Commentator

Rafah, Avdiivka, Navalny and the Satyr, the Elderly Man

THE BRIDGE TOO FAR IN RAFAH

I haven’t written much about Israel/Gaza, because a) I’m aware of how much I do not know and b) I find it too upsetting. Neither of which is an excuse. The spirit of ‘Commentator’ is to boldly go where we are relatively ignorant! — and to try, in good faith, to think things through. And what’s happening right now in Gaza (maybe right now, like this week, more than at any other time) is of colossal, almost unfathomable importance.

There’s another reason why it’s so difficult to write about Israel/Gaza, which is that something about the conflict makes it almost impervious to rational discussion — and even to speak about it involves cutting away so much wood, dealing with all of one’s own biases and preconceptions. 

So these would be my, as it were, ten commandments before even entering into this topic. 

-Israel is a state and has a right like other states to defend itself. 

-Implications that Israel shouldn’t fight back when attacked — which is the premise of so much of left-wing discourse — are tantamount to saying that the state of Israel is somehow illegitimate.

-A great deal of anti-Israeli sentiment is anti-Semitic, including (particularly among the European Left) the near-total obsession with Israel at the expense of all the world’s other problems.

-Calling Israel a ‘settler’ state or ‘colonial’ state is absurd. It’s pretty rich to deny the historical connection of Jews to the territory of modern-day Israel or to imply (as is so popular in woke discourse) that Israel is some sort of project of ‘white supremacy.’

-Pinning all responsibility for the ongoing conflict on Israel conveniently forgets about 10/7 and Hamas’ program of militarization.

-Calling Israel’s offensive a “genocide” is inflammatory and inaccurate. It’s ‘war’ — or a ‘civil war.’ It’s violent and awful. A “genocide” is something different and refers to the wholesale elimination of an entire people. 

-Holding Israel accountable for “war crimes” elides over Hamas’ style of fighting — the use of human shields and the close immersion with civilian populations. 

BUT 

-Large numbers of Gazan civilians who shouldn’t be dying are dying. 

-There is an immense humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, and Israel seems to be lacking all interest in trying to address it. 

-It is important to maintain proportionality in warfare. Israel seems to have crossed over into disproportionality at different times in its Gaza offensive. A ground attack into Rafah is at the point of being not only disproportionate but indefensible. 

***

What I’m articulating here has been the American position all along, and I suppose there isn’t much daylight between what I believe and what, say, Jake Sullivan believes. The Israeli offensive so far has been brutal but comprehensible in terms of reducing Hamas’ war-making capacity. A ground invasion of Rafah without adequate protection for civilians (which really is an impossible ask) is a bridge too far. 

In terms of politics, the critical issue at the moment is whether the Israeli establishment can sell its achievements in the war so far as a “victory.” It’s obvious that Hamas will, for a long time to come, lack anything like the capacity to carry out another 10/7. A large number of its fighters have been killed and its tunnels destroyed. As war studies professor Lawrence Freedman puts it in The New Statesman, “Israel has to work out whether whatever marginal further gains it may make against Hamas are worth its almost complete international isolation.”

Bombing in the central Gaza Strip

The rational decision would be to halt here — probably not to declare a “ceasefire,” which from the Israeli perspective amounts to giving in to Hamas’ demands, but to return to the low-boil “third phase” of the conflict that Israel advertised in January involving pinprick raids against Hamas’ military leadership while negotiating for the release of hostages and an agreement to reconstruct what’s been destroyed in Gaza. 

The concern is that the current government of Israel is not rational, that Israel is seeing red and — as the Americans believe — Netanyahu regards a “full victory” as essential to his political survival. For UnHerd, the grand strategy professor Edward Luttwak lays out the more hardline Israeli position. “Victory remains Israel’s objective — and it is far from a distant prospect,” he writes. But, as Luttwak himself acknowledges, victory is not so easy to define. The complete destruction of Hamas’ remaining combat forces becomes something like Zeno’s paradox — ever more difficult and with civilian casualties disproportionately higher. And a focus on Hamas’ military leadership — which, from Israel’s perspective, is the emotionally satisfying end to the conflict — runs into the issue that, as The Jerusalem Post reports, it’s not even clear that Yahya Sinwar is still in control of Hamas’ military operations. “No one in Hamas’ [political leadership] can locate Sinwar to get his approval of a deal,” the Post writes. 

Meanwhile, as Israeli’s leadership makes up its mind on Rafah (the fear is that they have already decided and are willing to accept “complete international isolation”), the international community is dealing in fantasies of its own. The Washington Post reports that the U.S. State Department and Arab nations have been putting together a plan for a two-state solution. “It’s coming ever more sharply into focus,” Anthony Blinken said. 

From America’s perspective, that’s the ‘emotionally satisfying’ outcome: out of the ashes of the war in Gaza, a revival of the peace talks of the ‘90s. But even the articles in favor of an imminent two-state solution have a way of talking themselves out of it. “The elephant in the planning room is Israel,” writes The Washington Post — which is, um, yes, a big issue. Or, as the former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk puts it in a somewhat mealy-mouthed article in Foreign Affairs, “There are, of course, two major obstacles to such a plan, and they are the main combatants in the war.”

In other words, people like Blinken and David Cameron (who has also come out in favor of the plan) are deluding themselves. From Israel’s perspective, agreeing to a Palestinian state now would be tantamount to rewarding Hamas for 10/7. “Should the Palestinians have an army?…Of course, I say, of course not,” Netanyahu said when asked about the two-state solution. “The most important power that has to remain in Israel’s hands is overriding security control in the area west of the Jordan” river.”

Trying to negotiate around Israel isn’t going to work. Israel has committed virtually all of its political capital (as well as sacrificed a great deal of human life) to regaining a position of strength, and the only real question now is what Israel does with that strength. The two-state solution isn’t going to happen. But what Israel can do is exercise a degree of magnanimity, step back and start to allow for reconstruction. 

What the United States can do is to take the lead in that. It’s maybe a cynical way of thinking about U.S. foreign policy, but it does have a certain effectiveness to it — pay for the breaking of things and then pay for the rebuilding. It’s what the United States did in Europe and Japan in the 1940s, and it’s what the United States should do in Gaza. By all accounts the damage is immense. A satellite analysis found that 50% of all buildings in the Gaza Strip have been damaged or destroyed — a “mind-blowing” rate of damage, said the researchers who carried out the analysis. Indyk estimates that reconstruction in Gaza would cost around $50 billion — which Israel certainly won’t pay for. 

That is a number, though, that the United States can chip away at. And the U.S. can help to restore its prestige in the Middle East by conspicuously bankrolling Gaza’s reconstruction effort. The familiar questions arise of who the on-the-ground partners will be, and that won’t be smooth or easy. Probably the Palestinian Authority would be asked to step in, and the Gulf states would play some role in implementing the reconstruction. As shocking as it is that UNRWA workers participated in 10/7, that’s not a justification for expelling the UNRWA — the UN would also need to play a pivotal, or leading, role in the reconstruction. 

Strength has two sides to it. One side is the amassing of strength; the other is benevolence and backing away. This seems to be the moment for Israel to back away. And if the U.S. can pass or reroute funds to reconstruct Gaza — which is, of course, a big if — then Israel can let others take the lead in reconstructing Khan Yunis and Gaza City and can spare Rafah. 

NAVALNY AND THE SATYR

I’ve already said most of what I wanted to say about Navalny. The style of our time is to retain a healthy cynicism, and never to lionize, but Navalny was the real deal, a great man, and it’s important to wrap our minds around what that means. 

If you haven’t already seen it, it’s worth watching Daniel Roher’s documentary on him — particularly the sections on his return to Russia in 2021. There’s been a bit of Monday morning quarterbacking the last few days about why he returned — was he trying to be a martyr? did he really think he could outlast Putin and assume the presidency? 

The point is that he clearly returned not out of some immense calculation, but because — checking in with his own sense of courage and his own principles — he felt that that was the right, the only, thing he could do. Neil MacFarquhar, in The New York Times, is astute in viewing the Navalny story as a kind of Greek tragedy, in which the hero has a certain innate fate — “the hero, knowing that he is doomed, returns home anyway because, if he didn’t, well, he would not be the hero” — but the deeper idea, as the Greek dramatists well understood, is that the hero always does choose their fate, and Navalny, more than anyone I’m aware of in the contemporary world, consciously, courageously chose his.

The Navalnys sitting for good luck before their flight to Russia

There have some pinpricks on Navalny — so far only on social media rather in mainstream publications — and I suspect there are more to come (not least because the Kremlin has been pushing this line). Yes, he was in the nationalist right in the 2000s. Yes — like very many Russians — he had some racist beliefs. Back in 2021, the American political commentator Eliot Borenstein wrote, “Navalny is not Nelson Mandela. He’s Aung San Suu Kyi.” And, who knows, maybe he would have been proved right. But now we’ll never know. In the end, Navalny showed us something about how it’s possible — still possible — to live for principle and with infinite courage and good humor. At the very, very least, his legacy deserves better than our cynicism. 

***

And, meanwhile, like from Hyperion to a satyr, Tucker Carlson makes news for his voluntary trip to Russia, and all the cynical, clownish qualities of our era come through. Like the very worst of the Stalinist apologists of the ‘30s (although from the right this time), Carlson is taken in by the lack of bums in the subway and the deliciousness of a Russian cheeseburger. The sense is that we have returned to the slow nightmare we were in during the Trump years and before the moment of international unity of February 24th.

Tucker in the “radicalizing” Russian supermarket

The premise for people like Trump and Carlson is that Putin represents a kind of inevitability — a ‘strong’ government with national unity and unencumbered by civil society. Trump seems to genuinely think that he can sic Russia on any country as a way of achieving his own aims. John Bolton, in his piece on Navalny, is probably right to see Navalny’s death as an extension of Putin operating from a position of strength. The West’s sanctions haven’t worked. After the initial setbacks, the military juggernaut is gaining ground in Ukraine. The Prighozin problem has been dealt with. And the dysfunction of the U.S. political system confirms to Putin both his initial assessment that the United States wouldn’t be a reliable backer of Ukraine; and, more broadly, that democratic countries have inherent limits in their ability to wage a determined war. 

There’s a choking feeling in thinking about all of this — and even more so in reading the transcript of Carlson’s interview with Putin, which, I think, hasn’t been fully digested in the West. The media line on it is that Putin is just “airing well-trod grievances” and that’s true — we get the familiar complaints about America’s perfidy and the somewhat staggering justification of the war, which even Carlson had a hard time swallowing: that Hitlerism never really died and that Ukraine’s embrace of its World War II-era heroes (Stepan Bandera in particular) makes modern Ukraine an extension of the Nazi regime. “It was these people who were made national heroes — that is the problem,” Putin said.

But if we’ve learned anything from the last few years, it should be that anytime Vladimir Putin starts giving a lesson on medieval history — as he did to the befuddled Carlson — that’s the time to get very nervous. (And anytime he mentions Oleg the Prophet, it’s particularly dire.) The gist of Putin’s discursus was the perfidy of Poland. The history of Ukraine — and you have to read this to believe it — is understood as a millennial-long struggle between the dueling “magnets” of Russia and Poland, with Russia as by far the more benevolent protector. “So, the Poles were trying in every possible way to polonize that part of the Russian lands and actually treated it rather harshly, not to say cruelly,” said Putin, at which point Carlson, utterly lost, had to ask what century Putin was talking about and received the discouraging answer that it was the 13th.

Tucker trapped in the 13th century

The more trenchant and unsettling point Putin made, though, was to perceive Poland as — believe it or not — one of the instigators of World War II. “In 1939, after Poland cooperated with Hitler — it did collaborate with Hitler, you know….and engaged together in the partitioning of Czechoslovakia,” Putin said.

Carlson, who at this point was almost visibly pining for his cheeseburger and chocolate cake, couldn’t take in the significance, but everybody in Eastern Europe did. In Putin’s private cosmology, Poland is “Nazi” in the way that Ukraine is “Nazi.” It’s impossible to interpret remarks like Putin’s — and how careful he was to repeat them to the West’s emissary, Tucker Carlson — without seeing Putin’s territorial appetite as undiminished and his perspective as unchanged since 2022. Ukraine will fall eventually, is the unstated assumption. After that, it’s the cruel, perfidious, Hitlerite Poles. 

BURY MY HEART IN AVDIIVKA

Unfortunately, there’s good reason for Putin’s confidence. More than at any other time since the outbreak of the wider war, we’re back to where we were on February 24th — with Ukraine facing a deficit in manpower and material, and with Ukraine just handed a bruising battlefield loss at Avdiivka. 

The New York Times has a string of good pieces on Avdiivka and reports on the Ukrainian positions simply getting overwhelmed. Ukrainians described Russians fighting with a “10:1” shell advantage and with Russia obtaining “fire superiority” all across the line. “Ukraine has tried to bridge that gap with self-exploding drones but is far from reaching any kind of parity with Russian forces,” Thomas Gibbons-Neff writes.

Ukrainian soldier — presumed dead — in Avdiivka

That pattern is felt on a wider scale as well, with Russia simply out-mobilizing Ukraine. “One of the key events from 2023 was that Russia was able to recruit a large number of volunteers,” Rob Lee of the Foreign Policy Research Institute told Gibbons-Neff. “The flip side is that this is happening right as Ukraine is facing mobilization problems.” Ukraine is attempting to mobilize an additional 500,000 soldiers — which is an admission of facing a long, grinding, defensive struggle. 

The military historian Max Boot, visiting Ukraine, found that morale had “sagged” over the course of the past year and noted that the percentage of Ukrainians willing to make territorial concessions to end the war had risen from 10 to 19%. 

But, in a way, that’s sort of beside the point. As Boot writes, “There is zero chance right now of Putin ending the war. Why should he when he sees U.S. support for Ukraine wavering?” And the peace offer that Putin dangled at the end of last year increasingly seems to be revealed for what it was — a political ploy to weaken the West’s support for Ukraine. 

“When the Russian troops entered, it wasn’t just a nightmare, it was some kind of Armageddon,” a resident of Avdiivka said in a video released by the Ukrainian police. And Zelensky, in Munich, said, “If Ukraine is left alone Russia will destroy us.” 

So Ukraine, at this stage, has little choice except to keep fighting — and now moving backwards again. Americans in Ukraine have been particularly incensed by the slowdown in funding from the U.S. “Military aid has slowed to a trickle,” writes Gibbons-Neff. Ukrainian soldiers during the battle for Avdiivka were reportedly compelled to ration ammunition. “Here in Avdiivka, we felt the result of Congress’ actions to defund Ukraine,” writes John Roberts, an American volunteer with the Ukraine Armed Forces, in The Kyiv Independent. 

It’s a nasty axis — Vladimir Putin to Mike Johnson — and it will be very hard to break, at least until after the November election. At the debbie-downer Munich Security Conference (even the front cover of its report read ‘Lose-Lose’), the Eurasia Group head Ian Bremmer analyzed the world as facing “three wars” — Ukraine, Gaza, and then the war “between American democracy and the looming force of Trump trying to destroy it.” As it turns out (and I guess this was always sort of expected), Ukraine’s fate will be settled at an American ballot box. 

But what can be done before November is to finally extend an invitation to Ukraine to join NATO. As Anders Fogh-Rasmussen, a former Secretary General of NATO, writes in Foreign Policy, it’s “time to call Putin’s bluff” and issue an invitation. We know by now that an invitation wouldn’t lead to nuclear war, and it would confirm what has long been obvious —that Ukraine is doing all of NATO’s fighting for it. As Fogh-Rasmussen writes, “Gray zones are danger zones when it comes to Russia.” A commitment to Ukraine — which Ukraine, incidentally, has more than earned — is at this stage the only way to make good wavering American support and to tip the scales of a long-term conflict back against Russia. 

THE WELL-MEANING ELDERLY MAN

So, with malevolent irony, everything — all three wars — comes down to “a well-meaning elderly man” currently occupying the White House, who, over the next months, has to not only hold the line but, let’s not forget, make up for a polling deficit while convincing the public that the occasional confusion of Mexico for Egypt is no big deal in a Head of State.

I’ve been really right about this. There were two pivotal moments when we could have averted the mess that we’re in. Biden could have looked at the actuarial tables and, after the 2022 midterms, decided to be the James K. Polk of Wilmington, Delaware — determining that he’d set out to do what he wanted and passing the torch back to the Democratic Party. And some presumptuous Gavin Newsom type could, in early 2023, have forced the question and at least made Biden prove himself in a primary. 

Instead, Biden not only got greedy but played hardball, keeping any challengers from emerging — and the mainstream media closed ranks, declining for a long time even to discuss Biden’s age. 

But the cat’s out of the bag now, and many of the press grandees are breaking, In November, writes Nate Silver, he crossed the (very figurative) “Rubicon” and “concluded that Biden should stand down if he wasn’t going to be able to run a normal reelection campaign.” Ezra Klein joined him this week with a long podcast essay.

With almost total derangement, Biden’s allies have decided that the problem is the media, and if only the media wouldn’t talk about Biden’s age, the problem would go away. “To hear many of them tell it, the coverage…has been the product of an irresponsible pundit class that would prefer to critique the president’s speaking style than focus on the substance of his governance,” wrote New York Magazine on the perspective of Biden’s team. “Washington’s chatterers in particular simply don’t get Biden as a politician, and certainly not his appeal to voters.” 

But, as Klein puts it, “If you have really convinced yourself of that, in your heart of hearts, I almost don’t know what to tell you.” The questions about Biden’s age have nothing to do with disloyalty or ageism or unfairness in comparison with Trump. It’s all about electability. “The biggest problem Joe has is the way he walks, and the walking translates to ‘frail,’ and the frail translates to ‘feeble,’ and the feeble translates to ‘mentally deficient,’” said an old-time friend of Biden’s, meaning, actually, to be supportive. 

It’s very late in the day now, and it feels like we’re in some unusually shitty Choose Your Own Adventure where all outcomes lead to Trump. We could just stick with Biden and sort of sleepwalk to November but with no real reason to think that he can make up ground against a dynamic, energized opponent. He could throw the election to the convention, but this process of picking a candidate at a convention isn’t in anybody’s muscle memory and the likely outcome would be a divided party, with Biden keeping the seat warm until August and then a new candidate emerging with only two months before the election. He could try to achieve an orderly succession relatively soon, releasing his delegates to another candidate — although political pressure would dictate that his chosen heir would have to be Kamala Harris, who is even less popular than Biden. 

It’s all very depressing. But I do think Robert Hur may have done the Democrats a favor — he said what everybody was thinking and gave the press cover. Everything depends on Biden and on the Democratic panjandrums who would have to have The Talk with him, but stepping down would probably be the best thing. It’s too late to have a real primary, but Biden could release his delegates back to the convention. The DNC could organize a series of debates in the late spring or early summer and have some semblance of a democratic process, with the delegates at the convention ultimately deciding and with whomever comes out of the convention at least having a fresh wind behind them. I’ve seen this described as a “West Wing fantasy,” but, as Silver writes of the idea of bringing the candidacy to the convention, “This is a real option. Don’t let anyone gaslight you into believing otherwise.” The stakes couldn’t possibly be higher. The Democrats need a candidate who can win.