Month: July 2014

Tunnel Vision

Ben Caspit attributes the Israeli public’s willingness to stomach a ground invasion of Gaza to the discovery of Hamas’ network of tunnels leading into southern Israel:

It should be remembered that had Hamas not rejected the Egyptian cease-fire initiative, Israel would not have discovered the scope of this threat, and Hamas would have continued digging and expanding its tunnel network, right until the moment it was deployed.

One senior Cabinet member I spoke with this week described that possibility to me: “Imagine,” he said, “that we are in the middle of a conflict with Hezbollah up north. Our top-notch infantry brigades are up there, in the north, when suddenly Hamas deploys its network of dozens of tunnels all at once. Some 2,000 Hamas commandos suddenly burst out of them and embark on a killing spree, slaughtering thousands of people in the cities and towns across Israel’s south, from Sderot through Ashkelon, Netivot and Ofakim, maybe even all the way to Beersheba.

Who would stop them? The police? The air force? It would take weeks to clean up the mess, and at the end of the entire process, we would find death and destruction across southern Israel. I know,” the minister continued, “that it sounds like a figment of the imagination, but based on what we are discovering these days, the scenario is far more realistic than it is imaginary. In this region, the reality easily exceeds anything we can imagine.”

But in a translation provided by J.J. Goldberg, Nahum Barnea debunks the Israeli government’s claim that the tunnels came as a surprise to them:

When the Cabinet agreed to the Egyptian cease-fire proposal in the middle of last week, was it aware that Gaza was teeming with tunnels, dozens of which reached into Israeli territory? The answer is, Yes. In an extended effort, over a period of years, Military Intelligence mapped out the underground world of Gaza. Not all the tunnels were identified, not all the openings and routes were located, but the magnitude of the threat was known. It was found not only in the secret material that reaches the prime minister’s desk, but even on YouTube: Military Intelligence chief Aviv Kochavi included the story of the tunnels in a lecture he gave at the Institute for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv. …

Netanyahu was not the first to war against the tunnels. He takes the name of the tunnels in vain. As prime minister he hadn’t seen the tunnels as a threat that justified a military operation — before and during Pillar of Defense in 2012, before and during Protective Edge in 2014. He chose to take a risk. When he said, in reply to a question from Udi Segal of Channel 2, that he hoped the problem of the tunnels would be solved through diplomatic means, he knew the sentence had no grounding in reality.

The Next Phase Of The Ukrainian Conflict

Serhiy Kudelia expects that, if Ukrainian “insurgents are pushed out of big cities, the ongoing asymmetric warfare in Donbas that will be fought largely by conventional means is likely to take the form of an underground guerrilla movement”:

Similar to the PKK in Turkey, ETA in Spain or the IRA in the Northern Ireland, it will rely on sporadic attacks on government and military installations to exhaust the incumbent and damage its governing capacity rather than establish control over a territory. And like Hezbollah in Lebanon or FARC in Colombia, it will rely on outside powers for provision of arms, funds and training. In its new form, guerrilla attacks will likely spill over to other Ukrainian regions, particularly Western Ukraine. According to the latest poll, most Donbas residents (39%) blame radical nationalist organizations for the ongoing conflict, with Western intelligence services being close second (34%).

The path to solving the current conflict in Donbas goes not only through Brussels or Washington, but also through Moscow.

While Russia has become an active participant in the conflict, it is also the only actor with real leverage over the insurgents. By denying them sanctuaries on its territory and ending arms supplies, it will effectively cut their main lifeline. However, the Kremlin will not acquiesce to an outcome that ignores what it views as its legitimate interests in the region with a large ethnic Russian presence. While Russia’s immediate commitment to peace is doubtful, the prospect of a protracted conflict on its border, growing international isolation and risks of regional war is also hardly appealing for Putin. All the sides – Ukraine, Russia and the West – should in principle be interested in finding a sustainable resolution to the conflict. One thing that prevents them from negotiating in earnest now is the belief that their interests will be better served by continued fighting. However, as the recent study of war duration shows, irregular wars last much longer than conventional or symmetric non-conventional wars (113.32 months on average). So if guerrilla war begins there may not be an end to violence in sight.

 

Book Club: To Philosophize Is To Learn How To Die

A reader adds to the other near-death experiences sparked by Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live:

I am 65 years old. In 1958, when I was 9, I suffered a ruptured appendix that was misdiagnosed as flu, so I lay in my bed for a week getting sicker and sicker until I was taken to Lankenau Hospital outside Philadelphia. They treated me with drugs for three days and then operated.
bookclub-beagle-tr

I have a number of memories from the three weeks I spent in the hospital but my near-death experience is still very close to me 55 years later. I, too, have a vivid memory of looking down on myself from up high, the minister at my right hand, and my already grieving parents on my left. I remember seeing a bright light and feeling a great sensation of peace and comfort surrounding me. Then my father kept shaking me. He kept saying “Wake up! Don’t go to sleep!” He pulled me back from that gate or passage I was about to enter.

I also have another vivid memory which I have kept from that time. While I was passing in and out of consciousness I had a dream that has stuck with me.

My heritage is Latvian, and my Latvian forebears are Nordic looking. In my dream I was wrapped in a blanket in the back seat of a big, black limousine like a Packard. I was taken to the ferryboat landing at the foot of Flower St. in Chester PA where we used to cross the Delaware to New Jersey on the way to the shore, before the bridges were built. It was night and cold (I got sick in January.) Very blond men wearing cashmere coats and black Homburg hats took me out of the car and onto the ferryboat. They laid me on one of the wooden benches polished from decades of use. The engines started and the ship began to vibrate. I felt cold and was shivering. Then, one of the men came back for me and picked me up in my blanket. He took me back to the Packard. He said “it’s not time yet. We made a mistake.”

Now I have bladder cancer and have been in the OR 12 times in the past four years. I am able to control my fear and make the most of it now largely on the basis of my early brush with death. To tell you the truth, in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. I don’t want to die just yet but, you know, it really isn’t that big a deal.

Montaigne would be chuffed. Another reader:

One thing I took away from this excellent biography is something you touched on a bit in your very good kickoff to the discussion. Montaigne‘s essays are the antidote to today’s happiness-obsessed culture. Parents raise their children instilling happiness as the most important, above even having good morals. Our social climate today believes that if you’re not happy all the time, there’s something wrong with you.

It hasn’t always been that way. When my father told his father he was divorcing my mother because they were no longer happy, my grandfather, dismayed, replied, “Who told you you were supposed to be happy?” But now, if you live in NYC or Los Angeles, it’s unusual to not have a therapist. Campus counseling services cannot keep up with influx of demand. So the title of this book is sublime irony.

Hope this is valuable. So glad you’ve started these monthly discussions. I have read all three books so far.

Read the whole Book Club conversation here. Send your own thoughts to bookclub@andrewsullivan.com.

Buying Politicians Is A Man’s Game

Rebecca Traister mulls the lack of big political donors among women:

[M]en have known for generations how to use money to exert influence and buy access, shape policy, and make inroads into the world of electoral politics. Women, by contrast, historically saw money not as a means to expand public power, but to ensure personal or familial security, survival, perhaps a slim chance of independence. There are many phrases for the small caches of money that women stash away: pin money, mad money, the Yiddish word knippel, which means a secret sum of money that a wife siphons off in order to protect herself and her family in case she loses the husband on whom she has had to depend. These phrases exist—and almost always refer to money used for the literal safety and protection of women—because money was so scarce for women, and chances to replenish funds lost on a bad bet or ill-timed investment were non-existent.

It’s not crazy that, in a contemporary context, throwing money at politicians and policy-makers would still be an easier, looser, more practiced move for wealthy men than it would be for even wealthy women, who we like to think of as having clambered over all the gendered obstacles of the past, but who—with 95 percent of CEOs still male—remain a very small exception to very long-standing male rule.

The Lady Cops Of The Islamic State

As ISIS commands all women in its domains to veil their faces or face unspecified punishment, Kathy Gilsinan explores the role Iraqi Syrian women themselves are playing in enforcing the group’s fanatical dictates:

The al-Khansaa Brigade is ISIS’s all-female moral police, established in Raqqa soon after ISIS took over the city a few months ago. “We have established the brigade to raise awareness of our religion among women, and to punish women who do not abide by the law,” Abu Ahmad, an ISIS official in Raqqa, told Syria Deeply’s Ahmad al-Bahri. Ahmad emphasized that the brigade has its own facilities to avoid mingling among men and women. “Jihad,” he told al-Bahri, “is not a man-only duty. Women must do their part as well.”

The institution of female enforcers for female morality makes a certain kind of sense if you take the prohibition against sexes mingling to its logical extreme. Still, ISIS in Raqqa may be the only jihadi group employing this kind of logic. In other jihadi groups, “it is men who enforce modesty in public,” explains Thomas Hegghammer, an expert on Islamist militancy affiliated with the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, via email. Nor has the practice spread elsewhere in the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate. The al-Khansaa Brigade may be what Hegghammer calls a “short-lived stunt in a single city.”

Indeed, regional news sources suggest the brigade was designed to solve a specific problem: male anti-ISIS fighters disguising themselves in all-concealing feminine garb to pass through checkpoints. With male ISIS members reluctant to inspect under garments to verify the womanhood of the wearers, they got some women to do it.

Let The Applicant Work For It

New research suggests that employers should give up trying to woo job interviewees:

[P]articipants asked to entice the applicant were poorer judges of character than those explicitly asked to evaluate them. A follow-up field study found similar effects in genuine interviews within two samples: applicants to an MBA program and teachers applying for school assignments. In both samples, interviewees rated as having high [Core Self Evaluation (CSE)] were more likely to go onto success – job offers for MBAs or “above and beyond” citizenship behaviours by the teachers – but only when the ratings came from interviewers who reported having a strong focus on evaluation. Those who reported giving more attention to selling the role produced CSE estimates that didn’t predict future success.

The authors note in their conclusion that “interviewers who focused only on evaluating applicants actually believed they were less able to select the best applicants than those who adopted a selling focus.” In fact the reverse was true, and the risk goes the other way: when we focus too much on soliciting applicants, we can miss the gorilla in the room: that they simply aren’t up to snuff.

Hanging On To Heidegger

Michael Marder defends (NYT) Heidegger’s philosophy from the anti-Semitism present in his diaries:

dish_heideggersketch2[N]one of the recent revelations about Heidegger should be suppressed or dismissed. But neither should they turn into mantras and formulas, meant to discredit one of the most original philosophical frameworks of the past century. At issue are not only concepts (such as “being-in-the-world”) or methodologies (such as “hermeneutical ontology”) but the ever fresh way of thinking that holds in store countless possibilities that are not sanctioned by the prevalent techno-scientific rationality, which governs much of philosophy within the walls of the academia. It is, in fact, these possibilities that are the true targets of Heidegger’s detractors, who are determined to smear the entirety of his thought and work with the double charge of Nazism and anti-Semitism.

Now, if canonical philosophers were blacklisted based on their prejudices and political engagements, then there wouldn’t be all that many left in the Western tradition. Plato and Aristotle would be out as defenders of slavery and chauvinism; St. Augustine would be expelled for his intolerance toward heretics and “heathens”; Hegel would be banned for his unconditional admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte, in whom he saw “world spirit on horseback.”

As for Heidegger himself, those minimally versed in his thought will know — whether they admit it or not — that his anti-Semitism contradicts both the spirit and the letter of his texts, regardless of the ontological or metaphysical mantle he bestows upon anti-Semitic discourse. Perhaps the German thinker did not sense this contradiction, but this does not mean that it was not there.

Recent Dish on Heidegger here.

(Image: Sketch of Heidegger via Renaud Camus)

Haute But Reheated, Ctd

The new French law demanding transparency on whether restaurant dishes are homemade continues to cause controversy. Marc Naimark points out that the law assumes ready-made as the default:

If you’re the kind of consumer who likes to know where your food comes from, this might sound like a pretty good idea, but au contraire: This law is as flawed as they come.

The logo itself comprises one problem with the law: It requires that all homemade dishes be identified, under penalty of a fine of up to 300,000 euros and two years in jail. That’s right: If you dare make real food without labeling it as such, you can go to jail. The fact that identifying homemade food as such is not an option but an obligation strikes everyone I’ve spoken to here in Paris as nonsensical. How fair is it that the burden of compliance lies on those offering real food—the people this law is supposed to protect—rather than the purveyors of factory-made food? (It’s worth noting that those hefty fines are in fact not likely to be applied: The country’s consumer protection inspectors are already overworked, and past menu labeling efforts have gone mostly unenforced.)

Naimark adds this “shocking” tidbit:

Chefs need not make their own stocks and basic sauces. French cooking is founded on its sauces: How can a cook unwilling or unable to prepare his own sauces claim to be making quality food?

Those still reeling from the news that French food isn’t all lovingly crafted from scratch – and, consequently, that those amazing Parisian meals may just have been a welcome respite from a day of touring the city – may take some comfort in the following WSJ story about the state of Gallic school cuisine. Christina Passariello and Marion Halftermeyer report from Paris:

Baptiste gingerly tasted a puff pastry with the tip of his tongue before squishing up his face in disgust. The 2½ year-old gastronome doesn’t like cream.

“I don’t want to try the berry,” added Emy, crossing her toddler arms across her chest.

In France, a country obsessed with good eating, even food for junior must be gourmet. [Jamila] Aissaoui was one of 14 day-care cooks participating in a recent bake-off in Paris. The best recipes will be published in a cookbook and could enter the repertoire of four-course meals that are served to more than 33,000 children under the age of three at the city’s day-care centers. …

Public schools and day-care centers see it as part of their educational mission to teach children—with the help of chefs like Ms. Aissaoui—to eat a diet as broad as it is balanced. Crèches, as French day-care centers are known, serve children as young as 1 year-old sophisticated ingredients such as leeks, Roquefort cheese and dark chocolate, to encourage adventurous palates.

The Best Of The Dish Today

Volunteers Continue To Plant Ceramic Poppies At Tower Of London

A reader says it best about where I’m now at with respect to Israel/Palestine:

You quote Goldblog:

A moderate-minded Palestinian who watches Israel expand its settlements on lands that most of the world believes should fall within the borders of a future Palestinian state might legitimately come to doubt Israel’s intentions.

This is really the whole Israeli-Palestinian problem in a nutshell. For 47 of my 56 years, Israel has occupied the West Bank and Gaza.  (Yes, Israel “withdrew” from Gaza some time ago, but it is still very much Israel’s captive.)  In modern times, there is no single other example of a nation that supposedly shares “western” values sustaining such a long occupation of another people.  Yes, Israel has a right to defend itself.  Yes, Israel has every right to Smoke trails over Gaza cityquestion whether it has a partner to make peace.  Of course I don’t trust Hamas.   Of course the rockets merit a vigorous no-nonsense response.  But one question sticks in my mind about the position of Israel: If Israel really wanted peace, why does it keep building those darn settlements?

Every answer I’ve ever heard – the irrelevant “there never really was a Palestinian state on this land”, the hopeless “even if Israel did that what makes you think they’d suddenly change their stripes?”, or the more limited “construction is for the most part only expansion of existing settlements anyway”, whatever – all of them only go so far as to try to justify why Israel should be permitted to continue to build.  It doesn’t explain why it is a good idea for Israel to continue to build.  

Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.  And in that sense, there is no justification I have ever heard for the settlements that one can reconcile with trying to make the two state solution a reality, or indeed even with leaving it open as a possibility.   Just the opposite.  Until there is an answer to that question, in my mind, Israel cannot and will not be guilt-free.  Maybe if those of us who love Israel but think it has lost its way focused on that one simple question until it is answered, we might get somewhere.

That’s where I’m at as well. At some point, the denials and equivocations and diversions and distractions fade away to that core reality: why are they continuing to settle the West Bank? It empowers Hamas, it weakens the Palestinian Authority, it is a constant grinding of salt into an open wound.

The Israelis had a golden opportunity with Barack Obama’s presidency to make a historic peace; and they didn’t just throw it away, they treated the US president with contempt for even trying and now cast ugly, public insults at the secretary of state. If the settlements had been reversed, if Abbas and Fayyad had been given the autonomy they needed, this war in Gaza would appear as something very different. It would be much simpler to condemn Hamas’ extremism, if there was clearly another way forward. But Netanyahu – because of the settlements – has blocked any way forward. The Palestinians have two options: bombardment and blockade or the humiliation of more settlements. Which is why I have come to the conclusion these past six years that Greater Israel is the goal, that nothing else really matters, and anyone who doesn’t see that is a useful idiot.

Today, in non-war-and-dead children coverage, we looked forward to an app that will guide you to a scenic route across town; we celebrated the better late than never endorsement of legal weed by the NYT (by the way, try watching the David Gregory segment on the question yesterday without needing to toke from the instant nausea); and cheered a new study on sponsored content that proves it’s deceptive to readers, great for advertisers for only a while, and damaging to publications for ever. I also happened to love the window view today – from Buffalo.

The most popular post of the day was The Lie Behind The War; followed by Why Am I Moving Left?

A few of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them here.  You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 19 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. One writes:

Andrew, you and I don’t always agree. But today I became a paid subscriber. This post alone – “Why Am I Moving Left?” – was worth the $20. It is what I have been posting and commenting on, over and over, to anyone who will listen, for three years. As someone who once would have been considered a pro-business Centrist and registered Independent, there is absolutely no way I can comprehend anyone can feel any sense of pride and honor in identifying as a Republican in the current climate. Just the thought causes a disconnect. And like you, it isn’t me that changed. Thanks for speaking for me.

See you in the morning.

(Photos: Yeoman Serjeant Bob Loughlin admires a section of an installation entitled ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’ by artist Paul Cummins, made up of 888,246 ceramic poppies in the moat of the Tower of London, to commemorate the First World War on July 28, 2014 in London, England. Each ceramic poppy represents an allied victim of the First World War and the display is due to be completed by Armistice Day on November 11, 2014. By Oli Scarff/Getty Images; Smoke trails over Gaza city after Israeli shelling on July 25, 2014. By Ashraf Amra/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.) Update from a reader:

Sad to have to make this correction, but less than a million ceramic poppies only represents the death toll of soldiers from the British Empire. Russia had twice that many again. Even France had close to a million and a half. It would take more than the moat around the Tower to hold enough poppies for all the lives lost on the Allied side. It’s a fabulous installation, though.