Israel–Iran Proxy War, Day #50

Midway through the hostage deal and ceasefire are two concerns: will the ceasefire become permanent, letting Hamas remain in place? And on what basis does US support for the war rest and will it continue?

Brighton, England
Tuesday, November 28th, 2023

id-hostage deal and subsequent ceasefire, the overwhelming determinant of the war since the casus bellum itself, the savagery of the original October 7th invasion, is the force of Israel’s military success. Here multiple force multipliers apply:

sky-high morale stemming from the military’s mortification at its initial failure to secure the border and subsequent determination to redeem itself
wall-to-wall support from society for preventing further such attacks and establishing ongoing homeland security
military superiority including numerical and technological superiority on the ground, control of the air above and the sea to the west, and new levels of communication enabling unprecedented coordination among these forces
coordination with the United States superpower to keep other threats at bay and contain the theater.

Though the Gaza war is obviously not a duck shoot and the fighting is fierce ⁠— Hamas has had over a decade to focus singlemindedly on its military capabilities, and confronting Israel is what it exists to do ⁠— it is nonetheless to date a shattering and overwhelming Israeli military success.

Against this is the international reaction ⁠— from the Vatican to Berkeley to the Chinese Politburo ⁠— that war is itself a war crime regardless of the intensity of the provocation or the direness of the existential necessity. Such opposition movements have however always existed and roll off the foothills of the implacability of a powerful endangered nation. Moreover the thuggery and intellectual dishonesty with which they are carried out probably gains at least as many to Israel’s cause as it garners support for what can be most generously described as moral vacuity.

Two things however currently give pause: first, the worry about the pause itself. Israel has in the past benefitted greatly from pauses in fighting ⁠— the War of Independence especially comes to mind. Yet Israelis worry about the ceasefire not mainly because it allows Hamas to regroup and plan some attacks and surprises, but due to concern that the morale force multiplier that is wrath is fading. Whilst Israel may indeed still be reliving October 7th ⁠— today Netanyahu took Elon Musk on a tour of the ravaged kibbutzim ⁠— Israelis are now now also daily experiencing the near-jubilance of hostages returning. Some Israelis seem worried about their compatriots’ staying power. My tentative conclusion is: Israel’s very fear of being lulled back into complacency is a marker that it will not do so and restart the war with ferocity.

The second concern is the foundation of the US support for the war: on what does it rest? Sympathy is insufficient; everyone is sympathetic until the hard power response arrives. The Biden Administration’s policies of weakness to Russia and Iran are what encouraged the invasions of Ukraine and southern Israel in the first place; but once the invited aggressions did take place, the Biden Administration has been pretty steadfast in standing by the victims. What are the motivations? Are they merely the emotional biases of a man old enough to be fundamentally a cold warrior? Or does the support rest on more solid footing, and America in fact needs this win almost as much as Israel? I’ve read and heard commentators say this, but is it true? Americans have, after all, accepted plenty of defeats in the Middle East recently, from Assad in Syria to Iran in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan, many of them in the name of their ongoing quixotic quest towards reaching a rapprochement with the Iranian regime. Would an ascendant Hamas in Gaza be such an overwhelming problem given all these other calamities?

Biden’s approach is almost inverse to Reagan’s successful formulation of peace through strength. And far from a policy of showing no daylight between the USA and Israel, until the attack happened Biden wouldn’t even meet with Netanyahu in daylight. Nonetheless, given all this, my second tentative conclusion is that American support will continue for reasons both strategic ⁠— Israel is a bulwark against the march of illiberal regimes ⁠— and moral ⁠— to avoid slaughter of innocents at a scale not seen since the Nazis and before then the Romans.

Moreover, when strategy and morality both pull in the same direction, each serves as boundless force multiplier to the other.

The Trail

Sunday, June 21st, 2026

The Software Architect Elevator: Redefining the Architect’s Role in the Digital Enterprise

Gregor Hohpe

♦♦♦

Engaging, pleasant, timely and knowing, I was nonetheless somewhat disappointed by the thinness of this book. That said, I’m about to read his next one, Platform Strategy, which is really is the one I wanted to read.

In his Contraptions substack, Venkatesh Rao notes an obvious split that I never fully saw: thinky versus writerly writers:

Those who write to think typically resist any attempt to change the content of what they’re saying, but generally don’t care about style, verbal precision, tightening, and pragmatic cutting suggestions to hit word-count limits.

Those who write to write are typically attached to every word and comma, but can be surprisingly indifferent to substantial content edits and highly open to saying entirely different things than they originally set out to.

I must be mostly of the latter, affirmed by my not having thought enough across the decades to even note the schism.

That said, the best writing is where the thinking may be primary but the author has been an artist over the supporting form.

Wednesday, June 17th, 2026

Amit Segal, longer than usual for his It’s Noon in Israel newsletter, posits the perennial faultline in Israel politics: Jewish vs Israeli.

“Jewish” and “Israeli” are simply the two tenets of Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish and democratic state ⁠— not in open contradiction, since most Israelis hold both, but forever rubbing against each other. Like asking whether strawberry-banana yogurt is more strawberry or banana, Israelis are endlessly asked, in one disguise or another, whether they are slightly more Jewish than democratic or the reverse. Once you see it, most of the news in the country ⁠— most push notifications, most studio shouting matches ⁠— dissolves into that same question, with a thin veneer of fresh event on top.

Segal himself straddles the divide nicely, as does the society writ large, part and parcel of the fading Ashkenazi/Sephardi divide. In my thin slice of observation, secular Israelis who delight in eating swine abroad now light candles and recite more complete prayers at home for Friday night dinner than they used to ⁠— indeed holding Friday night dinner itself is the gateway. And there are so many gateways.

I do however take issue with Amit’s characterization of the Israeli/left side:

Of course we are Jewish, the left answers ⁠— the flag is essentially a prayer shawl, the emblem is the Temple menorah, every kindergartner comes home Friday with a challah ⁠— but that is the décor, not the purpose; the purpose is to be the only democracy in the Middle East.

Instead, it seems to me that people on this side, those of the “villa in the jungle” view, would rather just forget about the jungle; being “the only X in the Middle East” is merely apologetics, not identity. Rather, it’s about being a liberal democracy simply because that is the enlightened, obvious, natural thing to be; anyone with a Yiddisher kopf can see that. And as for the Right downgrading democracy to merely being the operating system, well, that’s what Judaism itself arguably is too, so being the OS is no small thing.

Play of State