Weekend Jolt: Israel Didn’t Start the Fire

WITH JUDSON BERGER

October 05 2024

Israel Didn't Start the Fire

Dear Weekend Jolter,

The Israelis are on a streak of vengeance so mercilessly effective and innovative they make John Wick look like a tit-for-tat prankster.

But with the region seemingly on the brink of an even wider war, Israel's critics continue to portray the nation as the primary instigator and inflamer. To the contrary, the besieged country is reacting, not provoking, even now. That it has responded with ferocity and tactical brilliance these last several weeks does not change the fact that, nearly one year after October 7, Israel is waging a multi-front war in response to the provocations of outside forces.

Hamas committed a massacre across southern Israel a year ago, raping and mutilating and hostage-taking along the way. As a result, Ismail Haniyeh is dead and the group's leadership is decimated. Hezbollah launched 8,000 rockets at Israel and forced tens of thousands from their homes. As a result, Hassan Nasrallah and other top commanders are dead, and thousands of operatives will go back to not ever using pagers. Iran has been pulling the strings on this torment for years, and this week it launched another barrage of missiles into Israel. As a result, Israel has vowed to respond, "in the time and place that we choose." When it does, Israel can expect the global condemnation to which it has become accustomed. But Mark Wright explains why Israel is forced, once again, to act:

For the second time in six months, the Islamic Republic of Iran has shown that it has ballistic missiles with enough reach to hit targets protected by Israel's air defenses and that, critically, it has the will to use them. And Iran is now — right now — a threshold nuclear state. . . .

However, I fully expect Israel to now execute a campaign to destroy the Iranian nuclear program. This may include air and missile strikes against targets in Iran. The Israelis will want to send a very public and very visible message that it is a bad idea to shoot missiles at Israeli cities. Deterrence must be restored.

As Phil Klein writes, Israel's measured response to the last such attack, earlier this year, "clearly did not have sufficient deterrent effects." Any expectation that Israel should continue to absorb thousands of rocket and missile attacks from Hezbollah and Iran, and maybe the occasional ground invasion from the Gaza Strip, is an unrealistic and irrational one. Yet Israel faces opprobrium from the West for its retaliation, especially the Hezbollah beeper blasts. John Brennan judged that this was not an acceptable form of warfare. Leon Panetta called it a "form of terrorism." AOC accused Israel of "clearly and unequivocally" violating international humanitarian law. As Noah Rothman writes, "Their problem is that Israel won't roll over and die." Israel, Andy McCarthy often observes, is assessed a competence penalty.

There is no question that what has unfolded since October 7, 2023, is a humanitarian tragedy, for civilians across borders caught up in the close-quarters chaos and horror and upheaval this war has brought. The ubiquitous calls for "cease-fire" in Western nations and on the front lawns of their suburbs are understandable in this sense. But, as Andy writes, the surest path to a lasting peace is an Israeli victory, preferably a swift and decisive one — as opposed to a pause that will "enable terrorists and their state sponsors to regroup for future murder, mayhem, and repression of civilian populations."

These are not organizations inclined to honor cease-fires one minute longer than is convenient for them. In August, NPR aired a revealing interview with a Hamas leader in Qatar who said he has no regrets about October 7, and would only acknowledge "mistakes" arising from Israel's lack of preparedness to blunt their assault. "Maybe this has led to some mistakes or had led to some steps which was not part of this operation," he said. In other words, the leadership of Hamas thought Israel would do a better job stopping its fighters from committing atrocities.

The past several weeks' operations leave no doubt that Israel's security apparatus does not intend to risk another disaster of this kind. Israel's leaders are acting on a compressed timetable because they know they have to — as a matter of survival, but also under the weight of political and diplomatic pressures. As NR's editorial on Nasrallah notes, "The Israelis are acting fast because they know their supporters in the West, who stand as much to gain from Hezbollah's decimation as Israel does, don't have the stomach for a protracted counterterrorism operation. Israel's victories have come in short succession out of sheer necessity."

One year later, those victories could achieve something lasting. "The mathematical balance of power in the Middle East seems to have shifted, in a matter of days, against Iran," Jeff Blehar writes. Richard Goldberg, with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, argues that Israel is finally executing a victory strategy to defeat Iran and its terror axis, and its "logical conclusion . . . is one that would be not just a win for Israel but a major achievement for American grand strategy."

President Biden, in urging Benjamin Netanyahu to pull his punches after the last Iranian missile attack, reportedly told him to "take the win." The West, in witnessing how effectively Israel has struck back at Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, pounding two U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations and one U.S.-designated state sponsor of terrorism which is also one of the most destabilizing forces on the planet, should do the same.

NAME. RANK. LINK.

EDITORIALS

On the veep debate: J. D. Vance's Big Night

More on the Iran missile attack: Iran's Ballistic-Missile Attack Is a Failure of Democratic Appeasement

The Harris campaign has filled out the policy details, but something's still missing: Kamala Harris's Video-Game Economy

ARTICLES

Jim Geraghty: Tim Walz Loses His Bubble Wrap

Ryan Mills: A Confident J. D. Vance Keeps Tim Walz on His Heels in First and Only Vice-Presidential Debate

Audrey Fahlberg: J. D. Vance Defies Media Caricature with Polite First Impression

Andrew McCarthy: Jack Smith's Damning, Political, and Legally Flawed J6 Filing against Trump

Brittany Bernstein: No, Marcellus Williams Was Not 'Lynched'

Andrew Stuttaford: John Kerry against the First Amendment: Saying the Quiet Part Aloud

James Lynch: Soros-Backed Group Wins Biden Administration Approval for Takeover of 200 Radio Stations

Fred Bauer: Kamala Harris's Attack on the Filibuster Puts 'Democracy on the Ballot'

Caroline Downey: Trans Inmate Medical Procedures Cost Washington State $500,000 since 2020

Jack Butler: The Useful Lessons from Covid's Weirdness

David Zimmermann: Israel Bars U.N. Chief from Setting Foot in Country over Anti-Israel Bias

Dan McLaughlin: The Hit King Is Dead. Long Live the Hit King

Christie Hebert & Dylan Moore: Government Overreach Is a Blight upon Property Rights

Abigail Anthony: A Terrifying Journey through Cosmo

CAPITAL MATTERS

A Dominic Pino special, on the (tentatively resolved) dockworkers' strike: That's Just How We Do Things Here

LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.

Armond White curses The Damned: Destroying America from Inside the Movies

Brian Allen, on what he calls the most heartening arts story in America: Lynnewood Hall: America's Versailles Makes a Comeback

EXCERPTS: MORE FUN THAN A HAYRIDE, NOT AS FUN AS A CORN MAZE, JUST RIGHT

The pendulum swung once more this week in the aftermath of a 2024 debate — almost certainly, the last of the season. J. D. Vance more than made up for his running mate's pet-focused performance in September, though he, like, Trump, still can't talk straight on 2020/January 6. Jim Geraghty looks at what happened on the other side, with Walz:

Being a Democratic statewide official in a deep-blue state ranks among the easiest jobs in America. Once you've won your primary — which can be hard fought and nasty — you've got that job until you choose to retire, or until you are term-limited out. It's extremely unlikely you'll lose a subsequent primary, because while neither party tosses out incumbents much, Democrats almost never do it. (That's usually the case down ticket as well; of the 2,214 Democratic state legislators who ran for reelection this year, 98.5 percent won their primaries.)

What's more, your state's media will often be a wind at your back. Your gaffes will rarely matter; scandals, mistakes, and policy failures will be explained away; you'll always have the fundraising advantage unless you're challenged by a self-funding billionaire; and no matter how bad you are, the biggest names in your state's media world will always endorse you for reelection. What are they going to do, vote for a Republican?

Democratic statewide officials in deep-blue states lose their jobs so rarely, they might as well have tenure. They play the game of politics on easy mode.

The 2024 Democratic ticket features two figures shaped by the political cultures of their deep-blue states. Kamala Harris's lone competitive general election came in 2010, the first time she ran for state attorney general. Tim Walz's last competitive election came in his 2016 House race. Since then, neither one has had to break a sweat in a general election, unless you want to count Harris's role in the 2020 presidential election.

The Washington Post's Dylan Wells recently called Walz "a surprisingly bubble-wrapped campaigner." . . .

Last night, Walz's inexperience with tough races and tough questions showed. Once the Bubble Wrap came off, he was supposed to demonstrate toughness, a steely spine, a righteous anger over Republicans' outrages, and the strong will of a man who's ready to be commander in chief. Instead, Walz looked and sounded like he was made of Nerf. . . .

The Minnesota governor looked like a guy who had no expectation of being on a nationally televised debate stage three months ago, and who realized early in the night that the moment was too big for him. His default facial expression is one of worry; he does not have a commanding presence. He looked down to take notes so often, someone on social media asked if he was working on a crossword puzzle.

You'll have to read the whole thing to get the full effect — but Dominic Pino puts in plain terms the madness of our ports and dockworkers’ arrangements:

Imagine you're on a trip in a foreign country. You get off the plane and need to go down to the ground level of the airport to catch a taxi. You follow the signs to an elevator to take you there, and you discover the elevator still has a human operator. How charming, you think, and you smile as you tell the operator to take you down to the ground floor.

Then, you arrive at your hotel. You check in, and the receptionist directs you to the elevator — which also has a human operator. What lovely customer service, you think, as you wish him a good night while exiting to your room on the 19th floor.

You have a packed day ahead of you, so you get up early to get breakfast. Around 6:15 a.m., you head to the elevator, which has a sign on it informing you that the elevator does not open until 7:00 a.m.

What you found charming yesterday, today leaves you a little perturbed. "I'm fully capable of pushing the buttons without an operator," you say to yourself. You don't really want to go down and then back up 19 flights of stairs first thing in the morning, so you decide to just burn time until 7:00.

At 7:00, on your way down in the elevator, you ask the operator, "I'm not from here, can you explain why the elevator wasn't opened this morning? Where I'm from, you can use them basically whenever."

The operator replies, "Those are the rules. I don't want to have to be awake in the middle of the night to run a few trips up and down." . . .

Your trip is done and it's time to go back to the airport. You check out of your hotel, and you see on the receipt an "elevator service charge." It takes you a second to mentally convert the charge to dollars, but when you do, you realize that the hotel was charging you about $15 each time you used the elevator.

Now you're upset, and, perhaps unwisely, you take it out on the hotel receptionist. "You never said you were charging me each time I used the elevator! I have never, in all my years of traveling, been charged like that! What is going on?"

The receptionist answers, "I know it's unusual in other places, and I'm sorry it wasn't clear to you beforehand, but it's how we do things here. The elevator operator has to eat, too, you know."

"I know he has to eat, but couldn't he eat by doing something useful instead of getting paid a bunch of money to do stuff technology does everywhere else on the planet? I can't believe this country has such a backward system in place to do something so basic."

That's roughly how people from foreign countries should think about the stranglehold that dockworkers' unions have on U.S. ports, which are some of the least efficient in the world and can be shut down for a strike during a hurricane recovery by union bosses who turned down a 50 percent wage increase and promise to "cripple you." But that's just how we do things here.

Brittany Bernstein's Forgotten Fact Checks column this week looks closely at the case of Marcellus Williams, and at what the media are getting wrong:

An opinion essay for The Hill called the execution a "tragedy" and dubbed it a "legally sanctioned murder."

Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian asked, "What kind of country would kill Marcellus Williams despite the doubts about his conviction?"

Williams died by lethal injection in Missouri last week, 23 years after he was first convicted of the murder of Felicia Gayle, a former newspaper reporter who was stabbed to death in her own home.

Gayle was home alone taking a shower in the summer of 1998 when Williams entered her house by breaking a window. As she headed downstairs after her shower, Williams attacked, stabbing and cutting her 43 times with a butcher knife he'd grabbed from the kitchen. He left the knife in her neck when he fled the scene, though he took off with Gayle's purse and her husband's laptop.

He put a jacket over his blood-soaked shirt and headed to pick up his girlfriend, Laura Asaro, after the killing. Asaro would later recall asking Williams why he was wearing a jacket in August. When he removed the jacket to reveal his bloody shirt and scratches on his neck, he said he had been in a fight. But when Asaro discovered the stolen laptop and purse in the car the next day, she confronted Williams, who confessed to the killing but threatened to harm Asaro and her family if she told anyone.

Williams was arrested on unrelated charges just two weeks later. Williams's cellmate, Henry Cole, later told police Williams had bragged about killing Gayle.

When Cole was released from prison in June 1999, he made police aware of Williams's confession. The police then got in touch with Asaro, who shared her story as well.

Police searched Williams's car and found items belonging to Gayle and found the stolen laptop in the custody of a man who said he had bought the laptop from Williams. . . .

More recently, Williams's supporters had hoped that DNA evidence could bolster the convicted killer's claims of innocence. Along the way, the cause received the support of St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell.

Bell, a progressive prosecutor who himself has pledged to never seek the death penalty, filed a motion claiming that new DNA tests had exonerated Williams. . . . For all the attention the "new DNA" received in the media, the testing actually showed that the murder weapon had been mishandled before the 2001 trial, thereby contaminating the evidence with the DNA of an assistant prosecuting attorney and an investigator who had handled the murder weapon without gloves prior to the trial. And Cole, Williams's former cellmate, testified that Williams had said he was wearing gloves when he committed the murder, which would explain the lack of his DNA on the knife.

CODA

I've got another from the Steven Wilson archives for you. (The "yays" are deafening; please, everybody, simmer down.) "Rock Bottom" is a relatively new one, a power duet, off an album he released a year ago, which I'm still listening to, unpacking, and enjoying. In the song, he collaborates once more with Israeli musician Ninet Tayeb, whose vocal cords get as close as a human being’s can to squeezing out a pinch harmonic, no strings attached. Listen to her ring in the guitar solo toward the end.

Meantime, from another Wilson project called Blackfield, here's something a bit poppier. Just for fun.

Have a nice weekend.