Bret Stephens: Palestine Makes You Dumb - WSJ

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Palestine Makes You Dumb

Of all the inane things that have been said about the war between Israel and Hamas, surely one dishonorable mention belongs to comments made over the weekend by Benjamin J. Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications.

Interviewed by CNN's Candy Crowley, Mr. Rhodes offered the now-standard administration line that Israel has a right to defend itself but needs to do more to avoid civilian casualties. Ms. Crowley interjected that, according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Jewish state was already doing everything it could to avoid such casualties.

"I think you can always do more," Mr. Rhodes replied. "The U.S. military does that in Afghanistan."

How inapt is this comparison? The list of Afghan civilians accidentally killed by U.S. or NATO strikes is not short. Little of the fighting in Afghanistan took place in the dense urban environments that make the current warfare in Gaza so difficult. The last time the U.S. fought a Gaza-style battle—in Fallujah in 2004—some 800 civilians perished and at least 9,000 homes were destroyed. This is not an indictment of U.S. conduct in Fallujah but an acknowledgment of the grim reality of city combat.

Oh, and by the way, American towns and cities were not being rocketed from above or tunneled under from below as the Fallujah campaign was under way.

Maybe Mr. Rhodes knows all this and was merely caught out mouthing the sorts of platitudes that are considered diplomatically de rigueur when it comes to the Palestinians. Or maybe he was just another victim of what I call the Palestine Effect: The abrupt and often total collapse of logical reasoning, skeptical intelligence and ordinary moral judgment whenever the subject of Palestinian suffering arises.

Consider the media obsession with the body count. According to a daily tally in the New York Times, NYT +2.19% as of July 27 the war in Gaza had claimed 1,023 Palestinian lives as against 46 Israelis. How does the Times keep such an accurate count of Palestinian deaths? A footnote discloses "Palestinian death tallies are provided by the Palestinian Health Ministry and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs."

OK. So who runs the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza? Hamas does. As for the U.N., it gets its data mainly from two Palestinian agitprop NGOs, one of which, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, offers the remarkably precise statistic that, as of July 27, exactly 82% of deaths in Gaza have been civilians. Curiously, during the 2008-09 Gaza war, the center also reported an 82% civilian casualty rate.

When minutely exact statistics are provided in chaotic circumstances, it suggests the statistics are garbage. When a news organization relies—without clarification—on data provided by a bureaucratic organ of a terrorist organization, there's something wrong there, too.

But let's assume for argument's sake that the numbers are accurate. Does this mean the Palestinians are the chief victims, and Israelis the main victimizers, in the conflict? By this dull logic we might want to rethink the moral equities of World War II, in which over one million German civilians perished at Allied hands compared with just 67,000 British and 12,000 American civilians.

The real utility of the body count is that it offers reporters and commentators who cite it the chance to ascribe implicit blame to Israel while evading questions about ultimate responsibility for the killing. Questions such as: Why is Hamas hiding rockets in U.N.-run schools, as acknowledged by the U.N. itself? What does it mean that Hamas has turned Gaza's central hospital into "a de facto headquarters," as reported by the Washington Post? And why does Hamas keep rejecting, or violating, cease-fires agreed to by Israel?

A reasonable person might conclude from this that Hamas, which started the war, wants it to continue, and that it relies on Israel's moral scruples not to destroy civilian sites that it cynically uses for military purposes. But then there is the Palestine Effect. By this reasoning, Hamas only initiated the fighting because Israel refused to countenance the creation of a Palestinian coalition that included Hamas, and because Israel further objected to helping pay the salaries of Hamas's civil servants in Gaza.

Let's get this one straight. Israel is culpable because (a) it won't accept a Palestinian government that includes a terrorist organization sworn to the Jewish state's destruction; (b) it won't help that organization out of its financial jam; and (c) it won't ease a quasi-blockade—jointly imposed with Egypt—on a territory whose central economic activity appears to be building rocket factories and pouring imported concrete into terrorist tunnels.

This is either bald moral idiocy or thinly veiled bigotry. It mistakes effect for cause, treats self-respect as arrogance and self-defense as aggression, and makes demands of the Jewish state that would be dismissed out of hand anywhere else. To argue the Palestinian side, in this war, is to make the case for barbarism. It is to erase, in the name of humanitarianism, the moral distinctions from which the concept of humanity arises.

Typically, the Obama administration is hedging its bets. The Palestine Effect claims another victim.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com

Stuart Don Levy

Russia, MH17 and the West: A web of lies | The Economist

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21608645-vladimir-putins-epic-deceits-have-grave-consequences-his-people-and-outside-world-web

A web of lies

IN 1991, when Soviet Communism collapsed, it seemed as if the Russian people might at last have the chance to become citizens of a normal Western democracy. Vladimir Putin's disastrous contribution to Russia's history has been to set his country on a different path. And yet many around the world, through self-interest or self-deception, have been unwilling to see Mr Putin as he really is.

The shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, the killing of 298 innocent people and the desecration of their bodies in the sunflower fields of eastern Ukraine, is above all a tragedy of lives cut short and of those left behind to mourn. But it is also a measure of the harm Mr Putin has done. Under him Russia has again become a place in which truth and falsehood are no longer distinct and facts are put into the service of the government. Mr Putin sets himself up as a patriot, but he is a threat—to international norms, to his neighbours and to the Russians themselves, who are intoxicated by his hysterical brand of anti-Western propaganda.

The world needs to face the danger Mr Putin poses. If it does not stand up to him today, worse will follow.

Crucifiction and other stories

Mr Putin has blamed the tragedy of MH17 on Ukraine, yet he is the author of its destruction. A high-court's worth of circumstantial evidence points to the conclusion that pro-Russian separatists fired a surface-to-air missile out of their territory at what they probably thought was a Ukrainian military aircraft. Separatist leaders boasted about it on social media and lamented their error in messages intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence and authenticated by America (see article).

Russia's president is implicated in their crime twice over. First, it looks as if the missile was supplied by Russia, its crew was trained by Russia, and after the strike the launcher was spirited back to Russia. Second, Mr Putin is implicated in a broader sense because this is his war. The linchpins of the self-styled Donetsk People's Republic are not Ukrainian separatists but Russian citizens who are, or were, members of the intelligence services. Their former colleague, Mr Putin, has paid for the war and armed them with tanks, personnel carriers, artillery—and batteries of surface-to-air missiles. The separatists pulled the trigger, but Mr Putin pulled the strings.

The enormity of the destruction of flight MH17 should have led Mr Putin to draw back from his policy of fomenting war in eastern Ukraine. Yet he has persevered, for two reasons. First, in the society he has done so much to mould, lying is a first response. The disaster immediately drew forth a torrent of contradictory and implausible theories from his officials and their mouthpieces in the Russian media: Mr Putin's own plane was the target; Ukrainian missile-launchers were in the vicinity. And the lies got more complex. The Russian fiction that a Ukrainian fighter jet had fired the missile ran into the problem that the jet could not fly at the altitude of MH17, so Russian hackers then changed a Wikipedia entry to say that the jets could briefly do so. That such clumsily Soviet efforts are easily laughed off does not defeat their purpose, for their aim is not to persuade but to cast enough doubt to make the truth a matter of opinion. In a world of liars, might not the West be lying, too?

Second, Mr Putin has become entangled in a web of his own lies, which any homespun moralist could have told him was bound to happen. When his hirelings concocted propaganda about fascists running Kiev and their crucifixion of a three-year-old boy, his approval ratings among Russian voters soared by almost 30 percentage points, to over 80%. Having roused his people with falsehoods, the tsar cannot suddenly wriggle free by telling them that, on consideration, Ukraine's government is not too bad. Nor can he retreat from the idea that the West is a rival bent on Russia's destruction, ready to resort to lies, bribery and violence just as readily as he does. In that way, his lies at home feed his abuses abroad.

Stop spinning

In Russia such doublespeak recalls the days of the Soviet Union when Pravda claimed to tell the truth. This mendocracy will end in the same way as that one did: the lies will eventually unravel, especially as it becomes obvious how much money Mr Putin and his friends have stolen from the Russian people, and he will fall. The sad novelty is that the West takes a different attitude this time round. In the old days it was usually prepared to stand up to the Soviet Union, and call out its falsehoods. With Mr Putin it looks the other way.

Take Ukraine. The West imposed fairly minor sanctions on Russia after it annexed Crimea, and threatened tougher ones if Mr Putin invaded eastern Ukraine. To all intents and purposes, he did just that: troops paid for by Russia, albeit not in Russian uniforms, control bits of the country. But the West found it convenient to go along with Mr Putin's lie, and the sanctions eventually imposed were too light and too late. Similarly, when he continued to supply the rebels, under cover of a ceasefire that he claimed to have organised, Western leaders vacillated.

Since the murders of the passengers of MH17 the responses have been almost as limp. The European Union is threatening far-reaching sanctions—but only if Mr Putin fails to co-operate with the investigation or he fails to stop the flow of arms to the separatists. France has said that it will withhold the delivery of a warship to Mr Putin if necessary, but is proceeding with the first of the two vessels on order. The Germans and Italians claim to want to keep diplomatic avenues open, partly because sanctions would undermine their commercial interests. Britain calls for sanctions, but it is reluctant to harm the City of London's profitable Russian business. America is talking tough but has done nothing new.

Enough. The West should face the uncomfortable truth that Mr Putin's Russia is fundamentally antagonistic. Bridge-building and resets will not persuade him to behave as a normal leader. The West should impose tough sanctions now, pursue his corrupt friends and throw him out of every international talking shop that relies on telling the truth. Anything else is appeasement—and an insult to the innocents on MH17.

Stuart Don Levy

‘Protecting’ Russians in Ukraine Has Fatal Consequences - NYTimes.com

Foment unrest in a neighboring country.  Supply rebels with big guns.  Watch them shoot an innocent civilian aircraft out of the sky.  And then blame the neighboring country's government for not having control of it's territory.  Very sad.  Reminds me of Adolf Hitler's playbook.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/opinion/sunday/protecting-russians-in-ukraine-has-deadly-consequences.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region

'Protecting' Russians in Ukraine Has Fatal Consequences

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A man examined debris on Friday from the Malaysia Airlines crash a day earlier, in a field in Grabovo, Ukraine. Credit Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images

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OXFORD, England — SOMETIMES, just sometimes, you should pay attention to annoying things said by tiresome people at worthy conferences.

In 1994, I was half asleep at a round table in St. Petersburg, Russia, when a short, thickset man with a rather ratlike face — apparently a sidekick of the city's mayor — suddenly piped up. Russia, he said, had voluntarily given up "huge territories" to the former republics of the Soviet Union, including areas "which historically have always belonged to Russia." He was thinking "not only about Crimea and northern Kazakhstan, but also for example about the Kaliningrad area." Russia could not simply abandon to their fate those "25 million Russians" who now lived abroad. The world had to respect the interests of the Russian state "and of the Russian people as a great nation."

The name of this irritating little man was — you guessed it — Vladimir V. Putin, and I know exactly what he said back in 1994 because the organizers, the Körber Foundation of Hamburg, Germany, published a full transcript. For the phrase that I have translated as "the Russian people," the German transcript uses the word "volk." Mr. Putin seemed to have, and still has, an expansive, völkisch definition of "Russians" — or what he now refers to as the "russkiy mir" (literally "Russian world"). The transcript also records that I teased out the consequences of the then-obscure deputy mayor's vision by saying, "If we defined British nationality to include all English-speaking people, we would have a state slightly larger than China."

Little did we imagine that, 20 years later, the St. Petersburg deputy mayor, now uncrowned czar of all the Russians, would have seized Crimea by force, covertly stirred up violent mayhem in eastern Ukraine and be explicitly advancing his 19th-century völkisch vision as the policy of a 21st-century state. Today's Kremlin has its own perverted version of the Western-developed and United Nations-sanctified humanitarian doctrine of the "responsibility to protect." Russia, Mr. Putin insists, has a responsibility to protect all Russians abroad, and he gets to decide who is a Russian.

We should, of course, avoid what the philosopher Henri Bergson called the illusions of retrospective determinism. History seldom moves in straight lines. After Mr. Putin's rise to supreme power in the Russian state, starting when he became prime minister in 1999, he experimented with other models of relations with the West and the rest of the world. For some years, he tried modernization in cooperation with the West. He embraced membership in the Group of 8 — one of several inducements that the United States and Europe offered to help Russia down its inevitably difficult post-imperial path. President George W. Bush got Mr. Putin wrong when he "looked the man in the eye" in 2001, but it would be bad history to conclude that the Putin of 2001 was already secretly planning to take back Crimea and destabilize eastern Ukraine.

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Although historians should explore those paths not taken, it is nonetheless fascinating to see how the essentials of Mr. Putin's resentment-fueled protector state doctrine were already there in 1994 — even if they were not then buttressed by ideological quotations from Russian thinkers like Ivan Ilyin.

Once upon a time, there was the Brezhnev Doctrine, which justified as "fraternal help" such actions as the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Mikhail S. Gorbachev replaced it with the Sinatra Doctrine —You do it your way, as Gennadi I. Gerasimov, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, put it — toward Eastern Europe. Now we have the Putin Doctrine.

It is impossible to overstate the degree to which this is a threat not just to Russia's Eastern European and Eurasian neighbors but to the whole post-1945 international order. Across the world, countries see men and women living in other countries whom they regard as in some sense "their people." What if, as has happened in the past, Chinese minorities in Southeast Asian countries were to be the targets of discrimination and popular anger, and China (where, on a visit this spring, I heard admiration expressed for Mr. Putin's actions) decided to take up the mother country's burden, exercising its völkisch responsibility to protect?

TO make clear why such actions are totally unacceptable, and a grave threat to world peace, we also have to agree on the legitimate rights and responsibilities of a mother country. My British passport still carries the resonant old formula that Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State "requests and requires" foreign powers to let me pass "without let or hindrance," and if I got into a spot of local difficulty in, say, Transnistria, I would hope (though not necessarily trust) that he would very earnestly require it. More relevant, Poland has expressed concern for the position of Polish speakers in Lithuania. Hungary has handed out both passports and voting rights in national elections to citizens of neighboring countries whom it deems to be members of the Hungarian people. To pin down what is illegitimate, we have to explain more clearly what is legitimate.

As of Friday, American and Ukrainian officials were saying it was likely that a Russian-made antiaircraft missile had brought down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, in yet another harvest of sorrow on Ukrainian fields already blood-soaked by history. It was not clear who fired it. But it is hypocrisy on an Orwellian scale for Mr. Putin to maintain, as he did on Friday, that "the government over whose territory this happened bears the responsibility for this terrible tragedy." There is undoubtedly bitter discontent among many self-identified Russians in eastern Ukraine, but the violence of their protests has been stirred by a massively mendacious narrative on Russian television, and their paramilitaries have been supported, to put it no more strongly, by Mr. Putin's Russia — including the presence of members or former members of Russian special forces.

It seems plausible already to suggest that a regular army (whether Ukrainian or Russian) would usually have identified the radar image of a civilian airliner flying at 33,000 feet, while a group made up solely of local militants (even ones with military experience) would not ordinarily have had the technology and skill to launch such an attack without outside help. It is precisely the ambiguous mixtures created by Mr. Putin's völkisch version of the "responsibility to protect" that produce such disastrous possibilities. He subverts and calls into question the authority of the government of a sovereign territory, and then blames it for the result.

So if an obscure deputy mayor starts sounding off in alarming terms at some conference you are attending, my advice is, Wake up. Of course, most such ranters do not rise to the top. But when they do, their ideologies of resentment may be written out in blood.

Stuart Don Levy

The Court’s Ruling on Contraception - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/02/opinion/the-courts-ruling-on-contraception.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Moth&module=inside-nyt-region&region=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region

The Court's Ruling on Contraception

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Credit Image by Matthew Hollister

To the Editor:

Re "Court Limits Birth Control Rule" (front page, July 1):

The Supreme Court's decision that family-owned corporations do not need to pay for insurance that covers contraception is outrageous.

Let's be clear: The effect of this ruling is to elevate the religious beliefs of company owners above those of employees. And why do owners' beliefs trump those of employees? Not because those beliefs are more worthy than those of employees, but only because of their economic position as company owners.

To impose the owners' religious beliefs is particularly offensive since the effect of insurance is only to make it economically feasible for their employees to avail themselves of a legitimate medical service. No one is required to use a service she finds objectionable.

If the company owners believe that it is somehow immoral to use the service, then persuade employees not to use it. That should be the preferred approach, not the use of economic power to force other people to follow one's dictates.

STEPHEN M. DAVIDSON
Boston, July 1, 2014

The writer is a professor at Boston University School of Management and the author of "A New Era in U.S. Health Care: Critical Next Steps Under the Affordable Care Act."

To the Editor:

The Supreme Court's decision is outrageous, but not at all surprising with this court. One of the reasons it is particularly outrageous is that the Hobby Lobby continues to do business with China — a country that actually forces women to have abortions against their will. Obviously Hobby Lobby does not stand on its religious high ground when it comes to making a profit.

We are more clearly seeing how far the Supreme Court has been corrupted by corporate interests. Now a group of people owning a corporation can impose its religious beliefs on its employees. And where does it end? Does my employer now have the right to dictate my private behavior according to his or her religion? Where is that line drawn?

SONJA DRAUGHN
Arlington, Va., July 1, 2014

To the Editor:

Your July 1 editorial "The Justices Endorse Imposing Religion on Employees" finds the Supreme Court's decision in the Hobby Lobby case "deeply dismaying" because the ruling allows owners of closely held, for-profit companies the "right to impose their religious views on employees." It would have been far more troubling for the court to rule against Hobby Lobby.

The First Amendment's guarantee of the "free exercise" of religion is precisely to prevent the government from imposing its views on Americans of faith, absent the most compelling need to do so. That's why a virtually unanimous Congress enacted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and President Bill Clinton signed it.

As the high court's majority pointed out, there are many other ways that the Obama administration can ensure women widespread access to contraceptives and other health services without an infringement on the conscientious beliefs of business owners.

The positions of religious minorities and dissenters are often unpopular, but they deserve constitutional protection.

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NATHAN J. DIAMENT
Washington, July 1, 2014

The writer is executive director for public policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America.

To the Editor:

The Supreme Court ruling suggests that the religious liberty of an employer that sponsors a corporate health plan receives higher priority than the employee's access to accepted standards of modern health care. So what does that mean if I work for a family-run company owned by Christian Scientists? Based on its religious tenets, am I entitled to no medical care at all?

DOUGLAS KROHN
Scarsdale, N.Y., July 1, 2014

The writer is a clinical assistant professor of pediatrics at New York Medical College.

To the Editor:

One thing can be said in favor of this breathtakingly wrong-minded decision: It shows how inappropriate it is for employers to provide health coverage. The need for health coverage has nothing to do with employment, much less the employer's religious commitments. This decision provides one more reason to press for national health care, provided not to employees but to citizens.

RON MEYERS
New York, July 1, 2014

Stuart Don Levy

Uphill Fight Ahead for Hong Kong’s Democracy Movement - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/03/world/asia/uphill-fight-ahead-for-hong-kongs-democracy-movement.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSum&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Uphill Fight Ahead for Hong Kong's Democracy Movement

HONG KONG — A pro-democracy march held Tuesday by a huge crowd of mostly young demonstrators underlined the determination of many of this autonomous Chinese city's residents to preserve and expand the freedoms that they inherited from British rule. But it also brought to light more challenges that may lie ahead.

The protesters remained peaceful and did not resort to violence, which would have given the local government a pretext to respond much more firmly and probably would have hurt broader public support for the demonstration. But at an overnight sit-in that followed the march, the police also showed that they could efficiently remove and arrest 511 protesters in less than four hours — a brisk pace suggesting that they may be ready to respond to larger sit-ins that some democracy advocates are contemplating for later this year.

The calm and poise of the demonstrators Tuesday seemed to help reassure the business community that future protests would not severely disrupt commerce, resulting in a 1.55 percent rise in the Hong Kong stock market on Wednesday. But while the protesters disproved government warnings that their activities would lead to chaos, their civil behavior could also lead to an impression that they are manageable, which could limit the pressure they are able to bring to bear on the government for changes.

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Hong Kong Challenges Beijing

On Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of people held one of the largest marches in Hong Kong's history to demand democracy.

Video Credit By Jonah M. Kessel, Alan Wong Publish Date on July 1, 2014. Image Credit Image by

The preponderance of young people among the demonstrators may also make it much harder, rather than easier, to reach any compromise with the local government and its backers in Beijing. The key question is who may run to become the territory's chief executive in the next elections, in 2017. That issue was front and center for Tuesday's march, as well as the subject of an informal vote last month in which nearly 800,000 Hong Kong residents participated, and which Beijing dismissed as illegal.

Students and people in their 20s have overwhelmingly supported a plan calling for the general public to be allowed to nominate candidates for chief executive — so-called civil nomination, an idea completely dismissed by Beijing and its allies.

By contrast, older Hong Kong residents have tended to support a compromise that would retain the nominating committee mandated by the Basic Law, the territory's mini-constitution, but make that nominating committee more diverse and open to a wider range of candidates than Beijing wants.

Asked after a speech on Wednesday afternoon whether the political center was eroding in Hong Kong, Anson Chan, the second-highest official in the Hong Kong government in the years immediately before and after the British returned the territory to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, bluntly replied, "I have to say that I agree."

Mrs. Chan, one of the most influential advocates of democracy here, noted that a key pro-democracy member of the city's legislature, Ronny Tong, had even withdrawn his own plan for reconstituting the nomination committee, after concluding that support in the democratic camp for civil nomination was overwhelming. She said that she still favored a nominating committee with broad rules that would make it possible for a full array of candidates to appear on the ballot, not just those approved by Beijing.

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She contended that such a procedural compromise would still make it possible to achieve full democratic goals.

"Hong Kong people have demonstrated that we want the whole loaf, not half a loaf, and we certainly don't want a loaf rotten through and through," she said at the Foreign Correspondents' Club.

Mrs. Chan noted that foreign countries and their citizens and companies in Hong Kong had a large stake in the issue as well. If the many individual and political liberties that define Hong Kong are eroded, then the city could eventually lose its separate, preferential status from mainland China for the purpose of many international agreements, covering everything from airline routes and international trade to taxes, cross-border investments and visa requirements, she said.

Michael DeGolyer, the director of the Hong Kong Transition Project, a 26-year-old coalition of academics who have been studying the territory's political evolution from a British colony to a Chinese territory, expressed caution about whether Tuesday's march had been large enough to change political calculations in Hong Kong's government and in Beijing.

"It wasn't this enormous, overwhelming turnout that everyone would be stunned by — it was big," Mr. DeGolyer said.

Organizers estimated that 510,000 people joined the march, while the police calculated that the largest number of people simultaneously participating at any one time during the eight-hour march was 98,600. The police did not attempt to estimate the total number of participants.

The Hong Kong University Public Opinion Program estimated that 154,000 to 172,000 people had taken part in the march. Since 2003, a sizable pro-democracy march has been held every year in Hong Kong on July 1, the anniversary of its return to Chinese sovereignty; the turnout Tuesday came closest to rivaling that of the enormous 2003 march.

One lingering question Wednesday, after the police had removed and arrested participants in the sit-in, was whether future sit-ins would be as peaceful. A small but noticeable number of elderly residents and people in wheelchairs chose to participate; one of the many subthemes of the march had been a call for better social benefits for the elderly and the disabled.

The young protesters treated the elderly and wheelchair-bound protesters among them with respect and even deference, resulting in a calmer tone to the sit-in than most had expected. The police also treated those protesters with great caution, and reluctantly arrested them while showing a clear awareness that every move was being followed by numerous television cameras and cellphone cameras.

"Nobody wants to be a granny beater," Mr. DeGolyer said later.

But the participation of elderly and disabled protesters at future protests is uncertain. At the same time, the police showed Wednesday morning a new willingness to formally arrest large numbers of people, not just carry them out of the downtown road they were blocking.

"This was not an illegal assembly; it was a peaceful and legitimate protest under international law," said Mabel Au, the director of Amnesty International Hong Kong. "The police action was hasty and unnecessary and sets a disturbing precedent."

The backdrop for the protest was an increasingly repressive political environment in mainland China, where detentions of human rights advocates and others have increased as President Xi Jinping has rapidly consolidated power. Some demonstrators in Hong Kong, particularly the limited number of older demonstrators, voiced an awareness that they were seeking a greater political voice at a time when the political climate, if anything, may be darkening.

"I just try my best by marching even though it may not be of much use," Gary Fong, a 45-year-old metalworker, said during the march on Tuesday. "Who knows, this may be the last year that we will be allowed to march."

Stuart Don Levy