Passing judgment on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was never going to be simple for the International Criminal Court. Even harder than acting fairly and impartially would be appearing to have done so, in a conflict that stirs fierce passions the world over.

On top of that, equality before the law is a basic principle of justice, but until this point, the ICC has mainly prosecuted authoritarian and non-Western leaders. Almost all of the court’s top funders are Western democracies or their allies. Now, for the first time in its history, the ICC would be asked to assess the actions of a democratically elected government allied with the West, and to show that it could do so without special favor.

Last Thursday, the ICC rose to this challenge. A three-person panel at the court approved arrest-warrant requests for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The Israeli officials are accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the murder and starvation of Palestinians.

[Eugene Kontorovich: The International Criminal Court’s folly]

Back in May, prosecutors also asked for arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, who stand accused of extermination, murder, rape, and sexual assault against Israeli citizens during the attacks of October 7. Two of the three (Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar) have since been killed by Israel. The ICC issued the arrest warrant for the third, Mohammed Deif. Israel claims to have killed him too, but Hamas has not confirmed his death.

The three judges who made the decision hail from Benin, France, and Slovenia, but were elected by all 124 member states of the ICC and went through a rigorous vetting process. Their months-long deliberations included engaging with the Israeli government and assessing its claim that its own courts could handle the matter.

Since its foundation, in 2002, the ICC has investigated crimes all over the world. It is limited in both the types of crimes it can investigate (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression) and its territorial jurisdiction (restricted mostly to its member states, which include countries in the European Union, Latin America, the antipodes, and half of Africa). Yet it has managed to levy charges for crimes committed in 17 countries and issue arrest warrants for despots such as Vladimir Putin, Muammar Qaddafi, and Omar al-Bashir.

For years, however, many non-Western leaders have accused the court of having a pro-Western bias. The arrest warrants against Israeli leaders offer the ICC an opportunity to prove otherwise. But much will depend on how seriously countries allied with Israel take the court’s orders.

The court’s members include the majority of Western countries, which will now be obligated to arrest Netanyahu or Gallant if either sets foot in their territory. Canada, one of the court’s biggest funders, was among the first to commit to doing so. Belgium, Ireland, Portugal, Norway, Australia, Spain, Liechtenstein, the Czech Republic, Finland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Slovenia have followed suit. Most other Western countries have treated the warrant with vagueness, generally agreeing that it is valid without committing specifically to arresting Netanyahu and Gallant.

Initially, only one EU member, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, a self-described “illiberal democracy,” outright opposed the warrant and even asked Netanyahu to visit. But on November 27, France declared that it considered Netanyahu immune from the ICC’s order because Israel is not a member of the court. If this principle is to be applied elsewhere, Putin, too, should be considered immune, given Russia’s non-membership in the ICC. The United States is also not a member of the court and is in fact openly hostile to its operations. The Biden administration has declared its disagreement with the arrest warrants, and surrogates of President-Elect Donald Trump have accused the court of anti-Semitism, promising a much tougher approach when Trump comes into office.

Netanyahu, like many others wanted by the court, will probably never appear before it. But that doesn’t make the ruling meaningless. International law has always been aspirational, in part because the world lacks an international law-enforcement agency (Interpol serves only to coordinate among various national police forces). But international justice has more significance in the world today than at any previous time in human history. Dozens of treaties obligate countries around the world and are referenced every day in national and transnational courts, sometimes leading to real results for victims and perpetrators. Viewed from a long historical perspective, this is a grand achievement. And last week’s ruling, by demonstrating an equal application of international law to a Western country, advances that cause.

In Governing the World: The History of an Idea, the historian Mark Mazower writes that the quest for a global court began before the First World War, with an enthusiastic, international group of peace activists who hoped that arbitration could bring an end to war. President Theodore Roosevelt, an ardent supporter of that movement, helped give tooth to the Permanent Court of Arbitration, founded in 1899 at The Hague. But advocates’ hopes soon crashed into the gory realities of the 20th century. The First World War killed millions. The League of Nations, created in its aftermath, was soon overtaken by events: Liberalism retreated behind fascism and communism in the 1930s, and a Second World War followed the first, culminating in atrocities with little precedent in human history.

[Arash Azizi: The problem with boycotting Israel]

Still, the quest for international justice did not die. The defeat of Nazi Germany and of Japan, and the revelation of the extraordinary extent of their crimes, led to international trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo and the foundation of the United Nations.

Nearly a century later, the International Criminal Court was founded during the optimistic period that followed the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1991. Democracy appeared ascendant, maybe even inevitable. The genocides in Rwanda and the territories of the former Yugoslavia tempered that period’s hopes—but they were met with international tribunals, which held out the promise that war criminals could no longer expect impunity. A United Nations conference in 1998, attended by representatives of 161 states, adopted the Rome Statute, which established the ICC four years later.

Many of the legal professionals who went to work for the ICC had been shaped by the experience of working for the ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, which were relatively successful in delivering verdicts against human-rights offenders. For example, the Iranian Canadian lawyer Payam Akhavan served as a legal adviser at the tribunals for both Rwanda and Yugoslavia and then argued cases before the ICC, where he represented post-Qaddafi Libya as the country attempted to bring officials of the former regime to justice. In his book, In Search of a Better World: A Human Rights Odyssey, Akhavan describes the establishment of the ICC as the consummation of the idea of justice propounded at Nuremberg.

But the ICC has been bedeviled by controversy for much of its short life. In its early years, the court focused largely on African war criminals, because many of its member states were African. This led to allegations of bias. In the years since, it has expanded its operations across the world. And yet, most people live in countries where the court has no jurisdiction. Powerful nations such as China, India, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia never joined. The United States, Israel, and Russia signed the Rome Statute but then withdrew their signatures. The year the court was founded, the United States adopted the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, in which it promised to take any necessary measures to release “any U.S. or allied personnel” detained by the court.

A far simpler way of denying the court’s authority is to ignore it. In 2015, South Africa refused to arrest Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir despite an ICC warrant. Earlier this year, Mongolia all but rolled out the red carpet for a visit from Russian President Vladimir Putin, the ICC’s warrant for his arrest notwithstanding.

But none of this means that the court, or the quest for international justice more broadly, is ineffectual. Putin has had to skip many an international summit (he skipped the recent Group of 20 meeting in Brazil, just as he did last year’s BRICS meeting in South Africa). And the ICC’s legal work can be used by other courts to prosecute alleged perpetrators. In the case of Israel, Netanyahu and Gallant are unlikely to ever be tried in The Hague, but the world has become much smaller for them. The warrants also provide an opportunity for Israel’s judicial system to prove its mettle: The ICC has declared that if Israel chooses to prosecute the allegations in its national court system, the warrants will be dropped.

The quest to have human conflicts decided by men and women in robes and wigs, and not just those in berets and boots, should resonate deeply with Israel’s founding ideals. The state’s declaration of independence in 1948 promised that it was “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.” But it anchored this right in international law, pointing to the newly formed United Nations, which is mentioned seven times in the declaration.

Israel’s first government was led by nationalists and socialists. But the country’s first justice minister, and the architect of its judicial system, was one of the few signatories of the declaration who defined himself primarily as a liberal. A Berlin-born lawyer, Pinchas Rosen had moved to the British Mandate for Palestine in 1926, at the age of 39, having earned law degrees in Germany before the country’s liberal traditions were destroyed by Nazism.

Israel was hardly a liberal paradise in its early years. It enforced a military rule over its Arab citizens until 1966. But Rosen did establish a robust court system and was adamant that the State of Israel was to be a state of law. The country joined the United Nations and, with such legendary diplomats as the British-educated Abba Eban, overcame the isolation of its early years to establish a seat for itself at the table of international law. Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories since 1967 has rightly called that commitment to the law into question; but it has also been the subject of contestation within the country.

[Gershom Gorenberg: Israel’s disaster foretold]

Practically all of Israel’s political leaders have condemned the ICC’s decision. But some voices of dissent are audible. Naama Lazimi, a progressive member of the Knesset, called Thursday “a sad day for Israel” and put the blame for the decision on Netanyahu, not the court. “This was unnecessary,” she wrote on X, adding that it could have been avoided if the Israeli government had undertaken an independent inquiry and pursued a settlement to end the war and return the hostages held by Hamas. “But Netanyahu chose and still chooses his own position and cynical and personal interests,” she concluded: “The Hague has come out against Netanyahu, Netanyahu against Israel.” The Israeli organization Peace Now has taken a similar position, blaming the country’s leadership.

The long-term interests of Israel and those of enthusiasts for international law need not diverge. As a small country with many ill-wishers, surrounded by militias that clamor for its destruction, Israel often feels itself under siege and classifies any action against it as an unforgivable betrayal. But the country owes much of its past success to its recognition under international law and its membership in the community of democratic nations. Illegally occupying the Palestinian territories, and disregarding competent international forums such as ICC, serve to undermine that status. A world where liberal democratic norms, such as respect for international legal institutions, are more prevalent will ultimately be a safer one for Israel, especially if it wishes to fulfill the dream of its founders to be a Jewish and democratic state.  

The call from The Hague should thus be seen as an urgent message that the country needs to correct its course and step back from the campaign it has pursued since October 2023. True friends of Israel are not those who attempt to shield it from international justice. They are those who remind it that as a sovereign nation, it has the right to defend itself—but not the right to be immune from legal judgment.

When you hear that thousands of writers have signed a petition, you can already guess what they are calling for: What other than boycotting Israel could generate such enthusiasm among the literati?

A staggering 6,000 writers and publishing professionals have signed a letter to address “the most profound moral, political and cultural crisis of the 21st century.” They are calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions. The letter says that these institutions have played a crucial role in “normalizing … injustices” and that cooperating with them harms Palestinians—the implication being that withholding cooperation will help Palestinians. Signatories include some of the best writers alive. If you like to read, chances are a favorite of yours is on here. Among the best-known are the novelists Percival Everett, Sally Rooney, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Annie Ernaux. Some of my own favorites include the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, the Canadian novelist Miriam Toews, and the British critic Owen Hatherley.

[Read: The cowardice of open letters]

Predictably, the letter has led to a backlash. Almost 1,000 writers issued a counter-letter. They include the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright David Mamet, the essayist Adam Gopnik, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, and the Nobel laureate Herta Müller. My favorite signatory on this one is another Nobel laureate, the fiery left-wing feminist Austrian Elfriede Jelinek, known for her 1983 masterpiece The Piano Teacher.  

I am as horrified as anyone by Israel’s brutal and criminal war in Gaza and its decades-long regime of occupation. As a writer, my primary solidarity is with the dozens of journalists killed in the conflict in the past year, the majority of whom were Palestinian. But I also have no doubt as to which side of this literary civil war I am on.

I’ve never joined a cultural boycott of any country—not Israel, not Russia, and not Iran, my own country of birth. The latter informs my outlook on the issue.

I grew up in one of the most culturally isolated countries on Earth. Our case was of course very different from Israel’s. Iran’s isolation was partly the doing of its own government, which banned foreign cultural products that violated its religious and political strictures—meaning most of them. Cinemas hardly ever showed newly released foreign films (rare exceptions included Michael Moore’s Sicko and Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile). The censors constrained what foreign literature Iranian publishers could translate and publish.

But our isolation also owed to the international sanctions on Iran that made any financial exchange with foreign entities into a potentially criminal affair. For example, we might have accessed banned foreign literature by ordering copies in original languages from abroad—except that this was not so easy in a country that had no credit cards, partly because international banks faced legal penalties for transacting with anybody inside it. When I was a teenager, my mom once helped me order a copy of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation through Amazon, using a prepaid card we went to some trouble to obtain from Dubai. The ordering process was labyrinthine, and even then, the book took six months to arrive. (My Palestinian friends in the occupied West Bank tell me of similar travails, because their post is sometimes held by Israel for months.) In 2002, Iran’s clandestine nuclear program was exposed, and the United States imposed a progression of sanctions that effectively blocked even this circuitous route. Today, many such simple exchanges between Iran and Western countries are close to impossible.

Some opponents of the Iranian regime abroad have reinforced Iran’s isolation by equating cultural exchange with an unwanted “normalization” of the regime. They have protested the inclusion of Iranian films at festivals and the travel of Western cultural figures to Iran. I left Iran in 2008, but I have never supported such efforts, because I saw for myself how cultural isolation served Iran’s oppressors. Many of us in Iranian society wanted nothing more than to find allies, counterparts, and inspiration abroad, and our regime wanted nothing less for us. Boycotting the country simply advanced the cause of our adversaries—namely, to cut the Iranian population off from influences that could bolster its courage and expand the reach of its solidarity.

That the Iranian people yearned for such contact was evident to those Western thinkers who did manage to visit. Jürgen Habermas, Immanuel Wallerstein, Michael Ignatieff, and Richard Rorty were among those who traveled to Iran and were treated like pop stars, filling meeting halls and taking part in enthusiastic exchanges with Iranians. Sadly these visits have dwindled in recent years, not just because of the regime's restrictions, but also because sanctions make any such exchange a tremendous hassle and a potential violation of U.S. law. (Foreign visitors also fear coming, because of the regime’s grim track record of taking Western citizens hostage.) That Iranians can still enjoy a good deal of foreign literature in Persian translation owes entirely to the courage and persistence of Iranian publishers, many of whom have tangled with both the censors, who determine what is permissible, and the sanctions, which make dealings with publishers around the world difficult.

When I hear of boycotts on Israeli writers, I think of those Israeli writers who have been published in Persian translation regardless of these obstacles. I ask myself who would benefit if fewer Iranians could read Amos Oz’s enchanting fairy tale, Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest, rendered in Persian by the Marxist poet Shahrouz Rashid. The book tells of two children in an unnamed village who decide, against the advice of their parents, to seek out a demon that has taken all the animals away. Some critics saw this story as an allusion to the Holocaust. I remember discussing it with friends in Tehran and finding within it our own meanings and references. We dreamed of meeting Oz, who died in 2018, and of sharing our interpretations with him. What good is served by severing such cross-cultural exchange?

Some supporters of boycotts will address these concerns by saying that their means are selective, that they punish only those writers or other artists who are linked, financially or ideologically, with states engaged in objectionable behavior, and that doing so has a track record of success in changing state behavior. But the question of which artists to tar as complicit with their governments’ policies is not a simple one, and boycotts are a blunt instrument at best.

For instance, the writers’ petition explicitly calls for sanctioning only those Israeli cultural institutions that are “complicit in violating Palestinian rights” or “have never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.” Any Israeli cultural institution that has had to rely on state funding, in any form or at any point, could conceivably fall afoul of this criterion. Perhaps this explains why LitHub, the outlet that first published the letter, has done away with niceties and simply headlined it as a “pledge to boycott Israeli cultural institutions,” as have most other outlets.

[Read: When writers silence writers]

Since it was founded in 2005, the Palestinian-led movement for boycotts, sanctions, and divestment (BDS) against Israel has shown that it likes to paint with a broad brush, censuring organizations that promote contact between Palestinians and Israelis on the grounds that they “normalize” Israel: In the past, BDS has boycotted the Arab-Jewish orchestra started by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said; one of its most recent targets was Standing Together, a courageous group of anti-war Israeli citizens, both Jewish and Palestinian, whose leaders and members have faced arrest in their long fight against Israel’s occupation. A similar zeal seems to animate those who have promoted a boycott of Russian culture following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Many of those who advocate cultural sanctions point to South Africa as the shining example of boycott success. As is often the case with politicized appeals to history, the purpose here is to draw a strong moral injunction: Who could possibly stand on the side of the apartheid regime, which was triumphantly brought down in the 1990s and replaced by a multiracial democracy? But the history of the boycott movement against South Africa is more complicated than those analogizing it commonly acknowledge.

Started in 1959 following a call by the African National Congress, the movement encompassed pledges not to work with South African universities or publishers and not to perform in South African venues. Several major U.S. publishers refused to provide books to South African libraries. The boycott’s proponents included not only fiery left-wingers but liberal doyens, such as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the American Library Association (ALA), which refused to work with any publisher that traded with South Africa. In 1980, the United Nations General Assembly voted to back the boycott and asked member states to “prevent all cultural, academic, sports, and other exchanges with the racist regime of South Africa.” When apartheid finally collapsed in the 1990s, Nelson Mandela proudly proclaimed the return of his country to the international community.

But for all that they may have achieved, the boycotts were far from uncontroversial, even among opponents of apartheid. Many South African trade unions and social movements were in favor of them, but the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the main workers’ organization that helped bring down the regime, was concerned that divestment could lead to the loss of jobs and pensions. Parts of that group embraced selective boycotts instead of a blanket ban.

Sanctions were even more contested in the art world. In 1975, Khabi Mngoma, the legendary principal of Johannesburg’s African Music and Drama Association (AMDA), which had produced stars such as Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, visited New York to campaign against the boycott movement. “We feel isolated inside South Africa,” he told The New York Times, “and we also feel isolated by the outside world.”

Mngoma was especially incensed that Black Americans were boycotting his country. “The students in our school, for example, would gain tremendously simply by being exposed in seminars and other classes to the expertise of black American artists,” he said. “By staying away, blacks here do us a great disservice.” But the zealots of the boycott movement didn’t listen to the likes of Mngoma. In 1972, Muhammad Ali was scheduled to compete in South Africa, but a vociferous campaign dissuaded him from doing so.

Mngoma believed that engagement could be more constructive than sanction. On an earlier trip to New York, in 1968, he met with theater personalities and tried to persuade them to perform in South Africa instead of boycotting; they could tax white audiences and channel the money to Black theater. That strategy had some successes. The Broadway musicals Cabaret and Fiddler on the Roof were performed in South Africa and contributed tens of thousands of dollars in royalties to AMDA. Later, the American playwright Arthur Miller agreed to stage his plays in South Africa, but only for desegregated audiences. The singer Paul Simon recorded his Graceland album in South Africa in 1986, insisting on the importance of working with Black artists in the country. A year later, he headlined an enormous anti-apartheid concert in Zimbabwe with Makeba and Masekela. That same year, boycott proponents picketed his concert in London’s Royal Albert Hall and denounced him.

Just how important a role the boycotts played in ending apartheid is disputed. Mattie C. Webb, a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at Yale, tells me they were significant, “but they were only one factor in a broader movement that also included internal social movements against apartheid. The sanctions themselves were limited, and frankly came rather late in the broader struggle against apartheid.” Lior Sternfeld, an Israeli American historian of Iran at Penn State, put a finer point on this, telling me: “I have tried in vain to find any empirical evidence that the boycott movement helped topple the South African regime.”

Sternfeld has taken an interest in the question because of his work involving Israel and Iran. He is a critic of Israeli policy—both the occupation and the conduct of the war in Gaza—and he makes no brief for Israeli universities, which he says have tried “to get cozy with the government.” He does favor some sanctions—for example, kicking Israel out of the FIFA World Cup and other sporting events, as has been done to Russia. But he believes that cultural boycotts will primarily hurt Israeli intellectuals, who are already demonized by their government.

“I have always believed that activism is about engagement, whereas BDS is articulated as a call for disengagement,” he told me. “I oppose the boycotts because it is important to have some sort of a bridge to Israeli intelligentsia.”

Sternfeld’s position, like mine, is informed by observing the results of sanctions against Iran. He points specifically to How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare, a book published earlier this year by four Iranian American scholars, which argues that isolation has had adverse effects on Iran’s political culture and has counterproductively strengthened the regime’s repressive apparatus. The Iranian scholar Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, an outspoken opponent of the sanctions on Iran, has raised questions about boycotting Israel for similar reasons, to the ire of some on the left.

Lately Iran and Israel have found themselves ever more dangerously at odds, and the lack of people-to-people contact between the two countries doesn’t help. That’s one reason Sternfeld accepted a surprising overture in September: The Iranian mission to the United Nations invited him to attend an interfaith meeting with President Masoud Pezeshkian on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. This encounter made Pezeshkian the first post-revolutionary Iranian president to knowingly and openly meet with an Israeli citizen. Iranian hard-liners attacked him for it relentlessly. As for Sternfeld, some critics of the Iranian regime in the United States denounced him for taking the meeting, even as hard-liners in Tehran called him a Zionist infiltrator.

Iran bans its citizens from visiting Israel, but numerous Iranian writers and artists in exile have traveled to the country anyway in recent years. Their visits have helped show Israelis, used to hearing of the “Iranian threat” from their government, a more human side of the country.

The filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf was a guest of honor at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2013. Makhmalbaf was once an Islamist revolutionary; he spent four and a half years in prison before the 1979 revolution. But he went through a remarkable metamorphosis in the 1990s, becoming an anti-regime dissident and winding up in exile in Paris.

“I am one of the ambassadors for Iranian art to Israel, and my message was of peace and friendship,” he told The Guardian of his trip at the time. “When I flew to Israel last week, I felt like a man flying to another planet, like a man flying to the moon.” Makhmalbaf criticized the logic of boycotters, saying, “If I make a film in Iran, and you come to my country to watch it, does it mean you confirm dictatorship in Iran and you have no respect for political prisoners in Iran?” he asked rhetorically of his critics. “If you go to the US, does it mean you confirm their attack on Afghanistan and Iraq?"

Orly Cohen, a Tehran-born scholar who has lived in Israel most of her life, has helped organize the trips of several Iranian artists to the country. Now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Haifa, she has also translated the work of Iranian poets into Hebrew.

“In the Israeli news, all Israelis hear of Iran is war,” she told me by phone. “They don’t know about Iran’s culture and how much beautiful art is made in the country today.”

[Read: Iranian dissidents don’t want war with Israel–but they can’t stop it]

Cohen translated a book of poems by Mehdi Mousavi, known in Iran as the “father of postmodern poetry,” and facilitated his visit to Israel last year for its publication. He was the subject of a cover story in Haaretz, and he struck up a relationship with a well-known Iraqi-born poet, Ronny Someck. “He was seen as a bridge of friendship,” Cohen told me. “For the first time,” she said of Mousavi’s Israeli audience, “they saw Iran through Iranian, not Israeli, eyes.”

Cohen also helped organize an exhibition about Iranian feminist movements at Jerusalem’s Museum of Islamic Art. Israeli feminists took an interest, but what surprised Cohen more was the feedback from religious Jews, some of whom were inspired by the example of Iranian women standing up to religious repression.

Boycotts preclude such experiences and connections. In the years since 2005, when the Palestinian movement adopted BDS, the tenuous links that once allowed Israeli and Palestinian scholars and artists to be in contact have been cut one after another. Israeli peace activists used to travel frequently to the West Bank and speak at events there. But in 2014, Amira Hass, Haaretz’s correspondent in Ramallah and a vociferous critic of the Israeli occupation, was kicked out of an event at Bir Zeit University by two professors.

Some boycotters do seem concerned about punishing people like Hass, hence the guidelines that carve out ostensible exceptions for those who are critical of the policies of the boycotted state. But I don’t see how any freedom-loving writer can embrace such a position. What distinguishes us from authoritarians and censors if we impose ideological litmus tests to decide which writers can present their work at festivals—if we ask them to declare their opposition to a political regime before they are allowed to speak?

This world is full of walls that divide peoples, and of regimes that impose ideological purity tests on writers. If writers are to use our collective powers, it should not be to add to them.

The small town of Irvinestown in County Fermanagh is the final resting place for 82 young airmen.

Waking up to the election results on Wednesday, many Americans who opposed Donald Trump may have felt inclined to resent their neighbors. How could more than 70 million of them vote for a convicted felon who had hobnobbed with a fascist, showed little respect for the country’s institutions or alliances, and couldn’t even promise not to rule as a dictator? Some foreign observers on social media seemed to react similarly, seeing in Trump the worst traits of American caricatures: egomania, narcissism, chauvinism, carelessness.

But these prejudices were unfair on November 4, and they are still unfair on November 8. Yes, Trump is a true native son of this country, and some of its worst tendencies have allowed him to flourish. And yes, those who care about the future of the United States have every right to be worried about the trends he has unleashed or exploited—authoritarianism, misogyny, conspiracism.

And yet: This country has always been a big, beautiful land of contradictions. As an Iranian Canadian socialist who moved here from Europe in 2017, I hear my share of anti-American chatter from left-leaning Middle Easterners, Canadians, and Europeans. Many seize on simple stories about America as a land of hyper-capitalism, violence, racism, and imperialism—and such stories are not in short supply. The United States remains the world’s only developed country not to have public health care. It is by far the world’s biggest military power. And expressions of racial animus can be loud, deadly, and persistent.

[Jennifer Senior: Focus on the things that matter]

But to reduce America to these clichés is to miss much that is extraordinary. This same country of megalomaniac capitalism is home to public libraries and research universities that are the envy of many European social democracies—institutions tended by millions of Americans deeply committed to their survival. Those who imagine America as a country of racists perhaps haven’t actually visited its small towns, where mosques, Hindu temples, and gurdwaras prosper next to churches and synagogues. In this supposedly immigrant-hating country, Trump banned entry to the residents of seven Muslim countries in 2017—only for thousands of Americans to show up at airports in protest. Thousands more Americans staff immigrant-rights groups. For a narcissistic country, the United States has a lot of excellent public museums that acknowledge historical injustice and encourage self-reflection.

This country got its start as a naively daring social experiment already riven with contradictions. A group of European slave owners on ethnically cleansed land pledged to establish a nation whose self-evident truth was the equality of all. And yet, what they founded was a breathtakingly dynamic republic whose tree of creativity has never ceased leafing. The hopes vested in the United States have been sometimes vindicated, sometimes dashed. Chattel slavery endured here long after it was eradicated in Britain. But in 1860, Americans did elect a president who brought about its abolition at the end of a bloody civil war. The postwar promise of Reconstruction gave way to Dixiecrat rule and Jim Crow, but the American civil-rights movement of the 1960s was to become the most inspiring example of civil disobedience of its era, encapsulated in the call of Martin Luther King Jr. for the United States to “live up to the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

American actions abroad have also been contested and contradictory. In the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, Washington played the role of imperial power. The same Washington helped establish the League of Nations in an effort to end all war—before the U.S. Senate refused to join it, undermining its efficacy. The United States first vowed to stay out of World War II, then joined the Allies to help defeat fascism on the beaches of Normandy and the plains of Manchuria. After the war, the United States helped establish democracies in Japan and West Germany—during the same era in which it took part in organizing an antidemocratic coup in Iran.

[Listen: Are we living in a different America?]

The essence of America has always been the battle over its essence. No one election has ever determined its complete or permanent nature, and that is as true now as it was in 1860 and 1876. If today’s America is the America of Donald Trump, it is also the America of those who would stand up to him.

Don’t give up on this beautiful country. Its best traditions are now in danger, and no special genius of constitutional design will automatically keep them intact. In the hands of a president who may wish to model himself on Vladimir Putin, democratic institutions will be tested like never before. Americans will have to fight to safeguard them at every level of government. Daunting as this task may be, I have faith that Americans will rise to it. Trump may be the Founders’ nightmare, but their dreams can still outlive him.

Feminist fiction turns on an unresolvable tension: Writers must acknowledge patriarchy’s near-universal reach without paving over the acute specificity of women’s lives. What makes this difficult is that misogyny, though mean, is not clever; it deploys the same old tricks, over and over again. Yet not all women respond to sexism with identical emotional choreography. Even those who share the same culture will not always see one another’s experiences clearly; solidarity is not a given. This friction between collective struggle and individual personhood animates Miss Kim Knows, a new collection of eight stories from the South Korean author Cho Nam-Joo, translated by Jamie Chang.

Like her star-making novel, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, which was published in 2016, translated into English in 2020, and subsequently longlisted for a National Book Award, Miss Kim Knows focuses on the quotidian lives of Korean women. Most of the collection’s primary characters are middle-class working adults, although a few are elderly or nearing retirement, and the youngest is a newly minted fifth grader. Across these varied seasons of life, Cho’s characters contend with—and repudiate—the insidious influence of male-dominated social structures on their relationships, both intimate and professional. Characters break up with their boyfriends, or reject traditional domestic roles. A widow changes her name from Mallyeo, or “last girl”—chosen by her parents to summon boy children—to Dongju, “bronze bead,” a nickname bestowed by her beloved elder sister. Another woman, unjustly fired, refuses to leave quietly and instead seeks revenge on her workplace.

Decidedly a companion to Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, Miss Kim Knows is Cho’s third book to be translated into English (in 2019 she published the novel Saha, which is set in a corporatized dystopia). Again, Cho invokes the name Kim, in this case to refer to a key character in the title story, as well as other characters throughout the collection, both principal and peripheral. Kim, one of the most common last names in Korea, connotes, in her fiction, an everywoman. At first glance, the repetition of such a name might register as homogenizing, a slapdash effort to unify Korean women in their shared plight. As Cho takes pains to convey, sexism saturates nearly every corner of South Korean society: in the blatant preference for male children common especially among elder generations; in the widespread tolerance of sexual and physical violence against women; in workplace gender discrimination. Yet the might of Cho’s storytelling resides in her tender precision; her style is distinguished by keen attention to each character’s particular foibles and agitations.

[Read: The real reason South Koreans aren’t having babies]

In Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, the titular character develops a bizarre postpartum psychosis, which seems at first like a direct response to the exhaustion of new motherhood. Yet, as Cho emphasizes, Jiyoung’s illness is not a stand-alone phenomenon; rather, it marks a breaking point, a powerful psychological crack under the punishing exertion required to navigate a society built for men. Jiyoung begins to impersonate other women’s voices, “some of them … living, others … dead, all of them women she knew … Truly, flawlessly, completely, she became that person.” The metaphor performs a balancing act: Jiyoung is just one woman among millions, but sexism is so commonplace that she easily inhabits these other personas. This ethos of fellowship, without implying identical experience, underpins the Kim motif across the two works, and renders Cho’s fiction both sensitive and philosophically cogent.

When Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 was published in English, Cho described her motivations as explicitly political. As she explained in an interview with The New York Times, her goal was to make sexism in Korea “a public debate.” (She succeeded. A national conversation on gender blossomed after the novel’s publication; politicians and pop-culture figures alike championed it.) That righteous intent informs both narrative scope and tone: Kim Jiyoung is relentlessly diligent in its portrait of a woman undone by the ravages of her society. The reader takes leave of the novel bone-chilled, their stomach crackling with uneasy urgency, as if they held in their hands a feminist pamphlet, rather than a work of fiction.

Miss Kim Knows shares the political concerns of Cho’s first novel, but elaborates on them. This makes it a more emotionally refined work of literature, populated by more introspective characters. “I’m not doing anything productive, just taking step after step towards death each day. Does my life have meaning?” wonders the elderly narrator of “Under the Plum Tree,” the collection’s opening story, as she reflects on the quiet routineness of old age. This is a typical enough question to ask oneself, especially in the twilight of one’s life. But the anxiety in this case feels more specific: How does a woman abide, even enjoy, a life scaffolded by ideologies and traditions that diminish her?

Unlike Kim Jiyoung, the characters in Miss Kim Knows are, for the most part, not in crisis, at least not in the present. But neither are they satisfied, and Cho meticulously renders this discontent. When the narrator of “Dead Set” recalls her older brother’s domineering influence over their family affairs, it feels “like swallowing a very tiny, fragile fishbone every day.” Distressed by her only child’s pregnancy announcement, Hyogyeong, the narrator of “Night of Aurora” (the collection’s strongest, most full-bodied story) confesses that after years of grueling domestic ministry—maintained while also advancing a career outside the home—she’s looking forward to retirement. And yet she knows that, like many Korean grandmothers, she will be expected to devote herself to the care of another child, her own desires perpetually deferred.

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The conflicts at the center of these stories reside in the characters’ inability, or outright refusal, to swallow their discomforts in the interest of preserving the peace. Across this collection, Cho’s characters search for agency and sometimes even find it. Still, these women understand their prescribed roles; they are sensitive to the expectations of the people who love them, or who depend on them. Many of their decisions—whether to leave a relationship, to deny a family member support, or to publish fiction based on experience as the victim of sibling abuse—emerge from painful processes of self-determination, and they arrive at them alone.

Meanwhile, the men who populate these stories have little sway over women’s choices. Some are rendered obsolete through death, others through distance. Many are troublesome—or worse—but the impediments they pose are not insuperable. “Dear Hyunnam Oppa,” a goodbye letter from an unnamed narrator to her ex-boyfriend, chronicles the latter’s manipulative, gaslighting abuse. But more important, it records the narrator’s assertions of hard-won truths: that her boyfriend corrupted her reality through derogation, lies, and systematic isolation; that she does not want to have children; that she prefers her meat grilled, rather than boiled.

“Dear Hyunnam Oppa” is the only story that foregrounds a breakup, but its cool appraisal of straight romantic partnerships—and its implication that women often gain little by them—abides throughout the collection. In Miss Kim Knows, heterosexual relationships are either actively dissolving or recalled with ambivalence. Though Cho avoids universal gestures, one thing her primary female characters have in common is that they are largely uninterested in finding romantic love. Instead, they cultivate other intimacies, which tend to flourish in the absence of men.

That tendency is evident in “Runaway,” which sees the narrator’s 72-year-old father abandon his family without warning. He leaves only a note to his wife with a firm directive: “Don’t come looking for me.” As it turns out, his departure yields few disadvantages: No longer mediated by the head of household’s stern, importunate presence, the narrator, her brothers, and their mother grow closer to one another. The narrator also breaks up with her long-term boyfriend, as if her father’s abrupt disappearance has undermined her attachment to conventional romantic arrangements. She begins a group text with her older brothers and renews the lease on her apartment, where she lives alone. She rejects the customary trajectory, in which a woman leaves home and forms a new allegiance to her husband, while also repairing ties in her family of origin. This fracture in the nuclear family ushers in a rush of oxygen.

The book withholds judgment of its characters’ actions. Instead, these stories are united by the implicit trust they place in their protagonists, as they suss out new frameworks for their relationships and, sometimes, their lives. In “Night of Aurora,” Hyogyeong is eager to fulfill her long-deferred dream of traveling to Canada to see the aurora borealis. But after her daughter, Jihye, has her baby, she makes clear that she expects her mother to prioritize caring for him.

Hyogyeong doesn’t want to look after her grandson. Moreover, she dismisses Jihye’s attempts to make her feel guilty. “You left me with Grandma and did whatever you wanted,” protests Jihye. “I’ve been hearing that all my life,” Hyogyeong replies. “The guilt trip doesn’t work on me anymore.”

Ultimately, Hyogyeong makes her Canadian pilgrimage, with nary a regret. Rewarded by the aurora’s splendor, she is overcome, and howls a tearful declaration to the polychromatic sky: “I don’t want to take care of [my grandson]! I really, really don’t want to! I won’t take him over the holidays. I won’t take him when he starts first grade.” It is not what another grandmother might choose, and it is not what her daughter wants. It is one woman’s desire, clarified and affirmed, in defiance of her only child.

Solidarity and self-determination can, at times, make for unwieldy bedfellows: When Hyogyeong honors her own desires, her daughter suffers the consequences. Yet the story’s denouement indicates that Hyogyeong and Jihye will mend their relationship; in fact, Hyogyeong’s epiphany begets Jihye’s own realization that she, too, does not wish to sacrifice her ambitions to domesticity. Her mother’s decision, like any progress, is painful in its demands. And though neither Jihye nor her mother realizes it at the time, Hyeogyeong’s act of self-interest is also an unintended gesture of encouragement toward her daughter, a signal that she, too, can make the choices that are right for herself alone.

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