A brief comment on casualty numbers

 Hamas's current tally of the killed is around 26,000. Israel's current tally of combatants killed is around 9,000. Neither total is reliable, and both sides have reasons for exaggerating the totals on their sides, but since both totals are probably exaggerated, we can assume that the percentages between the two are roughly correct.

That means a few things:

1. As barbaric as it is to speak in these statistics, let's register that Israel kills less than two civilians for every 1 combatant. That is an unprecedentedly low total, even in spaces much larger than Gaza.

2. Supposing that Hamas is counting with some integrity, what does Hamas count as killing? Are people who die of bad sanitation killed by Israel? Are patients already terminally ill killed by Israel if they die a few weeks sooner because they don't have sufficient medical care? Are Palestinians accidentally killed by Hamas soldiers killed by Israel? You'd think these are academic questions, but when the totals are so murky, everybody is left to speculate how they came up with the totals they did.

3. Supposing the Israeli army is reporting correctly that 9,000 Hamas combatants were killed, who then is considered a combatant? An army takes all kinds. An army of 30,000 soldiers takes just as many people to run weapons to them, to convey messages, to manage the payroll, or to do simple things like putting out fires (assuming Hamas wants them put out...). Are these people combatants, or is it just the people who fire the weapons.

Ultimately, we have no idea what's going on in Gaza, and that old phrase, 'the fog of war' means that nobody knows what's really going on, even the people fighting it. There's a Heisenberg uncertainty principle that goes through every aspect of war. The full truth is never meant to be known by human perception. Whatever the objective truth, we will never know it except in outline. What goes on in war is entirely in the perception of the mind's eye: everyone brings their own beliefs to war, and everybody affects how a war is conducted through the decisions they make based upon their beliefs.

Machiavelli wrote much about how a leader must be virtuous in his conduct of state affairs, but obviously Machiavelli did not mean 'virtuous' as we understand 'virtue.' A closer English translation might be 'virtuosity.' Statecraft requires an awareness of a thousand different challenges at the same time: all the ways war threatens to break out, all the ways war alters the mind's perception, all the ways diplomacy can work to your advantage, all the ways force must be threatened, all the ways you have to understand your competitors' threats, all the ways your competitors' can be exploited: both in their excessive desire for peace and their excessive desire for war.

What's required is a virtuoso's dexterity to stay afloat amid thousands of challenges, surviving only by instinct because there are so many challenges for which one can never know until it's too late to prevent their explosion. Netanyahu has obviously proven that dexterity in peacetime, but while he's invaded Gaza in the past, he's never truly faced a war until now: no Israeli Prime Minister truly has since Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin 50 years ago. The challenges of peacetime are very different, and in putting your own political survival above your state's, you may have caused your state to spill over into war.

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4 Mini-Essays on the War: #2

This is a more difficult post to write, emotionally, because it gets into questions no one wants to think about. It takes a bit of courage to make these points among liberals, and it will inevitably make people who read it angry. 

Honestly, what could you possibly think would happen if Israel left Gaza to its own devices? 

It already has. 

I'm no fan of the New York Times's in-house conservative, Bret Stephens, but he had a very good column that everybody ought to take into consideration. 

The column is about tunnels: 

In a territory that is 25 miles long, there are somewhere between 350 and 450 miles of underground tunnels. Fathom that for a moment. The London Underground (its subway) is 249 miles. There are 5,700 entrances to Gaza's tunnels discovered so far. The central node with the most entrances is Gaza's main hospital. In other words: the very doctors who can best treat the wounded are human shields.

Israel recognized the need for a Palestinian state in 1993. Israel evacuated Gaza in 2005. The Palestinian Authority was given literally $40 billion in the years after 1993. What's been done with this money? Among other things, a city of tunnels. 

What is done with these tunnels? Well, some of them are for smuggling in provisions, but considering the state of Gaza, even before 10/7, it's worth asking what provisions are being smuggled in. For years, we heard that we should let these tunnels be because they were used to bring in food, textiles, household chemicals, all of which Gazans can acquire in a black market that is almost literally underground. And clearly that's part of the tunnels' purpose. I even advocated that for a while. 

But when you have 40 billion dollars in initial seed money, you don't need tunnels. Even a generation after that initial $40 billion, you don't need tunnels. Even if Gaza had not received a cent of international foreign aid in the decades after 1993, and it's received billions, there would be no need for the tunnels. If there had ever been leadership in Gaza that was even semi-corrupt or semi-authoritarian, leadership that occasionally prized the common good over their own acquisition of more power, there would be no need for tunnels like this because life, however difficult, would be semi-bearable.  

There is no constructing these tunnels without a significant chunk of that initial seed money and an equally significant chunk of all the foreign aid thereafter. How many billions of dollars went into paying Gazans to dig these tunnels? How many billions went into construction equipment? How many billions went into paving the tunnels with concrete and metal? How many billion went into making the weapons the tunnels housed? How many billion went into building underground depots to store weapons? How many billion went into building underground training facilities so that Hamas's soldiers would know how to use them?  

It's just too easy to say 'there is no prosperity in Gaza because Israel hasn't allowed it,' or 'there's no prosperity in Gaza because Israel's destroyed it,' that's no less unfair than saying 'there should be no accountability for Israel's war actions because Palestine's actions are barbaric.' Part of the responsibility is on themselves, not the whole responsibility, but part, and a significant part. 

Everyone in the world is simultaneously acting in the context of their surroundings, and also responsible for their actions alone. 

Just as Israel persists in the illusion that it can fight a perpetual war for its security without eventually losing, Palestine persists in the illusion that it can fight a perpetual war for its liberation without eventually having no state left worth fighting for. 

4 Mini-Essays on on the War: #1

 

There are two types of people who believed Netanyahu's threat to wipe out Hamas.

- Stupid people.

- Wait, there's only one.

The point was never to wipe Hamas from the face of the planet, the point of saying so was to convince stupid people that Israel has the willpower to do so and the capability, so you'd better not get any ideas from what Hamas did.

The problem is that stupid people have always believed that Israel is so powerful and so impervious to world opinion that it has both the capability and the willpower to wipe out whomever they want to wipe out. They're not.

So there are four (actually four) problems with this strategy.

- Israel can only bluff so many times before the bluff catches up with them. Just like their enemy combatants, the more they threaten destruction, the more urgent it is to meet their threats with force if anyone is going to believe them. If Israel continues to pursue this policy, eventually it is going to have to actually decimate one of its enemies. To decimate the enemies, they would have to decimate everywhere the enemies hide, and that means decimating hundreds of thousands of civilians Hamas and Hezbollah soldiers hide within. For the moment, that is extremely unlikely, but if a WMD is ever fired into Israel, that is precisely what would happen.

- So many "stupids" around the world believe that Israel is a unique confluence of evil and power that, for the moment, they thoroughly believe Israel intends to wipe out Hamas, whatever the cost. Therefore, they act as though this is what Israel will do, and it results in Israel being isolated around the world, and eventually would result in Jews being isolated too.

- Netanyahu's coalition testifies to the fact that there are at least a couple million Jewish 'stupids' too, and view it with approval. Netanyahu has always straddled that line between true believer and realist, but he so values his own power that he inevitably chooses realism. But if a true believer ever becomes Prime Minister, like Finance Minister B'Tzalel Smotrich, he might truly believe Israel can accomplish what Israel's establishment knows is a threat Israel can't possibly carry out.

- Even moreso than the actual damage Israel does, propaganda about the extent of Israeli power is Hamas's best recruitment tool. The unseen is always more powerful to the imagination than the seen, and however cataclysmic the damage done to Gaza, the thought still exists in the minds of potential recruits: "If you think what Israel did to us now is bad, imagine what would happen if Israel visits its full might on us. After all, they say they will."

The inevitable cost of propaganda is that, eventually, the line between bullshit and reality is so blurred that propagandists come to believe their own propaganda. Hundreds of millions in the rest of the Middle East persist with the idea that you can get rid of the Jewish presence, and because this propaganda is so successful, their leaders inevitably come to believe it too. Israel has relied on the myth of its infinite power and will for the near-entirety of its existence, and every year, more Israelis come to believe it.

Nerve

 It's been a while since I've written anything constructive. Just the act of putting words to the page causes a kind of low key panic. The panic is not that the words go down but that they'll be read. Words don't exist to be sequestered, they exist to be shared. I don't understand people who write diaries for themselves, sometimes volumes and volumes of them: so much effort purely for their own edification. Perhaps I don't have enough sense of self to take reward from my own doings, but what's the point of a diary you keep entirely to yourself?

And yet the thought that people read what I write is more than I can take because when people read what you write, people judge what you write. It's easy to write something relatively personal about your doubts, there are a couple dozen people who will rush to your support - you appreciate them, but we're all doing our best human duty in supporting each other when one of us appears to need it.

But what about when we write our more objectionable thoughts? What about the stuff we really want to write?

What about thoughts about Israel/Gaza war that both the Israeli side and the Palestinian side would view as unprintable heresy? Well past what they think I think of either... Thoughts I keep to myself because I'd rather not endanger the friendships.

What about thoughts on other subjects: books, movies, music, the stuff nobody gives a shit about... the stuff that if I stop to think about what I'm thinking about, I'm always get worried I'll be caught in a howling mistake that proves I don't know what I'm talking about?

What about fiction? What about fiction that includes descriptions so deliberately disgusting that you'd think twice about associating with a soul who'd write such things? What about the best piece of fiction I ever wrote, which is from the point of view of a trans person in Cleopatra's court? What about the simple fact that if I publish the fiction in any manner, publishing companies wouldn't pay me shit - so I have to keep it to myself, all in the hope that publishing companies will be interested in the kind of difficult, form-disregarding writing for whom they never have interest in otherwise.

I can't find the quote, but in some book VS Naipaul has a bit about how after 40, a man loses his nerve. We won't talk about Naipaul, but nerve is what I'm beginning to lose. We all know that life gets simpler after 40. As you get older, you lose energy, you lose possibilities, you lose opportunities, you lose memories, you lose concentration, if you're not lucky like me you lose your basic health too. Unless you're an exception to the rule, your life story basically has its trajectory. You start to settle in for the long haul of what life will be, and if you really want to expend the energy to change things, expect that you will only have enough energy for that fight and none more.

So I guess the only choice is to fight against my waning nerve, and expect nothing out of life but exactly this fight.

So see ya soon with more controversial Israel writing, more bad writing about subjects you don't care about, and more great fiction none of you will like.

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A Brief Comment on Major Depression

 Fifteen years ago or so I used to cast aspersions on people who posted their dirty laundry publicly, and was proud that I kept mine relatively private and at least I didn't vomit it all over social media, then the person I judged harshly became me. I don't doubt many people judge in the same way as I did even now.

Please understand, I know there's something to be valued in stoicism, but people stopped being the strong and silent type for a reason. It's because it was killing millions of people before their time. They turned to alcohol and cigarettes to carry a burden and it took decades off their lifespans. That was me in my twenties.

When Robin Williams killed himself, I realized that no matter how funny you are, you might be doomed if you keep the fight private (note: I don't see myself as doomed, just quite unfortunate). So I came forward as having suffered from disgustingly severe depression for decades. Many diagnoses were bandied about for it, but none have truly given it a name. Whatever else I am, it is as much me as it is not truly me. And maybe if I come forward, I can help myself as much as I can help others avoid experiences like mine.

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I don't have much to say about Lebanon

All I can say is that Netanyahu, in his desperate ploy to kill people rather than give up power, is losing control of a situation that's demanded his immediate removal from the moment this happened three months ago. In order to maintain his right wing coalition, he needs to submit to extreme operations that not even he wants to do, and in pursing the most destructive course of action, he better ensures a continued political dominance.

Watch whatever happens very closely. This may well be a dry run for the world's future.

Thing I don't care about: Harvard's President Resigned

Thing I do care about:

Iran has a warship in the Red Sea. Why? Because the Houthi rebels of East Yemen have turned a bit of their fire away from their Saudi backed opponents and aimed it towards Israel. The missiles haven't hit Israel, but the Houthis have intercepted multiple ships going through the Red Sea's very narrow straits that are crucial for world trade. Of the four (I think) ships captured, one of them ships was owned by Israeli shipping magnate: Rami Ungar. The shipping world is international: every crew is international, every manufacture is international, so it's entirely possible that they captured all four with the intent of finding the Israel-owned one.

So why is something this vague this important?

First of all, this demands knowing something about Yemen, which I hardly do, and I'm not going to spend the weeks reading up on it unless Yemen's the reason a gigantic war breaks out (and it probably won't be...). Suffice to say, important things are going on in Yemen that you don't know about, with multiple regions, multiple ethnic groups, multiple factions, multiple wars. Even if it's true that 22,000 Gazans have died at Israeli hands, the blood of the Yemenite conflict seems to exceed the Gaza conflict by a multiple of SEVENTEEN.

You don't know anything about this conflict. Why is that?

...you obviously don't want to hear the answer.

But now Iran has a warship in the Red Sea. Why? Because the fact that Yemen's conflict is now becoming Israel's conflict is obviously at Iran's behest (possibly with an OK from Putin or Xi), and Iran wants an excuse to keep this conflict going as long as possible. Tactical maneuvers are easier when you want to keep wars going than when you want to stop them, but this is, sadly, a brilliant tactical maneuver.

It serves a triple purpose:

1. It demands some kind of response. You can't simply tolerate missiles going into Israel in the middle of a war they're already fighting or else ten other countries or terrorist groups might get the same idea.

Such a response would either come from Israel or the US.

- If it's Israel, it reminds every Israel-hater in the Middle East that, to their perception, Israel has always been an aggressor, and that if Israel is not defeated, the humiliations of still having an imperial occupier on their land will continue to effect countries whose distance from Israel seems extremely far.
- If it's the US, it reminds every America-hater in the Middle East that the US's reach is everywhere, it can come to your doorstep at any moment, and the US can decide at any moment to upend your country on a whim.

So far, it's the US, and again, thank god for that. The fact that the US can decide to upend a country on a whim isn't news to anywhere in the world.

2. Israel is finally moving into the next phase of its conflict where thousands of ground troops are withdrawn. Thank god for that or every Jew around the world would eventually walk around with a target on our ass.

The idea that you can end Hamas is a delusion, everybody knew it was a delusion but the delusional; but an even bigger delusion is Hamas's that you can end Israel itself or even end the Jewish people, and the whole point of this war was to bring them closer to this goal of theirs by exposing us Jews to the world as the murderers and torturers we so obviously are. So long as Hamas stays in power and the people who support Hamas maintain their delusions (and don't forget, annihilation of the Jews is in Hamas's own charter), Hamas will find reasons to prolong this conflict. In other words - and stop reading if you're delicate... - you can't stop Hamas from killing people unless the price for Hamas's murders is so high that those who celebrated Hamas's killings would think twice about doing it again.

In case you haven't noticed yet, Israel/Palestine is a game of inches. Every foot of land has disputed claims and competing stories, every meter is subject to endless disputes, negotiations and battles, and each foot of the battle can last a hundred years.

There are only two actors in the world who want to see this war end less than Bibi Netanyahu, and one of them is Hamas. Without war, Hamas's entire purpose is run out. There is nothing left for their followers and captives but the obvious realization that so long as they draw a few percent support of the Palestinian electorate, Palestine could have all the apparatus in place to flourish, and it wouldn't take more than a generation for Hamas to remake Palestine into exactly what it already is. All it takes to make a country prosper is one group of practical hard workers and a rich, powerful backer. All it takes to ruin a country is one wing of ideological nuts with a rich, powerful backer. Israel: take note.

If Israel is unwilling to continue a war in Gaza at a pace that shocks the world, then Hamas, Iran, and all the people who want Israel eliminated need this war to spread.

Where can it spread? To a place already so bombed out and hellish that it makes Gaza look like Dubai.

3. The biggest quagmires are not wars in which there are two sides, clearly demarcated, where but where there are five or seven. The American Civil War was over in four years, but civil wars have been going on in Syria, Mali, and Camerooon for well over ten years. The 17th century German civil war was known as the Thirty Years War. The 14-15th century English civil war is known as the Hundred Years War. Civil wars too can go on forever with only two sides, but if the conflict takes forever, that's usually a sign that it has many sides, many actors, many belligerents in play - each of which have their own shifting motives, conflicting ambitions, personality tensions, corporate interests, and compete for the same resources; alliances break apart, fighters switch sides, actors within each side advance their own interests at the expense of the groups' goals, and generations of citizens live in a world of chaos.

Two factorial is just two, and two sides can fight to a stalemate, but three factorial is six, so all it takes is three sides in any conflict and the complications get beyond the ability of anyone to foresee.

For a thousand years, Jerusalem's been a quagmire for the Arab world, but Israel/Palestine is not a quagmire, it's a stalemate. The main components of Israel/Palestine aren't unpredictable, they're all too predictable. The same situation continues with the same factors: year after year, decade after decade, until the smallest disruptions seem like epochal events. But in Yemen, the largest disruptions barely merit mention in the world's news, and even if world news covered it properly, what was true when written down would change by the time it's published.

So long as Israel/Palestine never spreads, it stays a stalemate, but in 1982 (really 1979), Israel launched itself into the Lebanese civil war to defend its borders and couldn't get out of it until 2000, ten years even past when the civil war ended.

Israel's involvement in Lebanon was the literal poison that set the world against it for all the future to foresee. What might an excursion further abroad do? What might happen were Israel to feel itself compelled to interfere this region 2200 kilometers away, with all its competing factions and competing factions within competing factions, each of which has a whole new beast of chaos to unleash?

It all seems unlikely or unbelievable, but consider this (with credit to the Stimson Center): 

The Houthi movement's founder: Hussein al-Houthi, believed that the US and Israel had plans to occupy no less than Mecca and Medina. In 2021, the Houthis deported any Jews left in Yemen from the mass exiles after 1948. In 2021, al-Houti's brother Abdel-Malek declared his intention to capture the areas held by their Yemenite enemies who 'want to subjugate them [the areas] to the Americans, British, and Israelis. The rallying war chant for the Houthis is said to be 'God is great, death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews, victory to Islam.' 

Yemen is, in all likelihood, not going to be a new front in this particular war, but it just might be. This is a bid by a Shia group to be considered part of the Axis of Resistance: stretching from Hamas to Hezbollah to Iran and its militia groups in Iraq and Syria, that have taken put the commitment to wiping Israel off the map into Islamic form that used to be the pan-Arab cry of nearly every leader of every Arab country. What better way than embroiling Israel and its allies in a second front in the Israel-Gaza war that is of an unprecedented distance from Israel by a factor of 2,200 kilometers? 

A quick listening guide to Leonard Bernstein

We won't get into anything that wasn't his compositions.

A+:
West Side Story (obviously. Look, it's probably the greatest theater work this country ever produced. Your life is poorer without knowing it. The best way to know it is to find the Spielberg movie and watch it on the biggest screen you can find. In the meantime, listen to the original Broadway soundtrack, which has still never been bettered.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-oyVRuPRlY&list=PL2HvIoVJcahcqRssUsnv0g8lV3W-I2TfL&index=10

A:
Candide (WSS's companion piece. It doesn't work as a show. It's just one thing, after another, after another, but along with Porgy and Bess, it just might be the most amazing music ever composed for Broadway)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kovAiSbTyBI&list=OLAK5uy_l84_XoNl81Szssi1_CjfkTqPVENs6x1NQ&index=2&fbclid=IwAR0Rk1eAZIXeEBoLEALQyqz4JJRxe69UA0KUFWdUUVV668JCJlvnPIHq8AQ

On the Waterfront Suite: (Lenny's only movie score. It's one of the all-time movie scores, and here are twenty minutes of the most evocative music ever composed about New York) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojnVIW3wRJo

Fancy Free: (Bernstein's ballet on the subject of three sailors with a day of shore leave in New York. This is the piece in 1944 when Lenny truly becomes Lenny, that brash, unmistakably New York voice that combines classical and jazz in a third stream fifteen years before third stream jazz was a genre.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G91xB1a2ftU&list=OLAK5uy_nITeKxfMVD1yTTkXKwFZ3piLWwTId5WLw

Symphonic Dances from West Side Story: (just the orchestral music - and a little bit more - that gives as good a sense of New York as anything in On the Waterfront) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_NelA3ZW4g

A-

On The Town: (That incredible first show of his, based on Fancy Free. Another one of the most incredible shows put on, as a soundtrack the love songs are a little more insipid than onstage, maybe because it never got a great performance.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t062tjKmK_I&list=PLaEnMuxCkiA4h6JHoYJqRN2H1xQS4Yg7W&index=16

Jeremiah Symphony: (A biblical evocation of the prophet Jeremiah and his lamentations, inveighing against sin and in the middle, a depiction of the orgiastic sinners he so loathes - you may psychologize away, but written in 1942 and knowing the destruction that would soon make itself public, it's very difficult not to be deeply moved) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uic4qcyDmDQ

B+:

Chichester Psalms (Bernstein's 20 minute sacred piece that sets ancient Hebrew psalms as pure Broadway) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnrZGTmMjYc

B:

Wonderful Town: It's almost pure fluff, but it's fun fluff) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNWpiNPK8tg&list=OLAK5uy_lIqAhr80hXDCsO-WBOrcEPIp_u3fJMFKc&index=11

B-:
The Age of Anxiety: (At this point, I think there's only one movement that matters in this symphony: the jazz movement. Oh my god I love this.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftPNojzZYHw&list=OLAK5uy_nZTOZ1rFILOj3JB2u2hcxygtufuCnAHZ4&index=18

C: Serenade - another work of Lenny in pretentious mode, a musical depiction of Plato's Symposium on the nature of love. It has a lot of exciting stuff, but let's get serious, this is not philosophy.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpROC4gsZhQ

D: Kaddish Symphony: (It's not good... but getting rid of Bernstein's own pretentious text helped enormously, and replacing it with the testimony of Holocaust Survivor Samuel Pisar -Anthony Blinken's stepfather - makes it come much closer to working. It's not a masterpiece, but at least with some moral weight you get closer to what he must have been aiming for.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTAnmHPTKEk

F:

Mass: Oh god it sucks.

Free Speech

Here's a preemptive f*** you to every single person who's ever taken a side in this particular Israel/Palestine debate.

Of course cancel culture exists, it obviously does, it always has, and there is no better evidence than the Israel debate of how both sides use it disingenuously as a political weapon and have for the better part of a hundred years.

The idea that the pro-Palestine side invokes free speech now after having suppressed speech on so many other issues from... to... I don't want to say them because it will get everybody mad and get me ever asymptotically closer to the complete cancellation I've courted for thirty years. The hypocrisy of the pro-Palestine left is so unbelievably outrageous. Your chickens have finally come home to roost and it could not come a moment too soon and one can only hope your behavior results in the same in... any other country in the world.

Meanwhile, the right and center who've complained about cancel culture for years are now doing everything they can to silence everybody who disagrees with them into non-persons. This is... this is... this is... everything you claim to hate, and even if the pro-Palestine side completely controls academia and just about every government in the world, your side literally controls a government that can countermand the will of the entire world. Anti-Israel resolutions can't even get through congress with 20 votes. What more could you possibly need in America? Every attempt to suppress it will just make the oppostion to you worse.

Who's right in this debate? Everybody is, and everybody is also deeply, deeply wrong.

It's understandable. In a war, everybody fights dirty, but for god's sakes, own what you're doing. You don't have righteousness on your side, you're just indulging in the same base slime everybody does who wants their side to win.

ET: Almanac

 It is on. The Rosenbergs are to die at last. Television networks interrupt programs with the announcement: "President Eisenhower and the Supreme Court of the United States of America have refused to spare the lives of atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg." At the Bernard Bach home in Toms River, New Jersey, a small ten-year-old boy is watching the baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Detoit Tigers on channel 11 when the announcement is made. The score is 0-0, but Yankee first baseman Joe Collins has just beat out a drag bunt in the bottom of the fourth. It is a sunny day and the boy is thinking about going out to play baseball with friends in the neighborhood. That's what Sonia Bach wants him to do. But he's fascinated by the television and can't pry himself away from it. The announcer says the executions are scheduled to take place tonight. He looks very intent and serious. The boy tries to see past him to the ballgame again, but the announcer won't go away. "My Mommy and Daddy," the boy whispers, feeling that someone or something is watching him. But he doesn't know what to add. A prayer? A seventh-inning stretch? At the ballgame, nobody seems to have noticed that the announcement has been made. Yankee outfielder Gene Woodling has come to the plate during the interruption, and he now watches a ball go by. There's something magical about TV, everything seems to happen at once on it, the near and far, the funny and sad, the real and the unreal. Tonight! Collins, taking a big lead off first base, is not thinking about this. He doesn't care. The boy hates Collins for his cheap hit. Just like the Yankees. His Mom and Dad like the Brooklyn Dodgers; the New York Yankees are Judge Kaufman's team. Judge Kaufman is rich and lives on Park Avenue and takes his sons to see them play. The boy feels that awful lump growing in his stomach again. His little brother is out on the front porch with Leo painting a homemade Father's Day card with watercolors. Father's Day is Sunday, a long time away. "That was their last chance," the boy tells himself, trying to picture this new finality in the same way he sees the Tiger pitcher stretch, study Collins at first, then whip the ball toward the plate: ball two! Are the other guys in the neighborhood watching the game, did they hear the announcement? His mom and dad have told him it's not manly to be afraid, but he is afraid, he can't help it. He feels like there are two of himself loose in this world, one who likes to play baseball with friends and come home to Mom and Dad and sometimes push his little brother around, and another one on television and in the newspapers who is threatening to eat the other one up. Both of them, the one eating and the one getting eaten, are frightened, because they both believe the world is not crazy, how could it be? and yet why is it doing these maniac things? why is it killing his Mom and Dad like this, and why is everybody so excited about it, and what is it they want with him, a plain ten-year-old boy who's still learning his fractions and doesn't even know how to fix a television or throw a curve ball yet. "Why don't you go and play catch with Steve?" says Sonia gently. She is being too nice to him. Like everybody else of late. Even Mr. Bloch. Sometimes he feels like shouting at them: damn you all! Woodling slams a one-strike, two-balls pitch clean out of the ballpark, and the Yankees lead, 2-0. The television camera shows people cheering and waving and having a terrific time. If people really loved one another, he wonders, would the world be like this? His poor Mom! What is she thinking? How does it feel? What is love in a world where people behave like this as if it were normal. Woodling circles the bases. His little brother comes in, wearing his Brooklyn Dodgers T-shirt all smeared with paint, and asks Sonia for a glass of milk. "That's it. That's it," the boy says, "Good-bye." "Good-bye." Nobody's listening. 

His folks lawyer Manny Bloch is having the same experience: he and his defense team are flinging themselves frenetically at any judge they can find at home or in chambers, but they all seem to have vanished or gone deaf. A stone wall. Manny fires off a telegram to President Eisenhower, raising the Hugo Black point that the case has not been reviewed by the Supreme Court, but this wire is short-circuited by Special Counsel Bernie Shanley and "transmitted to the Justice Department": Eisenhower never sees it, Bloch, who has fallen unprofessionally in love with the entire family, is beginning to lose his forensic cool and is having flashes of self-destructive temper, as the doors slam shut in his face. He and others plead for a stay of eleven-p.m. executions tonight because of the Jewish Sabbath which begins at sundown. Kaufman, playing it close to the chest, says he has already spoken with Attorney General Brownell about that: the executions will not be carried out during the Sabbath. The lawyers take this to mean a delay is in the offing, past the weekend at least, and relax a moment: at Justice, they exchange knowing winks. 

The Rosenbergs themselves, locked away in the stillness of Sing Sing Death House, are remote from all this noisy maneuvering, but they are not unaware of it. One thing they know: they are not alone in this world. Julius even clings to the mad hope that justice will be done, that they will be vindicated, these walls will come crashing down, and they will ride out of here on the shoulders of their friends, the people, but Ethel, though never more strong and serene, shares her son's mood of grim resignation: that's it, good-bye, good-bye. She sits with Julie, separated from him by a wire-mesh screen, composing a farewell letter to the two boys. What she wants above all is to save them from cynicism and despair, so she speaks of the fellowship of grief and struggle and the price that must be paid to create a life on earth worth living. Julie, watching her, nods in agreement, awed by her radiant tranquility . . . 

. . . Your Daddy who is with me in the last momentous hours, sends his heart and all the love that is in it for his dearest boys. Always remember that we were innocent and could not wrong our conscience. We press you close and kiss you with all our strength.

Lovingly,

Daddy Julie and Mommy Ethel

Julius's mother, Sophie Rosenberg, turns up meanwhile at the gates of the White House asking to see the President, but they don't even let her get close--her emotional behavior is notorious, and besides, she's not in good health, and people near the end are capable of anything--so she has to do her scene in the streets. Much is happening out there. Demonstrations are building up in Washington, New York, around the world. Riots are expected and police everywhere are put on special alert. Bloch blames Judge Kaufman for stirring up all this trouble through his merciless intransigence: "Tens upon tens of millions of people in this country, in Europe, in Asia, know about this case!" The Boy Judge is not taken in: "I have been frankly hounded, pounded by vilification and by pressurists--I think it is not a mere accident that people have been aroused in these countries. I think it has been by design!" On a crepe-paper banner strung out above the Republic Chop Suey eatery in Times Square, Senator Frank Brandigee's immortal rejoinder to Woody Wilson: 

I AM NOT GOING TO BE BUNCOED BY ANY OLEAGENOUS LINGO 

                   ABOUT "HUMANITY" OR "MEN EVERYWHERE" 

 

 

 

 

Robert Coover: The Public Burning - Beginning of Chapter 16, will try to copy the whole chapter later. 

At best..

Being caught in the middle is a tough place no matter where you are, but when the issues are existential, nobody wants to concede you might be right because that means that their very strong feelings are wrong. This is why I generally insist on not talking about Israel in person anymore except a few close friends and my immediate family with whom I can't avoid the topic. Literally the entire world wants you to tell them what you think privately, and it's always just a smokescreen for them to tell you why you're wrong. What's the point of enduring all this public online heat if we have to endure it person-to-person too?

I have never been completely sanguine on this war, and until the far-right threat is gone from the Israeli government, I never will be. Jews do not endure this ever-present specter of death only to become the death we fear, but I will never apologize for Jews doing what they have to to survive, so long as it's essential for its survival. Well off socialists will never understand what it means to live in a dangerous neighborhood, and neighborhoods don't get more dangerous than Israel's. Doing nothing can get you killed. Doing the wrong thing can get you killed too.

But with the news that Israel has killed a top Iranian official in Syria, my willingness to spill blood for this fight gets thinner until Netanyahu goes. There is no point of killing people except if lives are ultimately saved, and this ends more lives than it saves.

I could be wrong, but I don't think Israel meant to kill this guy. I don't think it was a targeted assassination. I think he simply happened to be at a Syrian base from where Israeli forces were worried weapons of mass destruction could be deployed, and the whole reason he was there was to inspect the base for its fitness to deploy exactly such weapons.

They did not know a high Iranian official would be on the premises, and as usual these days, some high ups in Israel fucked up. This time, it would not surprise me if the Netanyahu administration and the military pretended their incompetence was deliberate.

But this is exactly the excuse Hezbollah needs to saturate the north of Israel with missiles, any of which have a much better chance of having WMD's attached than any missile coming from Gaza. Will they? Probably not, not yet at least, but the clock is ticking, and the whole world is getting closer to a point of no return.

What is the point in supporting a war when you can't get rid of leaders who are, at best, willfully incompetent?

Israeli Christmas

It may be a Jewish state but Christmas in Jerusalem is an extraordinary thing. Thousands of pilgrims around the Old City flooding churches of every denomination and language that are hundreds of years old, sometimes thousands. It is one of the great events of the Israeli year, and life without it feels empty. I'd imagine a lot of it is still going on in Jerusalem even if at nothing like that scale, but Christmas without pilgrims would be unthinkable in Bethlehem and Nazareth, and one has to assume there is no such pilgrimage there presently. Just emptiness and sadness in places where thousands experience the most profound joy every year.

War depopulates, not just life but all the things which make life worth living.

I wish every Notzri out there a Merry Christmas. May you get your time in Jerusalem back, and may we all figure out a way to share this place while letting all our best traditions thrive. Life itself depends on it.

All rea

I wish I hadn't defriended so many anti-Israel people

I could totally use their posts to refute them now.  

So Long as Bibi Stays...

 Today Iran threatened to cut off the Mediterranean Sea at the Strait of Gibralter. I don't know how Iran would get over there and they could be stopped in a hundred different ways for a hundred different reasons, but the fundamental fact of Bibi's presence remains the same regardless:

Everyone is in danger. Not just Gaza, not just Israel, the world. So long as Bibi stays, we have an actor in place willing to risk a world war rather than give up power, even an actor in place willing to use a world war to his advantage.

Until the deaths get close to 100,000, I don't pay much attention to the outrages of world conflicts. 20,000, if that's the real number, is still below average for the median worldwide crisis. The fact that it's happened in 2 1/2 months, that's pretty remarkable, but so long as the crisis soon moves into the next phase, it would be just another world crisis, without much to remark on except for the incredible amount of attention it engenders while crises that get next to none rage far more lethally.

But so long as Bibi is in power, this crisis will not end, and if it goes on for a year with the same policy, the death toll, if Gaza's Health Ministry tells the whole truth (doubtful), may go to 90,000. THAT is remarkable, and that is an infamy Israel would do extraordinarily well to avoid.

I may be the only person in the world who sees it, but Bibi has arched for a dictator's unlimited power his whole time in office, and is looking for any way to get it. Hamas handed him a golden ticket.

When Hamas would like to kill a million Jews or many more, we have no choice but to support this would be dictator as we tacitly do dozens of others across the world. This is simply a fact of foreign policy everywhere, but that does not change that Israel is in the gravest peril of becoming the dictatorship the world suspects they already were. Should Israel get there, does Israel become the threat to world peace the world pretends Israel has always been?

Where then must we lend our support?

What Would I Do in Israel?

 The truth is that I have no desire to go back. I have a few friends and family worth seeing, but however much at 24 I romanticized being a journalist in the middle of an Israeli war, there's very little about experiencing a war that's worthwhile unless you get to pose like Camus for a black-and-white photo with sunglasses and a cigarette in your mouth. For the hoi polloi, there's just the general hell of enduring it, and however much it must be endured in Israel, one can only imagine what it means to endure it in Gaza, either as a Palestinian or an Israeli soldier.

The only reason to go back would be to write about it, and for whom would I be writing? The few friends who read me here? Does anybody actually read me here?

No, the real reason to go back would be for my continued grandiose delusion of Jewish history novels, because I want to experience what Jews act like under siege. I would imagine there are incredible situations: dramatic, tragic, comic, heroic situations, situations of cowardice, irony, love and hate so far past anything I could imagine or read about that to miss out on great material is the biggest regret for a mediocre artist looking to become good at what he does.

I have no desire to have the Israel experience again, but history is being made right now, and I'm missing it, almost 42 and with no overwhelmingly pressing responsibilities to keep me here.

There are probably dozens of Jewish ne'er do wells with exactly the same thought right now. It's a pseudo-intellectual's 'get rich quick' scheme: go to Israel, write about what you see, and somehow people will pay attention that never paid attention before.

But my real desire is not to write about this war, it's to write about war generally. It's to write about the long Jewish history of enduring sieges and mounting them, the long history of being victims and perpetrators, the long history of moral infamies and ambiguities that follow us everywhere we go, and the long history that whatever hell we pay to other peoples will be visited upon us seventy-seven fold.

That's why I want to go to Israel.

...I probably won't.