Torn-up roads, cut-off water, blasted homes, blood-soaked alleyways riddled with bullet holes.

The scene resembles wartime Gaza; it is in fact a Palestinian refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

A day after an Israeli military raid in mid-January that Israel said targeted militants – amid an ongoing cycle of raids, destruction, and armed resistance – Tulkarm camp residents were picking up the pieces.

“Just like the Israelis are doing in Gaza, they are doing to us here in the camp, but on a smaller scale,” says resident Mohammed, pointing to his missile-damaged home.

With the world’s attention drawn to the rising death toll and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, refugee camps have become the West Bank front of the Israel-Hamas war, with a spike in militancy accompanying the increasingly destructive raids.

The most recent was in the northern West Bank town of Jenin Tuesday.

Analysts and camp residents say the military campaign in marginalized camp communities, which Israel, paradoxically, maintains is an effort to stop Hamas from opening such a West Bank front, is sowing extremism by damaging homes and killing bystanders.

With residents beginning to leave camps they say are becoming “uninhabitable,” analysts warn that absent a political solution, the impoverished camps, many with a long history of militancy, may soon become full-fledged urban battlefields.

Collective punishment?

Israeli raids on West Bank camps intensified in 2022 in response to the expansion of armed youth brigades that attacked settlers and the Israeli military; the first such raid in Tulkarm was in August 2023.

Since Hamas’ attack on Israel Oct. 7, raids on camps have increased tenfold, with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) deploying snipers, anti-tank missiles, and drone-strike assassinations. According to sources in the Palestinian Authority (PA), which governs the West Bank, the Tulkarm camp and nearby Nur Shams camp have been raided 20 times, on a nearly weekly basis.

Taylor Luck

A building was hit by an Israeli missile in what was reportedly a strike on a hideout for a militant force, in Tulkarm camp, West Bank, Jan. 21, 2024.

Israel says the targeted militants are “terrorists,” some linked to Hamas’ military wing, who are planning and launching attacks on Israelis. Camp residents say the young men are a mix: members of the Islamist Hamas that rules the Gaza Strip, of its rival Fatah that dominates the PA, and independents who wish to take part in “armed resistance” against occupation forces.

In the mid-January raid in Tulkarm, which lasted 45 hours and claimed eight Palestinian lives, the IDF says it scanned 1,000 buildings, located more than 400 explosive devices, seized 27 weapons and other military equipment, and arrested 37 people.

It deployed airstrikes and drone strikes in the West Bank’s most densely populated camp, where more than 20,000 people live in less than one-tenth of a square mile.

Some 24 hours after the raid ended, the camp was a scene of ruin: severed water and sewer pipes poking out of roads torn by Israeli bulldozer, its telecommunications cut.

“They are destroying infrastructure. They are not just punishing the family of a ‘terrorist’; they are punishing the entire community,” retired schoolteacher Jamal Omar says, pointing to a ripped-up road.

Residents trudged through ankle-high mud and broken concrete that was once the main street; others picked through destroyed hair salons, mobile phone shops, and nongovernmental organization offices. Homes were charred. A kindergarten was marked with a crater and bullet holes.

A trickle of residents walked to the funeral tent of one of the young men killed in the raid, passing a falafel shop with a large Star of David spray-painted in red on its metal doors, apparently left behind by the IDF.

Amani Hmeidan’s home, located near where suspected militants were based, was taken over by the army during the raid. Her two elder sons were arrested, the rest of the family held in a bedroom for two days.

She points to black bootprints on her beige carpet, and says she is unsure if she will clean them. “I don’t want to see their marks everywhere, but I am worried they’ll be back,” she says.

Taylor Luck

Retired schoolteacher Jamal Omar stands by a camp services distribution center damaged in a recent Israeli military raid, in Tulkarm camp, Jan. 21, 2024.

Checkpoints and movement restrictions imposed by Israel across the West Bank since Oct. 7 have all but cut off the market town of Tulkarm from northern Israel and its Israeli Arab trade partners. Many camp residents worked in Israel prior to the war; the restrictions mean they can no longer travel there.

The raid damaged shops, their stock ruined by the fighting or confiscated by the IDF.

“Everything has been taken from us. We are not part of the armed resistance; we are not Hamas, but we were all targeted by the army,” Rafaat al-Tibi says, picking up shattered glass from his bare mobile phone shop. He is unable to buy new stock.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says, struggling for words. “I have no money, and I have no idea what I will do.”

Contributing history

The history of militant activity in West Bank camps long predates Oct. 7 and, analysts say, is being revived by recent events.

Tulkarm and camps like it were home to leading Palestinian fighters and brigade leaders from the 1970s up through the second intifada, which began in 2000.

Many families in the camps, refugees displaced and dispossessed by the 1948 or 1967 wars, are mired in multigenerational poverty.

Tulkarm, like many others, was mainly quiet after the second intifada, but the younger generation grew up with family lore of fathers, uncles, and brothers arrested or killed by Israeli forces.

Jehad Harb, political analyst at the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, says the collapse of peace process attempts in 2014 and economic hardship before and after the pandemic sowed the seeds for the current violence, which was ignited by an uptick in settler violence in 2022.

The war and increased IDF presence in the West Bank fanned the flames. Militant activity, first concentrated in Jenin, has spread to camps across the West Bank.

“When young people are without hope or work, this often ignites violence,” says Mr. Harb. “This violence can come in the form of crime, drugs, theft, but in camps it often it comes in the form of violence against the occupation.

“These young men are willing to sacrifice themselves because they have nothing to lose,” he adds. “They are ready to die in acts of armed resistance to gain political and social dignity to make up for their lack of socioeconomic dignity.”

Taylor Luck

A bedroom that residents say was used by Israeli forces as a fighting position in their battle with militants is left pocked with bullet holes, in Tulkarm camp, Jan. 21, 2024.

The analyst notes that in the camps, amid this conflict with Israel, “you can’t tell who is Hamas and who is Fatah” – a sentiment residents echo.

Fatah loyalists defend Hamas members “because we are brothers” united by communal bonds and resistance to Israel, one resident says.

The unity among camp factions and their conflict with Israeli forces is also placing the communities increasingly beyond the reach of the governing PA, which sees the militant brigades and their fierce autonomy as a challenge to its own authority.

With the violence, “Israel is creating a generation more extreme than the last,” charges Mr. Omar, the former schoolteacher, who worries for his camp’s future. “It will only get worse until there is peace.”

“How do they expect us to act?”

Mustafa, a Tulkarm camp teenager who did not wish to use his real name, says he was “at home playing video games” when he was detained by the IDF.

“They are coming to us; we are not coming to them,” he says. “We are all in our homes in a refugee camp in the West Bank, not starting problems with Israelis at checkpoints.

“How do they expect us to act when they occupy our homes and shoot our neighbors?” he adds, pointing to a mural devoted to “martyrs” killed by Israeli forces. “Of course, this will push us to armed resistance.”

In the wake of the violence, some residents are moving out of the camp and into nearby apartments. The trend is sparking worries they will lose access to refugee service, but it also has security implications.

If most residents leave, Mr. Harb, the analyst, predicts, the West Bank camps may soon more closely resemble northern Gaza: rubble-strewn enclaves dominated by and attracting militants who wish to target Israeli forces.

“It will be easier for fighters to confront Israel without the fear of killing innocents,” he says. “Violence will only increase.”

Sputnik/Mikhail Metzel/Reuters

Russian President Vladimir Putin visits a pilot training school. He has threatened grave consequences if Ukraine uses advanced German cruise missiles against Russian targets.

Vladimir Putin is facing a critical referendum on his war in Ukraine. And it is unclear whether he will get the result he has been trying to engineer.

That’s because the “voters” in this contest aren’t the millions of Russians poised to hand him a further six years in the Kremlin at next weekend’s presidential election; anti-war candidates have been barred from running.

This audience is tougher and, for Mr. Putin’s war, more consequential: the leaders of Western Europe.

Over the past 10 days, they’ve been locked in an intensifying debate over whether, and how, to ratchet up military support for Ukraine – even if that means ignoring Mr. Putin’s warnings of a wider conflict.

And as Ukraine’s key ally, U.S. President Joe Biden, finds it ever harder to win bipartisan backing for aid to Kyiv, the European debate could prove decisive in the war.

The immediate issue is arms, like the artillery shells Kyiv desperately needs and longer-range missiles capable of hitting targets far from the front lines. That includes the Kerch Bridge, the multibillion-dollar span between Russia and Crimea that Mr. Putin inaugurated after seizing the peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.

At the core of the debate, however, are deeper strategic questions: How important for Western Europe’s future is the Ukraine war? And if, as some European leaders fear, a Russian victory would embolden Mr. Putin to threaten other neighbors, how might they deter him?

Through diplomacy? Firm warnings, calibrated arms deliveries to Ukraine staving off major Russian gains, and a reliance on a mutual interest with Mr. Putin to avert a head-on conflict?

Or a more assertive response? That would mean both arming Ukraine better and stepping up Europe’s own military preparedness, expenditures, and arms production to build a long-term bulwark against potential Russian attack.

The debate has been bubbling for months, as countries nearest to Russia – such as Poland and the former Soviet Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – have tried to nudge other European leaders toward the more assertive Option 2.

This week, the debate erupted into a public tug of war between Europe’s leading political players, Germany and France.

Germany favors the more cautious approach.

It’s not that Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants Russia to prevail. Within days of Mr. Putin’s invasion, he called it a Zeitenwende – a turning point – for Germany and committed to meeting NATO’s target of spending at least 2% of gross domestic on the military.

Germany has been the second-largest provider of military aid to Ukraine, behind only the United States.

Yet Mr. Scholz has repeatedly delayed sending key weaponry – first battle tanks and now Europe’s longest-range missile, the German Taurus.

Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa/AP

A long-range Taurus cruise missile, the most powerful such missile in Europe, is displayed in the showroom of the German company that makes it. The German government has so far banned its export to Ukraine.

His concern is to avoid anything that might draw Germany into direct conflict with Russia.

That’s partly for historic and political reasons: the legacy of two world wars in which Germany battled Russia, and a distinct lack of popular support, especially in the former East Germany, for deeper Ukraine involvement.

Mr. Scholz has been withholding the Taurus despite pressure not just from other Europeans, but also from some other German politicians.

That’s where France has now entered the fray.

President Emmanuel Macron has made no secret of his frustration over Germany’s reluctance to deliver a missile that no other European country can provide.

But his aim in convening a Paris summit on Ukraine late last month was wider: to make the case for Option 2, a more assertive, longer-term recalibration of Europe’s security policy in response to Russia’s aggression.

Germany was quick to point out that Mr. Macron seemed an unlikely standard-bearer.

Early in the war, he continued to talk to Mr. Putin, hoping to negotiate an end to the fighting. He urged Western leaders not to “humiliate” Russia, arguing that this would make a diplomatic exit harder.

Gonzalo Fuentes/AP

French President Emmanuel Macron addresses a top-level European meeting in Paris Feb. 26, to show unified support for Ukraine.

And France’s military assistance to Ukraine has been but a small fraction of Germany’s.

Yet Mr. Macron’s view of the war, and of the longer-term security threat that he fears Mr. Putin represents, has been steadily hardening.

After the summit, he said Russia “has its eyes not just on Ukraine, but other countries as well.” For the first time, he insisted that Europe’s interests required more than preventing Mr. Putin from winning. An outright Russian defeat, he said, was “indispensable for stability and security in Europe.”

This debate – not to mention the kind of major European security overhaul Mr. Macron wants – will take many months to play out, and Mr. Putin is clearly watching.

Listening, too. This week, the Kremlin-backed overseas network RT released a leaked tape of supposedly private discussions among senior German military officers about how they might convince Mr. Scholz to approve the provision of Taurus – complete with references to its ability to take out the Kerch Bridge.

Russian officials promptly played up the potential threat, and the wider repercussions, if that happened. And for now, the leak and Moscow’s response may well harden Mr. Scholz’s view.

Still, Mr. Macron’s longer-term argument resonates strongly in other European countries, especially those closest to Russia. It is unlikely to go away.

And while Mr. Putin will have no doubts about the outcome of Russia’s upcoming presidential election, when it comes to Europe’s Ukraine debate, he can be far less certain.

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

Snow graces the peaks of southern Salt Lake County, Utah, Feb. 3, 2024, in a view from the border between the city of Herriman and neighboring Riverton.

For Mayor Lorin Palmer, the first alert about changes underway in the town of Herriman, Utah, came from a school principal. A teacher shortage at the high school seemed imminent as the number of immigrant students soared.

Since then, Mayor Palmer has focused more on new arrivals, many from Venezuela, and how to match them with resources that support their self-sufficiency. Last month, Herriman City Hall hosted a resource fair, arranged by the state and nonprofits, where those eligible could apply for work authorization.  

“We’re trying to do the right thing,” says Mr. Palmer, a Spanish speaker, who spent a church mission in Uruguay. He’s called for more coordination from nonprofits, and supports a new community center that will offer free English classes. 

The local government is trying to build rapport with the new arrivals, many of whom fled governments they feared. Citing limited public resources, officials here don’t want to be perceived as a “sanctuary city” – but also recognize that trust among newcomers and longtime residents alike enables more community cohesion. If migration at the southern border is a crisis of scale, Herriman is trying to build trust one newcomer at a time.

Responding to historic increases 

As global displacement reaches historic levels, so has illegal immigration reached record highs under the Biden administration, with more than 2 million Border Patrol encounters along the southern border a year. Budgets are strained in places like Chicago, Denver, and New York, which provide social services to migrants and asylum-seekers. Those cities are targets of a busing campaign by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

These new immigrants, who’ve entered both lawfully and unlawfully, are arriving in smaller cities too, like Herriman and others across red and blue America. As neighborhoods, food banks, and schools receive more newcomers, residents have offered assistance in heartfelt ways, even as some grapple with a broken immigration system.

Julie Shaw is one Herriman resident who is moved to serve new immigrants but also questions the limits of local resources and federal border security.

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

Julie Shaw, a local volunteer, helps babysit children whose families are attending a work authorization clinic in Herriman, Utah, Feb. 3, 2024.

At the recent resource fair, Ms. Shaw volunteers to babysit children of parents processing forms. She helps kids fit wooden pieces into an alphabet puzzle. She also thinks about the fitting together of her own community.

“I totally understand wanting to come to this country because of economic reasons,” she says. However, “that’s what makes it complicated, right? You can’t take in the whole world.” And while she opposes illegal immigration, Ms. Shaw also believes in fixing the system to allow more immigrants to enter lawfully. 

The system is the problem, says the volunteer. “Helping people is the most important thing.”

The helpers 

In Herriman, tidy rows of houses sprawl in tans and bluish-grays, the same colors seen in a nearby mountain range. The peaks remind Venezuelan asylum-seekers of the Andes back home. 

The state’s Latter-day Saint pioneers were asylum-seekers of another era, fleeing religious and political persecution in the 1800s at the hands of fellow Americans. Utah today, home to the global Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is a story of rapid growth. Herriman’s population of roughly 60,000 has nearly tripled since 2010.

“We’re trying to keep that small-town feeling ... while also dealing with the growth,” says Mayor Palmer, who holds weekly lunches for any residents. It helps, he says, that the community is full of people with “shirt-off-your-back” generosity. 

For Marisha Manzano, at the Herriman Police Department, it wasn’t shirts but coats that made a difference.

In winter 2022, Officer Manzano began a coat drive for parents attending English classes in the local school district. Some had stopped coming in the cold. “If I can help keep Mom and Dad warm, they can work, they can learn English, and they can be there to help support their children,” says the school resource officer, who continued the effort this winter.

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

Mayor Lorin Palmer (standing at right) speaks to locals who attend one of his Wednesday lunches at a restaurant in Herriman, Utah, Feb. 7, 2024.

At Herriman High School, Todd Quarnberg alerted Mayor Palmer to the area’s growing immigrant community last year. The principal admits he is overwhelmed with new arrivals. 

“We don’t have enough teachers because we didn’t know they were coming,” says Mr. Quarnberg in his office. The principal is calling on the state for more funding, especially for bilingual staff. A hundred unexpected students enrolled last summer, he says. 

The current student body around 2,500 grows by two or three more immigrant students each week. Beyond Latino students, who make up most of the influx, the school is starting to welcome Rwandan students as of the past month.

Despite the challenges, “anybody that crosses my threshold, of this school, I’m going to help,” says Mr. Quarnberg. “If we don’t educate them, we’re just causing a cycle of have-nots reliant on assistance.”

Marian Alvarez, a soft-spoken high school senior, arrived in Herriman this fall, legally paroled into the country. Even with temporary permission to stay, Marian says adapting to a new culture has been hard. 

“When you arrive with nothing, it’s disorienting. You don’t know anything,” she says in Spanish. “If someone helps you, welcomes you – it’s nice.”

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

Marian Alvarez, a senior at Herriman High School, stands in the library after class, in Herriman, Utah, Feb. 7, 2024.

What is the scope of arrivals? 

So far, Utah appears nowhere near as operationally overwhelmed with newcomers as New York or Colorado. Denver has tracked nearly 40,000 migrant arrivals in over a year.

Places like Herriman represent a more traditional model of immigrants who disperse across the country organically, typically supported by the private sector, says Muzaffar Chishti, senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.

Utah officials say there is no formal, public tracking of new immigrants. Salt Lake County, which includes Herriman, is trying to “understand the scope of the need” through community partners, says Katherine Fife, associate deputy mayor of the county. Since late 2022, official Denver data shows purchases of more than 1,700 travel tickets to Salt Lake City for migrants who request them.

Utah has taken various pro-immigrant policy positions in recent history, says Erin Hofmann, associate professor of sociology at Utah State University. In 2010, the Utah Compact, a public and private partnership, called for immigration reform. In that decade the Beehive State earned a reputation as a model red state for uniting religious, business, and immigrant advocacy groups, says Dr. Hofmann.

Now the state is “back in the middle,” she says. “The governor, the legislature of Utah have moved a little bit more towards what I would call typical Republican positions on immigration.”

Last month Utah Gov. Spencer Cox appeared at the Texas-Mexico border joining fellow Republicans in a call for tighter border security. At a press conference afterward, he said he’s “deeply concerned” about immigrant arrivals to his state “taking up resources.” 

Yet Governor Cox also last year penned a Washington Post opinion piece calling for state “sponsorship” of immigrant workers to fill jobs. That echoed Utah’s 2011 attempt to create a state guest-worker program, which never went into effect after objections from the U.S. Justice Department. 

Still, supporters of new immigrants continue to advocate for help filling labor needs. As of January, Utah’s unemployment rate stood at 2.8%, nearly 1 percentage point lower than that of the nation. 

Rule-breaking and security

Nearby in Salt Lake County, Carlos Moreno is of two minds about the newcomers. 

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

Carlos Moreno reflects on his experience as both a Venezuelan asylum-seeker and conservative American citizen in West Jordan, Utah, Feb. 6, 2024.

The West Jordan resident stresses that he’s “pro” immigrant – he is one, after all. After studying labor law in Venezuela, he came to Utah with a student visa in 2009. After speaking out against his government back home, he says he was charged with treason and conspiracy. Mr. Moreno applied for and won political asylum in the United States, and went on to successfully advocate for extending in-state college tuition to refugees and asylum-seekers in Utah. 

Yet “I want to see the border secure,” says Mr. Moreno, who was naturalized in 2022. He serves as the Latino liaison for the Salt Lake County Republican Party and is concerned that criminals are entering the U.S.

For some observers, such fears are justified amid instances such as the killing of a Georgia nursing student last month, resulting in murder charges against a Venezuelan man who entered the U.S. illegally.

For others, the salient fact is that there’s no hard evidence that immigrants, including those who are unauthorized, commit crimes at higher rates than their U.S.-born peers, as a recent Washington Post fact check concluded. 

Newcomer José, another Venezuelan, crossed illegally from Mexico into Arizona in 2021 to seek refuge.  

Back at the Herriman resource fair, he sits in line quietly in an electric-blue collared shirt. José, who preferred that his full name not be used due to privacy and safety concerns, has already applied for asylum and received his work permit. He’s been looking for job opportunities. 

José worked in Venezuela’s petroleum industry as an electrical engineer. Beginning in 2019, after he reported corrupt operations to his manager, he says he survived three attempts on his life. 

“Returning to Venezuela would be death,” he says in Spanish at a Herriman cafe. “The only country in the world where I can feel safe is here in the United States.”

José finds that people here are kind. Though José is allowed to remain in the U.S. while his asylum case continues, terror seized him last year when he says a police officer pulled him over on the road. 

It turned out to be a small issue with his license plate registration sticker, he says. To José’s relief, he says the officer was “very polite.” Plus, the officer spoke Spanish. 

One of the few Spanish speakers on the Herriman police force is Sgt. Jose Lopez, who recalls entering the U.S. from Mexico as a young child. Smugglers brought him unlawfully across the border, he says, to reunite with his parents, who’d come to the U.S. first and secured a lawful status. 

His parents settled in Utah “because it was a great place for family and opportunity,” says Sergeant Lopez, now a citizen.

At his job, building trust with new immigrants is a two-way street, says Mr. Lopez. Through conversations around town, he tries to build rapport.

He explains how it’s important to learn and follow laws here, which may be different from the laws people knew in their previous homes. 

“At the end of the day, it’s the overall goal, right?” he says. “To make sure that our community is safe, and that we have a good place to live and work.”

When Stephen Handy took his family to cheer on his Utah Utes in the Rose Bowl, he spotted something as exciting as a Hail Mary pass before the game even started. Leading the team onto the field was Utah’s new state flag – a banner featuring dark blue mountains, a red canyon stripe, and a large yellow beehive.

“I said, ‘Wow, that is so great,’” Mr. Handy recalls of the January 2023 game in Pasadena, California. “I mean, it was visible. You could see it. It represented Utah to me. It said something.”

Mr. Handy should know something about Utah’s new flag, which was slated to be officially adopted March 9. When he was a state representative, he sponsored bills to study a redesign and create a task force to implement it. Having a flag that people recognize is an important way to stoke civic pride, he says. “I could see, as people began to embrace this, a passion that never, ever has been there in the old state flag.”

Many states fly flags with designs that are centuries old. To preservationists, traditional flags represent shared history and continuity.

But an increasing number of elected officials feel the convention of a “seal on a bedsheet” no longer represents their modern citizens. Legislators in Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Utah have all recently passed or filed bills to create flags more evocative of state heritage and iconography.

There’s not much of a playbook for creating shared symbols. For states taking on new flags, settling on a unified sense of identity and a version of history everyone can agree on has been thorny – as has, in some cases, the question of whether to try doing it at all. But legislators and vexillologists – the term for those who study flags – say the process of picking a new state flag is not just about colors and shapes. Flags hit at the core of residents’ relationships to their history, geography, and collective identity.

Inviting discussion about a new design, though, can reveal just how far apart people’s senses of those concepts lie.

Office of the Lieutenant Governor of Utah

The Utah State Flag Task Force’s (from left to right) Utah state Sen. Dan McCay, Gov. Spencer Cox, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, and then-state Rep. Stephen Handy hold T-shirts featuring the flag’s new design, Nov. 11, 2022, in Salt Lake City.

Finding common ground is the most important part of creating a new flag – and the most difficult, says Josh Mattie, a designer who helped lead a flag project in Cincinnati.

“What really makes a flag important is it being invested with enough true meaning, but also enough broad symbolism that people can
project their own meaning upon it, too,” says Mr. Mattie. “It’s that strange dance of having specificity but also a broadness that can be an umbrella over a larger, changing, diverse populace.”

Jonathan Martin, one of three designers behind Utah’s adopted version, says updating the flag was an inevitable outcome of Utah’s changing population. One of America’s fastest-growing states, he points out, Utah is also the youngest. He says featuring the topography – mountains to the north, red rocks to the south – and the beehive, representing the state’s industriousness, was intended to boost the aspects of Utah that all residents recognize.

“We can do better,” he says. “We can take control of how we want to identify and define who we are as a people.”

But John Hartvigsen, a former North American Vexillological Association president who participated in Utah’s redesign task force, left the process unconvinced that pursuing an update was more important than honoring the emblems and significance of the original flag.

“If we say, well, we need a new state flag to represent the people today,” he asks, “does that mean in 50 years that we should have a new state flag to represent the people as they exist 50 years from now?”

Some opponents say the 1913 flag was “canceled” by legislators. Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed an order last year to keep the previous flag flying at the Capitol along with the new one. A ballot measure to repeal the change fell short of the necessary signatures.

On Feb. 8, seeking to keep the effort alive, a group brought a lawsuit against the lieutenant governor, challenging the rules around signature collections.

In Minnesota, members of the State Emblems Redesign Commission felt a distinct onus to shift the flag’s historical narrative. The state’s Native tribes have sharply criticized the previous banner for its depiction of an armed white settler working a field while an Indigenous man rides away.

Mohamed Ibrahim/Report For America/AP

Minnesota recently updated its previous flag, which included imagery of an Indigenous person and an armed white settler that Native tribes objected to.

The commission sifted through 2,128 submitted designs – including a handful featuring loons shooting lasers out of their eyes. In December, the group settled on including a minimalist representation of the state’s shape, an eight-pointed North Star, and a vast bright blue field to signify Minnesota’s thousands of lakes and rivers.

Some Minnesotans felt strongly about centering natural elements that all residents could claim. Anne Krisnik made that point on behalf of her children, who teach in local schools.

“One of the things they’ve really talked about ... is the love of having a flag that kids can look at and see what it means to Minnesota,” she told the commission. “The waters of Minnesota are something that people can look at the flag and really identify.”

But to others, focusing on a few broad elements felt too reductive.

“It’s just largely missing anything that people can relate to, that demonstrates that [the flag] is about them,” state Sen. Steve Drazkowski, a nonvoting member of the commission, told the Monitor. He worried, also, about the process of creating a flag by committee, instead of allowing state legislators or voters to make the final call.

Courtesy of The State Emblems Redesign Commission

The new Minnesota flag includes a representation of the state’s shape and a bright blue field to signify Minnesota’s thousands of lakes and rivers.

Mr. Mattie, of Cincinnati, coordinated a project to design flags for each of the city’s 52 neighborhoods – an experience he says was especially instructive in bridging the gap on questions of identity and history.

When he pitched a flag featuring symbols of a local university and children’s hospital at one neighborhood meeting, residents’ reactions were deeply negative because they felt the imagery centered developers’ narratives about the area.

“Our ideas [were] out of step with the actual values and people of the neighborhood because we were misinformed by what ends up being corporate propaganda,” he says. Armed with the feedback, his team went back to the drawing board and returned with symbols that represented residential architecture, churches, and the neighborhood’s multigenerational ties.

The community engagement process for a design that’s intended to represent everyone is never easy, by its nature, he says. But taking the time to connect with people yields the strongest results.

“It takes a long time to build that trust and that understanding,” he explains, “and to hear what people actually believe represents them.”

Reuters

A woman shops in a Cairo market March 7.

One reason for giving foreign loans to countries with faltering or even corrupt regimes is to coax them into honest and fair governance. The loans often come with a condition for belt-tightening. In a multibillion-dollar agreement brokered yesterday to lift Egypt out of an economic crisis, the International Monetary Fund has flavored a demand for prudence with subtle sweeteners.

The deal, which remains to be approved by the IMF board, ties $8 billion in loans to stabilizing Egypt’s currency, bringing down inflation, and wresting the economy from control by the state and military. Cairo has been dragging its feet on such measures for years. What may have brought a change now is the lending agency’s acknowledgment that the conflict in neighboring Gaza has imposed “significant macroeconomic challenges” on Egypt.

Such empathy carries a hint of gratitude for Cairo’s ongoing work to end the war in Gaza and return Israeli hostages held by the militant group Hamas. A key lesson from decades of international lending, said former World Bank Director Khalid Ikram, is the need “to have a more humble approach.” Sometimes that means tempering “economic purity with the politically doable,” he added.

Like other governments in the Middle East, Egypt has sought to avoid taking economic steps that might lead to a popular uprising, such as the Arab Spring of the early 2010s. The country’s current crisis is rooted in runaway spending on infrastructure projects and policies that protected the military’s influence in state enterprises. From 2014 to 2022, under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt’s foreign debt rose from $40 billion to $155 billion.

Talks between the government and the IMF were stalled from late 2022 until last month, when Cairo brokered a $35 billion deal with the United Arab Emirates for investments in urban development. The change in Egypt’s balance sheet offered an opening for renewed dialogue with the IMF. Egypt raised its interest rates by 600 basis points yesterday and floated its currency to reflect its true value. The IMF reciprocated immediately, more than doubling a stalled rescue program.

Those measures may help offset the financial impact of the Israel-Hamas war, including lost revenue from a decline in ship traffic through the Suez Canal due to attacks on ships by Houthi rebels in Yemen. More important for ordinary Egyptians, the measures coaxed concessions from an unpopular government that economists say will boost private enterprise – and a note of humility from the IMF.

“Egypt’s international and regional partners will play a critical role in facilitating the implementation of the authorities’ policies and reforms,” the agency stated. “The IMF team would like to thank the authorities for the constructive dialogue, warm hospitality and strong cooperation to finalize the reform package.” In diplomacy, soft gestures are often persuasive.