Briefs
Sunday, June 23rd, 2024
1948
Benny Morris
First bought and read a dozen years ago, and mostly forgotten, I returned to Benny Morris’s 1948 now during the post-October 7th Israel-Gaza conflict, for which 1948’s War of Independence serves in a number of ways as a distant mirror. Although 1967’s Six Day War seems to loom larger in consciousness, 1948 was the big one, the epoch-definer.
Even back then, Israel labored under a diplomatic situation where it was held back from victory. This time around the Palestinians have different weapons: no Arab armies, but lopsided savagery, projectile warfare, a dedicated sponsor and participant in Tehran, Western cultural cognitive decline, and lawfare from a corrupted globalist establishment. The book, with its encyclopedic ambitions, suffers from one sin of history: it does not elicit mental images of many of the events it describes, such as the battles around Gaza between Israel and Egypt. That said, it’s a vital primer.
Thursday, June 6th, 2024
Salem Alketbi in The Jerusalem Post on Arab do-nothing-ism vis-a-vis Gaza. It’s great to hear this pragmatic, humanist voice coming from the UAE.
What remains unspoken about the Arab role in Gaza is the lack of a collective political vision for a solution to the crisis, despite the fact that it has been ongoing for over seven months. Instead, they have settled for official face-saving statements, while refraining from calling a spade a spade and without playing any real role in saving the Palestinian people from the ruthlessness of the Iran-backed Hamas faction.
Sunday, May 5th, 2024
I cannot (yet) follow Lee Smith to his conclusion that the Biden Administrations’ goal is American decline and defeat (though there was a strong strain of this in its precursor Obama Administration); rather than conspiratorial and malevolent, it seems more likely due to the more common weaknesses of delusion and cowardice.
Moreover Israel shares some blame for being weak-willed enough in recent months to go along with the Administration’s tacit protection of Hamas.
Thursday, April 25th, 2024
In contrast with the Jonathan Freedland piece I linked to earlier, Armin Rosen’s survey “The Israel-Gaza war has changed everything: The norms of war are being rewritten in real-time” in Unherd is simultaneously more detailed yet more humble.
Much of what’s happened since October 7 is without any real precedent … we are deep into the unknown, and were there long before this past week. The sides have notched accomplishments that are both novel and gruesome enough to demand real analytic humility…
Wednesday, April 17th, 2024
Amidst all this it’s a happy thought that Germany sold Israel a doomsday device (Dolphin subs) and a couple of decades later Israel is selling Germany an anti-doomsday device. Ben-Gurion and Adenhauer.
Tuesday, April 16th, 2024
Giora Eiland’s commentary on Channel 12 last night warranted its own story this morning on Arutz7, with him arguing that the response to Iran’s attack should be to focus on Lebanon.
Israel does not need to attack in Iran. There is no reason for it, and it has the potential to become complicated militarily, as well as regionally and with all of our friends – and the achievement will not be significant, regardless. If you want to put Iranians in their place and maybe even test them – there are two other arenas: One is in Syria.
There is merit here, though I think his suggested mechanism, to announce Israel’s return to the North for the school year, is fatuous. Both the low- and the high-level attacks from Hamas and Iran respectively point to a response aginst the mid-level main threat from Lebanon. Even if it doesn’t happen visibly — Bibi’s response seems to be to keep things simple and retaliate against actual perpetrators — it does feel like the appropriate true focus.
Kudos to Britain’s Daily Mail for publishing the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ piece “Why Israel’s failure to strike back at Iran could lead to NUCLEAR WAR” by FDD’s chief exec Mark Dubowitz and senior fellow Jacob Nagel.
Israel was acting well within the rules of its dangerous neighborhood by taking out [Mohammad Reza Zahedi, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force in Syria and Lebanon]. But the Ayatollah responded with a potentially catastrophic barrage on Israeli civilians, military bases and government facilities. If Iran walks away from this moment without paying a severe price, Tehran may be emboldened to deploy its weapons again. And the next time, these drones and missiles may be armed with nuclear or chemical payloads.
Their conclusion is indisputable and anything else is either appeasement or overthinking.
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
This Dearborn crowd musters up a “Death to America” chant (though the speaker to his credit doesn’t say it). Stupid fucks.
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.
We all know that if these tattooed trustafarians who think men can breastfeed went anywhere near Gaza their pronouns would be was / were quicker than you could say ‘Free Palestine!’.
Brendan O’Neill, “The unbearable sanctimony of the ‘pro-Palestine’ set”
Sunday, March 31st, 2024
Good ep of Mike Doran and Gadi Taub’s allcaps ISRAEL UPDATE podcast “Is the US Stabbing Israel in the Back?”
Tuesday, March 19th, 2024
Bibi to AIPAC and Bibi with John Spencer, urban warfare historian. What a high-octane human.
Thursday, March 14th, 2024
The worst news I’ve seen in a while [Hebrew]: The head of a Gaza clan has been assassinated by Hamas for collaborating with Israel. We need to not be fuckups in this crucial endeavor: empowering, enabling and ensuring acceptable alternatives to Hamas is the capstone to victory; all the battlefield victories come to naught without it and we are back to square one alongside some demolished buildings and bereaved locals.
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.
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.
Thursday, February 8th, 2024
It’s so weird reading The Telegraph’s news feed of the day’s events because it reads like Iranian Press TV, full of Israel’s dastardly deeds. I guess it’s like The Wall Street Journal where there’s a real schism between the leanings of the so-called news division vs the editorial section.
Wednesday, February 7th, 2024
I must admit I knew almost none of this history of Gaza as narrated by Jean-Pierre Filiu in Foreign Affairs. After long staying clear I think I’ll look more closely at this magazine.
Gaza’s sudden new prominence should hardly come as a surprise. Although little of it is remembered today, the territory’s 4,000-year history makes clear that the last 16 years were an anomaly; the Gaza Strip has almost always played a pivotal part in the region’s political dynamics, as well as its age-old struggles over religion and military power.
As the recounting reaches the present day, no mention is made of the fundamental wound kept open: that Palestinian refugee status is uniquely passed down the generations.
Tuesday, January 2nd, 2024
“Expert, unbiased global coverage,” the Financial Times claims. But this so-called Long Read on Gaza, “What will be left of Gaza when the war ends?” is undersourced, underdeveloped and quite biased indeed — it could have been published in any freebie and seems inappropriate for a leading £59/month newspaper. “I heard [the Israelis] shot the horses,” one Gazan is quoted. But did the Israelis in fact do so? Nobody bothers to check. Yet the statement remains, dangling potently at the end of a paragrah. The term “Hamas” appears very infrequently, and when it does, is in bland terms, eg, “Hamas won Palestinian elections and in 2007 ousted Fatah”. The term “terror” appears only once, quoting Tzachi Hanegbi’s op-ed in a Saudi newspaper.
Thursday, December 28th, 2023
Sometimes it seems The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board is the world’s only source of clearly-wrought sanity. Here they summarize the current state of the war with Hamas: Sinwar is sitting pretty thanks to American bear-hug limiting Israel’s war machine, but don’t underestimate Israel’s October 7th-induced determination.
Sunday, November 26th, 2023
There’s so much strong stuff being published in Tablet but I’ll just link to this long and searing piece by Andrew Fox entitled “A Dark Thanksgiving” about his teenage son’s experience at school in Durham in northern Virginia, where Muslims outnumber Jews by a ratio of at least 50 to 1.
I was particularly moved by his mention of his other two children:
My oldest son, who had started a chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America at the same high school, refused to hear a word I had to say about Israel, abruptly leaving the dinner table whenever the subject arose. My middle son was hardly any more receptive, pinging me with the moral equivalencies he’d picked up from Instagram posts and then ignoring the long responses I sent in return. Now my youngest son had accused me of betraying him and using him.
This is rough.
Monday, November 13th, 2023
Among other points, in his piece “Initial Lessons From the October 2023 War” at The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune, Yaacov Amridor admonishes:
It is wrong to argue – as some significant critics have done – that too much money has been spent on technology at the expense of training and high levels of combat readiness. As it turns out, ground operations are demonstrating that technology is vital for the IDF’s success in general and for the specific challenges of urban warfare in particular.
Thursday, November 9th, 2023
I just finished watching Michael Doran’s 6-part lecture series on the Yom Kippur War at the Tikvah Fund (requires free registration). After Walter Russell Mead, Doran is doing so much to promote the American-Israeli relationship.
Monday, November 6th, 2023
Kobi Michael and Gabi Siboni write:
The Gaza war is also a historic opportunity to dismantle UNRWA, which is an active partner in perpetuating the conflict by fostering the ethos of armed resistance, the demand for the return of refugees, and incitement against Israel.
And the next step:
The sole course of action vis-à-vis Hezbollah must be its complete and utter destruction.
Saturday, November 4th, 2023
On Tel Aviv University’s YouTube Channel, host Ido Aharoni interviews former Director of TAU’s program in Ottoman and Turkish Studies at the Department of Middle East and African History Ehud Toledano on the current situation.
Toledano characterizes himself a believer in credible ultimatums. Rather than finishing off the Hamas leadership, Israel should surround them and offer them death or expulsion (perhaps to Turkey) akin to the PLO model from Beirut to Tunisia, with exile also contingent on hostage release.
He’s against Israel occupying Gaza in the aftermath, instead recommending a laissez faire approach of instant withdrawal resulting either in the West rushing in or else letting locals organize, with Israel conducting offshore balancing militarily (ie bombing) to suppress any jihadists emerging victorious.
Then with credibility at a high, he suggests Israel present Hizballah with an ultimatum: dismantle the missiles and retreat north of the Litani River or face war. Hizballah would not go for it, he points out, as Hizballah’s very existence is to provide a deterrent against an Israeli attack against Iran’s nuclear program. So Hizballah would not comply and Israel would face two devastating days of missile attacks and it would be over.
It’s all perhaps slightly fanciful — starting wars is not Bibi’s style — but worthy strategic thinking in the mix (plus he may not be in the saddle by then).
Friday, November 3rd, 2023
I hesitate to even bother linking to Matthew Continetti’s Washington Free Beacon column “Let Israel Win” because it’s such a statement of the bleedin’ obvious, as even Continetti himself writes:
Hamas could end all this tomorrow if it released the hostages, put down its arms, and surrendered. Hamas, not Israel, is the aggressor. Hamas, not Israel, is the “occupier” of the Gaza Strip. Hamas, not Israel, rejects international law. Hamas, not Israel, steals food, fuel, and water from civilians. And the fact that these words need to be written at all is evidence that the culture-producing institutions of the West—the media, the universities, cultural and political celebrities—are irreparably broken.
Wednesday, November 1st, 2023
Hamas official Ghazi Hamad is pretty sober in his insanity, as translated and promoted by MEMRI:
The existence of Israel is illogical. The existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood, and tears. It is Israel, not us. We are the victims of the occupation. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October 1,000,000 – everything we do is justified.
Frank Furedi and Brendan O’Neill discuss Gaza, anti-Semitism and the global culture war and it is a single topic. Ultimately, Furedi argues, Hamas is not even an entirely Middle Eastern phenomenon but at least partially a cultural creation of an influential strand of Western self-loathing that seems to be on track for a self-evisceration.
Do the woke not see that if they are successful in their takeover of the modern state they will immediately become actually oppressed, this time by their erstwhile favored activists who have already demonstrated their methods? All the glories and technologies that have come about as a result of the new liberties of modernity will fall into the hands of ruling barbarians. We need no longer fear the singularity; technology will have peaked and start regressing. I hope the American high school curriculum still assigns A Canticle for Liebowitz alongside Brave New World, Animal Farm?? and 1984.
Another tour de force interview with Walter Russell Mead, this time with Bari Weiss.
I look at the last 300 years of world history as this contest, a series of contests, between English-speaking commercial, reasonably liberal maritime powers and these big land powers… We’re back to the Cold War when Russia was a huge sponsor of Palestinian terrorism. And Russia has decided to go back to that today. See, we don’t want, the Biden Administration doesn’t want, Russia and Iran and China to cohere because that just makes all of our problems worse. But they also know that cohering makes all of our problems worse. And that’s what they want.
Wednesday, October 25th, 2023
Aha, more spot-on clarity from Tablet magazine in “America Needs a Decisive Israeli Victory” by Raphael Benlevi.
America is being tested no less than Israel; the outcome will determine whether regional states will ally with America or with China and Russia. In other words, the Gaza war will determine whether the American-led order in the Middle East is still sustainable, or rather a relic of a historical period whose time has passed.
Take heed, o Wall Street Journal Editorial Page and Commentary Magazine: your might is being eclipsed!
Kudos to Tablet for publishing “Biden’s Three Nos” by Gadi Taub:
The closer you examine Biden’s hug, the more it appears like a full nelson. To be sure, there are positive aspects to the visit, but the cons decisively outweighed the pros. Biden came to Israel to preserve his—and President Barack Obama’s—disastrous policy of appeasing Iran.
Together with Caroline Glick, Taub is a useful right-wing voice in the mix that is my head, and I’m inclined to agree with much of this piece, except for one glaring and ultimately overriding omission: events, dear Gadi, events. The leopard will not change its spots; momentum has its own momentum; reality itself will pop — is already popping — the Democrat delusion of an appeasable Iran.
Brigadier General Pat Ryder speaks to and takes questions on the missiles that the USS Carney shot down:
There were no casualties to U.S. Forces and none that we know of to any civilians on the ground. Information about these engagements is still being processed and we cannot say for certain what these missiles and drones were targeting but they were launched from Yemen, heading north along the Red Sea, potentially towards targets in Israel.
The US has now had to defend Israel in this war. On Iran’s part, might firing from so far away have been a strategic mistake?
Monday, October 23rd, 2023
Great interview [Hebrew audio] with Prof. Danny Orbach on historical comparisons to Israel’s current war, including 1973, 1948, Vietnam, Lebanon, WWII, etc.
Israel shows 200 foreign journalists 43 minutes of footage of the Hamas invasion and mass murder — I think this could make a difference. I think at last Israelis understand that other people are not us and need to be told, need to be shown, otherwise falsehoods will rush in to fill the new empty space of attention that is demanding filling.
Sunday, October 22nd, 2023
A strong piece by Yinon Weiss in response to Thomas Friedman’s latest condescending piece to Israel:
It has not been since 1945 that an enemy was entirely and irrefutably defeated. It has been so long that many people, rank and file and leaders alike, forget that such a war is even a strategic option. I am not one to downplay risk or quickly advocate for any war, let alone total war. As a U.S. combat veteran, I have seen the horrors of war up close, and like many veterans, I have been against virtually all military interventions of the last 15 years. However, when your neighbor ceases being a manageable threat and instead enters your house and kills and rapes your family, you can no longer rely on bigger fences and brainstorming sessions to unwind the situation – the evil force must be removed.
Thursday, October 19th, 2023
To paraphrase: “What do you all think sovereignty means? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers.”
With some distaste I link to the BBC Verify page on Gaza’s Al-Ahli Hospital explosion (whatever the heck BBC Verify is, at any rate you’d think it would not be a separate thing from BBC News). I would wager that the link, currently 3rd on the BBC News homepage, will soon quietly disappear and this story will not be heard from until weeks or months from now, when it is acknowledged that the preponderance of evidence indeed points to an Islamic Jihad misfire. There’s no mention that the US Department of Defense has determined the explosion was “very unlikely” to be the result of Israeli action — arguably fair enough, the US is not above the fray. Yet not in the lede, nor at the beginning nor end of the article, does the closest text to a conclusion appear:
Three experts we spoke to say it is not consistent with what you would expect from a typical Israeli air strike with a large munition.
Rather, it is buried in paragraph 14 of 22, caveated by: “So far, the findings are inconclusive.”
As I write this, I remember that in even as a high schooler at the American School in Israel I was examining British press reports for media bias. I think I will stop now. But this example is especially important because it should make Westerners pause and note their eagerness to believe a false version of events put out by organizations their own governments have classified as terrorists, should the historic horrors of October 7th be leaving them with any doubt. It can affect whether or how much the person in the European living room trusts and supports Israel to do what it must in response to Hamas’s surprise attack.
Another barnstormer interview with Haviv Rettig Gur on Israel on Dan Senor’s Call Me Back podcast, all the more powerful this time for the steely quiet tone.
Monday, October 16th, 2023
I’ve been saying it all week and here Michael Oren has posted it up nicely in Israel Hayom: “A golden opportunity to focus on Hezbollah”:
Hamas cannot escape anywhere; it is trapped within Gaza, which can be sealed off gradually, and the air force can strike it at any time without significant hindrance. Rooting out Hamas can be done at a later stage. On the other hand, Hezbollah has a vast geographic area and open supply lines.
In terms of military capabilities, the organization poses a much greater threat than Hamas, including hundreds of thousands of missiles (some with precision capabilities) and many experienced fighters with combat experience in Syria. As long as Hezbollah remains unchallenged, it will continue to pose an intolerable strategic threat to the State of Israel.
Tackling Hizballah first seems to me the most rational order, so much so that the onus should be on why not to proceed so. Some questions:
Hostages: Does dealing with Hizballah first improve or degrade the hostages’ chances of safe return? It does buy some time to locate them and also provides a credible threat of destruction to Hamas while also providing its leaders with the option of at least personal survival, which is a reason to deal. But it also delays matters, which might be critical.
USA: Presumably the Biden Administration will oppose it — hence perhaps the aircraft carriers — because it brings things closer to a head with Iran, a confrontation the Democrats seem unwilling to have. Yet that is what proxies are for, and Iran seems to always climb down. And America has unfinished business with Hizballah. [Update 2023 Oct 17: Victor Davis Hanson has mused: “Why does the U.S. discount any possibility of a strategic response from Russia—which reportedly has some 6,000-7,000 nuclear weapons—to attacks on its homeland, but seems almost terrified about calling Iran to account for its central role in arming and funding terrorists to start a war with Israel by slaughtering 1,200 civilians?”]
1948: Oren’s analogy to 1948 may not be the best one; wasn’t Egypt on the southern front the more serious military threat? It is true though that Jerusalem, like the kidnapped Israelis, was being held hostage; moreover, the spiritual and moral imperative of relieving Jerusalem is analogous to that of saving hostages. In which case, perhaps the 1948 comparison resolves back into the issue of hostages.
Clearly Oren has thought about this a bit, if maybe not enough, and the op-ed is a whittled-down version. I’m sure decisionmakers are bandying about the notion, which might one of the reasons there’s been no ground invasion yet.
Ultimately I think the reason not to go this route, and it is an overwhelming one, is to not start a war that might be avoided. Perhaps here intelligence matters; if Israel can induce that this attack was truly a joint one in which Hizballah as well as Hamas has an active assigned role, that tilts things further towards starting first on the northern front. But if that role is as passive deterrent, like Biden’s aircraft carriers seem to be, then it seems prudent to not fan the flames further for now.
Update 2023 Oct 17, 12:11am GMT:
Some corroboration of my thinking:
- “Israel weighing possible ‘first strike’ against Hezbollah in north, former soldier says” in The Washington Times
- “The Next Unthinkable Attack: Growing Risks of a Third Lebanon War” at JINSA
In fact if it’s coming at all it could come at any moment.
Update 2023 Oct 21:
Do the warnings of Itzhak Brik regarding the IDF’s unreadiness [Hebrew video] have any bearing here? We are all assuming Israel has the capability, maybe it doesn’t. Well, maybe it didn’t three weeks ago, but — and I hope this too isn’t merely a misleading conceptzia — democracies once awakened are the most formidable war machines.
Aviv Rettig Gur has become one of the go-to writers on Israel, and his latest, “Hamas does not yet understand the depth of Israeli resolve” makes some pithy points:
If the response of Palestinian politics to the Oslo peace process was the mass murder of Israeli civilians, and the response of Palestinian politics to the stagnation of the peace process under Benjamin Netanyahu is the mass murder of Israeli civilians, then Israeli policy isn’t the cause of Palestinian mass murder of Israeli civilians.
But Israelis’ minds are already made up regarding the dissolution of Hamas, so this piece reads merely as a primer for foreigners to grasp that implacable determination. In fact, what strikes me most is the gaps in logic that seem almost deliberate given how well Gur reasons; Straussian even perhaps. He writes:
That enemy is not the Palestinian people, of course, even though support for terror attacks is widespread among Palestinians.
What is his explanation for teasing apart the enemy — some sort of historical meme — from the people who believe it?
When Hamas is destroyed, Israel will finally have liberated the Palestinian cause from the bottomless brutality of its most fervent practitioners, from the shattering albatross of a violent decolonization movement that refuses to grasp its enemy has no colonial motherland to which they can return, and so from an addiction to cruelty without purpose or function.
I see no reason why destroying Hamas will achieve this; as Gur points out in the same piece, this attitude predated Hamas.
In The Wall Street Journal, poetic justice from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who suggest “each of these countries should be called on to take ownership of their terrible decisions” by taking in Gazans:
- Iran: Hamas’s chief financier and arms supplier
- Turkey and Qatar: material and financial support [to Hamas]
- Malaysia: a haven for Hamas in years past
- Algeria and Kuwait: cheered on Hamas’s violent and brutal tactics
One wag (I’ve been reading so much I can’t remember who) deliciously suggested Ireland. [Update 2023 Oct 19: Scotland!
Now, forcible population transfer, or ethnic cleansing to use the pejorative language, is a terrible thing — it’s what Meir Kahane was banned from the Knesset for advocating — but Allah help the jackals we have entered war footing, wherein historic generational changes occur.
(That said, these proposals are historic and controversial enough to warrant nitpicking. The authors write:
Civilians are seeking to flee in advance of the fighting…
This is a bit disingenuous, as the IDF has been instructing the population in northern Gaza for days now to head south.
The Rafah crossing on the Egypt-Gaza border is open.
This seems false, it’s most definitely closed, though there is talk of it opening this afternoon for a few hours.)
For decades Palestinians have absurdly been calling themselves refugees even while sitting on territory they control and maintaining refugee camps with nary a tent on their own territory. Ditto the contradictory simultaneous accusation of both occupation and apartheid. So, as it goes for what you wish for, herein lies a lesson: be careful what you lie about.
Saturday, October 14th, 2023
On a call driving south, Jerusalem Post defence correspondent Yonah Jeremy Bob muses on Israel’s war in Gaza, echoing many thoughts I’ve had lately.
Israel could turn to a hybrid solution, with autonomy for the Palestinian Authority, helped by a multinational group, and the Israeli military in some way involved to prevent a Hamas comeback. “That is utter speculation on my part,” Mr. Bob says.
Tuesday, October 10th, 2023
Since the international community’s bludgeon against Israel taking wise action against Hamas and Gaza will now likely be claiming that conducting a siege is against international law, here is the UK’s Chatham House on siege law.
Thursday, March 2nd, 2023
Wednesday, January 4th, 2023
This tweetstorm by Heshmat Alavi points out how the MSM glorified IRGC Quds Force chief Qassem Soleimani, no doubt at least partially because it was Bad Orange Man who ordered him killed. Most egregiously, MSNBC compares this methodical murderer to Princess Diana and Elvis Presley!
Saturday, December 3rd, 2022
A History of the Israeli Army
Ze'ev Schiff
Author Ze’ev Schiff provides a matter-of-fact overview, probably not too different from many other books of Israeli military history, though I did learn that it was probably Arafat who precipitated the Six Day War. The edition I read was published a decade after the first publication, in the midst of the Lebanon War, about which the author is caustic and upset yet manages to end the book on an optimistic note, wishing Lebanon serve at least as a lesson for future non-endeavors.
Saturday, October 8th, 2022
Himars, highly mobile precision missile launchers, is a revolutionary military technology that has changed the balance of war in Ukraine’s favour against Russia.
Sunday, October 2nd, 2022
The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People
Walter Russell Mead
Mearsheimer and Walt — three words that do not appear once in this 1045-page book but are clearly its raison d’etre. John Mearsheimer is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago; Stephen Walt is Professor of International Relations at Harvard Kennedy School; together they are the respectable face of American anti-Semitism, sufficiently reputable that Walter Russell Mead seems unwilling to criticize them by name, sufficiently retrograde however that their book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy infuriated our southern-born dean of foreign relations to work on this book for a dozen years or so.
The Wikipedia article on the Lobby book illustrates Mead’s Southern Gentleman approach; whereas Israeli historian Benny Morris says “their work is riddled with shoddiness and defiled by mendacity,” Mead applauds the authors for “admirably and courageously” initiating a conversation on a difficult subject, but more in sorrow than in anger laments that while their intentions are surely strictly honorable, they commit “easily avoidable lapses in judgment and expression.”
Making multiple approaches from multiple angles, Mead demolishes their central notion, giving it the withering moniker of Vulcanist thinking. (Actually I take issue a little with this label, because since the book is so long I forgot the elegant historical anecdote that originates it — a theory of astronomy that attempted to explain celestial workings by means of an undetected planet that doesn’t actually exist. Instead I mentally defaulted to popular culture, where Star Trek’s Vulcan is a stand-in for excessive logic — a characterization quite antithetical to his notion of Vulcanist thinking. This is a shame because the term therefore probably won’t catch on, which it could have perhaps as a shorthand for tendentious yet respectable and therefore ultimately even more ridiculous thinking.)
Especially enriching are his fleshing out of the geopolitical maneouverings among the US, Britain and Russia at the time of Israel’s founding. Important here for Mead’s thesis is that the legend of Truman’s Jewish friend from back in Missouri inveighing on the flummoxed President to recognize Israel be relegated to Queen Esther-echoing myth. For it is WRM’s contention in his chapter “Cyrus Agonistes” that American support for Israel is endemic to the United States, rather than due to the influence of the American Jewish lobby qua Walt and Mearsheimer. Moreover this support comes despite American Jews, whose leaders have for most of Israel’s history been actively working against a Jewish state, their energies only turning once America as a whole pursued full-throated support for Israel after it became the Middle East’s unambiguous Six Day War strong horse.
It’s also a helpful historical insight that WRM groups 19th century American support for Jewish return to Israel with support for the birth of the Italian and Greek nationstates:
In the ancient world, as Americans saw it, the Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews had been much like Americans of the nineteenth century. They were mostly agrarian people, nations of family-owned farms. They had free institutions and their societies were grounded in virtue. But corruption, urbanization, and monarchy had wreaked their ugly work; in time, all three of the ancient peoples fell from their virtue and freedom into slavery, superstition, and oppression.
…
As the nineteenth century progressed, and the Greek and Italian independence movements advanced, the possibility of a restored Jewish commonwealth also began to gleam on the horizon.
In fact the discussion of nationalism’s birth pangs from the empires of eastern Europe, the chapter entitled “Maelstrom”, is perhaps the richest part of the book.
As a columnist I have been irritated by what I perceive as WRM’s intellectual mealy-mouthedness. But as a full-throated podcast guest I realize this is merely his print persona, a tic I suppose similar to what he probably views as his Straussian icy politeness regarding Mearsheimer and Walt. That said, I took umbrage when in the book he referred to the Second Intifada, a wave of despicable terror attacks against Israel in the wake of the Oslo Agreements, using the BBC-like passive even-handed term: “violence flared”. I instantly recalled eyewitnessing the shellshock in the hours after the Dolphinarium suicide bombing that killed and maimed dozens of partying teenagers. I was only somewhat mollified later in the book when he mentioned this particular bombing by name, without mentioning that the victims were teenagers.
This is a book about America not Israel, and as well as constituting a scathing retort to Mearsheimer and Walt, is a continuation by other means of his 2001 book Special Providence that classifies the various streams of America’s foreign policy; in portraying America’s relationship with Israel, Arc explicates the fullest expression of the Jacksonian stream, a Meadian classification that, unlike Vulcanism, does seem to be sticking.
Tuesday, September 6th, 2022
The Mufti, Qadaffi, King Hussein — I’m vastly enjoying season 2 of the Israeli TV documentary series Enemies (streaming requires an Israeli IP). One thing I can’t help but notice is the impressive living rooms in which the interviewees — mostly military intelligence vets — sit. None of them are in apartments, all have leafy window views, there’s a lot of wood, and most of them aren’t furnished like typical Israeli dwellings. I guess these aren’t military men, they’re men and women of the world.
I can’t tell if I enjoy Israeli docs because they’re so good, or merely because I’m the target audience. If it’s the former, and I think it is, they really should be selling them subtitled to wider audiences, say to Netflix and Amazon Prime.
It’s great, this pounding away at Israeli history, each episode a different prism.
Friday, August 12th, 2022
Hamas stays out of the fray in Israel’s latest Gaza blow-up, further fractalizing the Palestinian movement.
