Latest Parries
February 2012
2001: A Space Odyssey: Exemplary, Luminous
After they finished watching the Bond movies, I figured the next series John Gruber and Dan Benjamin would discuss on The Talk Show would be Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. But Gruber refused — too personal for podcasting, he said. Disappointed, I rewatched 2001 and wrote up my own thoughts.
January 2012
A Scheme of a Number of Friends
Instead of acknowledging the wisdom of leading from behind, the Right jumped on the Obama administration’s handling of Libya as yet another example of at best incompetence. They lost me there.
October 2011
The Mouse and the Cantilever
Steve Jobs we lost at the age of 56; when Frank Lloyd Wright reached that age it was still only 1923, the time of merely his second comeback with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.
March 2010
Friendship is for Weenies
It’s amazing, given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere, that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.
Before the Setup
Nobody from usesthis.com has asked me what my setup us, nor is likely to anytime soon. So I’m just going to mouth off here about it. But first, some background.
February 2010
Walter Russell Mead steps gingerly into the Wieseltier/Sullivan imbroglio
On the Leon Wieseltier/Andrew Sullivan spat, Walter Russell Mead seems to want to have his strudel and eat it too.
October 2009
My Hope: Obama’s Change
Defeat in the Olympics bid may focus the mind in the Oval Office where it should be: Afghanistan.
July 2009
At Modi’in Mall
There’s nothing else around here except empty desolate pretty hills. The Israel Trail passes by a bit to the west. It’s a hot July Wednesday morning. Things are reasonably busy. The shops are mostly franchises, almost all homegrown — Super-Pharm, Aroma, Tzomet Sfarim, Cup O’ Joe’s, LaMetayel, Mega, Fox, Castro, H&O.
Israel, the Bad So Far
I’m surprised at the general appearance of Tel Aviv folks. Yes, it’s hot, but people appear dressed as if they’re in, I don’t know, Be’er Sheva. And the people in Be’er Sheva, last time I was there, looked to me like they’re dressed for Gaza.
March 2009
Namaste, Dharma Workmen
What do the Lost characters mostly want these days? It’s not to get off the island. Increasingly, the island is just where they live and love. If anything, they’ve found home — or, rather, their home found them.
I srael has had two great strategic lessons to learn. The first did not need to be taught and came from within: to choose your friends from the gut and stick with them. All Israel’s leaders, even those that remained socialist, determined very early in the nation’s history that the democratic United States, not the authoritarian Russia, is in actuality our true deep great friend (even if it took the United States a couple of decades and some captured MIGs to warm up and reciprocate). The second lesson was harder to learn, especially for a country that feels itself to be tiny: that defeat can sometimes look like victory, and victory defeat. After the Six Day War in 1967 Israel appeared to have won a stupendous victory, smashing a number of Arab armies simultaneously and gaining much more territory: the West Bank, Gaza and the Sinai, and of course Jerusalem. But that defeat brought seeds of woe and danger: Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza.
When the great tactician Ariel Sharon became prime minister (“those who don’t want him as chief of staff will get him as defence minister; those who don’t want him as defence minister will get him as prime minister”), he left behind two positive legacies: economic reform implemented by his finance minister Binyamin Netanyahu; and the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, which Sharon steamrolled through and seemed such a mystery coming from the great advocate of settlement.
But Sharon’s masterplan, it seems to me, despite appearing like defeat, was a victory, intended to undo in a controlled fashion the damage done by the victory of 1967. Its purpose was to bifurcate and thereby defang the Palestinian national movement, to have the Palestinians ease back into their natural spheres of influence — the Gazans to Egypt, the West Bankers to Jordan, leaving Israel be at long last. When Hamas took over Gaza, Israel may have displayed dismay, but it was in fact the first milestone in the unfolding of the sequence of events Sharon’s masterplan intended. Today, as reported in ‘Gazans Flood Egypt After Border Breach’ by the AP, and ‘Palestinians Topple Gaza Wall and Cross to Egypt’ in The New York Times, we saw the second. With the border between Gaza and Israel sealed and the floodgates opened between Gaza and Egypt, Gaza takes another step towards being absorbed back into Egypt.
I’d like to think that the reason Ehud Olmert remains prime minister despite his rock-bottom popularity in polls is that he presented this idea to Sharon, and Sharon was impressed with its subtlety and audacity and decided that this is the wily Machiavellian figure to lead Israel through the coming perilous times; and that the nation trusts Ariel Sharon’s judgment and understands that a plan has been set into motion; and that plan is wise; and that we need some patience to see enough of it bear fruit before making a change. I’d also like to think that George W. Bush is well aware of this plan, and that he and Sharon struck a deal: if the Palestinians are peacable, then fine, they will get their state in Gaza and the West Bank; but if they are not, if the scorpion cannot help but sting, then their national movement will not be allowed to fester indefinitely as a swamp providing safe harbor for jihadists, and circumstances will have been set in place that permit the Palestinians to rend asunder their own national movement; a majority of them embrace pan-Islamism, wherein the nationstate is not paramount.
Today, the news report says: “The United States expressed concern about the border breach. Israel demanded that Egypt take control of its border.” Here then is the un-‘67, a defeat that permits delicious moments. Egypt, given a reprieve regarding Gaza for 40 years, must shoulder its responsibilities once again.
Update #1: In an editorial “‘A Farewell to Gaza’“http://www.nysun.com/article/70096, the New York Sun opines: “What some see as a problem to be concerned about may also be an opportunity to be seized on, because it could be a first step in getting the world to perceive that many of the residents of Gaza are Egyptians rather than Palestinians. They’d rather be in Egypt than in Gaza, as they showed by voting with their feet these past days. They speak Egyptian Arabic. They have closer family ties to Egypt than they do to the West Bank, where many of them have never even visited.”
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