Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held court Wednesday within an extra-fortified U.S. Capitol, making the case that America’s security, liberty, and prosperity are interlinked with Israel’s. 

The speech, his first before both chambers of Congress in nearly a decade, marked what is likely his best opportunity until a new president is inaugurated in January to shore up U.S. political and military support. 

His pitch comes amid a devastating war with Hamas, whose sponsor Iran reportedly may be just weeks from achieving nuclear capability. In bracing language and imagery, the prime minister – an alum of one of Israel’s most elite special forces units – spoke in existential terms: life and death, liberty and tyranny, civilization and barbarity. 

“We meet today at a crossroads of history,” Mr. Netanyahu said, describing Iran’s “axis of terror” as a threat not only to Israel but also to America and Arab nations. “Our enemies are your enemies. Our fight is your fight. And our victory will be your victory.”

Rising Iran-linked threats in Middle East

It’s a crucial moment geopolitically, he and his Republican allies argue.

The Israel-Hamas war threatens to spiral into a broader regional conflagration, with Iranian proxy Hezbollah already attacking Israel from the north. The Lebanese group is believed to have stockpiled more than 100,000 missiles, whose far greater range and precision than those used by Gaza-based Hamas pose a far greater threat to Israel. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently warned that Iran may be within a week or two of achieving nuclear weapons capability.

Craig Hudson/Reuters

Families of Israeli hostages gather ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's address to a joint meeting of Congress, at the National Mall in Washington, July 23, 2024.

But it’s also a terrible moment politically. Much of Washington is consumed with the U.S. presidential campaign, which has seen dramatic turns over the past month. 

Mr. Netanyahu will be meeting with President Joe Biden on Thursday, and GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump in Florida on Friday. But it’s Congress that holds not only the purse strings to U.S. aid, but also the most direct connection to U.S. taxpayers, who for decades have underwritten Israel’s military capabilities.

Netanyahu speech draws mixed reactions

Israel maintains strong Republican support, including among Christians with deeply held biblical reasons for the alliance, beyond the geopolitical rationale. 

“For some of us it goes even deeper than that, because it is a matter of faith,” said GOP Speaker of the House Mike Johnson at his weekly press conference on Tuesday, in response to a question from the Monitor. “In Genesis, … it says very clearly that God will bless the nation that blesses Israel and curse the nation that curses Israel.” 

That view aligns with Mr. Netanyahu’s central message: America’s support for Israel helps not only its ally, but itself. But while Republicans praised the speech as clear and inspiring, Democrats came away disappointed with the tone and lack of specifics. 

“It was an unsurprising but unfortunate setback for the US-Israel relationship,” said Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee. Instead of thoughtful analysis, he said, it offered “a lot of mindless war sloganeering.”

Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, July 24, 2024, on Capitol Hill in Washington.

Democratic support for Israel wavers

The once-ironclad support Israel enjoyed from Congress has shown widening cracks.  

Though the prime minister received a formal bipartisan invitation from congressional leadership, dozens of Democrats skipped the speech, with some citing scheduling conflicts. Among them was Vice President Kamala Harris, who would normally sit on the rostrum behind Mr. Netanyahu, but was instead on the campaign trail as she appears poised to become the Democratic nominee for president. 

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer notably declined to shake hands with the prime minister, whom Mr. Schumer has referred to as one of the four main barriers to peace in the Middle East.

Democrats and allied groups have increasingly voiced concerns about the Jewish state’s treatment of Palestinians – not only in Gaza, where tens of thousands have been killed in Israel’s retaliatory military offense following the brutal Oct. 7 Hamas attack, but also in the West Bank. 

“I was expecting to hear at some point, some recognition of the loss of innocent Palestinian lives,” said Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, a former U.S. Navy captain. He said he knows firsthand the difficulty of urban combat, but sees room for improvement by Israel.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the sole Palestinian American in Congress, sat draped in a Palestinian kaffiyeh holding up a small sign reading “WAR CRIMINAL” until a House official told her to put it away. 

Many Democrats don’t see Mr. Netanyahu engaging seriously with a postwar vision for peace.

“I want to talk about an actual solution that gets us to peace in the Middle East, that brings home the hostages, and that provides security for Palestinian people who are being killed every single day,” says Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, who chairs the large Congressional Progressive Caucus and said Tuesday she planned to skip the speech in favor of meeting with families of Israeli hostages.

One freed hostage and relatives of others still in captivity accompanied Mr. Netanyahu, who acknowledged them in the crowd – along with several soldiers whom he honored. Some 120 hostages are still being held in Gaza after Hamas kidnapped them in the Oct. 7 attack, in which 1,200 were killed. Eight of the hostages are American. Relatives see the high-profile visit from Mr. Netanyahu has an opportunity to exert further pressure on the prime minister to secure a deal. 

“I want to be there to hear him say we are committed, we’re going to do this, we’re going to find a path, we’re working diligently to make sure it gets done,” says Efrat Moshkoviz of New Jersey, whose abducted niece Naama Levy – a 19-year-old Israeli soldier – became one of the first hostage faces to circulate in the media, with a video of her bloodied in a jeep in Gaza. “I want him to feel that pressure and hear our voices.” 

Julia Nikhinson/AP

Capitol security was reinforced as U.S. Capitol Police and New York Police Department officers ride ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who arrived to speak to a joint meeting of Congress and to seek increased support for Israel's fight against Hamas, July 24, 2024, in Washington.

“King Bibi” a controversial messenger

Mr. Netanyahu is in some ways the best person and the worst person to make the case for more U.S. support for Israel.  

Having lived in the U.S. during his youth and early career, he is fluent in English and at home in America.

He has long fashioned himself as an ardent defender of Israeli security. When his brother Yonatan became a national hero after being killed while commanding the 1973 Entebbe raid that rescued nearly all 106 hostages taken in a plane hijacking, Mr. Netanyahu took up the mantle. With the help of such credentials, Mr. Netanyahu transformed himself from a shy young man into a master of shaping media narratives, as chronicled in the 2018 documentary “King Bibi.”  

Now serving in an unprecedented sixth term as prime minister, Mr. Netanyahu’s image has become intertwined with the image of Israel. And as he has increasingly allied himself with right-wing parties in Israel’s fractured coalition politics, that image – of both him and the country – has become more controversial. That has made it harder politically for Democrats to demonstrate unqualified support for Israel.

On Thursday, hundreds of Jewish Voice for Peace activists protested near the Capitol. About 200 of them were arrested. 

“We’re appalled that the U.S. would invite somebody who’s been considered a war criminal here to address Congress, and we’re demanding an immediate arms embargo,” says Noa Grayevsky, who was born in Israel but emigrated as a baby to the U.S. with her family. 

Congress has approved at least $12.5 billion in military aid to Israel since the Oct. 7 attack. According to figures from the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the nearly 10 months of fighting, though the ministry does not distinguish between civilian and militant deaths.

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for both Mr. Netanyahu and Hamas this spring. Israel and its allies criticized the ICC for a lack of moral clarity, given Hamas’s barbaric attack and pattern of intermingling with the civilian population and hiding in underground tunnels.

“For Israel, every civilian death is a tragedy,” said Mr. Netanyahu. “For Hamas, it’s a strategy.”

An Israeli-Arab alliance against Iran?

He spoke of a new alliance in the Middle East of Israel and its Arab neighbors, who came together this spring to defend his country against a barrage of missiles from Iran. He described the alliance as “a natural extension of the groundbreaking Abraham Accords” – a Trump initiative that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states – which could counter Iran and its proxies.

“I thought the prime minister did an outstanding job of telling people exactly why this is important – not just for the people of Israel, but for folks in Nebraska,” said Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts afterward, speaking of his home state. “This is about taking on the evils of terrorism, and being on the frontline there to prevent it from spreading further.”

The prime minister framed this moment as an existential one for the Jewish people, who emerged from the Holocaust to establish the state of Israel three years after the end of World War II.

“‘Never again’ is now,” he said, before adapting a line from Winston Churchill. “Give us the tools faster, and we’ll finish the job faster.”

Kamran Jebreili/AP/File

Vice President Kamala Harris waves as she arrives in Dubai to attend the COP28 U.N. climate summit in 2023.

Until last Sunday, governments and actors on all sides of the Middle East’s varied conflicts agreed on one thing: A second Donald Trump presidency appeared inevitable.

But this week’s arrival on the scene of Vice President Kamala Harris – a relative foreign policy unknown without the international relationships and experience of Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump – is forcing politicians in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world to ask themselves an unexpected question.

What would a Harris presidency look like from abroad?

In the Middle East, a region at war whose players had planned their strategies for a Trump presidency with a Biden contingency, Ms. Harris’ emergence has them racing to recalibrate.

Ms. Harris’ background as a district attorney and prosecutor, with a strong sense of right and wrong that she is already playing up in her nascent campaign, makes her an unusual figure. She shares neither Mr. Trump’s transactionalism nor Joe Biden’s long history of internationalism.

A new view of Israel? 

Vice President Kamala Harris’ Middle East experience is limited to two brief trips to the United Arab Emirates.

By comparison, when he took office, Mr. Biden had ties to the region stretching back 30 years. Mr. Trump has long had deep relations with Emirati and Saudi leaders.

Both men have also enjoyed decadeslong, sometimes fraught, personal relationships with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Marko Djurica/Reuters

Supporters of hostages seized during the deadly Hamas raid last October rally in Tel Aviv June 3 to demand their release as part of a deal being advanced by the United States.

Mr. Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race poses an immediate dilemma for Mr. Netanyahu, a polarizing figure both in Israel and in the United States, who is currently in Washington trying to polish his image.

Vice President Harris and President Biden will meet with Mr. Netanyahu in separate meetings at the White House on Thursday. 

With the ascent of Ms. Harris, a vocal critic of the Israeli prime minister within the Biden administration, Mr. Netanyahu’s trip “playbook was ... ripped to shreds,” says Nimrod Novik, a fellow at the Israel Policy Forum and a former adviser to the late Israeli President Shimon Peres.

“Now, it is important for him to attempt to look Kamala Harris in the eye and assure her that he is not the Republican agent that everyone makes him out to be,” Mr. Novik adds.

The broad lines of Ms. Harris’ thinking are clear enough. She has repeatedly pledged her support for Israel’s security while criticizing Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza and voicing empathy with the Palestinians, making her an outlier in the Biden administration.

The vice president was the first in the administration to call for a cease-fire, and the first to warn that Palestinians in Gaza were facing “famine conditions.” She argued earlier this year at the Munich security conference that “far too many innocent Palestinian civilians have been killed” and that “Israel must do better to protect innocent civilians.”

Pointedly, Ms. Harris declined to preside over Mr. Netanyahu’s address to Congress on Wednesday, preferring to attend a campaign event instead. A President Harris would be more willing to “speak the truth to the Israeli public” than President Biden, Mr. Novik believes.

But a shift in rhetoric alone is not enough for the Palestinians, eyeing the 2024 elections and seeing little policy daylight between Ms. Harris and a Biden administration they accuse of giving Israel a blank check for the war in Gaza that has killed tens of thousands of civilians.

Ahmed Saad/Reuters/File

A demonstrator in Baghdad supporting Palestinians in Gaza burns an image of U.S. President Joe Biden near the U.S. embassy.

The U.S. under Ms. Harris would need to “recognize its responsibility in supporting the occupation and to act decisively to halt the violence before it is too late,” insists Nabil Abu Rudeineh, the official spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority.

To stay or go?

Ms. Harris’ lack of experience in the Middle East and progressive slant are stoking concerns among Gulf states and some Israeli officials that a Harris administration could try to scale back U.S. diplomatic and military involvement in the region. They worry that a pivot from the region, following Barack Obama’s example, would be especially dangerous at a moment when many of them believe American involvement is crucial to prevent wider war.

“With the litany of challenges in Europe and at home, perhaps Ms. Harris will see the region as a burden on America and once again withdraw or pivot the U.S. away regardless of the consequences,” warns one Gulf Arab diplomat, who was granted anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press. “The region cannot afford that again.”

As a senator, Ms. Harris was critical of Saudi Arabia, voting to restrict arms sales to the kingdom. “We need to fundamentally reevaluate our relationship with Saudi Arabia, using our leverage to stand up for American values,” she said while campaigning for the presidency in 2020.

For Riyadh, “when it comes to Harris it will be somewhat of a fresh start,” says Aziz Alghashian, a Saudi analyst and fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

But Saudi officials are holding out hope that Ms. Harris will “retain the alliance-building of the Biden administration,” he adds.

Hamad Al Kaabi/Ministry of Presidential Affairs/AP/File

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, in Abu Dhabi, offers her condolences to Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, on the passing of his predecessor in 2022.

An urgency for peace

Facing the prospect of a Harris or a Trump presidency, an unknown quantity or an isolationist, Middle East actors are now in a diplomatic flurry to get what they can from a U.S. administration that is still heavily invested in the region.

Arab states and the European Union are accelerating efforts to formulate a Gaza peace plan they intend to present to the United Nations General Assembly in September, according to European and Jordanian diplomats.

Meanwhile, Arab states, Israel, and the U.S. are discussing plans for the governance and reconstruction of postwar Gaza, under which the Palestinian Authority and an international force would enter the strip.

Arab Gulf sources say that Saudi Arabia is speeding up its time line to secure a security treaty with Washington as part of a diplomatic normalization deal with Israel – a prized diplomatic goal of the Biden administration.

With the future uncertain, Riyadh would like to tie up the deal before President Biden steps down next January.

“It is becoming clear we must end this conflict in Gaza and move to the next stage of reconstruction in Gaza and regional integration by the end of this year,” the Gulf diplomat says, citing the risks of regional war at home and political instability in the U.S.

“The region cannot risk letting this stretch into the next administration,” he adds. “No one knows where America – or us – will be by then.”

Editor's note: This article has been amended to clarify Nimrod Novik's affiliation.

Vice President Kamala Harris is officially campaigning for herself now – and reintroducing herself to an American public still forming opinions about her. 

In a brand-new presidential campaign, Vice President Harris’ initial public forays offer a glimpse into how she’ll guide her messaging, image-crafting – and potentially her presidency – now that she can focus on speaking for herself rather than primarily as a cheerleader for President Joe Biden.

While polls of Americans show many have strong opinions of the vice president, those numbers clearly aren’t set in stone. After she trailed Mr. Trump in hypothetical polling for most of the past year, recent surveys now show her pulling into a statistical tie nationally and in key swing states, with more undecided voters than before in many of those polls.

With just over 100 days to go until the election, the race is on for her to redefine herself – before Republicans do it for her.

Here are six issues Ms. Harris focused heavily on in her first two speeches as the likely Democratic standard-bearer against former President Donald Trump: a pass-the-torch event with President Biden at her newly inherited campaign headquarters in Delaware and a rally in Wisconsin. 

The issues Kamala Harris wants to talk about:

Abortion

In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned a national right to abortion that had stood for half a century, after Mr. Trump appointed three conservative justices to the bench. Polls show it’s one of the issues where Democrats fare the best with voters. Mr. Biden had been an imperfect messenger – a devout Catholic with a mixed record on abortion who seemed hesitant to talk about it. Ms. Harris has been a vocal abortion-rights supporter throughout her career. 

In one of her few specific legislative pledges in either speech, Ms. Harris promised in Wisconsin that if “Congress passes a law to restore reproductive freedoms, as president of the United States, I will sign it into law.”

Without evidence, she also accused Mr. Trump of planning to sign a national law banning abortion, even though he’s repeatedly insisted that the issue should be left to individual states.

Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/AP

Former President Donald Trump appears at Manhattan criminal court during jury selection in New York, April 18, 2024. He became the first former president with a criminal conviction, after a guilty verdict on falsifying business records with the intent to commit crimes including influencing the 2016 election. He has said he'll appeal the ruling.

Donald Trump’s legal troubles

Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor and California attorney general, made it clear she plans to draw a sharp contrast with Mr. Trump, who has faced felony charges in four different criminal cases in the past year and has decades of legal battles over his business dealings and accusations of sexual assault.

“In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said to cheers in suburban Milwaukee before attacking Mr. Trump for being found liable by a jury for committing sexual abuse, running a for-profit university that was forced to pay $25 million to settle fraud accusations, and promising to back Big Oil in exchange for campaign donations. 

“During the foreclosure crisis, I took on the big Wall Street banks and won $20 billion for California families, holding those banks accountable for fraud. Donald Trump was just found guilty of 34 counts of fraud,” she concluded. 

Democracy and voting rights

Ms. Harris did not specifically mention Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss, which led to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot where his supporters attacked Congress. Instead, she stressed Republicans’ move to push restrictive bills that make it more difficult to register and vote. 

The only bills she referenced by name in either speech were the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, a pair of voting rights bills backed by Democrats that she promised to fight for as president. 

Gun control

In both speeches, Harris pledged to push for more gun control, framing it as an issue of “the freedom to live safe from gun violence.” She promised to fight for universal background checks, red flag laws, and an assault weapons ban.

Trump’s tax plan

Ms. Harris also promised that “building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.” And she repeatedly blasted Mr. Trump’s plan for further corporate tax cuts. “America has tried these economic policies before,’’ she said. “They do not lead to prosperity. They lead to inequity and economic injustice, and we are not going back.”

Project 2025

Democrats have spent months attacking Project 2025, a playbook for the Trump administration written by former Trump staffers and close allies and spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank with close ties to Mr. Trump. The former president and his campaign have sought to distance themselves from the work’s most controversial elements, though some of those in the Project 2025 group remain involved in his campaign. 

“He and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class,’’ Ms. Harris said. “We know we’ve got to take this seriously. And can you believe they put that thing in writing? Read it. It’s 900 pages.’’

What she doesn’t want to talk about:

Immigration and border security

Back in early 2021, President Biden tasked Vice President Harris to work with Mexico and Central America to address the root causes of immigration in hopes of stemming the flow of people into the U.S.

Ms. Harris had a rough interview that year with NBC News’ Lester Holt, where she grew defensive for not having visited the U.S.-Mexico border, then promised to go. 

Jose Torres/Reuters

Migrants of different nationalities walk along a road in a caravan toward the U.S., in Tapachula, Chiapas state, Mexico, July 23, 2024.

Republicans jumped on that, branding Ms. Harris the “border czar” even though no one in the administration actually called her that, and attacking her for the surge in migrants that have come into the U.S. since 2021.

Mr. Trump made clear Tuesday that this would be his campaign’s opening salvo against his new opponent.

On a hastily organized press call, Mr. Trump accused Ms. Harris of a “willful demolition of American borders and laws” and warned that if she became president, she’d make the “invasion” of immigrants “exponentially worse.”

Polls have consistently found that border security is one of the top issues for voters in this election, and they give the Biden-Harris administration poor marks on that count.

The Biden-Harris administration

Ms. Harris heaped praise on what she called a Biden record of achievement “unmatched in modern history.”

“In one term, he has already surpassed the legacy of most presidents who served two terms in office,” she said in Delaware. In Wisconsin, she gave Mr. Biden credit for getting the COVID-19 pandemic “under control” and overseeing the creation of 15 million new jobs during the pandemic rebound and beyond since his inauguration. “Joe has stood up for democracy at home, and he has stood up for democracy abroad, and he has always stood up for what he believes is right,” she said.

But the vice president didn’t dwell long on the administration’s work, seeming happier to gain a bit of daylight from the outgoing president and his sagging poll numbers and casting herself as a fresh choice.

It’s clear Republicans want to make sure that this election remains a choice between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, however, and plan to tie Ms. Harris to her boss.

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters/File

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris walk together on the grounds of Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia, Jan. 11, 2022.

Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio laid out some of these coming attacks in a memo that the campaign circulated on Tuesday that warned to expect a polling bounce for Harris. “The Democrats deposing one Nominee for another does NOT change voters discontent over the economy, inflation, crime, the open border, housing costs not to mention concern over two foreign wars,” he wrote in the memo.

Her 2020 presidential campaign

Ms. Harris spent plenty of time talking about her political biography as a former prosecutor. But in both speeches, she didn’t once mention her lackluster 2020 campaign for president, in which she began as a front-runner but dropped out before a single vote was cast after taking a number of liberal positions in an attempt to woo progressive voters, then sliding in the polls and running out of money.

Republicans are already using some of the positions she staked out in that race in attack ads.

Her time in the Senate

Maybe it’s because senators haven’t done all that much in the current polarized and dysfunctional Congress, but Ms. Harris didn’t talk specifically about any work she’d done there. That includes the grillings of top Trump administration officials and judicial nominees like now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh that first put her in the national spotlight.

Israel and Gaza

Israel’s war in Gaza has divided Democrats, creating a schism that makes President Biden’s support of Israel a huge problem with some base voters. Republicans have tried to turn his occasional criticism of Israel into a wedge issue with Jewish voters and a motivator for conservative Evangelicals. Ms. Harris has been a bit more critical of Israel than Mr. Biden – but she avoided the thorny topic in her initial campaign speeches.

Kateryna Tolmachova started working in the Donbas coal industry in 2017.

But when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and men were called to military service, her career accelerated. For women like her, stepping into the critical roles the men left empty wasn’t just an opportunity, but a duty.

“Who, if not us?” says Ms. Tolmachova, who recently became deputy head of the pumping division at Metinvest Pokrovsk Coal. “If our men are taken to the army and protect us from there, we need to protect the economy.”

Nowhere is this shift more evident than in the coal mining industry of Donbas, where women have increasingly taken on critical roles to sustain both the war machine and their families. Ms. Tolmachova’s journey from machine operator to a leadership role highlights the expanding opportunities for women in the industry as more men get called to the front.

“Our women can do everything,” she says. “Now when the situation is hard, they understand that we have ... to be supportive, and able to adapt.”

Dominique Soguel

Tetiana Zaitseva, shown here in the control room of the coal mine elevator, has worked at Metinvest Pokrovsk Coal for 17 years.

Women’s duty, in the mines

Metinvest Pokrovsk Coal, one of Ukraine’s newest coal mines, has been quick to harness the potential of female employees.

Established in 1990, it was the last coal mine completed in the region before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its coal powers blast furnaces of steel plants across the country.

The war has brought significant challenges to the company. Approximately 1,000 employees have been mobilized to the Ukrainian military, and about 1,500 have moved to safer regions with their families. In all, 87 employees have been killed and 232 injured due to the ongoing conflict. Before the war, Metinvest employed around 8,000 people; now, this number has decreased to about 6,000.

In response, the company’s female employees are taking on a greater share of the workload, and in more critical capacities. As Andry Akulih, general director of Metinvest notes, they make up almost a third of the current workforce (31%) compared with just under a quarter (24%) before the war. Those who stay often do so to care for older relatives who are either unable or unwilling to leave. Women are turning to the mine for employment opportunities as there is a dearth of other jobs, with most supermarkets and schools closed in the region.

Traditionally, he explains, women at the coal mine were confined to roles such as operating the elevator or managing the facilities where miners receive their lamps and oxygen equipment. These jobs were considered suitable for women, as they did not involve the strenuous physical labor required underground.

Dominique Soguel

Houses stand in a field in the shadow of a coal mine in the resource-rich region of Donetsk, east Ukraine.

“Women have come to substitute men in some underground jobs like pumping and electrical machines,” he says. Before, “there were enough men to do these jobs. Women were not interested.”

However, the war has shattered conventional notions of what women can and cannot handle. Women who were once employed in administrative roles above ground now find themselves underground in a variety of roles.

Learning in a new environment

Metinvest’s training center, led by Larysa Batrukh, has adapted to this new reality. Previously, the center trained approximately 100 students per month, but now it trains around 50, including a small but growing number of women.

“There are about two to five female students per month training for underground positions,” Ms. Batrukh says.

Inside a large classroom with boarded-up windows, most chairs are stacked on empty desks. One woman was killed after a Russian missile hit the grounds of the training center.

Dominique Soguel

Coal miners step out of the elevator at the end of an underground shift.

Dominique Soguel

Badges show the names and photos of Metinvest Pokrovsk Coal employees working deep underground.

But that did not deter Oksana Mariash, who returned to the mine after evacuating her daughter to Poland. She is training to become a pumping system operator, and focuses attentively on her lessons, aware that exams are approaching. “Of course, it is scary and hard when you hear explosions, but it is interesting to learn, and I really like my teachers.”

One of those instructors, Yevhen Mezhenny, oversees the education for technical positions, including welders and machine operators. He is impressed by the seamless transition of women into traditionally male-dominated roles.

“I’m surprised, but it is going very smoothly, with no big hiccups,” he says. “Ukrainian women are very smart and hardworking, and they put a lot of effort into studying. Many of them were previously teachers or accountants.”

A second job

Most of the women working or training at the mine also have significant responsibilities on the home front, too.

Tetiana Hrekova manages the demands of her job while caring for her 11-year-old son and her elderly parents. She begins her day at 4 a.m. to catch the bus, a crucial link in keeping operations running smoothly despite the war. She returns home at 5 p.m. and starts a fresh shift feeding the family and supporting her son’s online schooling.

Dominique Soguel

Tetiana Hrekova works a shift in the Metinvest Pokrovsk Coal mine, April 18, 2024.

“I can only hope that the war will be over soon and children will go to school,” she says during her eight-hour shift deep in the coal mine. “We will not be afraid of leaving them above ground and be able to ... enjoy our work.”

Olena Boiko, a native of Pokrovsk working in the chemical lab, has been at the company since 2008 and hopes to continue for many more years. “These are difficult times. Sometimes, we don’t get enough sleep. The work is hard. The situation is tough. I’m grateful that the company hasn’t abandoned us during these challenging times for Ukraine, and I hope peace will come soon,” she says.

Coal mining is not the only sector where traditional gender barriers have been broken down as a result of the war. Women have also entered other traditionally male-dominated professions, such as driving buses or long-haul trucks. With road transport now being essential for importing and exporting goods in Ukraine, women’s participation in these roles is vital.

“Today, Ukraine would not make it without women’s contribution to the economy,” says Ella Libanova, director of the Ptoukha Institute for Demography and Social Studies. “And we must remember that 4 million working-age Ukrainian women are abroad. There are fewer men serving in the army than Ukrainian women are abroad.”

Mr. Mezhenny, the instructor, concurs. “I don’t know what would become of the economy of Ukraine if not for women,” he says.

My cousin Annie and I have been collaborating on quilts for a few years now. It always seems like such a great idea. Old-timey, even.

But we’re modern quilters. We don’t repurpose old clothes; we don’t cut up our wedding dresses. Our artwork isn’t made from what the children grew out of, or the salvageable portions of threadbare calicoes. No ma’am. We are proper consumers. We buy fabric at 14 bucks a yard, and we’re well into three figures by the time the binding goes on.

But time was, women would gather together around a quilt. I have several quilts in my blanket chest that qualify as genuine antiques, because my mom, who also qualified as a genuine antique, made them. They’re 100 years old. They’re made of faded pastel prints that earned their softness through years of wear on a North Dakota farm. Those prints saw eggs gathered, potatoes peeled, bread kneaded. Outhouses visited, in the snow.

So when Annie proposed a long-distance collaboration, it sounded quaint, and carried a whiff of Mom’s modest grace and virtue. Let others squander their time on their phones: We were going to make art together the old-fashioned way! She proposed that we each send the other a colorful block, and we’d add to them in turn, back and forth, until we were satisfied with them. Or they were big enough. Or there was no fixing them.

Creation! Community! Coziness! What could go wrong?

Then I remembered my mom’s wedding-ring quilt. I admired it; I thought it was perfect. She’d pieced the top together, and the quilting of it – the sandwich of batting and backing – was accomplished by hand on a quilting frame. That’s where the other women came into the picture. And my sweet-tempered mom? I can still see that cross look on her face when she pointed out the section Betsy had quilted. “Tsk. Those long stitches!”

Annie and I live 100 miles apart. We slip our quilts in the mule’s saddlebag and send the beast plodding with a slap to the rump. Or we send them through the mail, whichever is faster.

Every time we get our newly expanded quilts, we gasp. “Wow! I would never have thought of that!” we say, which can be interpreted in more than one way. It might be a good thing we’re never in the same city at the same time.

Because we don’t have the same fabric stashes. We don’t even have the same taste in fabric. Annie likes big blue prints. I like small prints in every color that isn’t blue. My favorite blue, in fact, is green. So all our exchanges are a little alarming.

On the other hand, we end up with quilts we never would have made on our own. We are shaken out of our routines and complacency. But I know I have sent off contributions that hit Annie like a sharp yellow dart to the heart. And she has sent me blue puddles of gloom. Everything we add is an attempt to solve whatever the other person did before.

It’s been a fun challenge, though. We each have three pretty quilts out of it. The whole enterprise was going great. Until last year.

I was the one with the bright idea for a new challenge. “How about,” I said, “every time we get the quilt, we have to cut it up in some way before we add to it?”

“Interesting,” Annie made the mistake of saying. And we were off.

What I was visualizing was something almost geological. We’d have artful fractures running through our work, bright mineral fissures, a slab of veined marble in fabric form! Problem: It was scary. Here someone sends you her best artistic effort, and you have to slice it up? Not only that, but once it was cut, it was hard to square things up again.

Our efforts rather quickly went off the rails. It felt like trying to reassemble a whole tomato out of the sauce. By the third addition, we were each in possession of a chaotic, ghastly composition of material that we couldn’t imagine how to correct. There were bizarre geological cracks running through it, all right – and there’s no telling whose faults they were.

But that’s the point: to challenge us. To get us to the sketchy backstreets of our comfort zones. Finally, I punted on Annie’s quilt. There were colors in it found nowhere in nature and they were screaming at each other. I cut the whole thing up into little squares and reassembled them into a staid but well-behaved grid in a neutral sea. It’s not great, but it’s not an assault on the senses.

Meanwhile, Annie had a look at mine. There was a lot going on. There was nothing to do but throw a big river of hand-appliquéd salamanders through the center of it, so that’s what she did.

Now, once again, we both have quilts we would never have made on our own. Surprising! Anything but normal! This was a challenge made. A challenge met.

And a lesson learned: The next one will definitely be normal.

VTV24

Thich Minh Tue as seen during a June 9 interview on Vietnam Television.

One of this year’s most influential people on TikTok and YouTube does not see himself as an influencer. He is Thích Minh Tuệ, a middle-aged man who adopted a humble, ascetic life a few years ago and began to walk barefoot up and down Vietnam. He lived in forests with few clothes and accepted alms from strangers, practicing a Buddhist way of frugal simplicity.

In May, he became an internet phenomenon. Admirers began to post videos of him along his pilgrimage, inspiring millions. While disavowing any attempt at virtue signaling, he nonetheless was widely seen as an exemplary model, especially in comparison with the lavish lifestyles of top officials. Vietnamese were particularly irked when the minister of public security was caught on camera eating gold-encrusted steak at a London restaurant three years ago.

In June, at the strong advice of police, Thích Minh Tuệ disappeared from public view. “His real crime was his humble lifestyle that stands in such stark contrast to the corruption scandals that have rocked Vietnam,” wrote Zachary Abuza, professor at the National War College in Washington, for Radio Free Asia.

Thích Minh Tuệ’s story reflects a bubbling debate among corruption fighters around the world about whether to focus less on corruption itself and more on the intrinsic integrity and honesty of people. “There have been growing calls for a renewed focus on the central role of values, ethics and integrity in controlling corruption,” stated a 2022 report by the watchdog Transparency International.

One example for this rethink is Vietnam’s official anti-corruption campaign, known as “blazing furnace.” Over the past decade, the ruling party has snared nearly 200,000 people, including top party leaders, on graft charges. Rather than ending corruption, however, the campaign has enhanced the perception that corruption is intractable and widespread. Many Vietnamese also believe the campaign was mainly used to target political rivals and keep the party in power. 

Such “weaponization” of anti-corruption efforts is common in many countries. It has slowed a multidecade, international campaign to fix institutional weaknesses that allow corruption. Those weaknesses include low salaries for public workers, lack of transparency in government, and no protection for whistleblowers.

Nonetheless, the newer tactic of appealing to people’s integrity is growing, according to Transparency International. In more than a dozen countries, programs now reward officials as “integrity icons” for preventing practices like bribery. More professions, especially in finance, require an “integrity oath,” like the Hippocratic oath for doctors. In more than 30 countries, officials and bidders on contracts are asked to agree on an “integrity pact” that sets high standards for public procurement.

Transparency International says some scholars have lately argued that “integrity is not simply the inverse of corruption but a more expansive concept that ‘involves doing the right thing in the right way.’” Perhaps it was the “right way” practiced by Thích Minh Tuệ – his solitary observance of a simple, selfless life – that made him such a social media star.