Hawks v talks: barriers to peace in Gaza

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1:04The Economist

1:11Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer. And I'm Rosie Bloor. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

1:26Every labor-saving technology brings an argument that farming out tasks to tech makes humans weaker in some way. When's the last time you did long division? We look at the evidence that artificial intelligence may, in the long run, make us more stupider. And there's been a proliferation of adverts for testosterone jabs that make you look, feel, and be more manly. Or so they say. But how much testosterone do men really need? And what happens if you take too much?

2:05But first...

2:15Perhaps hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza City crowd around a fence. It surrounds aid workers who are doling out steaming liquids as fast as they can. To call this chaos, this wall of hungry people, each with an empty pot thrushed through the fence, chaos is an understatement.

2:39Yet it could be worse. Elsewhere, it's proved dangerous, even deadly, for them to reach the aid being offered by the American-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. And yesterday, the war expanded yet again, an air and ground offensive towards the central city of Deir el-Balach. International voices have slowly become more united in condemnation of Israel. 28 countries jointly called yesterday for an immediate ceasefire and lambasted aid operations. Signatories included Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and Britain, whose Foreign Secretary David Lammy made his position clear. I utterly condemn the killing of civilians seeking to meet their basic needs.

3:26The Israeli government must answer what possible military justification can there be for strikes that have killed desperate, starving children. Impatience is growing, both outside Israel and inside. But there remain plenty of obstacles to a robust agreement. Well, the fact that a large number of Western countries are calling upon Israel to end this war, isn't that surprising? I mean, we've been hearing it in various forms now for a few weeks from Donald Trump himself. Anshul Pfeffer is our Israel correspondent. But these calls have largely remained unheeded. So, to your mind, nothing special here.

4:11This is just a performative finger-wagging. I think that the governments involved and the ones who were leading this initiative seem to be mainly Britain and Germany are aware that there is a ceasefire agreement and the talks are pretty advanced, but there are still some obstacles and they're trying to do their little bit to push it on. I don't think that this is necessarily what's going to push it over the line. If those leaders are in any way privy to the protocols of the Israeli cabinet, it, they'll see that the chief of staff of Israel's army is saying pretty much the same thing, that their minifery operation has more or less achieved whatever aims it can.

4:52And if Israel wants to achieve its goal, first of all, of releasing the 50 hostages, 20 of them who are still assumed to be alive, then the only way to do that right now is through a diplomatic agreement with Hamas. And as far as ending the war, the war as it's being waged by Israel now is more or less spent. And the only reason to continue it is because some of the cabinet ministers harbour designs of perpetual occupation of Gaza by Israel and perhaps also transferring a large part of its Persian population outside of Gaza. If that's the aim, Israel has to say it clearly. But since it's not the stated aim of the war, the army is basically saying to the government, we think time's up.

5:37And in that context, Anshul, tell me about the latest offensive on Deir el-Balach. Well, the move into and around Deir el-Balach, which is a refugee camp or a medium-sized town, sort of in the middle of the Gaza Strip, is something that the Israeli army is doing basically because it's out of options in Gaza. It's waiting for news about a ceasefire. It's been focusing to a large degree on this economic war with Hamas over who controls the humanitarian supplies to Gaza. And meanwhile, it has a lot of soldiers and tanks on the ground that need to do something with them. So what they're doing now is they're cutting Giribala off from the neighboring towns.

6:19Now, Israel's being very careful about not going too aggressively into the town because it believes that at least some of the hostages may be there and they don't want to jeopardize that. The problem with operating around Deir Barach is it has become one of the central refuges of people who have been forced to leave other parts of the Gaza Strip. And by operating in and around Deir Barach now, they are once again displacing these people. And what about the question of humanitarian aid, what we've talked about a lot on the show, and who's running it and how it's been going? Bring us up to date on that.

6:56So in the Hanunas Mawasi area, where roughly 60 % of Gazans are now concentrated, there are a couple of Israeli operations ongoing. One is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, this controversial American organization which works with Israelis, which has a number of centers where basically boxes of dry goods are dumped several times a day and thousands of people come to pick them up. but we've seen around these centers on the routes leading to them, countless incidents in which crowds have surged forward and there's been shots fired by the Israelis. Also, reports of tear gas by the American mercenaries operating the centers, which have caused dozens, and by reports of the Palestinian health authorities and international aid organization, hundreds of people have been killed in that.

7:48So last week, I went in with the Israeli army on an embed tour and was at an observation post a few hundred meters from one of these GHF hubs for a couple of hours. And I saw how the distribution worked and it was a really very chaotic scene. Thousands of people were walking, some of them were running from Hanulis, the city to the north, queuing there in a very rowdy crowd trying to get to the front of the queue, trying to get into the compound to pick up these cardboard boxes. there was an attempt to kind of create sort of a separate queue for women so they wouldn't be harmed and then the moment that happened then more people searched forward at some point the American contractors or mercenaries who were operating the site kind of gave up and just left the boxes there and people just grabbed them and ran back there's also a separate Israeli operation which various clans or perhaps crime gangs are being allowed to bring in food so there is a certain quantity of food in that area.

8:52The distribution is haphazard to say the best chaotic and in many cases deadly, but some food is going through there. In the other parts of Gaza to the north where about 40 % of the population is still living in Gaza City and in the towns in the south of Gaza City, situation there is dire. We're getting terrible reports of starvation there. some food is going in. Israel is allowing some convoys to go through via the international aid organizations, but their numbers are small. And due to the chaos there, very often these convoys are mobbed or commandeered. And there's also the Israeli accusation that a lot of that supply has been plundered by Hamas for its own purposes.

9:37And at the beginning of our conversation, Anshul, you gave a sense that some factions within the Israeli leadership think that this war is just about done, just about wrapping up. But then we've talked about a lot of things that suggest it's still going on at some pace. Do you see an endgame here? Well, we've now had three weeks of talks in Doha, the Qatari capital, between Israel and Hamas. They're not talking directly between them, but the Qataris and American diplomats are the go-betweens. And the contours of the deal are very clear. There's a 60-day truce period in which some of the hostages will be released in Palestinian prisons will be released as well.

10:14And Israel will retreat to certain areas in Gaza, but most of Gaza, there'll be freedom of movement and supplies will get in. And then during that period, there's supposed to be ceasefire talks, which would end the war. But getting over the line with those talks seems still to be elusive. Hamas are demanding clear guarantees that they'll be allowed to remain in Gaza. Israel is much more vague. And that's different factions as the far-right parties within Netanyahu's coalition who making no attempt to their desire to remain in Gaza forever and to kick out most of the Gazans. And there's Benjamin Netanyahu who we hear that his representatives in the talks are accepting the fact that the war is almost over, but in public he's not admitting that.

11:05And he seems to be keeping all his options open while these talks just continue to drag on. I think a lot of it depends now on how much pressure Donald Trump is putting on Netanyahu, if at all, to actually end this. Anshul, thanks very much for your time. Thank you once again for having me, Jason.

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12:46Okay, here's a little quiz. What's 13 times 47? How do you spell the word sacrilegious? And what does pauciloquent mean? I'm looking forward to our inbox on this one. For decades, teachers uttered warnings that if you relied on a calculator or computer to solve tasks like the ones I've just set, that you'd never learn even basic arithmetic or how to write well. You won't always have a calculator in your pocket, they warned. Well, with the rise of smartphones, jokes on them. But though most of us do carry mini computers in our pockets these days, concerns persist about whether technology is making us more stupid.

13:27AI seems to be hurting our ability to do, well, anything that we start doing with AI. Alex Hearn is The Economist's AI writer. As you use a cognitive aid to get better at certain tasks, you generally appear to lose the ability to do that task unaided. You really lose the ability? Not always. You know, if you use a bike to get around, you're never going to forget how to walk. But there's a long history of cognitive enhancements eating away at people's practiced skills. If you use a calculator in your daily life as a shop assistant to add up the change you give, well, firstly, you're living in the 1990s.

14:10And secondly, you're going to not exercise the mental arithmetic skills that you might have used otherwise. If you use a navigation aid to drive your car around, your ability to read a map is going to atrophy. If in 500 BC, you're Socrates and you're grumbling about newfangled writing, eating away at people's ability to memorize 10 ,000 lines of epic verse, well, you're basically right. You and I are less good at memorising the Iliad start to finish than Socrates' peers would have been. So what's the actual evidence that AI really is eating into our cognitive abilities? So there have been a few studies that have come out over the past few months suggesting this.

14:50One of the biggest ones was a neurological study from MIT that set students a series of essay writing tasks. Some of them carried them out with the assistance of AI and some of them carried them out freehand, old school. After they'd done those tasks, they were hooked up to an EEG and asked to write one final essay. And what was clear is that the people who had used AI to write their first tasks not only wrote subpar essays, but the parts of their brains that were supposed to light up when they were writing these essays and did light up in the people who had written several unassisted didn't fire as strongly.

15:22They were, in a very real sense, out of practice of essay writing because the AI had done the work for them. And you said there are a number of studies. What do the other ones show? Other ones suggest, for instance, that people who are asked to come up with inventive, innovative uses for a pair of trousers, who are given a list of suggestions by an AI assistant to kick them off, actually come up with less innovative uses than those who are forced to start cold. So if the AI suggests, for instance, stuffing it full of hay and using it as a scarecrow, that doesn't get the juices flowing. It seems to sort of cut people off at the knees.

16:01They feel like the AI has done it already and they don't have anything more to add. So is that it, Alex? Are kids doomed never to think critically? So education and what happens to child development is a whole other question here. The fear, I think, is less that people will never learn how to think critically and more that AI may be a substantively different cognitive enhancement from ones we had previously. The history of humanity has always been that as we develop a technology that lets us stop having to do a mental task, we generally do atrophy at that task, but we also culturally come to reassess what we think of as sort of core to human creativity, knowledge, intelligence.

16:44I bring up Socrates, but genuinely he would have been horrified, based on one of his thoughts we have through Plato and so on, at the idea that you could be seen as an intelligent, well-rounded person, but you haven't memorized the great works. That was not the ancient Greek conception of what it meant to be intelligent, but it very much is our modern conception. The question is with AI, whether or not it's such a fully-fledged cognitive enhancement that it starts to be more of a cognitive replacement. Do people who are using AI assistants to help them with a task use it to help them with a task or does it just do the task entirely?

17:20And if it's the latter, what is actually left of the human intellect to flourish in the gaps created by that AI help? Getting very philosophical here, Alex. What's your view? You spend all your time thinking about AI. Where do we end up? My current view is that this is a genuine problem for the future, but that in the present, it sort of overstates the ability of AI technology to be worried about this. Fundamentally, if you hand over these sorts of all-encompassing tasks, like say writing an academic essay to an AI, one of the important outcomes is that task is done poorly. The AI isn't very good at it.

17:56You're going to produce slop. So currently there is definitely a lot of room for human flourishing in being better than AI. And this isn't just a qualitative judgment. One of the other interesting studies that came out in the last month was from METR, an AI research group, that looked at how much AI coding assistance sped up developer productivity. And the developers they asked were all very experienced users of AI, right? Before they carried out the task, they assumed it would give them a roughly 20 % speed up in their ability. After they carried out their task, they assumed it had given them a 20 % speed up in their ability.

18:30In fact, it slowed them down by somewhere between 10 and 40%. Using AI felt like a real improvement, but in actual fact, They were spending so much time tinkering with the AI assistant, correcting its mistakes, trying to work out the best way to prompt it, that they spent more time doing the task than they would have unaided. We're not yet at this position where it's a cognitive replacement. We simply aren't. But thinking about what it would look like if we got there might prepare us for the very different world that could be coming. Fascinating. Alex, thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

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19:49Becca, I presume. Hey, yes. I saw you loitering up. I recently went to visit Game Day Men's Health Clinic in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia. They offer testosterone replacement therapy. Not at all. The waiting room is what they call a man cave. It was decked out with black leather chairs, a fully stocked fridge, and these posters of men doing manly things like playing football and golfing. Do those Cokes intentionally say dude on them?

20:25Rebecca Jackson is our Southern correspondent. Demand for testosterone has rocketed in the past few years, and especially among younger men. New legion of health clinics are serving it up at astonishing rates.

20:43Becca, you talk about a legion of health clinics. What is the demand they're actually meeting? So Rosie, the number of men who want testosterone just seems to be going up and up. You can see this in the prescription numbers. Between 2019 and 2024, prescriptions for testosterone jumped from 7.3 million a year in America to 11 million. In Texas, which is for some reason kind of the testosterone hub, there were more prescriptions filled in the final quarter of last year than in all of 2021. And there are tons of clinics that are popping up all over the country to meet this demand. The Game Day clinic that I visited in Atlanta was the 50th franchise of Game Day corporate.

21:24They opened in April of 2024. In the 14 months since, Game Day has opened more than 300 other clinics all across the country. And this is not the only clinic of its type. When I walked out of the game day clinic, there were actually two other clinics on that block that also offered testosterone replacement therapy. So why is there so much demand for testosterone? One important thing here is that like many wellness fads, it aims to solve a real medical problem. Hormone levels naturally fall as people age. They fall more for women than for men, But older men do sometimes experience lower testosterone.

22:02And there's some evidence to suggest that societally, men have lower testosterone now than they did, say, decades ago because of things like obesity, diabetes, and opioid use. And it turns out that that can make you feel pretty terrible. Low testosterone can make you have low energy, and it also leads to mood disorders like depression. It turns out that injecting testosterone, you know, these clinics offer up weekly injections, that can really improve your mood, your sleep, your libido, and it can reduce body fat for men who are struggling to put on muscle or lose weight. But the interesting thing here is that the soaring demand cannot all be from people who medically need it.

22:41Men under the age of 35 are especially unlikely to have a serious medical problem. So why would anyone take testosterone if they didn't medically need it? That's a great question. We're kind of in this moment where there is a cultural craze over this stuff. You know, Joe Rogan is America's top podcast has over 20 million followers on YouTube. And he touts it as something that can make men feel young again. He talks about how he started taking it when he was 40. Other celebrities like Dax Shepard, who's an actor, talks about how he went from being a medium-sized boy to a big boy when he went on testosterone.

23:17He gained 24 pounds of muscle. There are all these influencers on TikTok, on all forms of social media, who are saying that basically, if you want to man up, if you want to have better sex, if you want to look better, if you want to feel more like the alpha man you were always meant to be, you should get on testosterone, even if your doctor says that it's not medically necessary. And Rosie, I think this is all kind of enhanced by the Make America Healthy Again movement that endorses these kinds of holistic health measures, even if they aren't supported by the medical establishment. And you can see this especially in RFK Jr., who has set aside his usual skepticism of injections to take testosterone as part of an anti-aging protocol.

24:00So aside from all these alpha males talking about how manly they are, are there downsides to taking a hormone if you don't need it? So compared with other drugs, testosterone is actually quite safe if you don't take it at bodybuilder doses. And my colleague Natasha wrote about last week how it can also really improve people's mental health. People used to think that increased the risk of prostate cancer and heart attacks, but that actually doesn't seem to be the case. But for young men who are taking it, there is one risk that isn't talked about enough. Testosterone can cause infertility if it's not very intentionally taken alongside another hormone that prevents that.