Today I wanted to share with you a few thoughts about history — both the history of the Middle East and the story that is consuming a lot of our politics in the US in these final weeks of 2023, as well as history generally, its centrality and sometimes its irrelevance.

I’m going to cover this in two ways. I’m going to give you a list of books that are helpful to understanding the origins of all of this. They’re both very good and helpful reads. They also shed some light on where I come from in all this because I come at this grounded in a specific part of the historiography and with my own set of personal and ideological commitments. The other part is my recent email conversation with fellow community member, TPM Reader ME. I’ll start with that.

This may seem like old news to some people. But I wanted to go back and reread some of the initial reactions to the massacres in southern Israel on October 7th. They are notable in themselves. And I read at least some versions of them in real time. But I felt the need to reread them now to understand the progression of events in North America over the last 5 weeks if not necessarily in Israel/Palestine.

National Students for Justice in Palestine is the national umbrella group which supports and coordinates messaging for over 200 Students for Justice in Palestine campus groups across North America. 

On the day after the October 7th attacks, the organization issued this statement as either their first or one of their first statements on the massacres in southern Israel.

Several times I’ve noted this key oddity of the Israel-Hamas war: it is certainly the gravest crisis in Israel in a half century and yet it is being led by an Israeli leader who is now overwhelmingly discredited within his own country. And there is no sign that that public rejection is fading as the war enters its second month. Polls continue to tell the same story. Indeed, last week the right wing daily that was literally founded to support Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel HaYom, called on Netanyahu to resign at the close of the war. The difference is that the costs and dangers of Netanyahu’s continued rule are growing graver and appearing in a starker relief.

One confusion for some in the United States is the belief that the intensity and ferocity of Israel’s response to the events of October 7th is tied to Netanyahu himself. That is not the case. While public opinion is complicated and there are disagreements over strategy, the current war has overwhelming support within Israel. It’s quite unlikely that any head of government who seems at all plausible would be prosecuting it in a different way.

To the extent there are disagreements it’s over what comes afterwards. What happens in Gaza? Who controls Gaza? Is it again governed by some kind of Israeli military occupation? Is it governed by the Palestinian Authority? Is it governed by some kind of international force?

Tuesday was another example of an election where polls had raised a lot of doubts about the environment for Democrats. But election results told a different story. Democrats ended up doing quite well. Of course “polls” covers a lot of ground. The “polls” that have atmospherically sent shivers down Democrats’ spines and launched a thousand media think pieces tend to be ones not about Democrats or signature Democratic issues but President Biden. Indeed, just as the results were starting to come in Tuesday night CNN published a poll showing Biden down four points to Trump. So are the polls wrong? Or is reality wrong?

With these questions in mind, it was with no little curiosity that I read this piece by Nate Cohn in The New York Times: Tuesday Was Great for Democrats. It Doesn’t Change the Outlook for 2024.

A couple pod episodes ago I told Kate Riga that I didn’t quite understand what was going on in the Virginia legislative races. It was being treated as a very close run thing in which Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin stood a very real chance of getting the full control of the state legislature he needed to pass a 15 week abortion ban. Was that really plausible since Virginia is basically a blue state, with maybe a few shades of purple, and abortion bans have been a loser pretty much everywhere? As she rightly explained, that was the consensus. But it was more vibes than data. There wasn’t much polling. (There seldom is for state legislative races since news organization don’t have the incentive or the money to poll multiple key races.) It was mainly based on the continuing perception of Youngkin as an electoral golden boy who managed to win the governorship in what is now a reliably blue state.

And yet, he put it all on the line and got … well, smoked. He didn’t capture the Senate and Democrats have also taken back the House of Delegates. In electoral terms, abortion remains a way that Republicans abort themselves. And a lot of them keep doing it. Moths to a flame, really. And here we are.

As with my post yesterday, this is a notebook of observations about various issues tied to the Israel-Hamas war.

Invisible War

As I noted yesterday, what amazes me is how little we know about what is happening on the ground in the battle between Israel and Hamas. The US press is filled with reporting on the domestic repercussions of the conflict; there’s lots of reporting on the civilian death toll in Gaza. Those issues deserve lots of attention. But Israel’s core goal is to physically eliminate Hamas’s de facto army, usually estimated to number around 30,000 militants; its arsenal of weaponry; and its complex of tunnels. It is very hard to find much solid information, from either side, on how much success they are having accomplishing that.

As many of you have likely seen, over the weekend The New York Times and Siena released a poll showing that President Biden is running behind Donald Trump in all the big swing states with the exception of Wisconsin. Meanwhile a “generic Democrat” is polling ahead of Trump basically everywhere. Not surprisingly this has again released flurries of questions about whether Biden should be running at all or whether he should be replaced with another candidate younger and with less baggage. TPM Reader LD wrote in to ask, “Is TPM’s position still that we need to sit down and shut up if we have doubts about Biden’s appeal to the coalition necessary to win?”

Let me first respond to LD’s grievancy gripe. The dynamics of the online world make us all reflexively assume the posture of fed up little guy in a battle with the elites. But the truth is that I never said any such thing. (By the way, LD and I talked it over and now I think we’re back to being best pals.) What I said is that I don’t think anyone but Joe Biden will be the nominee and I don’t think we have any realistic way to change that. (Just why I think that you can see in the earlier posts.) So I’m focused on getting this guy reelected rather than imagining some alternative, usually fantastical scenario. As I told LD in my initial, slightly volcanic response, by all means go out and advocate for Biden to step aside. I’ll be here in what I take to be the real world trying to get him reelected. I don’t control people. I certainly don’t control Biden. This is just my interpretation of the situation before us.

But this isn’t the whole story.

It’s hard to analyze public questions with dispassion and wisdom in today’s brutal cacophony of social media driven public conversations. It’s hard to do that when you bring deeply felt and even personal commitments to the questions at hand, though I seldom write about things I don’t have strong beliefs about. I wanted to share a few thoughts about the current arguments about anti-Semitism and Zionism.

There are a lot of American Jews at this moment who feel like they are seeing a wave of unconcealed anti-Semitism that they haven’t seen in their lifetimes.

Is that really true?

As the Israel-Hamas war grinds forward an emanation of that conflict is playing out in the United States with protests and counter-protests, fights over symbolic public actions, manifestos and public letters. Each in turn spurs a public debate about just what was going on in this or that social media viral video. Social media amplifies and accelerates every cut and thrust. What is anti-Semitic, what is simply protests against a war with harrowing numbers of civilian casualties? We see the same well-worn public debates, or rather yelling matches, about what’s anti-Zionism and what’s anti-Semitism, whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

It may help to start with some definitions and history, their relevance and often irrelevance.

Recently I’ve been thinking about a story I first read decades ago. In his mid-50s Winston Churchill wrote an autobiography covering his life through his mid-20s: “My Early Life, A Roving Commission.” Churchill was born well past third base. He was the nephew of Lord Marlborough, one of the most exalted British noblemen, and ended up a commoner only by a small accident of birth. But in his own world he was something of a reject. And that gives his account a sympathetic or emotional approachability it might otherwise not have.

Churchill’s father found him a disappointment, not bright enough for anything but a career in the army. It was a judgment he took little trouble to hide. When Randolph Churchill sent his eldest son to the Sandhurst military academy, the young Churchill thought his father had great expectations for him as a heroic warrior. He only later realized his father doubted he had any ability for anything else. Churchill’s mother, an American heiress, also had little time for him and spent much of her life in serial affairs. Only later did she take much interest in him, using her accumulated friendships with powerful men to give him critical assists in his improbable ascent. So Churchill is packed off to military school and ends up in India on his first deployment.

In India, he’s generally bored. He begins reading a lot and gets it in his head to be a journalist. Over the next few years, in large part through his mother’s connections and their deepening relationship, he gets a mix of military leaves, postings and journalistic assignments that lead him on a kind of grand tour of the conflict zones of the world. Over a couple years he’s in Cuba for the Cuban war of independence; he’s in Africa for the reconquest of the Sudan after the Mahdi rebellion; he catches one military expedition on what is now the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

I saw a new poll out today which reports that 70% of Jewish Israelis says Benjamin Netanyahu should resign from office as soon as the war ends. The same poll of Arab Israelis is currently in the field. There’s no doubt it will push that number higher. That represents a major deterioration from the first week or so after the October 7th massacres which had already shown a dramatic decline in public support for Netanyahu’s government. What does this mean exactly?

From following the news closely and talking to many Israelis it seems clear to me that this is about more than accountability for a security failure: ‘You’re Mr. Security. You had one job. You failed.’ There seems to be a much more thoroughgoing collapse of all sorts of basic assumptions about security and whether the status quo can ever really work. Turning on Netanyahu doesn’t mean any lack of support for prosecuting the current war. Fighting the current war seems to have all but universal support among Jewish Israelis though there are, of course, differences of opinion on how to prosecute it. The real questions are what comes afterwards.