Notes on Israel’s Crisis

I am amazed at this fellow, Daniel Weiss. Absolutely amazed. Perseverance of that sort is hard to fathom.

• The New York Times produced a report: “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” I’m not saying you should read every word; I am saying that you, that one, that we, should be aware of it.

• Aware of this, too:

Look: Hamas must die. Decent people can’t coexist with them. (Of course, this is true of all terror movements, and many dictatorships.)

• To our ambassador to the United Nations, I wish to say: kudos.

• A bit of news: “UN Admits: UN Women Deputy Chief’s Anti-Israel Tweets ‘Violated Code of Conduct.’” Here.

• You may be interested in the latest from Professor John Mearsheimer. Small wonder a Turkish ambassador was circulating it:

Along with his frequent collaborator Stephen Walt, Mearsheimer has been with us all of our lives, pretty much. They are darlings of a certain kind of Left and a certain kind of Right. Eventually, they will go (as everyone will). But there are many like them, younger. Walts and Mearsheimers in training. They dot the “conservative” media, for one thing.

• What is going on at Columbia University? A professor there, Shai Davidai, tells us, in a “thread” both stomach-turning and eye-opening:

• From the Times of Israel, an illuminating report: “Under the heart of Gaza City, IDF digs up a vast hive of lairs where Hamas’s elite hid.”

• Some things are comical and sinister at the same time: In Melbourne, “pro-Palestine” activists disrupted a live televised carol service, meant to raise money for blind children. To read about it, go here.

• Do you know that Zara, the global clothing retailer, is now a target of “pro-Palestine” activism? It is. How did this come to pass? (Zara is a Spanish corporation.) With his typical brio, Nick Cohen explains. His article is titled “Gaza has pushed the post-colonial left into QAnon-style conspiracy theories.”

• Above, I mentioned — I linked to — the Times of Israel. Its founder is David Horovitz, one of the finest journalists I know. I always hesitate to label anything “must-read” — there are countless things to read, and countless good or helpful things, too. But Horovitz is always a must-read for me.

Let me link to a piece of his with this heading: “Gradually dismantling Hamas, the IDF is also battling its own government’s impatience.” I will quote a particular portion:

The slaughter of 1,200 people in southern Israel on October 7 — the starting point of this war, the blackest day in modern Israel’s history, and the reason why Israel’s military forces cannot rest until Hamas is defanged — has long since receded into irrelevance internationally.

What a sad, vexing statement — and true. Horovitz continues,

The only country that strategically recognizes the significance of October 7 — recognizes, in other words, that a life-affirming sovereign state that wants to continue to survive in the unforgiving Middle East cannot do so in the shadow of a barbaric, hugely funded terror-state neighbor — is the United States. To Israel’s existential good fortune, the US is also the country most willing and able to back Israel in this war.

Its practical military support is central to Israel’s daily capacity to fight.

Yes.

A further point:

The US government is under pressure from most everywhere else on Earth. And it faces seething domestic dissent often fueled by reporting that takes Hamas claims at face value and that pays little heed to Hamas’s abuse of Gazans as human shields, and by a disinclination to distinguish between the cause and effect of a conflict that began with the mass-murdering invasion of Israel by the terrorist government next door.

Right. Exactly.

Yet the US administration has not set deadlines for an end to the conflict. And from President Joe Biden on down, the US has continually reiterated Israel’s obligation to destroy Hamas, so as to ensure that Israelis will not again be massacred in their homes and communities.

• I would like to recommend, and link to, one more piece — by Eliot A. Cohen, long associated with National Review: “For Israel, the Existential Question Returns.” The subheading of that piece reads, “It has been decades since the very survival of the country has been front and center for Israelis. The Hamas attacks changed all that.”

Professor Cohen manages to sum up 75 years of Israeli history and also the present moment (a terrible, nerve-racking one). I will do some quoting.

The author notes

the striking resilience of Israeli civil society, despite an unpopular government that was led by a now largely despised prime minister into a disaster of epic proportions. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis fled not abroad, but home, many of them to don uniforms and join reserve units.

Ukrainians did just the same after February 24, 2022. This surprised the Kremlin, and it surprised not a few Ukrainians as well. The country found out what it was made of — what its identity was.

Further in his piece, Professor Cohen has a caution:

Israelis will wonder whether they will live under the constant threat of an unshakably hostile and eliminationist coalition led by Iran and including Hezbollah, Hamas, Yemen’s Houthis and kindred groups that will use any means to weaken and eventually destroy their state.

They will also wonder whether

the brilliant young men and women who drive the Israeli economy will stay. They will ask whether the more than 100,000 displaced persons will return to border settlements near Gaza and in the north. They will brace for new rounds of violence on the West Bank. They will ask whether, once again as in Israel’s first quarter-century, they will have to live under perpetual siege, building a society while keeping one wary hand ever on the sword.

Those last words get under the skin. They remind me of a familiar phrase, liable to triteness, yet dead serious: “eternal vigilance.”