The Economist Magazine Cover For 02/03/2024

The Economist Read in browser FEBRUARY 3RD 2024 Cover Story newsletter from The Economist SUBSCRIBER ONLY Cover Story How we chose this week’s image Insert a clear and simple description of the image Zanny Minton Beddoes Editor-in-chief Our covers this week look at the desperate shuttle diplomacy trying to prevent the Middle East sliding into a regional war; and at how, almost unnoticed, the social is falling out of social media. After numerous background interviews with diplomats and officials, we decided that this was the week to write about their frenetic attempts to find a path towards peace in the Middle East. In Gaza Israeli soldiers and Hamas are still killing each other, even as 2m people face famine. Across the region, ten countries are now caught up in fighting. It is easy to despair, but there is a way out. We have brought together the main figures in the continuing life-or-death negotiations. The plan is to use a proposed hostage-release to reset Israeli politics; to use that reset to open a path to a Palestinian state; and then to use Israel’s commitment to two states as the basis for a deal with Saudi Arabia, in which mutual Israeli-Saudi recognition is underpinned by American security guarantees. Mindful of that, we have a picture of President Joe Biden, who must throw his weight behind a peace plan if it is to have any chance of success. To his right is Muhammad bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s autocratic but modernising leader. Before October 7th he was working on a deal with Israel; indeed, one probable motive behind Hamas’s assault was to sabotage his plans. Against the odds, Saudi Arabia is still striving for this vision. A deal would mark the biggest Arab commitment to peace in three decades. To Mr Biden’s left, we have the two big obstacles standing in the way: Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, and Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza and the terrorist-architect of October 7th. Mr Netanyahu is a lifelong sceptic about a Palestinian state. He has indulged the violent aims of extremist settlers. Mr Sinwar is thought to be holed up beneath south Gaza, with Israeli troops overhead. He will claim a great victory simply by surviving. With Iran’s encouragement, he may well attack Israel, provoke reprisals and thereby sabotage any progress towards peace. A collage conveys the many moving parts that have come to bear upon the spreading conflict. The splodge of black ink set against a map of the region gets across the violent impact that conflict is having on the entire Middle East. But that comes with a lack of focus. This olive-bearing hawk, set against columns of smoke, takes the opposite tack. It depends on readers knowing just how menacing the regional path has become. That is asking them to trace the war back through a series of regional proxies to Iran. By attempting to sow chaos across the Middle East, Iran’s scavenger regime could emerge as the main regional power, capable of threatening Israel and the Gulf and holding world trade to ransom. That would make a mockery of American deterrence. No one wants to see a ruinous war pitting America and Israel against Iran. Peace is the only way out. It is a beautiful image, but we worried that it was asking readers to do too much of the work. This struck a better balance. The firefighters in Washington and Riyadh urgently need to make progress. The more Israel curbs its West Bank settlers and the more credibly it commits itself to a Palestinian state, the more leeway it will have to contain the rump of Hamas fighters. The more Arab states are willing to spend money and provide security, the more confident ordinary Israelis and Palestinians will be of change. And the more America pushes all sides, the better. In our editions in Asia and continental Europe, we wrote about social media. The weird magic of online social networks was to combine personal interactions with mass communication. Now this amalgam is splitting in two again. Status updates from friends have given way to what amounts to a series of hyperactive TV channels that screen videos from strangers. Public posting is increasingly migrating to closed groups, rather like email. What Mark Zuckerberg calls the digital “town square” is being rebuilt—and posing problems. The enormous play button has pushed aside comment. Beside it is a desert full of spiny speech bubbles. Both these ideas point to a central theme of our coverage: new social media are no longer very social. Inspired by TikTok, apps like Facebook increasingly serve a diet of clips selected by artificial intelligence according to a user’s viewing behaviour, not their social connections. Meanwhile, people are posting less. The share of Americans who say they enjoy documenting their life online has fallen from 40% to 28% since 2020. Instead of taking place in public, debate is moving to closed platforms, such as WhatsApp and Telegram. The lights have gone out in the town square. Here we illustrate that by having a phone screen as the glass separating a man and a woman on a prison visit. And the shift does entail a sort of isolation. As people move to closed groups, the open networks left behind are less useful. Fewer people post on open networks. People see less news. Your feed used to be selected by your social network; now it is filtered by algorithms that select anything that is widely watched. We kept coming back to that sense of isolation. This image put it most directly. We experimented with the position of the woman bobbing up and down on the floating emoji. If she held her phone in both hands, she was too engrossed. If she sat back, she was just watching TV. We ended up with her cross-legged, engaged, but alone. Cover image • View large image (“How to end the Middle East’s agony”) • View large image (“The end of the social network”) Backing stories How to end the Middle East’s agony (Leader) America’s shuttle diplomacy to wind down the war in Gaza (Middle East and Africa) The end of the social network (Leader) As Facebook turns 20, politics is out; impersonal video feeds are in (Briefing) Also from The Economist