"It's Complicated" vs. "No It's Not"

The Israel-Palestine conflict has exposed and exacerbated our inability to figure out tough problems.

“If there's any chance of us being able to act constructively to do something, it will require an admission of complexity,” Barack Obama said, holding his hands just a few centimetres apart, as though they were tied together by a thicket of string.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, speaking the day before, offered a sort of counter-point: “The most shocking thing about my time over there [in Palestine, before the war] was how uncomplicated it actually is.”

The two men weren’t talking to each other, but they may as well have been. Clips of their remarks have gone uber-viral, racking up millions upon millions of views — being ripped and reshared and ripped and reshared. There’s good odds you’ve seen one, or both, over the past week.

Obama, speaking to a live taping of Pod Save America on Friday, underscored that ignoring the complexity doesn’t make it go away. “What Hamas did was horrific, and there's no justification for it. And what is also true is that the the occupation, what's happening to Palestinians, is unbearable. And what is also true is that there is a history of the…madness of anti-semitism. And what is true is that there are people right now who are dying, who have nothing to do with what Hamas did. And what is true—” he stops short, underscoring that there are plenty more vantage points to consider. “We can go on for a while.” Holding all those seemingly contradictory ideas in your head is necessary, he concluded.

Coates, in his interview with Democracy Now! on Thursday, argued that complexity doesn’t mean intractability. “History is always complicated. Present events are always complicated. The way this is reported in the Western media is as though one needs a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern studies to understand the basic morality of holding a people in a situation in which they don’t have basic rights, including the right that we treasure most — the franchise, the right to vote — and then declaring that state a democracy. It’s actually not that hard to understand.”

Back to Obama. He says, sure, you claim something is simple and easy. “You can pretend to speak the truth, you can speak one side of the truth,” he told the audience, made up of his former staffers. “And in some cases, you can try to maintain your moral innocence. But that won't solve the problem. And so if you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth. And you then have to admit, nobody's hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree.”

Coates arrived at a similar place to the former president: Holding a single truth isn’t good enough, he argued. “I keep hearing this term repeated over and over again: ‘The right to self-defense.’ What about the right to dignity? What about the right to morality? What about the right to be able to sleep at night?” the author said. “Because what I know is, if I was complicit — and I am complicit — in dropping bombs on children, in dropping bombs on refugee camps, no matter who’s there, it would give me trouble sleeping at night. And I worry for the souls of people who can do this and can sleep at night.”

At first blush, Obama and Coates are at odds with each other. Coates is saying we can’t use complexity as a shield to deny clear wrongs. Obama is saying that you can’t truly understand and call out suffering without understanding and appreciating that complexity. You can try and untangle the threads that connect those two axioms but you will become lost in the string.

But listen a little more intently, and both men’s arguments actually compliment each other well. Obama wasn’t wielding complexity as an excuse for inaction, but instead as a tool for change. Whatever you think of him, Obama spent his eight years trying — often unnecessfully — to put Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu onto a path of real peace with Palestine, in particular by opposing new Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank. “I’ve got the scars to prove it,” Obama said. “But there's a part of me that is still saying: ‘Well, was there something else I could have done?’” Everybody should be asking themselves if their own advocacy on the subject was effective, he continued.

Obama: And that can't happen if we are confining ourselves to our outrage. I would rather see you out there talking to people, including people who you disagree with. If you genuinely want to change this, then you've got to figure out how to speak to somebody on the other side and listen to them and understand what they are talking about — and not dismiss it. Because you can't save that [Palestinian] child without their help. Not in this situation.

And Coates, recalling his own trip to Israel and Palestine, explained how he connected his own identity as a Black man in America with the plight of the Palestinian people: But not just them.

Coates: It was at the same time clear that there was some sort of relationship with the Israeli people, too. And it wasn’t one that I particularly enjoyed, because I understood the rage that comes when you have a history of oppression. I understood the anger. I understood the sense of humiliation that comes when people subject you to just manifold oppression, to genocide, and people look away from that. I come from the descendants of 250 years of enslavement. I come from a people for whom sexual violence and rape is marked in our very bones and in our DNA. And I understand how when you feel that the world has turned its back on you, how you can then turn your back on the ethics of the world. But I also understood how corrupting that can be.

Last month I tried to explore the ethics and efficacy of terrorism (Dispatch #75). A week ago I attempted to investigate the dangerous idea that an insurgency can be defeated militarily (Dispatch #77). This week, on Bug-eyed and Shameless, I want to talk about our own relationship with the Israel-Palestine conflict. About how the conversation we’re having online is driving us slowly to madness and spilling out into the streets, portending a rise in anti-semitism and anti-Arab sentiment. But also how, past the histrionics, we’re not as far apart as we might think.

It’s not too late to reject our own sectarianism attitudes and have a conversation about the situation in Gaza that might be contentious, heated, and from radically different positions: But which might actually, inch by inch, push towards a real negotiated peace.

Obama: The issue is not a wish for different outcomes — an end to the killing, peaceful coexistence between two sovereign and free peoples — but rather different assessments of the path that we need to take in order to get there, and the roles each of us have to play in order to maximize the chances of what seems impossible right now.

And yet, as heartbreaking as the news is right now — and it is heartbreaking — as daunting as all the challenges that we face may be, I stand here convinced that it is within our power, or more specifically within your power to make this world better.

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One Truth at a Time

I’ve been watching and re-watching those clips, from Obama and Coates, as they pop up in my social media feed — often stuck between a virtual barrage of images, videos, infographics, and short essays insisting that the truth is simple. It can fit in a tweet.

In his appeal to appreciating complexity, Obama made a sideswipe at this “TikTok activism.” It, he said, doesn’t just demand simplicity, it demands that you pick a single truth and stick to it, to the exclusion of all others.

I understand what he means.

On October 7, as reports filtered in of the horrors inflicted by Hamas terrorists in Israel, I clicked on the Instagram profile of a Palestinian influencer who I’m fond of. He’s a massively popular young Palestinian voice. Normally, I find that voice to be thoughtful and pointed. But in the hours after the massacre, as the true depravity came into focus, he shared footage of young Israelis hiding from Hamas gunmen. Crying, terrified, likely moments away from death. “Israelis in a settlement hiding from Palestinian resistance fighters by lying in a garbage can,” he wrote. “I’m sorry but…😂 this is just…😂”

I’ve thought about that post so many times over the past month. How does one come to banalize murder that way? Has the suffering of the Palestinian people over the past few decades actually pushed him to think that more killing is not just justified but enjoyable? Or has social media gamified conflict to the point where watching young people at a music festival, around your own age, cower before their execution becomes a fun meme to share with your like-minded friends, putting on fine display how edgy and committed to the cause you are? It’s probably a combination of both.

It’s become a trend. Some Israeli Tiktok stars have abstracted the suffering in their own way, by pretending to be Palestinian ‘crisis actors’ — civilians who, they believe, are just pretending to be dead. How detached from reality you must be.

Whether you’re laughing at Israeli civilians recording their final moments or cosplaying as a Gazan child who, you say, is just acting — this is all very easy, if you opt to hold just a single truth in your head at a time.

For many progressives, that truth is decolonization.

“Stop centering the Gaza genocide around zionist propaganda language & racist western narrative,” that same popular Palestinian Instagram account wrote last week. It concludes: “Stop using their language. Stop feeding into their narrative. Stop this ‘peace & love’ bs. 10,000 Palestinians were murdered. This is about Palestinian lives, not colonizer lives.”

To start from this value proposition and work backwards, things become very simple. Colonization is a primordial violence from which all conflict flows. That’s why students at Harvard University penned an open letter declaring that “the apartheid regime is the only one to blame.” And if colonization is the source of violence, then violence against that system must be just. That’s why unions at York University hailed the massacres of October 7 as a “strong act of resistance.”

Given the gravity of this injustice, indifference is complicity. That’s easy to figure out. One particularly guilty party is “white moderates,” as one widely-shared Instagram explainer detailed. These immoral moderates hold beliefs like “there can always be compromise” and “both sides deserve to be heard,” the social media post explains. These positions are actively harmful, and guilty of creating “space to legitimize the ‘opposing stance.’”

These positions demand a cartoonishly naive understanding of the world. But then I look across this invisible divide, where another truth has taken hold: That destroying the threat of terrorism is not just achievable through force but that it is an existential imperative.

In the name of improving domestic security, Israeli cabinet ministers have blithely suggested launching a nuclear strike on the Gaza Strip and speak about “sterile zones” around the Palestinian territories, free of Arabs. An Israeli police chief told Arab Israelis — Israeli citizens — that if “identify with Gaza,” he will “put them on buses that will send them there.” There are those who see no daylight between Palestinian identity and terrorism.

Here in the West, organizations like HonestReporting — which dedicates itself to calling out percieved anti-Israel bias in the media — has been using social media to peddle such gross simplifications as: “Are you pro-Palestinian or pro-Hamas?” and “if you're debating whether Jewish babies were decapitated on purpose or by accident, then you might be a terror apologist.” Germany’s president made a similar call at a national level, demanding that German Arabs distance themselves from Hamas.

Brian Robinson, the Republican candidate who lost his race for a New York City Council district on Tuesday, had spent the race accusing his opponent of being a terrorist sympathizer for being insufficiently deferential to Israel. After he lost, he declared that “the Nazi machine” had “killed a great city.” There are many Brian Robinsons out there, convinced that anything less than blind and unconditional support for the Israeli government is tantamount to apologizing for Hamas’ crimes and paving the way for a repeat.

Whereas student groups, social media users, and professional activists are responsible for some of the most obscene comments about Israel, it’s people with real power who have dehumanized the Palestinians. They may bill their politics as a hard-nosed approach to the world, but these are racist and homicidal positions that would make many Israelis wince.

These two sides have traded recriminations. Pro-Palestinian voices who have been dismissive of or even apologetic for Hamas’ violence have lost jobs and been hounded by well-organized name-and-shame efforts. Rashida Tlaib, the House of Representatives’ only Palestinian member, was censured for posting a social media video accusing Israel of “genocide.” Jewish businesses have been targeted by street protests and faced staff walk-outs merely for being Jewish-owned. One wrong word can get you denounced by your peers; but dehumanizing language about the other side gets applause from your kin.

Actual violence has followed. A brick through a window of a kosher pizza restaurant, a firebombing of a synagogue, the stabbing of a young Muslim boy. Amidst an already difficult climate for both Jews and Arabs in the West, things are getting much worse.

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The Whole Truth

So we’re seeing a strong trends in the social media discourse that tries to rationalize torture and murder by passing it through domestic politics and personal identity, which has spilled over into the real-world and permitted open anti-Semitism. And we are seeing establishment figures who have defended any and all Israeli action while erecting walls around acceptable speech, universalizing the offensive comments of some to represent many.

It’s a toxic feedback loop: A particularly severe or objectionable position on one side motivates and even radicalizes those on the other side, who condemn and attempt censorship. That causes a rally-around-the-flag response on the original side. That prompts a whole new round of accusations and denunciations. Both sides entrench and move apart.

Some walk up to that tableau, declare themselves morally superior radical centrists — both sides are equally wrong, and the truth is simply the difference of the two — and trod off. That’s a cop out. (And, I would argue, almost never the answer to anything.) Many others confront this toxic fight and conclude that no good can come from appealing to nuance or complexity so they, unfortunately, just give up.

This is the essence of polarization. A small number of actors are forcing a divide and dragging both camps further apart. Even reasonable people fall into tribalism, while many others just quit.

But I’m here to argue that things aren’t as bad as they may appear. If you exclude the most objectionable and inflexible on the fringes, extreme both in position and discourse, I would argue you’re left with a lot of people who can actually navigate this issue rather well. Focusing on them, and not the rage-inducing trolls, armchair philosophers, and holier-than-thou social media influencers is a great place to start.

Ask Americans and Canadians their views on the conflict, and you’ll find scant evidence that they are oceans apart. Americans overwhelmingly feel sympathy for both the Israeli and Palestinian people, a sizeable majority in both countries support some kind of a ceasefire. If we were to set a test for reasonable thought on the matter — the mere existence of moral objection to the violence perpetrated on October 7 and to the civilian loss of life in Gaza since then — it would only exclude a tiny minority of people. That is even true on social media, where the most objectionable takes may go more viral but where most conversations are still within that realm of sanity.

Where things seem to fall about is how we discuss these issues. It’s no great secret to say that human beings communicate with each other more effectively when we start by recognizing areas of shared purpose or values — you’re more likely to convince someone that a municipal levy for the local library is a good idea if you start by talking about their favorite books, instead of calling them a book-hating illiterate. The internet, for whatever reason, pushes us to highlight areas of discord first. That’s part of why we live in this age of polarization. (Dispatch #75) But I think we’re starting to figure out how to talk to each other like people, again.

A good starting point is to figure out how these seemingly-incompatible positions interact. Because they, in fact, have some significant overlap.

Decolonization is, of course, a perfectly reasonable ideological position — just so long as it’s not your only position, not your only truth. The state of Israel was not built by explorers seeking riches, it was founded by refugees fleeing genocide. It was built through legal mandates and negotiations with regional leaders, designed to co-exist with its Arab neighbors. That, as we know, didn’t work out as planned: And there are no blameless parties in that failure. There is a debate to be had about whether decolonization is the right language, there every reasonable person agrees that the Palestinian people need autonomy and sovereignty.

Counterterrorism, meanwhile, is a perfectly reasonable objective, but it cannot be an all-encompassing worldview. It cannot be informed by the paranoia and anxiety which begat the War on Terror and gave state power permission for near-limitless destruction, overriding humanitarian law on a quixotic quest for security. Because if you make fighting terror your core objective, you start to see terrorists everywhere. At the same time, brutality on the scale of October 7 is deeply traumatizing. Israel has tried to show the world the horrors that were committed that day, to help people understand the severity of what they’re facing. Ignoring that is not an option, and no reasonable person can.

Both of these positions envision the same end point. Both incorporate a desire for the people of Gaza to be free, although there is some disagreement about what that looks like. Figuring out the specifics, instead of arguing about the ephemeral generalities, strikes me as a worthwhile exercise.

Doing that requires engaging with the other side. Those who demand we follow simple truths insist we shouldn’t consume media that challenges their worldview. Breaking out of those confines is a useful first step towards enabling a better debate.

Many who count themselves as pro-Israeli do not actually engage with the debate happening in Israel. For them, the voice of the Israeli government is the only one that matters. They would do well to purchase a subscription to liberal paper Haaretz or listen to opposition members of the Knesset.

Rather than forbidding or censuring the opinion, Haaretz writers have thoughtfully rejected the allegation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. But progressive Israelis — even an ex-Mossad boss — have certainly labelled what’s happening in Palestine an “apartheid,” a claim that elicits gasps here.

Tuning in to that debate means appreciating that criticism of Israeli policy is not a questioning of Israel itself. Take Labor leader Merav Michaeli: She has long warned that Netanyahu’s policies, propped up by radical discourse from far-right and pro-settler politicians. When a settler with a history of anti-Palestinian positions was tapped to head up a committee on West Bank affairs, Michaeli unloaded, calling him “one of the most dangerous people in Israel, a racist, pyromaniac, terror supporter.” Another Member of the Knesset, Aid Touma-Suleiman, has been hotly critical of Netanyahu’s prosecution of this conflict: “It is not a war to smash down Hamas, it's already a war to smash down the Palestinian people.”

Once you appreciate the diversity of criticism in Israel, the punishment of our politicians seems absurd. Censuring politicians like Congresswoman Tlaib or Ontario MPP Sarah Jama have turned this difficult debate inward, selfishly focusing a critical humanitarian crisis onto our own petty politics. And for what? Discourse that would not be terribly out of place in Israel.

At the same time, we should also recognize that it is not the peaceniks who are in power in Israel: It is a government which includes some of the “pyromaniacs” Michaeli talks about. Netanyahu’s coalition is no longer a collection of moderates and hawks, but a hard right-wing coalition that includes extremists like Bezalel Smotrich. This government has actively worsened Israel’s security by whipping up settler violence in the West Bank and distracting Israel’s security services from the Gaza border. This government was unpopular before the war, and it is only moreso now.

In other words, we need to break this paternalistic attitude that turns Israel into an icon, incapable of wrongdoing, instead of a complex, messy system with real, flawed, people at the heart of it — like any democracy, particularly a flawed one.

On the other side, many progressives here are relying on a narrow media diet which often includes the Qatari-owned Al Jazeera network and occasionally the Hamas-affiliated Quds News Network. As they are heralded as breaking through the pro-Israel consensus, readers approach them with far too little skepticism. They further reject any coverage that relies on statements from the Israeli Defense Forces as being inherently and irrepressibly untrustworthy.

Despite social media campaigns telling them otherwise, contradictory opinions cannot hurt them. These progressives won’t be harmed or injured by checking the Times of Israel or the The Jerusalem Post, and listening closely to Netanyahu’s moderate critics, like former IDF chief Benny Gantz.

And if Israel’s boosters are too uncritical of its government, then the left is often downright delusional about the state of Palestine’s governance. The Palestinian Authority is an ailing body, led by a deeply unpopular Fatah. They have no sway or standing in the Gaza Strip. While it is easy to say Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people, you have to confront the fact that they are the only government in Gaza. While polls show Gazans want peace and a functioning state instead of Hamas’ autocracy, they also view their militant government favorably. If Israel ended the war and the blockade tomorrow, Gaza would still be led by a violent terror group, a client of Iran, hell-bent on destroying the Israeli state. Decades of conflict has set up Hamas as the pre-eminent vehicle for resistance and aid delivery. Many Gazans believe in their message and mission. Disentangling that relationship will not happen immediately and with unrelenting optimism. Recognizing those problems is the only way to devise a plan to fix them.

Being a student of history is useful, here. Because Palestine had a chance at peace and sovereignty, and Hamas worked diligently to wreck it. As the Oslo Accords made progress, it unleashed a flurry of suicide bombings designed to inflame tensions. The Israeli far-right joined their crusade against peace, massacring worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque and assassinating Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Their terror tactics worked in destroying a fragile consensus. Any politic that ignores the prospect of that terrorism continuing, even if Israel agrees to a new peace process, is not serious. Hamas’ aim is the destruction of Israel, and there is no good indication that they are open to compromise on the subject.

Recognizing this whole truth isn’t a demand to adopt a particular worldview, or to de-identify as ‘pro-Palestinian’ or ‘pro-Israeli.’ It’s really just a call to adopt some kind of shared set of facts that can help break through the noise. While many fear that complexity is a barrier to engagement, the opposite is true: It enables productive conversation. Even if it can sometimes seem like you’re talking to a brick wall.

In A Problem From Hell, journalist-turned-human-rights-scholar-turned-Obama-staffer Samantha Power chronicles the lonely fight of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who had fled to the United States in 1939. He worked tirelessly to raise alarm over the atrocities being carried out against Europe’s Jews. He was ignored. It was after the war that he started a crusade to ensure it would never be repeated.

Power: Undaunted, Lemkin invented the word “genocide” and secure the passage of the first-ever United Nations human rights treaty, which was devoted to banning the new crime. Sadly, he lived to see the genocide convention rebuffed by the U.S. Senate. William Proxmire, the quixotic U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, picked up where Lemkin left off and delivered 3,211 speeches on the Senate floor urging ratification of the UN treaty. After nineteen years of daily soliloquies, Proxmire did manage to get the Senate to accept the genocide convention.

The fight, of course, didn’t end there. In many ways, it’s still ongoing. Figuring out how we govern the international order — whether it is putting weight behind the laws of war, which are still regularly broken; or preventing genocide, which has yet to be eradicated — is a woefully complex job. But it has, historically, been pushed forward by individuals who are undaunted by that complexity.

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Maximizing the Chances of What Seems Impossible

So we’ve mentally tuned out the most objectionable and terminally-online. We’ve recognized that understanding the whole range of opportunities and challenges is really the only way to effectively interact with the issue. Now the question is: What conditions are most likely to create peace?

Minor as they may be in the grand scheme of things, actions in New York or Toronto or London have an impact on what happens next in Israel, both positive and negative. The change is imperceptible, but it’s there. It’s only with time that it becomes noticeable.

Netanyahu, today, announced Israel would observe a daily four-hour humanitarian pause to allow civilians to evacuate and to allow aid to flow. Days ago, that seemed totally implausible.

The mass mobilization across the West in favor of a ceasefire coupled with opinion polling showing support for Israel but hesitancy of their military tactics — it has undoubtedly had an effect on how governments have set their position on Israel’s military campaign.

At the turn of the millennium, Power argued forcefully that indifference on foreign policy enabled very bad decisions.

Power: The inertia of the governed cannot be disentangled from the indifference of the government. American leaders have both a circular and a deliberate relationship to public opinion. It is circular because their constituencies are rarely if ever aroused by foreign crises, even genocidal ones, in the absence of political leadership, and yet at the same time US officials continually cite the absence of public support as grounds for inaction. The relationship is deliberate because American leadership has not been absent in such circumstances: it has been present but devoted mainly to minimizing public outrage.

One mechanism for altering the calculation of US leaders would be to make them publicly or professionally accountable for inaction. US officials have been conditioned to fear repercussions for their sins of commission—for decisions they make and policies they shape that go wrong. But none fear they will pay a price for their sins of omission.

To be clear, I don’t believe Israel’s campaign in Gaza constitutes genocide. But I do believe Israel has violated the humanitarian law and risks much graver violations if this war continues. At the same time, the threat posed by Hamas is clearly much more significant than the world had considered prior to now. Both of those truths require public pressure, government action, and Israeli reaction.

Figuring out how to amass public sentiment towards a humane and effective position, one that spares Gaza while rooting out Hamas, is one we must shuffle towards. We don’t need to all be saying the same thing, but we do need to figure out how to have that conversation without turning on each other.

International dialog isn’t just about arm-twisting Israel. On the contrary, global diplomacy has to be about providing Israel more options. It means coming up with solutions on how to bring the October 7 perpetrators to justice while giving the people of Gaza a hope that actual freedom and opportunity is coming. Or strategies on how to convert low-level Hamas militants who have grown disillusioned with a fight that seems to only ever end in more death. It’s impossible to know, now, what those solutions will look like: All we can do is make the conditions for their gestation more likely.

“People have to be shown or given options. We don’t have the option of being pessimistic,” Palestinian academic Sari Nusseibeh told David Remnick last week.

A good starting point is a peace proposal put forward by Lebanon’s prime minister, a proposal that starts with a reasonable plan for a short-term ceasefire while envisioning a long-term negotiated peace. It seems Beirut has won over converts in Qatar and Iran — if Western nations climb aboard, it may yet build momentum for an actual negotiated settlement.

Alternatively, those whipping up more hatred and vitriol here could divide our countries so aggressively down the middle that the reasonable majority consensus breaks down. In that world, nation-states will be unable to take moral positions out of fear of domestic backlash. Israel will be cheered on or roundly denounced not because of its actions in Gaza, but because how domestic politics plays out in other countries. That is bad for Israel and Palestine.

In a 2006 commencement speech, Power offers some useful advice to those looking to make international change, even when it seems impossible:

Power: The trick is never to confuse means and ends. Cold-blooded reason is a tool that you can employ on behalf of what you believe in. But if you employ reason too soon, it can preempt feeling, and you can end up believing nothing at all…Let reason be your tool, but let justice be your cause.

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That’s it for this especially late dispatch.

I had tried to write something more traditionally Bug-eyed and Shameless, about some new trends in how conspiracy theorists and extremists are organizing, but I couldn’t get my head into it. Like many others, the conflict in Gaza feels all-encompassing.

To that end, I wrote for the Globe & Mail on how Canada could help push the international conversation towards ceasefire. For CBC’s The National, I broke down how online misinformation is sowing confusion amid the conflict. And in Foreign Policy, I argued that the Lebanese peace plan is one that the West should be signing onto. (That should be out later this afternoon.)

As I explained in my previous two dispatches on the matter, these essays are therapeutic in a sense. In the first, I was wrestling with whether Hamas’ tactics, horrific as they were, could be an effective conduit for peace. I came to a pretty definite conclusion: No. In the second, I wanted to probe whether Israel’s conventional military operation could actually rout Hamas and enable the conditions for a sustainable peace in Palestine. Again, the answer became apparent: No.

This dispatch was really about grappling with the monsters that have emerged amongst us, who rip down posters of kidnapped Israelis or who peddle misinformation to explain away the deaths of children in Gaza City. But, more particularly, to figure out how we can foster a useful conversation despite them, instead of playing into their selfish politics.

I can’t ever know if I succeeded in untangling those issues until I hit send. So, here we go.

Until next week. (Or, hopefully, tomorrow.)