Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio stand for national anthems during a state visit at the White House in Washington, April 10, 2024.

The United States and Japan are dramatically beefing up their military cooperation and intelligence sharing, President Joe Biden said Wednesday, in an announcement widely seen as an effort to check an increasingly aggressive China.

Standing beside Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio in a Rose Garden ceremony, President Biden heralded the move as the “most significant upgrade” of the alliance in more than half a century.

Until recently, the military relationship between Washington and Tokyo has been “just about the defense of Japan,” as one senior Biden administration official put it earlier in the week during a background briefing.

Today, that relationship is undergoing a “major shift,” the official added, from “alliance protection to alliance projection” designed to disabuse Beijing of any notion that it could successfully launch an attack in the region.

It’s clear this aim is a work in progress: On the same day that Mr. Biden and Mr. Kishida celebrated their partnership in the Rose Garden, Chinese leader Xi Jinping sent his own message as he hosted the former president of Taiwan in Beijing. 

Making a pointed reference to Beijing’s vow to unify Taiwan – militarily, if necessary – with mainland China, Mr. Xi said that “external interference cannot stop the historical trend of reunion of the country and the family.”

The expanded defense cooperation is “not aimed at any one nation ... and it doesn’t have anything to do with conflict,” Mr. Biden said Wednesday, in an apparent answer to Mr. Xi. “This is about restoring stability in the region.”

Still, Mr. Xi’s remarks underscored warnings about Beijing “becoming much more belligerent,” as Adm. John Aquilino, America’s top military commander in the Pacific, put it in congressional testimony last month. 

“What we all have to understand is we haven’t faced a threat like this since World War II,” he told lawmakers.

Chinese actions have included efforts to economically isolate Japan and militarily intimidate Taiwan and the Philippines, the latter with boat rammings, water cannon blasts, and the unsettlingly creative use of acoustic devices and lasers by China’s navy. 

The Philippines will take part, along with the U.S. and Japan, in a historic trilateral summit to discuss these matters later this week.

The “fast and furious work” toward cooperation are steps “that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago,” a second senior administration official said.

The officials said the possibility of a Trump electoral victory – and the resulting uncertainty over alliances – lent no small sense of urgency to the proceedings.

A pacifist constitution since 1945 

For decades, cooperating with Japan was “much lower on the list” of America’s military partnership priorities, Christopher Johnstone, the National Security Council’s former director for East Asia under President Biden, said last week in a discussion at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Japan was, instead, “quite simply a platform” for U.S. operations in the region, most notably hosting some 55,000 U.S. Pacific forces.

This has been in large part because the island nation’s pacifist constitution, put in place after imperial Japan’s World War II defeat, has a “no war” clause that prohibits settling disputes through the use of military force. 

That it has existed since 1947 – longer without amendment than any other constitution in the world – speaks to widespread societal support, analysts point out. In a national survey from 2022, only 1 in 5 Japanese citizens said they would be willing to fight if their country were under attack.

This makes Tokyo’s defense posture evolution over the past decade all the more remarkable – and necessary, U.S. officials say.

Armed Forces of the Philippines/AP

In this photo provided by the armed forces of the Philippines, ships (from left) from Australia, Japan, and the United States maneuver during the first joint naval exercises by those nations and the Philippines in the South China Sea, April 7, 2024.

Japan announced last year, for example, that it would increase its defense spending to 2% of its gross domestic product by 2027, which would give the country the third-largest defense budget in the world.

It’s a vital step because historically low spending left Japan’s defense force with aging physical infrastructure, low munitions stockpiles, and too few personnel, says Jennifer Kavanagh, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

With the bigger budget, Japan is buying, among other things, American Tomahawk missiles to give its arsenal what’s being billed as “counterstrike capability.” That phrasing is in keeping with a defensive posture but is also “intended to signal to China that if China strikes Japan, Japan can strike back,” Dr. Kavanagh notes.

These missiles can reach Chinese ships in the Taiwan Strait and likely also the command-and-control nodes and air defense systems along the coast of mainland China.  

In order to effectively fire these Tomahawks, Japan will need intelligence in the form of, among other things, targeting assistance. “And they probably want their fires coordinated with the U.S., which requires joint command-and-control,” she adds.

For this and other reasons, the U.S. and Japanese militaries will need to engage in more day-to-day operational planning, which will be facilitated by restructuring the U.S. military command in Japan as well.

Playing defense or raising a threat?

On Wednesday, Mr. Biden said plainly that the new allied efforts will involve modernized command-and-control and expanded missile and air defense architecture.

“There’s clearly a need for a structure that enables the United States and Japan to respond more nimbly, more rapidly, more seamlessly to evolving contingencies,” says Mr. Johnstone, now the Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

“Contingencies” is Pentagon-speak for possible military run-ins, in this case with China, and there have been questions about whether this week’s big announcements of closer military relationships are more provocative than protective. 

Biden administration officials push back against this notion. If the U.S. and Japan aren’t considered close partners that can quickly and effectively work together, it could incentivize China to strike, they argue, much as Russia has done in Ukraine. 

Yet it’s clear that the U.S. military presence in Japan continues to be a sensitive subject, analysts say. The Pentagon has tried to make U.S. Marines working with Japanese forces in Okinawa more credible, for example, with a plan to give them more and better weapons to use in case of a Chinese attack. 

While this may make sense militarily, given Okinawa’s strategic proximity to the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, it also has the potential to exacerbate tensions with Okinawans, who already fear becoming the target of Chinese attacks, Dr. Kavanagh points out along with Kelly Grieco, senior fellow at the Stimson Center, in a piece for Foreign Policy. 

This in turn could create an opening, they add, for Chinese disinformation campaigns aimed at sowing discord among Japan’s populace.

Part of the U.S. military’s job will be ramping up military readiness while tamping down tensions.

America’s top officer, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., has said that he does not believe that Mr. Xi wants to take Taiwan by force.

“I do not think a conflict with the People’s Republic of China is imminent or inevitable,” General Brown told the Defense Writers Group at George Washington University’s Project for Media and National Security last month.

The U.S. military’s mission going forward, he said, will be to delve deeply into how deterrence works best in the Pacific. 

“Do we fully understand the PRC and what their intent is? I don’t know that we do as well as we probably could,” he added. “And you can’t deter what you don’t understand.”  

Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this article from Beijing.

Wafaa Abu Irjilia never dreamed she would become a single mother.

Six months ago, she was a housewife, happy to nurture her growing family with her husband, Ahmed – her rock and “strength” – by her side.

Now she is a widow raising four children between the ages of 2 and 7 in a tent alongside her own two sisters and six other young relatives. “If I need to leave the tent,” she says, “I have to tread carefully so as not to disturb the others.”

There is little time to grieve for her husband, “the kindest and most generous person I knew,” Ms. Abu Irjilia says. Instead, focus is on daily necessities: food, water, and the safety of her children.

“It is a huge responsibility on my shoulders,” she says.

Across the Gaza Strip, Palestinian women say they have been caught in a war of survival and adaptation ever since Israel began its bombardment in retaliation for Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. 

Mohammed Salem/Reuters

A Palestinian woman waits to receive aid from a distribution center run by the United Nations refugee agency, which was hit in an Israeli strike, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, March 13.

Ms. Abu Irjilia is one of some 3,000 Palestinian women who have been widowed, becoming heads of household overnight, according to United Nations Women. As many as a million women and girls are estimated to have been displaced, forced to try to create a sense of home and stability in desert tents or overflowing evacuee centers where privacy is impossible and sanitation is limited. Many have been uprooted multiple times, as each refuge has become newly unsafe.

Yet amid these unimaginable burdens, the women of Gaza are somehow rising to meet challenges that only seem to get heavier by the day: lack of sanitation, single parenthood, hunger, disease. Even pregnancy has become a life-threatening struggle.

It is a will to survive and keep their families alive that keeps Palestinian women in Gaza going – even as they no longer recognize the people they have become. 

Untold strength

Strength has always been important to Wisam Hamdan. 

As a personal trainer in Khan Yunis, she helped other women achieve their own fitness and strength goals. Now she lives in a makeshift tent on the outskirts of Rafah with her family. In the process, she has gone from lifting weights at the gym to carrying jerrycans of seawater back to her family’s tent to bathe.

“The burden of this war has fallen heavily on the women in Gaza,” she says, wrapped in the same prayer clothes she has worn for months. 

Having lost weight and most of her once carefully toned muscle, Ms. Hamdan says she feels disconnected from her body. Her hands ache. Her body is fatigued. Her legs nearly drag when she walks. It’s as if she is inhabiting a body that is no longer hers. 

By sheer will and determination, she has summoned a different kind of strength, the kind that enables her to carry on. 

Still, “I yearn for the girl I used to be before the war,” she says.

Ahmed Zakot/Reuters

A Palestinian woman points to where her apartment once stood after an Israeli strike leveled the complex, in Khan Yunis, March 13.

Preserving dignity

Since she left her home barefoot under the threat of incoming Israeli missile strikes, Basma Hamdan has shared a room with her parents, two sisters, two brothers, and their children in an evacuee center hosting thousands.

“The war is so humiliating. When I go to the bathroom, I try to go early in the morning when there isn’t a long line,” she says.

Prior to the war, Ms. Hamdan, an aspiring teacher, had an evening routine of showering and then applying night cream and hand cream. Now “bathing is a luxury.” 

Disheveled, wearing a frayed prayer gown, Ms. Hamdan searches for soap to clean the bathroom before her aging mother uses it. The gesture is an act of love, a preservation of dignity for the woman who nurtured her. But it is also one of survival, amid dismal sanitary conditions and an outbreak of hepatitis.

Crammed in with hundreds of other displaced families, she says, “I have never felt so isolated.”

She finds refuge in taking walks by herself along the sea. “I wish I could fly away from this war,” she says. 

Expecting

Asma Abu Daqqa discovered she was pregnant just weeks before Oct. 7 and the eruption of the Israel-Hamas war. Then, she daydreamed of the new addition to her happy family as she carefully prepared lunchboxes for her four young children.

Now Ms. Abu Daqqa has found herself in a makeshift tent in the al-Mawasi area, her home destroyed, her husband injured, struggling daily to find or purchase water and limited food, and washing laundry with seawater.

Mahmoud Issa/Reuters

Umm Nael Al-Khlout cooks breakfast amid the rubble of her home in Beit Lahia, in the northern Gaza Strip, March 13.

“No one in my family knew that I was pregnant until very recently, not even my parents,” Ms. Abu Daqqa says while baking bread over an open fire, her eyes tearing from the smoke.

Her stomach is small compared with previous pregnancies; there is no visible bulge. Like many Palestinians in Gaza, Ms. Abu Daqqa drinks dirty water and eats small amounts of processed canned food to survive.

Without access to prenatal care, “I have never checked on my baby’s health,” she says. “I am very concerned that I might lose my baby. I feel I am doing this baby an injustice.”

Against the odds

Walaa Abu Eliyyan’s contractions started at 1 a.m. on March 2.

The Emirati hospital was a kilometer away. Her mother-in-law and husband carried her on their shoulders, stumbling between tents in the pitch-black night, somehow managing to avoid shelling, airstrikes, and stray dogs.

“Giving birth in war is nothing but danger,” she says.

The U.N. estimates there are around 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, and that more than 160 babies are delivered every day. The war has caused miscarriages to triple, while stillbirths, premature deliveries, and postpartum depression are reportedly rising, according to the World Health Organization.

But Ms. Abu Eliyyan was fortunate. 

Once at the hospital, she spent hours in labor, with only an occasional nurse on hand for assistance. In the end, she gave birth to a baby boy, Qais – as Israeli military drones buzzed above and nearby airstrikes shook the ground.

The “recovery room” was packed with evacuees. Women came and plugged phone chargers in the electrical outlet above her head while strangers walked in and out to fill jerrycans with water. 

Due to limited beds, Ms. Abu Eliyyan had to return to her tent only a few hours after delivery. There was little time to take in the joy of her newborn, no ability to hold a baby shower or cook food and share with neighbors for traditional Islamic birth celebrations. Instead, it was an immediate return to the fight for survival.

“Becoming a mother should be a time for celebration,” she says from her tent outside Rafah.

Doaa Ruqqa/Reuters

Amid food shortages, Warda Mattar feeds her newborn dates, because there is not enough milk available at the school where they shelter in Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip, Feb. 25.

Feeding Rafah

Amira Asy, a mother of three, once owned a thriving restaurant and catering business in Khan Yunis, providing spreads for wedding banquets, funerals, and graduations. 

After an Israeli missile strike destroyed her kitchen, “the heart and soul” of her culinary creations, Ms. Asy was able to salvage utensils and some kitchenware from the rubble.

She lends her oversize pots to local residents and displaced families. And now, with the help of local organizations, she cooks again. 

Local nongovernmental organizations and charities have contracted Ms. Asy to prepare meals for hundreds of displaced families in Rafah, providing her with large supplies of flour – a rarity in the besieged strip. 

Each day this past Ramadan, rising before the break of dawn, she prepared a staggering 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds) of maftool, a traditional dish of small pearl-shaped hand-rolled wheat balls. At midday, she boiled them in large vats to be distributed across Rafah before the 6 p.m. sunset prayer, when Muslims break their fast.

“I want to live,” she says resolutely, “I want to recover. I want to help my family.” 

Amid a war that has taken so much, “I cannot bear the thought of standing still and not taking action.” 

Taylor Luck contributed to this report from Amman, Jordan.

In a crowded 1996 British courtroom, Robert Jan van Pelt was called on as a witness in a lawsuit to confirm this fact: Jews were systematically murdered at Auschwitz, over 1 million of them. 

Historian Deborah Lipstadt had been sued for calling British academic David Irving a Holocaust denier in one of her books. So Mr. Irving sued for libel, doubling down on his denial. As a result of the testimony of Dr. van Pelt and others, Dr. Lipstadt prevailed – providing solid proof of Nazi war crimes at Auschwitz.

Decades later, Dr. van Pelt has a new task ahead of him: providing evidence of the Jewish genocide’s worst site in a traveling exhibit. 

He aims to address rising antisemitism and denial of the Holocaust, especially since the Oct. 7 attack in Israel. Jews in academic settings increasingly feel sidelined in discussions of their history. In Greater Boston, for example, two separate advocacy groups led by students are suing Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for failing to protect Jewish students from harassment both inside and outside the classroom.

Dr. van Pelt, the chief curator of “Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away.” and a professor in Canada at the University of Waterloo, spoke with the Monitor at the exhibition’s latest stop in Boston. On a bench in a dimly lit gallery by his mother’s yellow star, her Dutch state ID branding her a Jew, and the fake ID she used to flee, he made his case for relying on evidence.

“We basically tell our students, ‘You may have your own opinions, but you can’t have your own facts,’” says Dr. van Pelt before turning his gaze toward the striped pajamas, the yellow star, and a giant barrack lifted from Auschwitz. “We leave something to [visitors] to draw their own conclusions and narratives.”

Courtesy of Immerse Agency

Visitors take in a table with a teacup and book from a Nazi captain’s office.

The exhibit features some 700 artifacts from the Nazis’ largest concentration camp. Curators say they have tried to present material in a way that accommodates visitors of all ages and backgrounds. The Liberty Mutual Foundation has paid for 10,000 schoolchildren in the area to visit the exhibition, housed at The Saunders Castle at Park Plaza through the summer.

“There was a somber hush in the air. I did not hear any conversations except in whispers, no laughter or any indication that the visitors were anything but completely immersed in the experience,” Nancy Harrowitz, director of Boston University’s Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies, says of her March 17 visit. “I do think that exhibits like this fight against Holocaust denial in an active and vivid way by presenting physical proof and testimonies.”

People behind the statistics

In a glass case lie the many items people carry in their purses and totes: hairbrushes, razors, pocketbooks, glasses, loose buttons, hand mirrors, compacts, and cologne and perfume bottles. They make it easy to see the people behind the statistics. 

Isabella Nguyen, a young professional in media, and her millennial friend group stopped by after work to better understand a moment in history amid trending discussion of genocide and antisemitism.

“I’ve been [at the exhibit] for three hours with my friends. It’s a testament to how detailed” it is, Ms. Nguyen says. “They went into the history and political background of the climate and where it started. The situation was similar [to now].”

Courtesy of Immerse Agency

On display in the exhibit are items from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, including a girl’s monogrammed dress and broken china, circa the 1940s.

“Auschwitz didn’t happen in a vacuum”

Antisemitism emerged strongly during an economic downturn in Germany in the 1930s. A small plaque enlightens visitors that Germany’s currency, the deutsche mark, was informally referred to as “Jewish confetti” – a dig at the background of the finance minister who eventually did rein in hyperinflation.

“I think giving context not only to the Nazi ideology but also of the duration of [its] power is important,” says Paweł Sawicki, a spokesperson for the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland. “Auschwitz didn’t happen in a vacuum.”

In one gallery, Jewish rituals and talismans are explained, speaking to the rich cultural life that existed in pre-Holocaust Poland in the city of Oświęcim, or Auschwitz. Resting inside a glass case is a tallit – a thin religious cloth traditionally worn by Jews in prayer and during burial. The people who gained a reputation for their “odd customs,” one wall plaque states, stuck out in European society.

“Most exhibits do not have much focus on what Jewish life was like before the Nazi destruction,” says Dr. Harrowitz. “The inclusion of this material helped to humanize Jewish populations, encouraging empathy for the victims, rather than just understanding them as faceless numbers.”

Courtesy of Immerse Agency

The exhibit includes wall plaques and artifacts, including a striped prisoner uniform.

How do you hold on to humanity in degrading conditions? Isabella Ribinstajn, a teenage Auschwitz prisoner, wore a pink slip under her uniform each day, preserving some sense of a normal girlhood. Its frayed cloth now sits under a dim light for other young girls to see.

“My students didn’t know the levels of resistance that people performed. These acts of resistance ... were new to them,” says Sarah Barbato, a history teacher who took her class from Souhegan High School in Amherst, New Hampshire.

Teachers are up against an influx of disinformation, says Ms. Barbato. “Denial is the final step of genocide,” which she makes sure to remind her students. She and a fellow educator, Aimee Gibbons, strive to steer their students toward the facts and away from digital propaganda.

On social media, an incubator of cultural pessimism, antisemitism will find a home in the hearts of those who are looking for a convenient scapegoat for global disorder, Dr. Harrowitz explains. “The retelling of the old and vicious antisemitic myths about Jews and power make young people more vulnerable to believing misinformation about the Holocaust,” says Dr. Harrowitz. 

Rooms of context and glass cases of personal belongings build to a confrontation with the Nazis’ instrument of mass murder, cyanide-based pesticide. Canisters of Zyklon B look like charred cans of spray paint to the untrained eye. A gas mask beside them makes their purpose unmistakable. Here was the proof that held up as Dr. van Pelt took the stand against Holocaust denial.

By slowing down and sampling maybe four, five, or six artifacts in the exhibit, you get an impression of the horror, Dr. van Pelt remarks as he walks between galleries that are bounded by transported fence posts – rusted wire limp at their sides. “This idea that people are willing to immerse themselves in a difficult story is important – and [that they] are willing to give it some thought,” he says.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to delete references to a 2023 Economist/YouGov survey about 20% of young Americans being Holocaust deniers. The survey’s opt-in methodology has been shown to be flawed. 

Among the warehouses of one of Portugal’s oldest ports, conversations are flowing among the men sorting their fishing nets. But not without the help of Google Translate.

The fishers at work include not just Portuguese people but also Indonesians. Thanks to a local ship captain who ventured east to solve labor shortages, Póvoa de Varzim sees a steady supply of deckhands from Indonesia, and now they account for half of all crew mates.

And while an influx of Muslim migrants into a traditional vocation like fishing is the sort of event that would be potentially inflammatory elsewhere in Europe, in Portugal it seems to be working out without much fuss.

“The Indonesians are quite well integrated in the community,” says another ship captain, Manuel Marques. “We were never against their culture. We did not ask them to change a single thing. We tried to make things as easy for them as if they were at home. We do need them, and we know it. There is a mutual respect.”

Portugal stands out among European nations for its openness to migrants, expressed in policies and the attitudes of Portuguese people alike. And while experts warn that the growth of Muslim and South Asian communities in the country and the rise of far-right party Chega are starting to raise challenges, so far harmony seems to be winning out.

“We also have a place to worship here, like a mosque,” says Wahono Lucky, an Indonesian fisher. “I tell my boss that I don’t eat pork – I eat meat, chicken, rice, pasta, but no pork. Muslim, Christian, it’s never a problem here.”

Dominique Soguel

Indonesian fishers work on nets in a complex of warehouses by the port of Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal, March 8, 2024.

“One of the biggest entry doors for Europe”

By European standards, Portugal has a liberal citizenship and migration system. The number of foreigners has steadily increased since 2020. In 2022, foreigners accounted for 6.8% of the population but made up 10.1% of the total number of contributors to social security.

“We are the only country in the European Union that allows people to come to Portugal without a job,” notes journalist and professor Paulo Agostinho. “We are one of the biggest entry doors for Europe, and we are having problems with Brussels because of that. But Portugal does not have an immigration problem.”

People from former colony Brazil make up about a third of the migrant population. Citizens of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries are also well represented, benefiting from facilitated residency procedures. In recent years, migration from India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh has ticked up.

Not all of Portugal’s South Asian arrivals are integrating smoothly. In the agricultural fields of Póvoa de Varzim, the sense of harmony that is palpable portside is elusive.

Lazaro Morgado, a foreman overseeing a quartet of Indians planting seeds, clearly prefers working with a Brazilian, with whom he shares a native tongue. “It is complicated for the Portuguese to work with the migrants,” says Mr. Morgado. “Sometimes they don’t know the procedure, and it is hard to explain. And sometimes they don’t obey the Portuguese worker even though at the end of the day, the Portuguese one is the one directly accountable to the boss.”

Two Indian workers say they paid exorbitant sums – about €14,000 ($15,200) – to visa consultants to get here. “Not all Portuguese like migrants,” notes Hardy Singh, one of the Indian workers, citing experiences of job and housing rejections on account of his ethnicity. “But our boss here is good.”

Back at the port, Mr. Marques wants the Indonesian crews to stay. That’s why he – like other shipowners in the area – houses the workers in apartments scattered across the community and invites them for barbecues. The Indonesian fishers also get minimum-wage contracts and a paid-for trip home for vacation.

“Some Portuguese don’t make as much as them because they are on contract, while we only get paid if we go to sea,” laments Tomas Postiga, an older fisher. But he grasps the importance of Indonesian workers to keep the traditional community afloat and prefers them to workers of other nationalities.

Religious differences are not a problem. “Some are religious. Some are not. It changes nothing,” stresses Mr. Postiga. “It is Ramadan now, but they still work. ... They work hard.”

Dominique Soguel

Masrura Rashid, shown sitting at her desk in a travel agency in Lisbon's Mouraria neighborhood March 5, 2024, studied engineering in Bangladesh before joining her father in Portugal.

Muslim Portugal

Portuguese society has not suffered from the sort of construction of stereotypes around and tensions with Muslims that other countries in Europe have, says migration expert Jorge Malheiros at Lisbon University. There was racism and discrimination against some migrant groups, but Islam was long a nonissue.

But “it’s no longer like that.” he adds. There is now “talk about the Islamization of Portuguese society.”

One focal point for such talk is Mouraria, the historical Moorish quarter of Lisbon. It is the kind of place that the far right likes to point to while railing against “uncontrolled immigration,” due to the neighborhood’s multicultural character and history. Migrants from across Africa and Asia live in the Moorish quarter, bringing to it a mix of attire, languages, and cuisines otherwise foreign to Lisbon.

For Masrura Rashid, Mouraria is simply home. She arrived here six months ago, after studying engineering and wandering in the lush tea gardens of Sylhet, Bangladesh. Her father moved to Lisbon first, obtaining the right to family reunification. Now she works at her uncle’s travel agency.

In a street rich in halal butchers and supermarkets, Ms. Rashid does not especially stand out. Donning traditional Muslim attire that fully covers her face, she is keen to learn Portuguese. “It’s easy here,” she shares. “The weather, the environment, the people, it’s all good. This is the first country after my country, so it is the best.”

The rise of Portugal’s far right – which secured a fifth of votes in last month’s general election – does not alarm Abdul Karim, a Bangladesh native. He arrived in 2010 from Saudi Arabia, where there were no avenues to citizenship. Now he is the proud owner of a Portuguese passport, as well as two bazaar-style shops.

“I love Portugal,” he says. “[Chega leader André Ventura’s] party is his party. My work is my work. Portugal for foreigners is great even if the language is hard. Immigrant people come here because migration is easy. People are helpful. There is no racism.”

Dominique Soguel

Khalid Sulimange stands next to a photograph on the wall outside his restaurant in central Lisbon. It shows him as a child, cooking in the same spot.

Why is Portugal so tolerant?

Khalid Sulimange, who grew up Black in a white neighborhood in central Lisbon, has an insider’s perspective on Portugal’s attitude toward race and immigrants.

“The way we do things in Lisbon – it’s different,” says the Mozambique native, who worked for a spell in the United Kingdom as a court translator before returning to Lisbon to run the family restaurant. “We accept more the immigrants here. It is easier here compared to the United Kingdom, even Spain or the United States. ... What’s the reason for that? That’s the million-dollar question.”

He has a few theories. The first is acclimation due to the longtime, prominent role of Black people in sports. Portugal’s national soccer team named its first Black team captain, the widely respected and popular Mario Coluna, in the 1960s.

Portuguese society has also long been mixed-race due to its colonial history. And its people, due to their own history of migration, are more inclined to be welcoming.

There are limits to that view, says Dr. Malheiros, the migration expert. Some Portuguese associate Muslim migration with the lack of integration, lack of security, and other social issues on display in other European nations. And when confronted with Portugal’s history of emigration, Dr. Malheiros says, they would argue that “we were the good migrants. We behaved well when we went to France and to Germany. We are Catholics, not Muslim.”

Nevertheless, the tolerant vision still seems more prevalent in the country. Portugal consistently ranks higher than average for Europe when it comes to openness to migrants. The European Social Survey shows that since 2000, there has been a trend toward openness in Portugal, while the perception of migrants as a cultural and economic threat has gone down.

“Portuguese people are more aware of the difficulties that the migrants [experience],” says Dr. Malheiros. “They are aware of this, so they are tend to be more understanding.”

REUTERS

Muslim worshippers attend Eid al-Fitr prayer, marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan at a stadium in Port Sudan, Sudan, April 10.

Most of the world’s violent conflicts end with either a military victory or a negotiated settlement. That may yet be the case in Sudan, a largely Arab country in Africa where a yearlong civil war between two warring factions has left tens of thousands dead. But even as world diplomats plan a fresh round of negotiations, ordinary Sudanese are attempting their own sort of peacebuilding.

Women, Sudan’s most stalwart pro-democracy activists, have set up community meal centers. Neighborhood “resistance committees” that once organized nonviolent protests for democracy now provide health services. Lawyers gather testimonies from victims of violence in hopes of postwar justice and national reconciliation.

In other words, citizens who once protested for democracy are now creating networks of compassion amid the devastation of war. Some are even rethinking how to redesign cities to promote ethnic harmony for the future. Such resilience shows how conflicts can compel civic-minded people to sow seeds of peace through mutual aid.

“While it may seem bleak and beyond hope, a global, self-organized, grassroots movement is meeting the survival needs of civilians on all fronts,” noted Fatima Qureshi, a Pakistani writer, in a detailed report from Sudan in March.

Such grassroots activism is not uncommon in societies where conflict has disrupted democratic uprisings. In Myanmar, for example, pro-democracy activists battling the military leaders who took power in 2021 have also arranged humanitarian aid for civilians displaced by the fighting.

In Sudan, too, democracy fighters are now meeting the basic needs of people. “In some areas, including [the capital] Khartoum, we are the only provider of aid on the ground – there is nobody else doing it,” a member of a neighborhood resistance committee told Mark Weston, a writer for The Continent who was on a reporting trip to Sudan, last month.

These local acts of compassion can often influence the warring parties or feed into international diplomacy. With conflicts ranging from Gaza to Ukraine to Haiti, a model may be set in Sudan. Peace may not come from only military victory or diplomatic deal-making. It can come from doing good for the innocent.