area,” says Mr. Donahoe, who now works at Columbus State University.

Today, military and civilian leaders describe each other as partners. Off-duty personnel visit the restaurants downtown on weeknight evenings. Many settle in the area, and recite their connection to the post like the title on a business card.

The upshot is a town less connected to Henry Benning but more connected to Fort Benning, which meant renaming it would still face a skeptical audience, though more out of tradition than support for the Confederacy. 

“You’re always going to have some folks who just don’t want to turn loose of the past,” says Skip Henderson, Columbus’ mayor. 

Engaging with the community 

But the decision to rename the fort had already been made, and it had been made by Congress.  The challenge was to find a way to engage the community in that process, rather than having them resent it.

That challenge eventually became the job of John Hargrove, the local civilian aide to the secretary of the Army.

Mr. Hargrove is slight of build with a firm handshake and an easy laugh. In Columbus and on the fort, he knows few strangers. 

The post’s military leaders asked him to lead community engagement at the most local level. A national commission was working with each Confederate-named base, and a group of 30-40 leaders from the Columbus area were meeting periodically with each other and that Naming Commission. Mr. Hargrove’s task was to hold one-on-one conversations in the community – a chance for local input without the potential for a large town hall to get off message.

Noah Robertson/The Christian Science Monitor

John Hargrove spent a year and a half speaking with community members in Columbus, Georgia, as Fort Benning was being renamed, July 26, 2023.

So he started a list of who to meet with, grouping them into categories – veterans, members of the Black community (Columbus’ population is around 45% Black), faith leaders, and the like. Then he started scheduling meetings, some as formal as a meal, some as short as a chat after a high school ballgame. 

“I probably drank coffee for close to 18 months,” says Mr. Hargrove. 

In all, he estimates that he met with around 100 people. He didn’t take notes, or keep a record of their conversations, to let people speak freely. His job was mostly to listen, and then represent broadly what he heard.

And he noticed that in about three-fourths of his meetings, people were familiar with the Moores, then just a candidate for the post’s new name. He sensed a trend. 

“It was a community ‘aha moment,’” says Mr. Hargrove.

“Why not Mom and Dad?”

Around the time that Mr. Hargrove was being asked to find out what the community thought about Fort Benning’s new name, David Moore already had an idea.

“Our family said, well, heck, why not Mom and Dad?” 

That question would eventually spell more than a year of work for him and his siblings. They led a push to rename the base that would rival a lobbying firm were it not family run. 

A retired Army colonel, the younger Mr. Moore now lives less than an hour away from Columbus in Auburn, Alabama. He first arrived at Fort Benning at the age of three, when his father was stationed there in 1965. 

Later that year, Hal Moore deployed to Vietnam and led his troops through an onslaught during the battle of Ia Drang, the first major battle of the Vietnam War. His leadership earned him the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest honor. 

Meanwhile, while living off base, David’s mother Julia began complaining to the Pentagon about its system to inform families of casualties: a telegram delivered by a taxi driver. She started personally joining taxi drivers to soften the news. Her complaints to the Pentagon helped lead to the protocol in place today – news delivered by an officer and a chaplain. 

No other military installation is named after a husband and wife pair, something Mr. Moore and his siblings saw as a way to set their parents apart from the other contenders: mostly famous generals like George Marshall and Colin Powell.

After making calls and writing a short summary, Mr. Moore began serious work with his brother Steve – the “family archivist” who has spent much of his life documenting his parents’ careers. They developed a website and wrote a full, 300-page proposal, which they shared with the Naming Commission and around town.

“People say ‘oh there’s big money behind Fort Moore.’ No, there’s Steve Moore behind Fort Moore,” says David. 

Then, for four months, there was silence. The Naming Commission was tasked with issuing a recommendation in its report. But the family didn’t know when that report would publish.

Mr. Moore was working in Maryland late last year when he got a call from Mr. Hargrove, the Army community liaison, asking if he’d seen the news. 

“We did it,” Mr. Hargrove congratulated him.

“I was stunned, stunned to tears, that we were able to to pull this off,” says Mr. Moore. 

From one name to another

The morning of May 11, around 7,000 people packed into Doughboy Stadium, the fort’s horseshoe-shaped football field, for the renaming ceremony. The crowd was a cross section of the area – soldiers, local leaders, veterans, and some 50 members of the Moore family. 

At 9:30 a.m., halfway through the ceremony, base personnel changed the final signs out from one name to the other. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Soldiers participate in paratrooper training at the Airborne School at Fort Benning, March 23, 2022, in Columbus, Georgia.

“When you came out of the ceremony, there was nothing that didn’t say Fort Moore,” says Col. Colin Mahle, the fort’s garrison commander. 

That change was the culmination of months of intense work on base – to plan the ceremony, then to change out almost everything that said Fort Benning. Among other items, that included all the signs on base, patches for the uniforms, the 35,000 books in the library, logos on the golf course equipment. 

“You wouldn’t believe how well this post had been branded for 105 years,” says Mr. Mahle.

The goal was simple but extremely difficult: nothing would be named Fort Moore before the ceremony, and nothing would be named Fort Benning after it. Planners were successful, even exacting. Early morning golfers on May 11 couldn’t buy Fort Moore merchandise at the pro shop until after 9:30 a.m. The fort’s boat at a recreational facility in Florida was changed from the “Stars and Stripes of Fort Benning” to just the “Stars and Stripes.”

“We’re not just honoring the Moores by the post being named Fort Moore,” says Maj. Gen. Curtis Buzzard, the commanding general of the base. “There’s a standard that comes with that.” The fort expressed it in its new slogan: Be Moore. 

For Gen. Buzzard, the connection is in part personal. He brought a copy of Hal Moore’s memoir with him to West Point as a cadet. Later, while stationed at Fort Benning, he had the war hero sign it.

The night before the ceremony, Mr. Buzzard hosted surviving members of the 7th Cavalry, Hal Moore’s regiment in Ia Drang, for a reception. They found his copy of the book and signed their names wherever they saw their pictures. 

“They loved Gen. Moore, and all the reasons why we renamed the post, just came to life in listening to them,” he says.

Fort Benning isn’t gone from Columbus. The city is reviewing how much it will cost to change the roads and other items that still have the old name – including Fort Benning Road, which leads to the post. Some members of the community say it will always be Fort Benning to them. Even David Moore sometimes finds himself calling it Fort Benning. 

That’s okay, says Mr. Donahoe, the former commanding general. Changing the name – both how they changed it and what they changed it to – was meant to be a start, not the end. 

“It’ll be a generation or two,” he says. “Then everybody will only know it as Fort Moore.”

Karen Norris/Staff

From 16th-century Mexico to the wilds of Siberia to modern-day Seoul, literature from around the world offers a window into diverse cultures and customs.

But only a small number of books published in the United States each year are translated from other languages.

Fortunately, certain publishers specialize in just such books and several have brought out three novels and a short-story collection, all originally published in Europe and Asia, affording English speakers an opportunity to embrace the larger world in their reading experience. 

“Not Even the Dead” by Juan Gómez Bárcena

“Not Even the Dead” begins in the 16th century, in an unspecified part of New Spain, in southern Mexico. Juan de Toñanes, a destitute Spanish conquistador now eking out a living as an innkeeper, is hired by representatives of the Spanish crown to hunt down an Indigenous man, also named Juan. Educated by Christian friars as a boy, Juan the Indian, as he is known, has since renounced those teachings, has traveled north, and is stirring up trouble among the native people. Worse, he has translated the Bible from Latin to Spanish, an act of supreme heresy.

Juan the innkeeper is commissioned to find and return Juan the Indian, or his head, along with his “notorious” book. In his long and eventful journey “north always north” among the marginalized people of Mexican society – and with Juan the Indian always a step or two ahead of him – the former conquistador begins to feel an affinity for the target of his search, thinking of him as “a fellow adventurer” and of themselves as “two homeless men, advancing because they can no longer go back.” 

Spanish novelist Juan Gómez Bárcena spins an epic, picaresque, hallucinatory tale that stretches in place and time from the interior of colonized Mexico to the U.S. border during the time of Donald Trump. Originally published in Spain in 2020 and translated into English by Katie Whittemore, “Not Even the Dead” is difficult to categorize. Part Western, part adventure story, with echoes of Cormac McCarthy and Joseph Conrad, it makes for a rich and unique reading experience. 

“Evil Flowers” by Gunnhild Øyehaug

Norwegian poet, essayist, and fiction writer Gunnhild Øyehaug has an international reputation and gained a sizable following in the English-speaking world after the publication of her short-story collection “Knots” in 2017. Her latest book, “Evil Flowers,” published in Norway in 2020, is her fourth translated into English by Kari Dickson. It is composed of 25 short stories that display her inventive and playful wit, along with an affinity for the bizarre. 

In “Birds,” the opening story, an ornithologist loses the part of her brain that contains all her knowledge of birds. She’s preparing to defend her Ph.D. thesis, so she scrambles frantically to relearn everything she can about them (“There were creatures that could actually fly!”). In the process, she recaptures the delight she once found in bird-watching.  

In several stories, Øyehaug parts company with established literary conventions. “Thread,” about an older woman in a care home navigating a thicket of memories, is followed by three very short “protest” stories in which the narrator, reminiscent of a Monty Python sketch, takes issue with various aspects of the preceding story. “We herewith wish to submit a written complaint against the previous text,” she writes, then offering a critique and suggestions for improving the story. 

Adventurous readers with a taste for the absurd will find this collection a delight. 

“Greek Lessons” by Han Kang

Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction in 2016 for “The Vegetarian,” a novel that garnered the South Korean writer many new English-language readers. She returns with “Greek Lessons,” written in 2011 and newly translated into English by Deborah Smith and Emily Yea Won. 

Two unnamed characters – one female, one male – tell their stories in alternating chapters. Grieving the death of her mother and the loss of custody of her son to her ex-husband, the woman suddenly loses the ability to speak. A similar incident 20 years previous, when she was 16, was treated unsuccessfully with psychiatry and medicine, and was only remedied during a lesson in French. This time, the woman enrolls in a class in ancient Greek, hoping that immersing herself in a language completely unlike her native Korean will cause her to regain speech. The Greek class is taught by the male character, who has been slowly losing his sight for many years and will soon be blind. The woman begins writing poetry, which catches the attention of the teacher. The characters, both solitary souls disconnected from the world in different ways, somehow find a connection. 

Kang is also a poet, which is readily apparent in many skillfully rendered passages in “Greek Lessons.” While the relationship between the two protagonists is moving, and the novel touches on some important themes regarding language and communication, the drama is pitched at a low level of intensity, and it lacks the appealing strangeness of “The Vegetarian.” The result is more smoke than fire. 

“Eastbound” by Maylis de Kerangal

Two strangers traveling to Siberia meet in Maylis de Kerangal’s brisk and brilliant “Eastbound,” a novella first published in France in 2012 and now available in poet Jessica Moore’s English translation. 

Skinny, innocent 20-year-old Aliocha and more than a hundred other rowdy young Russian conscripts are packed like “a mass of squid” into the third-class cars of the Trans-Siberian Railway, heading east. 

Terrified of the horrific hazing by second-year conscripts that likely awaits him, then badly beaten up by two fellow draftees, Aliocha resolves to desert at one of the train’s stops, a busy station where he can blend in with the crowd and make his escape.

Desertion proves to be more difficult than he thought as the exits are closely watched and he draws the attention of his malevolent sergeant. Then he meets Hélène, a 35-year-old French woman who is fleeing her Russian lover, whom she had met in Paris and later followed to Siberia for his work. Though she speaks no Russian, Hélène understands Aliocha’s plight and offers to hide him in her first-class compartment. 

They communicate through gestures and facial expressions. In a cat-and-mouse game to avoid the sergeant, they swap clothes and hide in an overhead compartment – and then in a toilet – as he moves relentlessly through the train in search of the would-be deserter. The action takes place almost entirely in the liminal space of the train, while the immense Siberian landscape that passes by the windows – especially a spectacular sighting of Lake Baikal, the country’s “jewel” – plays an important role in this brief but exhilarating adventure.

Reuters

Shoes symbolising war crimes committed against Ukrainian civilians are placed at the Old Town Square in Prague, Czech Republic, to mark the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Feb.15, 2023.

One of the greatest acts of hospitality in recent history has been Europe’s acceptance of 4 million Ukrainian refugees since Russia’s invasion 18 months ago. While “host fatigue” has emerged in some countries, especially as the war drags on, Russia’s hope that the mass migration would sow divisions in Europe and weaken its support for Ukraine has so far failed.

In fact, one benchmark of success for European backing of Ukraine has been how well the refugees have settled in. The Czech Republic, for example, reported last week that more than half of refugees now pay for their housing, a sign of how many have found jobs. More than 90% of the Ukrainian children attend school. The government is also setting up a center to help refugees deal with the trauma of sexual violence in Ukraine.

Czechia stands out for its hospitality because it ranks highest among European nations in the proportion of Ukrainian refugees to its population, or about 350,000 in a country of 10 million. “The Czech hospitality and welcome of Ukrainian war refugees is a perfect example of European solidarity and kindness,” says Lilyana Pavlova, vice president of the European Investment Bank, which helped finance the country’s settlement program.

While polls show Czechs have lately grumbled that the state is doing more for Ukrainians than for its own citizens, other data indicated how much the generosity has been at the grassroots. One-third of children have directly participated in the help of refugees. “We couldn’t have done it without help from the Czech people,” Minister of the Interior Vít Rakušan told Deutsche Welle. Before the war, the Czech Republic was ranked as the world’s second most welcoming country, based on a 2018 global survey of travelers by Booking.com.

Hospitality, especially when it is selfless rather than for show, is often overlooked in how it can change world events. One expert on the topic, Mona Siddiqui at the University of Edinburgh, says opening one’s home to desperate strangers reveals the “very cell” of an individual. “We must give and be generous because this is how God is, and God’s giving knows no limits,” she wrote in a 2015 book, “Hospitality and Islam: Welcoming in God’s Name.”

Hospitality toward war refugees helps restore their dignity. “The goal of hospitality as an act and as an attitude to life is far more radical; it demands a transformation of the self toward goodness and grace,” wrote Ms. Siddiqui.

Europe’s concrete expressions of love toward Ukraine’s refugees may help end the war. By educating and employing them, Europe is also preparing the refugees to rebuild their country after the war. The front lines of this war are not only in Ukraine. They are in the hearts of people like those in Czechia who open their homes and welcome refugees into their schools.