On any given morning, small groups of men dressed in jeans and hoodies hang around the Fatty Ding’s shopping plaza in Monterey Park, California, waiting for day-labor jobs or just passing time. This modest square has ricocheted around social media as a recommended destination for Chinese migrants, who are crossing illegally over the southern border into the United States in record numbers.

Monterey Park, just east of Los Angeles on Interstate 10, has been a migrant magnet for decades and is known as America’s first suburban Chinatown. It sits in the sunbaked San Gabriel Valley, where the network of Chinese churches and temples, businesses, service agencies, and cheap rooms for rent makes this – and surrounding cities – an immigrant gateway.

“The San Gabriel Valley is really ground zero for Chinese migrants and asylum-seekers overall,” says Kim Luu-Ng, an immigrant attorney in the Los Angeles area.

The local influx is part of record unauthorized immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border. Border Patrol encountered more than 24,000 Chinese between ports of entry in fiscal year 2023, compared with just 330 in 2020. This spike is a tiny amount as a share of last year’s 2.5 million encounters at the border, but it reflects a growing trend in the diversification of nationalities entering illegally from the south. Experts say the increase among Chinese was triggered when China ended three years of strict pandemic lockdowns at the end of 2022.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Photos of the city of Tianjin, China, where the restaurant owners hail from, hang on the wall of the Garage Kitchen restaurant that serves Chinese food at Fatty Ding's plaza in Monterey Park, California, April 4, 2024.

Coast-to-coast networks

In interviews at the border last month, Chinese migrants told the Monitor that they were heading to American cities where they have relatives or contacts. They named New York, which has the nation’s largest Chinese immigrant population, legal and unauthorized; San Francisco, which has the second-largest; and Los Angeles, which is right behind. 

In these urban areas, migrants can tap into long-established, effective ethnic networks, unnoticed by outsiders and largely independent of public services like shelters, says Ken Guest, an anthropology professor at Baruch College and a Chinese migration expert.

While Latinos and other communities have organizations and families to help newcomers, Chinese have a “particularly elaborate internal social structure,” he says. It dates back to the first Chinatowns of the 1850s, formed to protect residents from anti-Chinese violence and discrimination, he explains. America’s first major law restricting immigration was aimed directly at the Chinese: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese laborers from coming to the United States.

Chinatowns also created economic opportunity. Hand laundries and restaurants required little capital to start and little cultural capital in terms of language skills, he explains. Generations of legal and unauthorized immigrants have used Chinatown contacts to get a foothold in ethnic economies.

“Along the way this infrastructure has been built up and allows ... new immigrants, even today, to flow into a system that’s in place, that’s ready for them,” says Professor Guest.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Monterey Park, California, is heavily populated by Chinese Americans – and has Chinese-language services and shops that make it a draw for newly arriving Chinese migrants.

Welcome to Fatty Ding’s

In Monterey Park, the heart of this support system, is the shopping center known as Fatty Ding’s, named for a restaurant that closed long ago and is now a noodle shop. Although the rectangular plaza sits at the core of downtown – where almost all signage is in Chinese characters – it has a surprisingly sleepy feel. Quite a few parking spaces lie empty, as do a couple of restaurants boarded up after a fire. The plaza beats to a predictable rhythm: Every Friday and Sunday at 7:30 a.m., two tour buses pull away, carrying gamblers to a Palm Springs casino. Ethnic Chinese begin their day hunched over soups and hot buns at the Garage Kitchen – a humble, authentic eatery.

The square and surrounding area cater to new arrivals. Chinese-language employment agencies and attorney offices pepper the core city blocks. “Family hotels,” where migrants can rent a bed for $15 to $20 a night, are within walking distance. The Buddhist Tzu Chi charity distributes groceries nearby, as do churches. Migrants can visit the nonprofit Chinatown Service Center, which operates health clinics here and at other valley locations. Since January, unauthorized immigrants have been eligible for Medi-Cal, the state’s health insurance for low-income people – a first in the nation.

But how well the ethnic system is absorbing the influx, which residents say began in the past year or two, is hard to tell. The city hasn’t collected much concrete data, according to Mayor Thomas Wong, who was born and raised in Monterey Park and who says the migrant issue has not come up at his town hall meetings. That could be a sign that the flow is being soaked up.

Indeed, the city is focused on other priorities, mainly around affordability, he says. How will it pay for water and sewer infrastructure? Where will it find the money to fix the public swimming pool and gym? What about assistance for low-income families?

Similarly, City Council member Henry Lo, whose district includes Fatty Ding’s, says that he has not observed any great convergence on the plaza.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

City Council member Henry Lo sits in City Hall in Monterey Park, California, April 4, 2024. Mr. Lo is concerned about public safety and that Chinese migrants are not exploited.

“Where is this depot they’re talking about? Because all I see is people just parking their cars and going to restaurants, like me.”

Tension over “family hotels”

On the other hand, Mr. Lo says that he has gotten complaints about loitering, littering, and street vendors being in the area. Fights have broken out, and some service providers are asking for security. Of particular concern is overcrowding at the family hotels that are in apartment houses and homes, where one source encountered 13 families sharing one toilet. At the same time, the migrants themselves are discovering that work conditions are worsening, with the influx driving down wages – a condition ripe for exploitation.

Early on a Friday morning, a handful of men are hanging out at a reputed family hotel of garden apartments across from Fatty Ding’s. Presumably, they want a room. A woman dressed in a pink pajama outfit emerges in flip-flops. She is not happy. “This is not a family hotel,” she insists to a reporter.

Outraged, she points to a spot where someone has defecated behind bushes next to the apartments. Typical, she indicates, calling the migrants “dirty.” She says she lives at the apartment and is the cleaner. She emphasizes that the apartments are “a clean place” with “not too many people,” and then opens the locked mesh gate to reveal a tidy courtyard, where a big sign is posted in red Chinese and English: “No short term rental.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A man walks out of a reputed “family hotel” of garden apartments across from Fatty Ding’s plaza in Monterey Park, California, April 4, 2024.

Calling her boss a “good man,” she relates that he wants the migrants to leave and that he is “tired of everybody.”

It’s not clear whether her boss is the building’s owner, but subletting is a problem generally, says Mayor Wong, adding that the city has had to enforce the safety code at this building and other properties in the past. The city’s approach is to first educate landlords and tenants about safety requirements, but not kick people out. “Safety issues ... are of paramount importance to us,” he says.

At a City Council meeting in March, the mayor didn’t mince words: “We’ve seen a very clear uptick in the amount of migrants coming into the city,” he acknowledged. People are landing “looking for jobs, looking for housing, doubling, tripling, quadrupling up in rooms, in hallways, and we’ve had an uptick in code enforcement issues.”

He was speaking to officials from Los Angeles County, who had come to talk about a proposed pilot center for workers. It would be located in Monterey Park, and the City Council supports the idea. The center would take a preventive approach to labor trafficking by offering legal, job, and housing services to migrants in exploitative circumstances that make them vulnerable to wage theft, labor trafficking, sex trafficking, and slavery.

“There is a lot of potential for exploitation because the workers are kind of desperate to do whatever job they can get,” says Connie Chung Joe, chief executive of the legal and civil rights advocacy nonprofit Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California. 

For years, Fatty Ding’s has been a source of cheap labor, she says. Sometimes people are sent off for a few days, sometimes weeks; sometimes it’s close by, other times far away. She’s heard of people being sent to marijuana farms to work in unsafe conditions with little food or water. Her group has begun to put out QR Codes over Chinese social media so migrants can know their rights and contact the group if they need help.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Angie Liu works at an Asian employment agency near Fatty Ding's plaza in Monterey Park, California, April 4, 2024. The agency attracts many Chinese migrants looking for work.

Overcrowded labor market for migrants

A block north of Fatty Ding’s, an employment agency is like a revolving door. It, too, is located in a modest shopping plaza that’s home to half a dozen similar agencies and a lawyer’s office. A few migrants are hanging around. One of them eagerly shares videos of his long trek north, showing people plunging into rushing water and walking through a jungle.

The tiny office, with its overstuffed sofa beneath a Chinese-language map of the United States, only has room for five or six clients, who rotate in and out just before lunchtime. Two women are talking with an agent in Chinese. One hopes for a job as a masseuse. The other is looking to be a cook for pregnant women, who require a special diet in Chinese culture. The would-be cook pulls out her phone and proudly shows a sample of her dishes.

But the outlook for her is not good, according to Angie Liu, who works at the agency. “Jobs are very limited,” Ms. Liu says. A big reason: too many applicants. She runs through the kinds of jobs available: construction, restaurant dishwashers, farmers in Hawaii and Northern California, and warehouse workers. Employers call her from as far away as Texas, Oklahoma, and Arizona, but for every job, she has three to five people who want it.

The oversupply is depressing wages, according to another Chinese-language agency in the area. In prepandemic days, a restaurant cook with a work permit could make $4,500 to $5,000 a month. Since the influx, even with a permit, it’s $3,500 to $4,000.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Migrant Chinese men looking for work walk around Fatty Ding's plaza in Monterey Park, California, April 4, 2024. The city is heavily populated by Chinese Americans – and is a draw for newly arriving Chinese migrants.

The other mark against the woman is that she doesn’t have a work card, or employment authorization document. People can apply for such cards 150 days after they apply for asylum, which many migrants do. But it can take months for the card to arrive.

“Most employers can’t accept a worker unless they have an EAD card,” says Ms. Liu. “We ask if they have one, and if not, we say, ‘We don’t have any position for you. I’m sorry.’”

One client, a man who overstayed his visa and applied for asylum, does have an EAD card. He’s back in the area after working in Seattle at a restaurant. He describes it as surprisingly hard labor after his comfortable job as a stock broker in China. He left, he says, because of the bad turn in economics, the tense relations between the United States and China, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s tighter screws on the public.

He, too, shares images on his phone – of his newfound church family of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Seattle. “They treated me like a brother.” 

Pastor Liao: “mixed emotions” 

Pastor Alex Liao was shocked at the sudden increase of people showing up at his church’s weekly food pantry earlier this year. There were lots of new faces, most of them under age 45 – men, women, and children from all over China.

“I have a lot of mixed emotions about this,” admits the director of Chinese ministry at the First Baptist Church of Alhambra, the city next door to Monterey Park.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Chinese Pastor Alex Liao poses in front of the First Baptist Church Alhambra in Alhambra, California, April 4, 2024. He ministers to Chinese migrants, among others, but is conflicted about their entry and sincerity in seeking baptism.

On the one hand, they obviously need help, Mr. Liao says, recounting a case that brings tears to his eyes. They also haven’t heard of Jesus Christ in China, he says. “This is their opportunity to hear the Gospel.”

He wonders, though, whether he is hurting his country by helping people who are here illegally. He says that he also feels like he is being used. He knows that migrants coming to him for baptism can use their certificate to establish their Christian bona fides. That in turn can buttress their case for asylum on the grounds of religious persecution in China.

Mr. Liao is not the only one struggling with conflicting feelings. Some in the Chinese community who are longtime residents resent the migrants and have left the church, he says. “The resentment is that they make us look bad.” 

Others are angry that while they themselves came legally – after the Cultural Revolution or the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 – the newcomers are arriving by breaking the law.

But Mr. Liao asks, what would Jesus do? Not judge, for one thing. That’s the job of the courts, he says. The bottom line is that the church is there to love. “Love God, love your neighbor, and leave the rest to others,” he says.

As a matter of Christian ethics, though, he tells those who want to be baptized that if they suddenly stop coming to church, he will have to be honest with immigration officials when they eventually ask about them.

“Don’t feel bad someday that I say, ‘I don’t know you.’”

Second of two parts. The first article explored the reasons behind a migrant surge from China to the United States.

Andrew Harnik/AP/File

President Joe Biden talks with African leaders before they pose for a photo during the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, Dec. 15, 2022.

When President Joe Biden hosted 49 African leaders at a White House summit in December 2022, he pledged to make a trip to Africa in the coming year to showcase renewed interest and partnership after the Trump administration’s disregard for the continent.

The presidential trip would symbolize a U.S. commitment to a new kind of relationship with Africa – one based on furthering mutual security and economic interests while respecting African nations’ pursuit of independent paths, including deepening ties with other powers.

But the trip never happened. Instead, it symbolized what many Africans say is more of the same: an unreliable relationship of periodic fanfare over a promised new direction, with little follow-through.

“The way that the Africans perceive the U.S. is that the U.S. promises a lot and does not deliver what it said it will deliver,” says Mvemba Phezo Dizolele, director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. “So there’s a trust deficit.”

Mr. Biden will again try to jump-start U.S.-Africa relations – and reduce that trust gap – when he receives Kenyan President William Ruto for a state visit this week. It is the first state visit by an African leader since 2008, and the first by a Kenyan president in over two decades.

Ruto’s reputation

Mr. Ruto would appear in numerous ways to be the right choice to represent the path for Africa that the United States under Mr. Biden wants to encourage and cultivate.

Promoter of what he has dubbed a “hustler economy” that favors grassroots entrepreneurship and innovation over Africa’s more traditional reliance on business elites, the Kenyan leader is held up by many diplomats and regional experts for his stewardship of both a vibrant economy and a stable and advancing democracy.

“Ruto is quite popular in his own country; many Kenyans see him as dynamic and a break with the past,” says Phiwokuhle Mnyandu, assistant director of the Center for African Studies at Howard University in Washington. “At the same time, he seems to inspire that enthusiasm around the African continent.”

Jeff Chiu/AP/File

Kenyan President William Ruto delivers keynote remarks during the U.S.-Kenya Business Roadshow hosted by Prosper Africa: A U.S. Trade and Investment Initiative, in San Francisco, Sept. 15, 2023.

Indeed Kenya – viewed as a “middle power” when stacked against giants South Africa and Nigeria – has emerged as a new kind of leader in Africa, serving as a hub for humanitarian interventions across the continent, and increasingly on the international stage.

Kenya hosts U.S. special forces keeping an eye on Islamist extremists in neighboring Somalia, and recently accepted to take on – at U.S. encouragement – the tricky task of deploying what will be a United Nations-helmeted stability force to restore order to Haiti.

Kenya’s special forces police force, which has experience fighting East Africa’s Al Shabab extremist group, is set to arrive in Haiti within days.

“President Ruto is using this as an opportunity to raise his profile on the global stage,” says Cameron Hudson, senior fellow with the CSIS Africa Program. “Since coming to office he has really promoted himself internationally as a leader of the continent,” he adds, “hosting the African Climate Summit, his engagements at the U.N., his engagement around peacekeeping outside of Africa.”

Setbacks for U.S.

Yet at the same time, Mr. Ruto’s visit comes against a backdrop of setbacks for U.S. standing and influence in Africa.

U.S. troops are withdrawing from Niger after a decade of counterterrorism operations there. They were ordered out by the ruling military junta in favor of Russian soldiers from the Africa Corps – the new iteration of the mercenary organization formerly known as the Wagner Group.

Last month, military rulers in Chad also ordered U.S. troops stationed there to leave.

Elsewhere, Chinese investment and development deals have advanced, often in sensitive sectors like rare earth metals. A further sign of waning U.S. influence came last year when many African countries rebuffed U.S. diplomatic efforts to line up developing world support for Ukraine and global condemnation for Russia over its invasion of a neighboring country.

U.S. presidents going back to Bill Clinton have touted the idea of building trade and economic partnerships with Africa, but over the past decade, China has solidified its economic footprint on the continent. In recent years, China has been joined by smaller regional powers like Turkey and the Gulf states.

Jason DeCrow/AP/File

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken (right) meets with Kenyan President William Ruto (left) in New York, Sept. 21, 2023.

“Washington is learning late that it’s missing opportunities,” says Mr. Hudson. One of the “excuses” he says he has heard from U.S. officials for a long time is, “‘Well, we’re not China. We’re not a state-run economy. I can’t just tell Microsoft to go invest in Kenya [or] open a factory there.’”

While that may be, Mr. Hudson says that does not explain what has struck many as a roller coaster of initial attention to Africa followed by a step falling off.

The administration’s launch of a new Africa strategy in August 2022, followed a few months later by the leaders’ gathering in Washington, stoked fresh confidence that the Biden administration really was going to break the pattern of fanfare followed by neglect that has typified U.S.-Africa relations, he says.

“However, after that summit, we really saw a drop-off in at least presidential, if not high-level senior involvement from the administration,” he adds. “We have seen not the level of engagement that we would have expected from an administration that had launched this strategy and launched this summit.”

For their part, White House officials push back forcefully against any notion of administration neglect. They emphasize that an unprecedented number of Cabinet-level officials – 17 last year – have visited, as have first lady Jill Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Angela Nandeka/AP/File

Vice President Kamala Harris visits Panuka farms outside Lusaka, Zambia, April 1, 2023. She was on the last leg of a a seven-day African visit that took her to Ghana and Tanzania.

Howard University’s Dr. Mnyandu says there’s no denying the pattern of ups and down in U.S.-Africa relations – but he also says it can’t all be laid at the White House doorstep.

“Yes, there are ebbs and flows,” he says, “but sometimes it’s not the U.S. that is responsible, but the Africans themselves” who lack follow-through.

African exports

One item on President Ruto’s U.S. agenda that gives Dr. Mnyandu hope that this leader’s visit will be different is his planned stops at two Kenyan companies: Vivo Fashion in Atlanta and Wazawazi, which makes leather goods, in Denver.

“It wouldn’t be an eyebrow-raiser if it were the French president visiting French companies, but this augurs well for a new narrative about U.S.-Africa relations,” he says. “It says Africa isn’t always on the receiving end, but is now exporting to the U.S. and is a source of innovation.”

The expert on China-Africa relations says the way Mr. Ruto has organized his weeklong U.S. visit around business and investment opportunities, including with a dynamic diaspora, should also demonstrate to Americans a truth about most Africans: They would rather engage with the U.S. than with China if the opportunities are there.

“A typical African country realizes now that relations with the U.S. are going to be more comprehensive and people-to-people than [relations] with China,” Dr. Mnyandu says.

Even Chinese people tell him they know the typical African country relates better with the U.S. “because of this approaching each other as human beings,” he notes. “This is something that both sides should view with optimism.”

Peter Dejong/AP

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, Netherlands, said he’s seeking arrest warrants for both Israeli and Hamas leaders over their actions during the seven-month war.

With the specter of war crimes charges now hanging over the Israel-Hamas war, so too are questions.

Namely, how will the possibility of the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders shake up a seven-month war, a hostage crisis, and a growing famine?

For now, it appears, the arrest threat is having little influence on either Israel or Hamas in their conduct of the war, with observers saying both sides are doubling down on the battlefield and in the negotiating room.

Yet the move by prosecutor Karim Khan to seek the warrants is part of the court’s mandate to pursue accountability and uphold international law without favor, not to force an end to the war, says Kevin Jon Heller, special adviser on war crimes to the prosecutor.

“We do not make decisions on the basis of how they will influence actors,” says Dr. Heller, a professor of international law at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Military Studies.

However, “the prosecutor emphasized before he issued an application for arrest warrants that there are hopes that the realization that we are investigating and seeking arrest warrants will have an impact.”

Mr. Khan “said clearly that many of these listed crimes continue to this day. Ultimately it is up to the actors if the issuance of arrest warrants will affect their behavior, but our hope is that it will,” he adds.

Ohad Zwigenberg/AP/File

The chief prosecutor is seeking arrest warrants for Hamas leaders over the attack on the Nova music festival, where at least 260 Israeli festival-goers were killed by Hamas militants on Oct. 7, near the border with the Gaza Strip in southern Israel.

Prosecutor’s targets

On Monday, Mr. Khan sought arrest warrants for Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ leader in Gaza and mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Mohamed Diab al-Masri, commander of Hamas’ military wing, and Ismail Haniya, the militant organization’s politiburo chief and its face abroad. Their arrests were sought for the war crimes and crimes against humanity of extermination, murder, taking hostages, rape and sexual violence, and torture of Israeli hostages.

Mr. Khan also requested arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for the war crimes of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, “intentionally directing attacks on a civilian population,” extermination, and “wilfully causing great suffering” in Israel’s ongoing military offensive on Gaza.

Although Israel is not a party to the ICC, the prosecutor based its jurisdiction on Palestine’s status as a member state, allowing the ICC to prosecute crimes committed by Israel in Gaza and by Palestinian nationals in Israel.

A panel of judges will now review the application and evidence to make a decision on whether to issue the arrest warrants – a process that could take weeks or months.

With his office’s investigations ongoing, Mr. Khan has the ability to request arrest warrants for additional suspects or charges at any time.

Equating civilians

Predictably, Mr. Khan’s announcement drew outrage from Israeli officials and Hamas, and from Israelis and Palestinians from across their political spectrums.

Both sides denounced the allegations as equating the victims with the violators, though Mr. Khan and his office stressed that they were not equating Israel and Hamas, but Israeli and Palestinian civilians, victims who share equal rights for justice.

Adel Hana/AP/File

Yahya Sinwar, head of Hamas in Gaza, chairs a meeting with leaders of Palestinian factions at his office in Gaza City, April 13, 2022.

In a videotaped statement in English Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu described the charges as a “moral outrage of historic proportions” and a “twisted and false moral equivalence between the leaders of Israel and the henchmen of Hamas.” On Wednesday Israel’s attorney general declared the arrest warrant requests to be “baseless.”

Within hours of the announcement Monday, Hamas denounced the court for “equating the victim with the executioner,” claiming the decision would encourage Israel to continue a “war of extermination.”

But beneath the rhetoric, both sides are taking stock of the potential fallout of what could be a serious long-term development.

The Israel Defense Forces, Defense Ministry, and likely the prime minister’s office are taking the threat of ICC-issued arrest warrants “very seriously,” says Israel Ziv, a retired Israeli general with close ties to the military.

Hamas, too, is closely studying the impact on both Israel and the militant movement, according to a source close to Hamas who did not wish to be named for security reasons.

But for now, observers say, neither side is changing their approach, as fighting returns to northern Gaza and famine spreads in the enclave.

“On the one hand, this kind of action by the ICC represents a very significant threat, and they cannot ignore it,” says Mr. Ziv, who emerged as a wartime hero in Israel for organizing the defense of besieged kibbutzim on Oct. 7. “On the other hand, this is not a war of our choice, it is a war that was imposed on us, and now our security requires us to defeat Hamas. We must do what we must.”

Israel will not halt the war because of the court’s investigation, nor will it change its operational tactics, he says. “There is no scenario in which Israel will say ‘because of the ICC we will allow this … terror group that has attacked us to survive.’ Israel must remove this threat.”

“The move will not affect how the war is run nor speed up its end,” says Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national security adviser and a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University.

Rami Zohod/Reuters

Palestinians inspect the site of an Israeli strike on a house in Beit Lahia, Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, May 20, 2024.

“Netanyahu has his objectives, some of which are personal and some of which are real military objectives, and he will stick to them.”

Meanwhile, Palestinian observers expect Hamas to dig in its heels.

“The movement will criticize the decision in public, but internally they see the decision positively because, for the first time, Israel is accused in an international court for a war crime and crimes against humanity,” says Sari Orabi, a Ramallah-based Palestinian analyst and author specializing in Islamist movements.

“They will see this as a turning point. This may give them strength to remain steadfast on both the battlefield and in negotiations.”

Uriel Abulof, an associate professor of politics at Tel Aviv University, notes that the warrant requests are more personally targeted at Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant, and do not implicate the IDF or its top commanders.

“The course of war might be changed by various factors,” he says. “But I don’t think that the ICC by itself is a factor that is going to in any substantial way alter the course of the war, or decisions of whether to proceed in Rafah or not.”

Abir Sultan/Reuters/File

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left) and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant attend a press conference at the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 28, 2023.

Negotiations

Similarly, it remains unclear how or if struggling talks between Israel and Hamas for a cease-fire and the release of hostages would be impacted.

Mr. Orabi, the Palestinian analyst, says Hamas likely believes that momentum is on its side in both the international arena and on the battlefield.

“If Hamas gave in months ago, this type of decision would not have come from the ICC,” he says. 

It will likely hold out, he says, to push Israel to accept a proposal brokered by Hamas and Egypt this month that was short of what Israel had agreed to.

“The court decision gives Hamas potential leverage. It believes if it stays firm to the agreed proposal earlier this month, this added pressure combined with pressure from the U.S. may push Israel to accept,” Mr. Orabi says.

Despite the threat of war crimes charges, Hamas will hold on to the hostages to push Israel for a full withdrawal from Gaza, says the second source, adding that the unity between Hamas’ more moderate political office abroad and its hard-line leadership in Gaza “is stronger than ever before.”

“Hamas doesn’t see the arrest warrants as hurting its international standing like it does for Israel – they know full well they are already listed as a terrorist organization by many countries,” notes Mr. Orabi.

Circling the wagons

In Israel, all the main political parties have protested the ICC move, including opposition leader Yair Lapid, one of Mr. Netanyahu’s loudest critics, and cabinet ministers Mr. Gallant and Benny Gantz. Only days ago the pair called out Mr. Netanyahu for mismanaging the war and not providing a political endgame.

The ICC warrant request “is just going to make everybody more defensive and make them circle the wagons,” says Mr. Freilich, the former deputy national security adviser.

Mr. Netanyahu is already attempting to depict the ICC move as an attack on Israel itself – and a danger to every Israeli.

“I imagine that Netanyahu would like to mobilize [public outrage] to portray himself as, again, the victim of the international community, and as a defender of Israel, someone who is standing firm against all those evil forces,” says Dr. Abulof, the associate professor of politics. “Obviously with his base, this is going to work well. With others, I doubt it.”

Colette Davidson

Vincent Darnet, environment project coordinator of the Arc de Seine Kayak club, shows debris his team recently collected from the River Seine using a homemade trap in Sèvres, France, April 26, 2024.

The water in this part of the Seine, on the western edge of Paris, is only slightly murky. Dried leaves and the occasional dead fish float by. But when a blue plastic bag sails past the docks of the Arc de Seine Kayak club, Pierre Leguay points excitedly, ready to scoop it up.

“Everyone asks if we can swim in the Seine,” says Mr. Leguay, vice president of the kayak club, which does volunteer cleanup of the river. “It is the question.”

A plastic bag is easy to catch. But to collect smaller debris from the water, Mr. Leguay and his fellow kayakers use a homemade trap, of a nylon attached to a plastic container. They then send the captured gunk to a Bordeaux-based lab to check for bacteria levels. In February, kayakers collected 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of garbage in a single outing.

With just over two months until the 2024 Olympics and Paralympic Games, the cleanliness of the Seine is increasingly under the microscope – quite literally. The iconic river is set to host events like the triathlon and marathon swim, but just last month, a water charity released a report showing an “alarming” presence of E. coli.

Water hygiene isn’t the only concern around the Seine. The river will also play host to the opening ceremony, in an open-air event that will see athletes floating through a stretch of the French capital in a parade of boats. While the show promises to be spectacular, it also creates a monumental task for security forces.

With the Seine taking a central role in the Olympics, will authorities be able to keep it safe for athletes and attendees, both in and out of the water?

“We’re in that pre-Olympic phase where there are lots of worries, but we know now, better than ever, how to prepare and protect ourselves,” says Pierre Bréchon, professor emeritus of political science at Sciences Po Grenoble. “The idea of holding [Olympic events] on the Seine is a strong image that has the power to create an emotional reaction for people watching around the world. It’s seductive.”

Colette Davidson

Pierre Leguay (right) and Vincent Darnet of the Arc de Seine Kayak club look at a litter trap installed by the city of Paris to aid with Seine cleanup efforts.

Flowing in the right direction?

Paris has come to be defined by its River Seine, a 481-mile-long waterway that originates in Burgundy before spilling into the English Channel. And while a ride down its banks offers spectacular views of the Eiffel Tower, the Seine has long acted as the city’s drainage basin, thanks to a 19th-century system that combines sewage and street runoff.

In an effort to fend off a spike in pollution levels during the Games, Paris officials have spent $1.5 billion on a new reservoir near the Austerlitz train station that can collect 13 million gallons of wastewater before it reaches the Seine.

During the inauguration of the reservoir on May 2, France’s sports minister praised the city’s ability to “provide athletes from all over the world with an exceptional setting on the Seine for their events” and the prefect of the Paris region said that cleanup efforts were “on time.”

But much depends on the weather. Bacteria levels rise after heavy rainfall, and if it storms during the Olympics, athletes might just have to wait to compete – or not compete at all.

“There are periods when the Seine is clean, but it just depends on where and when,” says Vincent Darnet, the environment project coordinator for the Arc de Seine Kayak club. “In any case, it’s been a long time since we’ve seen the water this clean. The Olympics have definitely accelerated things in the right direction.”

While cleaning up the Seine for athletes is a calculated process involving lab tests and measurements, securing the river and surrounding neighborhoods for residents and tourists during the Games is a far harder task. More than 300,000 people have tickets to attend the outdoor opening ceremony, with hundreds of thousands more expected in the streets and watching from apartments overlooking the Seine.

To tackle the challenge, France will deploy around 45,000 police officers and gendarmes each day of the Games, in addition to 18,000 military troops and up to 22,000 private security force members. Several countries, including Poland and Germany, have also agreed to send members of their security forces to ramp up safety.

The Olympics have been attacked before – in Munich in 1972 and in Atlanta in 1996. And with wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, and a recent terrorist attack in Moscow by the Islamic State group, observers say French authorities are under added pressure to show strength.

“It’s a question of our risk culture. Do we give in to fear and stop everything or not?” says Marc Hecker, the deputy director of the Ifri think tank in Paris. “As a society, we need to show proof of our resilience.”

Eliot Blondet/Abaca/Sipa/AP

Garbage accumulates in the Seine River near the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, April 10, 2024.

Greater ambitions

But some residents living near the Seine are having trouble feeling reassured. Paris officials have encouraged people to work from home during the Games, as large portions of the city center will be barricaded off, only accessible with an event ticket or QR code for residents. Not only will daily life be disrupted; some worry that crime could go up. Already in December 2023, a German tourist was stabbed to death on the Bir-Hakeim bridge near the Eiffel Tower.

“People feel torn between staying during the Olympics and being monitored every time they come and go, or leaving their apartments to the possibility of a break-in,” says Elke Germain-Thomas, the president of the association Passy-Seine, a neighborhood group representing residents around the Seine and Eiffel Tower area.

With the Olympics just over two months away, Paris officials are cautiously optimistic that security efforts related to the Seine, both in terms of hygiene and public safety, are on track. In early April, Tony Estanguet, head of the Paris Organising Committee, said officials were “ready to face this final stretch with confidence” but cognizant of unexpected challenges.

And while the Olympics are putting cleanup of the Seine on the fast track, authorities say the effort is part of a larger ambition that extends far beyond the Games.

“We have to think about the legacy of the Olympics,” says Valérie Pécresse, president of the Paris region. “Everything we’re doing is for the people.”

It has been illegal to swim in the Seine for 100 years due to high pollution levels, and 70% of French people polled in 2021 by the IFOP polling agency described the Seine negatively – some calling it dirty and smelly. But Mr. Leguay at the Arc de Seine Kayak club says that when the summer months roll around, both children and adults are itching to jump into the river.

As for Olympic athletes, only time will tell whether Paris’ cleanup efforts have proven effective and if the iconic Seine can live up to expectations.

“There’s nothing I can do outside of just prepare and not be stressed about [whether the Seine is clean],” said Morgan Pearson, who will be competing in the Olympic triathlon, during a press conference in New York. “There are [people] figuring all of that out, so let’s just be ready no matter what.”

Ira Porter contributed reporting from New York.

AP

TN11, a group of citizens brought together by Citizen Solutions to discuss potential gun rights changes, stands outside the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville on Jan. 9, 2024.

One measure of the health of American democracy is The Lugar Center’s Bipartisan Index. Each year, it counts the number of bills in Congress sponsored by lawmakers from both parties. The most recent survey shows a modest gain last year. Such numerical tracking, however, does not capture something else: the tone of disagreement in dealing with big issues.

Outside Washington, that tone is often less strident, even respectful. “We can disagree and stand firm for our beliefs and principles, but we should never forget the dignity of the other human being,” Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, said last year. “Civility is not a weakness.”

That conviction is the basis of an initiative for civic renewal by the National Governors Association called Disagree Better. It seeks to restore an ideal that cordial disagreement is a source of unity rather than of division.

“We’re trying to give people permission to have strong ideological views without vilifying the other side as a threat to democracy,” Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, current chair of the association, wrote in the Deseret News.

Opinion polls show most Americans are exhausted by political division. In September, the last time the Pew Research Center asked, 61% of voters said talking about politics with people they disagree with is stressful and frustrating.

The governors’ campaign coincides with a raft of similar initiatives by civil society organizations and local elected officials to counter cynicism, enmity, and disengagement. City mayors, for example, have built a growing number of bipartisan coalitions to jointly address issues such as climate change, violence, and child hunger.

In Washington state, the Democratic-controlled Legislature passed more than 80% of its bills this year with support from a majority of Republicans. A consistency of bipartisanship, Senate Majority Leader Andy Billig wrote on a state website, reflects a determination to “disagree without being disagreeable.”

Citizens are central to that idea. In Tennessee, for example, a group called TN11 brings together an unlikely coalition – among the members a firearms instructor, a pastor, a former highway patrol captain, and a family therapist – to help state lawmakers find new solutions to gun violence through a balancing of gun rights and gun safety. Their work started with three days of just listening to each other and resulted in five legislative proposals.

“People are more hostile to others in the abstract than when they meet them in person,” wrote Arthur Brooks, a Harvard professor of business and government, in his book “Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America From the Culture of Contempt.” Worn out by division, many Americans are finding that the real vigor and value of disagreement rest in first caring for one another.