Bibi driver: battles led by and within Israel

0:28The Economist One of the few who seems to be thriving is Mexico's Claudia Sheinbaum. How is she managing that? And trilobites were wildly diverse creatures that filled every watery ecological niche for a quarter of a billion years. No one was more fascinated by their fossils than Richard Forty. Our obituaries editor reflects on a life spent educating the world about them.

1:02But first...

1:15Almost a week ago, Israel resumed airstrikes in Gaza, hitting what it said were Hamas terror targets. Soon after, ground troops were on the move again, definitively ending a fragile ceasefire in the territory.

1:33Yesterday, Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry reported that more than 50 ,000 people, fighters and civilians, had been killed since the war began.

1:50But for Israel, that's just one front on which fighting has flared, both outside and inside the country. After two months of relative calm in the Middle East, things are rapidly getting worse in the region. Greg Karlstrom is a Middle East correspondent for The Economist. Fighting has resumed in Gaza, to some extent in Lebanon as well, and there is growing political unrest in Israel. So all across the region now, concerns about the situation escalating. Well, let's take all of those in turn. what's the latest on the ground in Gaza? Let's talk about three things in Gaza, the first of which is the military situation.

2:32The Israeli army has been bombing Gaza for the past week. Hundreds of people have been killed in these renewed airstrikes and shelling and ground troops have also re-entered the territory. They have bisected one of the main corridors linking the north and south of Gaza. Israeli troops are encircling the city of Rafah in the south and telling civilians there to move to the north. And the Israeli defense minister is warning that Israel will permanently occupy parts of the territory if Hamas does not free all of the remaining hostages there. The second question is humanitarian aid. It has been more than two weeks now since Israel cut off the flow of supplies into Gaza and aid groups over the past week.

3:16Many of them have suspended the movement of their personnel around Gaza because they're not sure where it's safe to go. So not only supply is running low, but it's getting very hard to distribute them across the territory. And then the third issue is the plight of the 59 hostages who are still being held by Hamas in Gaza.

3:4024 of them are thought to still be alive and their families have been protesting the renewal of fighting, but so far to little effect. And you mentioned also the situation changing in Lebanon. What's going on there? Over the weekend, there were three rockets fired from southern Lebanon into Israel. Hezbollah denied responsibility for firing them. There are armed Palestinian groups in the south of Lebanon, but sometimes they act at Hezbollah's behest to give the group some plausible deniability. Whoever it was that fired those rockets, that prompted Israel to resume airstrikes in Lebanon, not only in the south of the country, but in the east as well.

4:23A number of people have been killed in those strikes. I'm more optimistic about the ceasefire in Lebanon returning to force than the one in Gaza. I think both Israel and Hezbollah still have an interest in preserving that truth. So I don't think it's about to completely fall apart, but it certainly looks a bit shakier than it did a week ago. And even a few weeks ago, there seemed to be real cause for hope, for a lasting peace, for a calming of tensions. Why do you suppose things have escalated again now? What's going on? I think there's one big reason why, which is the political interests of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister.

5:02He was very concerned that his coalition would lose its majority if he did not resume the war in Gaza, because his far-right coalition partners have made it clear that they would desert him if there was a lasting ceasefire to end that war. And it's a particularly fraught moment politically for Netanyahu right now, because Israel needs to pass a budget by the end of the month. And if it doesn't pass that budget on time per Israeli law, early elections are automatically called. So Netanyahu obviously wanted to avoid that. Resuming the fighting in Gaza has brought the far-right Jewish power party back into his coalition.

5:38That party left the government in January because of the initial ceasefire agreement. And within days of that happening, the budget made it through a committee vote. It's expected to be passed by the full Knesset before the deadline later this month. So that should, for now, allow Netanyahu to stay in office. And he needed that support to pass the budget. He also needs it right now at a time when he is escalating his attacks on the Israeli judiciary and the Israeli intelligence services. What do you mean by that? Since October 7th, Netanyahu has been determined to get rid of three senior officials.

6:16The first was the army chief who tendered his resignation earlier this year, and he has since stepped down and handed over to a new army chief. The second is Ronan Barr, the head of the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service. Last week, Netanyahu attempted to fire him. That decision has been blocked, at least temporarily, by a decision of the Supreme Court. But Netanyahu is still very determined to remove him from office because he is perceived as a political enemy. He's someone who has criticized the far right in Israel as dangerous. He warned two years ago about the dangers posed by Netanyahu's efforts to hobble the Israeli judiciary, warning that Israel's enemies might capitalize on that.

6:58And his agency is also investigating some of Netanyahu's top aides on allegations that they took money from the Gulf state of Qatar to advance Qatar's interests while Qatar was simultaneously funding Hamas in Gaza. So Netanyahu, again, keen to remove the Shin Bet director. And then the third official on his target list is the attorney general. And on Sunday, the Israeli cabinet, in an unprecedented step, approved a no-confidence motion attempting to remove her. That's only the first step in a process. She has not yet been removed from office, but Netanyahu wants her out, not least because her office is prosecuting him on multiple charges of corruption that have been working their way through the Israeli courts for a number of years now.

7:40So a remarkable situation in Israel where effectively a defendant is trying to remove the prosecutor prosecuting his case. So we're back to talking about charges that Mr. Netanyahu has been fighting, has vehemently denied for absolutely years in part, but this also has a feel of consolidating political power now in the current scene. What's your take on all of this going on right now? Right. Some of this is very similar to what was happening before October 7th. You think back to that year of mass protest in Israel when hundreds of thousands of people were out in the streets demonstrating against Netanyahu's efforts to weaken the Supreme Court, to hobble the Israeli judiciary.

8:19Those efforts had largely been put on hold after the massacre of October 7th, but Netanyahu now keen to resume those efforts. Add to that, he has had this longstanding belief that there is a deep state in Israel that is out to get him, that is undermining his premiership. He sounds a lot like his friend in the White House in that regard. And so what's happened over the past 18 months, giving him a pretext in some cases to remove those officials. He argues that Ronan Barr, the Shin Bet chief, ought to resign because he oversaw the agency's failure on October 7th. Barr has said that he accepts responsibility and that once the war is over, he does intend to tender his resignation.

9:00But this is also a way for Netanyahu to shift blame away from himself. He wants everyone else to be held responsible for what happened on October 7th, but he wants to avoid any personal responsibility for it. And what does all of that in sum mean for you in terms of prospects for peace now as things seem to be falling apart? I think the only prospect for bringing the Gaza ceasefire back into force is for Donald Trump to exert a lot of pressure on the Israeli government. I was in Washington two weeks ago, and the sense that I got speaking to people close to the administration there is that Trump is losing interest in this, that he was two months ago, very committed to bringing the ceasefire into force and trying to end the war in Gaza.

9:44But it has turned out to be more complicated than he thought. Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy, is distracted right now. He's also busy with talks between Russia and Ukraine over trying to end that war. And so there just isn't the sort of high level attention from Washington that you would need. And absent that, Netanyahu feels like he has a free hand to resume the war for as long as he needs for his own political reasons. Greg, thanks very much for joining us, as ever. Thank you, Jason.

10:29Many world leaders are finding dealing with Donald Trump a nightmare. Not so Mexico's president, Claudia Sheinbaum, who seems to be operating with impressive deftness. Trump has praised her publicly. I spoke with the president of Mexico, very nice woman, very fine woman. And she's twice won her country a month-long reprieve from threatened tariff hikes. That success has increased her approval rating to 85%, allowed her to step out of the shadow of her predecessor and mentor, Andres Manuel López Obrador, and strengthened her hand within Morena, her own party. The question is, how far is Sheinbaum's warm relationship with Trump now shaping Mexico's domestic politics?

11:12Claudia Sheinbaum has struck a great balance between both toughness and flattery that appears to have won her respect from Donald Trump, who's referred to her as a marvellous woman. Sarah Burke is our Mexico bureau chief. Now, obviously, this matters. Mexico has greater stakes in terms of what America does to it than other countries, such as, say, Canada, that aren't quite so economically dependent on the United States. So an example of how she gets this balance, her team sent to the White House this graph, and it says, look at the results on top with a nice exclamation mark. And it shows a graph of steadily dropping fentanyl flows across the border.

11:52And it has a sign saying, since Donald J. Trump came into power. So they really know how to make him feel good about himself. And she's also using this relationship and the fact that she seemed to be doing so well with her Northern counterpart to her advantage at home in domestic politics. Sarah, you say that Shane Baum is very good at making Trump feel like he's had an impact, but how much of an impact has he actually had on her domestic agenda? Well, one thing is he would definitely like to think that he's shaping her agenda, I'm sure. And he is to some degree, we can see a couple of examples when it comes to security, which is obviously the thing that he at least ostensibly says is the reason for applying tariffs, the fentanyl flows across the border and migration.

12:35So we saw a couple of examples of this. She sent 10 ,000 troops to the border in January, which she probably wouldn't have done otherwise. And on February the 27th, she took what was really a very unprecedented step of extraditing 29 alleged Mexican drug traffickers to the United States, including some really key capos. So those things wouldn't have happened without Mr. Trump. But she was already cracking down on crime, wasn't she? Exactly, Rosie. So he has influenced her in small ways. But one of the things that's been so successful about her approach is really the Mexicans aren't doing anything radically new, they're just hyping up what they've already been doing.

13:15So security is an area that Shane Baum said even before she came to power in October that she was going to get tougher on and we've seen that. She has much more of a security strategy than her predecessor that involves better investigative powers, better intelligence gathering. We've seen more proactive things such as more seizures of fentanyl in labs across the country. Her predecessor's handling of security was rated incredibly badly, even though he was very popular. And so this was something she was going to focus on. But domestic outrage is only pushing that further. In March, early March, there was a ranch discovered in Jalisco, which is a state of Mexico, that was used by the Jalisco New Generation cartel.

13:57And there was found three cremation ovens, hundreds of pairs of shoes. It was basically used as a place to kidnap people, forcibly recruit trainees and get rid of them. And it's really caused shockwaves and continues to cause shockwaves across Mexico. So Sarah, how much do you think Shamebound's actually using Trump as a cover for changing direction from her predecessors or from what she'd said before? At the moment, you could say, for example, that he's nudging her towards a more aggressive security policy. But I think the key thing will be if we see her using him as an excuse to potentially go after corrupt members of her own party or corrupt officials who are perhaps working in collusion with gangs.

14:41That's politically a very hard thing to do. But you could imagine her saying, you know what, I have to do this or Trump's going to slap on tariffs. And people are particularly watching this point because in his first order to put on tariffs, which then were delayed, it was written in the document that there was this intolerable alliance between Mexico's government and criminal groups. And so that's obviously something that if she wanted to, she could try and use as a cover. And there are signs that Claudia Sheinbaum wants to push for other changes in other areas. And what might those other things be?

15:14What other policy shifts might she push for? One of the things she's pushing for is greater involvement of the private sector. Now, her predecessor was very hostile to the private sector. And really, because of the economic threats that Trump is putting on, she has to think much more about how is she going to keep Mexico's economy going. And that's obviously going to require private sector investment, whether it's in energy, whether it's in investments, FDI, other things. So you're seeing her being nudged in that direction. And Sarah, we know that Trump changes his mind a lot, often changes his relationships with people.

15:48Do you think that Shane Baum's relationship with Trump will continue to be advantageous to her? It's really difficult to tell because Donald Trump is not someone who's predictable. And as a couple of analysts I've talked to in recent days have pointed out to me, yes, they have a good relationship. But at the end of the day, tariffs are very likely to be coming on April the 2nd when he puts them on globally. And Canada, with whom he has a terrible relationship, also managed to avert tariffs, even if it was a much more hostile negotiation over them. So it's really unpredictable. But what is clear is that Shane Baum obviously understands how to deal with Donald Trump, and that is going to help her and her country to navigate this very difficult period ahead.

16:33Sarah, thanks so much. Always good to talk to you. Thanks, Rosie.

16:54The map on the hotel wall where Richard Forty and his family were staying said, good fossils here. So Richard Forty, who was then 14, didn't hesitate. He grabbed his geologist's hammer and he was off to the beach. Anne Rowe is The Economist's obituaries editor. And there he spent a lot of rather grey, drizzly British summer days whacking at limestone rocks, hoping something would appear. Nothing much turned up until one day he just struck his hammer on what looked like a likely one, and there inside was a trilobite, looking a little bit like a kipper spread out.

17:44Trilobites were around between the beginning of the Cambrian, which is 500 million years ago and the end of the Permian, which is 250 million years ago. So they were successful and thriving for 300 million years, but they were probably wiped out in the great mass extinction at the end of the Permian. They were very distinctive. Their name came from the three lobes that divided up the back, and the back was made of hard calcite. Underneath there was a much softer part and when you found fossils of the trilobite, usually all the undersides, the legs and so on were not there, but the back was and the head was and on the head usually the most extraordinary excrescences and decorations and interesting protuberances which Richard Forty didn't quite understand the use of.

18:40He had looked into a trilobite's eyes and the eyes were one of the most fascinating things about it, because those two were made of calcite. They could have as many as 15 ,000 little calcite lenses in each eye, which gave them a most fantastic view of the world in fragmented light.

19:07Those eyes did it, and trilobites became his obsession. He went to study paleontology, the study of fossils at King's College, Cambridge, and then he joined the Natural History Museum, where he rose eventually to senior researcher and stayed there for 30 years. He got into trouble at first because he filled his work diary just with the single word studied trilobite. That was all he did all day. But sometimes he had expeditions. Once he had one to Spitsbergen in the Arctic, in which, for some reason, he suddenly found himself the sole possessor of more than a hundred beautiful trilobites, and they were all new to science.

19:50He was determined to bring this extraordinary creature and its life, and what it could see as it lived, to the public's attention. They were not just beautiful creatures, although he did find them beautiful and often said so. They were useful because he knew which ones lived in the deep sea and which others lived at the edge of landmasses. It was generally known that the modern continents broke away from a single landmass. But what was less well known was that there were separate continents before a single landmass congealed. So that was the map he was trying to reconstruct by studying trilobites.

20:32and he found he could in fact remake the globe just by calculating where different species had lived.

20:47His greatest joy at the end of his life, however, was his wood. He did a great many television programs and even journeyed with David Attenborough on some of them and the money he earned from these programs enabled him to buy four acres of beech and bluebell wood in the Chiltons near where he lived. And this became a wonderful project for him because he wanted to catalogue everything that he had ever found in the wood and everything that had ever happened there. So he kept a sort of cabinet of curiosities in which he put all his finds made out of timber from the wood, and his finds included a dormouse nest and papery eggshells and flints that he'd cut into sections.

21:32And he also wrote papers on the history of the wood, from when it was wild to when it was used as a source for furniture, to when it came under threat for house building for Russian oligarchs, a whole history of the place and a natural history of it. Because when he looked at himself, he was known as a paleontologist, but he preferred to call himself a naturalist. and a boy naturalist at that because he still kept that never-ending curiosity. He said he was always the boy who would pick up a stone just to see what was crawling underneath it. And of course, a boy who had hammered open a rock on a Welsh beach and had found a trilobite gazing up at him.

22:22Anne Rowe on Richard Forty, who has died aged 89.

22:39That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

22:48Thank you.