The Myth of Israeli Competence

Plus The Idiot Heresy of Cultural Appropriation and other items

“The army does not prepare itself for things it thinks are impossible.”

—Yaakov Amidror, former advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu

I once asked a member of Mossad which country in the Middle East had the best intelligence service—aside from Israel, of course. “Iran,” he said immediately. Why? I asked.

“Because we trained them,” he said, referring to the Savak, which had been the Shah’s spy service.

And that was the myth, from the 1948 war to Fauda: The Israelis were invincible. They were tough and smart, technological light-years ahead of their competition and furious defenders of their national sovereignty. The IDF was the best military in the region. Mossad and Shin Bet were world-class: They had Iran and Syria wired. They could pull off targeted assassinations and surgical strikes, like the one that took out Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor. Their vigilance and protection of the homeland was a given, sacrosanct. At least, until October 7…

The New York Times has laid out just how shockingly inept the Israeli security services were leading up to that day, and during the massacre itself. I assumed that it was just a momentary lapse. The Israelis had been caught napping before—by Egypt in 1973, for example—but quickly recouped. The IDF would go into Gaza, root Hamas out of the tunnels, dispose of the leadership and arms caches, and then leave; surely, they had a plan for this sort of contingency.

Three months later, you’ve got to wonder: The IDF has seemed more Goliath than David in Gaza. The fog of this war is particularly thick; much of the fighting has taken place underground, in the tunnels. It’s impossible to know what, if anything, the Israelis have accomplished just yet. But the growing skepticism of US intelligence suggests that the war hasn’t gong as well as the IDF thought it might. And there is an even worse-case scenario: that the goal was to simply to pummel Gaza, in lurching Goliathan fashion, and force its residents to leave. I’ve seen no indication, from anywhere, that Netanyahu’s stated goal of eliminating Hamas is plausible.

Perhaps it’s time to shed the myth of Israeli competence. Perhaps Netanyahu’s alliance with the least rational sectors of Israeli society—the looney-tune West Bank settlers and the ultra-Orthodox Heredim—has been amateur hour, corrupt, fantastical and stupid. Perhaps the statements of two extremist Cabinet Ministers—the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich—cited by Michelle Goldberg and others, are the real plan: to depopulate Gaza, from 2 million to 200,000. If true, and if Netanyahu concurs, that would be genocide, the mass displacement of a people. (I’ve been annoyed by the lefty Hamas-lovers who’ve argued that Israel’s retaliation in Gaza was genocidal; it wasn’t, it was simply, sadly war.)

Even if the war is more successful than it appears to be, it now seems obvious that we’ve reached a crucial moment in Israeli history: the long-term future of the country is at stake. The settler fantasy of a one-state solution is dead: there will be no “river to the sea” nation, either Israeli or Palestinian. Lest there be a holocaust beyond imagining, involving unthinkable weapons, there will have to be a two state solution—and that will require new leadership on both sides. It’s a long shot, but the alternative is too awful to imagine. There are three components to a long-term peace, unlikely as that goal may be:

First, Netanyahu has to go. The sooner, the better. His popularity stands at about 15% in the most recent poll; his tough-guy game has been played and it has failed. One hopes he isn’t prolonging the war just to remain in power—and out of jail—but I wouldn’t put anything past the guy. Israel needs to be governed by a centrist coalition if it’s going to survive (the pathetic detritus of the Israeli left can be part of it, too). The new government will have to take dramatic steps to limit the West Bank settlers; it will have to acknowledge that any legitimate Palestinian state will have independent, credible leadership, with whom Israelis may not always feel comfortable—and that the current borders are untenable. Land swaps will be necessary, possibly trading established settlements on the West Bank and giving up chunks of land adjacent to Gaza. A divided Jerusalem will be the capital of both countries; the Old City religious sites will be under international control.

Second, Mahmoud Abbas has to go. There will have to be new elections, new leaders on the Palestinian side. Some interesting names are beginning to bubble up—names I first heard ten years ago, before Abbas cancelled the elections. A slate of candidates was being floated back then: Marwan Barghouti at the top of the ticket, Salam Fayyed as chief bureaucrat, Mohammed Dahlan as security chief. This seemed wildly creative and impossible: the charismatic Barghouti—called the “Palestinian Mandela” by his supporters, though that’s probably a reach—was, and is, serving five life sentences in Israeli prison for his activities in the Second Intifada; he would have to be released. I interviewed Fayyed when he was running the West Bank for the Palestinian Authority—until Abbas fired him for being too effective. Fayyed is a solid technocrat, trained at Texas A&M, not very charismatic, but there was a real sense of optimism and economic progress on the West Bank when he was in charge. Dahlan would run security. I had a memorable lunch with him in Abu Dhabi—Abbas had banished Dahlan from Palestine. He was a tough guy, a muscle guy, but he had a vision: a detente between Israel and Arab states was coming. He didn’t want Palestinians to be lost in the shuffle. He was hoping the Saudis and Gulfies would insist on a Palestinian state as the price for a regional peace treaty; and that they would help with Palestine’s economic development. Those were the days when people actually talked about Gaza as the new Singapore. And it could have been—if Hamas had been as concerned about Palestinian prosperity as it was blinded by anger against Israel. These three—Barghouti, Fayyed and Dahlan—may not turn out to be the eventual leaders of an independent Palestinian state, but Israel is going to have to realize that people like these, moderates who have credibility with the Palestinian people and who can deal with the remnants of Hamas, are going to be necessary to any solution. The Israelis will have to live with a Palestinian leadership closer to the Arafat style (but more responsible than Yasser), leaders who aren’t patsies…and Israel is going to have live with a Palestine that is actually a country, not a collection of Bantustans.

Third, the United States and Israel’s Arab neighbors will have to play an active diplomatic and financial role in making this happen. And not just the U.S. government. The American Jewish community has to insist on a two-state solution. The powerful American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has to wean itself off its craven, unquestioning support of Netanyahu and his government. It has to be vehement about a two-state solution. It has to learn something from the Gaza disaster: if Israel is to survive, it has to change. The Palestinians aren’t going anywhere.

Cultural Aggravation

Sanity Goddess and I made a quick trip to Boston for a look at the John Singer Sargent show at the Museum of Fine Arts. It was extraordinary, but Sargent—with his incredible emotional precision and sense of fabric, shadow and color—is always a thrill. Things were going along just fine until we got to a room with portraits of theatrical performers, several in Asian garb. The wall plates noted that many people now believe these costumes were a form of cultural appropriation—the theft of indigenous arts by western oppressors. “That’s not cultural appropriation,” Sanity Goddess noted, taking the words from my mouth. “It’s cultural appreciation.” (We’ve been married a long time.)

I found the insertion of left-academic dogma into an aesthetic experience annoying. Sargent wasn’t an oppressor; he was an artist. And yes, yes the Dutch colonizers who brought to Europe the Indonesian dancers who inspired Sargent—and the British East India Company that plundered India—were thuggish, racist marauders, but that’s a different story for a different show. The fact that the exhibit’s curators felt the need to include the prevailing, stultifying campus righteousness into the show is an example of just how witlessly pervasive illiberality has become. (I’ve been on the record in the past as vehemently in favor of cultural cross-pollination—the genius of American music is a prime example.)

Gay Out

And on a related note, I’ve been amazed—well, not really—and disappointed by the reaction of some sectors of the black community to the firing of Claudine Gay as President of Harvard. Al Sharpton, who has shown recent signs of sanity on issues like crime and education, unleashed some old-fashioned trash talk: “President Gay’s resignation is about more than a person or a single incident. This is an attack on every Black woman in this country who’s put a crack in the glass ceiling.”

Actually, Gay—whose academic record was not incandescent even without the plagiarism—was hired as Harvard’s President for one reason: because she was black, a successful functionary in the perverse Diversity, Equity and Inclusion assault on merit. There are plenty of other black academics who have the intellectual chops to be Harvard’s President—Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Randall Kennedy come to mind immediately, and they’re right on campus. The hiring of less-than-stellar nonwhite candidates to high positions is a form of reverse racism that raises the hackles of political moderates and conservatives; it is easily exploited by right-wing populist extremists. It also does a disservice to those blacks and Latinos and women and gay people who really deserve promotion to the highest positions in the land.

Joe Lelyveld

He was a truly great journalist, editor of The New York Times, now gone at the age of 86. He served in many capacities at the Times, famously as a correspondent in South Africa during Apartheid. Joe only covered one U.S. political campaign and that’s where we became friends. It was the Maryland presidential primary in 1976. California Governor Jerry Brown had parachuted in, a last minute challenge to Jimmy Carter’s candidacy. The governor of Maryland hated Carter and threw his support to Brown, as did Nancy Pelosi’s father and brother, who ran the Baltimore political machine. Lelyveld, Garry Wills and I sat in the back of that peculiar campaign bus, an ironic caucus bemused by the ascetic, mystical Brown wandering through the ethnic precincts. At one point, Lelyveld asked Brown, “What do you think of all this machine support you’re getting in Maryland?”

“In my father’s house,” Brown replied, “there are many machines.” (His father, Pat, was the old-school Democratic governor of California.) Perhaps the most clever answer to a political question I’ve ever heard. We laughed and laughed. Joe was a great traveling companion. I’ll miss him.

Anthony Alvarado

Another loss, at age 81. I met Alvarado in 1983, after he became Superintendent of District 3, the East Harlem public schools. He was an early advocate of school choice, alternative curriculums and mini-schools, anything to seduce kids into learning. He created a school where kids obsessed with sports learned reading and math skills by studying their favorite subject. He took Benjamin Franklin High School, which was graduating practically none of its students, and turned it into three schools—The Manhattan Center For Science and Math. The results were terrific:

Alvarado oversaw a poor, mostly Black and Hispanic district in which the number of children who could read at or above grade level in the district rose to 48 percent in 1982, from 25 percent in 1979. Its rank in reading scores among the city’s 32 community districts rose to 15th from 32nd.

Alvarado taught me that education didn’t have to be an assembly line; it could be customized to meet the interests of the students. His success predicted the arrival of charter schools a decade later. His tenure wasn’t perfect; he had personal problems, which truncated his later run as New York City Schools Chancellor. But I learned a lot from him—especially how exhilarating schools run with intelligence, flexibility and tenacity could be.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/07/divided-america-pop-culture-unity-2024/