Amir Cohen/Reuters

Army boots hang on a wire during a demonstration in which reservists sign a pledge to suspend their voluntary military service to protest the government's judicial overhaul legislation, near the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, Israel, July 19, 2023.

On a sunny winter day last December, Israel’s most powerful military commanders, both current and former, gathered at a swanky Tel Aviv beachfront hotel to discuss the weightiest security matters facing the Jewish state.

Addressing the conference held by the army’s in-house intelligence think tank, the research division chief,  Brig. Gen. Amit Saar, was, overall, optimistic as he laid out the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) outlook for the coming year.

“Israel is perceived in the region … as a strong and stable player, with high economic and scientific capabilities,” Brigadier General Saar said.

His survey included the challenges facing Iran, unrest in the West Bank, and relative stability in Gaza. A distant fourth concern was Israel’s northern neighbor, Lebanon, and the threat posed by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement.

“Lebanon is a country in a deep crisis, and this creates deep tension for Hezbollah. Today [Hezbollah] is the sovereign in Lebanon, but it has the best tickets on the Titanic,” he said, alluding to Lebanon’s cratering currency, lack of medicine and electricity, and overall political chaos.

Fast forward eight months.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which took power in late December, has thrown Israel into unprecedented turmoil with its push to overhaul the country’s judicial system.

Many of the former senior officials present at the December conference have become highly public dissidents, warning of the damage to national security wrought by the government’s agenda and even supporting the refusal by thousands of military reservists to serve under a budding illiberal regime.

By every metric the Israeli economy has suffered, while scientists, doctors, and tech entrepreneurs either prepare emigration plans or march in the streets alongside hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens.

Israel is no longer as strong or as stable as it was mere months ago, and its border with Lebanon has become the scene of growing tensions and Hezbollah provocations that many fear could escalate into open conflict.

Indeed, Israeli military intelligence recently updated its assessment, putting the chances of an Israel-Hezbollah war at their highest since 2006, when the two foes fought a 34-day campaign.

“Hezbollah sees the internal situation in Israel and views it as weakness,” says one Israeli security official.

Last week, after parliament passed the first of the governing coalition’s judicial overhaul bills, spurring mass protests, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah described it as “the worst day in the history of the Zionist entity.”

“Israel has embarked on a path, God willing, of collapse, fragmentation, and doom,” he crowed.

Aziz Taher/Reuters

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah addresses supporters remotely during a religious ceremony to mark Ashura in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, July 29, 2023. The official Israeli assessment is that he does not want war but is using border tensions to enhance Hezbollah's standing in Lebanon.

Border provocations

For over a year, but especially in recent months, Hezbollah has become more aggressive, openly establishing border posts and deploying its forces on the frontier, and either actively or tacitly launching a series of exceptional attacks.

In March, a Hezbollah militant managed to cross the border, travel 50 miles deep into the heart of Israel, and lay an advanced explosive device by a highway. The ensuing blast only wounded one passing Israeli motorist; the militant, attempting to flee back into Lebanon, was killed by Israeli commandos as he tried to detonate a suicide vest.

“If the explosion had hit a bus of soldiers on the highway and 10 people were killed, this wouldn’t have ended with nothing,” says Brig. Gen. Assaf Orion, a retired IDF officer now at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, referring to Israel’s muted retaliation to the attack.

In April, amid tensions at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, Hezbollah allowed local Palestinian groups to fire more than 30 rockets at Israel – the heaviest barrage from Lebanon since 2006. Israeli jets struck agricultural fields in response.

In late May, Hezbollah militants crossed the international boundary into Israeli-held territory near the Golan Heights, and set up two tents, precipitating a stand-off that international mediators are still working to resolve. In a bid to mitigate the crisis, the IDF refrained from making the incursion public for several weeks.

More recently, near-daily provocations have taken place, with Hezbollah operatives attempting to sabotage the border fence and even firing an anti-tank missile at a disputed Israeli village that straddles the frontier.

Nevertheless, says the security official, Israeli intelligence’s official assessment is that Mr. Nasrallah still does not want war but is using the increased friction on the border to erode Israeli deterrence and strengthen Hezbollah’s standing as Lebanon’s “true protector.”

Israeli officials assess the strategy as risky, but surmise that the Hezbollah leader may be gambling that any flare-up can be contained to a few days of fighting, similar to the many clashes between Israel and Gaza-based militants in recent years.

“You know how something like this starts, but you don’t know how it ends,” warns the security official. “But both sides don’t have an interest in a total war.”

Brigadier-General Orion is more pessimistic, saying no matter the intentions of either side, the confrontations increase the chances of miscalculation.

“We’re treading on a very narrow ledge with no guardrails, even if Netanyahu himself is very careful and both sides don’t want it,” he says. “The tactical level [on the ground] will dictate what happens. … It could be a matter of inches.”

Marwan Naamani/picture-alliance/dpa/AP

An Israeli patrol watches Lebanese civilians from the Israeli side of the Lebanon-Israel frontier amid tensions with Hezbollah near the Golan Heights, June 9, 2023.

Does Hezbollah want war?

There are those in Israel, however, who offer an even more dire assessment, arguing that far from being simple muscle-flexing over a border dispute, Hezbollah’s recent behavior indicates a genuine desire for war – no matter the likely devastating cost to both itself and Lebanon.

“Hezbollah views Israel as the platform through which it can accelerate its … takeover of Lebanon,” says Major Tal Beeri, a former Israeli intelligence officer and research director at the Alma Research and Education Center in northern Israel.

“Hezbollah knows it will take heavy losses, they’re not idiots. But at the end of the war it will be the strongest actor in Lebanon with all of the others weakened. … Just look at how since the 2006 war it has become stronger, increasing its military capabilities and political standing,” Major Beeri adds.

In his view, Mr. Nasrallah has been genuinely surprised at the lack of a sharper Israeli response, including possible war.

The reason for Israel’s restraint (so far), analysts argue, is the knowledge that Hezbollah has amassed a vast arsenal, including precision missiles capable of hitting key Israeli infrastructure and institutions. Israel estimates that in the opening stages of any renewed conflict, Hezbollah will have the ability to fire 4,000 rockets and missiles at Israel daily, compared with the 100 per day it managed in 2006.

Whatever Mr. Nasrallah’s current intent, Israel, for its part, has since 2006 been extensively training and preparing for a conflict with Hezbollah – including the launch of a major air and ground offensive against Lebanon if war breaks out. Security analysts maintain it would be, by some measures, the most destructive Arab-Israeli war since 1973.

Mohammed Zaatari/AP

Amid a rise in tensions, an armored vehicle belonging to U.N. peacekeepers is parked along the Lebanese-Israeli border in the southern Lebanese village of Marwaheen, July 12, 2023.

Would conflict bring unity?

Amid these growing tensions on the Lebanon border and continued domestic unrest – including inside the military – Israeli officials have pushed back rhetorically against the proposition that Israel has been weakened. They argue that in any future conflict, the country and military would remain united.

“Regarding Nasrallah’s threats from his bunker, we are not impressed,” Mr. Netanyahu said at the weekly cabinet meeting Sunday. “At the crucial moment, he will find us standing together, shoulder to shoulder. Even Nasrallah knows that it is worth neither his while, nor Lebanon’s, to put us to the test.”

A statement released after a meeting the next day between the prime minister and his top security chiefs, purposefully delayed for days until after the parliamentary vote last week, was left deliberately vague as to the government’s intentions.

What damage the reservists’ protest has inflicted on Israeli capabilities is also unclear, as the military tries to publicly downplay the scale of the no-shows and personally convince reservists to resume their service. The impact may only become apparent in the coming weeks as the thousands of combat pilots, intelligence specialists, special forces commandos, and others refuse to report for duty.

“At this point in time, the IDF is operationally ready,” the top military spokesman said last week in an unprecedented statement. “If reservists do not show up for reserve duty in the long term – there will be damage to the military’s readiness.”

In a deeply divided society, if a security crisis were to materialize, it could either help mend what has been broken over the past seven months or simply exacerbate tensions and push Israel over the brink.

“A security escalation is the best way to break apart the protest movement, and [Netanyahu] does have a legitimate reason” to respond to Hezbollah's actions, said one leader of the IDF reservist protest group last month.

“Some [reservists] will report for duty, some won’t. And [the government] will simply continue legislating” its judicial overhaul.

Russia’s transgender community is not large. Just under 3,000 people have officially changed their gender in an often lengthy and expensive procedure, overseen by a commission of medical and psychological experts.

But all those people’s lives have been cast into turmoil after Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a new law essentially banning transgender people in late July. They, and probably many more living in the shadows, will now be thrown into legal limbo, deprived of health care and official status.

The new law bans any kind of gender-affirmation surgery or hormone treatment and closes all previous avenues for a person to change their gender in official documents. It also annuls the marriage of any person who has transitioned and forbids them from adopting or acting as guardians to children.

“We are left with nothing,” says Nef Cellarius, coordinator of Peer-to-Peer, a consultancy for transgender and nonbinary people. He says it’s impossible to count the actual number of transgender Russians because many live in “stealth mode,” hiding in their previous gender or their new one, and now find themselves virtual outcasts. “We cannot change our ID. We can’t obtain hormone or surgical treatments. This is a disaster.”

The new law is a draconian departure from previous Russian legal practice and, some experts warn, a sign of things to come as the 18-month-old war in Ukraine accelerates Russia’s drift into political authoritarianism and social intolerance. Though far more sweeping in its harsh treatment of one beleaguered community than anything in the past, the law seems to be an outgrowth of an ideological drive to create a unified “majoritarian” Russian society that’s been underway for about a decade. The war has greatly accelerated the official urge to differentiate Russia ideologically from the West while increasing the pressure to create a semblance of social unity behind the Kremlin.

“A new state ideology positioned as conservative is being formed,” says Irina Tartakovskaya, an expert with the official Institute of Sociology in Moscow. “The basic idea is that Russia differs from the rest of the world, with different ideas and purposes. We declare respect for tradition and claim that the West has turned away from it. ... But when you get down to it, how is Russia really different? Strong families? Many children? No. Our divorce and birth rates are European. Men and women here behave much as they do in Europe. Hence, we declare a different attitude toward LGBTQ people and the transgender community. They may develop normally in the West amid a tolerant attitude, but the situation in Russia is different.”

The State Duma/the Lower House of the Russian Parliament/AP

Lawmakers attend a session of the lower house of the Russian parliament in Moscow, July 14, 2023, where they passed a bill that outlaws gender-affirming procedures, annuls marriages in which one person has "changed gender," and bars transgender people from becoming foster or adoptive parents.

“You are not protected”

Mr. Putin’s return to the Kremlin for a third presidential term in 2012, following a massive wave of public protests, is identified by many as the starting point for the hardening of Russian political culture and curbs on social diversity.

A new law banning public expressions of “nontraditional” sexual orientation was enacted, casting a chill over the country’s LGBTQ+ community by effectively outlawing public expressions of gay identity. Laws that compelled civil society groups to register as “foreign agents” if they received outside funding were introduced and progressively toughened. Last December, the anti-gay propaganda law was amended to ban any expression of “nontraditional” sexual identity on any media platform.

“During Putin’s first term, in the early 2000s, there was little effort to interfere with peoples’ personal rights. You had the feeling that you could live your life pretty much as you wished,” says Masha Lipman, editor of Russia Post, a journal of contemporary Russian affairs published by George Washington University. “But the relatively liberal atmosphere of the early Putin years culminated in mass protests and led to a hardening in the next decade.”

Many analysts say that Russia’s gay and trans communities have been targeted because they are small and relatively powerless, and the Russian majority tends to be socially conservative and receptive to such legal restrictions. A survey by Russia’s only independent pollster, the Levada Center, found in 2021 that a quarter of Russians believed that same-sex relationships between consenting adults were OK, up from 19% in 2015. However, the number of people who said they “do not support” such relationships grew from 58% to 69% between 2015 and 2021, while the number who found it “difficult to answer” dwindled from 23% to 7%.

Egor Kotkin, a socialist writer who is openly gay but careful about his lifestyle, says most of the people in his immediate surroundings have a “normal attitude,” but the atmosphere outside his social circle has definitely chilled since laws began to explicitly single out gay identity.

“If you were attacked by homophobes 15 years ago, and the police were called, they would protect you. Nowadays, the police would protect them,” he says. “It’s not a surprise that migration of LGBT people from Russia has greatly increased, especially since the war. We are second-class citizens here, and even if the law doesn’t specifically outlaw homosexuality, you know that you are not protected.”

The situation for trans Russians in the wake of the new law is far more dire.

“In the past, people could get hormonal treatment, occasionally surgery, and, if successful, they could get certificates and go on to change their official documents,” says Alexander Kondakov, an expert at University College Dublin. “That’s all abolished. Those certificates are now null and void. Overnight, people are stripped of their rights, denied health care, and returned to the status of pariahs.”

The war has intensified the social and political pressures upon Russians not merely to conform but also to view people with “nontraditional” characteristics as enemies.

“All the nasty things about this regime have been boosted. There is an effort to convince people that the West is working against us, targeting Russian society through influences like LGBT people, and it must be excluded from our midst,” says Ms. Lipman of Russia Post. “The ideological realm has become much more important over the past 18 months.”

Mr. Cellarius, who is also the program coordinator for LGBTQ+ rights group Coming Out, says the law is a template for future legislation that will target other groups. “You start with someone who’s invisible, as trans people are in Russia, and if people accept that, the list grows,” he says. “Nobody is safe.”

When young Ellen McLaughlin was growing up in 1960s Washington, D.C., her parents would get dressed up – and get her dressed up, too – and take her to the iconic Arena Stage, which she calls “one of the first great regional theaters in America.” She saw masterpieces past and present: “Macbeth,” “Death of a Salesman,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” – and “King Lear.”

Though she now insists a 10-year-old has no business seeing a play with the madness and brutality of “King Lear,” she came out of that theater dreaming of someday playing Lear’s daughter Cordelia.

“And I did,” she says. But that was much later, after she’d become a professional actor. After she’d soared high over Broadway portraying the original Angel in Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Angels in America.”

Despite her accomplished career onstage and as a playwright – much of her extensive oeuvre has been produced around the world – she was not prepared for the phone call from Tim Orr, artistic director of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in Boulder, asking her to take on the title role in “King Lear.”

“Tim offered me the part, and he said to me afterwards, ‘Did you realize that you took a full minute to respond?’” Ms. McLaughlin says in a Zoom interview. She’d had no memory of that. Nor had she any inkling, as Mr. Orr told her later, that he was “sweating like a pig” waiting, hoping she would agree to play Shakespeare’s most larger-than-life male character.

Still, she hesitated. “Before I can say anything, I need to talk to the director,” she told him. “I don’t want to be in a production where we’re not in sync on how to do this thing.” 

In sync, for Ms. McLaughlin, entailed multiple requirements: “We’re not changing the pronouns. I’m not gonna do it in a dress. It’s not Queen Lear. It’s not about the terrible things that happen when women get power,” she says. “If we do it right, there will come a point at which the audience will stop thinking about the fact that I’m not a man, and they’ll just watch an actor interpret a part.” 

Fortunately, director Carolyn Howarth had the same vision. She recalls brainstorming with Mr. Orr two years ago: “It’s a hard role to cast,” she says via phone. “So we talked about a bunch of people: male, female, actors of different ages. When we started, I didn’t start out saying, ‘I want to cast a woman.’ But boy, did I hit the jackpot with Ellen.”

“McLaughlin as King Lear fully embodies the character both vocally and physically, giving a fierce performance with non-stop conviction,” writes OnStage Colorado reviewer Eric Fitzgerald, calling her performance “a magnificent interpretation of the ultimate Shakespearean tragic figure.”

Ms. McLaughlin hopes casting a woman to play a male character won’t overshadow what she insists is Shakespeare’s “biggest” play. “Nothing else comes close. And that’s odd to say when you think about big plays like ‘The Tempest,’” she says. “Even ‘Pericles.’ But I don’t think he takes on these huge metaphysical questions in any other play.”

Lear is a “feeling, feeling” character, Ms. McLaughlin says, “much more so than many of Shakespeare’s female characters, and certainly more so than a character like Hamlet, who’s such an intellect.”

Ms. McLaughlin’s Lear is preyed upon by his emotions, “and he’s a character that desperately wants to be loved and yet doesn’t understand love at the beginning of the play.”

Shakespeare, she believes, is looking at “what is man when you strip the human of all attachments, all possessions, all identity. He loses his kingdom. He destroys his family. He loses his identity and he loses his mind.

“And there’s this truth that he finds out,” Ms. McLaughlin continues, “once he has lost everything – which is: What are we at essence? And what do we really want? What do we really need? What is it that he has been seeking and never understood – and that of course is love.

“And he’s redeemed by love.”

Yet, Ms. McLaughlin says, the character understood none of this until “Lear walks out into the storm and into homelessness and into countrylessness and into a lack of power and into annihilation. It’s the harsh education of a king. And learns too late what he could have done with the power that he had.” 

The woman bringing Colorado’s Lear to life “absolutely” believes this play sizzles with contemporary relevance. “People in Shakespeare’s time knew something about the misery of the human condition and what it’s like at the bottom,” she says. 

“We see it all around us,” she continues, referring to modern issues such as homelessness. “We don’t like to see it. So we don’t see it. But if we choose to actually pay attention to our fellow creatures and do something about it, a play like this – which is exquisite – opens the heart to that level of compassion, which is necessary to do something effective to address the suffering of the world.”

Lear’s life is pure tragedy, yet the play concludes with a sliver of hope, “because Edgar, who becomes king at the end of the play, learns in time the lesson that Lear learns too late – which is to pay attention to the people who are your responsibility,” Ms. McLaughlin says. “If you’re the king, these are the people whose lives are in your hands.” 

Despite the age-old themes of this play, the novelty of casting Ms. McLaughlin as a brute of a man arrives at a time of increased legislation banning drag performances and of parents challenging libraries over books discussing gender identity or sexual orientation.

In Houston, in April, a school district canceled an elementary school’s field trip to see a stage version of Roald Dahl’s “James and the Giant Peach” after some parents complained that male and female actors would perform roles of different genders. Those parents insisted this made the production a drag show.

“As a nation, we’re experiencing extreme polarity around gender fluidity, and casting a woman in a male role gets lumped in with that,” says Heidi Schmidt, who is on the faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder and is the dramaturge for the festival’s “King Lear” production.

Pointing out that it was illegal in Shakespeare’s England for women to act in the theater, she says, “The original Juliet was male. The original Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia were all males. Peter Pan was played by a woman for generations, and nobody was bothered by that.”

Ms. McLaughlin adds that it was “very cutting edge” in the 1960s to cast African Americans in traditionally Caucasian roles. “There was no Black King Lear. And now it’s just commonplace to have Black people playing those parts, and I think the same thing is gonna be happening with gender.” (Indeed, British actor Glenda Jackson played the tempestuous monarch at London’s Old Vic in 2016 and reprised the role on Broadway in 2019.) 

Ms. McLaughlin thinks of the play as being about power rather than about masculinity. “The play’s about patriarchy. The play’s about fathers and daughters, and his fundamental dilemmas and his fundamental revelations and joys have to do with the human tragedy and the human experience – and I feel I’m perfectly capable of doing that,” she says. 

Dr. Schmidt put it this way: “We’re not saying anything about Ellen’s identity. We’re not saying anything about Lear’s identity. We’re just casting a great actor in a great role.” 

Ms. McLaughlin says she’ll never have a part this marvelous again. “There just isn’t a part this good, and I don’t want to stop playing him,” she says. “I would do this for the rest of my life. It’s a part that you’ll never get right. It’s like trying to throw a no-hitter, you know? You’re never gonna do it. But the effort to do it is worthwhile, and you learn something from that effort.”

What she learns anew each evening she plays Lear “is that you never know anyone’s story until you try to deeply understand. There’s no dismissing any human being because we’re all carrying these sorrows that are ineffable, and that rule us to some extent,” she says. “So I feel like it expands me as a human being to attempt to understand such a great and complicated character.”

“King Lear” runs through August 12 at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre in Boulder.

Reuters

The Catalan leaders bump fists after forming a new regional government in Barcelona, Spain, in 2021.

Since its elections nearly two weeks ago, Spain has been stalled. The two main parties each fell just short of a majority in parliament, which one or the other needs to form a new government. But buried in the ballot’s footnotes is a lesson for countries striving to heal the sharp divisions of political grievance.

The region of Catalonia in Spain’s northeastern corner has a long history of secessionist discontent. Six years ago, it held a referendum to break away. The Spanish government responded with police force that human rights watchdogs called excessive. Lately, however, Madrid has struck a more conciliatory tone. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez pardoned nine separatist leaders in 2021 in what he called a “constitutional spirit of forgiveness.” In January, he signed a law striking sedition – the crime for which the nine were imprisoned – from Spain’s penal code.

Those gestures help to explain one outcome in the recent election. “Catalan national parties performed rather poorly in this election,” noted Carlota Encina, a Europe expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, while “the very respectable voter turnout, over 70 percent, above the EU average, suggests that Spaniards have considerable faith in their representative institutions.” 

At a time when political grievances are testing norms and institutions in countries like Israel, India, and the United States, some democracies are finding resilience in the practice of respect and humility.

Twice during his administration, French President Emmanuel Macron has gone on listening tours in response to mass social protests over fuel prices, taxes, and retirement reforms. In India, opposition leader Rahul Gandhi has done the same. He recently walked the country’s length listening in response to political violence and new restrictions on the religious minorities. The aim, he said, was “to stand up against the fear, hatred and violence that is being spread in the country.”

The South American country of Chile is trying its own experiment in accommodation. In June, the government launched a new Commission for Peace and Understanding to address the long-standing Indigenous grievances over land rights. A previous administration deployed soldiers in response to violence in Mapuche strongholds and imposed a state of emergency. The new panel rests on an acknowledgment of historical wrongs, including dispossession and ethnic pogroms, as a basis for building trust.

“We all come together from different visions [and] daily political quarrel,” said President Gabriel Boric, “putting the common good above our differences.” 

Democracy, writes Harvard Business School professor David Moss, “needs to actively work against corrosive forces, both moral and institutional, or succumb to them.” From Spain to Chile, societies are finding a restorative power in words spoken softly.