What do I do?

 I have no idea what to believe at this point.

On the one hand, I'll stand with the Jewish community through any disingenuous approbation from people who stay silent in the face of every uncomplicated genocide everywhere but regarding the complicated actions of the world's only haven for Jews, and I no longer trust any friend who asks Israel to cease fire. You're asking Jews to just die willingly. So long as they don't call Israel a genocidal state publicly, I can stay friends with the hundreds who believe it, but not without resenting the hell out of them.

But I can't pretend there isn't an authoritarian curtain gone round the Jewish community long before October 7th, a curtain of steel that might lift only so slightly whenever Netanyahu goes. There is no pretending the modern Israel is not Netanyahu, and there is no pretending Israel wasn't deserving of blistering censure long before all this. The moment they ceased to be the state that pursued peace in this conflict, they began an agonizing moral slide that's gone on my entire adult life. Israel is as deserving of criticism as any other Western country that willingly welcomes right wing authoritarianism into its government, not much more, but around Israel's long authoritarian slide from Sharon to Smotrich, the Jewish community's formed a protective wall of incendiary rage. It's a pustule that needs a biopsy, and until we accept that it's a boil in need of the most painful lancing, the only chance to rid the region of radical Islamic parties is to so decimate Gaza and southern Lebanon that it would be a genocide indeed. Our long term choice is this: become again the side that pursues peace in the face of an enemy who demands war, or become the genocidal people our so called friends think we already are with offensives far worse than what's coming for Rafah.

I woke up October 7th and on that day said farewell to every chance the world will become anything I love. I was terrified of a bad outcome for the world before October 7th, but I wasn't certain of it. I've said it a hundred times, but Israel lives on the world's most dangerous fault line, and the seismic eruptions spread.

So now, I just can't see anything but the strange death of the liberal world in my time. After the biggest liberal gains since the 60s, this liberal rule of law is thoroughly decimated by right wing radicals, who are only enabled by a left's insistence on pushing reforms that are not even good, let alone practical. It seems to be an endemic feature of any historic period when liberals rack up victories: rather than celebrate, the people we most expect to celebrate want to smash it up, and an ever more resentful right wing is all too willing to help them.

On the one hand, anybody who hasn't ditched liberalism for leftism realizes there's no future for Israel without severely damaging Hamas. So far, the deaths are nearly 100% on Hamas, not Israel. The whole point of what Hamas did was to throw their own people into death and get willfully naive leftists to blame Israel for it. It's not antisemitic to criticize Israel, it's not antisemitic to think Israel went too far, but it's sure as hell antisemitic to expect us to turn the other cheek, and it's antisemitic to insist on ceasing fire the moment this all began. You expect Jews to die with no fight. What other group would you expect that of?

On the other hand, if Israel goes into southern Gaza, if they do not let aid in, it will be far from 100%. It's thoroughly out of touch with reality to expect you can get rid of Hamas. Until now, no matter how bloody, it's been self-defense. But an incursion into Rafah is simply vengeance. It's not genocide, but it's democide. And even if you get rid of Hamas, you've created a power vacuum where an organization as bloody or more than Hamas will rise. The best possible option is to not go into Rafah, let the aid come in, and make Palestinians so fear a repeat of these months that they would sooner rise up against Hamas than let them do it again. It's worked in Lebanon against Hezbollah for 18 years, it will likely work in Gaza. Not only does Israel not need to go into southern Gaza, going in will probably have the exact opposite of the desired result.

We have to face facts: some of hostages are not coming home without a colossally unfair prisoner exchange. It's just the name of the game. Let Hamas declare victory. 85% of Palestinians will realize at this point that any claim of victory is a thorough lie, including Hamas.

This is Israel: it's only a matter of months until they develop technology to monitor the tunnels.

In the meantime, I don't trust dozens of progressives for whom I have enormous affection. Many of them don't feel safe around people whom they think would not look out for their best interests, and now, I sure as shit don't feel safe around them. I'm no saint, but our friendship makes me feel dirty. The problems of Jews don't count for them. They excuse themselves by claiming you can separate Jews from Israel, and yet they don't. They hold the Jewish community responsible for its support of Israel. They say there is a conspiracy to support Israeli interests which they barely distinguish from the Jewish community. But they do exactly the same with the issues they care about.

On the other hand, Israel is going full speed ahead into a colossal, vengeful mistake. It was not a mistake to go into northern Gaza, but they've decimated the whole thing, pushed the entire population southward. It's enough. They're starting to make the Palestinian population starve to death, and now mean to push a million and a half people back into the north where they must starve amid the ruins. No words exist for a country that would do this except a state so dominated by military thinking that it's indistinguishable from an authoritarian dictatorship, and no word exists for people who'd willingly follow them except authoritarians.

How do you forgive a whole world that turns to evil?

All reactions

Program Note for Performance on 3/23

 To Jewish music listeners whom it may concern,

You are about to listen to two pieces by Evan Tucker, one of many Jewish composers featured on this very Jewish concert. Evan Tucker is not the best composer on this program, but he can assure with relative certainty that he is among the most Jewish - raised to speak both Hebrew and Yiddish, two languages which he tries to forget with only some success, and was brought up with so much Jewish content that he never really learned math or science (by the way, he's learning disabled). Were it not for music, he would not have known a single non-Jew until he was 16.   

The two pieces are settings of biblical Psalms, all 150 of which were supposedly written by King David, but probably written by an assistant adjunct court poet paid part time for full time work while still paying off their student loan along with two side jobs, one in a furniture moving company and one waiting tables in a Jerusalem restaurant for tips. The Psalms are generally regarded as so boring that John Mulaney based a whole bit on how much people hate them, but they were meant to be chanted as music, not poetry, and as music have a history so long and illustrious that they range from Monteverdi and William Byrd to Stravinsky and Steve Reich. 

The first of these Psalms is the first of these Psalms: Psalm 1. Mr. Tucker wrote this work in 2009: nearly homeless, living on the couch of friends with nothing to his name but fifty dollars and Sibelius software. He had dreams of starting a chorus and achieving 'choral glory', whatever that means, and rather than fix up his life, he decided to begin a mad project, ambitious as only undertaken by the delusionally desperate. For this chorus he'd found he would write settings of all 150 Psalms over the course of a lifetime. A Jewish Music Apollo Program. As befits a traditional chorus, this is a very traditional Psalm setting, no doubt filled with subconscious echoes of the Chazzanus and Yiddishkeit from which he then felt deeply alienated. 

The choral glory ended, but the dream of the Psalms did not. It followed him everywhere for years thereafter with almost supernatural obsession, and by 2016 he decided to resume them as electronic works: Musique Concrete, representations of the divine whose performers would not be present in corporeal form. 

The second of these Psalms, Psalm 16, was written when he had no idea what his next Psalm should be, but he had an idea in his back pocket. Baroque composers would set the old Spanish dance, La Folia, to music, creating virtuoso instrumental variations on a very simple sixteen-bar harmonic scheme. Mr. Tucker wanted to do a version that took La Folia through all its many possibilities in electronic music. This was just to be one of a number of La Folia settings he would do through the Psalms whenever he couldn't come up with a new idea for the next Psalm. 

After eight years, or possibly fifteen, Mr. Tucker is now 18 psalms into his project. He figures he will procrastinate on the rest until he's seventy, then do them all in a single all nighter. 

A Farewell to No Arms

 I had to defriend a guy I like for sharing an article accusing Israel of 'annihilation' in Gaza. Until I read it, I didn't think there was a word out there more hurtful to Jews than 'genocide', but annihilation is it. Annihilation, or 'vernichtung', was Hitler's exact word of intent for what he wanted to do to Jews. You might as well go all the way into medieval blood libels and say Israelis kidnap Palestinian babies, sacrifice them, and grind their bones into matzah.

When this all began, I prepared myself as best I could, knowing that the only way to ensure Jewish survival is hard, hard deeds that would make sick anybody with half their humanity intact. I prepared myself for hundreds of thousands of deaths before this all was done - not necessarily in Gaza but all around the Middle East. I haven't prepared myself for calling anything that happens a genocide - and I still think the accusation indicates a lazy sort of antisemtism. Nevertheless, I prepared myself for the worst sort of butchery: in Gaza, in Lebanon, possibly in Syria, possibly the West Bank, possibly even Iran, and god knows where else. I knew that I'd have to dissociate from many friends, and while I couldn't avoid it, I knew that talking to other Jews and their pride in vengeance would make me take multiple showers.

Worst of all, I prepared myself for the worldwide death of every human sentiment I value until the world recovers its sense, possibly not before I'm an old man: the death of American liberalism, of Judaism that can coexist with secularism, of any rational root that knows that the stability of the world is more important than any reform, any revolution, any principle; because once it all falls down, none of us can stand upright in the rubble. This conflict isn't like Ukraine where there are clear cut heroes and villains, and fuck you for thinking there are, this is a fight for survival and resources among two people who deserve it. Israelis are punished for achieving success for the first time in thousands of years. Palestinians are perpetually punished, by the Ottomans and Crusaders and Byzantines before the Israelis, passed over for success while other peoples around the north Mediterranean are only saved from squalor by their proximity to Northern Europe.

Will the death toll be over 5% of Gazans by 2025? Only a fool would deny the possibility. Though I have no idea how they come up with these statistics: the Economist tells us that there is one functional toilet for every 220 Gazans, one shower for every 4,500. Two thirds of Gaza's hospitals are closed and the 13 functioning cannot possibly minister more than a fraction of their would be patients. Arif Husain, chief economist of the World Food Program, says that the scale and speed of Gaza's famine is without parallel. Well over half a million are going without food for more than a day at a time. Whole families are given nothing more than a tin of beans to survive a single day, a sack of flour costs ten times what it did pre-war, and nearly all Gaza's cash machines have long since had their holdings drawn out. By 2025, it's possible that more Gazans will die of famine than bombs.

A kleptocratic dictatorship like Hamas is exactly as bad as it seems, and there's no victory in war against a totalitarian regime unless you siege the population to the point the dictatorship collapses, but it's worth prolonging the war if it means getting the supplies to the Gazans, even if Hamas steals many of them and the war goes on longer, Israel can't afford this level of hatred directed against them.

It's not a genocide, but it's the world turned completely to its dark side. I'm not willing to go over the basics yet again, but I don't see another option. Jews are not going to lay down and die again just because you demand it. And yet, to do this without guilt, to keep making self-righteous justifications, to not search endlessly for a different way, to declare with simplicity: 'we're right', 'they're wrong', is fascist, authoritarian, it's anti-democracy barbarism, and makes a direct line to any number of justifications that declare war on democracy. Once you believe completely in the rectitude of your violence, there is nothing you can't justify, and it's only a matter of time before you make violent decisions out of reasons far more contemptible than necessity.

War is war. It is so much worse even than all but the bloodiest dictatorships, and there's no way to trust that the Netanyahu government will prosecute it with anything but selfish aims. It's no genocide, but it's the killing of ten to twenty thousand innocent civilians in just four months with many more yet marked for death, it's famine, and it's more bombs than the US ever used in twenty years of Afghan occupation many times over.

The roots of this conflict are much more complicated than any bad faith American radical/Euroleftist would ever allege. For fifty years they've called Jews white oppressors when we'd been killed at unprecedented speed and volume for not being white enough, they call Israel an illegal occupier when dictators from minority sects occupy Middle Eastern country after country, they call for their countries to divest from Israel when they owe their entire first world existence to the cheap labor of China and the cheap oil of Saudi Arabia, both of whom violate human rights with a volume dozens of times more than Israel's; and most outrageously, they insist Israel solve a problem of refugees which their countries solved by simply murdering hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, and exiling millions more. The world holds Israel to a standard no other country is held, and then insists that unconscious antisemitism has nothing to do with their assumptions.

This is what it means to live as a Jew in the world, and often what it means to die as a Jew. But as much as you brace yourself for those realities, they sometimes come at you at light speed and all you can do is cry out to the god who puts us into these circumstances and seems to get his gratification from our suffering. We have paid every single price for our continued existence, and now the price of keeping ourselves alive is murder itself.

Another Three Mini-Essays #1: Where Are Our Navalnys?

 The reason we knew Navalny was the real deal was not because he was unimpeachably liberal, but because he wasn't.

Warts and all, Navalny made the compromises of a man who truly wanted to achieve a goal and not pose on ceremony. He believed in Greater Russia, he collaborated with 'Greater Russians', he maintained right to the end that Ukrainians and Belarussians were little more than Russians who didn't know they were Russian, he just didn't want to risk his whole country by going to war over it. He marched in the same right wing protests as ultranationalists, even neonazis. To the end of his life, he never truly repented.

Nelson Mandela never recanted on his periods of violent Marxism, Rabin never recanted the assaults he ordered on Palestinians over a period of 40 years. It makes no difference when a person whose conduct is above reproach wants peace or liberty, that's what you expect of them. But when a borderline authoritarian advocates peace and liberty, you take it seriously. They gained much of their power and respect through authoritarian methods, and to switch tactics to peace and negotiation puts their credibility on the line. *

It doesn't always work that way: all you have to do is look at Arafat, who to the end of his life could not let go of terrorism, but any authoritarian who offers peace puts his life on the line, and it's always an act of bravery for which they might pay with assassination.

Where is that bravery in Israel? Where is that bravery in the US? Where is that bravery in Gaza? In Russia, you're facing an authoritarian with an implacable mix of ruthlessness and power - Navalny's failure was all but assured. But here? There's a chance. Israel? There's a chance. Gaza? Well... so many potential Palestinian leaders are sitting in Israeli prisons where their lives are currently safer than they'd ever be in Palestinian territories. Is there no longer even one Republican congressman willing to stand up to Trump? Is there not one Israeli figure of consequence willing to say that offering a two-state solution is more important than ever now? Is there not one Palestinian leader willing to condemn Hamas's actions publicly?

* I might add, this is why I firmly believe that Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince is serious about his offer to broker peace.

Voweled Words

 It doesn't feel like two weeks since I set pen to keyboard. In fact it feels like two days ago. Nerve and morale are things you either feel or don't, and lately I've felt a complete lack of it, but the result of not writing is a mind that goes to seed. There's a reason I maniacally graphed my way through my thirties, and it's because without the words, there were just racing thoughts, and if the thoughts didn't focus on a subject, they always loomed on me, and only dread ever came out of that.

I have no thoughts that will endear me to anybody. I am growing more and more alarmed by Israel, but I have no faith in any righteousness in the Palestinian cause until getting rid of Hamas becomes a larger priority than getting rid of Israel.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see a way out of Israel simultaneously becoming both an isolated international pariah and an authoritarian state where a semi-permanent narrow coalition holds together a state that grows asymptotically close to that dreaded a-word... I'm not going to say it because I don't want to stir the pot that badly.

We are heading to that critical moment when Israel's Arab population is larger than its Jewish. When we hit that moment, Israel no longer has legitimacy as a Jewish state. Period.

The only way it can become a Jewish state again is through ethnic cleansing, the forced deportation of Palestinians to... who even knows where... believe it or not there are worse fates than ethnic cleansing, does anybody really think it's doing Palestinians any good to stay in Gaza? But who in their right mind can support with any enthusiasm a state so morally compromised that it deports longstanding populations with impunity? Again?

My support of Israel is unshaken, but my belief in Israel is getting very thin. No liberal can believe in a country that has a far right government in near-perpetuity, whether elected or imposed.

I'm not so naive to believe that the world can't support all manner of dictatorships, but my support of Israel draws ever closer to becoming the support of an authoritarian state. I'm beginning to view it as a partnership of convenience little different than support of Saudi Arabia. I obviously see the necessity of heavy operations in Gaza, I can even be convinced of the necessity of Rafah, but the longer this war goes, the less convinced I get.

All reactions:

Very Brief Piping Hot Israel take

 

On the one hand, BDS (boycott, divestment, sanction, not K-Pop band) is antisemitic. If you believe in it, I won't stop being your friend, but I will yell at you very loudly and you will probably stop being my friend.

But until Israeli settlers stop lynching Palestinians in the West Bank, settlers should temporarily be barred from travelling to any country in the world, no matter their beliefs. The fact that Netanyahu is not insisting on prosecuting this to the fullest extent would be an impeachable offense in any functional government, but Netanyahu has a vested interest in keeping Israel as dysfunctional as he can.

It's one thing if you live beyond the Green Line because of affordability, you've become collateral damage and I'd feel sorry for you in whatever population transfer eventually comes, but any person who'd believe in the necessity of Israeli settlements has long since become nearly everything the world accuses Israel of being.

Park School

To talk about the war today, I'm going to talk about a local story taking place at a school I didn't go to.

And we begin by talking about its location.

If Park School's location didn't exist you couldn't make it up. It exists at the border of two very particular realities: right where Old Court Road meets Falls Road. Drive just a block down Old Court Road and you get to Pikesville - Jewish Baltimore, where something like 90,000 Jews are said to live in a 5ish mile radius. Turn onto Falls Road in either direction and you get to goysiher Baltimore - not just goyim as in non-Jews, but goyim as a very particular subspecies of white person: upper middle class WASPS and Anglo- Catholics, and of a more recent vintage, Irish and Italians and Germans who want to live like WASPS. By now, this definition of goyim has grown so broad that it comprises people of color who like WASPy ways, and even Jews who marry out.

Park has always been the place for Jews who didn't want to Jewish, and goyim who didn't want to be goyish. Miserable at my first high school, I wanted to go to Park School for my second half. Park was the kind of progressive school where creative, individualistic, different drummer kids went, and a full third of those kids were Jewish. It was a school for Pikesville Jews who wanted to be defined more as liberals and universalists than as Jews - and therefore a place many Jews-with-a-capital-J looked at with extreme suspicion. In their minds, Jewish families sent kids to Park as a means to betray their Jewish heritage; but it should have been clear years before that that I badly needed a school like that.

It was too late for me to turn that ship around for a hundred reasons - principal among them being I was a bad student: learning disabled and emotionally discombobulated, I applied and didn't get in. The admissions director commented from my essay that I'd be one of the school's best writers, but one of my own teachers recommended I not be accepted in their recommendation letter. Another friend of mine transferred at the same time and he got in. He didn't even tell me he was applying. I remember going to his graduation party two years later, feeling completely dejected among all these high achieving kids who were about to go to the best liberal arts colleges in the country: places like Swarthmore, Williams, Bates, Mount Holyoke, Pomona, Harvey Mudd, to say nothing of the Ivies...

I don't know if Park School is a place that sees the world with any sense of reality, but I'm certain Park School's reality would be quite nicer for me.

A quarter century later, Park is grabbing local headlines. To show you what's happening, I'm going to reprint part of the story here as reported in the Baltimore Banner (please, everybody subscribe to it):

---------------------------

"Students at The Park School of Baltimore were five minutes into a Zoom call with two Swarthmore College professors on Friday when the screen went black. School leadership had shut down the internet.

The video call was an attempt by some students to take matters into their own hands when school leaders abruptly canceled an assembly on the war in Israel and Gaza. Angry with the decision, student government members contacted the professors who’d been scheduled to speak — Sa’ed Atshan, a Palestinian, and Moriel Rothman-Zecher, a Jewish Israeli citizen — and announced in a schoolwide email that the talk was on.

The school’s leadership wasn’t having it.

The Park School is the latest local institution where passionate discourse about the conflict in the Middle East has turned to controversy.

Students walked off campus in protest of the school’s recent action, with the support of “many” faculty, Paradis wrote to the school community Sunday.

“While the students’ goals and rationale — and indeed their commitment to advocating for what they believe they and their fellow students were ready to experience — were clearly articulated, their actions countermanded my cancellation message of the previous day,” Headmaster Paradis wrote.

The originally scheduled talk had been canceled because the speakers “express views and use rhetoric that are not in keeping with what we understood to be their planned program,” Paradis wrote in a Thursday email explaining the decision. He said he wants students to be engaged in difficult conversations but added, “We must find ways to do so that yield constructive, not corrosive or harmful, dialogue.”

Atshan and Rothman-Zecher had been scheduled to speak in person to the campus’s Upper School, or high school, at 9:45 a.m. Friday. But the school emailed the two on Thursday afternoon informing them that the event was canceled, Rothman-Zecher said, telling them “some of your rhetoric does not align with what our community currently needs.”

The email singled out Atshan in particular, but did not make it clear what rhetoric of his was deemed objectionable.

Atshan is an associate professor and chair of the peace and conflict studies department at Swarthmore . Rothman-Zecher is a visiting assistant professor of creative writing and novelist who teaches creative writing at Swarthmore, a liberal arts college outside of Philadelphia.

They have similar viewpoints, Rothman-Zecher said. Both are queer pacifists who oppose the war in Gaza and the occupation and believe “that everyone is deserving of justice and freedom.” They were never invited to debate each other at The Park School, he said.

“It was a space of openness and curiosity and not a space of pushing in a uniform perspective,” he said. “I was looking forward to speaking with the students [at Park] about the role I see for art and literature in broadening our minds,” he said. “I am still looking forward to that.""

-------------------------

I have no idea what the aforementioned 'rhetoric' would have been, though one can guess they'd freely use words like 'genocide', 'apartheid', 'imperialism' and 'settler-colonialism.' I also imagine that had a speaker from the Israeli embassy come to Park School they would be escorted off the premises before they got past that weird mansion you see from Old Court Road.

I'm sure there are pro-Israel parents and alumni at Park who threatened to withdraw their donations, and I'm sure there are pro-Israel students who feel completely isolated right now. No private school's administration is so stupid that they don't know on which side the bread is buttered; and if firing over an Israel issue can happen to an Ivy League president, it can certainly happen to high school administrators. But Park is the sort of place that creates radicals and the cutting edge. The very fact that being anti-Israel's actions is subversive enough to create an event like this will make the cause all the more appealing to students.

I also have little doubt at that as a 17-year-old Park student I would have lead that walkout and happily given my parents a coronary. It wasn't because of my vast comprehension of foreign affairs and statecraft when I was 17. It's because was utterly fed up with the parochialism of Jewish Baltimore, which I saw as an impediment to my being able to lead a quality life. Like so many 17 year olds, I was going crazy with understanding what seemed beyond my elders: not understanding of politics, understanding how we were all dying a little from the rigidity of a religious upbringing.

The heavy burdens of my youth are a quarter-century ago. I'm almost 42 now, and I don't put as much premium on quality of life anymore, but I'm still fed up with Pikesville's bullshit. I retain a small measure of contempt for the rigidity my community of origin espouses. My life alone doesn't mean much, but there is a direct line between that rigidity and the gathering authoritarian storm that threatens us all.

Correspondingly, there's a line between that rigidity and the opposition to it. Both have authoritarian roots. The latter sympathizes with Hamas in all but name, the former sympathizes in all but name with Putin. None of them may realize it, but that is the result of their beliefs. It's all the same desire to simplify life to the point that whole classes of people are the enemy. That's not the truth. The truth is that the world is made up of billions of complicated people doing the best they can in the face of sociopaths telling them that the world has billions of villains rather than thousands.

So even if politics is a lot more complicated than I realized, having sympathy for people who are different than you is complicated too, and few people are better at simplifying their eccentrics into non-persons than Jews in Baltimore.

But this is about Park, not Pikesville's bullshit. Every city in America has a Park School: a school for the kids of upper-middle class parents who think that unlike them, their kids should be free to minimize life's bullshit and not compromise their personalities or interests for life's demands. Hell, most cities in America have two of them, because while I didn't get into Park, I got waitlisted at Friends.

But inevitably, with the minimizing of bullshit comes the belief that life can and should be free of bullshit. Should it be free? I'm sure that's true, we're all sure that's true. Can it be free? Come on, we all should know better by now. Life itself is bullshit. It's bills to pay and bosses to assuage, children to entertain and parents to appease. Getting rid of capitalism won't change that, neither will getting rid of government, neither will getting rid of religion, neither will sweeping science's findings under the rug. 98% of life is the process of what we have to do to keep life going, and if you spend your time contemplating life rather than doing what's expected of you, you go far more crazy than you would if you just spent your life fulfilling your responsibilities.

This surfeit of opportunities, this conviction that life does not mean to insult us, this belief that life is something better than one foot in front of the other in a world that roots for our failure, is precisely what leads to life being exactly that. Accept that the world sucks, we can make the world somewhat better, shake your fist at the world and tell it that it's not good enough, the world gets much, much worse.

20th century Europe was littered with the verbiage of intelligentsia who supported totalitarian regimes because they promised utopia against all evidence that intellectuals were the first to be shot. If they were from 21st century Baltimore, the majority of them would have come from schools like Park or Friends, or magnet schools like Carver and BSA.

Don't misunderstand, these places don't produce naive radicals by coddling their students, but they do exactly what they're charged with doing: they protect their students from knowing just how bad the world has it, and therefore when they develop some vague idea of how bad the world is, they think a transformative solution will make it better rather than worse. And in thinking so, a disproportionate number their students fall into ideologies that root for totalitarians as much as any fundamentalist Christian education would.

Schools for quirky kids like Park, and the quirky liberal arts colleges they feed into, lead to better lives for their students where smart kids can grow up to be innocent of the mendacious ways of the world. I would have paid any price, born any burden, to live in that kind of innocence, and I'm painfully jealous of the hundreds of millions worldwide who have it.

But that freedom comes at a price for the rest: the world these people think they fight for doesn't exist. They go off to college ready to embrace anticolonialism and radical critical theory, not realizing that the organizations they advocate for would throw them into prison the moment they achieve power, then throw the rest of us too.

Gaza is not the USSR under Stalin. Russia is the world's largest country, whereas Hamas controls one of the world's smallest, but had Hamas a territory as big as the USSR, they'd be just as murderous as Stalin ever was. There is no civil rights struggle in Gaza until Hamas is gone and Fatah is reconstituted from the ground up. Until then, the only hope is Israel's success. Their quarrel is not against Israel, their fight is against Netanyahu and Likud, but so long as they're encouraged to mouth half-quotes from cultish radical theorists whose entire theories exist to be brainwashing, the world of the Left will continue to fight the wrong fight, and the triumph of the Right is a foregone conclusion: be that Right Christian, Islamic, or Jewish.

Unless the left keeps allying with the same causes as Hamas. So if you win, good luck enacting your agenda with those allies.

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.

All reactions

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.

All reactio