I didn't watch the debate

I didn't watch the debate. I won't watch the debate. The moment Biden entered, I switched it off. Whether due to a cold,, or laryngitis, or whether he simply had a bad makeup job, or just that he was tired, the moment he stepped on that stage, Biden looked like that foolish fond old man in Republican wet dreams. Dearest Joe looked older than old, he looked like the increasingly wax likeness of a person in the weeks before their passing. From that moment, I knew that even if Biden were full of life for the last hour of the debate, something so shallow as a debate would be decided by the first impression, and the first impression was that Biden is close to the end.

Joe Biden may come back, even from this. Debates are stupid. Debating Trump is stupider. Barely a single American hasn't made up their mind for whom they're going to vote, and many swing voters are even stupider than they look. If you haven't made up your mind by now, a blow of the wind will make you change your mind again, and again, and again, until your mind shows itself unable to hold anything at all.

The problem isn't Biden, the problem isn't even Trump, the problem is us. The problem is the whole system we've refused to reform for a half-century after reform's necessity was clear. Biden is just the personification of that system.

I believe Joe Biden is the best President of my lifetime. Obama was like Jefferson: an intellectual with words more inspiring than any action; but he proved willing to ditch lofty ideals when the reality of governing set in. Like Jefferson, Obama was truly great when he was great, but sometimes he was hidebound by his own abstract ideals, and when he was the results were scarcely mediocre. George HW Bush might have been up to it, but he governed like an Adams: a patrician who might have been great had he not given his bully pulpit to a mob movement he plainly despised. So Biden is the only President I've ever seen equal to the task of governing, but even if he's equal to the presidency, he's not equal to THIS presidency. This increasingly seems a moment that demands a Washington, a Lincoln, an FDR, who throws out the blueprint and redraws the country from scratch; so even a semi-giant like Eisenhower with enormous pre-Presidential experience and achievements won't cut it. Eisenhower presided over America after a great crisis: a period when the country knew best what it was and what its mission should be, because the world had no choice but look to America for answers they couldn't provide themselves.

Biden is a President for the mid-20th century presiding in the 21st. It is astonishing how much of the old formulas of Eisenhower, Truman and Johnson translate to our own time. Compare the first four years of Obama to the first four years of Biden: Obama did a lot, Biden did more. Yet even so, Biden is the dogmas of the quiet past unequal to our Stormy Daniels present. He's solving 2020s problems with 1950s solutions: they still work pretty well because they were good solutions, but they're old solutions near the end of their shelf life: incapable of solving anything for more than a couple years. Biden is demonstrably unequal to the enormity of an unprecedented crisis, not because he's old, but because our whole era is old. Any infirmities he exhibits are just a metaphor for the bigger problem. Biden does not see a way forward except through frameworks of a past which hardly anyone lived through but him. Obama was unequal to these problems too, but Obama saw that new ways forward were needed, and he spoke to that need for a new, cleaner air which every American intuited.

Obama bet on the light of our common humanity, and that bet allowed inhumanity to slither into the sunlight unashamed. He believed that given the objective truth, America would embrace truth. But few people want the truth, they want a truth told slant to flatter them.

The problem is not Biden or Trump, the problem is the way we process information. There is so much information to process now, an infinity of statistics most find too difficult to interpret except through a filter of ideological theories. There is hardly any news anymore, there is only news that's framed through commentary. Whether these ideological framers mean good or ill, it's impossible for objectivity to get through them. News is no longer news, it's just theories about what's going on. In most people's minds, these theories are either proved by statistics, or the statistics are lies. Artificial intelligence will only make this reality more acute as we have to doubt the veracity of everything we ever see on a screen - screens which are now the way we process the world.

Biden and Trump are just symptoms of this problem. Biden is old truths, old reliabilities, the certainties we've always known, the institutions that keep us together - but these institutions are falling apart, and if they're to be renewed, they need assurance that someone can keep them going through the next four years. Biden, God protect him, can't give that. Trump is a perfect incarnation of the doubts, the worm that eats through plants and certainties, trying to convince us the institutions that kept us together never did, never worked, and should be shed as a snake does its skin.

The problem is that Biden is the old guarantees: NATO, an impartial Supreme Court, legislatures without gridlock, lawmakers who vote their individual beliefs rather than party line. So effective were these old certainties that over of a half-century they made way for new possibilities: Civil Rights, The Great Society, Roe vs. Wade, the Kyoto Protocol, Obergefell vs. Hodges, and, most importantly, the Paris climate Agreement. The story of these victories is not the victories themselves but the lives they make better; but this improvement is temporary, we all know that now. New generations will be forced to watch as these possibilities turn into kindling little different than forest fires. Their challenge, our challenge, is to preserve or resurrect these possibilities for a better life, and to turn them into ironclad certainties.

Obama was wrong, change does not happen from the bottom up. It happens in synergy from the bottom to the top: a sturdy foundation of community activity is what creates a great leader, but change without a presiding leader is anarchy: only with a great leader is lasting change implemented without billions of unforeseen problems along the way. Leaders will come who are able to do it, but we don't know who they are yet, and we may not for a terribly long while. New problems need to be understood before they can be solved, and great as Biden is, he was never the leader to understand them. Great leaders will only come to help us after we take the lead in our own small spaces. We have to vote, we have to volunteer, we have to phonebank, knock on doors, go to town halls, sit on schoolboards, attend those PTA and HOA meetings, clean the local parks, get the crossing guards hired and more stop signs on the roads. Obama was right in the sense that we are the ones we've been waiting for. We are all our own little leaders, and there's no point in larger leadership if there's no leadership beneath them. To a certain extent, we get the leaders we deserve, so if most of us are not willing to demonstrate how leaders should lead, we get bad leaders.

Walter Klein

 I'd heard the name Walter Klein before yesterday, but somehow I'd never listened to him. I think I've happened on another of those artists whom your life changes when you hear them for the first time.

I don't think K. 457 is my favorite Mozart sonata, that will always be K. 533/494 after hearing Alfred Brendel do it live at his final American recital, but K. 457 is almost beyond a doubt the best, the most complex, the most elusive. Mozart's piano sonatas were generally not among the crown jewels of his output, but K. 457 is a crown jewel, and Beethoven's Pathetique would never be conceived without it - hell, at certain points the Pathetique sounds as though Beethoven should have paid Mozart for fair use. Many harmonic sequences in K. 457 are so chromatic that they can almost sound like 1910 Schoenberg.

Even in minor-key Mozart, he is forever skirting the line between happiness and sadness, and K. 457 is one of those works where the harmonies are grim, but the rhythms smile. Just as Mozart created a d-minor opera for Don Giovanni, maybe he had a c-minor opera up his sleeve: imagine Mozart's Hamlet or Candide, comic even amid the grim fatalism.

But some of the most complex chromaticism is right amid that sublime slow movement, which could be sung by Figaro's Contessa, yet imagine the Contessa singing some of those chromatic or six-three harmonies. I don't know if they ache with eros or with agony, but for a few seconds at a time, the most sublime Mozart sounds more like a prefiguration of composers a century later, not just Schoenberg but also Debussy.

The VOX sound is unfortunately somewhat brittle and treble heavy, but in spite of it, I have never been carried away by the slow movement like this. Here is yet another major pianist in the Viennese tradition. Where are they now? Instead of 'the grand tradition' we have an international allotment of 'very serious pianists' who play 'very serious music' that seems completely unconcerned with that oral tradition passed from Beethoven to Czerny to Leschititzky. Even the best of them like Brendel and Schiff are hidebound by their denial that the grand tradition has none of their horror of the bravura. The same tradition that produced Schnabel and Horoszowski produced Friedman and Moisewitsch. It is all connected, and disconnecting the intellectual from the popular does a deep disservice to both.

Mozart: Piano Sonata No. 14 in C Minor KV 457 - Walter Klien, 1959 - VOX SVBX 5429 (youtube.com)

Two Small Words on What's Going With 'The Situation'

When you're part of a group who chants 'Intifada Revolution/There is only one solution,' whether or not you realize that that's deliberately channeling Hitler's final solution, that's what literally hundreds of millions of antisemites hear. So if you're part of a group which does that, you might or might not be an antisemite, but if you don't dissociate yourselves from the group that organizes the protest, you're at very least an idiot.

All reactions

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If there ever were a ceasefire with Hamas (and there won't be, and if there is, not one that isn't broken a hundred times...), the more chance there is of full scale war with Hezbollah, an organization that created a dictatorship in south of Lebanon in all but name with weaponry that makes Hamas look like slingshots. That's what it means to work together in the 'Axis of Resistance.' The quieter one front gets, the louder the other gets. The more numb people grow to Gaza, the more fresh outrage can be generated by anything that happens in South Lebanon. The whole point of this operation is to keep Israel at war perpetually until world public opinion hemorrhages totally, Israel loses its economic opportunities, its sponsors lose their credibility, and their dictatorial backers gain the prestige lost by democracies like the US and EU. The whole point is to paint the entirety of the Israeli populace, and the US populace, as one monolithic block of imperialism, thereby driving a billion progressive idealists around the world into the arms of political Islamists that would set their allies on fire the moment they gain power over them.

Stay liberal, but do not be naive.

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A Few Points about Otello

 I just heard Otello performed in concert tonight at the National Symphony in DC. If it weren't already three in the morning I'd write a long post about Otello.

A few points:

1. Otello is a greater work than Othello. Othello is towering, but it's two plays awkwardly shoehorned into one: Othello's descent into jealous madness, and the rise of Iago's evil powers. Verdi, as practical a man of the theater as the Bard, streamlines it to one story by making Iago evil personified from the first word. Othello sprawls into a hundred directions. Otello is a masterpiece of concision. You know exactly why every note is there.
2. The way Verdi cuts Othello in half is through Iago's Credo, which literally sets a trifling prose poem Boito wrote as a vent for his own domestic frustration that had nothing to do with Otello. The setting would be astonishingly modern even in Wagner, and it is one of the core glories of all opera. While Shakespeare's Iago evolves, Verdi's Iago is. Iago, like Hagen, is evil: not only is he evil, he is evil itself.
3. Race is obviously near the core of Shakespeare's conception. One of Shakespeare's many tropes is to show that a villain from a disparaged race is the way they are because circumstances forced them to be. Just as Shylock is a Jew forced into his own stereotype, Othello is a moor forced into his. They are both villains and figures of great pathos. But the primary concern of the Othello story in any form is jealousy, but whereas Shakespeare's Othello is concerned places jealousy in a racial context, Verdi's Otello places it in the context of relationships, how envy leads friends to betray each other, and how envy leads to abusive domestic relationships.
4. There are moments when what happens in the music is so violent that one can only speculate that the music expresses what the stage directions lack. After Verdi sets Shakespeare's line, 'I took thee for the cunning whore of Venice,' the wrath of the music is so terrifying that one can only infer the actions the music implies.
5. Next time you hear Otello's shout of 'a terra, e piangi!' think of Pagliacci. Note for note, Leoncavallo literally sets the same musical cell as 'ridi Pagliaccio!'
6. Much is made by musicologists the subtle ways Iago insinuates his evil machinations in Act II, at least much is made by Ernest Newman. It's important to pace Act II relatively quickly, as Gianandrea Noseda did tonight (too fast elsewhere), because Iago's insinuating chromaticism can seem like mustache twirling unless it's done at the speed of conversation. Whether in Shakespeare or Verdi, Iago has to seem plausibly normal in order to make his devestating effect.
7. Late Verdi is a master, maybe the master, at coming up with the proper onomatopoetic musical gesture for every action. Such gestures are everywhere in Falstaff, but until tonight, the extent of it in Otello didn't quite occur to me. The Act III domestic squabble proceeds like so many fights do. It starts with one partner's cutting remarks that just barely keep civility's veneer, while the other partner does everything they can to subtly imply the unpleasant thing they need, only to proceed to the place of hurt, where the lid of respect falls off. Points of aggravation are repeated over and over again. And in the worst fights, there is always a place where the unforgivable thing is said, the point from which there is no return.
8. As the composer who perfected the tropes of grand opera, Verdi is in a unique place to play around with them. At least twice, Verdi seems as though he is about to go into an aria, once with Iago in Act I, once with Otello at the end of Act III, and probably half a dozen times between them in Act II, only to interrupt what seems like an introductory melody for something far more naturalistic.
9. We always talk about the importance of key and harmony in Wagner, but barely anyone speaks of Verdi as though he has any sort of tonal plan. And yet the harmonic plan in Otello is so clearly laid out. The love of Otello and Desdemona is played out in the tonality of E. The kisses are in a blissful E-major, but the jealousy takes root in b-flat minor, the most distant key from E. The constant rebukes and insinuations are always in a much more complex E-major, like a love that is struggling to remind itself that it exists. But at the most harrowing moments of domestic strife, the music turns to E-minor. The opera ends again in E-major but the most resigned, morendo E-major.
10. But the harmonic masterstroke is that the Willow Song is in C-Sharp minor - E-major's relative minor. The very note E has become the source of Desdemona's pain, and when it comes time to sing Ave Maria, she sings it in the dominant of C-Sharp, A-flat major. It's like a harmonic signal that heaven hears her pain, and will save her for it. All of which leads us back to the low E on the double basses with which Otello makes his final entrance.

...one half-hour later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqEgG2nSCM8

Israel/Palestine 3 1/2 FAQ's

 First the half question, which I won't even put in the form of a question.

There's no reason to talk about the peace proposal Biden put forward. It's entirely political theater to appease a left which refuses be appeased. Biden issued it knowing there is no way the Netanyahu government would adapt it, and knowing that were Netanyahu somehow to change his mind, Hamas would back out at the last minute. There is no peace possible until both Netanyahu and Sinwar are out of government, and the power of both depends on the presence of perpetual war.

So where are we right now? I think the only way to talk about this is to have a bunch of isolated FAQ, or at least, what I would imagine the FAQ is if anybody asked me.

- WAS BIDEN RIGHT TO WITHHOLD WEAPONS SALES TO ISRAEL?

Yes, he was right. It's purely symbolic. The one thing Israel has enough of is weapons, but it's a signal to Netanyahu's government that should Israel pursue its policies aggressively, they can't necessarily count on the US for a blank check to write up everything they need. What any army can never have enough of is manufacturing parts. In war, you never know what parts of your equipment will go wrong and you sometimes need defense manufacturers to ship you parts overnight. Netanyahu's government now has to factor in whether or not they can count on the US completely for every exigent circumstance.

- IS THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT RIGHT TO PROSECUTE NETANYAHU?

I know long time readers probably expect me to go with 'no, f-ck you' and leave it there. I'm going to say 'No, f-ck you' when it comes to the warrant against Netanyahu's defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who proved one of the loudest opposition figures in Netanyahu's government, dissenting from Netanyahu in full view of the public. Regarding Netanyahu, I'm still going to answer a resounding 'no,' but not a 'morally absolute no.'

This question is not quite as simple as it seems, because for Israel, the ICC is purely symbolic. It has no enforceability, and the fact remains, it is far more likely that an exiled Hamas leader like Ismail Haniya can end up in front of the ICC than Netanyahu ever will. If Netanyahu feels trapped by the worry that he might get arrested abroad, then it's a small price to pay for making Israelis feel trapped by him.

The ICC can only prosecute within states that recognize it, and Israel does not - Israel and the US jointly announced they no longer recognize the ICC as of 2002. They are not alone among world powers who don't recognize it: neither China nor India ever recognized the ICC, and Russia withdrew their recognition in 2016.

This means that the ICC warrant is just another piece of diplomatic leverage, and it's hard for me to believe that the ICC would have issued it without Washington's secret consent. This is just the 'carrot and sticking' of normal diplomacy: do what we want, you're rewarded, go against our wishes, you will be punished. More or less, the only part of the war effort that will be hurt by the ICC ruling is people's feelings.

And 'feelings' is ultimately what the ICC question comes down to. The warrant could not have been more poorly timed. The last thing Israel needs is another way to make themselves feel hated in the international arena, and by making Netanyahu seem like a victim, all the ICC has done is to give millions of Israelis who hate Netanyahu a reason to identify with him.

I've said and written this many times, but just as the world's neglect of their concerns radicalized Arabs, so does the world's neglect of Israel's concerns radicalize Jews.

So yes, no, f-ck you.

And this leads us to our next question:

- WHY IS ISRAEL MAD AT NETANYAHU (part 234124534563457)?

There are literally hundreds of reasons stretching over thirty years, but for right now, the reason is that Israelis realize Netanyahu has no plan for the future aside from his own future. It's true, most Israelis couldn't care less what happens in Rafah - you wouldn't either if these people had wanted to kill you since 1948, but even after all this, there is evidence that Israelis do care a little bit about human rights. I forget the exact number, but the percentage of Israelis polled who do not want military rule of Gaza after this is over is somewhere in the sixties or seventies. Israelis want Gazan self-governance.

On the one hand, it's hard to deny, military rule of Gaza would be the most secure option - so long as Israel is protected by a right-wing government in the US, which, starting next year, the US might have forever. But even now, Israel doesn't value their security to the point that they're willing to countenance a true apartheid government.

From 1967 to 2006, Israel ruled the Gaza strip. Israel was desperate to not have it, but Egypt wouldn't take it back in their 1979 peace treaty (the Camp David Accords) and the Palestinian independence movement was nowhere near what it is today. Israel controlled it as a temporary security measure that became more and more permanent, and while there were settlements in Gaza, Gaza is small enough to be nearly settlement-proof. Settlements in Gaza were nowhere near so serious a threat to a lasting peace as it was in the West Bank, where the settlement movement was serious indeed. In 1990, if you asked the average Israeli whether they wanted to keep the West Bank, it would be a resounding yes. If you asked the average Israeli whether they wanted to keep Gaza, it would have been a resounding 'f-ck lo.'

In 2006, prime Minister Ariel Sharon simply disengaged from Gaza and let them break their own heads. Who knows what circumstances it would have taken to work the way we hope, but the fact remains that George W. Bush insisted on a free and fair democratic election. Hamas won the election by three percentage points, and there was never another election. Had a leader like Mahmoud Abbas simply ruled Gaza as a dictator from Day 1 of the disengagement, it would not have been the disaster it was to let Gazans elect Hamas.

If there is no postwar plan, all that would be left is for Israel to simply retake Gazan territory. Last time, the territory was taken with the intent of getting rid of it, this time, the territory would be taken with the intent of holding it. The intent would be the opposite of what it was from 1967 to 2006. Gaza would be ruled with the intent to rule it permanently, and that, therefore, would very much be an apartheid situation.

Whether for moral, humanitarian, or practical reasons, this is the precise situation most Israelis don't want. 100,000 protest it every week. Whatever is going on Israel vs. the world, Israel is at an internal boiling point over the issue of controlling Gaza again, a notion that, for the vast majority of Israelis, is an unacceptable trauma.

More tomorrow, I mean it this time. I'll start working on it now.

11/4/95

 Gentiles will look at that date and see only numbers. Most Jews, the Jews for whom the identity is important, will look at those numbers and no matter how they order them, they'll know exactly what this means.

So much of that day is seared into my memory. The bat mitzvahs on the same morning of G------- Z----- and Y--- F--- at Chizuk Amuno congregation, the weekend visit of the L-----s at my parents house from upstate New York, the call from my uncle telling me that Rabin was killed, and the way I embarrassed myself at the Pikesville Hilton in front of a pretty girl at G-------- Z-----'s bat mitzvah party by doing a Jerry Lewis impression.

When Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, we knew the world would change forever. It turns out we underestimated how much.

Maybe the idea of peace was a chimera, but were it a mirage it was as much because of the people on either side who refused in bad faith to believe in it, or even to want it. There are people out there, hundreds of millions of them, who want the slaughter to continue in perpetuum, and not just the Arab side. They so hate each other that to them the only way to resolve this conflict is the eventual extinction of the other; and they don't just pursue it resignedly, they pursue it with a joy that's barely restrained. Hoping for slaughter becomes their reason for living. It's Likudniks as well as Hamasniks, apocalyptic Christianists as well as apocalyptic Islamists. If the right of this debate is not as murderous as the left, they are far more powerful, and they have far less distance to travel between murderous thoughts and murderous actions.

It's a generation later. Netanyahu was elected Prime Minister when he was five years older than I am now. He's lived the majority of his life since then as Prime Minister, and is now older than Rabin ever was.

What's happened in the meantime is the shattering of every dream a Jewish liberal ever had. All that's left is a left who not only rejects us, but rejects that either the US or Israel as any force for good, and in many cases, rejects that it ever could be.

My generation may well be the last generation of American Jews to believe you can be entirely liberal and entirely Jewish. So long as the left gets in bed with the lowest kind of Hamas sympathizing totalitarian forces and entertains the idea that the entire State of Israel is indistinguishable from a colonialist project, that's over. There is little future for Jews on the left, there may not even be a place for Jews in a center that no longer exists in our era that dismisses people on the other side of discourse as less than human - and not just their ideas but the people themselves. All that can be relied on to protect Jews is the loving arms of a reactionary far right that's perpetually on the verge of eliminating republican democracy around the world. We are the one minority they'd save, and when their power is eventually threatened, we will be the minority casually disposed of as a concession.

It certainly never felt that way, but in many ways, my childhood was idyllic. Almost all the bullies I knew, kid and adult, were other Jews. The problems of every Jew from the beginning to the end of recorded time did not exist for me. The problem was that I felt like a Jew among Jews, as many Jews inevitably do. In visiting my own pain on others, I don't doubt I made other Jewish kids feel the same way - maybe even other adults.

My very comical town of origin, Pikesville MD, is undergoing something of a renaissance. When it came time to pursue their own lives, most kids my age moved away. But now that kids ten years younger are starting families, these younger contemporaries are, to my astonishment, moving back and electing a life in Baltimore.

Why is that? What changed in the years between my peers and my youngest brother's peers that made life in Pikesville attractive again? I can only surmise, but the ultimate difference is a tiny critical mass of pressure: feeling just a tiny bit more of those gentile screws on their temples. I don't have statistical backing for any of this, it's only my own anecdotal speculations, and statistical measurements may prove wrong everything I say below.

Baltimore was always a dream deferred, but the Pikesville I grew up in never was. Within our white picket eruv kids who wanted to fulfill their dreams got the education, the connections, and the prestige to go to the best colleges, get the best jobs in the best cities, and live their best lives. That won't be true for kids just a little bit younger than us. For better or worse, DEI crowds many Jews out of the best colleges, and being a doctor or lawyer is nowhere near so lucrative a profession as it was in 1995. To my astonishment, Jews are about to become middle class again. Maybe that's a good thing, but the middle class is hollowing out everywhere. So long as the trajectory is downward, will their grandchildren even be middle class?

But the issue in the early 21st century that makes Jews feel completely unwelcome among non-Jews? You guessed it, there can only be one issue that describes the discrepancy. It's the simple fact of Israel. Not whether Israel is peaceful or bellicose, liberal or conservative, a nation of sanctuary seekers or a nation of colonialists: Israel itself. Over its history, Israel's been as all the world's most functional states have, but what has never changed is the animus against Israel, even in its most principled moments. Yes, the hatred of Israel is particularly vehement now, a little bit of it deserved, but the bacteria of anti-Jewish hatred is always there, waiting for a particularly humid climate when it can eat its way through a whole culture. Anti-Israel criticism is often not antisemitic, but YOUR anti-Israel criticism may be in ways you make a conspicuous effort to not understand.

Just ask yourselves: how often do you make a point of condemning Russia, China, or Saudi Arabia vs. how often you condemn Israel? Is it commensurate with how great a threat each of these countries are to world peace? And even if you do it equally, is it in proportion to the crimes these countries commit? And even if you think the US is too tied up with Israel economically, aren't they economically bound with China and Saudi Arabia? Stand outside yourself and then count: how many justifications do you have to make for the disproportionality of your attention to Israel's crimes before it sounds normal to you again?

You may find this trivial, maybe it is, but so long as the world believes in microaggressions and safe spaces, this may make the difference between making Jews feel welcome and making them mistrust you. Why should Jews be the only minority expected to accept feeling unsafe?

Hopefully more later. There is so much of this...

A Liberal Israel

Look, I've said this many many times already, I'll probably say it many times again, but I feel stretched on a cross, and I think most liberal Jews feel the same way. It takes no great insight to see the direction Israeli policy is trending, and our blind insistence on a rubber stamp for Israel aid has lead to the blind arrogance of a now permanently ensconced Israeli government. Even if Ganz leaves Netanyahu's government, there is still a conservative majority until 2026, and I think not even Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are stupid enough to give that up, and no liberal government will ever give the orthodox what the conservatives will.

We live in the real world, and there is no world in which the beginning of this war wasn't justified but fantasy, but going after Rafah is the red line past which this becomes a war of choice, and all the casualties are no longer on Hamas. But whether it's Netanyahu, Netanyahu-lite, or Netanyahu-extreme, we are stuck with some version of his policies for a while yet, and if impartial arbiters eventually confirmed that a few more ten-thousand Gazan civilians died, how would it not be justified to call it an ethnic cleansing? How would it not be justified to call it ethnic cleansing in the most brutal scale and manner?

Hamas is estimated to have 30,000 troops, but ask yourselves, what would happen after they're all gone? Knowing that ending the war ends his chances for keeping his job and possibly avoiding jailtime, would Netanyahu ever end the war willingly? So long as Netanyahu is Prime Minister, he will find new threats. If not Hamas then Hezbollah, if not Hezbollah then Fatah, if not Fatah then god knows what else.

It's one thing for Zionists to turn our backs on anti-Zionist Jews, it's another to turn our backs on the few Jews brave enough to say more than once that these policies can kill us. If Israel is endangered again, there's no decent insurance policy for when things get hairy abroad, and it's difficult to conceive of a future when things aren't about to get hairier.

A large part of being Jewish is dealing with ambiguities that would drive the rest of the world insane, and at the same time as we're endangered in the longer term, we're temporarily more secure than ever. We're heading towards a potential future where Trump is the President again, and it's naive to expect that Netanyahu or whatever sheol replaces him won't have blank checks. Not even Netanyahu or anyone short of a Ben-Gvir is dumb enough to wage a genocide, and were a genocide to happen, it wouldn't be a war like what's waged now, but the real thing where Palestinians are killed with the impunity with which China may have annihilated the Muslim Uighurs. But eventually, Netanyahu will almost certainly try everything he can to deport Palestinians from territories he very much views as Israel's, I'm sure he's tried already, but he will almost certainly fail. And yet, if an Israeli PM of the future offers some nearby country in crisis a price astronomical enough, some country can buy them.

So some form of ethnic cleansing is a very likely future. The worst of it wouldn't be in 2024, but by 2050 after global warming and AI can hit with the force of dozens of atom bombs. No country will get through it without the stink of their shit clinging to them for the next hundred years, but no people is punished for their sins as frequently as Jews are. After war, ethnic cleansing that goes well beyond 1948, that is a very real potential future, but god knows what would follow it for Jews.

Ethnic cleansing is not just Israel's likely future, it's the likely future of the entire world. In the years after World War II, Palestine was just another ethnic cleansing among dozens: German speakers from every Eastern European country, 12-14 million of them, along with 3 million displaced Poles in the Polish Civil War that followed WWII (including my grandparents). India and Pakistan, 11 to 14 million displaced in the partition, as many as 2 million killed. Stalin ordered 3 and a half million ethnic minorities resettled all around the USSR to break them of their national identities - the expulsion of 300,000 Italian speakers from Yugoslavia, the expulsion of 150,000 Turks from Bulgaria, 100,000 Greeks from Turkey, 300,000 Indians from Burma. By the 70s, another 300,000 Rohingya from Burma, 425,000 Chinese from Cambodia, 140,000 Kurds from Syria. By the 90s, another 360,000 Turks from Bulgaria, 60,000 Turks from Uzbekistan, 100,000 Bhutanese from Nepal, another 150,000 Rohingya from Burma, 125,000 in a population transfer between Ossetia and the rest of Georgia, roughly 4 million former Yugoslavians displaced in the wars that followed the country's collapse, roughly 800,000 from the Kashmir province on the India-Pakistan border, untold smaller expulsions, and, don't forget, 270,000 to 400,000 Palestinians from Kuwait! And, nobody cares off course, but 1 million Sephardic Jews expelled from all around the Middle East to Israel by 1970. And yet it's all Palestine, Palestine, Palestine as though the world itself didn't commit the same sin. After war comes, ethnic cleansing is the sin of every peace that follows, and in the whirlwind that follows the worst of it, it won't just be Palestinians that are expelled.

We liberal Jews are neither leftists nor conservatives, and we're reminded every day of how far we are from both camps. We know that there is no Jewish future worth having without Israel. We also know that there is no Jewish future without Israel taking so much more care. We are at an impasse, and there may be no fix for it. Israel must survive, but it must survive as a country worth fighting for.

Yes, it's true, Jewish loyalties are dual to the US and Israel. Get over it. This accusation of 'dual loyalty' usually comes from people who find the US a force for evil and feel no loyalty to the country at all. And yes, it's true, we conspire to make the US pursue Israeli interests. Not in the way people think, but yeah, I guess it has to be seen as some kind of conspiracy, even if compared to most political conspiring, it's relatively benign. We've partaken in a conspiracy to make the US pursue interests which, until recently, were in the interests of both the US, and of human rights. Oh how evil we are. Damn us all to the cross again.

Please try to understand, for Jews - not Israelis, Jews - it is still October 7th. The writing is on the wall again. It's not just about October 7th, it's about the 2000 years of October 7ths which might follow. We had a lifetime off from history's melee, but we are right back to where we were. Some Jews have to be forgiven for not seeing that peace is the only way out. Jews are subject to the same historical forces everybody else is, and if you put the backs of Jews up against the sea, they will radicalize and fight just like any Islamist would. But read Jewish history, not just the highlight reel but the unflattering stuff they didn't teach us in day school. We usually lose, and there were times we probably deserved to lose. We're like any country or peoplehood, we get complacent and arrogant, and we demonize the people who point that out. But there's a reason we remember Jeremiah and Isaiah: they denounced the ways of the Israelites, but it turned out they were right, and we paid the price sevenfold for not minding our sins.

So f*ck human rights. We need to pursue peace to save ourselves. No god would let us win forever.

Ten reasons I haven't written about the campus protests so far.

 

1. I think they're incredibly silly.

2. I think the counterprotests are incredibly silly.

3. Academia is the last place to encounter meaningful thought

4. This might be the most complex issue on Earth and everybody involved in this silly flareup reduces the issue to something that fits on a fortune cookie.

5. There's not a single person involved in any capacity of these college conflicts who is not willfully toxifying discourse on a scale far more massive than a social media feed.

6. Whether the ideal is justice, security, liberty, equality, halacha, or sharia, idealism untempered by realism about human capabilities is what gets people killed, as untethered idealists inevitably come into lethal conflict with idealists of other stripes.

7. Academia is not only the node of where ideas are created, but of where bad ideas are created. The vast majority of academic ideas are unusably bad. That's fine, because the point of academia is to create ideas, but there is no place in the world more disconnected from praxis than the modern university, so they have no way of knowing that their ideas are bad until they can prove so in practice. Which at this rate they eventually will.

8. All through modern history, from the original Protestants to the original socialists, the academic disconnect from real life has been a reliable unwitting incubator of revolutionary death.

9. What began with a revolution of liberals in 1848 seeking self-determination became the Marxist pre-war revolutionaries of the years around 1900 in which social democrats collaborated with the most violent Marxists and anarchists. And now, the basically liberal precepts of the sixties turn into the illiberal left-wing revolts of the 2020s, in which intersectional social democrats collaborate in real time with a number of actors brutal enough to make Israel look like Switzerland.

10. The funding of these protests by hostile states is comically obvious. So is Israel's funding of counterprotests.

Probably more later.

Grrr....

One More Thing about Yom HaShoah

There are two Holocaust memorial days. One is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The other is Yom HaShoah. One is for them, the other is for us.

Yom HaShoah may be an official Israeli holiday, but the speed with which Yom HaShoah took over Jewish memory is unprecedented - it's a holiday that feels as though it had always been there, even to Jews alive before the Shoah or the State of Israel. It is just one of a million ways that you could never separate Jewish identity from Israel. I'd never heard of International Holocaust Remembrance Day before the internet, and I guarantee most Jews hadn't either. For us, Yom HaShoah is the day of Holocaust remembrance, it is the day in Israel, it is the day in the US, it is the day for Jews around the world.

I'll spare you the lecture about Yom HaZikaron and Yom Ha'Atzma'ut. 

Six Out of Seven: How to talk about the Shoah

Eighty years later, we still don't know how to talk about the Shoah. The key figure is not that six million Jews died, the key figure is that six million died OUT OF SEVEN MILLION. THAT's what makes the Holocaust unique in recorded history. Other numbers are larger, and you'll have to excuse me for mentioning some ghoulish figures, for they all defy belief, but six out of seven is the ratio that makes the suffering of Jews unique among all groups of human beings.

On the intersectional side of things, you often hear that ten million died in the Belgian Congo under King Leopold. What's not said is that it was ten million out of twenty, and ten is an extremely high estimate that's sometimes put as low as two. In Russia you hear that Russians suffered as much or more in World War II, and that's true in some ways, something like 27 million Russians died in what they call The Great Patriotic War, but of the USSR's population that was one in six. In China under Mao, somewhere between 40 and 120 million died. It's enough to make you wash your hands of humanity forever, but China in 1950 was about 550 million people, so that's somewhere percentage-wise between 8 and the low twenties. It's true, the genocide of Native Americans wiped out 95% of the population, but it was conducted over 400 years, facilitated in large parts by accidental incursions of disease rather than deliberate murder. The closest modern approximation is the Armenians, and again, we don't have very reliable figures. The percentage may in fact be close to the Jews, as high as 1.2 million out of 1.5 - 80%, but that's only a high estimate. The low estimate is 664,000 out of 2.4 million, roughly 27%.

The horror of it all is unspeakable, and how can we wonder why genocide keeps happening when people don't even know these figures which should be on the standardized tests of every high school student?

What makes the Holocaust unique is its almost complete success. For the suffering of the Shoah, we have, relatively speaking, extremely reliable records - the Germans were, as ever, quite punctilious. It is the only genocide in modern history for which the goal was the complete annihilation of a scattered peoplehood. It is the only genocide in which the victims were chased around a continent from country to country in the effort to end them. It is the only genocide whose effort spanned almost an entire continent all at once; and the vast majority of it took place over just two years.

And if that's not horrific enough, ample evidence exists that Stalin was getting ready to finish in Europe what Hitler started, and only his death prevented his murderous plans. Counting Soviet Russia, before the Holocaust were nine million Jews in Europe. Had Stalin lived just a few years longer, all but a few hundred thousand would be gone.

Jews don't have a monopoly on suffering or genocide, but the Shoah has no parallel in man's inhumanity to other human beings, and those who insist that other groups endured what Jews endured are no friend to the Jews.

The worst fight anyone ever got into on this once very loud wall (much louder than now if you can believe it) was when I insisted on exactly that sentiment. All sorts of left friends and acquaintances I haven't heard from in years recoiled in disgust: 'horror is horror' they exclaimed, 'how can you quantify it?', they brought up imperialism, they brought up the suffering of nearby in Baltimore, they brought up how the Holocaust is always used as a cudgel to minimize other people's suffering.

Stalin is supposed to have uttered two quotes that put all that in perspective. One is the relatively famous: 'the death of a single person is a tragedy, but the death of a million is a statistic.' The other? 'Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.' You can't quantify horror, but you can quantify murder.

There are other forms of horror in the world that are arguably as bad, but Jewish history is unique in how frequently it contains the widespread profusion of nearly all those other forms of horror in addition to the worst of murder. It is also unique in how it prioritizes life over all things. So long as one is alive, there is hope for improvement, all that can cease hope is death.

The point is this: there are ideologies proliferating these days which tell us the suffering of the Jews is held on a pedestal to minimize the suffering of others.

Fuck them.

The purpose of showing the Shoah as the unique crime of history is not to minimize other people's suffering but to prevent anything on a scale nearly so vast - whether inflicted on Jews or on anybody else, by mapping out all the symptoms and signposts. Records are meant to be broken, and the Shoah is there as a lesson for exactly how these events can happen again.

There may be another post later tonight.

Two Further Thoughts on Rafah: particularly the negotiations

 1. There was never going to be a ceasefire agreement, the negotiations were always going to break down. That is Hamas's strategy. The strategic gambit is to bait Israel into offering the maximum number of concessions, then reject them at the last minute as a means of provoking Israel into the maximum possible assault on Rafah and bait Biden into sympathy with Israel's point of view.

Until a significant portion of the world stops making Israel shoulder 100% of the blame and pressures Hamas in the way they pressure Israel, the slaughter will continue.

2. A lot of people are going to say that it's Israel who walked away from the table. That's technically true, but an Egyptian official has already leaked that it was actually Hamas who deliberately blew up the deal. Let's face it, both sides of this table are negotiating in bad faith, and both sides want the Rafah invasion to happen, whether now or in six weeks. The truth, of course, is a much more complicated picture, and you won't get at it unless you're willing to put in the work to see it in the round.

Which everybody is always willing to do when it comes to this conflict...

All reactions:

All reactio

Facts in the round: Some thoughts at the beginning of Rafah

  On the one hand, even if the statistical figures of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry are true, there is a ratio of civilian to combatant dead that is roughly two combatants for every three civilians, that is unprecedentedly low in modern urban warfare by quite a margin. It means that even the Gaza Health Ministry can't disguise Israelis are generally fighting this war with extreme care.

On the other hand, there are a total of roughly 100,000 Palestinian casualties - casualties is a term that's widely misunderstood, it doesn't mean total dead, it means total dead + injured, and when you add the two, it's roughly 100,000 people. That's almost 5% of Gazans. And this is just the figure at the beginning of Rafah, which, for all we know, could double the figure in just a month or two. It does not include those about to die or get injured, it doesn't include those who are currently starving, or worried about how their routine infections could worsen, it certainly doesn't include those who are psychologically damaged for life, and it can't possibly include all those who are missing.

Even if Israelis are fighting this war with extreme care, even if, as American military observers note, they are using all kinds of safety precautions the US never used in Iraq or Afghanistan, they can't hide the fact that they've also deployed a level of weaponry the US never did in Iraq or Afghanistan. You read that correctly. The level of weaponry deployed is greater than Iraq or Afghanistan: not just relative to the size of the areas, but in real terms: in six months, more weaponry's been dumped on Gaza than were inflicted on two countries in twenty years that are 1500 times Gaza's size.

On still the other hand, the vast majority of these bombs are not dropped on civilians. They're dropped to destroy Hamas's tunnel network, which is forty percent larger than London's subway system in a territory less than a quarter the size. Tunnels built so deep that even the biggest bombs struggle to reach them. You cannot possibly expect that Israel will allow the tunnel system to remain in place, and if it means destroying Gaza to do it, well... nobody was calling Gaza that great a place to begin with, and even now, Israel is far from the sole author of Gaza's shame (we'll get into that another day).

On the other hand again, even with the extreme care taken for human life, there are no guarantees in war, particularly war of this scale. Areas that are planned to be safe turn out to not be safe: sometimes due to incompetence, sometimes due to competent people's margin of error, and occasionally because war crimes are committed - not by the Israeli military, 'Israel' has, thus far, neither planned war crimes nor committed them. Even now, Rafah will be unspeakably bloody, but depending on how the invasion is conducted, it can still be within legitimate rules of warfare. But individual Israeli soldiers? Even individual units? You'd have to be incredibly naive to not guess that war crimes are committed every day, just as individual soldiers do in every asymmetric war since the beginning of warfare. And if Israel does not eventually prosecute those soldiers who commit them, Israel itself will have committed war crimes.

But more often than not, and this is why Israel is in such serious trouble, part of the reason Israel's experienced so many PR disasters is not because Israel has succeeded in its military objectives, but because the cost of Israel's success is so high - and people can't help wondering if success can be procured at a lower price. Even if a 1/1.5 ratio is unprecedentedly low, all combatant to civilian ratios are too high, and any civilian murder will call an army's tactics into question.

There is all sorts of evidence of a trigger happy Israeli army, the World Central Kitchen episode is just one case study among dozens. It would appear that 142 journalists have been killed, 224 humanitarian aid workers, and more than 350 healthcare professionals. Israel can justify it by saying that many of these workers made a decision to embed themselves with Hamas, and must therefore be suspect of collaborating with Hamas - and in a sense they're correct, but surely nowhere near a majority of these workers are Hamas collaborators in any sense. If in six months they can kill so many professionals with so little regard for their collateral damage, how many outright civilians can they kill under a similar calculus? How many children?

Whatever the position about the Gaza war, we on Israel's side are going to have to get as serious about the cost of our beliefs as we wish people on Palestine's side would, not just the cost of our international esteem, but the actual human cost.

It's always tenuous to talk about morality when statecraft is involved, because a more moral world is only attained through immoral acts. But even if you don't want to view the human cost morally, you have to view the human cost politically:

We haven't annihilated a people, but we've annihilated whatever little society we allowed them, and if we don't leave the door open after this for some kind of negotiated settlement, we will have erased whatever chance we had to make this struggle not last generations longer, maybe centuries longer. If, after all this, we simply expect that we can make Gaza into an eternally occupied territory, basically an open air prison for millions requisitioned in an area 1/3rd the size of Philadelphia, we are delusional. If we expect that half the entire world won't rush to their side, do everything they can to subvert Israel's continued existence, and rush to judge every Jew as preemptively guilty helping these Israeli 'jailers', we are delusional. If we expect that Israel can perpetually occupy Gaza without Russia and China exploiting the turbulence it causes in the US to create a larger scale conflict that can topple the political power of democracy in favor of totalitarian dictatorships all over the world, we are delusional.

In history, in politics, moral absolutes are what get people killed. Leave chants and memes to the idiots. There is a far more complex morality at work, and it urgently needs more people to decode it.