Wednesday, April 24th, 2024
Every paragraph with its little bombshell: Edward Luttwak is in full elegant force in “Iran is weaker than we think” in Unherd. The opening paragraph:
It is only now, almost 16 years since Obama first entered the White House with the private determination to end Iran’s “death to America” hostility at all costs, that his Iran policy has achieved the exact opposite of what he had wanted: direct warfare, with US fighters intercepting Iran’s bombardment drones. All along, it was a policy that had two different faces: one perfectly reasonable, and the other perfectly delusional.
Such casual rhythm before the zing at paragraph’s end! Later we get a Luttwakian paradox of strategy:
The [Iranian] Revolutionary Guards finally failed strategically because their Arab recruitment policy was so successful that it overshot the culminating point of success: seeing the historic Sunni capital of Damascus under Shia domination, and Baghdad the very seat of the Sunni Arab Caliphate ruled by Iran’s agents, Sunni Arab states from Morocco to Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which had repeatedly fought Israel from 1948, moved to abandon their hostility, openly or discreetly.
And we end with striking, real-world evidence that demonstrates the strategic theories posited within. I won’t quote this evidence so as not to spoil the end of this masterful op-ed.
Tuesday, April 23rd, 2024
Monday, April 22nd, 2024
In The Wall Street Journal, this geopolitical news article on Finland is the first one I can recall reading anywhere. Swimming into focus are renewed tensions with the new Russia. Th
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, Finland has ramped up its military spending, boosting its defense budget to above 2% and snapping up U.S. rocket systems, as well as Israeli antitank and air-defense systems. The country is preparing to base F-35 jet fighters it will receive from the U.S. just over 100 miles from its border with Russia.
I wish for Finland and Israel to explore each other much more.
Sunday, April 21st, 2024
Friday, April 19th, 2024
Great lengthy interview with Giora Eiland, always with cogent orthogonal ideas on important Israeli geopolitical realities.
The Israeli story was, Hamas is like ISIS, and ISIS is like Hamas. No! That’s not the case. ISIS was a bunch of crazies from Baghdad who, unopposed, gained control of western Iraq and those who lived there. But it didn’t represent the people, not in Mosul or elsewhere. Gaza more resembles 1930s Germany, where an extremist party won elections, with the support of most of the people, and quickly unified the military and civil government into one entity. What happened on October 7 is that the State of Gaza went to war against the State of Israel. State against state. Now, the state of Gaza does have vulnerabilities. It doesn’t have sufficient fuel, food and water of its own. You can impose a legitimate boycott on that state until the state returns all of your hostages. Humanitarian for humanitarian.
I’m not sure whether to be disappointed or relieved that Eiland is granted the levers of power.
Wednesday, April 17th, 2024
Tuesday, April 16th, 2024
OK I need to stop reading the news, but one more, this diatribe in Arutz7:
To me, the word “State” has demeaning connotations in the English speaking world. What other country on this planet is referred to and refers to itself as the State of…….? To be referred to as a “State” implies a not quite equal status with other nations, implying some benevolent authority has graciously bestowed a degree of autonomy to Israel. It is time that Israelis and Diaspora Jews refer to Israel as Israel, period.
I see no need to take issue with the term “state”; we are in good company with the United States of America. Like them we explicitly acknowledge the legalistic framework within which the American and Israeli peoples live at liberty. There may even be some positive connotations; we live now in a state of Israel, as opposed to the previous state. At any rate, many nationstates have political prefixes that are ignored and shortened to their national names: République française is just France, for example, and the State of Israel is usually referred to as just Israel.
Monday, April 15th, 2024
Writing brief essays now on X, Victor Davis Hanson lists Ten Ways to Guarantee a Theater-wide War:
Vapid “Don’t!” … Abruptly pull out of Afghanistan … Chinese spy balloon … [okay a] “minor” invasion [of Ukraine] … Seem eager to resume the Iran Deal …
Etc.
Monday, April 8th, 2024
Rice cultures around the world do tend to exhibit similar cultural characteristics, including less focus on self, more relational or holistic thinking and greater in-group favoritism than wheat cultures.
The last time I came across this sort of diet-based sociology was in Nietzsche, where it struck me as both significant and true while feeling outlandish and ridiculous when repeated. So it’s nice to see it treated academically. Here’s one bit in Nietzsche, Aphorism #134 in La Gaya Scienza (he probably mentions it elsewhere too):
Pessimists as Victims. When a profound dislike of existence gets the upper hand, the after-effect of a great error in diet of which a people has been long guilty comes to light. The spread of Buddhism (not its origin) is thus to a considerable extent dependent on the excessive and almost exclusive rice-fare of the Indians, and on the universal enervation that results therefrom.
I enjoyed this very nice primer on editing by Eva Parish. Of her 9 recommendations, the one I fall down on most in my own occasional scribblings is “Be aware of your tone”, which is actually quite an expansive, non-technical problem. I guess I try to mix up the high and low due to insecurity that I’m a bore and aim to jolt and amuse the reader awake — but Eva argues that the mix is confusing and distracting.
I think however she is wrong to restore commas after prefixing subordinate clauses. Her examples:
Example: If you’re looking for me I’ll be in my office.
Revision: If you’re looking for me, I’ll be in my office.
Example: Due to the fog our flight was delayed.
Revision: Due to the fog, our flight was delayed.
My take instead: if the sentence is unambiguous without the comma then lean towards omitting it. Especially with the second example, with the clause being only four syllables long, the comma slows down the reader so much that the music of the sentence is broken. “Fog our flight” cannot be misinterpreted — nobody thinks of fogging a flight. Indeed the lack of a comma foretells to the reader they can confidently plow ahead through a well-tended sentence.
Her admonition to avoid the vague “this” — is new to me or else I’d forgotten it from The Little Red Schoolhouse, even though it fits very much into the Schoolhouse’s insistence of chaining sentences together nicely, and I will keep it in mind.
Via Hacker News, this Chrome for Developers post dives into browser colors beyond RGB.
Saturday, April 6th, 2024
He’s very good, is Brendan O’Neill, and I’m glad The Spectator is publishing him. “The Truth About Friendly Fire”:
Across social media, the cry goes up: Israel did this on purpose. It seems Israel is the only state not allowed to make mistakes. Where us decent Westerners kill friends in error, Israel does it intentionally, with malice at its heart.
Who would have thought this would be published in such a well-known British magazine. There is hope.
It seems that some in the West are seeking to launder their reputations through attacking Israel. From Cameron to Biden, powerful men who have been involved in wars far more horrific and far less justified than Israel’s war on Hamas, are now pontificating against the Jewish State.
But their finger-wagging attempt at rehabilitating their own reputations by slighting others’ — and hang the risk even unto civilization itself — does burnish at least one aspect of their respective reputations, ie being a sleazeball.
Thursday, April 4th, 2024
How gratifying, the plethora of common-sense comments reacting to this rather less-than-sensible Telegraph story “How international law could force Britain to stop arms sales to Israel” which furthers the tradition of latching on to that weird and mealy-mouthed “plausible” ruling by the ICJ.
Was this the Court’s intent, to say something with plausible deniability so that the very many people who want it to have said a thing can act as if it did? I in turn am latching on to that possibility to accuse it all of being quite transparent, truly despicable, and dangerously corrosive.
Wednesday, April 3rd, 2024
In Mosaic Magazine, a sweeping history of Israel v. Lebanon by Raphael BenLevi.
Israel’s geography currently provides it with reasonably defensible borders on three sides: the Mediterranean to the west, the Sinai Desert to the south, and the Jordan Valley to the east. Israel’s northern border, however, is not defined by a sea, a vast desert, or even a major river. Rather it is a man-made line that cuts through mountains, valleys, farms, and forests. This has been the case since antiquity, making the northern border of ancient Israel the hardest to defend.
The article mirrors one that I linked to from exactly three months ago on Gaza by Jean-Pierre Filiu in Foreign Affairs.
Tuesday, April 2nd, 2024
Sunday, March 31st, 2024
It’s in The Guardian so you know what’s coming in this restaurant review of Freddie’s, a New York-style non-kosher Jewish deli, plus they telegraph it in the title, so that in falling for the clickbait I skip the whole salt-beef bit to the predictable meat of the thing:
For all my lack of faith or observance these dishes, kept alive by a vestigial memory of the shtetl, root me. Then I hesitated. Could I really write about a Jewish restaurant given the current political turmoil? Would I get abuse for doing so? Surely better to keep shtum. At which point I knew I had no choice: I had to write about it. The horrendous campaign of the government and armed forces of Israel in Gaza cannot be allowed to make being Jewish a source of shame. When Hamas mounted their 7 October attack on Israel, they committed both an atrocity and a provocation. With so many hostages taken, there were no good options for the Israeli government. Nevertheless, they managed to choose the very worst one. They have killed thousands, starved many more, destroyed homes and turned their country into a pariah. As it happens, they have also made life for Jews who live outside Israel and have no responsibility for the decisions its government takes, so very much harder. I deplore what Israel is doing. But that doesn’t mean I can “refute” my Jewishness. That is a surrender to antisemitism. And so I sit here with my terrific salt beef sandwich and my chocolate mousse, indulging that bit of my Jewish identity which makes sense to me. It’s not much, but it’s all I have.
As a British Israeli my reaction to this sort of thing is always a multi-level “ugh”. But having returned recently to my native Glasgow for a Jewish funeral, I was reminded of what I would likely have been if my parents hadn’t made Aliyah to Israel when I was a child — and moreover since I have now lived in the UK again for a long time is arguably what I have reverted back to being. (Noooooo!)
Nonetheless it’s hard for me to feel anything but contempt for people who stroke the tiger in the hope it will eat them last.
And yet I must understand that as people who are primarily Britons their prism is the BBC, and as right-thinking people it’s likely The Guardian and its ilk, so this is what they may actually believe. But is the reviewer truly speaking in good faith? He says Israel chose the very worst course of action but does not articulate what other better ones might have been. Write a very stroppy letter?
Also, if a sandwich is the extent of his Jewish identity, he’d probably do better shucking it off altogether and embracing something else more all-encompassingly. I don’t mean that disparagingly, but men are meaning machines and if he’s not getting much out of Judaism then it is occupying a space in his soul that could perhaps otherwise be more fruitfully filled.
Levantine Israel is such a monumental and cosmic gift — especially for the rain-soaked British Jew who must otherwise seek any anthropological depth in Druidism and sun in other countries such as Spain (a pretty fabulous alternative it’s true). So I think it is folly for a British Jew to not embrace that mainline connection to Israel; Britons have a passion for the Middle East and now Jewish Britons have their own ancient piece of it again.
But that is all very well when it was done for you as a child or if you are wealthy enough to maintain an additional home and travel frequently. But for most of us, as I was reminded at the funeral, we grow up and get up and go to work, lifelong dalliances with distant exotic countries way beyond reach. And even for those who have the means to have additional homes, the center of gravity of their psyche and viewpoint is British. I need to understand that about British Jews who did not make Aliyah, which is most of them.
On one hand, I can see how the current war unites Jews in their fate, while on the other I can see how the cleavage in the West between appeasement and struggle runs right down the middle of Diaspora Jewry.
Saturday, March 30th, 2024
Friday, March 29th, 2024
Thursday, March 28th, 2024
The most awesome new pic of Fallingwater I’ve perhaps ever seen beyond the standard 3/4 view. This is by Andrew Pielage, who was an official Artist-In-Residence at the time. The viewpoint and the lighting give us each step’s full floating horizontality and their cumulative effect. I can imagine Mr Wright commending the image.
Wednesday, March 27th, 2024
One of the principal functions of a modern university is to provide… masses of human material capable of exercising the responsibilities while accepting the limitations of a bureaucratic career.
Walter Russell Mead, Twilight of the Wonks
Friday, March 22nd, 2024
Culture is cultural appropriation is culture.
ASK
Tuesday, March 19th, 2024
Sunday, March 17th, 2024
From what looks like his regular chair in his cluttered leafy office, Dan Schueftan — or should we call him Dr Dugri — provides a primer on Israel (dugri meaning something like English’s plainspokenness or brass tacks).
Reading up on Schueftan however, despite all the sagacity he seems the intellectual architect of much of the present misery, having advocating for unilateral withdrawals.
In retrospect one might be able to guess that this would be the general thrust of his advice, given his mercurial impatient demeanor; and that he gets the listener’s acquiescence — perhaps in Ariel Sharon’s case against their better judgment — with his many “ok?”s.
Saturday, March 16th, 2024
What a splendid piece by Charles Moore in The Telegraph on Israel.
Britain (with other powers) claims that Israel has been, in international law, the “occupying power” in Gaza even after it left the place in 2005. This is a strange idea, since the definition of occupation is “effective control”, which Israel even now does not have over the whole of Gaza.
If their subscription department was a bit less shady I’d totally resubscribe.
The official rejoinder to Chuck Schumer’s “Lost His Way” speech, given within days of Nathan Glazer’s statement at the Oscars:
We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.
comes not from the Israeli government but from the Likud Party, thereby demonstrating the very content of its statement: that Israel is indeed “an independent and proud democracy” complete with political parties proud of their heritage.
Benny Gantz made a commendable statement condemning the speech to which Arutz Sheva commendably dedicated a story. While the Likud’s statement is exquisitely-crafted English, Gantz’s is more Israeli — less catty, more direct: first unabashed fulsome praise, then: “but he made a mistake.” Blunt yet surgical. Lapid meanwhile chose to harness the speech to rail on Netanyahu.
We make such a fuss of all these bloviations even as the situation rages. I like the take by Danny Cohen, a producer on Glazer’s movie, who, as reported by The Hill, said on the Unholy podcast:
My support for Israel is unwavering. Listen, it’s his film. He can stand up there and choose his own words.”
Commentary reports for duty too.
Thursday, March 14th, 2024
Wednesday, March 13th, 2024
Anti-Israel Jews are not a political but a clinical sub-category.
Edward Luttwak
Howard Jacobson, I didn’t know you had it in you. So there is such a thing as a well-known public intellectual British Jew with at least half a bollock.
Wednesday, March 6th, 2024
Thank you, past and likely future Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, in particular for this Twitter post in memoriam for Dennis Yekimov, killed in action in Gaza. That big wide intelligent friendly face, and in the biographical notes:
He would hike dozens of kilometers in streams and in the hills of Jerusalem and the whole country.
Younger, betters versions of myself, that is how I see these heroic guys, who have so much to lose and are willing to lose it, and are doing so in the hundreds.
Monday, February 26th, 2024
My impression is that R2-D2 and C-3PO were the Laurel and Hardy, the comedy relief, with one being the superior intellect and dominant personality, pushing around a more innocent friend.
Mark Hamill
Monday, February 19th, 2024
Forget a 2-state solution: emulate the Emirates! In English, Mordechai Kedar explains a political horizon to Arutz Sheva. Update: In the wake of Bibi’s outline for post-war Gaza announced just a few days later, Kedar seems prescient, so much so that either he has the Cabinet’s ear or was tasked to float the notion.
As Rumsfeld say, if you can’t fix problem, make it bigger. So what we’re going for is not a 2-state nor even a 3-state but an 8+ statelets solution! I wonder if the Biden Administration will grudgingly go along with this. You know what, I’m guessing they will. Viva la chamulot!
Wednesday, February 14th, 2024
Gadi Taub at his best, in Tablet, saying “Sorry, but There Is No Two-State Solution”.
As a sidenote, it’s getting harder to differentiate among the various competent public intellectuals in terms of style these days; this could have been written by any number of people — Seth Mandel for one, who seems to be writing everything in Commentary these days.
Tuesday, February 13th, 2024
Jeremiah Rozman:
I want a homeland, not a 22,000 sq. km. Yad Vashem … Victory will ensure both Israel’s security and its image.
Monday, February 12th, 2024
Jason Fried again, with an insight into Apple’s new Vision Pro that one important value proposition is recording:
What I think is super interesting about the Apple Vision Pro is the potential to be able to literally see through someone else’s eyes. Not just see their field of vision — you can get at that with head or eyeglass mounted cameras — but to actually see where they’re looking. To know what they’re focused on. To lock in with them. To see how they see. To watch them look from their point of view. Standing in someone’s shoes is one thing, but even if you could do that, you’d still be looking through your own eyes. But to literally see as they’d see from someone else’s point-of-view perspective feels groundbreaking. If I was making an app for this, I’d call it “See With”.
For the past few months I’ve retreated from working on a software product to, well, for a month after October 7th I didn’t seem to get much work done, then I was working on software systems for clients. Now dipping my toe back into RSSDeck, the biggest edifice I’ve ever created, I’m inspired by this short piece by Jason Fried, “To Make”:
I’ve consulted. I’ve done client work. I’ve advised. I’ve served on boards. I’ve invested. I’ve written books. I’ve spoken on the circuit. I’ve blogged for years. I have to say, I’ve found no greater professional joy than working with a tight group of people to ship and support our own products.
The New York Post has published a post by Mordechai Nisan advocating that Gazans leave. After October 7th this position — “transfer” in Israeli parlance — went from the extremist fringe to being I think the unspoken mainstream preference among Israelis.
The world power with the strongest ideological opposition to transfer — apart from the Arabs still wanting to keep it as a bludgeon against Israel — is probably the USA, as it seems to go against the American grain of self-determination for peoples. But if the West Bankers manage to make a go of it — highly unlikely but still — then former Gazans could always migrate there again eventually if the call to return remains strong.