This Stuff Isn't Hard
And This Stuff Is
A while back I announced to my two followers that I wasn’t taking comments anymore but I carelessly backslid. I was then discovered by a vicious alt-right creep. Although I blocked him and removed his comments (a wonderful feature of Substack) I’m not in the mood to deal with his particular school of piranhas, so back to non-commenting I go.
MORE IMPORTANT, I’m also not in the mood to deal with my own side. I am positive they will be offended by what I say here. I just don’t care anymore about their disapproval, but I need to ration my exposure to it.
There’s always the wonderful “Notes” feature so rip me a new one there.
I am gloriously happy that the little bastards who smashed their way into Hamilton Hall were removed.
If you do this, you’re not exercising free speech.
You’re a criminal, and you should be treated as such.
Feast your eyes on this new image:
To take its place next to this 9/11 icon:
But this isn’t hard.
Virtually all of the arguments I see on Twitter and here are people blowing off steam. In the real world we have a constitution, a first amendment, and loads of case law defining and refining captive audiences and true threats. Go read them, I’m moving on.
As we’re in a moment of near complete political insanity, I must be clear about this:
I’m against borrowing any concept from some dummy NGO that defines “antisemitism” and doubly opposed to involving Congress. The effect will be to entangle antisemitism with current DEI laws and regulations.1
This stuff isn’t hard. It takes zero bravery to say so.
Here’s the hard stuff.
Dealing with the fact that Israel has failed in Gaza. They have not removed Hamas from power, they have engaged in humiliating negotiations with this terrorist entity, they have allowed Hamas to toy with them. And the north of Israel is depopulated of Jews due to the Hezbollah threat, which has been allowed to fester like an abscess.2
From the start, I questioned the wisdom of going into Gaza. I kept my mouth shut because who was I to criticize, what good would it do, and that old devil, political tribalism, which in this case I don’t apologize for. Everyone on my side was in favor of it and there really are times you shut your mouth and go along.
Politics makes really strange bedfellows, and I was and am sick of making alliances with people whose values I despise. A great example being Ukraine — I knew damn well what someone like Claire Daly thinks of the US and Israel. I didn’t want to be on her side but I was. I stuffed my criticisms of her then. Not now. There’s a difference between hating someone and making a provisional agreement with her, and loving someone and disagreeing with them. It requires a different approach.
If I didn’t make it clear here that I oppose hostage deals on principle, I will now. I’m against them on principle and in practice.
When I say this to my side, I get a spray of static so powerful that it’s impossible to reproduce it, but here’s a try:
“You don’t understand. You’re not one of us. You have no skin in the game. Arabs only understand force. We love life, they love death.”
At this point your Average Brilliant Substack Writer, the kind who has a degree in applied mathematics and makes money in Silicon Valley, will give you a complicated description of Game Theory. I don’t do that because I’m dumb.
I derive my reasoning from normal life. I’ve noticed that when something matters a lot to you and little to the other guy, when you cannot walk away from a deal and the other guy can, he can jerk you around. And that’s exactly what Hamas has been doing to the Israeli populace.
(At this point pro-Israel people engage in much whining and gnashing of teeth and “We love life!” screeching.)
Guys: No point bemoaning it. It’s what they do.
Israelis fall into this trap. Every fucking time.
Am I saying that Israel should have told Hamas, “boil them and eat them for all I care”? 3
Yes, that’s what I’m saying. That’s what they should have said to Ahmed Jibril. That’s what they should have said about Gilad Shalit.
Jesus Christ, the carrying on over that kid was nauseating. I am so sorry to tell you this, but when a man puts on a soldier’s uniform, his life is forfeit. If you don’t like that, dissolve Israel and move en masse to the US. We have plenty of space here, much of it quite cheap. I’m not being sarcastic. Really. Shalit, who was manifestly unfit to be in a combat unit, forced his way into one. Then the entire society devolved into a hysterical cult devoted to releasing him (please read my article for details).
One of the criminals who Israel traded for him was Yahya Sinwar. If anything cemented Sinwar’s contempt for Israelis, it had to be this.
Contempt is a nasty word, but I have to say that I feel it myself when I think of this shameful deal. Israel covered itself in disgrace by this deal. Shame and disgrace. It was an insult to every man who ever put on an IDF uniform.
Surely I cannot be the only person to say this. There must be behind the scenes grumbling (mostly from men?) but they’re too scared to say it in public.
But, however—
I believe that Israel should have focused on getting the hostages back and militarily focused on destroying Hezbollah.
Why, given the fact that I’m against hostage deals, would I say this?
It’s not enough to say, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” (which is misunderstood anyway…)
It’s because of the previous hostage deals, and the criminal lack of preparedness, and the sedation of the Israeli public as to the nature of its enemies, that I think the hostages should have been focused on. You cannot blame average Israelis for being stupid about the threat just over a flimsy fence. People need leaders.
I understand that an Israeli leader has a delicate balancing act. He’s got to sell Israel as a great place to live and to do business. A good leader, never mind a great one, should reassure his people. That’s not lying, it’s putting the best face on thigs. But he can never fool himself. He must always be hypervigilant, aware of the reality.
Israel’s leadership failed its people. They not only didn’t protect, they didn’t allow people to protect themselves. They allowed a goddamned rave to go on right next to Gaza. Competent adults who should have been armed, weren’t. You don’t have to go full Second Amendment to exercise reasonable caution.
I don’t know what happened to all the security that Israel once had watching Gaza, perhaps someone who knows can clue me in. Snipers, helicopters, fully manned military bases ringing Gaza. Where were they?
As I said earlier, if I called 911 in NYC and I told them that a bunch of guys wearing bandannas armed with assault rifles were roving through my neighborhood and had smashed their way into my building, and were on my roof, I’d at least expect a couple of beat cops to be sent over.
Nothing. For at least six hours.
This is not a Gilad Shalit situation. This is not Yitzhak Grof, uniformed men who were abducted while on duty.
These are mostly civilians who were let down by their government and who were taken hostage as a result. I include the military bases in this equation because they were lightly staffed by unarmed young women—who had warned their superiors that something was amiss. They were told to stuff it. These people were betrayed.
That’s the moral part. The pragmatic reason is this. Warning, counter-insurgency cliches alert.
Gaza is a quagmire. There’s no military solution to a political problem, at least none that Israel can afford to apply. Kill one of them, ten will pop up to take his place. Where’s the end game?
I know that no amount of argumentation will convince who disagree with all of the above that they’re wrong. I’ll only say this:
The crossing is at the northern border of Gaza/Israel, which Israel supposedly has conquered.
And yet, Hamas is functioning well enough there to divert aid?
The quagmire theory is a cliche because it’s true: a conventional force “conquers” territory, the insurgency melts into the populace, lets the stronger force take the (illusory) win, and then comes back at a time and place of its choosing.
Cue the inevitable World War Two analogy. Japan. Germany. Occupation. Japan goes from worshiping a divine emperor to playing baseball.
Stop the wishful thinking. Israel doesn’t have the manpower or the will to occupy Gaza the way the US occupied Japan. It’s not going to incinerate Tokyo Rafah or drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Khan Younis and Jabalia.
I’m not in the arena. I’m not privy to communications between Biden and Netanyahu. Maybe Netanyahu did try to get the hostages back, while (of course) holding out the threat of invasion as a last resort. But I don’t think so. He’s a shifty character who has survived by being most things to most people, and that the hostages were never his top priority. Of course he had to throw a sop to the hostage families but he knew that you can’t wage a war against the people you’re negotiating with.
What I would have done after October 7, when Israel did genuinely have some support in the halls of power:
Throw everything in the book at Biden. Tell him that if the hostages aren’t released YESTERDAY, every dead girl and every live boy will be exposed in public. Totally obliterate Hamas’ finances. Go after every Hamas leader with cyanide pills, zip ties, barbed wire, and garrots. Wipe every one of them from the earth. Then go after Hezbollah.
Would it have worked? I don’t know. That’s the beauty of being a keyboard warrior. I just know that you can’t pursue two antithetical goals at once.
Maybe Netanyahu really did have no choice in the matter. He was told by Biden, “leave Hezbollah alone. We can’t risk a regional war. We’ll do what we can about the hostages. You play your double game with the Israeli people, I’ll play mine with Americans. You can fuck Hamas up but after a point, stop. Remember: I need t be re-elected. Apres moi the real radicals in my party. You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.”
Maybe that’s where Israel is. No ace in the hole, just muddling through.
And it will get worse. Oh, much, much worse.
If you don’t like it, there’s always Kansas5.
That’s why they say that the presidency is the loneliest job in the world. Because you spend your entire adult life getting this prize, doing things that directly undercut what you have to do as president, which is to put the commonweal over partisanship.
Being a congressman is like being a kid: you just grab what you can for yourself and your buddies. A senator is a boastful adolescent, strutting his stuff on center stage. A president is a man with adult responsibilities, a father of his nation. And fathers have to say “no.” A lot. No playing favorites. Sometimes they actually do that. They never get credit in their lifetime, but history applauds them.
Not Arabs, which tells you something kind of bad about Israel. Another story for another day.
I am not cold or heartless. I am simply being realistic about bargaining tactics. If Israelis don’t like this truth, then they should leave and come to boring, peaceful Kansas. But before the Civil War, Bleeding Kansas was Lebanon:
“On the night of May 24th, 1856, Brown banged on the door of James Doyle and ordered the men to come outside. Brown’s men attacked them with broadswords. They executed three of the Doyles, splitting open heads and cutting off arms. Brown watched as if in a trance.”
Want peace? Pay with war.
US says Hamas seized first aid shipment that entered Gaza via reopened Erez crossing. After 210 days of war, Hamas is still there.
Some think that “Bleeding Kansas” is a myth propagated by the newspaper industry. The historian is narrowly correct—much of what we think of as “Bleeding Kansas” happened during the CW and was retrofitted onto the earlier era—but he misses the larger point. It set the stage for the atrocities that later did happen.