Israel/Palestine: 20 Questions

 

1. Does Netanyahu want a ceasefire?

No.

2. Does Hamas want a ceasefire?

No.

3. Whom do they think they're fooling?

Everybody.

4. Who are they actually fooling?

Nobody.

5. Why do millions on either side continue to support them?

Because people with authoritarian beliefs believe leaders lie to the public for their own good, and everyone who doesn't see what the the leader sees is too dumb to understand the truth.

6, Who is responsible for this impasse?

Technically, the Israeli and Palestinian governments, but actually it's everyone who supports the Israeli right (probably 3 out of every 8 Jewish citizens), along with everyone who supports Hamas (unable to be calculated). There is a sizeable part of both sides who still support Netanyahu and Sinwar because they long for this war to go on perpetually until one side is vanquished, which they delusionally believe is possible. Neither side will ever vanquish the other side, but they may yet get their wish for the first half of that question: a long war that prolongs the tenures of both Netanyahu and Sinwar (or a replacement) until things get sufficiently violent to make both sides dread war's cost enough to demand new leadership.

The Israeli military is responsible in that it must carry out the policies of a lunatic government. Netanyahu refuses to give up the Philadelphi Corridor, a small plot of land connecting Egypt and Gaza, and this is a sticking point without which bringing hostages home is impossible. His own defense minister wants him to concede it, his own general staff wants him to concede it, his own intelligence agencies want him to concede it, but Netanyahu refuses to give it up because he says it's how Hamas reloads (and in all fairness, he may be right, but clearly the military thinks they can manage it).

Without hope of a ceasefire, the hostages become of no value to Hamas, and most of them will be killed. Fortunately, Hamas can't be seen as walking away from a ceasefire either, and that buys the hostages time. If negotiations cease, many of the hostages are doomed, but both sides must be seen as going through the motions of negotiations they have no intention of agreeing to nor honoring.

7. What would it take to unseat Netanyahu and Sinwar?

Surprisingly little, and yet like the Israel/Palestine conflict itself, enacting the obvious solution depends on millions giving up their most cherished beliefs. Only five defections of Knesset members in Netanyahu's coalition would bring down the government.

8. How likely is it that five members would leave?

Almost impossible. Meaning Netanyahu has an unbreakable hold on power until Israeli law mandates elections must be called in 2026

9. How is Netanyahu still in power?

Because like a leech he drains the Israeli body politic of everything that was once good about it. From its beginnings, Israel's greatest virtue was that however chaotic the country and the body politic, they banded together in a crisis. Israel was briefly united after October 7th, that unity now seems a grand delusion.

10. What is it that Netanyahu exploits to stay in power?

The chaos of the Israeli multi party system of government. This chaos used to be thought Israel's great strength, it is now clear that like so many unstable governments, it was waiting for a demagogue to exploit it to sit atop the chaos like a dictator.

Hamas has announced it's bringing suicide bombing back to Israel. When it happens, Netanyahu will get a whole new group of supporters

11. What are the chances to negotiate the return of more hostages?

Almost impossible. Even now.

12. What would make it possible?

The negotiated settlement neither Hamas nor the Israeli right wants.

13. What will happen to the hostages if they're not returned home?

Many of them will be killed, some deliberately placed under Israeli bombing raids, others shot to prevent nearby Israeli soldiers from rescuing them. Others will fester in Palestinian captivity for years.

14. Does Netanyahu care?

Of course not.

15. Does Netanyahu even believe his own rhetoric?

Nobody believes his own propaganda more than this guy. Even after all this, Netanyahu believes the State of Israel is his personal property. If Netanyahu decides total victory is more important than getting back the hostages, no one can convince him otherwise.

16. Does anyone believe Netanyahu's rhetoric?

A large number of Netanyahu's supporters believe he does not go far enough and wants him to simply announce perpetual occupation and further settlement in the West Bank.

17. Is there anyone who opposes Netanyahu's plan?
Nearly 70% of the country does. Some estimates show that as many as 700,000 participated in this weekend's protest to demand a ceasefire just in Tel Aviv, along with tens of thousands in protests around the country elsewhere.

18. Whose fault is all this?

Everyone's, yet no one's. 40,000 Palestinians are likely dead, yet the truth is that were Israel not successful in deterring Palestine, 40,000 dead Jews is a mere trifle compared to what Hamas would visit on Israel's Jews. It's not going to happen, and yet it could...

Nevertheless, even if Israel were correct to see itself as the side of democratic civilization against totalitarian barbarism, Israelis are so much more powerful than Palestinians that there is far less distance to travel between bloody thoughts and bloody actions. Israel has an obligation to show their model of how to go about things is the superior model, and yet by convincing themselves that they are the unquestionable side of democracy and civilization in a civilizational conflict, they become the barbarism they despise. When people believe they're in a struggle between good and evil, there is no evil act they cannot convince themselves to do.

Israel is changing as rapidly as any country in the world. Israelis complain about Islamic birthrates, but the birthrates of Israel's religious are breathtaking. 20% of the country is orthodox and half of that is ultra-orthodox. Birthrates have nearly doubled in the ultra-orthodox population in a mere fifteen years. This could give the orthodox enough power to make Israel a semi-theocracy sooner than we can fathom, a theocracy sitting atop a nuclear stockpile that will dwarf anything in the Arab world, even should Iran successfully develop a nuclear weapon.

Netanyahu knows this, and he means to drain the efficacy of secular Israel and be succeeded by the religious right, which can be the majority of Israeli society sooner than you think.

19. What is Netanyahu's ultimate goal?

Superficially, to stay in power and avoid jail, and in order to do that he must placate the far far right members of his coalition by having no negotiated settlement.

More broadly, it's to create a conflict large enough that the US becomes directly involved, therefore the US bombs Iran's nuclear program using their military capabilities that still dwarf Israel's. Iran's nuclear program is so deep under mountains that no Israeli weapon can reach it.

But Netanyahu can't be seen as causing the conflict himself, so he waits, and subtly provokes, until the axis of resistance commits a terrible mistake that kills American forces or the number of Israelis that are now killed in Gaza. And make no mistake, Netanyahu would view 50,000 Israeli deaths as mere collateral damage in a much larger conflict in which victory would save millions of lives from nuclear annihilation. Netanyahu will wait a long while yet, because neither Hamas nor Hezbollah have set a foot wrong. But in their manipulation of public opinion around the world, their tactics are astonishingly modern.

20. What could stop Israel from becoming a theocracy?

Ironically, antisemitism abroad, causing mass migrations from countries with lots of Jews. It doesn't happen until it does. That is the great lesson of Jewish history.

* I may be wrong about all this.

One last question:

Was the authoritarian drift of Israel inevitable?

Maybe, but if it was, then the drift of the world toward authoritarianism is inevitable too. The functionality of the world depends on the ability to tolerate contradictions: Israel itself has always been such a contradiction: secular yet based upon a religion.

Israel was a compromise that had to happen in order to keep Jews alive. If your ideology prevents you from seeing the necessity of places like Israel, your ideology is too simple to work in the real world. If your ideology prevents you from seeing why Israel must aspire even through its battles to be as liberal a democracy as can exist in these circumstances, your ideology is too simple to work either. Either way dooms Israel, and writ large, dooms the world too. The real world demands pragmatism, not ideology, and embracing the contradictions.

The world is leaving pragmatism behind, and without it, there is no real world anymore.

The Tepid War

Nobody wants this war, not Israel, not Hezbollah, not Netanyahu, not Nasrallah. The only actors who do are Hamas, because a war in the north makes Israel far less likely to complete any objectives in Gaza, and Iran, who wants Hezbollah to fight their war for them. Everybody actually involved in this Northern dispute finds this potential for war a colossal disaster.

But this is the Middle East, a bad neighborhood where anything that makes you look weak gets you exploited. It may not even be your enemy who shivs you, it may be your longtime ally who uses this moment to charge you with weakness and remove you from power.

That is exactly the game Netanyahu plays. Dampen his reaction to Hezbollah's bombing and the self-destructive right wing of his cabinet may bolt. Do as his right-wing cabinet wants, and Israel may self-destruct: embroiling itself in a war that makes its entire north look like Gaza. A new red line of status quo shapes itself next to Netanyahu, and if he deviates even an iota from its path, he can cause a mistake that ends his political career... or at least it would end the career of anybody else.

This means that Netanyahu is stuck, as Hezbollah is, in a holding pattern where he needs to give the appearance of making war without actually making war. Even as Hezbollah built up its truly impressive weapons stockpile and created a tunnel network that may be even more intricate than Hamas's, Hezbollah has kept their border as peaceful as possible for eighteen years only to destroy that peace for the least possible gain. If Hezbollah wanted to inflict the most possible damage, they made a colossal strategic blunder by not keeping their border quiet until they were ready for a devastating attack. Their middling level of missile launches was enough to get the whole north of Israel evacuated. If Hezbollah wanted to inflict the maximum possible damage, they would have attacked very suddenly and not waited until after the North was evacuated, and if Hezbollah wanted to cross Israel's border to stage an attack like October 7th, who even is now there to be kidnapped?

I may be the only person in the world who thinks this, but I think there's a greater than 50% chance Israel didn't kill Hamas's Chairman (in exile) Ismail Haniyeh. Rather, I can't help speculating that he was killed by Iran as an excuse to make the war on Hamas into a regional war.

When Iran's president was killed, I said to myself 'this checks out.' Iran had just leveled a direct attack on Israel, and Israel needed to send the starkest possible message that this was unacceptable. Well, assassinating the second-most-powerful man in Iran is a pretty powerful message, but something about killing Haniyeh doesn't add up in the same way. Haniyeh was in charge of Hamas negotiations to effect a ceasefire and known as a moderate. Obviously, Haniyah's moderation is in the time honored tradition of Israel's enemies saying things in the western press that sound peaceful to liberals, then extolling the glory of holy war to the Arabic press - Arafat was a particular master of that tactic; but every Middle East expert seemed to think that, relatively speaking, Haniyeh was a moderating force in Hamas, perhaps THE moderating force, and hardly anybody in the Axis of Resistance wants to hear about moderation after October 7th, their greatest triumph.

There is no peace possible when the opposition kills their negotiating partner, and Hamas's new chairman is Yahya Sinwar, literally the man who engineered this war. So far, it would seem that the Middle East has no leader shrewder than this man - everything's gone according to his plan. Israel had little choice but to attack Gaza devastatingly, thus making Hamas look to the world like Palestine's only line of defense. Does Israel really want to face a leader that bellicose and formidable? Does Israel really think they can assassinate a guy who's been ten steps ahead of them at every turn?

There's always the chance that that is exactly what Netanyahu wants: a leader with whom peace is absolutely impossible, but I have to imagine there are similarly moderating forces among Israel's top military brass who would have warned starkly against killing Haniyeh for exactly the reason that replacing him makes negotiation impossible: no negotiation, no hostage deal. On the other hand, if Iran did it, then the assassination of a leader as eminent as Haniyeh could send a message to Hezbollah's Secretary-General, Hassan Nasrallah, that he is not safe and could easily be replaced by those who do Iran's bidding.

So both Nasrallah and Netanyahu are in an impossible position. They must give the appearance of war without actually declaring war. They've declared just enough war to minimize the casualties: causing 150,000 people to evacuate from the border area - 60,000 from Israel's north, 90,000 from Lebanon's south. Both have the capability of bombing far further into each other's respective countries, but we are now a month out from Haniyeh's assassination, every day a response doesn't happen makes Iran look weaker. Perhaps Iran's waiting for the perfect plan to strike, but there's no such thing as a plan that's executed the way they watned. Hamas planned on using October 7th to hit Israel's nearest city, Sderot, which may have caused far greater casualties and kidnapping, but in an improvised move, they went to a music festival instead.

Just for context, Hamas seems to currently possess 6,000 rockets. I used to read figures claiming that Hamas had 15,000 rockets, which means the majority of them have already been fired. I have no doubt that Hamas's tunnel system allows them to slowly replenish their supply, but the damage Hamas can inflict on Israel is tiny compared to Hezbollah's potential for damage. Israel's Iron Dome, the anti-missile system largely funded by the US, can handle a lot of fire, but it cannot handle a consistent battery from the Hezbollah arsenal of 40,000-120,000 rockets. But even 120,000 rockets are minimal compared to the damage Israel can inflict on Lebanon. If either leader values his survival, let alone the survival of their people, it is in neither one's interest for a greater war to happen.

Israel and Hezbollah may have no choice but go to war, but both are doing everything to avoid it. What's going on in the north is obviously too violent to be called a cold war, but neither is it a hot war. For the moment, it's a decoy war, a room temperature war: tepid, middling, perfunctory, designed to keep business as usual as possible in both countries.

We'll see if the strategy works, but for the moment, whether they're coordinating this decoy together, they both have the same aim. These are the actions of actors who have no desire to do what they seem to be doing.

The North

 It's impossible to convey the beauty of Israel's north to those who've never been. In some ways it's just another piece of Mediterranean. Merely another landmark on the world's most historic region teeming with grapes and olives: a biome containing Tuscany, Venice, Genoa, Pompei, Nice, Rome, Sicily, the Greek islands, Barcelona, Dubrovnik, Ljubljana, Marrakesh, Alexandria, Anatolia, Tangiers, Ephesus, Cyprus... are the Galilee and Golan really that special?

There are all kinds of theories for what makes Israel special: here is mine. Israel, the geographic meeting point of Europe, Asia and Africa, is the ultimate place where one feels connected to the entire world. Whether ruled by Jew, Muslim, or Christian, the dynamism of the entire world is packed into that tiny place in which one feels connected not only to the present, but the entire human past, and therefore to the entire human future. Metropoles like New York and Tokyo can make you feel connected to humanity as it exists today, but only the land around Israel can make you feel connected to humanity in all times and places.

But it's not the South that feels that way. The South has its own beauty. You feel as though Abraham and Moses trod in your footsteps, but the South is Israel's unique secret, it doesn't belong to the world; and I'm not qualified to say whether the beauty of the South is any different than the beauty of the Sahara or Patagonia.

And it's not really Jerusalem either. Jerusalem, for all its fascination, is too urban for the feeling of which I speak. Whatever mystique Jerusalem carries within it, the earthly Jerusalem is too disputed, too teeming with actual humans and their annoying desires. Even as you're entranced by the beauty of those mournful stones, today's Jerusalem is too loud to hear how those stones weep.

It's only around the Northern District, Ha-Tzafon or Ha-Galil, where you hear that real connection: Akko, T'veriyah, Tz'fat, Kesariyah, Rosh Ha-Nikra, the Hula Valley, the beaches around Chadera and Nahariya, the shores of the Kinneret, and of course, the Golan Heights.

I'm not a prodigious traveler, I haven't left the US since 2012, but in all the world, the only place I've felt something similar was Delphi, rural Greece: a spiritual presence that emanates from the floor. The very flowers and trees speak of things they've seen: the history that's passed through, the armies that crossed, the cultural eminences who set up tent, the mystical spirits the place still conjures thousands of years after its greatest eminence, the longings of millennia of pilgrims.

But here is the ultimate irony of the North: to this day, it's majority Arab. Not majority Muslim, but majority Arab when you count the Christians and Druze people who live there. So it's not Jews Hezbollah's rockets hit, and if the North of Israel is mostly Arab, is the distinction between the North of Israel and the South of Lebanon entirely arbitrary?

Perhaps all Middle Eastern borders are arbitrary and we are yet another people parsing out a land that belongs to the Arabs in its entirety, but white people invented neither colonialism or conquest, and few great civilizations were more imperious or expansionist than the Mohammedan Caliphates. Arabian civilization was a conqueror here like everybody else, unique only in how long their presence lasted. What happened to all those ancient nations of which the Bible speaks? The vast majority of Palestine's indigenous were not killed by Israelites, either they were sold into slavery by Rome, or the Islamic Caliphate presented them with the ultimate choice: crescent or sword.

But if you're ever in Israel, go to the 'far North' and you'll realize one obvious thing: everybody's left. It was already starting when I lived in Israel, how much moreso today?

The Golan, for all its beauty, was never particularly settleable. The land's kept pristine because war covered the whole region in landmines, but even in once prosperous cities like Kiryat Sh'mona, hardly anybody's there anymore. Technically, Kiryat Shmona has a population of nearly 25,000, but currently, it's 3000. The entire population is displaced to hotels around the country: the only people left? Critical workers, army reservists, the elderly, and people with disabilities. From the moment a siren warns of an incoming rocket, people have ten seconds to get to their bomb shelters. Sometimes the rockets explode and the siren only goes off afterward.

Any country would find this an untenable situation, but then you remember that there are people on the other side of the Israel/Lebanon fence, much more than 25,000, who have neither hotels nor basement shelters to take them in. If Israelis find the situation untenable, what must the Lebanese?

Is there any real distinction between the landscape in the North of Israel and the South of Lebanon? I have no way of knowing. Like every Middle Eastern border, it's an arbitrary demarcation between two bits of landscape that saw the same history, the same vegetation, the same animals, the same ruins, and the same conquerors. Before the Lebanese Civil War, Beirut was widely known as the Middle East's most beautiful city. It was called the Paris of the Middle East, so if Beirut was the Paris, was the south of Lebanon the Provence?

...My record isn't great for the last while but hopefully I'll finish this later.

So Is it Apartheid?

 The answer is no, but if we're being honest with ourselves, it's not much better...

On the one hand, there is a huge Israeli Arab population, roughly two million, who live in Israel with unimpeded freedom of movement, rights to vote and work, and, in principle, full freedom of opportunity and equality before the law. To call what happens in Israel itself apartheid is a scandal.

On the other hand, the difference between apartheid states and what happens in 'the territories' is not particularly large. It is ideologically very different from apartheid, but it is not particularly different in effect.

On still another hand, blame for that effect should be shared between the Israeli and Palestinian governments together.

On the one hand, Palestinians have the inability to move, that's the fault of Israel, on the other hand, Palestinians have the inability to vote, and that's the fault of Hamas and Fatah.

On the one hand, Israel pulled out of Gaza 20 years ago and has no hand in running it, so at this point what goes on there is mostly the fault of Hamas, including most of what happened in this war. On the other hand, Israel is directly responsible for the West Bank, continually claiming new territory within it and pushing the Palestinian residents into ever smaller areas: that is Israel's fault, and little different from apartheid in effect.

On both hands: the most effective way to solve this issue is through economics. Palestinian economic rights are limited everywhere outside of 'Israel proper', and that's both countries' fault.

It is very different from apartheid in that Israel's policy in the West Bank is not based on principles of racial superiority (which is not to say that millions of Israelis aren't racist - anybody who's lived in Israel knows), it is based on nationalist expansion. It is based on the idea that the Palestinian peoplehood is an impediment to the Israeli nation's security, particularly inconvenient to those Israelis who believe it necessary to have a state stretching from the river to the sea - as though any demarcation can secure the world's most disputed real estate.

For some Israelis, it is based on more than national security. For many religious Israelis, it is also based on the premise that God promised the land of Israel to the Jews. While for many secular Israelis, it is based on the premise that Israel simply should have the entirety of the land and that the claims of Israel matter more than an indigenous population whose presence they dispute. "Arabs admit themselves that the borders of their countries are arbitrary." they always retort. "They have 99.9 percent of the Middle East", so they reason, "let us have our portion."

When the settlement project began, it wasn't necessarily the correct action, but it was morally defensible, and an extremely small experimental project.

1970 was a different world. Jordan was the most negotiable of Israel's mortal enemies, but it was still an enemy next door in wars that put Israel in mortal peril - such existential wars happened in 1948, 1967 and 1973. It was very easy to imagine enemies invading Israeli territory due to unimpeded access across the Jordan river over and over again until Israel fell. But Israel made peace with Jordan in 1994, that peace has lasted and will last for the foreseeable future. The main necessity for the settlement project is thirty years out of date.

However, to single Israel out for expansionism, doing what dozens of other countries continue to do, countries without democracy for even its favored classes: that is something that smells. No country has the right to imperial expansion, but the world pressures its only Jewish state to stop far more than anybody else. Many people believe Israel's conduct is uniquely important to stop because of the US's complicity in it, but ask yourselves, is the United States not more complicit in the misdeeds in still more flagrant human rights violators like China and Saudi Arabia? And is there any way to articulate that point of view without indulging in half-a-dozen antisemitic tropes about invisible Jewish money and power? If it smells like a duck...

It's worth repeating that it's obviously not antisemitic to criticize Israel or resent its actions, but when the focus your animus is against Israel when there are far greater human rights offenders, including among Israel's neighbors, that disproportion should give you pause. The Lebanese Civil War killed 300,000, the Iran-Iraq War 500,000, the Syrian Civil War killed 600,000 and created 12 million refugees, yet none of them got a small percentage the ink or demonstrations of Israel.

A relatively small percentage of people in the West are consciously antisemitic (let's say: 15%?), but a similarly small percentage are consciously racist, yet the vast majority commit all sorts of unconscious bigotries that are residue of the world's previous attitudes.

On the other hand, Israel has violated human rights far more in the last year than it ever has before. In less than a year, the Gaza Health Ministry tabulates Israel killed approximately 40,000 Gazans and displaced nearly the entire population. Leaving aside that the organization is Hamas run, this war is unquestionably highest kill toll of any Israeli war by exponential magnitude. If that total becomes 50,000 by October, then continues for another ten years, it will be easily comparable to any other Middle East war and potentially then some. Before 2024, the highest total was roughly 17,000 in the occupation of South Lebanon, and the first Lebanon war took eighteen years. But then again, Israel was far more provoked in the last year than it's ever been. Realistically, maybe an invasion of Gaza could have been a little less bloody, but it was never going to be remarkably less bloody than it is now.

Brutal as it is, the war in Gaza is a military necessity, at least it was until recently. This war is the fault of Hamas, not Israel. But there is no Hamas-like entity on which you can blame the situation in the West Bank. Fatah, the West Bank's governing party, is a kleptocratic dictatorship who derives its power through corruption and patronage, but it is not a totalitarian death cult trying to get its own citizens killed as a way to alienate Israel from potential allies. What goes on in Gaza is a horror show directed by a government that wants its own people dead. What's going on in the West Bank is, and has been, Israel's responsibility: a drip-by-drip ethnic cleansing. The bulk of it has not been carried out yet, and yet may never be, but the end plan of Israel's powerful right wing is clearly to throw out the Palestinian population from the West Bank to a place to be determined later - to doubt that is to doubt your face has a nose.

On the other hand again, there are plenty of Hamas sympathizers among the West Bank population whom if unchecked could easily elevate Hamas or a similarly extreme organization to a credibly powerful force in the West Bank. You can't blame Israelis for not wanting to take the chance of living among them. As the liberal Israeli historian Benny Morris says: 'there are circumstances in history which justify ethnic cleansing... when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide--the annihilation of your people--I prefer ethnic cleansing."

The reason the 'apartheid' argument has so much power is because South Africa seems like such a success story. The reality of South Africa isn't great, but it's 100x better than a couple dozen African and Asian states where white occupiers conducted similar policies, and modern progressives find it inconvenient to remember the anticolonial dictatorships which followed imperial occupation, dictatorships that sometimes resulted in the murder of millions within a single generation: Nigeria, Ethiopia, Cambodia, many others whose deaths numbered merely in the hundred thousands. The 'Apartheid' accusation assumes that there's a solution by which Palestine would do better under self-determination, while the overwhelming evidence shows Palestine won't. Both Yassir Arafat and Hamas had golden opportunities to prove themselves - literal tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid, but they were not interested in peace, they were not interested in justice, they were interested in pursuing precisely the expansionist, eliminationist wars which they accuse Israel of partaking. There was plenty of death when the world was controlled by the imperial powers, but, generally speaking, not that quickly, and not that deliberately - though with many exceptions. The amount of freedom and security imperialism provided was insultingly small, but humiliation is better than death. There are still worse fates out there than apartheid, and one of them is Hamas.

Prepare for This Week

Intelligence shows that this is the week Iran plans its retaliation on Israel.

Don't think the US is not figuring into their calculations. Iran knows as we all do that there will be a massive pro-Palestinian demonstration at the Democratic convention. They want the average American scandalized by this protest and by merely at the thought that a political party would give house to it. Today's Republican party is the unity of authoritarianism, today's Democratic party is the chaos of democracy. The point, as always, is to use democracy's levers of freedom against itself.

The KGB called it 'ideological subversion.' The KGB used most of its intelligence not to spy or fix elections, but to make the advantages of liberal democracy look like a sham. They threatened, bribed and amplified all sorts of intellectuals, activists and demonstrators in the press and universities and unions to advocate philosophies that undermine democracy from the left, and they often provoked the same in right-wing journals, think tanks, and mass movements - and sometimes with exactly the same tactics they used on leftists. The point was to make hundreds of millions waver in their belief that democracy leads to better lives.

Whether KGB or FSB or the Chinese Ministry of State Security, the point has always been to divide us and make us despair. The point is not to make us look bad, the point is not even to make America look bad, the point is to make Palestine's own advocates look as bad as possible in the eyes of the average American, so as to provoke the maximum possible response. They want Trump to win because freedom and justice is a bigger threat to them than the US. The US is no threat to the Iranian regime so long as the US has no chance of living up to its self-conception.

In addition to holding my tongue about Israel in person, I've become more circumspect about writing about Israel. These moral conundrums are above my intellectual paygrade, they're above my moral paygrade, and well beyond my emotional bandwidth.

The only way I can make sense of this 'situation' is to believe that is that Israel/Palestine is a front in a much larger cold war. Gaza may seem under Israeli control, but its government makes it a client of Iran, which is itself a client of Russia, which is itself a client of China. The ultimate goal is to make the world safe for dictators, and no amount of hand-wringing about the imperialism of 150 years ago will change that in 2024 we deal with an imperial project that aspires to the whole world.

But like all cold wars, they can only be won if there if the demarcations of moral superiority stay clear. Israel may be fighting in a booby trapped Gaza, designed by Hamas to kill its own citizens, but the more casualties Gaza creates, the harder it becomes to pin the blame on Hamas. If the death toll goes up too quickly, the world says Israel goes into these booby traps all too happily: and you know what? About a large part of the Israeli population: the world is right. And so long as there is a majority which delusionally believes you can achieve total victory against Hamas, or even total victory without an even worse price, this minority will stay in power.

So long as this is the government of Israel, so long as there is a strong minority which supports it, even a nub, there is barely a difference between people who give cover to the ambitions of Sharia and people who give cover to the ambitions of Halacha. And furthermore, so long as there is a majority which delusionally believes you can achieve total victory against Hamas, or even total victory without an even worse price, this minority will stay in power.

There is an authoritarian petrie dish in the free world that believes it only does wrong by not going about its business with sufficient force. They believe, as the other side does, that extremism in the pursuit of virtue is no vice, and that belief is the telltale sign of an authoritarian movement: Jewish or Christian or Islamic, religious or secular, left or right, fascist or communist, socialist or conservative, and yes, even liberal. It is also the sign of authoritarians who believe the Israeli side is more justified and authoritarians who believe the Palestinian side is. Your beliefs give you the justification to think yourselves saviors. You are not the solution, you are the problem.

To banish doubts about your own beliefs is idolworship, and until we're all mercilessly careful about it, we are all guilty, all complicit, all aiders to and abetters of the most murderous forms of totalitarianism on earth: all of those forms, not just the ones we think are totalitarian.

If you do not check your own beliefs, you have no right to check anyone else's.

Note: wait a minute... the convention is NEXT week. This whole post is invalid.

Emergency Room Haikus

emergency room

again. Cleanse ordered. No

Eating since Wednesday

Nausea, bloat, chills, thrills

The misery of humans

Brain fog, haiku hard.

Lots of wheelchairs

Old lady fell in shower

Five ribs broke. Seen first.

Cute girl catches me.

She has UTI. Eaves is

My thing. Blame me please.

Wheelchair and moaning

From lady with worry lines.

Husband: comb over...

Room smells like chlorine.

Healthy looking old man too

Friendly for ER.

Tattoos are a thing

Everybody has them now.

Even the sick do.

I am old old old.

I don't belong in new State.

Too young for this health.

Prematurely old.

Time is weirdly circular.

Cant I be young yet?

My parents are here.

Should I even be here now?

Power outage at home

Mind suffered before.

Child father of the man.

Body catches up.

Italians are here.

The American sunset.

Rich and poor subsets.

Lots of Spanish too.

Don't know how to place them yet.

Demographics tough.

A habit of art.

It helps to live and pass time.

Bad art is still art.

Emergency room.

Too many sick people here.

The best show in town.

ET: Almanac

 "Books are cold but safe friends."

- Victor Hugo

Three Sentences on What's Going On Over There

 For those few who care, I'd comment on what's going on in the Middle East but there's no sense in commenting until we know what's going to happen. All one can say is that whatever happened in Iran, we already know that Bibi's foolhardiness is biblical in proportion, worthy of Pharaoh and Rehovam. No matter what your ideology, you do your best not to read the old stories of divine retribution for hubris into what goes on in Israel, but let's face it, many leaders make it very hard.

What Happened in Israel Yesterday

 Blink and you missed it. A January 6th like riot happened, and if you don't follow Jewish media, you wouldn't know about it. I'm not even sure the international media thought it worthy of mention.

Basically, masked members of the ultra-right tried to storm an Israeli detention center. This includes masked Israeli soldiers currently serving in the army, even a member of the Knesset (Israeli parliament). Why? Because soldiers inside were being investigated for misconduct against potential 10/7 perpetrators.

The Israeli military wants to police itself, but it's the organization the world charges as perpetrators of apartheid and dictatorship. The military is in fact the functional, pragmatic arm of Israeli life. Many generals try to maintain resistance to pressure to prosecute the war much more aggressively. Often they fail, because the civilian government is a lunatic fringe. This hated fringe tries to politicize the military, the facet of the country most Israelis deem too important to be politicized.

So in summation, the Israeli ultra-right tries to violently intimidate Israel to be the repressive military state the world already thinks Israel is. And yet, if this fringe government can't be dislodged, maybe, just maybe, Israel is already the kind of state the world says it is.

There's a war in the Jewish soul. I have to imagine every Jew in the world feels either nonstop rage or completely stretched out on a rack. Jews are demanded to defend Israel when a large part of the Jewish world wants Israel to become an indefensible country.

Israel is not the apartheid state the world thinks it is, but a huge segment of the Jewish world wants Israel to be that state and may yet get their way. Millions of Jews looked the other way at these other millions for decades. It was exhausting. We were caught up in a constant melee of propaganda and social pressure to defend the actions of a country whose actions were often wrong, counterproductive, and exploitative of our good will.

No ideological movement is immune from its own manichean extremities, not Zionism, not liberalism, not the progressive ideologies people think beyond question today. If you believe your movement can only be criticized for not pursuing its actions more forcefully, you and your movement become in the most dire need of criticism.

But just as in the case of those ideologies we won't mention, part of this war in the Jewish soul is the knowledge that a large part of Israel still needs our defense, and separating the good from the bad is extremely messy. The reason nobody outside Israel pays attention to this riot is that the world doesn't concede there's another side to the Israel establishment, a liberal side, that tries to rein in its brutality.

I'm a Zionist because without a Jewish state, Jews died in the millions. Not just in the Holocaust but for millennia before it. I am not a Zionist because I believe God promised a land to the Jewish people. Even were I to believe in God, I categorically reject that interpretation, and so do millions of other Jews. Once any movement believes their rights are God given, there is no limit to what they justify in God's name.

And even in the pursuit of defending Israel, I categorically reject the idea that soldiers should not be held accountable for any brutality that has no necessity, and so do millions of other Jews, including Israelis. If a Jew has even a tenuous grip on reality, they'll soon realize that this war should have been over months ago. It only still goes on for the Prime Minister's gain.All react

Kamala. Good for....?

 All you have to do is take one look at $81 million in the first day of her candidacy to realize that Kamala Harris is suddenly likely to be the next President - at least she is barring a third, fourth, or fifth world historic event in the next few weeks. She still might not. She has yet to undergo the coming orgy of Republican slutshaming (she started in politics as the girlfriend of legendary San Francisco mayor Willie Brown), and for all the leftshaming of Harris for being a prosecutor, Republicans will charge that she was disgustingly lax on crime. She'll be thought of as the 'Border Czar,' a thankless job that will cause the right to charge she was absurdly lax on immigration, and the left to charge that she was absurdly strict.

Why is that? Because Kamala Harris has made a career taking on thankless jobs nobody else would take. As California's attorney general she took on what amounted to a political suicide mission and took on the US's five biggest banks all at once and refused an aid package for California of 2-4 billion dollars and even more suicidally, she won. The relief package she got? $18.4 billion! She also took on cases against all the major drug cartels. Imagine the threats to her safety, and all the while she instituted body cameras on police, antagonizing the very people charged with protecting her.

So we may have thought last week that Donald Trump was a shoo-in, but the US is so starved for a new generation of leadership that they will take even the appearance of it.

Kamala Harris may yet prove a greater President than Obama, but does Harris have Obama-level charisma? Let's not pretend she does, but we are all so scared right now that the appearance of any energy that resists Trump's blitzkrieg of negativity is met as though the leader is the reincarnation of Churchill. A number of female politicians can inspire a crowd better than Harris can: Elizabeth Warren most obvious among potential candidates, but unlike Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris can work in a team without burning bridges, she can fade into self-effacement, she can give credit to other people, can you tell I soured on Elizabeth Warren?

So its with maximum schadenfreude that, in this week of reversed fortunes, Netanyahu comes to America. It was supposed to be a Roman triumph of spite to enable Bibi to crow 'Biden's disappearing, but I'm still here.' Instead, Netanyahu is arriving at a moment of maximal Republican panic, and surely must read into the bad timing that his own days are numbered.

And yet... is she good for the Jews?

Kamala Harris would be the first President with a Jewish spouse. The frontrunner to be her running mate is Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania and very, very Jewish - though I still think it will be Mark Kelly. Even if Shapiro is not the Vice-President, this will be, by far, the Jewyest White House the country's ever seen. There is no better time or cover to reorient the US's Middle East policy. What kind of Jew is our potential First Gentleman, ('Doug')? We don't really know, but we do know that his daughter was arrested at a protest against Israel's actions.

We don't really know what Kamala Harris's opinions are on foreign policy. We can guess but they're only guesses. I'd imagine her opinions run much closer to Obama's than Biden's, and even if the difference between the two is much smaller than the difference to any Republican, the difference in approach is enormous. Biden is a man of the 20th century, growing up on stories of the camps and gulags, taking the lesson that totalitarianism is the worst of all possible governments, whether the right-wing totalitarianism of Hitler or the left-wing varieties of Stalin and Mao. Obama literally defined the early 21st, growing up on stories of Hiroshima and Congo, taking from them the lesson that democracy unchecked can be as lethal as any totalitarian power.

Perhaps, being this Jewy, I'm too much a creature of the 20th, but I'm clearly more with Biden than Obama. There are other looming American threats worse than anything in our sometimes shameful history, but most of them would be facilitated by America taking some kind of authoritarian turn. Unfair as I may be, I hold Obama's discomfort with American power partially responsible for the authoritarian turn of the world. Part of Obama is a peacenik who believes that when offered reason, people listen to it. Whether in foreign relations with Vladimir Putin, or domestically with Mitch McConnell, the refusal to wage political war emboldened them. Force occasionally has to be met with force, and not just in those moments when the ends are absolutely definite.

Had Obama been President on October 7th, it's hard to believe he would have tolerated the Israel-Hamas war going on anything like this long, but he would have allowed for a retributive war just like Biden did, and would have been savaged by the left for letting it happen a single day.

And it's reasonable to assume that regardless of what happens, a war like the Israel-Hamas war will never happen under a Harris administration, no matter how extreme the act against Israelis. No matter what her opinion of Israel, with such close Jewish contacts, Harris is particularly susceptible to accusations of collusion, and however she really feels, she will have to go to extreme lengths to give the appearance of impartiality with Israel, no matter how reasonable or unreasonable Israel is in the coming years.

Let's not kid ourselves: Israel deserves a turn against it - how much of a turn is an open question, but the idea that Netanyahu is celebrated in the Capitol tells you all you need to know about Netanyahu or about Republicans. Israel's own authoritarian turn may be gradual, but government by government, Israel turns more and more into the enemies it loathes: an overmilitarized gerontocratic theocracy where constitutional rule of law can be overridden by a leader with no limitations on his power.

Make no mistake, Israel on its worse day is no Iran on its best, but in fifty years on its current trajectory? Are you kidding? The average secular Israeli family has 2.08 children. The average ultra-orthodox Israeli family has 6.6 children. For all the right's handwringing about Islamic birthrates in the west, Israel is being overtaken by its own bellicose fundamentalists so much more quickly. Eventually, all that would be needed is for the ultraorthodox to militarize and the transformation to a halachic state (run by Jewish law) would happen overnight.

But nothing would facilitate that Israeli transition quicker than an economic boycott which dried up opportunities around the country for Israeli business to flourish. Every educated Israeli would move away, leaving nothing but a dried out husk of a boycotted country sitting atop a nuclear stockpile.

None of that is likely, not for a while at least. But if Harris doesn't turn against Israeli defense, the worldwide left will take matters into their own hands, and the spread of a grassroots economic boycott becomes so much more likely.

So brace yourselves, being a Jew is probably not getting easier any time soon.All reactions

Artists, get ready

Artists, get ready. If America is beginning to look like what we fear it might, it's the artists who get us through the dark periods and help us endure what we can't endure.

We don't like artists in the USA, we don't understand them, we never had all that much use for 'art' rather than 'entertainment.' Sure, we honor a few, but so often we've treated our artists like shit, particularly the good ones. We make it impossible to work at their best because they're too busy having to get an audience interested in their stuff to do the damn work. And so often, even if they get an audience interested, it's by pandering to their very fickle tastes and never doing the work they want to do. Even if you count rock stars and movie directors among our greatest artists, and if they're good enough there's no reason not to, how many of them created cosmically great art their whole lives long the way Michelangelo and Rembrandt did?

We barely let our entertainers be more than one-hit wonders, but think of how many of our great American artists did one great work, or had one great period of a few years, then sauntered on as a shell of what they were, sapped of the ability to create as they used to because they encountered so much resistance along the way. Now imagine how many artists you've never heard of. Many of them did some great works that you'll never experience, even more of them were deprived of the ability to work with their best selves. How many American artists can you think of that got the opportunity to do a whole lifetime of work that fulfills their potential and continually evolves with new influences, new techniques, new insights? I know more about this subject than most people I know and my list would probably be around a dozen; maybe two dozen if I'm being charitable.

But, paradoxical as it seems, great art thrives in times of troubles because that's when audiences are most receptive to it. Art thrives on ambiguity like double meanings and subtle implications that audiences can spend a lifetime parsing and never fully understand. If the audience is receptive enough, they pick up on every implication in the work then add a few of their own.

Obviously, art can't much thrive in a totalitarian state where everyone is in danger of going to jail for treason (though it did in the Soviet Union until they all were killed off), but art can and has thrived in dysfunctional, repressive states where censorship is rife and we are desperate for people to tell the truth about what's happening, even if the truth has to be told slant. If art thrived anywhere in American history, it was in the African-American community. Why? Precisely because they were limited in the truths they could speak, and had to find creative ways to say the unsayable.

When politics ceases to work, that's when art has to.All reactions

Chronic Illness

My forties are likely defined by it: bloating, burping, nausea, and other details of which I will spare you. I no longer eat dairy, gluten, garlic, onion, chocolate, more than half the world's fruits and vegetables, and every restaurant outing is a gamble that can lead to two weeks' illness. Whatever mental capacity I had to concentrate, to work hard, is pretty well gone. Concentration on mental problems becomes minimal. The ability to be spontaneously facile with words begins to dry up, along with the ability to write more than one essay a week. The concentration for reading can feel colossal and comprehension is certainly not what it was. Travel? Well, one can only pray that eventually you...

It's the result of a twenties and thirties of ravenous appetites. One mood medication induced a massive appetite for food, another slowed my colon like a tortoise. I knew the inevitable result would be something like this or still worse, yet I felt completely powerless to stop. I take the most minimal amount now of the former medication, but for the latter there is no antidepressant that will not induce something similar, and potentially a bit worse.

The kingdom of the perpetually mad is a tough enough place, but to be a dual citizen with the kingdom of the perpetually sick is another level of madness. To bear it forces you, however mad, to find strength you didn't know you had as you descend into still new realms of suffering.

And yet the perspective one gains is helpful as well. It instills a new hunger to discover those available bits of life. The concentration on the physical means that there is less mental energy that feeds into mental suffering. Physical suffering forces you to hope in precisely the way that mental suffering takes hope away from you. The two become locked in a battle and one begins to realize that hope is not a state so much as a practice. If one 'performs' hope enough, one can convince oneself to become the performance.

A conclusion later, if I can concentrate...All reactions