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?