The Tepid War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The North

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So Is it Apartheid?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prepare for This Week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emergency Room Haikus

emergency room

again. Cleanse ordered. No

Eating since Wednesday

Nausea, bloat, chills, thrills

The misery of humans

Brain fog, haiku hard.

Lots of wheelchairs

Old lady fell in shower

Five ribs broke. Seen first.

Cute girl catches me.

She has UTI. Eaves is

My thing. Blame me please.

Wheelchair and moaning

From lady with worry lines.

Husband: comb over...

Room smells like chlorine.

Healthy looking old man too

Friendly for ER.

Tattoos are a thing

Everybody has them now.

Even the sick do.

I am old old old.

I don't belong in new State.

Too young for this health.

Prematurely old.

Time is weirdly circular.

Cant I be young yet?

My parents are here.

Should I even be here now?

Power outage at home

Mind suffered before.

Child father of the man.

Body catches up.

Italians are here.

The American sunset.

Rich and poor subsets.

Lots of Spanish too.

Don't know how to place them yet.

Demographics tough.

A habit of art.

It helps to live and pass time.

Bad art is still art.

Emergency room.

Too many sick people here.

The best show in town.

ET: Almanac

 "Books are cold but safe friends."

- Victor Hugo

Three Sentences on What's Going On Over There

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