Politics

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.

The AI is building itself. On his Moonshots show, Peter Diamandis and mates discuss what they call an historical inflection point. 

In City Journal, Joel Kotkin marks the rise of the unJews: 

Among Democratic undergraduate students, according to one survey, only 5 percent support Israel.
…
Zohran Mamdami … won one-third of Jewish voters and as much as two-thirds of those under 45, according to exit polls.

Demonstrating the relative seriousness of Israeli versus British media discourse, The Independent vs The Jerusalem Post on Trump’s UN speech. The former characterized it as “an extraordinary tirade” and “a spectacular outburst” and worried that “the speech risked all of the goodwill from last week’s historic state visit.” The latter:

Trump held up a mirror to the world. He did not seek to please, did not seek to appear enlightened, but exposed what other leaders try to hide. For him, leadership is not the art of compromise but the courage to tell the truth.

The Manhattan Institute surveys American Jews. The more Jews attend synagogue, the more they support Trump. Only the Orthodox care most about Israel ⁠— and are the only Republican Jews. As a whole, American Jews are mostly sticking with the Democrats despite qualms. Conservatives most care about the economy and abortion equally. Reform Jews care most about abortion (wishing to enable it, presumably).

Pretty troubling ⁠— in this interview with Hugh Hewitt, who asks repeatedly and gets the same answer again, Trump believes a deal can be made with Iran once they are sufficiently impoverished.

I would have had a deal a long time ago, because they were bust. They were totally busted. They were ready to make a deal. They would have made a deal. … I would have gotten, in my opinion, 50/50 chance, maybe more than that, Iran would have been in the Abraham Accords. They wanted to make a deal so bad until we had that phony election.

To his credit, Hewitt pushes back with: “I think they’re fanatics, and you can’t deal with them.”

UN General Assembly speeches this week:

• Argentinian President Javier Gerardo Milei: A great speech about the UN itself, praising it first before damning it.

Biden enabled this infamy too: in The Telegraph, Richard Kemp skewers the ICC on Israel.

Our assessment was that the IDF was complying with international law. We pointed out that they have been making greater efforts and employing more sophisticated procedures than any other armies to mitigate harm to civilians.

I am grateful that The Telegraph at least is promoting such common sense views to the great British public and beyond.

Haviv Rettig-Gur rants [Hebrew] about how Betzalel Smotrich’s statements are undermining support for Israel. While Rettig-Gur is impressive, nobody elected him; indeed it sounds to me like has a case of burnout over business class and should take a break from jetsetting on Israelis’ behalf.

The very special Mike Doran hints at why he votes based on a candidate’s Israel policy (in response to Elon Musk’s enumeration of why he will vote for Trump):

I vote on Israel. The Israel test is the simplest and most elegant. The candidate that is best on Israel will be best on all the other things. I guarantee it. There are profound political and cultural reasons for this fact.

Someone asked him to explicate this. Here’s one quick stab at a vector: ‪Supporting Israel demonstrates both powerful intelligence and strength of character: to be able to power down through overloaded linguistic chimeras, ie, towers of lies big and small, then have the intellectual integrity to choose not to look away but digest the (many) resulting conclusions, and finally have the courage to express support despite local social disapproval, with the faith that it’ll be ok to do so.

Thank you Rusto Reno, editor of Feisty Things, for this articulation towards the end of this podcast episode:

The liberation project is a utopian project that doesn’t have any limits. And moreover, if you can redefine husband and wife, why can’t you redefine men and women? I mean, if we can redefine marriage, the primordial institution of society that is more fundamental than any particular form of government, it’s universal across all cultures, then if you can redefine that, then I don’t see how you can object to people redefining what it means to be a man and a woman, or for that matter, to redefine anything.

There is not one UK political party that expresses the main stances I value:

• Get back into Europe: Brexit is a silly nonsense; Britain’s historic role is offshore balancer to Europe, and how better than deep within its regulatory institutions.
• Be economically sensible: Look back at and reapply what worked in the 20th century: top-notch educational opportunities for less privileged people paired with business-friendliness.
• Support Israel properly: I mean not “staunchly” like the Conservatives say but barely do; I mean get ahead of the USA and Germany and be Israel’s most reliable ally as a fellow smaller world-historic democracy always working for true liberalism. And I also mean: find an independent way to be relevant and helpful in the Middle East. Both Jordan and the Gulf states look to Britain I believe as a senior partner; these are hugely important players who would do more if Britain had their backs; and France might see that and in turn play its part, maybe even in new Anglo-French joint initiatives with yes some boots on the ground.
• Jettison the bollocks: Rigorously and vigorously dispatch with the medievalist self-mutilation that is political post-modernism, including both the extreme rights-based Orwellianism eroding actual liberalism, and the climate apoplexy eroding actual science (there are less oppressive and destructive ways to foster energy innovation).

Theoretically the party closest to all this are the Conservatives, but in practice not so much; moreover they are the cause of the top mess with their Brexit business ⁠— Britain is a European nation, not a semi-continent unto itself like a USA or an India, and now that the Britain-led industrial revolution and resulting empire is long gone, it’s folly to presume and proceed otherwise.

Gaymen and ladies in San Francisco, your true colors shining through…

Only now, after calling an election, do the Conservatives say a woman is a woman. And that is why they will lose: because they have not been governing as conservatives. The only caveat to this prediction is that they are the worst except for all the rest. Or, as Allistair Heath writes in “Nigel Farage has driven the Tories to a state of near-total psychological collapse”, also in The Telegraph:

Aending out strong Right-wing vibes at one minute to midnight in a desperate bid to deflect the oncoming Nigel Farage tsunami isn’t enough: after 14 years of talking as conservatives but governing as social-democrats, the Tories have run out of excuses. They broke their promises on migration, legal and illegal, and never had the guts to pull out of the ECHR. They increased taxes, and are planning to do so again as a share of GDP.

This is why I blame the Tory wets, in charge for almost all of the past 14 years, for the Starmer-ite calamity that is about to befall Britain.

It is the wets who jettisoned free-market economics, deregulation, tax cuts and supply-side reforms, who crippled the City, who increased immigration, who ignored the collapse of community and family and the baby-bust, who failed to fix the Civil Service, who refused to scrap the BBC licence fee, who had no interest in properly reforming the public sector, including the NHS (and who promoted even more cultish reverence for a failing system), who vetoed prison building and a real crackdown on crime, who embraced net zero and the neo-Blairite quangocracy, and who wanted to surrender to the woke stormtroopers.

Once again I link to Brendan O’Neill, Chief Political Writer at Spiked, a publication that increasingly seems to me just about the only sane and brave outpost out there. “The climate witch trials”, an excerpt from O’Neill’s new book A Heretic’s Manifesto, ingeniously frames climate orthodoxy within medieval witch hunts. Towards the end, O’Neill laments:

Since the 1960s, the intellectual classes have been pondering the ‘social construction’ of scientific truth. The Social Construction of Reality, by Peter L Berger and Thomas Luckmann, was published way back in 1966. French philosopher Bruno Latour was fawned over on campuses across the West for his theories on ‘the social construction of scientific facts’. Feminist philosopher Judith Butler thinks even biological sex is a social construct. Meanwhile, the cry goes up to ‘decolonise the science curriculum’, to weave ‘Indigenous Witch-Finding knowledge’ ⁠— an equally valid way of knowing, apparently ⁠— into scientific discussion.

Everywhere science is picked apart, dismantled, relativised, often in a way that undermines the entire project of scientific inquiry and its important search for knowledge. But climate-change science is never socially deconstructed. It is sacralised, made utterly unimpeachable, put beyond the grubby questioning of both the layman and the expert.

I might as well start addressing my thoughts as my Michael Linds because they appear to be one and the same:

• Missing but Wanted: Children
• The End of Progressive Intellectual Life

Oh my, Michael Lind writes in Tablet exactly what I’ve been thinking, so forgive the extensive quoting:

… The Western elite culture of transgression is an example of antinomianism … Derived from the Greek words meaning “against” and “law” or “norm,” the term antinomianism refers to the view that all laws and norms are oppressive always and everywhere, and that the act of transgression in itself is virtuous, if not holy.
…
The three saints of transgression are the illegal immigrant, the transsexual, and the woman who proudly celebrates abortion. All three are idealized by our revolutionary ruling class precisely because they violate traditional norms ⁠— the traditional norm of patriotism, based on the legitimacy of the city-state or nation-state or kingdom and its laws and borders; traditional gender norms; and traditional family norms, which celebrate the capacity of women to give birth and to nurture their infants and of men to provide for them. Most of what is called “progressivism” today is really transgressivism.
…
By now the antinomians in Western nations have won their war against tradition in every realm.
Having vandalized every premodern tradition, the elite antinomians of the modern West now don’t know what to do next. What should rebels against the bourgeoisie rebel against when the bourgeoisie has fallen?
The answer, it is increasingly apparent, is to rebel against the proletariat.
…
Whatever working-class “normies” believe and enjoy, the most influential tastemakers of the trans-Atlantic ruling class denounce and seek to ban, using one of their three or four specious all-purpose justifications. If non-college-educated Americans were to take up square dancing as a fad, the powers that be in the media and academia would solemnly inform us that square dancing is problematically racist or sexist or worsens climate change.

Increasingly, Dan Senor’s weirdly-named podcast Call Me Back is becoming my favorite due to frequent regular output on topics close to my heart with authoritative guests. This is Micah Goodman on the Israel protests. He’s more sympathetic than I am towards the elitist tantrums protests but has the perspicacity to step back and view things historically.

A couple of worthwhile recent podcast episodes: Dan Senor on Israel at the Commentary podcast and Kevin Kelly at Russ Robert’s EconTalk [both links via Overcast].

In Mosaic Magazine, the redoubtable Evelyn Gordon lays out the issue of Israel’s judicial reform.

The increasingly indispensable Michael Doran points out that:

If the goal of the Biden administration were to work with Israel to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, then [US Ambassador to Israel Thomas] Nides would either avoid any intervention whatsoever in Israeli domestic politics, or he would urge Lapid publicly to put forth practical proposals that could lead to a constructive compromise. Nides has demonstratively done neither.

Natan Sharansky exemplifies fair-mindedness and balance on the judicial reform bills despite some rather outraged prompting by old colleague and Times of Israel founding editor David Horowitz.

One side says it won the elections [and can do whatever it wants]. And the other side believes that it doesn’t need to enter a dialogue [over the proposals] because it can get them canceled through demonstrations, through mobilization, by utilizing the denunciation that we are becoming a dictatorship, and that if it enters negotiations on this or that paragraph, it would be accepting the principle [of the need for judicial reform], and it doesn’t accept the principle. So I’m really concerned by the lack of willingness to negotiate from both sides.

As interviewed by Netael Bandel in Israel Hayom, Professor Yoav Dotan opposes judicial activism:

The High Court took the accepted understanding of reasonableness ⁠— intervening when a government authority harms the citizen in an absurd and capricious manner ⁠— and turned it into something else entirely. Everyone must be reasonable, the government and the prime minister, except that they always think they are acting reasonably. The court’s reasonableness approach states that the government will balance its own considerations and that the court will reverse-engineer the government’s determination. In effect, the court becomes a second government that oversees the elected government, and in instances that have no bearing whatsoever on personal liberties.

Finally, Congress will pass a resolution expressing solidarity with and support for Iran’s protesters.

A story most emblematic of Israel’s governmental switchover: Finance Minister Smotrich’s cancellation of Liberman’s tax on plastic plates, as sympathetically reported by JTA.

I’m sad to discover that Carol Gould, my father’s American neighbor and friend during his decade in London, died in late 2021. She wrote a concise memoir of her life and times in London, “42 years in Britain ⁠— 37 years in broadcasting”:

One of the most nerve-wracking broadcasts in which I ever participated was a two-hour special produced by [Iran’s] Press TV about Israel’s illegitimacy as a state, anchored by Alan Hart, a former ITN presenter. Though never substantiated we heard through the industry that his blatant anti-Semitism eventually led to his departure from ITV. This special was devised to illustrate that Israel was not a sovereign state, but illegitimate ⁠— a bantustan created by unwelcome Zionist invaders who used the Shoah as an excuse to displace and massacre Arabs who had lived there for centuries. … I tried to keep my cool and defend the aspirations of the Jewish people to have a homeland, going back to the era of the Dreyfus trial, Emile Zola, ‘J’accuse,’ Theodor Herzl and Ahad Ha’am, but the head of the Muslim Brotherhood UK got so angry at me that he fell off his chair in the front row of the audience and hit his head; the recording had to be suspended whilst we waited for him to be taken away in an ambulance.

Carol notes that she experienced much more anti-Semitism from conservatives than liberals in London.

I recommend this tour de force on Israel’s recent election by the excellent Haviv Rettig Gur in The Times of Israel.

[The left and Balad] spoke of Netanyahu’s imminent return to power as a vast danger, but then did everything required to make that outcome more likely.
…
The Israeli left didn’t collapse in a sudden, recent rightist lurch of the electorate. It has been in a tailspin for three decades. And three decades of failure suggest a simple, unsparing conclusion that hovers over the anxiety about the election results and the patina of moral panic that accompanies it: The left that just collapsed, in terms of raw political strategy, doesn’t deserve to exist.
…
If the left does not fundamentally redraw the Israeli political map ⁠— that is, fundamentally reconceive itself ⁠— then Tuesday’s result will be more than a single painful failure. It will be a harbinger of the foreseeable future. It is this reality that drives the “end of the country as we’ve known it” panic.

From here, Rettig Gur starts to build a case for a revived Israeli Left. What a piece!

Oh my, Walter Russell Mead joins Tyler Cowen for a rich brief hour, and they barely mention WRM’s new book Arc. While in print WRM can seem a bit mealy-mouthed, often it seems throat-clearing to not alienate those with whom he basically disagrees, here he comes out strong and hearty. And TC’s idiosyncratic method of firing off questions works with WRM because each one prompts such a rich answer that there’s little need for normal back and forth.

Jonathan Haidt speaks with Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly on democracy in the next cycle of history and the fragility problem of Gen Z. What a line-up!

Yippee, Conrad Black is back, juicy and crunchy as ever. From “The Triumph of Davos Man”:

Our [hard Left] enemies leapt from the jaws of bitter and total defeat, hijacked the careening gadfly of esoteric conservationism, and transformed it surreptitiously into a well-camouflaged battering ram that has inflicted immense costs and opprobrium on the corporate world and great sadness and inconvenience on the laboring proletariat on whose behalf the Marxist Left has supposedly been crusading these past 150 years.

Good for him: the great Guy Zohar quickly demolishes a climate alarmist report on Israeli TV [Hebrew video]. From here in the UK, it puzzles me why Israel also jumps on the bandwagon of American neuroses. But everybody does it ⁠— we can’t just switch off what has until 5 minutes ago been a salutary cultural parent for over a century.

To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Mark Antony in Julius Ceasar speaking of Brutus: “And in 2022 the United States is a serious country.” Upon receiving a Bradley Prize, Wilfred M. McClay, Professor of Classical History and Western Civilization at Hillsdale College, begins (as published in the redoubtable City Journal):

A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to have dinner with a very wise friend, here in Washington, at his favorite seafood restaurant near Dupont Circle. I remarked that he seemed to be spending more and more of his time in a certain foreign country. He acknowledged the fact, paused for a moment, and then said: “I want to live in a serious country.” It may be relevant to point out that the foreign country in question is Israel, where seriousness is an existential requirement. But it is equally important to point out that the gentleman in question is an American patriot of the highest order, the author of distinguished books on the subject. For him to say such a thing was therefore, for me, a very serious matter.

Hispanics: the new world-historic anchor whilst America’s Whites flounder.

Religious liberty, always. Parental rights, always. Right to life, always. Free markets, always. Compassionate but firm on immigration, always.

Jonathan Haidt is wise enough to note that it is mainly America, not necessary the rest of the world, that has gone particularly mental the past decade. Haidt blames social media. But the word “marriage” does not occur even once in the article, despite the decade having seen same-sex marriage transformed from oxymoronic absurdity to self-evident cudgel. If a human institution so deep ⁠— deeper than the nationstate, than monotheism, even than history itself ⁠— can be so decidedly upended, then what chance has anything else of standing, the collective subconscious must wonder.

I just had to read this one entitled “Why Putin didn’t invade Ukraine during the last U.S. administration”. The question should be a discomfiting one indeed for people of the author’s ilk. His response, prefaced by a prudent “perhaps”: “because Putin was so pleased to see Trump pursuing goals in line with Moscow’s agenda”. Steve Benen is a producer for The Rachel Maddow Show.

America today: the fractious school board meeting. I blame, well, so many things. Corn subsidies? No-fault divorce? The lack perhaps of a dietary component in Protestantism? But despite the madness this video shows that the will to civility still remains, which is a tendril for hope.

Israel’s US Ambassador Michael Herzog responds to Amnesty International’s ”Apartheid” report [tweet].

I’ve been hoping to read a headline like this: “Ministers urge Boris Johnson to rethink net zero plans as cost of living crisis bites” in The Telegraph.

It’s great to be pushing towards renewable energy sources, not because of the climatist calumny but because of the wonderful fact that renewable energy will eventually become a lot cheaper than fossil fuels ever were. As J. Storrs Hall writes in the his transformative Where is My Flying Car, “Counting watts is a better way to measure a people’s standard of living than counting dollars.”

I do understand that sometimes a fire must be lit underneath our collective feet to get things moving, in this case the tarring and feathering of fossil fuels (an unfortunate phrase to be sure). Without this cultural move little might have happened in renewal energy innovation due to the massive interests of energy incumbents.

Meanwhile national leadership’s responsibility is to get this balance right. Deliberately fostering energy poverty is folly, not to mention sadistic ⁠— and has real deleterious geopolitical consequences. Nothing is free, especially that seemingly cost-free thing we increasingly swim in, ie, bullshit, rife with opportunity costs. As pleased as people are to wave utopian ideals and do our little bit, we prefer the political party that enables us to heat our homes.

One main worry exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic is erosion in faith in science. While some of our denizens have pursued wantonly contrarian beliefs, others got busy blithely eroding core tenets. The Royal Society is warning that all this is dangerous. Its first prescription: “investing in lifelong information literacy programmes”.

The solutions are deep because the problems are; we live in an information glut yet there has been no parallel explosion in education ⁠— indeed rigor has likely lessened alongside national priorities skewered due to intemperate new orthodoxies which are due in turn to I know not what.

Yet some heartening news, as related in “Inside Operation Warp Speed: A New Model for Industrial Policy”, which happened under Trump. If we can optimistically harness the former President as a metaphor for Western civilization, perhaps the outlandish demeanor belies sound and enterprising deeds.

At any rate, this is the big shit.