So Long as Bibi Stays...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where then must we lend our support?

What Would I Do in Israel?

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's why I want to go to Israel.

...I probably won't.

Books that will help: a start

 I don't do many 'book reviews' here. It's not because I don't read. I read at least fifty pages a day, sometimes well over a hundred. I read four hundred books every year, I finish a dozen. The 50-100 pages a day is rarely of the same book and my record of finishing all the books I start is pretty abysmal. Like every intellectual striver ruined by the internet, I'm much better with magazine-length essays and essay collections than with full-length books. Books can't be consumed in one sitting, they have to be remembered from day to day, and what interests you from one day has to be the same as what interests you the next. I've read many books with chapters out of order, I've read many books skipping the sections that bore me, I've read many books having come back at the place I put down twenty years ago.

I'm a reader, but I'm a terrible reader, and someone without that work ethic for reading shouldn't trust themself to remember everything they need to remember to talk about books properly.

So here are the books that I think will be of value to people, divided into the books I've, more or less, read, and the books I've, less or more, haven't read.

...come to think of it I don't have the nerve to do it yet

This is so not what I'm supposed to be doing

 If nothing else, when this is over, I hope I've earned a couple readers for whatever fiction I write.

Like my music, the majority of it is dense, it's dark, it's hard to assimilate, I'm not sure I'd look forward to reading a lot of it if I didn't write it, but it's really only dense if you are accustomed to something user friendly. I think the things I can say in fiction are much more interesting things than anything I can say in essay form. Essays inevitably end up becoming polemics of what you believe and only you, but in fiction, you can get a whole community of beliefs, in dialogue with each other, creating the workings of what a whole community thinks, a whole society, whole eras and peoples.

It's not that what I have to say is important, though sometimes I've deluded myself as a way of keeping morale up, but the things I have to say are only able to be said the way I write it. I was not born with the gene to make myself accessible, I wish I was. Delete that, I think they are important to say, but I think it's important that someone say them, not me.

For better or worse, I've come to realize that Jewish history is my life, I'm boxed in by it and have never been able to escape it, so I've had a very dense epic of Jewish history in my head for the better part of fifteen years that I only made a workable start on in the last two.

Shortly before 'this' all started, I was exhausted by it. If I couldn't convince the editor I paid that this was the way it had to be written, how could I convince anyone to publish it, let alone read it or like it? But it stays in me, insisting on itself, aching to get out, if only I have the nerve to persist through all the doubts.

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More later probably...

All reac

When Left Goes Right

 "...but right now we're gonna party like there's no tomorrow, cuz there's no feelin' in the world half as good as winnin', but the sun will come up, and the knives will come out, and all these smilin' faces will be watchin' me, watin' for that one first moment o' weakness, and then they will gut me like a deer.'

It's from 'All the Way', this is the second half one of my favorite speeches in any movie or play, a work about LBJ (Lyndon Johnson) and the steep price of politics in the raw.

It's not just how politics interacts, it's how humans interact. What we call 'cancel culture' doesn't just exist, it began before the internet, it began when humans began existing, it never began, it was always there as a technique by which societies enforced their norms. Usually they were bad norms enforced in bad conscience, a way of seeing in other people those ugly notions about humanity we repressed in ourselves, and if you've never seen the problem with it, you've never been cancelled. But anybody who lived even a few months of their life as a non-person recognizes the phenomenon, even if it was friends turning on you in high school to avoid getting cancelled themselves.

I lived this sort of cancellation multiple times in a cult-like high school where the possibility of cancellation was present in every interaction, and so did many I knew. Occasionally I was one of the cancellers: friends were practically ordered to turn on each other by the administration and faculty. I'm even sure that many students who didn't endure cancellation lived in fear of the place's heavy, blunt apparatus.

I moved nearly as far left as one could move when I was there, seeing in that place human's full capacity for authoritarianism, but I had the bad luck of starting college in Washington right as 9/11 happened. It moved me to the center prematurely, and then I began the slow crawl back to some kind of left. I'm no leftist today, but I'm a 'left conservative.'

It's not because I think the 'right' and Trumpers are trustworthy that I occasionally sympathize with them, it's precisely because however much I fear the woke world, I fear the Trump world more.

You may think you understand how much the right resents you. You don't. It's so much worse. I won't get into the details, but they think we have destroyed this country, that all of us not on their side represent an existential threat to them and everything they hold dear. They don't see us as the enemy worthy of death, but they do see us as the enemy's helpers, and therefore a threat worthy of imprisonment. People on the left want to avoid and shun those who disagree with them, people on the right want to end and break those they disagree with.

Even in an era that does not put ill on so many people, this shunning is one of life's many seasons; but in an era when every interaction is politicized, interactions become far more dangerous.

It's the nature of partisan extremes to have a kind of borderline personality disorder, a schism in the mass psyches by which the same people who 'love bomb' you to win you over are the people who mistrust you once you're welcomed in. The very fact that you once believed otherwise from what they did means they will look for signs of unpleasantness, dissent, even misbehavior, because keeping the commitment of the values of the group is more important than individual relationships.

We obviously live in fraught times when people behave irrationally, but the most irrational are not the far leftists or even the far rightists, it's the no less than millions who've recently moved left to right. It's not just the pundits and entertainers, it's the laymen who depend on them for what to think.

I'm not going to wade into the details of the irrationalities the left believes, it's much too controversial for now and I don't want to alienate more people than I suspect I already have, but once you stipulate so many dogmas to be thought a decent human, it follows that more and more people will dissent, and once they disbelieve the orthodoxies of the left, all notions the left disbelieves come into question, including notions on which the left is very much correct.

At the end of this post I'm linking to an article which perfectly describes one of the great irrational phenomena of our times, and like the perfect progressive thinkpiece, ascribes it to a complex cocktail of reasons. Good on them for identifying the trend, but as for their diagnosis: bullshit.

Politics is not determined by the head, it's a phenomenon of heart and nerves: a visceral reaction to what most inspires you and most offends you. Conservatism, as Galbraith said, is the eternal search of a justification for selfishness. What moves our generation right is the fear of cancellation, pure and simple.

You'd think this is the moment when ostensible progressives understand how high the stakes are and circle their wagons all too happily, but quite the opposite's happened. The tighter the wagons circle, the more leftists leave the circle to go right with full knowledge of the current right might be anti-democracy. Why? Because they think the left is anti-democracy too. Why do they think that? Because of how they were treated themselves.

Most of them claim they're anti-Trump, but whom do they support? Well, 16% of polls claim they would vote for RFK Jr. RFK Jr. is known as the antivaxxer conspiracy theorist, but his insanity goes so far beyond what you might think it does, and so does his influence. Every month, his website with all his conspiracies gets 4.7 million unique visits! Again, I won' go into detail, there's just too much to write and it's too depressing: rather, go here to this Slate article for details of what he believes about COVID and vaccines, Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, AIDS, and, of course, the Kennedy assasinations: https://slate.com/.../rfk-jr-conspiracy-theories-vaccines...

THIS is our center alternative. Not even traditional conservative Republicans like Lynn Cheney or Ben Sasse, but rather: 16% of the country would sooner vote for a man who promotes these conspiracies than a President with 36 years of a voting record in the Senate that bespeaks far too sensible moderation because he welcomed an unwelcoming left into his tent.

There is only one possible explanation for this, not political but personal: the fear of isolation from those dozens of friends who brook no disagreement, the fear of rejection, the fear of a life without love and support.

That fear is what provoked many people far left to begin with. A quote from this thinkpiece below, dealing with the 'horseshoe theory' that the two sides begin to resemble each other, doesn't quite describe what happens. "...a political spectrum bending to met at its extremes, doesn't describe this drift. It goes in one direction."

It doesn't go in one direction, it goes in both, but the ones who go right to left usually happen in high school. It's those kids who grew up in the Christian right, among jocks who beat them up and families who only read the Bible and only listen to worship music: these are the ones who end up rebelling in punk rock and metal, b-horror movies and science fiction, who make up the extremity of the left's bulwark. It's only when they get thirty years older that we get the opposite phenomenon of people moving right once they have teenagers of their own.

Why? I would think it would be obvious but I'm clearly the only one: it's just that hard to keep up with the impossible standards you set.

It's this far below the fold, where nobody is reading, that I'll put the impetus for this post, and the dynamics that made me realize just how deep this pathology goes.

...actually, I can't, I'm just not that brave. Maybe another time.

https://inthesetimes.com/.../former-left-right-fascism...

What Biden's Doing

This isn't going to be long.

It's time for Israel to scale back. We've made our point. Are we really now going to hunt Hamas by shooting our way through the DP camps? It's not about killing people, it's about deterring Hamas. According to some Israeli sources, they've killed as many as 7,000 Hamas fighters. if that's true and the killed number of 18-20,000 is accurate, that would mean just about everybody killed that isn't Hamas is a woman or child. That's both an astonishingly high rate of success, an astonishingly low collateral damage considering the circumstances. It's also, if it's true, an astonishingly brutal series of statistics - speaking to just how awful Hamas's tactics really are.

Back in 2006, Israel went into Lebanon as a way of deterring Hezbollah. The action was controversial in Israel for not pursuing it to the point of ending Hezbollah, and it was controversial to the world for having done it all. Hezbollah is still there, but Hezbollah has never kidnapped another Israeli and it never again launched a full rocket war. Even if Hezbollah resumes where Hamas left off, the Lebanese have not stood for or a repeat of 2006 for nearly two decades. For seventeen years it's been deterred.

We are now at the point that any further Hamas deterrence is redundant. If you want to get rid of Hamas, don't try to deplete them completely. Even if the figure of displacement is inaccurate, there's no way that less than half of Gaza has been displaced, and it very well may be much much closer to the 90% figure Hamas fed us in the media. When well over a million Gazans have been displaced., the point is made, and it's up to Gazans to draw the conclusions of where their leadership has lead them.

Part of the reason I 'left the left' twenty years ago is that the left never understood how foreign policy works. You can't just support the good guys. You have to wade into moral ambiguity if you want any influence on how potentially bad leaders conduct themselves. Coming out mostly on the Palestinian side, even were it justified, would only get more Palestinians killed because Israel would 'go it alone' and be completely unanswerable to any ally about human rights concerns. If the dead are actually 20,000 at this point, Israel without allies could have killed 40,000 more by now or even many more than that.

The only way to apply pressure on Israel was to ally with them. But now that the US has proven its support, it's time to apply heavy pressure to move to the phase of filling in the tunnels as quickly as possible, and then comes phase 3: withdrawal. It's delusional to expect that anybody can replace Hamas but the Gazans themselves, and Israel has to get ready to leave and let a people hold their government accountable. And even if Gazans don't (they won't...), the chances of Hamas employing this tactic again are unlikely at best. And if they start going after Jews like us abroad, maybe this will finally be what convinces NATO that something has to be done about Hamas rather than us put up with Europeans treating another 6 million Jews like non-persons. But any further carpet bombing or targeting in crowded areas will just bind the Palestinians to Hamas as they wait longer and longer to go home and fear their mortality.

This is the time to move into phase 2 where the tunnels are effectively filled and the booby traps diffused. I was wrong when I defended the tunnels years ago and said that the tunnels were largely for economic purposes, so was the world, and so, I believe, was Netanyahu, who probably based his intelligence decision to be less vigilant about Hamas because he received the same intelligence the New York Times did that Hamas was using the tunnels mostly to smuggle in food and economic materials rather than the weapons of war. So the tunnels have to be filled. This is the priority now, not further depletion of Hamas's ranks.

...but even if that's what we want, even if that's what Biden wants, that's not going to be what Israel does, is it?

The Hypocrisy Arms Race

 Again, I'm the wrong person to write this post. I'm much too cynical and only grow more as I age. Whether it's to point out the double standards in people's treatment of people of color, white people, or Jews, my perception of people crying for justice just gets sadder and sadder. Not lower, just sadder at how they don't realize that they're still more entrapped than they think they are.

Just ask yourselves a question, one that I've already posed: why is it that there is so much more outcry, in both the leftist world and the Islamic, for Palestine rather than Yemen where 300,000 are almost beyond doubt murdered by the Yemenite government (HEAVILY backed by the Saudis)? Just one of a half-dozen horrifying examples I could name.

The answer isn't quite antisemitism. It's a lot more complex than that, yet it isn't that complex. The answer is that, unlike in Yemen, it's being done by 'someone else.' In the hierarchy of privilege, Jews?..., when it counts we're seen as privileged, so we count as the untethered white oppressor. Rightly or wrongly,.

But the point is not Jews, Jews are just a straw man as we often are for the real problem. The problem is that to hold an Islamic country, even Saudi Arabia, to the kind of accountability to which we hold Israel is tantamount in many minds to admitting that not all people of color are victims of a white oppressor. Jews are seen as white, As I said yesterday, the majority of Jews in Israel--and the VAST majority of right wing Jews--are descended from other parts of the Middle East who in no sense even look white. But to put too much focus on Yemen or Ethiopia or South Sudan is viewed as an implication to non-white people of "Get your house in order!"

Jews? Well, historically, we haven't had nearly as many chances over history to be hypocrites, and every time we were we found the world ready to point out all our flaws and then some, but insofar as we have our hypocrisies, our hypocrisy is pretty breathtaking right now.

Just take the current 'cancel culture' debate of academia, this debate is just a distraction from issues that matter, and no side in it looks like anything but a cretin. I've gone through all this before, but the hypocrisy of both sides should take everybody's breath away.

Or for that matter, still more obviously, take the question of Israel being a democracy in a region of nothing but autocracy. So long as Netanyahu is still in power, this argument has frayed beyond repair. People can say all the want that Netanyahu will be gone soon, but until Netanyahu is gone, the argument is moot.

And for that matter, so many Jews complain about how Western liberals used to have Israel's back. Well, Israel turned its back on liberalism since 1977. In the 46 years since, Israel's been run by a right-wing Prime Minister for 37 of them. It used to be thought of as the near apex of worldwide social democracy, but has long since stripped its kibbutzim for nearly every dollar to get more corporate holdings.

The point is that it is so much easier to view others' behavior accurately than your own. If you peer into your own soul, your findings may revolt you.

We are accusing Israel writ small of the future problem in which we will all be implicated. It's a problem bigger than the US, it's a problem bigger than the West, it's a problem even bigger than capitalism or imperialism. The problem is the luck of being born into a place with the wherewithal to control the entirety of the planet's resources.

Imperialism is every bit the crime people think it is, but it's a deeply misunderstood phenomenon. If you're OK with people dying at pre-industrial revolution mortality rates, then you should be alright with humanity in that perpetually threatened state of nature. Some of us, however, might like better out of life.

It's not like Africa or Latin America knew how to use their natural resources without the West's discoveries, and it's not like imperialism would have never existed without the West. The West only did what every other region was already doing to itself, but by now, its very success at it is what threatens the planet. And therefore, imperialism's greatest crime, the crime that truly sets imperialism alongside Hitler and maybe surpasses him, could be in the future, not the past.

Whatever the total dead in Gaza so far, whatever the total may eventually be, we could be staring down a century of death that makes the 20th century look innocent. In the face of global warming, in the face of misused artificial intelligence, in the face of bioterror and vast nuclear proliferation, this outrage can seem insignificant. And if unprecedented numbers die, it will be people just like the Gazans, billions already relegated to life's margins who could not make it to a safe space. If the misfortune is bad enough, we will all suffer from it, but those of us in affluent countries still have a pretty good shot of surviving. Gaza is just a small tip of a melting iceberg on which billions of people sit, and compared to the crime the entire West and East Asia has perpetrated upon them, Jews as well as goyim, Gaza is just a tiny corner in a vast dry globe of displacement and famine.

Once we start caring about results, we'll come to realize that this crime, something which dwarves even the Shoah, is what we should be working to prevent, Jews, gentiles, Arabs, everybody else, because what's at stake is so much more important than a few university presidents.

This post is too depressing to be this bad. Hopefully I'll say all this better in future weeks.

18,000

The first thing to say about that number is there's no way it can be trusted, that's different than saying there's no way it can be true, but we should be extremely skeptical about this number. If nobody comes up with agreed on totals in the Russo-Ukraine war dead within a few hundred thousand, how can we rely on the totals here to the last digit from the health ministry of a totalitarian dictatorship? Even if they've been 'fairly accurate' in the past (as they were rated by Human Rights Watch), this is 'the big one', and Hamas is dependent on optics as never before. Don't misunderstand, I'm sure the real total is well over a few thousand, it may well be quite a bit over 10,000, I would imagine 15,000 is the upper limit, but I suppose it's theoretically possible that the true number is higher than what the Gazan Health Ministry estimated. But even if the Gazan Health Ministry is filled with people of irreproachable integrity, their lives have been threatened by Hamas every day for seventeen years. Long before this war, the lives of Gazan doctors were threatened by Hamas just like anybody else's. If the Health Ministry doesn't release plausibly high death tolls, every person a doctor cares about may become the casualties they refused to make up.

Ask yourselves, if the Gazan Health Ministry is so trustworthy, then how did no one in the Gazan Health Ministry ever warn the world that the central node of Hamas's tunnels with all its weapons was beneath al-Shifa hospital? No one can plausibly claim the medical community didn't know. What would have happened to any doctor or nurse had they warned the world? Would they have died? Would all their co-workers have died? Their families? Would Gaza's largest hospital have been dismantled?

But IF the number is true, even if I doubt it is, then this is a very important number. This is now the most blood Israel has ever spilled in a war. It's generally agreed on that Israel killed a rough total of 17,000 in Lebanon, and that was over a period of 18 years. If Israel appears to kill at this number for an entire year, that total will be somewhere between 100 to 115,000, putting Israel and the Netanyahu administration in a terrible category - even that would not necessarily be a genocide, but it would count as the next worst thing: a democide on the widest possible scale, comparable in scale to 90s Sudan and Somalia even if not in intent - and once it's at that scale, who cares about the difference?

But even if the number is not true, and it probably isn't, the vast world majority will take it on faith that it is, and even if the total number by the time this is over isn't even 18,000 (and no matter what the total, it will eventually be higher than that), the vast majority of the world will insist on proceeding as though this is a Milosevic-level crime. It is, almost certainly, not that, but it's worse, a set stage for much bloodier crimes to come.

Think of here in America: with the news that Jack Smith is moving to the Supreme Court to try to prosecute Trump, this week may be the last realistic chance we get to see if prosecuting Trump can prevent him from becoming President again. If Donald Trump can't in any meaningful sense be prosecuted, then there was no sense in pursuing prosecution to begin with.

How do we know that?

Well, look at Israel. I doubt Netanyahu would have ceded power had he not feared going to jail, but the entire Jewish world disagrees with me. 99% of the Jewish world believes that had Netanyahu not feared prosecution, he would be gone, and we might have had a competent Prime Minister who paid more attention to his intelligence services. If it's true that Netanyahu would have left for a guarantee he wouldn't be prosecuted, then it was never a good idea to prosecute him.

And if that's true for Netanyahu, who clearly likes the job far more than Trump ever did, then it's definitely true for Trump. If we can succeed where Israel has thus far failed with Netanyahu, it will have been worth it, but that is beginning to look so much less than likely.

So look to the future. How will this play out?

There's no way of knowing for sure, but there is an historical precedent right in front of us.

On New Year's Eve 1999, the massively corrupt Boris Yeltsin gave us Vladimir Putin because he needed someone ruthless enough to protect him and his family from jail. Yeltsin, sadly a democrat by Russian standards, still managed to kill somewhere between 30,000-130,000 civillians in Chechnya (let's not get started on the divergence in totals between the two sides...) and displace more than half a million.

Where Putin took his country I don't need to tell you, but look to the Ukraine war for a moment. No one can say just how many are dead, the totals are so incredibly confusing, but what remains clear is that hundreds of thousands are dead and many more yet will die.

The US Republicans may well be about to cut off Ukraine funding because they want accountability for how the bills are paid in a war setting where there is no possible accountability. If Ukraine loses its US funding, Ukraine is almost certain to lose. The biggest bloodbath may be yet to come, and once it's over, Putin will move on: to Belarus? The Baltics? To Moldova? Georgia? How long until Russia is caught red handed in an unforgivable act against a sovereign EU country?

How this could parallel the future of the US is not the purview of this diary, and though it may come up some other day, we're here to talk about Israel.

Netanyahu is not an historic war criminal, modern Israel is not an historic aggressor, not yet at least, but both may just be warmup acts for the real thing. Not now, but in 2035 or 2040. If the Republican party is about to rule the US without a serious challenge for a generation, Israel will have full protection, and being seen already as a state of war criminals, what is the point of holding back? Israel would move against every single threat to its security with its full military might: Gaza and the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, wherever an Islamic fundamentalist threat comes from next. The oil plutocrats would be more than happy for Israel to eliminate its biggest religious threats and Israel would just be another authoritarian state grown out of a stale democracy that refused to reform itself until it was too late.

Did six million of us get killed only to...

Israel the Settler-Colonialist State

Fuck you. This isn't hard.

More specifically, the idea proliferates that Israel was a colonialist state from its beginnings. There are small merits to this question, but they're frankly miniscule. Some important Zionist thinkers and leaders proudly called the settling of the Yishuv (pre-Israel Palestine) colonialist among many other things, including socialist, but that was hardly a universal view. Surely the Yishuv had a number of points in common with colonialists, but Jews did not go to Israel to profit off Israel's natural resources - of which Israel has very little, or wage slavery - since nearly the whole point of Zionism was to enable Jews to work the land of their ancestors. Jews went to Israel because there was nowhere else they could freely settle. Imperialism and slavery existed everywhere long before modern white civilizations implemented it, and sometimes on just as large a scale. As I've said many times, Jews suffered from white people 1500-2000 years before 95% of people of color knew what a white person is. In the context of the time, what is remarkable was how little Israel had in common with colonialism.

The reason Israel is considered a colonial state is that the modern far left still sees the world through the aftereffects of modern European imperialism, but European imperialism is basically over except for in Europe itself where Russia is doing its damndest to resurrect its Soviet empire. Israel is one of the very few places where a (quite debatably) white country has anything in common with colonialism, and therefore is the only place where the modern far left can think they've caught white people red-handed in an imperial venture. Never mind that the extreme backbone of the Israeli right is Mizrachi (Middle Eastern) Jews, making up 50% of Israel's population, ejected from Middle Eastern lands in its own Naqba, and incontrovertibly people of color in their very appearance.

The place Israel could be a settler colonialist state is in, obviously, the settlements. This is the only place in Israeli history where the accusation rings true. For obvious reasons. That is the only place, and that is why the settlements must end, and those who live there must and will eventually be forcibly removed in the population transfers that will be an inevitable end to this conflict in which both sides are, by modern technical standards, ethnically cleansed.

The Rot in the Ivy - A bit more...

  I'm the wrong person to write this post. I already hated Ivy League Schools. Right away I began this post and invective already flowed that had you read it would lose me friends. Powerful ones...

The Ivy League is based on models of privilege that go back to the feudalism of the Middle Ages, where universities were founded in the 1100's for the benefit of a few aristocrats, many of whom were not even the elite of inherited titles, but, rather, the second sons to whom the title never passed and were destined for a life in service to the Church and cloth, to whom education was deliberately hoarded to keep the masses ignorant. 

Even today, you can see how these privilege models stymie their countries. Nowhere more so than in Britain, where the elite go to Oxford and Cambridge, often after elite boarding school, and make connections that define their class and opportunities for the rest of their lives. Like the Ivies, there are the equivalent to 'lesser Ivies' in Britain: London schools like University College, Imperial College, King's College, but at the top two, you can get a 'third' (the equivalent of a 'C') or drop out, but the simple presence of 'Oxbridge' on your resume defines opportunities for the rest of your lives. Were the Oxbridge kids the smartest? Well, most of them were some of the smartest, but nobody can say there weren't kids just as smart at other colleges, but the vast majority of them come from poorer backgrounds who didn't fall into opportunities. 

For the better part of a millennium, these universities were not open to minorities: Christians of minority denominations, people of color, and especially Jews - the 'villains of Europe.' It's really too much to expect that they will ever reform into the true requirements of any time and place. They need to be regulated as much as any corporation needs to, and their graduates' monopolies on the institutions of government needs to be broken up as much as any corporate monopoly. 

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What astounds about educated discourse is that in the place where thoughtful nuance is supposed to reign above all, the embrace of simplistic ideology is inevitable. It was around 1900 Germany, the world center of university life at the time, where the most poisonous nationalism flourished that convinced whole generations of intelligentsia to initiate two world wars. 

There should no more be such a thing as the Ivy League than there should be billionaires or a corporate monopoly. Any institution powerful enough to dictate government policy should be broken up. The holdings of Harvard and Yale should be held by ten unaffiliated schools, old buildings and dorms be damned. The same should go for Princeton and UPenn, and the same for non-Ivies like Stanford and MIT. None of these schools should be more influential than the average liberal arts college where students go to smoke weed and write a thesis about juggling. The richest schools, with the most prestigious professorships and most ambitious students, should be the state schools; where future policy makers are forced to interact with those tens of thousands of peers most affected by the policies they'll implement. It'll go the other way too: the other students will see that the best students are real human beings, hardly different from them. The only real difference? The best students are more boring.

The Rot in the Ivy

 I'm the wrong person to write this post. I already hated Ivy League Schools. Right away I began this post and invective already flowed that had you read it would lose me friends. Powerful ones...

There should no more be such a thing as the Ivy League than there should be billionaires or a corporate monopoly. Any institution powerful enough to dictate government policy should be broken up. The holdings of Harvard and Yale should be held by ten unaffiliated schools, old buildings and dorms be damned. The same should go for Princeton and UPenn, and the same for non-Ivies like Stanford and MIT. None of these schools should be more influential than the average liberal arts college where students go to smoke weed and write a thesis about juggling. The richest schools, with the most prestigious professorships and most ambitious students, should be the state schools; where future policy makers are forced to interact with those tens of thousands of peers most affected by the policies they'll implement. It'll go the other way too: the other students will see that the best students are real human beings, hardly different from them. The only real difference? The best students are more boring.

I need a few more days on this one...

That Photo....

 I'm going to begin with three paragraphs I wrote at the end of the first week:

"There will be atrocities committed by Israel. Period. They will be dreadful and malevolent. They will challenge everything we ever thought we knew about Israel. They will not be what Hamas just did, and yet everyone we know will tell us that they're worse.

... In moments of rage Israeli soldiers may commit massacres of a dozen civilians, even a few dozen, but there will not be a single night in which 1300 were butchered with complete intention as a public statement of barbarity: everyone from genocide survivors to babies. Israel has cut off all supplies and aid to Gaza. Thousands of wounded may die for lack of medical care and starve for lack of food, but what is Israel supposed to do when Hamas will hoard all the aid and distribute it as rewards for service and compliance? There will be cellphone captures of the murders most brutal, but can anything Israel do be as brutal as a kidnapping one-hundred-fifty people (it turned out to be 240) of all ages with the possible intent to murder them on live television?

And yet friends the world over will push us to draw moral equivalence, and push, and push, until the yelling and the insults start, then the green lines in the sand that everyone crosses."

15,000 dead. I don't know if it's true, but if it is then it's... It's... it's... well it's war, but that doesn't make me any less nauseous. And if that number doesn't make you nauseous too, you've lost what makes you human.

I want to make something very clear: at no point did I say that I supported a ground invasion. A ground invasion was inevitable, and there was no point in strenuously opposing it, but I only supported a ground invasion so long as Netanyahu is gone as Prime Minister. He's not yet, and may never be. If you're going to kill 15,000 people in two months, the end had better be a good one, and no good end is even likely right now.

So far, the best we can hope for is the status quo. Israel goes in once every five years to uproot the latest generation of terror, with all the blood and horror that brings. To do that, you don't need a fifteen year PM aching to exploit a war for a chance to stay in power forever.

Only 19% of Israelis want him to stay, but how do the 81% get rid of him? Bibi doesn't have to call elections until 2026. If elections were held today, Benny Gantz's party would get 1/3rd of the seats and form a governing coalition very easily. Gantz is one of the most decorated soldiers in Israeli history, and no 'Greater Israel' right-winger, but if he leaves the National Unity government, he deserts Israel in its hour of greatest need and his whole appeal goes with him.

Before October 7, Netanyahu was at the head of a very VERY fractious coalition with a slim majority. The way he got it? He was virtually the most left-wing, scrupulous member of his governing coalition. So long as there is no more right wing politician than Bibi capable of putting together a coalition, I see no way Bibi leaves.

Every Jew I know says not to worry, that Bibi's career is over, that Bibi is so hated that the country will get rid of him, but how?

It took a full year to depose Golda Meir after the Yom Kippur War started on her watch (five major Arab countries invaded Israel simultaneously on Yom Kippur, 1973). The difference is that Golda was at the head of the 'Alignment', a coalition of two parties, either of which could bolt. In 1973, there had never been a right wing prime minister, and she could easily have been replaced by Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon or Abba Eban. They were all flawed, many of them had significant roles in the Yom Kippur failure, but they all had the governing experience to do the job. Bibi has switched cabinet ministers so many times that is there even a right wing replacement with the experience to call themself competent?

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I don't think there is a single person who could look at those photos of Gazans in their underwear and not think of Abu Ghraib. We don't know the context of the photo. We don't know who these men are. We don't know what was the security precaution invoked, if any.

We're told they were being taken for mass questioning, but they are at the edge of a small cliff, as though at the precipice of a mass grave. I'm sure others thought of Abu Ghraib, I thought of Srebrenica, a town where 8.500 Bosnian men were killed en masse as a brutal, senseless act of revenge.

It was probably a demoralization tactic. Israel is much too practical to kill men they need for questioning, even Netanyahu's Israel, but these are the sorts of photos and videos that Gaza will start to hemorrhage. They will shake us all, make life more and more difficult for Jews, and make friendships with those who oppose Israel's actions that much harder.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Jewish life, where every action is futile and moral ambiguity sweats from out life's pours.

The goal at the end of all this, the eventuality we most need prevent, the justification for all this striving to survive is....

We'll do it another night. It's late.

ET: Almanac

"Bright, sympathetic young people who now face a time when innocent human beings are killed by the thousand can be excused for thinking that their elders do not care enough, and indeed it is true that complacency tends to creep in as the hair falls out. But their elders grew to maturity in a time when innocent human beings were killed by the million. The full facts about Nazi Germany came out quite quickly, and were more than enough to induce despair. The full facts about the Soviet Union were slower to become generally appreciated, but when they at last were, the despair was compounded. The full facts about Mao's China left that compunded despair looking like an inadequate response. After Mao, not even Pol Pot came as a surprise. Sadly, he was a cliche."

- Clive James: Cultural Amnesia

 

Posts I Still Want to Write:

1. A New Liberalism, Not Centrism:

In state after state, liberal beginnings curdle into mushy moderate governance, which only resulted in the railroading by the right, which in turn causes liberals to jump into alliances with the left. The right railroads moderates, the left railroads liberals, and society's breakdown is assured.

The stability and prosperity of society is not achieved by keeping to a mushy middle point between ideologies, it's by, yet again, evolving liberalism, taking the best of left and right, combining them, and rejecting what is toxic:

A broad social safety net from the left, a vigilant national defense from the right. Multilateral cooperative diplomacy from the left, reprecussions for foreign countries who behave destructively from the right. Promulgation of an agenda for human rights from the left, tolerance of alliances with dictators from the right. Massive amounts of foreign aid from the left, putative action against those who misuse aid from the right. Toughness on crime from the right, toughness on crime's causes from the left. Belief from the right in the importance of family, community, tradition, and the institutions that have always fostered them like religion, belief from the left in the importance of inclusion, chosen family, and heavy pressure to revise those traditions of religion that have no place in civil or civilized society. Fostering from the right the growth of corporations, fostering from the left the growth of government so that corporations are not too powerful to control. From the left, belief in abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, and the inviolate the rights of minorities, but also beliefs from the right in incentivising two-parent family structures (AT LEAST two parents...), and, I can't believe this is a more a right-wing point than left now, FREE SPEECH. VASTLY increased income and corporate taxes from the left, vastly increased vigilance in paying off debts from the right. Encouraging mass immigration from the left, continual mass background checks and security tactics from the right that today's leftists would find to be harassment.

To achieve all this and more is absolutely impossible in the current social state of the US or any other state, but something like this will be what's required to survive into the twenty-second century as democracies. God knows what it will be to take us there, but I believe something not unlike this is what will come when we realize there's no other choice.

Somehow this all is related to Israel....

2. The Jewish Shakespeare, The Arab Shakespeare

It's unlikely to happen, but if someone called Naguib Mahfouz and Isaac Bashevis Singer the two greatest writers of the 20th century, I'd raise no objection. It is difficult for outsiders to understand just how much both of them mean to their cultures, hell, it's difficult for insiders too. How have these two geniuses fostered so much love and so much hate? How have both of them presented dozens of characters their peoples still recognize? How do both of them so effectively challenge their peoples to constantly reexamine what it means to be both Jewish and Arab?

Both of them are said to lose half their meaning outside of their languages, just as the greatest are said to in every major language: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dante, Pushkin, Goethe, etc. and yet they both speak in English so forcefully that how much more meaningfully must they read in their own tongues?

By reading them, we get more morally serious by having fun. There are only two words for this process: great art, and there are no artists in the world better than Mahfouz and Singer.

3. A series of posts expanding that post: "How Do You Explain?"

A. I need to explain better what I meant when I said 'persecution of Jews matters more.' It's a very controversial point, that's why I lead with it. I don't mean that it matters more in an absolute sense or that Jews are racially superior, I mean whatever the threat to individuals within certain groups or even nationalities within those groups, Judaism and Jews are more threatened than Muslims or Christians. I don't know how anyone could claim otherwise.

B. I need to explain how America's funding of Israel is not just a bribe to not become a rogue state, but is morally justifiable on its own terms; and that, perversely, if other countries put their loans to use as good as Israel does with their loans, there would be no question that Israel is deserving of it.

C. Try to get people to understand that the military industrial complex is a much more complicated phenomenon than people think, in both its benefits and dangers. It's too big a subject to elaborate on here, assuming I even have the competence....

D. Pre-emptive war. Does it save Jews? Does it save other nations? Does it save any nation? Would it? Will it? In what circumstances should it be used? In what circumstances is it dangerous? Are the results of pre-emptive war at all predictable?

E. How do you talk to radical zealots who hate everything you believe in, every choice you make, every priority you have, half your friends, half your family members, half of everything you are, and insist on you knowing it every time you see them? Can you even talk to them when they spend every interaction clearly trying to bait you and then take even the slightest irritation as a personal slight? Is it inevitable that eventually you will take the bait again without even realizing it until it's too late?

For better or worse, democracy and peace depend on exactly these interactions - both of them. If you seal yourself into a corner with people you agree with, it's not a democracy and it's a recipe for war. So we all have to find a way to have these conversations with people who wish ill everything we are, and have to have all the same carrots and sticks in our arsenal as any accomplished diplomat.

Hopefully I'll figure out what three thousand years of writers haven't...

4. The failures of educational institutions: this includes television, internet rabbitholes, and podcast propaganda on the right in addition to university, social media and podcast propaganda on the left. The current state of intellectual discourse has caused a hundred million minds over three separate generations to go to seed, and until the whole apparatus of infotainment is thrown out, we are never going to get your minds back.

Also, ---- you. :)

5. Right wingers and left wingers are enemies to Jewish survival. Full stop. This includes the Jewish ones. Do I even write an essay about it?

Also, ---- you. :)

6. Liberal Realism: Abolishing Liberal Illusions

I watched a podcast video (irony) with Walter Russell Meade, a 'radical centrist' thinker who makes great points but rarely seems to connect the dots. He made a point that's impossible to refute: in era after era, liberals attached themselves to the illusion that the formula for progress has finally been solved, and the institutions in place will solve every new challenge. It was the illusion liberals had at the end of the Cold War when regulated capitalism seemed to cause the 'end of history' (moderates and sane conservatives too). It was same illusion liberals (and leftists) had at the end of World War Two as well: that the UN would solve our problems.

The problem was never that the solutions didn't work, the problems was that the solutions worked well enough that they caused different problems.

The Cold War was not a result of failure but of success. In the late 40s and 50s, it was heightened diplomacy, prosperity and disposable income which created the Cold War even as it prevented a Third World War. Instead of the chaos of nations fighting without a deliberative body, two superpowers with diametrically opposed conceptions of prosperity faced against each other in an existential competition for who could bring the most prosperity to the most number of people. In the process, they used an infantry's worth of measures: hard, soft, sharp, diplomatic, military, intelligence, covert, and all done through the body of the UN. The United Nations was both the cause of and the solution to the Cold War, and the fact that this war was cold rather than hot was progress, and even if it was hot in many places around the world, the fact that we haven't had a nuclear war yet whose death toll is in the billions is the ultimate indicator of some human progress. We have the UN to thank for that.

Now turn that formulation on its head: it was military might that ended the Cold War, which created an unprecedented amount of disposable income in the 90s. The disposable income created what what we call the Information Revolution. If the Cold War ended hotly with bombed out continents, the world would have been too focused on rebuilding to focus on computers. The Information Revolution gave us exponentially more information, but no real way to interpret it, and since the world is focused on computers, the world is divided on how to interpret all that information, and has therefore lost its ability to interact with itself diplomatically. So instead of computers creating a better world, the world will soon be as unstable as it was at the height of the Cold War, and we have the internet and the Information Revolution to blame for it.

Once you solve the world's problems, the real work begins.

Also, ---- you. :)

Oh god there are so many more.... Let's leave it here.

Also, ---- you. :)

An Attempt to Restart...

 So where has your faithful facebook correspondent been?

He's been exhausted. Writing about issues of this import is exhausting. Life's other tethers have called, and sometimes you just want to stop reading.

Books have been too exhausting the last few weeks, regardless of the subject. Instead: it's been catching up on The Crown, rewatching Bojack Horseman, listening to Elgar (don't ask), and generally trying to think about, well... anything else, anything at all, please let me not think about this, oh my god I hate this subject that endlessly obsesses me. And consequently, I've developed writers block.

I promised not to get mad, but I just had to defriend a few people who posted publicly that what was going on is a genocide, people for whom it might be inconvenient socially to rock the boat like that. We all have our red lines, this is mine. It's one thing to call it a genocide privately, I obviously don't like it but at least it's not direct incitement, but the best you can say about people who do it is that they're not serious people, maybe even juvenile, but the worst you can say? Well... it's a lot worse than calling them mere antisemites.

But getting angry is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. It's just too easy to get angry about these issues, and you do your best to keep a cool head even though there's an omnipresent urge to rage daily, weekly... hourly... because the wear and tear of these issues insist on themselves. It's impossible to go through Jewish areas without them discussed endlessly, and feeling forced to constantly affirm your commitment to this Israel side of this argument which frankly never deserved our full support.

All I know is that if I don't keep writing about it, if I don't keep thinking about it, the rage will come out in ways that are deeply unsettling.

More later I'm sure...