Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a ‘Commentator’ post, which is news analysis. The idea here is two-fold: to share materials from a broad range of publications and then to try to think through current events from a slightly more distanced perspective than is typically on offer from the news. This post is so long! — but obviously there’s a lot going on. There are two terrific pieces at the partner site
. writes on time and creativity and writes on Phillis Wheatley.Best,
Sam
WAR IN THE EAST
I’ve been writing this Substack for a little over a year now. The last two weeks have been by far the worst period in that time.
There’s something about Israel/Palestine that makes everyone lose their minds, so let’s just say a few very obvious things. Once you’re in a war, there’s no such thing as acting rightly. Everybody is doing terrible things. Something like the attempt to assign capability for the blast at Al-Ahli hospital misses the point: with Israeli air strikes occurring, with Hamas and Islamic Jihad launching rockets at Israel, and with Israel intercepting the missiles, there will be plenty more events just like Al-Ahli. As that golden rule of second-grade ethics has it, “two wrongs don’t make it a right,” and the incessant attempts (by virtually every publication and promulgator of opinion all around the world) to weight the scales against either Israel or Hamas have a way of overlooking that civilians on both sides are suffering terribly.
At this point, the number of Gazans killed in Israeli strikes appears to be several times greater than the number of Israelis killed on 10/7 — but the strikes are often unseen and underreported and make far less of an international impression than the much-uploaded butchery of 10/7. On the other hand, attempts to balance the scales by left-wing publications like The Nation, Democracy Now!, The Intercept, etc, have a way of eliding over 10/7. Democracy Now! has (count ‘em) twenty stories exorciating Israel on its home page and not a word to suggest that Israel might have its reasons for taking aggressive action. The Nation’s “coverage” of 10/7 focuses on some exaggerated reports of Hamas’ depredations, writing “conjuring rape and decapitation feeds on Islamophobic tropes” — as if what Hamas’ militants actually did on 10/7 was any less bloodthirsty. (The Nation goes on to criticize journalists’ tendency towards hyperbole — rich stuff in an article titled “Western Journalists Have Palestinian Blood on their Hands.”) In a situation like this, all that those of us who are not directly involved can do is to try as hard as we can to remain somewhat balanced, somewhat clear-eyed, and to try to envision a path towards peace.
Sad to say, that peace is clearly a long way off. At the moment there is a great deal of Monday morning quarterbacking about how 10/7 could have happened. In an analysis for The New York Times, Steven Erlanger writes, “Some paradigms taken for granted about Israel and the Palestinians have been broken” and implies that a sort of widespread neglect of Hamas by Israel and the West is at fault. The problem is that, as these things go, Israel’s plan in recent years wasn’t a bad one — to attempt to work with Hamas; to increase the number of work permits for Gazans in Israel; to collaborate with Qatar in providing aid for Gaza. “The consensus was that Hamas was a mostly rational actor that could be reasoned with,” writes Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic.
But, unfortunately, it was all a setup. That’s not to say that the modus vivendi was, as Rosenberg concludes, necessarily misguided from the start. Israel had intercepted a similar plan by Hamas all the way back in 2014 to attack Israel using underground tunnels. Maybe slightly better intelligence — say, greater reliance on human intelligence as opposed to signals; an intelligence coup in the nick of time; better reactivity by Netanyahu’s government in response to the warnings it did receive — and none of this would have happened. But it has happened, and now a reasonable approach is off the table and we’re facing a dizzying array of bad scenarios.
As I can count them, these seem to be the possibilities in play:
Israel slow-walks its retaliation against Hamas, limits itself to air strikes and negotiation for the release of hostages, draws yet another arbitrary partition, by essentially annexing northern Gaza and driving Palestinians towards the southern part of the Strip. This is what the U.S., quietly, seems to be encouraging. Thomas Friedman puts this very lucidly in a New York Times op-ed writing, “I believe that Israel would be much better off framing any Gaza operation as ‘Operation Save Our Hostages,’ rather than ‘Operation End Hamas Once and for All’” — and argues that a ground invasion would permanently undermine Israel’s security.
The ground invasion of Gaza. The trouble with “surgical air strikes and special forces operations,” as called for by Friedman, is that Israeli society clearly is in need of its pound of flesh in response to 10/7 — and the slow-walk approach just may not cut it politically. “Our population was attacked in a barbaric way, we have to act” is how former primer minister Ehud Barak matter-of-factly puts it. In the best article I’ve read since the outbreak of the conflict, Yossi Klein Halevi, though far from a fire-breather, writes, “Friends abroad have warned me that…you need an end-game, a vision for Gaza the morning after, a vision for peace with the Palestinians. I fear they may be right. But those concerns are irrelevant to Israel’s most urgent need, which is the immediate restoration of our shattered deterrence.” The rules of deterrence (the U.S.’ playbook, as adopted by Israel) call for a disproportionate deployment of violence to reassert dominance. As analyzed by, for instance Halevi, only the ground invasion of Gaza and the breaking of Hamas’ leadership can plausibly succeed in that aim — a scenario that brings about a bad case of déjà vu for all US military planners, with Colin Powell’s “you break it you buy it” admonition proliferating across op-eds and with David Petraeus poetically calling the ground invasion “Mogadishu on steroids.”
A two-front war with Israel fighting Hamas and Hezbollah at once. I’m a little perplexed as to why clashes with Hezbollah have ignited so soon after 10/7 — as far as I can tell, it seems to be about Hezbollah getting in on the action and expressing spiritual solidarity with Hamas. “We are trying to weaken the Israeli enemy and let them know that we are ready,” Hezbollah’s deputy leader said. Ehud Barak put the “probability of a major war between Israel and Hezbollah at about 50 percent” — a very high percent. The point here may be that Israel is half-hoping to get its pound of flesh in some other way than a grinding and ultimately self-defeating ground invasion of Gaza — say through a combination of hostage releases, air strikes against Hamas, and some tactical victories against Hezbollah.
Escalation with Iran. At the moment, the foreign policy priority for all Western nations seems to be to contain the Wall Street Journal. The Journal has reported that Iran knew about and “green-lit” the attacks, and both Israel and U.S. intelligence have been quick to insist that it’s not so. The issue is that the Journal’s assertion is plausible enough (it’s hard to believe that Iran or the IRGC knew nothing at all), which would bring us to the real disaster scenario, spreading war across the Middle East, pitting Israel and Iran against each other (and with both in turn near-proxy states of the greater conflict between the U.S. and Russia).
In the array of really terrible possibilities, I’m rooting for scenario #1 — with the lowest humanitarian impact — but I understand that what Israel takes to be its realpolitik calculations makes something between #2 and #3 more likely. And that may well mean a humanitarian catastrophe: as The New Statesman puts it, “Permanent mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is a very possible scenario in the event of a regional escalation.” I’ll just mention also that the press has been near-unanimous in assuming that Netanyahu is on his way out — a “dead man walking” — but this strikes me as wishful thinking. Netanyahu is a wily and tenacious actor and people like that are never so dangerous as when they are politically cornered — as Netanyahu clearly feels himself to be. All in all, I almost can’t imagine a worse situation than what we currently have: the flames fanned for wider conflict; and no good outcomes available.
THE WORLD SPLIT ON ISRAEL/PALESTINE
The on-the-ground situation in Israel and Palestine is terrible enough that it seems not worth getting pulled into the various culture war controversies surrounding it — these are the definition of a sideshow — but, more than other conflicts in recent memory, the outburst of fighting in Israel/Palestine has led to a really depressing schism in civic life in the West.
It actually makes me sick to think about what the evident kneejerk response to 10/7 has been across college campuses and on the “social justice” left. At Stanford — Stanford (!) — a university lecturer, days after the 10/7 attacks, segregated out the Jews in class so that they could have the experience of being colonized; and students hung a banner dripping with red paint saying “Zionism is genocide” outside their residential house. Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter’s Chicago chapter posted an “I Stand With Palestine” tweet proudly depicting a paraglider. And, all across the web and in left-wing publications, 10/7 is cast as Gaza “breaking free” — just a jaw-dropping formulation (all the more so for how widely it’s been repeated), as if Hamas’ highly-trained, highly-murderous militants were just taking a stroll outside the “open air prison.”
But let’s try to be a bit detached about this. For a very long time, Israel/Palestine has never been just about Israelis and Palestinians. It’s the prism through which everyone sees what they want to see (and through which they shape their deepest political convictions). Do you subscribe to an agency or structural model of violence? Is your image of mass suffering the Holocaust or imperialism and colonialism? Do you feel that Israel’s wealth and high-stand modernization stand for “progress” or are they just another iteration of systemic oppression? Do you subscribe to visions of liberal amelioration that Israel (at one time) seemed to represent or do you believe in an insuperable clash of civilizations? (And these deep-seated political litmus tests are for those who are thinking beyond the obvious fault-lines of ethnicity and religion.)
There’s clearly no arguing with the political left on this issue. I kind of knew that about the European left; I’ve been surprised to see how extensive the same feeling is on the American left. It’s not even necessary to trot out the argument that “anti-Zionism” tends to be an excuse for anti-Semitism. For decades, as the Left (led by Edward Said) has made anti-imperialism its salient issue, criticism of Israel has become the requisite badge of membership. It seems impossible even to take a day-long timeout from that thinking when attendees of a trance music festival are machine-gunned or old women executed in their homes (the left appears to be interested in the massacres only enough to point out that, after all, there’s no evidence of babies actually being decapitated — which has led to one of the more grisly online back-and-forth arguments that I can remember).
And the center-right, which I’m sympathetic to, has taken the opportunity to basically say that there’s no point even talking to leftists and that politics from this point forward has to follow a strict logic of realpolitik and national self-interest. “Call it a realignment, call it a political awakening, call it a vibe shift,” writes The Free Press in an article titled ‘The Day The Delusions Died.’ “[10/7 gave a] sense of how thin the line is between civilization and barbarism. And how the West, which so many take for granted, is more vulnerable than we ever imagined.” And Compact Magazine says that, in a way, 10/7 balances the books on Iraq and Afghanistan: “Despite sharing much of this skepticism, we believe that critics of US foreign policy have taken a gravely wrong turn. Too often, fitting mistrust toward the claims of America and its allies is accompanied by a profound credulity toward those of foreign rivals and adversaries.” From this point forward, both The Free Press and Compact imply, atonement, second-guessing, liberal self-doubt take a backseat to advancing the interests of the US, the West, and its staunchest Middle Eastern ally.
The article that I’ve found most useful for trying to understand the current state of affairs is a tough-talking Foreign Affairs piece from earlier this year called “Israel’s One-State Reality.” The article takes as its primary target Western liberals (like me) who continue to believe that it’s possible to revive Yitzhak Rabin and reset the clock to 1993 with some sort of rational, negotiated, two-state solution (if Protestants and Catholics could do it in Ireland, why not Jews and Muslims?). The Foreign Affairs authors are unsparing on that line of thinking calling it “fantastical visions for the future that obscure deeply embedded existing arrangements” and contending that “policymakers and analysts who ignore the one-state reality will be condemned to failure and irrelevance, doing little beyond providing a smokescreen for the entrenchment of the status quo.”
Their point is that, whether anyone wants it or not, the one-state paradigm is so clearly the reality that we can only move forward by accepting it and trying to work assiduously for ameliorated conditions for Palestinians. Notwithstanding their harsh words for the two-state dreamers, I’m not so sure that the Foreign Affairs writers aren’t succumbing to some rosy thinking themselves when they write, “A better U.S. policy would advocate for equality, citizenship, and human rights for all Jews and Palestinians living within the single state dominated by Israel.”
But, sad to say, their framing is probably right. Liberals have had such a staunch belief in the nation-state that we’ve tended to assume that sooner or later a two-state solution just has to shake out. But that seems not to be in the cards. Instead, we are in an imperial framework — a militarily-stronger, more industrialized set of people ruling over another set of people, with no end in sight, with Israel as the successors of the British who were in turn the successors of the Ottomans. As Foreign Affairs puts it, “Israel’s system may not technically be apartheid, but it rhymes…Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste.”
This state of affairs is not what anybody wants to hear, but there’s something about framing it this way that at least casts it in less existential or apocalyptic terms. It’s sort of as if the nation-state model has never existed when it comes to Palestine, and we’re in an imperial framework with a highly asymmetrical balance of power. Think of it that way and Israel does have more of a responsibility to the territories than it has tended to acknowledge; and genuine Palestinian independence is more something to work towards than a deprived right. Meanwhile, Western liberals have assumed that the nation-state model is the only operable political philosophy in the modern world, but that’s clearly not the case — with Russia embarked on a policy of imperial revanchism and Israel/Palestine locked into a dynamic that is evidently colonial. So what’s there to say that except that international politics is always grimmer than we would like it to be and whatever compromises are eventually reached will tend to satisfy no one.
WAR UP NORTH
By the way, there’s also a war on in Ukraine, and The Washington Post has a bombshell piece out about U.S. intelligence’s contribution to that war.
This has been a mystery for me since the beginning of conflict. I’d been hearing from people I knew connected to the military that U.S. special forces and intelligence had had a highly-active role in Ukraine dating back to 2014, but, in all the voluminous reporting since 2022, I hadn’t really seen anything analyzing the shape of that relationship.
Now, through The Post’s piece, that dynamic is much more apparent. After 2014, the CIA worked to create an entirely new directorate — the “Fifth Directorate,” focusing on “active measures” operations against Russia — within the SBU, Ukraine’s domestic security service. And, not only that, but the CIA developed a newer wing of Ukrainian military intelligence called GUR with vast signals-interception capabilities. “GUR was our little baby. We gave them all new equipment and training,” an American intelligence officer told The Post. “We calculated that GUR was a smaller and more nimble organization where we could have more impact.”
U.S. intelligence, it turns out, has been involved not only with the strikes on Russian battlefield generals but with attacks deep into Russia. Even if there is an arm’s-length relationship between Ukrainians and their American backers — “Ukrainian officers operated the [intelligence-gathering] systems but everything gleaned was shared with the Americans” is how The Post’s sources put it — it was intelligence units with American training that carried out the attacks on the Kerch bridge, assassinations of prominent war supporters inside Russia, and, most famously, the assassination of Dasha Dugina (with a bomb hidden in a cat crate).
Do these disclosures change my attitude towards the Ukraine War? Well, a little. I can understand Putin’s perspective better — the idea that, after 2014, Ukraine was becoming more and more a satellite of the U.S., with Ukrainian intelligence in vital respects more or less just an extension of the CIA and NSA.
Do I think that that gives Putin license for the 2022 invasion or for the atrocities that have followed? No. Even if Ukraine borders Russia, it is a sovereign state and has the right to choose its allies. But the disclosures do weaken my sense of idealism or notion that the U.S.’ involvement in Ukraine some sort of altruistic participation in a “just war.” The U.S. really was playing with fire in its extension of intelligence cooperation with Ukraine through the 2010s — this was John Mearsheimer’s point —and it shouldn’t be too surprising that, partly as a result, Ukraine got burned.
There is truth in The Free Press’ analysis of 10/7 — that “something has changed since the attacks on Israel.” And maybe something has changed as well with The Washington’s Post’s report. It’s harder to make liberal arguments about the sanctity of nation-states or the preservation of the “international order.” It’s more about blocs and alliances. We’re worried about Putin’s expansionism so we’re aligned with Ukraine. We fear ever-greater bloodbaths if Hamas remains intact, so we’re supportive of Israel in its retaliation and deterrence campaigns. It’s not pleasant to be thinking in this way, but that may be the reality of the world we’re in — “realpolitik” as opposed to “the concert of nations.”
EVERYWHERE IS WAR
As if the world didn’t have enough troubles, there’s also the crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh, although it seems the iron law of this conflict that nobody in the international community can bring themselves to care, even when the conflict reaches an apparent endgame, even when tens of thousands are displaced.
I’ve really found very little decent reporting on Nagorno-Karabakh. This Financial Times article by Polina Ivanova is the best so far — with access to some of the territory seized by the Azerbaijan. Ivanova describes meals abandoned in the middle of cooking, card games dropped mid-hand, in Nagorno-Karabakh houses, and prams and even bathtubs lining the trail the refugees took to Armenia. Maria Titizian, an Armenian journalist, tells a story she heard of a refugee leaving a note to the Azeris saying, “In this house, there lived a dignified family. Please take care of it. And also, I beg you to water my flowers.”
I’m really very surprised that Armenia has taken the attack as pacifically as it has. Nagorno-Karabakh is a tremendously emotional issue in Armenia. When I visited, several months ago, there were posters up in virtually every small town honoring soldiers who had died in the Karabakh conflict.
The way to understand what happened seems to be that Russia, which has historically close ties with Armenia, had made itself the guarantor of the Armenian-aligned Artsakh Republic. Azerbaijan’s lightning strike on Nagorno-Karabakh is perceived in Armenia as, above all, a betrayal by the Russians — “this operation would not have been possible if the Russian peacekeepers had tried to keep the peace, but they just basically stood down,” said Thomas de Waal, an expert on the region — and there’s been a movement within Armenia for holders of dual citizenship to tear up their Russian passports.
And Russian lassitude within Nagorno-Karabakh is understood to be revenge for the westward-leaning policies of Armenia’s prime minister Nikol Pashinyan. The Russian Foreign Ministry, in its turn, blamed “the inconsistent stance of the Armenian leadership, which flip-flopped on policy and sought Western support over working closely with Russia and Azerbaijan.”
So: a real mess. To be honest, it seems like everything here could have been a lot worse: the conflict could have been more prolonged and bloodier, there could have been more deaths among the refugees who made the trek to Armenia, the Azeris could have taken more reprisals. Looking at a map it’s obvious that the Artsakh Republic was untenable, and there may be a certain relief among policymakers that it collapsed as abruptly as it did. However, it’s hard to believe that this is the end of the matter. Armenians and Azeris continue to hate each other. And the dynamics that are playing out on Russia’s western borders — with the invasion of Ukraine — are apparent in the Caucasus as well. Georgians profoundly hate Russia and would dearly like to join the EU. Russia’s perceived betrayal in Nagorno-Karabakh is unlikely to be forgotten or forgiven in Armenia anytime soon — and Armenia may well find itself drifting more pronouncedly in Georgia’s direction and wishing to join the Western bloc (a faint hope since the West is seen as not being in a position to help with anything, as was clearly the case with Nagorno-Karabakh, and Russia is making it very clear that any movement towards the West results in severe repercussions).
So all a mess. War in Ukraine, war in Gaza, humanitarian crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh, and everywhere the blocs hardening, the fault-lines becoming more apparent.
Well balanced article. A series of wicked problems.
On Ukraine, I hope that more people will be able to hold two thoughts in their heads that are not at odds:
1) Putin is 100% responsible for the war.
2) American actions prior to the war made war far more likely.
The below Charter Agreement between Ukraine and the US has been under emphasized. It came out in November, 2022. Section 2 comes pretty close to a publicly stated alliance against Russia. Which fits with the Post article you wrote about.
https://www.state.gov/u-s-ukraine-charter-on-strategic-partnership/
I'm not necessarily against containing the Wall Street Journal--their editorial board could use it--but I think that's not what you meant.
More seriously, I'm not sure that in war there is no such thing as acting rightly. Both pragmatically and philosophically--even prior to the Geneva conventions or outside of traditions of 'just war' ethics, combatants have recognized that certain actions against an enemy might provoke a response that would make some eventual resolution or conflict harder or impossible, or provoke reprisals in kind that would damage all sides beyond repair. Total war is a modern idea, and dependent upon the material capacity of modern nation-states to make war, which is why more than ever, modern nation-states try to talk about how to circumscribe conflicts should they happen to break out.