However, my edge as a blogger is just not saying things that are obviously ridiculous and thus gaining arbitrage in intra-retardation debates. With that in mind, hero has been extending his campaign to exonerate subjects of high-profile rape-accusations, leading to a split in the pro-Epstein community. Michael Tracey’s argument is summed up here:

Or, as distilled further by a commenter:

1. It is clear that large majorities of the public think that it should be illegal to be like Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Puff Daddy or Russell Brand, that is to say dedicating substantial portions of your life to having sexual intercourse with hundreds of different women.

2. There is a perfectly good utilitarian justification for this. It’s basically impossible to have sex with that many people that quickly and not leave some proportion of them emotionally and spiritually damaged. The simplest way to make sure that your lothario exploits are not leaving a string of wrecked human beings in their wake is to lower the quantity and velocity of your sex life. (An additional reason is that this is demoralising to ordinary guys who struggle to land one woman and maintain her sexual interest if it’s all too out in the open that total jerks are getting multiple beautiful women to put out per day. This contributes to them becoming depressed and/or misogynists.)

3. The problem is that according to the law, as well as generally accepted ethical theory, (a) the only morally and legally relevant aspect of sexual intercourse is consent and (b) women are not emotionally or intellectually weaker than men and do not require special protection from harm caused by consensual intercourse. This leads to increasingly baroque attempts to define women who were willing participants as victims of rape, sex trafficking and other neologisms. This is bad for at least two reasons. First, it degrades the legal process in a way that could potentially spill over into other areas undermining basic civil liberties. Secondly, it leads to people believing that there is far more sex trafficking and rape in elite circles than there actually is, and some of them are going totally potty over this.

4. Consent is an absolutely terrible tool for regulating this sort of sexual behaviour. The ‘consentyness’ of these kind of interactions doesn’t correlate very well with their ‘traumatisingness’. Also, it’s extremely hard to prove whether or not consent happened, and once you move beyond the ‘rape-rape’ scenarios, it’s not clear it even makes sense in light of neuroscience. I don’t want to get all manosphere about the alarming numbers of women who have rape fantasies, but even the good ones don’t want you to gross them out by actually asking.

5. Therefore, if as a society we do not want this behaviour we should just ban it. Pick a number, let’s say 60 as a starting guess, and simply make it illegal to have sex with more than that number of women in any given calendar year.

This is a very good suggestion. One objection is that such a law would be very hard to enforce, but that is no objection at all when comparing it to rape, which is famous for exactly that thing. It would actually be a lot easier to enforce this law, but, crucially, you don’t even need to. No-one actually cares if some lowlife is trawling Tinder for hoes all day, they just don’t want these people to be famous celebrities on telly or friends with powerful politicians. Just as the BBC couldn’t employ Russell Brand if he was openly discussing being a drug dealer because that’s a criminal offence, so if this was the law, he’d either have to scale it back, or they’d have to fire him. And that’s what we all want, so why not just do it? Because you’re a lib? Well, just stop.

So far, we’ve been sticking to moderate and reasonable ideas. The median number of lifetime sexual partners for men in the United States 25-49 is 6.3, so a law like this will have no impact whatsoever on 99% of people unlike expansive definitions of rape that could theoretically lead to millions being imprisoned if their ex decides to be vindictive. However, I do have a controversial suggestion too.

1. In Jewish law, there is no such thing as rape as a criminal offence, but there is such a thing as rape as exempting the woman from criminal responsibility. In the classic example, if a betrothed or married woman has sex with another man, both parties incur the death penalty. If, however, he raped her, only he gets the death penalty. If there is no way to prove whether he raped her or not, then we assume he did. For the same reason it’s hard to prove there wasn’t consent, it’s also hard to prove that there was.

2. Heterosexual anal sex was illegal in most places until recently. It was legalised in the UK in 1994, in the United States as a whole in 2003, in Israel in 1988 (thanks Yitzhak Shamir), New Zealand in 1986, in Singapore in 2008. Only depraved freak-show country, France, legalised it all the way back in 1791.

3. The key Russell Brand allegation concerns anal sex and whether it was consensual in light of the circumstances. I will assume that either you have read the details or don’t want to (good for you if so). In any case, while I’m not 100% sure if anal sex should be illegal, it should definitely be illegal like that. Gross, WTF is wrong with you?

4. It is agreed beyond reasonable doubt that the incident happened. He says it was consensual and she says it wasn’t. Additional evidence points in opposite directions. If the offence being judged is rape, the burden of proof is on prosecution, and one may very reasonably doubt if this was cleared during the trial that ended in his conviction. However, if the offence is deviancy, then it’s easy. He gets 5 years in prison for being a pervert and she says it wasn’t consensual so she doesn’t. That’s the outcome you want, so just legislate it.

As a side-note, the claim that Russell Brand was persecuted for becoming right-wing is basically false. His conversion to Christianity and rightoidism happened after criminal investigations were opened. Before that, he was into generic apolitical health crankery conspiracy. The political angle here is that the Right are such easy marks that they don’t just welcome in someone who is clearly going to imminently crash out (like Kanye West), but even people who are already in the process of crashing out. It would actually be a good thing for the Right if retarded slopulist social media influencers who sell amulets were all put in prison. However, that isn’t going to happen. Even if there was a plan to do it, there are just too many of them anyway. It’s a demand issue, not a supply one.

While we’re at it, I also have a take about the Nvidia guy. On the internet, people are divided about whether he’s a bad person for cheating, or his wife is bad for not being attractive enough to hold his attention. Obviously, the second take is completely depraved. She’s 65 and looks completely fine. The first take, however, is unrealistic. It’s perfectly reasonable to use moral or religious arguments to persuade a guy with $155,000,000,000 net worth to keep to strict monogamous fidelity, even when his wife is old, but it’s not reasonable as a social expectation. If this is really the demand, then he’ll just get divorced. In all historical societies that enforced monogamy, this brute fact of human nature was dealt with by the institution of the ‘mistress’ or ‘concubine’. It’s not what you do if you are aiming for spiritual perfection, but it’s not a lot worse than eating factory-farmed meat.

Therefore, the CIA should assume that every rich citizen who is in possession of sensitive national-security information and flies around the world a lot has three mistresses and he must declare who they are so they can be vetted, or subject him to investigation to find out who they are. You might say that they are already doing this, but obviously they aren’t which is why this is a news story.

That’s all. It’s been a busy week. Starting a new job, wish me luck!

1. Hadash

Strictly speaking, Hadash is not an Arab party, it’s a communist party that rejects the concept of ethnicity as a basis either for a political party or a country. Its origins are in a breakaway faction of the majority-Jewish Maki party, and, while the split in 1965 correlated with ethnicity, it wasn’t predicated on it. To this day, Hadash has a Jewish MK and perhaps 15% of its support is from Jewish voters. What makes Hadash an Arab party is two things. First, it is explicitly committed to anti-Zionism as a founding principle. Secondly, after the introduction of the 3.25% electoral threshold (intended to remove the Arab parties from the Knesset), it has chosen to run as part of the Joint List.

Hadash’s attitude to nationalism is the usual leftist one. Jewish nationalism is illegitimate and so Israel must become a state of all its citizens, with no ethnic favouritism, for example, in immigration policy. Palestinian nationalism, however, is completely fine because [balloon] and, thus, Israel should withdraw from the occupied territories to allow for the creation of a Palestinian state. The two-state solution is one Arab state and one state for everyone. Given the de facto nature of Hadash as an Arab party, this obviously amounts to a policy of self-interest disguised in the language of universalism, a bit like the traditional politics of the Jewish diaspora toward nationalism in general and Zionism in particular.

The core voter base of Hadash is wealthy, educated and secular Israeli Arabs, disproportionately of Christian extraction. It has the highest proportion of PhDs of any party in the Knesset. It is especially strong in Kafr Yasif, Nazareth and Haifa. The core of the party, Rakeh, is Marxist-Leninist, and really Stalinist though it prefers not to emphasise that these days, but from the formation of Hadash in 1977 it has adopted a big-tent policy of including leftist anti-Zionist factions in a united electoral front. Its previous leader, Ayman Odeh, explicitly denied being a communist and identified as a social democrat. Nevertheless, the party (at any rate its communist core) does have some moderate tanky leanings, most notably expressed in supporting Assad during the Syrian Civil War, an extremely unpopular position among Palestinians in general.

While Hadash is the correct name for the party, it is generally known by its Arabic supporters as Al Jabha (‘The Front’)

2. Balad

Balad stands for ‘National Democratic Alliance’ in Hebrew, and the acronym was chosen because it also means ‘homeland’ in Arabic. Even so, Arabs call it Al-Tajammu (‘The Assembly’). It was founded in 1995 to represent the Palestinian nationalist perspective among Israeli Arabs. This was the culmination of a process of ‘Palestinianisation’, which began with re-establishment of ties between Arabs on both sides of the Green Line following 1967 and was facilitated by the relaxation of restrictions on Israeli Arabs travelling abroad and participating in wider Arab culture. If you know about Arab nationalism, you won’t be surprised to find out that the founder was a Christian with a PhD in philosophy from a European university called Azmi Bishara. This was all pretty stupid though. In the 1930s, you could be forgiven for thinking that Arab nationalism was going to revitalise a backwards region and allow ethnoreligious minorities to integrate themselves into cultural dominance. By the 1990s, though, Arab nationalism was a failed experiment, in an advanced stage of circling the drain, so what were Balad on about? Beats me.

Like Hadash, Balad advocates for the abolition of Zionism and full equal rights for Arabs while also creating a separate Palestinian state, so therefore one state for me and one state for us. It’s also kind of borderline communist, and led by highly educated atheists like Jamal Zahalka. That’s what Hadash already is, though, so what’s the point of Balad, and who votes for it?

The answer to the first question is that it dispenses with the universalist rhetoric and commitment to Arab-Jewish cooperation of Hadash and just advocates Arab interests on the grounds of being Arabs. More specifically, it just hates Israel a lot more and supports armed resistance against it. Its aforementioned founder, Azmi Bishara, had to flee the country after investigations were opened into his passing information to Hizb’Allah during wartime. Its most famous MK has been Haneen Zoabi, who took part in one of the Gaza flotillas and just generally ran her mouth all the time about how great terrorists were. In answer to the second question, the social base of Balad is similar to Hadash, but it is more popular in the mixed cities of Ramle, Lod, and Jaffa, which is not a good thing at all, and helps explain why the latter two were the center of the riots that gave Israel its first fully right-wing government. Balad is also somewhat more popular among younger voters, which is also concerning, but the optimistic perspective on that is that people become more moderate as they get older and vote communist instead. Hadash, while theoretically more radical in someways, has an institutionally moderate character, and its communism has a kind of retro Woody Guthry vibe to it.1 Hadash is embedded in the boring stuff like local government and trade unions while choosing Balad is a vote for explicit confrontation with the Israeli state.

Unlike Hadash, Balad supported the opposition during the Syrian Civil War, though this led to an old-school pro-Baathist faction called Kifaḥ to break away. This faction accuses Balad of being Qatari dominated, and, indeed, Bishara, lives in Qatar.

3. Ra’am

Ra’am stands for ‘United Arab List’2 in Hebrew, and is called Al-Muwahhada (‘The United’) in Arabic. As the name implies, it was founded as a union of two parties in 1996. One of these, the Arab Democratic Party, was created by an ex-Labour MK, in order to provide a third way between participation in Zionist political parties and Arab rejectionism, namely pragmatic advocacy for explicitly Arab interests. Its partner was the southern branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Israel which had split from the northern branch over (a) supporting the Oslo Accords (b) participating in Israeli elections and (c) just generally being a bit less mental.

In its early incarnation, Ra’am was a big mess. Its first leader, Abdulmalik Dehamshe, was apparently confused about what political pragmatism is and spent his time in the Knesset trying to be a Muslim version of Balad, supporting suicide bombings, kidnappings and rocket attacks by Hamas. After three elections with him as leader, the party got one seat.3 He got the top job mostly because he was a lawyer with a degree and, unlike the above parties, Ra’am didn’t have a big pool of that. Since then, two things have happened. The first is that, gradually, the Muslim Brotherhood faction came to dominate Ra’am, which is now generally recognised by supporters and opponents to be essentially an Islamist party. The second is, counter-intuitively, that the political approach of the accommodationist Arab Democratic Party became dominant. The combination of these two factors has made it by far the most popular Arab party, and the ability to pursue both goals simultaneously is the achievement of its leader Mansour Abbas.

Abbas is a representative of the wasatiya (moderation, balance) school of Islamism that has separated from the mainline Muslim Brotherhood over being less obnoxious and psychotic and being concerned about not driving countries into the mud the second they take them over. Its equivalents abroad are Zamzam in Jordan, Al Wasat in Egypt and the Movement of Society for Peace in Algeria. The difference is that, while all of these parties support armed resistance to Zionism, Mansour Abbas’ version says that the specific application of wasati thought in Israel is that Muslims should accept they lost, and bargain for their rights through the political process.

Mansour Abbas is an Islamist in every sense of the word, meaning that he seeks to promote a trans-national Sunni orthodoxy that is oblivious or hostile to local custom, doesn’t get bogged down in madhab quarrels, and seeks to raise standards of sharia observance. To gauge how superfrum he is, here’s a picture of him with his wife:

This is, I think, what a lot of American supporters of Israel think Palestinians look like, but you rarely see one dressed like this. Generally, hijabs are colourful, and those who wear them, if they are anything above dirt poor, have a fancy handbag and makeup on. A black jilbab with no adornments is rare. What Mansour Abbas is doing is inverting the traditional role of Islamism in Palestinian politics since Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, the Syrian itinerant preacher who wandered around MENA condemning bid’ah, and then told Palestinians that they would be able to kick out the Zionists if they got serious about Islam. This is the playbook that Hamas used to turn Gaza from a communist to a strict Muslim stronghold. Instead of that, Abbas preaches that if you go to Mosque five times a day and don’t go to shrines, then you can get a good job as a security guard and Israel won’t bulldoze your roof extension.

Right-wingers in Israel will point out that various members of Ra’am are not as, ahem, cooperative as Abbas, and see their participation in the political process as jihad by other means. This proves the exact opposite of what they think. Islamism existed in Israel before Abbas, and Islamism will exist in Israel after him. The question is will it be the kind of Islamism that has a principled commitment to peaceful relations between Arabs and Jews and opposition to political violence, or the opposite? In as much as the State of Israel has a choice in the matter, it is only by boosting or undermining Abbas and others like him. Even if he was just pretending - a thesis that is absurd in the light of available evidence - it wouldn’t really matter because, if you pretend to be something long enough, you become it.

The real problem with Ra’am is actually something different. Here is a picture that was going round on election day of a queue of people waiting to vote in their desert stronghold, Rahat.

Now, I am opposed to racism, OK, no-one’s going to buy that, but I am very much, indeed viscerally, against attempts to incite communities against each other through incendiary words and images. But I don’t like this, I don’t like this at all. That is a rising tide of colour if ever I’ve seen one, and I don’t want it in this country. Googles how many people there are in Rahat. 77,997? Wait, that’s the figure from 2024, now it’s 83,668. WTF?

The thing about this image is that it doesn’t just look like a hostile foreign country from the perspective of Israel, it looks like a hostile foreign country from the perspective of Palestine. As mentioned above, you see a lot of hijab around here. When I lived next to Jabel Mukaber, I would also periodically see chador-type things. However, I can recall seeing a woman in full niqab precisely one time, in a clinic in Jerusalem. I don’t know what she looked like, obviously, but her husband was some kind of wigger LARPer, probably from Luton. Who, then, are the people in this picture? Bedouin.

One of the many paradoxes of Israeli politics is that rightists love nothing more than to claim that Palestinians are from somewhere else, but the Arabs here who genuinely are from somewhere else are the ones we have the easiest time getting on with. Many Bedouin join the army (you can see an example in the bottom-right corner), and are typically uninterested in, and sometimes even extremely hostile, to Arab and Palestinian nationalism. I used to have a semi-regular smoke outside school with a Bedouin security guard, and he liked nothing more than to regale me with stories about his Givati days and advocate for annexing large parts of Lebanon and Syria in time for the coming global economic crisis. I could kind of smile and nod through that, but it got a bit much when he started getting into Zamir Cohen videos.

The problem about the good Arabs, though, is that, well, they suck. A short description of Bedouin is that they are Arabs, with all that means for good and for bad, but also Gypsies. Of course, there are better and worse ones distributed on a bell curve, but the bell curve overall is not in a good place. If your neighbour is a PLO-supporter, then he’ll probably be pretty decent and maybe will show you up by keeping his garden in better condition than yours. But if your neighbour is a Bedouin, then you should probably just move. The whole south of Israel is full of tales of business owners who had their establishment burned down because they couldn’t keep up with multiple Bedouin protection rackets, or people who have been run off the motorway by 12 year-olds on quad bikes, or whatever this nonsense is.

Mansour Abbas is not Bedouin at all, and nor are most of the top-ranking Ra’am politicians, but the party has been particularly successful in organising among southern Bedouin and is deeply embedded in society there in roughly the same way Hamas is in Gaza through social services and religious/educational institutions. The basic problem we have with Bedouin is that there are too many of them, and there are more all the time. TFR is estimated to be 4.7, and population growth is 3.7% a year. This is down from earlier levels [!], but still very high. In principle, the Ra’am agenda of economic advancement and embourgeoisification could help with this, but matters need to be expedited somewhat, and you don’t need a lot of training in game theory to see that Ra’am might not be on board with population control for their electorate. So, this is a real issue, but the whole jihad thing is totally fake and the actual opposite of the truth.

We should say something briefly here about Ra’amGate, the claim that voters were given pre-paid cards to buy petrol or envelopes of cash to incentivise them to go out and vote for Ra’am. Some general context is in order. The first is that laws against improper electioneering in Israel are habitually and publicly broken and nothing happens. The most egregious examples are of public officials who are legally prevented from campaigning doing so anyway and using public funds and resources in the process, especially on behalf of Shas, though Smotrich’s party did a lot this time too. It’s also the case that, as the last votes were being counted, one of the final updates was an extra seat for Ra’am at the expense of the Joint List, so these extra votes probably didn’t even change the proportion of Arab representation, let alone the election overall. Nevertheless, the understandable instincts of the libs to pooh-pooh the whole thing in response to the open mendacity of rightist demagoguery is wrong. It’s indicative of the general lawlessness and Third-Worldism in the Negev and sooner or later (sooner is better), this needs to be dealt with. It will require the same general level of cruelty employed by Ben Gvir but, of course, exercised for the pursuit of constructive goals, not petty sadism.

4. Ta’al

Ta’al stands for the ‘Arab Movement for Change’ which is also what it’s called in Arabic, but that doesn’t matter very much what it’s called because Ta’al is not really a political party, but the vehicle for one politician: the man, the legend, Ahmed Tibi.

Tibi is by far and away the most popular politician among Israeli Arabs, and that is most fundamentally because he represents them in a way that none of the Arab political parties do. He is a Muslim, not a commie weirdo, but not excessively into it and definitely not into transnational Islamist revival. He’s against LGBT rights, but not in an obsessive prurient way. He is a proud Arab, but also speaks fluent, indeed beautiful, Hebrew, and is known for memable clips of him smacking down cretinous Israeli politicians. He values education (he frequently compares favourably the Arab emphasis on education to the illiterates of Otzma Yehudit), but as a tool of professional and economic advancement not studying German philosophy like a gaylord. He’s still buthhurt about 1948, but he doesn’t want to fight it all over again, and he definitely doesn’t want to live in some kind of shithole Arab country. One famous story really sums up how he exemplifies how he represents both the id and superego of the Israeli-Arab middle class:

This is what every Israeli Arab who isn’t a dumbass or a nutcase (and let’s not beat around the bush, there are plenty of those too) really wants: to do well at school, get a good job where you are respected by elite hilonim, and then smack upside the head the dumb Mizrahi who lords it over you because he lucked out by being on the same team as Ben Gurion and Einstein. This story isn’t completely perfect because the security guard was some doofus American oleh, but it’s good enough.

Officially, Ta’al’s ideology is a watered-down version of Balad’s and one of their former MKs, Osama Saadi, made an arse of himself on election night by getting overexcited and dedicating their victory to Palestinians (as if anyone who voted even knew who he was in the first place). What Tibi really represents, though, is something more basic: the desire to not be considered a second-class citizen and a foreigner in the place where you are from.

General considerations

As R. Zachary Truboff points out in a recent article, the desired end result of Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall is that the Arabs would realise that they had lost and make a bargain. I think Jabotinsky was a sophist with even less foresight than the average Zionist leader who unleashed horrors upon the Jewish people because he wouldn’t accept that the Zionist leadership were just better than his crew. However, in this, at least, he was right.

There are two types of people whose interests lie in lumping together the ‘Arab parties’. The first are overt enemies of Israel who delight in pointing out that it is a fake democracy that refuses, on principle, to integrate a fifth of its population in the political process. The second are also enemies of the state of Israel because they wish to replace it with something else, a really Jewish state, and part of their roadmap to getting there is to escalate conflicts with Arabs on both sides of the Green Line until a conflagration occurs that necessitates desperate measures.

I’m not saying that in a critical way exactly. I think this country is dumb and I’m not patriotic at all. If I believed it could be replaced with something better, I’d be totally up for it, but since the option on the table is replacing it with something much worse that will flame out in justified infamy to the eternal disgrace of our nation, I’m in favour of keeping the current thing going. Plus, I live here. Israel would be better off if all the Arabs went to the moon, but they aren’t going to, so we have to figure out a way to get along.

With that in mind, the correct take on the Arab party question is as follows. Balad is an illegitimate party that should not exist and no relations with it should be entertained, including any sort of tacit support of a government from the outside. Hadash is also illegitimate because it is a Communist party, and thus supportive of the most destructive and murderous ideology of the modern era. If it wants to become a social democratic party interested in giving money to dopeheads and promoting sexual deviancy then that would be different, but it has to actually do that first. Ra’am is in every sense a legitimate partner and is actually preferable to most of the Zionist political parties. At the very least, there is no rational reason whatsoever for a Zionist to consider it worse than UTJ just because it’s Muslim. The main issue is whether it will cooperate with or obstruct plans to deal with Bedouin overpopulation which, in due course, will become an existential problem. It should be actively enlisted to promote more peaceful relations with the broader Arab and Islamic world.

The real prize, however, is Ta’al. At the moment, they are no more partners than Balad and Hadash, for the simple reason that they ran together in the Joint List. If Tibi wanted, though, he could run on his own, and, with a good campaign, he might get 5 seats and leave the dirty commies in the dust. If he wants to be the man who can admit his team lost and lead mainstream aspirational Arab Israelis to make a deal that protects their dignity within a stable state of Israel, he can do it. Will he? No, I don’t think he will. He doesn’t have much direct incentive and, though he’s a cool dude, he’s kind of a jerk and not a plausible candidate for a self-sacrificing brave leader. Should Jews try to make it as easy for him to do it as possible? Of course they should, unless they just want to burn it all down.

Esoteric Bibism fell apart after the 2022 election when, because of his two decades of increasingly psychotic behaviour, Bibi’s only option to form a coalition was to include in his cabinet politicians with both the desire and capability to make him actually do things. The result was that the new government spent a year pursuing judicial reform - designed with no rationale beyond giving various interest groups immunity from criminal prosecution - to the chagrin of Israelis who pay taxes, openly expanded settlements while telling both the PA and Hamas to get stuffed and that they should probably roll the dice on some kind of military gambit, didn’t prepare for that at all in any way, and then ignored warnings from various parties that disaster was coming on the grounds that this was exilic cucked thinking or something. Fast forward to this year and the following things happened in the run up to the election:

• Remaining Likud politicians who weren’t just depraved criminals decided they had had enough of all the clownishness and destructive incompetence and bounced, notably Dan Ilouz, Yuli Edelstein, Gilad Erdan. Other internal Likud opponents of kakistocracy, such as Nir Barkat and Avi Dichter, were humiliated and sidelined.

• When asked how Israel should avoid sanctions, Bibi said he wouldn’t even try and would just do magic with blockchain or something like a senile boomer who saw a YouTube advert.

• Bibi declared that as a result of his successful seven-front war, and multiple historical victories over Iran that would secure Israel for decades to come (this year!!!!), Israel was at imminent risk of nuclear attack.

And as a result, he got 27 seats. Not much to say about this really. Likud voters shouldn’t be allowed to vote, but they can. Under the circumstances, the obvious sane thing for the country is to have a Likud-Yashar unity government, with one or two more parties, but that can’t happen because of Bibi. Thus, the true believer in esoteric Bibism understands you must get rid of Bibi. You could, for example, well, let’s not get all specific. But not all heroes wear capes, as the saying goes.

A few notes:

1. Every election there’s a bit of a flurry about Shas’s election campaigning tactics, which combine a sort of disarming childishness with ruthless amoral cynicism and the systematic exploitation of their target audience’s emotional incontinence and inability to perform complex cognitive tasks. But actually, Shas got 7 seats, less than half what they achieved at their peak, despite modest relative demographic growth of their core electorate. Our hero Deri might get kicked out. They couldn’t sell a continued blanket Charedi draft exemption during a forever holy war to traditional Mizrahim. Perhaps it’s just unsellable.

2. Secondly, the Democratim did pretty badly, and some say that’s because they got sucked into dumb culture-war leftardism by the Meretz wing. It’s a good thing, it must be said, that woke politics are so genuinely unpopular in this country. On the other hand, it’s a bad thing, that there is no organised political force explicitly in favour of a realist foreign policy that doesn’t pander to ethnic grievances, revenge fantasies and pseudo-religion.

3. Otzma didn’t do as well as they were polling a few months ago. It turns out that the relentless cruelty slop Ben Queer has been pumping out actually isn’t such a big vote winner either, even in the gutter. A little sliver of hope maybe.

4. Speaking of Ben Gvir, he is in charge of prisons and police. Murder, the crime which (as Steve Sailer tirelessly points out) is the hardest to fudge, doubled in his first year and stayed there. Statistics for violent crime, rape and burglary are hard to find because the reporting rules were changed and statistics are now published with delays of more than a year like a third world turdbucket. Statistics for anti-social behaviour are hard to come by even in countries that aren’t deliberately misgoverned, but you can just get on the bus. Ben Gvir’s policy of allowing crime to explode while engaging in non-stop provocation of Arabs for the benefit of depraved imbeciles is being blamed by some for the surge in the Arab vote. I think it’s more because of Smotrich. Here’s the ad he was putting out promoting his policy of establishing farms in the Galilee on the Samaria model.

   Compared to everyone else in the Bibi coalition, I like Smotrich. He’s spiritually white. But it has to be said that this is a completely deranged and literally evil thing to be doing in an election campaign, and also dumb.

Now I’m going to talk about the big flop of the elections, Tzibbur Charedi. When I talked with Mordechai, I was sceptical, but clearly not sceptical enough. They flopped so bad that they did even worse than the neo-Peleg party with a random fat weirdo as its leader. People are giving their takes, so I’ll give my take:

1. Most Charedim don’t want reform of their system, because their system works well and is good for them. They have happier more fulfilled lives than most people; if they mess up and lose all their money they will be supported; they can have lots of kids with a reasonable expectation that they won’t come out as nutters. It’s just better. Officially, Kiryas Yoel is one of the poorest towns in America, but anyone can wander around and see that not only is it not poor overall, but basically no-one there is poor by ordinary standards. Partly that’s because of not reporting salaries earned in cash, but also it’s because a given family’s access to resources is substantially different from their income because of community structures. The community has very rich businessmen who spread their wealth around in return for status. In Israel, Charedim aren’t at the same level of material comfort, but it’s a lot better than statistics would suggest, and enough to be happy. The actual problem with this situation is that other people are paying for it without their consent, but that’s other people’s problem, not their problem. Why would Charedim vote to solve other people’s problem? A reasonable analogy is black people in America. One can argue that, for complex reasons, they really suffer because of the welfare state, but the more simplistic way of looking at it is that when other people give them money, they win and other people lose. That’s not the whole truth, but it’s kind of the ground floor truth. Why would you vote to have to join the army and get a job? Have you ever worked at a job? On top of that, Charedim don’t experience most of the negative results of community welfare dependency. You look at the Tzibbur Charedi guys as brave, enlightened figures, but maybe it’s more correct to see them like this.

2. When I was talking to Mordechai, I was sniffy about R. Yehoshua Pfeffer and it occurred to me that that was unbecoming. He’s obviously extremely intelligent, driven and conscientious, and has succeeded in different fields. I happen to think his politics are whack, but that doesn’t justify talking smack. The really relevant point is that he isn’t Charedi. He’s superfrum, for sure, but that doesn’t make him Charedi. If you are pro-secular education, and civic duty and go to conferences with Douglar Murray about reinvigorating the West, then that’s wonderful, but you’re not Charedi. Unlike him, Nechumi Yaffe was born Charedi, but in a sense that makes her even less Charedi because she doesn’t get the one-generation-only pass to break the rules. There was an old video going around where she explained that she was culturally Charedi while rejecting many beliefs held to be normative in the community, and used as an example that she preferred kugel to sushi. Some people pounced on this to show that her conception of Charedi identity is comically shallow. That’s not an unfair critique, but there’s a more fundamental one: Charedim love sushi! There’s nothing an upscale Charedi woman likes more in the ladies’ section of a simcha than a stunning plate of sushi alongside the stunning flowers and the stunning napkin arrangements and the stunning tiny bits of cake with 16 different layers and the stunning plastic diamond things on the tablecloth. By contrast, upscale Charedi women don’t eat kugel. They make a big pan for their husbands and then nibble on something at the other end of the table so that the other women don’t snicker at them for being fat at chasunes. Sushi is perfect for that. Charedi men like sushi less. If they have pretensions to piety, they may even denounce it as foreign and materialistic. But Nechumi Yaffe is a woman so I don’t know what she’s on about.

3. People like Nechumi Yaffe and Yehoshua Pfeffer have way lower status in the Charedi community than they would anywhere else, or than their achievements and capabilities merit by any reasonable standard. That sucks for them, and they tried to build a party out of other Charedim who are discriminated against by the system. The problem is that most people with low status in the Charedi community are just low status by nature. The husband can’t be bothered, or isn’t organised enough to always daven Mincha with a minyan. The wife can’t get round to twisting up the children’s peyos regularly enough. They use a Gameboy to make the kids shut up so they can destress. They have relatives who became junkie OTDs. If there is a school that won’t accept parents below 3.6 points on the Charedi scale that combines wealth, conformity and piety into one number then parents who are a 3.5 will, with perfect justice, feel hard done by. However, they don’t want the parents who are 3.4 to have their kids accepted. If they wanted their kids to go to school with 3.4s, they could just send them to the reject school that already exists. Thus there is no real way to coordinate internal victims of the Charedi system because what they all want is to get in the door and shut it behind them. The whole idea is misconceived.

4. I will now close with an interesting anecdote that I think is quite revealing

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1. Yahadut haTorah

Below is a picture of the Moetzes Gedolei haTorah of the Agudas Yisroel in Israel.

On the left with a red ring around him is Menachem Mendel Hager, founder of a Vizhnitz offshoot known as Vizhnitz Merkaz or Mendelisten. As we have discussed elsewhere, Chassidus started off as a rebranding of moderate Sabbatean tendencies in Podolia and Volhynia in which the signature Sabbatean doctrine of the quasi-divine tzaddik who acts as an intermediary between his followers and God was applied to a wide range of entrepreneurial holymen and magicians. Chassidus in its authentic form became very rare after the Holocaust (though it started growing exponentially in the last few decades) and was largely replaced by a Hungarian-Romanian tendency, exhibited in its purest form by Satmar, which emphasises cultural Chassidus as a prop for traditionalism, while downplaying the theological side to the greatest extent possible compatible with maintaining plausible deniability. In his wing of Vizhnitz, though, Menachem Mendel has gone old school demanding his followers say prayers to him at various times of day, teaching that he does not really have a corporeal body etc., and setting up some kind of weird Rosh haShanah to commemorate his becoming Rebbe. Followers who have left in response to this madness have been victims of targeted harassment and beatings.

I am aware of two Rabbis who have said the obvious truth, namely that Menachem Mendel is running an idolatrous cult that is outside of Judaism. The first is R. Chaim Yosef Dovid Weiss, Rav of Satmar in Antwerp, who has authored a number of teshuvot on questions asked by those who have left or are leaving the cult (you can read them in this rather clumsily arranged booklet below that also collates various pieces of evidence of the terrible goings on in Vizhnitz Merkaz). The second is R. Eliyakim Schlesinger of Stamford Hill (recently deceased זצ’’ל).

קונטרס כת בשבי המלא עם תשובות הגאון ר' חיד''א ווייס

38.4MB ∙ PDF file

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This illustrates a rather depressing but unavoidable point. I prefer the ‘non-Zionist’ position of moderate Charedim to the extremist anti-Zionist position on substance. But the fact is that, regardless of the merits of Zionism, contact with the State of Israel is pure cancer for Charedim, and really for religious Jews in general. In fact, a list of Rabbis, mostly associated with Peleg or the Eida Charedis also signed a letter against Menachem Mendel, but all of them subsequently declared that they hadn’t signed it, or didn’t understand what they had signed, or didn’t mean it in the sense it was understood or otherwise weaselled out, so it’s not even enough to be an ordinary extremist, you have to flee from this thing like ebola.

Back to the Moetzes. Menachem Mendel maintains his place at the council, but has boycotted meetings since the appointment of the present secretary, Yakov Walzer, a Vizhnitz chossid who is opposed to idol worship. Recently, Menachem Mendel has switched from his previous affiliation to Gur to supporting the Belz-Slonim alliance in a bid to have Walzer fired. He has also used the conscription controversy to boost his street cred by sending out his freaks to demonstrate in front of the Knesset. Time will tell if his bid for greater power is successful, but what of it? Why is this a thing? As Rav Schlesinger said, he’s a goy, kick him out. If he wore jeans, he’d be out for sure, so how is this not worse?

I’ll pause here for a brief personal reflection. It takes a bit of time to get used to it, but there’s really no way to avoid it: Orthodox Judaism as a real entity embodied in concrete institutions simply does not care about idolatry. It’s not strictly in favour of it, it just doesn’t care. If you make a fuss about it, you can predict in advance the rolling of the eyes, the curling of the lips, a particular tone of voice used when scoffing. It’s all very tiresome. If it’s Chabad, it’s fine because they give out grape juice to holiday-makers in Burma; if it’s Breslov it’s because they take troubled youth and, in place of vandalising bus stops, encourage them to vandalise the property of Arabs. But Menachem Mendel doesn’t do any of that even. Take away all the evil, and he’s just a dickhead clowning around in a shiny coat and still, nothing happens, no-one cares.

Well, I care, cringe and nebbish though it may be. Goings on in Ger, as we have discussed, arguably justify this judgment on its own, but given how off the chain Vizhnitz Merkaz is, it’s a slam dunk that it is forbidden to vote Yahadut haTorah. If you’re litvish and wondering what this has to do with you, then, yes, hypothetically, if Degel ran separately from the Aguda, then it would be permitted to vote for them, but they aren’t, so it isn’t.

2. Otzma Yehudit

This section we can keep a bit shorter. I have already written about Ben Gvir’s trip to America’s center of idolatry, 770 Crown Heights, where he was recorded on camera endorsing the propositions that Menachem Mendel Schneerson is alive, resident in the building and the messiah. The connection between meshichist Chabad (which in Israel, basically is Chabad) and Ben Gvir has been documented by others and I won’t belabour it. Any remaining doubt about the matter was dispelled by the selection of a meshichist, Yosef Goldberger, to number 9 on their list (a position that gives him a small, but not negligible, chance of election). It is clearly forbidden to vote for this party.

3. Democratim

On the question of security and foreign policy, I am closest to the right-wing of the Democratim (that is to say what was once the Labour party). It would definitely be a good thing if someone represented this position in the Knesset and, preferably, in the government too. I also believe that, as a human being, Yair Golan is far and away the best of the party leaders, and the kind of person that you or I should stand up for when he enters the room. However, the fact is that they have decided to run on a policy of abolishing Israel’s existing safeguards against 21st century liberalism’s excesses, as well as the Jewishness of the state in a substantive sense. Given the mess we have made of the religion, and the always-increasing correlation between religiosity and general turdiness created by our kiruv strategy, one can very well understand why an educated and morally sensitive person of basically sane disposition would want to get as far away from it as possible. However, that is not the same thing as actually voting for it. Israel is plenty liberal on every question other than how to treat Arabs already, it doesn’t need any more. One day, the Left in this country might realise before it’s too late that in order to get a foreign policy based on restraint and some kind of universalist tempering of ethnic sadism they have to be willing to bargain away some of the degeneracy they are in favour of. But that’s not what they decided for this election, and they shouldn’t be rewarded for it. I don’t predict that their policies will make all that much difference, even if implemented, which they might not be even in the event of electoral victory. This is not a consequentialist argument. If you are Jewish, you can’t vote against Judaism.

Matters of taste

Now for my personal takes. I am against voting. I think, considered as an act in and of itself, that it is a disgusting thing to do, namely to ceremonially pledge allegiance to a system of government that is inherently morally wrong, a giant machine for driving people insane. I also think that making too big a deal of it is also incorrect. Thus, if you can plausibly change your own bank balance or your incarceration status by voting, then it would be sacralising the system in a different sort of way not to do it. If it would be worth cleaning up a puddle of sick for, then it’s also worth voting for. You also shouldn’t argue with people who do vote, as if not voting is some kind of political solution in itself. The ideal of #novote is to achieve the closest thing as possible to a state of emotional indifference to voting, to embrace, virtually, the status of a subject, because that is what you want to be. On the other hand, this can get a bit hard to maintain in stressful circumstances.

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Yinon Magal is also a proud traditional Jew. He was very outraged that the daughter of R. Ovadya Yosef shook hands with a man, because that’s against the Shulhan Aruch. He’s known for a schtick where he pulls a kappel out of his pocket and interrupts the show to count the Omer or whatnot. And of course, because of course.

Anyway, Magal was back in the news last week because he said that Eizenkot was a monkey. This is purportedly racist against Eizenkot, who is of Moroccan Jewish ancestry and this scandal showed that the Right are the real racists after all. This was seized upon by Eizenkot, whose core target audience is right-leaning Mizrahi voters who vote Likud because Begin was nice to them, but find the open criminality and clownishness of the Bibi coalition a bit much.

This is all a bit silly though. Magal has pointed out that the term ‘monkey’, which is not commonly used as a derogatory term against MENA Jews, is standard Israeli slang for a frontman or patsy. Yinon Magal is calling Eizenkot a ‘Moroccan patsy’ for Ashkenazim behind the scenes. Critics on the Left know that’s what he meant, and they are counting on swing voters being too inattentive or emotional to notice, which is no doubt smart.

Yinon Magal is, though, obviously correct. The electoral campaign of Yashar has perhaps been unparalleled in history in simultaneously putting all of its emphasis on the leader (who can even name 5 prospective Yashar MKs?), while also having a leader who doesn’t express any opinions or really do anything except point out he’s a Mizrahi who used to be high up in the army. And yet, for all the transparent reliance on identity politics, Eizenkot clearly is the frontman for a party which will substantially increase the political power of ‘heritage Israelis’ that is to say, the secular Ashkenazi descendants of the people who built the country.

OK, so pretending to be offended by stuff to win round dopes is just what electoral politics is (which is one of many reasons why it’s a BAD THING that should be abolished). However, there is something rather more sinister about the whole thing. What Magal is saying is that, while Eizenkot is himself a Mizrahi (which is good), he is really controlled by Ashkenazim (which is bad). The wicked European Jews hide behind the face of a sturdy MENA general in a polo shirt who likes nothing better than to banter with illiterates in a falafel shop, but, in truth, behind him there they are pulling the strings, grinning as they contemplate their evil plans to kill slightly fewer people in Gaza or whatnot.

The sinister bit is this. Obviously, this is an example of hostile sentiment being directed against Ashkenazim. One can debate whether it rises to the level of ‘racism’ or ‘bigotry’; one can even say it’s justified based on the misdeeds of said Ashkenazim, if you will. But that’s what it objectively, clearly is. However, when the opposition reacted to it, they did not accuse Magal of fanning the flames of ethnic resentment and hatred against the people he was actually fanning it towards. Rather, they accused Magal of being racist towards Mizrahim. ‘Who are you to say a proud brown man can’t become Prime Minister on his own without whitey backing him up?’.

Anyone familiar with American politics will know this game. When Republicans say ‘the Left are the real racists’ they never mean (or at any rate never meant until recently) that this is because they were racist against whites. The huge volume of invective, ranging from mildly demeaning to, at times, overtly murderous, directed against white Americans, as well as policies explicitly advocated in terms of benefitting everyone except white Americans would lead one to think precisely that, but you know better. What it means is ‘when the Left say that white people cause blacks to be poor because of mind rays, and that whites should therefore be expropriated to give blacks the money due to them, this means that they are really racist against black people, because they are saying that a black man can’t stand on his own two feet without gibs and affirmative action’. The appropriate response, obviously, is that while this may be true at some deeper level, it’s not the most pressing matter. We can discuss whether liberal attitudes to African Americans subtly diminish them through being patronising and creating an environment of low standards, but more to the point is that they are explicitly racist against white people and they should stop because it’s wrong.

Israel is, in so many ways, a kind of weird funhouse mirror of western democracy. One of the more amusing ways that this manifests itself is the endless demonisation of anything and everything as racist by the Right-wing coalition, in between calling for the extermination of millions of Arabs. There are so many examples, but one that sticks in my mind is this:

Yoaz Hendel today is heading up the Reservists party, which combines technocratic liberal conservatism with the idea of denying civil rights to those who don’t serve in the army (don’t ask), but back then he was on the right end of the many centrist parties headed by ex-generals that have tried and failed to unseat Netanyahu. He was giving an interview talking about how awesome Israel is, especially compared to the Arab world (including Israeli Arabs), and he remarked in passing on the challenges that Israeli society had faced creating a common culture at a time when ‘some came here with a mentality of Vienna concerts and some came with a mentality of darbukas’. During the conversation, he made other comments that were explicitly critical of Arabs (whether or not you think they rise to the level of prejudice or racism) and some Arab MKs did try to make hay of that, but the overwhelming reaction was against Hendel’s completely nonexistent prejudice against Mizrahi Jews. Hendel tried to defend himself from the damning charge of having any preference whatsoever either for his own kind or for objectively superior things by saying he preferred drum banging to Mozart (which, sad to say, is probably true), but it was not enough and his own colleagues condemned him too.

Apropos here are some words of Lawrence Auster:

As I was reading the story, my jaw was literally (not figuratively) hanging open, not because I was shocked that this would happen, and not because I didn’t know that anyone in a mainstream position who says anything in public under his own name that is in the slightest degree “iffy” about blacks is taking his livelihood and his future in his hands, but because, for a few moments, I was at a loss as to how to respond to it. What do you say about a society (Western society) in which you don’t have to say anything actually negative, anything actually biased about a protected group, particularly blacks, to have your career and place in society destroyed, you just have to tell a garden variety joke? A society in which, even if you issue the most profound apology for your garden variety joke, as Papachristou did, that will not rehabilitate you? No. In liberal society, the society that worships not God but the nonwhite Other, there is no forgiveness….

Her joke was not an act of discrimination against anyone, it was a joke. At worst it was in questionable taste. But if you mention blacks in any context which has the slightest negative implication (such as referencing the large number of Africans in Greece in any other way than to celebrate them, or to joke about African mosquitos eating African “food”), that is considered discriminatory, and once you have committed a discriminatory act, you are dead meat.

But really this is not about discrimination. it is about the fact that blacks are sacred objects, and you do not make jokes about sacred objects. But this truth, that in liberal society blacks are sacred objects, cannot be stated aloud because it would reveal too much about the liberal order, so instead it is said that we must “never discriminate between human beings and races.”

And there is no mainstream organized resistance to this reign of fear anywhere in the Western world.

Auster was being a bit hyperbolic. He was prone to that. It isn’t that bad, but it does kind of suck.

Anyway, our own version of sacralising an ethnic group and making them immune even to implied criticism defined by the standards of a paranoiac manifests itself in various ways. The most grotesque is this:

Not much comment here is really required. A more recent example of how stupid and unhinged Israeli discourse is can be found in Itamar Ben Gvir whining that Smotrich doesn’t treat him with sufficient respect, not because he’s a clown recklessly undermining Smotrich’s ambitious settler project with slop for morons, but because he’s Mizrahi, of course.

How much of a problem is this all really? I guess it depends how much you mind. Most non-Mizrahi Israelis don’t seem to mind very much; if they did, presumably they would say something instead of soaking up abuse and paying taxes like cucks. Of course, it has complicated knock-on effects that percolate through society whereby bad actors can just blame miscellaneous bigotry when caught. But, in truth, Israelis don’t seem to mind politicians embezzling all the money too much either.

What I’ll talk about here is a different issue, which is how much do Ashkenazi Jews deserve it? Now, obviously, if you think that American Blacks should pipe down and stop moaning after slavery and segregation then a fortiori there’s nothing at all here to discuss. And, in truth, there isn’t really. Many MENA immigrants had a rough time because Israel in its first decade was a very poor country trying to maintain a kind of fortress state, emerging from a devastating war and taking in immigrants equal in number to its original population. Some people complain that the Labour Zionists didn’t respect the religious beliefs and practices of Jews from the Middle East and tried to make them irreligious. It’s true enough (though they never ask whether these religious beliefs deserved respect), but MENA Jews in Europe or America aren’t more observant than those in Israel. One might hazard a guess that the total number of Mizrahim who were successfully converted into Labour Zionists who celebrate the liberation of the Hebrew proletariat on Seder night is zero. To the extent that they became less religious, it’s mostly the same reason that most people around the world did: it’s constricting, requires adherence to beliefs that are open to challenge, and is hard to maintain without a supportive community designed (or evolved) to resist the trappings of modernity.

There are, of course, things that Mizrahim could legitimately complain about. The first is that after more than a thousand years, Jewish life from Algeria to Iraq became untenable almost overnight and more or less the whole population emptied out in two decades. There is a good case to be made that, ultimately, they were better off given the disaster zone that the region has been since, but, even if they had to move, simple common sense says it would have been preferable for them to move at a slower pace, under less pressure and with more freedom of choice. Half or more of the descendants of Levantine Christians circa 1900 now live in North or South America. It’s obvious that if they had, instead, been hastily gathered in to bulk out a garrison state somewhere in southern Syria formed by Ukrainian Orthodox Christians, they would be worse, not better, off for it. Apart from the mere fact of its existence and the ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, the details of which were well known and exaggerated throughout the Arab world, the Zionists, at any rate some of them, in their desperation for numbers, took really rather ridiculous steps to expedite what was already an excessively traumatic process (or did so out of depraved indifference).

The other thing the Zionists did wrong was not taking away the religious portion of MENA Jewry’s culture, but just about everything else. As we have discussed, in the same way that an Ashkenazi who doesn’t speak Yiddish is fundamentally damaged, so a Mizrahi who doesn’t speak Judeo-Arabic (or Judeo-Persian, or, most based of all, Judeo-Aramaic) is also cut off and disconnected from his roots, and unfortunately that’s pretty much all of them. The absolute best-case scenario in such a circumstance is the shamelessly extractive franchise Judaism of Shas.1

But, as we have also discussed, when the Shas cartel loses its grip, it can get a whole lot worse, and so it does. Unironically, Aryeh Deri is a kind of hero.

The thing is, though, Mizrahim (discounting some who work for lib NGOs) never complain about any of these things. Of course, it’s a good thing that the Zionists moved them out of Djerba to live in Teverya. If anything, they should have done it even harder. As for the other stuff, the loss of an ancient culture carried by a language, the destruction of folkways deeply intertwined with a particular place? They prefer not to talk about it. It gets awkward. Funnily enough, Naama Lazimi, responded to the fake Magal scandal in fluent Moroccan Arabic (though it’s only a few sentences and who knows how many times she had to practice it).

But in so doing she really only revealed herself to be whatever the Israeli equivalent of a coconut is. There’s nothing more Ashkenazi elitist than showing any interest whatsoever in MENA Jewish historical culture, as opposed to trinkets, anti-human techno music, Eastern European mystic imbecilism, and recycled American gutter race politics. Can we turn this country off for a bit?

Meir ben Alexander

Live Debate between PostKahanism & NonZionism

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a month ago · 24 likes · 6 comments · Meir ben Alexander, Baruch Hasofer, and משכיל בינה

Please give feedback in the comments. Don’t tell me I should stop fiddling with stuff because I’m not going to stop doing that, but other substantive comments are welcome. Now my take.

In some parts, most notably the whole section about discipline in schools, Boruch is, charitably, engaged in motivated reasoning to justify partisan affiliation and defending an Israeli Right that doesn’t exist. Whatever downsides standing on the sidelines and carping has - and I’ll freely admit that there is something a little gay about it - it does free you from the temptation to engage in that kind of obviously false stuff. It’s like a free blogger IQ boost, perhaps roughly equivalent to a cigarette. Nevertheless, for the most part, he does faithfully represent the spirit of the movers and shakers in the present government, and I hope that if you weren’t paying attention to me, you were paying attention to him.

To sum up: how is Israel supposed to manage its diplomatic relations given still plummeting popularity in every country? Whatever. Who is supposed to provide all of the added value if hilonim in hi-tech decide they have had enough of being exploited and abused and bounce? Whoever. Where should we actually send the Arabs we don’t know what to do with so that they don’t just end up being on the border attacking us like what happened last time we did it. Wherever. None of these extremely prosaic, common-sense concerns are even worth discussing; they deserve, at most, a bit of sarcasm, some random factoids thrown at the wall, and lofty contempt.

The Right in Israel is characterised by three things, all of which you got to see. The first is a deep feeling of invincibility, the conviction that since we have got away with everything over the last three years, we can just keep pushing and it will all be fine, and, therefore, that even token efforts to minimise the risks involved are beneath our dignity as proud Jews. The second is the belief that willingness to kill civilians is the hidden cheat code of geopolitics and, once you crack it, then you have everything set from now on in. All you need to do is throw off false western morality and you won’t even need to try anymore. The third, which is a logical corollary of the second, is that, all along, the problems of Israel have been easy and the Zionist leadership, in their perversity, have erred consistently in the direction of excessive leniency, expending all their energy on money for Palestinian programmes.

Now I’m just going to ramble a bit. Attentive readers have already figured out that that’s my thing, so might as well make it explicit. You put the pieces together.

I haven’t much cared for ’s commentary over the last year or two. I do think that Israel deserves someone out there in the ring who is literate and not overtly imbecilic to defend it, so I don’t begrudge our loyal goyim per se, but, still, there’s a point where it becomes demeaning. He’s had enough though:

Israelis have, moreover, lived among the Palestinians, and in the region long enough to have absorbed a good many of our habits and ways, and not all of them, I confess with grief, are good. Among the more recent acquisitions, for which an Arab pro-Israel hasbara advocate bears the dubious credit for introducing it to Israeli public life, is the custom of handing out baklava and dancing when an enemy has been killed, a rite that until very recently Israelis cited as evidence of how backward, if not primitive, Palestinian culture has become. Now some Knesset members perform the ritual themselves, assimilating it into Israeli political culture. And one cannot look at the gangs of hilltop youth, their faces masked in keffiyehs, rocks and stones in hand, without seeing the iconography of the first Intifada. Ben Gvir videos of “revenge porn,” taunting prisoners and revising Israeli national security doctrines to deprive convicted terrorists of fresh pita, remind me of similar videos from Iraq, Syria, and Libya. The fear is that superficial imitation at the level of buffoonery is giving way to deeper absorption of “Arab” ways of doing politics, the process Rene Girard described, in which rivals imitate one another until they become each other’s doubles.

…

Radicalism, as those who know it can attest, is a slippery downward spiral: each form leads to a worse and more degrading one. The Muslim Brotherhood gave rise to the jihadists, and al-Qaeda gave rise to the Islamic State, whose savagery made al-Qaeda look restrained. Israelis have seen this logic at work on their own doorstep. In 1993, as Hamas rose, Yitzhak Rabin turned to Yasser Arafat, the man who had founded modern Palestinian terrorism, hoping that the PLO would deal with Hamas “without the High Court and without B’Tselem.” If Jewish radicalism keeps growing, there will come a day, likely sooner than many think, when there are Jewish radicals who make Itamar Ben-Gvir look like a reasonable and sober man, and secular Israelis may turn to him and his like in the hope that they can tame darker forces. Purity outbidding, the competition among radicals to prove who is the most zealous, will keep pushing things further and further.

Sooner or later, everyone will have had enough. It doesn’t matter how developed your skills are in excusing, in handwaving, in changing the subject, in providing context, our capacity to make you look like a massive dick for standing up for us will, in the end, exceed your capacity to take it on the chin. Here’s Jeremiah:

בראשית ממלכות יהויקים בן־יאשיהו מלך יהודה היה הדבר הזה מאת יי לאמר: כה  אמר יי עמד בחצר בית־יי ודברת על־כל־ערי יהודה הבאים להשתחות בית־יי את כל־הדברים אשר צויתיך לדבר אליהם אל־תגרע דבר: אולי ישמעו וישבו איש מדרכו הרעה ונחמתי אל־הרעה אשר אנכי חשב לעשות להם מפני רע מעלליהם: ואמרת אליהם כה אמר יהוה אם־לא תשמעו אלי ללכת בתורתי אשר נתתי לפניכם:לשמע על־דברי עבדי הנבאים אשר אנכי שלח אליכם והשכם ושלח ולא שמעתם: ונתתי את־הבית הזה כשלה ואת־העיר הזאת אתן לקללה לכל גוי הארץ: {פ} וישמעו הכהנים והנבאים וכל־העם את־ירמיהו מדבר את־הדברים האלה בבית יי: ויהי  ככלות ירמיהו לדבר את כל־אשר־צוה יהוה לדבר אל־כל־העם ויתפשו אתו הכהנים והנביאים וכל־העם לאמר מות תמות: מדוע נבית בשם־יי לאמר כשלו יהיה הבית הזה והעיר הזאת תחרב מאין יושב ויקהל כל־העם אל־ירמיהו בבית יי: וישמעו  שרי יהודה את הדברים האלה ויעלו מבית־המלך בית יי וישבו בפתח שער־יי החדש: {ס} ויאמרו הכהנים והנבאים אל־השרים ואל־כל־העם לאמר משפט־מות לאיש הזה כי נבא אל־העיר הזאת כאשר שמעתם באזניכם: ויאמר ירמיהו אל־כל־השרים ואל־כל־העם לאמר יי שלחני להנבא אל־הבית הזה ואל־העיר הזאת את כל־הדברים אשר שמעתם: ועתה היטיבו דרכיכם ומעלליכם ושמעו בקול יי אלהיכם וינחם יי אל־הרעה אשר דבר עליכם: ואני הנני בידכם עשו־לי כטוב וכישר בעיניכם: אך  ידע תדעו כי אם־ממתים אתם אתי כי־דם נקי אתם נתנים עליכם ואל־העיר הזאת ואל־ישביה כי באמת שלחני יי עליכם לדבר באזניכם את כל־הדברים האלה

Let us assume, just for the sake of argument, that God has once more set his mind to destroy us. Let us stipulate further that He wishes to give us no excuse, to make our guilt as inarguable as possible. What would He do differently than to give us over to the leadership of criminals, lovers of silver and blood, who sing, as they march into catastrophe, the songs of the false prophets almost word for word, who are not merely unable to hold back their contempt for every principle of religion, but pester you with it, unable, it seems, to just shut up for one minute, for whom no blasphemy is so foolish and beneath ordinary human dignity that they will not run towards it with all their heart, with all their soul, and with all their might, who laugh in the face of every obstacle for they simply know that God is with them, no matter how many signs they receive to the contrary, who consider - of all things - rebellion against the principle of compassion for sucklings to be the cornerstone of a new moral order in which they will rule? Was that sentence long enough? I’ll be the judge of that.

And yet, when it comes, and whether it’s a biggie or more of a Judges-era chastisement, God will not let us die - this too He has promised - and we will have to pick ourselves back up and carry on, though all who pass will hiss and shake their heads. We will have to work out what it is we have that is worth preserving. Here is something that happened on a bus between Tel Aviv and Petah Tikva the other day:

A woman was speaking Arabic on the phone. As it happens, she is a Druze and the sister and daughter of distinguished combat veterans in the IDF. Regardless, members of the דור הגעולה were in no mind to tolerate her presence. They ordered her off, and, when she would not oblige, they cursed and threw things. Boruch told me that if you can get these guys to put on a kippah, they become much better behaved. I guess it depends how you define it.

There are so many questions to ask at this time, but not the least of them is this: ‘is this the people we wish to be’. In three weeks, we will answer. The only thing we can say for sure is that it will be a close call.

Obviously, anyone secular enough to look at a screen on Shabbos knew what was going on from early in the morning. In addition, most of Israel’s population live in areas that had rocket sirens. Even up here in the Golan, there are many thousands of religious people in the medical or security services who have beepers or phones and received a notice to rush into action. Two young religious men from my town, both of them fine people by all accounts, drove south and were killed in action after having not received adequate body armour. Anyone still left in schul tried to varying extents to proceed with the service as news of the horror and humiliation dripped in.

Or at least so I understand because I was having lunch. In Israel, because there is no second day of Yom Tov, Shemini Atzeret has been cannibalised by Simhat Torah and is universally observed as a day of dancing. Dancing is forbidden on Yom Tov and a fortiori on Shabbos, which it also was that year. I don’t want to get into that now, but it’s an objective fact and there are no counterarguments. This year I was poked into overcoming my usual lethargy and organised a house minyan and it was lovely, but usually what I do is go to schul and then leave after hallel before the dancing starts and spend the rest of the day at home. Some years I go back for Mincha, but my guest wasn’t in the mood and it being Shabbos adds an extra layer of distaste for the whole affair, so I davened at home and remained blissfully unaware. If I knew my neighbours better, they might have told me, but I live on the edge of town and next door live Russians who have trance raves so they didn’t.

Maybe that’s an interesting anecdote or maybe it’s not. You’re the one who reads this; I’m just writing it. What I’ve wondered on and off since then, though, is whether this is the reason that my response to the whole thing was the opposite of everyone around me. Almost the entire Israeli and Jewish world moved rightwards, and increased its cruelty threshold and I went left, after a fashion. If I had experienced that day like everyone else instead of singing zemiros and chilling out with a book then would I have come out of it the same way as everyone else?

There are other explanations. I’m a contrarian, plus I was already on the same kind of general trajectory as the Left Moldbuggists but, in the absence of an audience, without any incentive to overshoot for provocation points. For a while - it’s hard to remember how long without documentation - I’d been saying ‘at least the smolanim are white’ to be edgy, and if the history of the dissident Right shows anything it’s that anything you say to be edgy will end up one day being your sincere belief. So maybe that’s it. If you were on a slow cruise to the Right, as most Israelis were, then October 7th kicked it into overdrive. If you were on a slow cruise to the Left, then maybe it did the same.

The story I tell myself is this. For many years, I had heard people, some of them friends, some of them acquaintances, some of them social media personalities whose videos were passed around on Telegram, some of them Rabbis, say various things about what has to be done with the Arabs of Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, the region, the world. They are all Amalek; there is no degree of collateral damage that is too high; their children will grow up to be terrorists; to kill them is a mitzvah; cruelty to them is mercy to ourselves. I thought that they were directionally correct - and perhaps at a certain time they were - and that when push comes to shove they wouldn’t actually do that. They didn’t mean it, at least they didn’t mean it, mean it. There’s even a term, ‘Shabbos table guy’ for the type of character who sounds off on how all you need to do is nuke Jordan and it will be fine. But Shlomo’s a sweety-pie; if that Arab child was staring him in the face, he wouldn’t really pull the trigger. Obviously.

I thought to myself a few things. First of all, this must have been the experience of many Gazans over the past few decades as their society turned insane, contorting itself into something foul, rancid. ‘Sure, Sheik Abu Bamba is very free with his words. But the Jews, it is true, have been so cruel to us and a reckoning is due. No, we will not hunt them to the last man and drink their blood like he says; but they will have to pay, somehow. How? We’ll see when the time comes.’ Something like that. How do you ever know whether the people around you really mean it? You find out when they have the chance. In the meantime, though, you should probably err on the side of caution. You don’t have to gaze at the hummus and wonder whether there’s anyone else at the table you can raise your eyebrow to. You can say, ‘no, shut up, that’s deranged’.

The second thing I thought is this. I know a lot of people with genocidal views about Arabs. Some of them I like more, some of them I like less, but in almost no cases do I think they deserve to be killed. Most people in Gaza have very deplorable opinions about the conflict. The extent of this is somewhat exaggerated in Israeli discourse, though to a lesser extent than it is underplayed in western discourse. Lior Schlein had a clip that went around a lot recently on the ethics of killing Gazan babies.

But I realised that this misses the point. There are indeed people in Gaza who areחף מפשע, but even the ones who aren’t don’t actually deserve to die, not in that sense. Some Christians say that not only does humanity all deserve to die, we deserve to be tortured for all eternity, but even they don’t say that you get to go and lock random unredeemed sinners in a room and torture them, not even a little bit. My Kahanist friends, even the ones who spam me with Hilltop slop in the middle of the night (hi Meir), shouldn’t be killed for their crummy views, and nor should their Gazan equivalents. Some people there really do deserve to die; some need to be killed for tactical reasons, and, to some extent, some others will have to get wasted on the way there. Assuming there’s some kind of point to it. I’m a very moderate person. But the median Gazan doesn’t deserve to get killed because of his crummy beliefs. I know perfectly well that these are not deep or profound thoughts. There’s no excuse for not grasping them right away. But there’s no excuse for most of the dumb crap that people believe either. We should all be patient.

The third thing I thought wasn’t really a thought, it was just revulsion. I still haven’t watched most of the footage that’s publicly available, but that night I binged on various videos that were going around, mainly on non-Israeli sites. Many years, I stay up after Shemini Atzeret and catch up on work I didn’t do over Hol haMoed, taking advantage of not having two-day Yom Tov to meet sundry deadlines. It’s doubtful whether this is ever a good idea, but it was definitely a bad idea that time, because I got hardly anything done. I just kind of sat there stunned.

The day after I looked for some volunteering to do. Like a lot of Olim, I felt guilty about not having driven off to an army base as Israelis my age were doing. The volunteering I did wasn’t very useful; I should probably have searched around rather than just doing the first thing that came up. For the first two days, I did some stuff that at least felt good, carrying around chest freezers, and bagging up rubbish. But after that I was just wasting time, or doing jobs that teenage girls would do better. And then eventually school started again, with a completely unworkable and chaotic system in light of potential threats from the north, so I went back to work. I remember two things most clearly from that fortnight. The first was sitting in the Netzah Yehuda base eating a burger, while a sweet, if somewhat awkward, young soldier was flicking through his smartphone. He gave me a nudge and showed me the phone. It was a picture of a kid mangled up in rubble. I thought I should probably put down the burger as some kind of token sign of allegiance to civilized humanity, but I was very hungry. The second was in a certain fellow volunteer’s home while we took a break. The TV was on the entire time, though no-one was watching it. Secular people of a certain age live like this I am given to believe. The intent of the producers presumably was not to traumatise the viewer by subjecting him or her to an endless stream of atrocity accounts, but I can’t see what other effect it could have.

One thing I did do was write an article. I didn’t have a blog back then, so no-one read it. It’s not a good article at all. Two particular lines make me wince. But it’s good to have a record of what you wrote, so here it is.

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The general orthodox view of the Haskalah is as follows. The Jews were all religious and everything was good, except for poverty and trouble from goyim. Then the maskilim came along and said that Jews should be more enlightened and change some of their outdated practices. Perhaps they meant well and just lacked a proper appreciation of Jewish tradition, or perhaps they were snakes who knew that they were pulling at a thread that would unravel the whole garment. Either way, their programme led to disaster. The Jews who heard the call of the new enlightenment were not content, at least not for long, to be a Jew in the home and a mensch in the street; they wanted to be a goy everywhere. After nearly two thousand years of patiently and faithfully waiting for exile to end, an unprecedented wave of assimilation and apostasy hit European Jewry. The leaders of the Misnagdim and Chassidim wisely foresaw where the Haskalah would lead and agreed to bury the hatchet over their relatively trivial disagreements so as to attack the new movement together. It wasn’t enough to save the masses of European Jewry bewitched by promises of liberal equality that ultimately led to the ovens of Auschwitz, but it did preserve a faithful Jewish core which would rise from the ashes while enlightened Jewry dissolved into the upper class of the emerging Hapa ethnicity in the United States.

If you’ve been following the series, you’ll be aware of the first problem in this narrative, which is that, long before any maskilim arrived on the scene, European Jewry was in a right mess. In the Sephardi lands, the mystics had eventually responded to their particularly acute crisis by coalescing around an arcane, explicitly elitist and ossified version of Zoharism that was Sabbatean-proof, but the lands of Ashkenaz were a free-for-all, with Sabbatean preachers able to go more or less anywhere they wanted and promote the most batty forms of heresy without anyone intervening. If anyone did try to intervene, be they even top-tier Rabbis, they quickly found out it was more trouble than it was worth. Things got so bad that the generally admitted rabbinical genius of Europe was an outright fruitcake who thought the God of Israel had to do anal sex because he was impotent or something. Perversely, things eventually got so out of hand that it actually ended up saving the day. Depraved weirdo Jacob Frank managed to build up such a large following, and was so immunised from any form of rabbinical control, that he decided to go all-in and form a wholly new religion by leading his followers into the Catholic Church, solving the problem that Judaism couldn’t solve on its own. Concurrently, the moderate wing of the Sabbatean movement went underground and one branch of it rebranded itself as ‘Chassidim’, reapplying the Sabbatean theology of the redeeming tzaddik to a wider range of charismatic holy men.

The other problem with the orthodox narrative is that the supposed relationship between Haskalah and mass secularisation doesn’t really pass the chronology test.

In short, the relationship between Haskalah and secularisation is not one of cause and effect, but of a common cause. The collapse of traditional belief and therefore adherence to the onerous lifestyle it mandated happened among Jewry for the same general reasons that it has happened everywhere. With Jews it happened on average a bit earlier than surrounding groups, partly because Jews had higher literacy rates, partly because the Jews had more to gain by throwing off their religious obligations than the surrounding Christians, and partly because European Jewry was pretty messed up, caught between grim misanthropy and total nonsense (not necessarily even being able to pick merely one). Secularisation came later to Eastern Europe than Central Europe because the Jews of the former were more backward, and the gentiles less tolerant, offering fewer advantages to Jews who assimilated unless they were willing to convert to Christianity.

Seen in this light, it’s possible to see the maskilim precisely as opponents of secularisation because they were engaged in trying to articulate a vision of Judaism that a thoughtful and well-read person could feel comfortable in instead of bouncing. Far from providing a way station on the path to becoming a goy, they were offering, or trying to offer, a viable option for remaining a Jew. This is roughly speaking the argument of Olga Litvak in Haskala: The Romantic Movement in Judaism. At least I think that’s the case, but it’s hard to know because this may be the worst book I’ve ever read. You might say it’s easy to lose the thread of her argument amidst the endless digressions articulating novel interpretations of texts no-one’s ever heard of in the first place, but it would be more accurate to say I never picked up a thread in the first place. In any case, though, this is roughly speaking the general view of contemporary scholarship: the maskilim acted within an unfolding reality of secularization that they had the power neither to promote nor to resist and in which they saw both opportunities to be exploited and dangers to be fought.

Of course, they failed. There is no maskilic Judaism today. At any rate, there is no form of Judaism that marks itself as maskilic. In most respects, Modern Orthodoxy fulfils the demands of the Haskalah, including almost all of what were once its most controversial demands. For that matter even Charedi Judaism, to varying extents, has adopted many signature maskilic innovations. But this adaptation of Judaism to modernity was forged by those who identified as the Haskalah’s opponents. Indeed, opposition to Haskalah was perhaps the principal thing they had in common. The Haskalah itself left little in the way of an institutional footprint.

This was not by accident either. Haskalah was not merely difficult to transmit from one generation to the next, it was in a certain sense impossible. Properly speaking, you couldn’t be raised to be a maskil, even by another maskil, perhaps especially by another maskil.

What did the maskilim want? Mostly they wanted Judaism not to be stupid. It’s easy to paraphrase that in a hostile fashion by saying they wanted Judaism not to make them look stupid in front of the goyim. No doubt that’s true and there’s nothing especially wrong with that, at least as far as the Torah is concerned, though, as with many things, it’s important to not get too carried away. Another way of looking at it is that they couldn’t bear the idea of being fools in the eyes of God, which is perhaps worse, since we are all ineluctably in such a condition. As to what that meant in practice, it could mean a lot of different things.

Some of these guys look frummer than other ones because that’s what they actually were. The common thread of the Haskalah was to promote a moral and spiritual revival in Jewry through reviving lost or neglected forms of learning, but that could mean a lot of different things. The maskilim were linked to each other through participation in the journal Me’asef and other organisations in which ‘enlightenment’ was the goal, but not by a specific programme for what that meant. What united them was a certain seriousness, sometimes bordering on the hysterical, which distinguished them from mere secularisers who sought an easier and more comfortable life away from the constraints of the traditional Jewish community. Lazarus Bendavid and Isaac Baer Levinsohn didn’t agree on very much, and disagreed about most of the fundamental issues of religion, from a Jewish perspective at least. What made them both maskilim, beyond a general orientation towards making Judaism more dignified, was that they really meant it. They were for real.

That’s not to say that among the maskilim there weren’t bad apples. The most famous was Hirsch Ber Hurwitz of Uman, Nachman’s chess buddy, who, after trying to promote educational reform at home, went to England and became a teacher of Hebrew at Cambridge. This must have involved an affirmation of Christianity, which was presumably insincere (whether that makes it better or worse). Even here, though, Hurwitz, or Hermann Hedwig Bernard as his colleagues and students knew him, seems to have wanted nothing more really than to nerd out and study Hebrew grammar at a place where he would be appreciated for doing so. There is no maskil whose personal morality was as low as the devouring venality characteristic of Chassidic Rabbis in the 19th century who lived in opulence funded by redemption payments from their followers (we’ll get back to that in the next installment).

Because they opposed stupidity, both conservative and liberal maskilim, with very few exceptions, were opponents of Zoharism, and thus they were the good guys. They didn’t add a great deal to what Rav Emden had already provided in terms of philological and source criticism, but they did have the guts to say the obvious, namely that it’s all just rubbish and we don’t need it so we should get rid of it. Whatever we can say, therefore, we can’t say we weren’t told. The actual achievement of the maskilim, however, was to polarise the rabbinate into an obstinate defence of the Zohar, a position now maintained based on pure obscurantism, adding to the chronic constipation of post-Sabbatean Judaism a layer of degenerative dementia. The frantic opposition of the maskilim to the chassidim also catalysed the latter’s eventual acceptance by the orthodox who decided, first, that they were the lesser of two evils and then gradually came round to the view that they weren’t an evil at all. The maskilim themselves offered almost nothing in the way of institutional opposition that could compete with the innovative and highly successful social technologies employed by chassidic Rabbis in their fierce competition for paypigs, apparently convinced that if they just wrote a satirical play witty enough then it would all come crashing down; that, or the gentile authorities would solve the issue for them.

‘Twas not to be and the Haskalah failed. Its energies that did not simply fizzle out were eventually redirected into Zionism, or Moritz Steinschneider’s quest to give Judaism a decent burial. But since God will not let us die, the choice of what Judaism would be was left to others, in particular those most emphatic in their scorn for the vision of Haskalah while pragmatically adopting its policy recommendations. I do not think it is inaccurate to say the most successful network of girls’ schools anywhere in the world today is managed by Satmar, but if not, it’s Belz.

In truth, I don’t know very much about maskilim. I couldn’t continue the series without saying something, but I also can’t just take a month out of my life to read a bunch of books to say something informed. So the above is the best you’re going to get. Actually, even if I had a month, I wouldn’t do it because maskilim are boring. As is often the case, those most desperate to escape parochial constraints in the search for timeless truths appear the most parochial when viewed from the perspective of another era. The manifestos of the Haskalah at once have the character of a utopianism that we can’t help but think of as silly nowadays, while also being strikingly mundane, lame even.

One thing I can talk about is Hebrew grammar, which is another interest I share with the maskilim, absent their conviction (shared by a remarkable chunk of educated humanity over history) that it was a tool for the cultivation of character and morality. The maskilim, like the medieval grammarians, took for granted that the Tiberian vocalisation tradition, which is expressed in the diacritics every Jew finds in his Chumash, is the correct form of Hebrew grammar and all forms of Hebrew that depart from it are degenerate. Therefore, they sought to correct Jewish liturgy to reflect Tiberian norms, both because they genuinely thought it to be the right thing to do, and also because it was a weapon against the rabbinical establishment whose Hebrew genuinely was degenerate, an incoherent aramaicised pidgin, deformed by the importation of ill- fitting Yiddish speech patterns.

The problem is that Tiberian pronunciation isn’t a kind of ur Hebrew, it’s a highly academic elite tradition cultivated specifically for the recitation of scripture. It is not how anyone ever talked, and it’s not supposed to be how anyone ever talked. Apart from its specific ritual nature, it has three other chief characteristics. The first is that it is hyper-conservative, preserving ancient features of the Hebrew language that had long since died out in spoken and liturgical Hebrew. However, as Hornkohl has demonstrated at length, many of the characteristically archaic forms it preserved were part of dialects current in the second not first temple, so it is not how the books were originally read. In some cases, ancient linguistic features were preserved while others that were connected with them were allowed to develop, leaving them with no grammatical rationale in the obvious sense (though this is extremely useful today for performing linguistic archaeology). The second is that it reflects what was considered to be an elevated form of Hebrew, what we might call posh. The third is that it contains ‘orthopeic’ features that do not reflect natural linguistic evolution, but rather were employed to resist it. In particular, the Masoretes were on guard against the slurring of syllables and the omission of guttural letters (the latter being considered both the mark of an ignoramus and Hellenistic acculturation). This typically manifests itself in the extension of vowels, or the introduction of new ones to allow more time to pronounce letters. Thus, the verb ‘to do’ is not la’soth or li’soth but la’asoth, so as to avoid dropping the ע and becoming lasoth (as certainly happened in speech).

With that in mind, let’s look at one of the most characteristic feature of maskilic Hebrew reform, the introduction into liturgy of pausal forms, so hagafen in בורא פרי הגפן and hagashem in משיב הרוח ומוריד הגשם. This is based on the observation that at the end of verses and other strong pauses, Tiberian Hebrew has pausal forms with longer vowels, thus ארץ becomes aretz instead of the standard eretz. The maskilim reasoned that this ‘rule’ should apply to liturgy and thus started printing siddurim with קמץ in the relevant places instead of segol, because that’s correct and also made ordinary frum people look uncouth.

The problem is that there is no such rule in the sense of a principle that obligates, or rather that this rule only emerges from analysing the Tiberian vocalization of the Bible as an artefact of a timeless Hebrew, which it isn’t. The real story goes like this.

1. Most segolate nouns in Hebrew originally had a short vowel (often an a) followed by a consonant cluster. Thus גפן was gapn and גשם was gishm. This is preserved in the construct forms of these words (e.g. ארצכם, גפני, גשמיכם)

2. A short vowel emerged between the last two consonants. In the Babylonian tradition this was a short a, and in Palestine it was something in the region of e (thus making gafen, gashem, aretz). In the Tiberian tradition this vowel was distinguished from the tzere whereas in other traditions it was categorised as a shortened version of it.

3. At pauses, the opening vowel was lengthened (so áretz, gáfen) in line with a general principle in Hebrew and languages generally.

4. Subsequently in the Tiberian tradition specifically this opening long vowel in pausal forms was transformed into the kamatz as was the long á generally.

5. Separately, in the Tiberian tradition or its forebear, the first vowel in these words assimilated to the second one, thus aretz → eretz, gashem → geshem. This didn’t happen with pausal forms, which thus preserve an exaggerated form of a more archaic pronunciation.

6. Over time the Tiberian tradition developed melismas for pauses, marked by specific diacritics. As a result, the lengthened vowel in the developed form of the tradition is strictly obsolete (because you can lengthen any vowel by melisma), but preserved because of the general principle of conservatism.

7. The Tiberian school collapsed, but not before its diacritic system became generally accepted across Jewry. Unfortunately, very few communities knew what the marks were supposed to mean and established pronunciation cargo cults of various degrees of failure usually roughly proportional to their distance from Palestine.

Now, what do you do with that? My view is that what we really need to do is to recreate the Tiberian school and let them continue where the old one left off but with the benefit of modern linguistics. Teach us, Geoffrey Khan. What is silly though is taking the Tiberian vocalisation system and trying to make a living language out of it, which is what the Zionists, following the maskilim, did. It’s also silly to import every historical quirk of the system and stick it into liturgical Hebrew, which is basically a moderately archaising post-temple dialect. The fact is that in Hebrew dialects used around most of Jewry for the last thousand years the word גפן is ‘gefen’ (and actually segol is one of the few things almost everyone got right). Lengthening it at pauses makes sense. I can even grok the idea of transforming it into a tzere for effect, since these two vowels are not infrequently paired in morphological changes that lengthen or shorten a vowel. But changing it to some totally other unrelated vowel is just dumb. If you have to do it because that’s what the book already says (as is the case with Tanach), then maybe that’s too bad. But if your book doesn’t already say that (as is the case, or was, with the siddur) then don’t go and make it worse. And definitely don’t do it with משיב הרוח ומוריד הגשם, which isn’t even a major pause. Some exceptionally reactionary Charedim insist on geshem, and, as is not untypically the case, they are right.

There is an important lesson here about not jumping the gun on academic-based religious reform until you’ve done the groundwork. And that’s what I have to say. Grammar is cool. The maskilim were right. More importantly, Zoharism is fake and sucks. The maskilim were right about that too. But no-one very much listened to them. You could say that they failed, or you could say that the Jewish people failed. You should say both, because both are correct.

So, I turned to a Rabbi-intellectual Guy Alaluf who is good at taking inchoate sentiments of right-leaning Israelis and turning them into something coherent, without unduly worrying if it ends up sounding horrific:

To sum up:

1. The nations of the world are collaborators in an exterminationist agenda against Jews lasting thousands of years.

2. This campaign works by constantly upping demands for concessions from Jews until there is nothing left to concede, so you just have to kill them. Therefore, any time any gentile anywhere criticises Jews for any reason, this is a step in a campaign which ends in genocide.

3. The proof is that Christian churches complain about incidents of Jews spitting on Christians in Jerusalem. This is so clearly a trivial problem that no-one could be honestly aggravated about it and concern can only be motivated by antisemitism. [?!]

4. Therefore, it is forbidden to even think about the charges made in the film, and the only appropriate response is to pray for the death of its creators.

We are honestly so cooked. It’s important to get into your head that there is an extremely plausible path for this country in which it flames out in ever more outlandish acts of military aggression while rightoid pundits shriek still louder about ‘suicidal empathy’ and ‘Jewish syndrome’ of caring about your enemies more than yourself, decrying the exilic mindset that simply won’t see that you can just solve all your issues by killing some large number of people, and explaining why the numbers of people killed to date just aren’t sufficient. It’s not definitely going to happen because various forces are arrayed to stop it, but if they take their eye off the ball, then it could happen. Like AI existential risk, even if you think there’s a 10% chance of this going down (and I think that’s too low), then it’s worth thinking hard about how to prevent it based on weighted expected outcomes.

Back to the point though. I don’t understand Israeli outrage at the NAZA film and I don’t think there is anything to understand. There is obviously some kind of vague idea these people have that if only all Israelis stand their ground and insist on the absolute righteousness of our military efforts (whether it’s by denying we killed civilians or saying it’s good to kill civilians, doesn’t matter) then the goyim will have to admit it. Unfortunately, though, a few scabs don’t play ball and this is what permits the nations to condemn us. We saw this on display when various intellectuals declared that, after years of cabinet ministers shouting insane genocidal nonsense as loudly as possible to the entire world, it was really Yair Golan who had blackened our name. This is so obviously stupid that even Guy Alaluf can’t launder it, but that’s the best I can do. So, instead, I thought it might be good here to set out a framework for those who for whatever reason, want to think about the topic. Israeli war crimes, I think, should be divided into three categories.

1. Hunting Amalek

Some Israelis believe that it is good to kill civilians in Gaza because they are innately evil and eternally hostile. Some of these Israelis are in the army.

In this video, a young man eulogising his brother who died in combat declares that he went into Gaza to kill as many people as he saw, specifying women and children, this sentiment apparently endorsed by his family and other mourners. People say stuff when they are emotional, but I’ve heard similar sentiments expressed enough times by people who weren’t emotional. It stands to reason that those who want to murder women and children do, in fact, when given the opportunity, murder women and children.

This is the easiest category of war crimes for Jews to think about because we are not officially corporately responsible. In theory, even Otzma Yehudit is against just shooting Gazans without tactical justification, even though everyone knows that they aren’t really. Indeed, the entire right-wing of Israeli politics will fight tooth and nail against anyone who does so being prosecuted, while centrists will mumble and change the subject for fear of looking weak. Still, we’re not ordering it.

In reality, though, if you don’t set up law courts to punish things, you are responsible. Long before the war, Israeli soldiers had almost complete immunity for killing Palestinians. To face time, you have to literally do it on camera, and walk over and shoot someone on the floor, and even then you get 18 months and it will be commuted to 9.1 As long as you don’t do anything on camera, you can even just murder a Jew and you’ll be fine. If it is on camera, then the family of the victim will have to spend years lobbying to get anyone to prosecute you.

In order to not be classified as completely lawless, the IDF runs a military prosecutor unit, whose job is to file lots of paperwork to show that claims of crimes have been investigated, and once every so often to actually prosecute a particularly black and white case and give a small sentence. This is very important. The Palestinians have on their side one of the best activist networks in the world, able to draw on a vast well of generic leftist organisational experience and Gulf oil money. One of the things they want to do is use established mechanisms of international law enforcement to make it so that Israeli politicians, high level generals, and even ordinary soldiers who posted something unfortunate to social media can’t go abroad without getting pinched. The response of western governments who want to avoid that kind of thing is that prosecuting Israelis is outside their jurisdiction because Israel has its own robust system of investigating and prosecuting abuses committed by its military. Of course, they know that it doesn’t, but it does have the ability to provide formal evidence of such robustness and that’s probably good enough unless some rogue judge kicks off and then you can call him an antisemite.

Unfortunately for us, the Right Wing is one big machine for the systematic elevation of human shit, and so they were not willing to tolerate this arrangement. They want their cookies now. At one of the military prisons where literally everyone knows that Palestinian prisoners are being beaten up every day, one turned up in hospital with his rectum torn, apparently consistent with having had a metal object stuck up it. The military prosecutor ordered some soldiers to be arrested prior to investigation (note: did not pre-emptively declare guilty and throw in a dungeon, nor even hold without charge for years as is routinely done to Palestinians), and there was a riot including MKs. Some of them said the soldiers were innocent, some said they did a good thing, some said both, the ones with laughable pretensions to intellectual accomplishment spewed out some word salad about class warfare. It doesn’t really matter; the point is it’s not OK to arrest a soldier on suspicion of a crime just because you have probable cause to suspect him of a crime. At this point, a power struggle ensued in which what is left of the secular Ashkenazi elite showed their usual ineptitude and cuckdom in the face of internal adversaries. The military prosecutor leaked some footage to the press like a dumb cow and got caught, she was arrested, and the case was dropped. We’re no longer going to pretend; that’s goyish and we don’t play that no mo'.

Of course, what that means is that now we have lost both plausible deniability and implausible deniability about enforcing the law against our own war criminals, so a simple application of accepted international norms is that other countries have to do it for us. We can lean on our other weapons - German dweebs wracked by Holocaust guilt, obese boomer lunatics, open perversion of the American electoral process - and maybe that will buy us some more time. At some point though, Corporal Major Yossi can’t go for a relaxing holiday on the beaches of Croatia anymore; he’s going to have to settle for Eilat.

Oops, we got distracted again. More important than after-the-fact investigation, or its absence, is how much this stuff happens in the first place. October 7th drastically increased the number of Israelis who think this, the number of Israelis who already thought it and are now willing to say so, the number of Israelis who aren’t quite there but are willing to look the other way etc. The Gaza war also increased the practical ability of people to act on such sentiments. Maybe 5% of Israelis think this way, but it’s higher among those still young enough to be serving, and higher still among those in combat units. Perhaps it’s 10%, but they won’t be evenly distributed. The army is large enough that there must be some platoons where they are the majority. Boys will be boys.

On the other hand, most power in the IDF is still wielded by people ranging from center-Left to soft Right and, at the very least, they consider that kind of thing to be a breach of discipline and do what they can to stop it. Perhaps more important is that the IDF has consistently cleared areas of civilians and then chucked in a lot of bombs before sending in troops. It’s perhaps telling that many of the clearest cases of intentionally targeting civilians are those of Palestinians who entered already cleared and designated killzones. The most sustained run of alarming shootings happened at the GHF aid sites, which was one of the few times that IDF soldiers were in sustained contact with large numbers of civilians. I’m inclined to think, therefore, that this is a relatively marginal problem in practice, responsible for 1 or 2% of Palestinian civilian casualties. But it’s definitely happened and it makes sense out of apparently senseless cases like that of Hind Rajab.

2. Laying waste

A lot of Gaza is rubble. At least 55% of buildings have been completely destroyed and more than 80% are damaged. It looks pretty bad.

As a result, the majority of Gaza’s population is living in tent camps or shacks, and these are pretty bad too. Sometimes it rains and that’s really bad.

By any standards, this is cruel. The policy of destroying most of urban Gaza emerged from the bottom up. The IDF was caught in a cycle of giving evacuation notices, going into urban areas and killing any paramilitary members present, then coming back a few months later and having to do it all over again. This was because the IDF didn’t have a plan, or at any rate a good plan, or maybe had multiple incompatible plans, and was trying to achieve ‘total victory’ by just killing everyone in Hamas. Zionists are prone these days to declaring that their critics ‘don’t understand the reality of war’ and that’s certainly true, but if they did understand it more they might be even more critical. There are not many cases of wars fought without either an attempt to hold territory or to create a political entity that will do it on your behalf, or even with a demand that the opposing side could accede to, but instead solely based on killing enemy troops faster than they can be replaced. Those that came closest to such a modus operandi (like Vietnam or the Soviets in Afghanistan) are case studies in failure. Feiglin loves to make that stupid face where he tells you that the point of war is kill your enemy unlike whatever it says in that cursed IDF ethics book written by godless snobs alienated from their true Jewish identity, but actually it isn’t. That’s a means to an end. If it’s all your doing, you aren’t doing anything good. Our friend Sam Kriss was very exercised about this:

Israel is not fighting to remove Hamas from power in Gaza.

Nothing about this war makes sense until you realise that what’s at stake here is something other than victory. The length it’s been going, for one thing. During the Suez War, it took Israel five days to capture the Gaza Strip from a well-armed and dug-in Egyptian army. In 1967, Israel had seized the entirety of Gaza by the end of the Six-Day War’s second day. The IDF of 2024 is not the IDF of half a century ago, and unlike the Egyptians, Hamas has nowhere to retreat. But I’m not sure that can explain why this conquest of Gaza has already taken seventy times longer than the last one. Or the other unusual events that keep happening. Not long ago, Israeli jets bombed the al-Shifa hospital complex in Gaza City. You might remember that last November, the IDF besieged the hospital: they cut off fuel and bombed solar panels while snipers shot doctors through the windows. Dozens died. In the end, the IDF captured the complex, which they claimed was a Hamas command centre; their evidence consisted of a few Kalashnikovs planted in an MRI room, a box of dates, and a calendar on a wall. So why are they bombing it again now? IDF strategy in Gaza appears to consist of a series of rapid advances, moving in to destroy houses, smash up shops, vandalise schools—and then equally rapid retreats, followed by aerial bombardment of whoever’s moved into the ruins. Outside a few strategic areas like the Salah al-Din Road, which runs the length of the strip, they’re not interested in holding territory in Gaza. They do not want to have to take over governmental duties for its population of two million (and shrinking) Palestinians. They don’t want to collect Gaza’s taxes, operate its sewage system, or pick up its litter. They just want to destroy.

I think this is unfair. The goal - and I will return to this - was not just to destroy, it was to destroy Hamas. A goal, even an incoherent impossible goal, is still a goal. It’s something, but it’s admittedly not much. There’s a left-wing critique of this (instead of pointlessly killing people, don’t kill people), but there’s also a right-wing critique (instead of pointlessly killing people, pointfully kill people). Kriss’s charge that the IDF wasn’t serious because it wasn’t holding territory was heard plenty in Israel, just not the way he wanted it.

That wasn’t the only critique though, or even the most widely-held one. A good number of Israelis didn’t want to hold land, and knew that pointfully killing would actually end up landing them with a big headache they preferred not to deal with. What almost all Israelis agreed with, however, is that too many Israeli soldiers were dying. These numbers were indeed high. Not high by the standards of the mid-20th century wars to which Israelis invariably refer to when asked to justify their conduct. By these standards, they were so laughably low as to not even merit consideration. But Israel is not a mid-20th century state, it’s a cucked 21st century liberal pantomime just like everywhere else where kids who throw rocks at their headteacher go to the school counsellor to play a card game which helps them express their feelings. Israelis have more stomach than western European countries for military casualties, but not that much and certainly nothing like Russia or Ukraine has. Israelis wanted it to end.2

The solution the IDF hit upon was simple. Instead of going in and clearing an area and then leaving so both civilians and soldiers could return, just blow everything up before you go. The soldiers can’t come back now, and nor can the civilians, who will have to make their tent a permanent abode. Then when you’re sent to a new area, you do the same thing, and again, and again. Eventually you’ve destroyed most of it.

It’s important to be clear that this tactic definitely worked. Lives were saved. In every single case it was used, it could be justified on tactical grounds (or at least we can grant that this is so). That is why it was done. Each time, the guy on the ground put in a request to demolish everything, and each time it was approved. No-one needed to order anyone to raze the place like Carthage.

Nevertheless, it became clear at a certain stage that the policy was more than that. Each individual case had a tactical justification, but tactics are supposed to serve strategy, and the killing now was no more pointful, it just came at lower cost. Eventually, when you have fields of gray as far as the eye can see, you either come up with a strategy or stop, unless that is the strategy. Bit by bit it became clear that the idea was to create so many Palestinians with no homes to go back to that they would just have to leave.

The dual nature of the campaign allowed for the Israeli Right’s favourite pastime: being a mendacious crymurderer. In the most obvious example, a certain Rabbi called Avraham Zarbiv who claims credit for inventing the ‘blow everything up’ tactic made a name for himself by sending out videos giving inspirational divrei Torah3 about having the courage and emunah to do ethnic cleansing before blowing up a building and saying woohoo. A certain lib-leaning Rosh Yeshiva named Yuval Cherlow made a mild objection by quoting certain medieval Rabbis on the need to avoid allowing warfare to warp ethical sensibilities. Predictably, the rage machine erupted, accusing him of pOSTMODERNISM and aghast that he could decry a tactic that saved soldiers’ lives.

Regardless, though, whenever plausible deniability about this ran out, it’s certainly ran out by now. The Defence Minister has boasted of his accomplishment in destroying the houses more than a million of Gazans so they have no choice but to leave. This is government policy, with only the most superficial layer of deniability for international diplomacy. and if you can’t be held corporately responsible for government policy, what can you be held corporately responsible for?

For my part, I’m in favour of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza in principle. Gaza is a big mess, a place created to herd Arabs Israel didn’t want in 1948, with no plausible pathway to becoming something functional after having been developed into a booby-trapped lunatic asylum. Everyone would be better off if the Gazans went somewhere else, and, while I’m aware that Palestinians have a perfectly good claim to be considered natives of the land, I am generally unmoved by ethnonationalist claims to connections between soil and bloodlines. My chief objection to voluntary emigration as a strategy for solving the problem is that if you don’t do it in the required volume, it just makes the problem worse by removing the most reasonable and pragmatic Gazans and leaving behind all the hopeless nutters who then breed themselves back to the original level. So I get that if you are going to make it work then ‘voluntary’ is going to have to be ‘voluntary’ with a big fat asterisk attached.

On the other hand, putting people in tents and then leaving it up to them to find out where to go while they rot year after year in sub-medieval conditions is barbaric. If you want them to leave, then put at least as much effort in finding them a new home as into immiserating them. It would be a lot cheaper to pay someone to take them than to keep blowing stuff up and becoming an international pariah, but the fact is that too many Israelis hate Palestinians more than they love their own children. They don’t mind spending the money, but they sure as hell won’t put up with it being spent on them. So, because the two bordering countries to which Gazans would walk if they could are blocked off, we end up doing a bunch of the bad stuff associated with ethnic cleansing while not even doing very much ethnic cleansing, which sucks.

3. Death from the sky

The third category of war crime we have committed is in lowering the threshold for a legitimate military target for an aerial strike and raising the permitted level of collateral damage way, way beyond what is normal in contemporary warfare. This has happened all through the war, but it happened most, ironically or perhaps not, precisely when global support for the Israeli war effort was at its highest ebb during the opening month. The thought process went like this:

1. Following October 7th, Israel must achieve total victory over Hamas.

2. Because Israel must achieve total victory over Hamas, therefore it is possible to achieve total victory over Hamas.

3. Israel cannot incur the kinds of casualties likely to result from sustained urban combat in territory prepared in advance.

4. Therefore it must be possible to achieve total victory over Hamas without incurring such casualties.

This logic appeared impregnable to almost every Israeli and non-Israel Zionist. So Israel did what democracies tend to do when faced with a difficult military situation and fired bombs all over the place. True, these bombs were very not indiscriminate; they were extremely discriminate. If there was a local Hamas police chief in a building with 20, 30, 40 … well we don’t know because they won’t say, but we have allegations and a lot of circumstantial evidence.

This is something that Israelis aren’t just corporately responsible for. They are, almost without exception, individually responsible. I certainly was. Oh another tower block went down? FAFO I guess. There’s a neat interview with Naftali Bennet on Sky News:

That’s how pretty much everyone felt. But it turns out that it’s not true that just because you must do something therefore you can do it without paying the costs you won’t pay. So what you did was, if not for nothing, not for all that much, and killing people for not all that much is murder, and murder is wrong.

Darryl Cooper, back before he let himself get totally cooked by rightoid internet culture, actually had a pretty good take on this. If you found out your neighbour had walked into someone’s house and slit the occupant’s throat, you’d be very perturbed. If you found out, he was in the airforce and dropped a bomb on someone’s house, you might want to argue out the morality over a barbeque, or maybe you’d just avoid the topic. It is different. But it isn’t limitlessly different. The civilian to combatant ratio of Israelis on October 7th was 1.9:1, somewhat better than what the IDF achieved in Gaza and, of course, the overall quantity is a lot more. The IDF outperformed Hamas sometime around the 11th or 12th of October and kept going. Eventually it’s too much. When? Mr Borelli in the first week or so called it at 40,000. He was pretty prescient.

Does this mean that Israel is one of those irredeemable countries like the Third Reich that has to be disassembled and replaced with a gay version of itself? I don’t believe so. ‘I was angry’ is a legitimate excuse. It doesn’t justify murder for you, but at the state level it does, otherwise every state is illegitimate, at least in potentiality. International law wasn’t given to Malachei haShares. When you have calmed down, you just cook up what you need between some combination of heat-of-the-moment and rogue-actors and that-bit-didn’t-really-happen until enough time has passed that you can ask why people are being so woke and have their head stuck in the past. You move on. But you do have to move on. What you shouldn’t do is declare your crimes the highest expression of morality and thus commit yourself to committing ever more in the quest to turn your conscience into an accomplice. Don’t do that. Move on, while there’s still time. If there’s still time.

No posts over Succos, so have a great Yom Tov everyone.

First of all, it’s mekorism with a k. Cut that out, OQ? I’m loath to pull rank like this, but sometimes you have to.

Secondly, yes, sure, the human capital issue is key. People are policy, cadres decide everything etc. Ironically, given the present direction of attacks, traditionally, a chronic problem weighing down mekorism has been its general association with Kahanism. Machon Shilo literally started off as one of the various Kahanist factions formed after Meir Kahane was murdered, but even the other groups with less of a direct connection were still intertwined. The general assumption was that both mekorism and Kahanism involve going back to some earlier and more pure form of Judaism, so they went together. Not all Kahanists were mekorists, but almost all mekorists were Kahanists. The problem is a lot of Kahanists were obese weirdos with chaotic personal lives, and a lot of the ones who weren’t were prickly and couldn’t get on with each other.

I would like to say that my own ramblings have been instrumental in breaking this connection, but, in truth, I was pushing at an open door. Kahanism in its original sense doesn’t really exist anymore. It has folded into being the violent wing of Religious Zionism. Or, if you prefer, Religious Zionism has folded into being the hinterland for Kahanism. Not only are pre-Kookian Mizrochniks now more or less extinct, but orthodox Kookists are an endangered species too. The Breslov-Chabad-Kook-Irgun synthesis is what Religious Zionism is, and Kahanists are distinguished only in the degree to which they are eager to impose this by unauthorised violence, and barely even in that. To be a Kahanist is to be an active promoter of Zoharism in one of its most extreme forms. This has a lot of implications, but one of them is that you can’t be a Kahanist and a mekorist anymore. They are incompatible things. Not everyone can figure that out on their own, but it’s pretty obvious once it is pointed out.

A little anecdote before we move on. Limor Son Har Melech and some other Otzma MKs wanted to pass a law enshrining Menachem Mendel Schneerson as some kind of official figure in Judaism, the practical implications of which were (even more) public moneys diverted to the movement and also some kind of obligation for schools to teach about him. It likely would have passed because the Left don’t care about this kind of stuff, and there are informal arrangements in Knesset committees according to which each side signs off on the other promoting their respective versions of degeneracy. But, in fact, the law went away. Bentzi Gopstein, who is old school and still takes it for granted that Rambam is the boss, kicked off about it, and Ben Gvir, who is worried about his old mates starting up a separate party that will bleed him votes, made the law go away. So we won that battle, but everyone knows the war is being lost. Gopstein will soon be an old man, and the young guys aren’t interested in monotheism, not interested at all.

Back to mekorism. I know it’s hard for people my age, and even a decade younger, traumatised by too many sparsely-attended meetings where multiple participants had mustard all over their ill-fitting T-Shirt, to accept, but things are going pretty well. One center of mekorism is the Modi’in Yeshiva, Migdal haTorah, where the consensus of the smart kids is that some version of our schtick is obviously true and the rebbeim are kind of resigned to it. These guys all come from upper-middle-class families and, after one or two years in learning, are going to go and pursue an upper-middle-class career. If there’s a danger, it’s that when they settle down they will be too well integrated into upscale ModOx or Yeshivish-lite communities to really make much of a difference. Similarly, the Habura guys in the UK are, if anything, too normie and well-adjusted, and they are on course to basically be whatever remains of Anglo-Jewry that isn’t Charedi.

But neither is really where mekorism is at these days. Check this out:

It probably won’t surprise many readers if I say I don’t really get this. The aesthetics and general vibe … it’s a nope from me. I think I also disagree with the theory expressed, but I’m not sure because I couldn’t make it more than 5 minutes. However, I’m just one guy and 36,000 views is an awful lot for a frummy video, more than most big-name YouTube rabbis can reliably pull in.

Who are these people? Their husbands are middle-class mizrahim from traditional/moderate frum backgrounds who wanted a bit more and would have gone the generic Shasnik route, but didn’t have to because someone bothered to put in a bit of basic legwork promoting Rambamism. They are software engineers, kablanim, air-conditioning installers, that sort of thing. Some of them do pretty well. A few of them are doing really well. I don’t want to get anyone too excited, but proper money is starting to slosh around. Projects people have been thinking about for years are suddenly possible. If you are an Anglo, it’s easy to be completely unaware of what’s happening, because it’s very Israeli. But this is real, and it’s just getting started. The web of lies is thick, it chokes, but for that very reason it is all too visible, it cannot be ignored, no-one can disguise it anymore. And when you stop believing you are bound to these lies, you just blow a little, and it all goes away.

Relatedly, I have decided to stop engaging at all with people who make apologetics, of any description, for Chabad and Breslov. Look at this.

In the same way that everyone instinctively knows that putting a wire on some poles doesn’t make it a private domain, and everyone knows putting a wavy wig on a woman’s head doesn’t make her more modest, everyone who has said Krias Shema even once and meant it knows how wrong this is. You don’t need anything explained to you to grasp why going to Uman to have an invisible man fix your head is the antithesis of every word of the Torah. It’s obvious. The problem is an entire edifice of fake learning designed to intimidate honest Jews into feeling they are inadequate to make such basic judgements until they have spent decades in learning, and when they have done that, their brains are too fried by all the garbage and nonsense to make any kinds of judgements at all.

The job of the mekorist who has the capacity (and the time, time is important too) to read and write is actually very simple. It’s giving these Jews the permission structure to do the right thing. There are various different strands to this. Talmudic and halachic study is obviously the most important, but intellectual history is necessary too, especially for dealing with חבלה, and perhaps philosophy has a role to play too. But while the methods may (and, I believe, contrary to much Rambamist sentiment, do) require subtlety and skill, the end goal isn’t complicated at all. The one God created the heavens and the earth; He gave us a law that is righteous and good; He loves justice, kindness and mercy; He hates idolatry; He will not permit it. And so we must not do it, or allow it to be done.

This is why I disagree with our friend at Datepalm Discourses.

I don’t agree with Maskil. If a person rejects the notion that the talmud is authoritative because of the nature of the institution it came from and that community practices can spontaneously become authoritative, then it becomes difficult to identify why the Yeshivish community isn’t right.

I don’t think it hard, even a little bit, to identify why the Yeshivish community isn’t right (and they, of course, are very far from being the worst offenders). It is trivially easy to point out what’s wrong. Every one who has learned a bit can see it all over the place, which is why so many buffoonish theories of a non-existent ‘halachic process’ have been cobbled together out of myriad gentile (oh no!) philosophies to justify it. What is hard is designing something better. Mekorists have generally got everything precisely backwards: they portray the perfect end state and then try to figure out how to get there. Their end state is based on selective, often incoherent readings of primary texts, but that isn’t even the most pressing problem. The opposite is necessary: just stop deliberately doing the wrong thing. After a while, it becomes a habit. When we get to the end state, we’ll know what it is.

Again, there is no need to explain what is wrong with doing toasts with an invisible man-god. It is necessary, because we are in a hole, to make space to allow Jews to express the justified horror and rage at such things, and we must make that space. There are some, of course, whether because of the way they are born or what has happened to them, who genuinely do not understand, that actually like it. For them it’s the point. They will have to be dealt with in due course, but we have nothing to say to them. Our attention must be focussed on those who, out of misplaced shame, are suppressing their disgust, to give them the words to pour it out.

This brings me to the particular plight of the disagreeable smarty-pants. There are two errors that such a man is prone to. One is to imagine himself as the best human type; the other to think himself uniquely defective. Both are mistakes. Different people are different and it’s OK. The challenges of such a person are not my concern here. Suffice it to say, focus at a young age on finding a remunerative career you can tolerate, go to the gym, and learn to play some kind of game that you can do socially that doesn’t require a lot of talking. I didn’t do those things, but those are the correct things to do. More pertinent right now is what you can do as a mekorist. Probably the least effective thing you can do is write manifestos. The most effective thing you can do is patiently gather and organise knowledge that other men with skills you do not possess can use.

I would be remiss here not to point out that the wider situation is very bad. The Jewish people as a collective are systematically recreating every error and perversion decried by the prophets in minute detail and in such a way that it seems almost deliberate. The Torah is widely believed to be a doctrine of criminality, of race narcissism, of the most grotesque and imbecilic forms of paganism, of nonsense for its own sake, nonsense without end. The most probable future is that it just keeps getting worse until we get the just deserts spelled out in the Torah. Again. But you need to know it isn’t hopeless. In the places you least suspect, hope springs. Doubtless the fact that we least suspected it there means our mental models have something wrong with them. You can help, but probably not in precisely the way that you want to. Likely no-one will remember you for it. Trust me, though, if we somehow pull this off, it will be worth it.

For reference, here is Shahak’s paraphrase.

Even the real dopes, I hope, will have noticed a few differences. First of all, though it might seem a bit trivial, the proposal was to transfer Arab peasants from Palestine, not to Iraq, but to Syria. This is not a distinction without a difference, because the most popular opinion of educated Arabs in Palestine was that they were part of a Greater Syria (Bilad al Sham), so the proposal was not to transfer these peasants to a different country, but a different place in the same country. More importantly, the idea was not at all the ‘expulsion of all Arabs’, but ‘a limited population transfer’ of those who were dispossessed when Zionists bought land from absentee landowners and removed their new tenants, as was their legal right (subject to adjudication at court which, of course, Arab peasants did not have the wherewithal to organise). Thirdly, Shahak remembered the wrong man. It wasn’t Bergmann, but one of his Brit Shalom cofounders Arthur Ruppin, a man who certainly never seemed to anyone incapable of hurting a fly.

The man who built the Yishuv

Arthur Ruppin is not one of the better-known Zionists. Most Israelis would not recognise his picture.

The reasons for this are not mysterious. Ruppin was a race crank. There were a lot of race cranks knocking around in the early 20th century, but because the Nazis lost the plot in the middle, everyone afterwards did their best to try and forget about it, unless it was to smear their enemies. Mainstream Zionism, both in its socialist and liberal forms, therefore preferred to pretend he never existed. Right-wing Zionists, for their part, reject him because he wasn’t a race crank enough. The theory for which he is best known, namely that the ancient Hebrews were a non-Semitic race might not be correct,1 but he did recognise the obvious fact that the category ‘Jewish’ includes different ancestry clusters, with different average characteristics and capabilities. This, of course, is absolute kryptonite to the Israeli Right built by Begin, whose central conceit is that the honours accrued by Einstein and von Neumann demonstrate that an illiterate Breslov junkie in Afula with tattoos is the master race. Thus, no-one is interested in making Ruppin part of their Zionist history. They prefer to claim continuity with terrorists and fruitcakes.

Nevertheless, Ruppin was extremely influential in the establishment of the state of Israel, and, with the probable exception of the big man himself David Ben Gurion, you can tell the history of the Zionist movement through his life story better than anyone else.

Herzl, as is well known, did not invent the Zionist movement, but reinvented it. His big idea was that efforts to buy land and establish settlements in a run-down malaria-ridden, bandit-infested shithole under the radar of the Ottoman authorities were both demeaning and pointless. What was needed, instead, was to get a charter from the Ottomans, or from someone else who would take over the territory, giving Jews legal right to settle and then move in as an organized national unit. Herzl was obviously right that Zionist efforts up to that point had not borne much fruit, and the movement, hitherto centered in the Russian empire, lined up, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and resentment, behind the new Western European leadership. Before too long, however, it became clear that Herzl’s ‘Political Zionism’ had failed too. Half a decade of start-up shuttle diplomacy had resulted only in the offer of some land in Uganda. At this point, the movement fractured, with many orthodox Herzlians leaving to become ‘Territorialists’, and the Russian old guard taking the opportunity to seize back control and turn Herzl’s new institutions into vehicles for their sundry plans for spiritual and intellectual renewal in the Holy Land.

What eventually came out of this was ‘Synthetic Zionism’, the idea that you could focus both on practical settlement and diplomacy because each one made it easier to make progress with the other. The political representatives of Synthetic Zionism were the General Zionists, led by Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow, who dominated the elected parliament of the World Zionist Organisation until the early-1930s and were tied to the largest Zionist education system in Palestine, but were a small minority in the Yishuv’s local representative body and eventually also the WZO, totally outmanoeuvred by the better-organised and more ruthless Labour movement. However, the key figure in implementing Synthetic Zionism on the ground was Arthur Ruppin, who directed the Palestine Office of the WZO from 1908, organizing the settlement and colonization policy during the second half of the Second Aliyah, while acting as the movement’s principal land agent.

Ruppin was a German bourgeois with no moral commitments to socialism, and untainted by adherence to Marxist economics or historical theory. Nevertheless, in practice, he worked to set up agricultural collectives run on egalitarian principles in Palestine because he understood that this was what was necessary to get the state off the ground. He steered idealistic pioneers from the Poalei Tziyon and HaPoel haTzair movements into collective agriculture projects because this was what could reliably bring young Jews to the Land of Israel and keep them there. Indeed, while the Labour Zionist movement in theory owes its origin to Dov Ber Borochov, in reality its working model contradicted his consistently expressed views, excepting a few speeches made towards the end of his life. Of course, the kibbutz and moshav system as it eventually emerged was the result of trial and error on the part of many people, but the quiet father of Labour Zionism was not a theorist like Syrkin or Gordon, but the bureaucrat Ruppin.

Ruppin was also unusually precocious in understanding that the Arab Question was by far the most serious one Zionism had to face. The typical approach of the Zionist movement to the issue of fellahin displaced following Jewish land purchases was strictly legalistic. We bought it fair and square, and they have to go. This can (and from a leftist perspective certainly should) be questioned on ethical grounds, especially since many formal land titles had been acquired in the mid-19th century through political intrigue and corruption, but in practice it’s easy to ignore ethics if you are pumped up enough. However, Ruppin saw that the more important issue was urgently practical: displaced Arab peasants weren’t going to just dissolve or wander off, they would form a restless and bitter proletariat open to propaganda from the Arab nationalist bourgeoisie. All around the world, modernisation of agriculture led to peasants relying on informal and customary tenant arrangements getting screwed over, and Palestine, being a dump, was long overdue for this process. However, while always and everywhere this process presented challenges to political stability, its racialisation in Mandate Palestine was obviously disastrous. It is not necessary to ascribe to Ruppin an unusual degree of benevolence to see that his Syrian relocation scheme was an attempt to solve a real social issue in a way that didn’t involve people murdering each other.

Ruppin’s hard-headed and open-eyed approach to the Arab problem eventually led to him co-founding Brit Shalom. There have always been two strains in dovish Zionism, one, represented by Bergmann, being primarily ethical, and the other, represented by Ruppin, being essentially pragmatic. Ruppin arrived at binationalism while much of the Zionist movement was still stuck in its ‘fingers in ears’ stage of thinking about the Arab problem, because he became convinced that, whatever one may wish to be the case, Arab national feeling in Palestine was an objective social fact that had to be dealt with no less than the presence of Arab individuals. What is perhaps most interesting is that he didn’t arrive at this position because of Arab political violence. To the contrary, he drifted away from Brit Shalom after the riots and massacres of 1929, convinced there was no Arab party with enough control worth talking to. Rather the more boring work of Arab nationalist propaganda, strikes and petitioning over the 1920s had won him round to the inevitability of compromise. Palestinians don’t want to hear it, but the resort to violence has always been their movement’s Achilles heel. Of course, acceding to binationalism, while being beneficial to the Arab population from any reasonable utilitarian perspective, would not have satisfied certain ethnonationalist aspirations. People can believe what they want, but no-one is obligated to indulge them in it. In cases like this, I would say they are obligated not to indulge them in it.

Arthur Ruppin today

Ruppin was the most quintessential of Zionists, both a General and Labour Zionist at the same time, without ever being formally either. He did more to build the new Zionist society than any other non-politician, and a great deal more than most politicians. He saw more clearly than most that the real obstacle to Zionism was not Jewish apathy or international interference, but the opposition of the local population, and his journey from indifference to compromise to gritty determination to do what it took prefigured Ben Gurion’s by about a decade. As a middle-class German, he was a part of a minority in the Yishuv’s population, and didn’t fit in well with its leadership class. However, the German-speaking bourgeoisie, about 10% of the Yishuv population thanks to the Nazis, did more to build the State of Israel than is generally appreciated, disproportionately creating the capitalist economy and university system that would, in due course, eat the kibbutz movement and provide the economic might necessary to survive in the region. But who today wants Arthur Ruppin the racist peacenik and snob? Is the true Zionism NonZionism after all?

As a result, this has been even more of a diplomatic disaster for Israel than the normal resting state of diplomatic disasters. None other than the cringest of cringe boomerzionists, Mr Huckabee himself turned up and was like ‘errr what?’ Coalition pressures or no coalition pressures, Bibi had to buckle this time, and he ordered some outposts to be dismantled, and some of the perpetrators actually got arrested. Where were they arrested?

This is not a very big surprise because 95%+ settler terrorism is committed by Breslovers. It’s interesting, though, because Daas Yochid is starting his revolution, and it turns out the missing ingredient for Haskalah ver. 2 that isn’t just a big disaster is Breslov, you see:

People like to mock Rebbe Nachman, but most people who become Breslov are noticeably happier and more fulfilled, no matter how crazy they started off.

Sigh. So I guess we have to do this again.

Item:

I suppose they are happier and more fulfilled.

Item:

They sound extremely happy and fulfilled.

Item:

So happy, so fulfilled.

Item:

The boys certainly seem happy and fulfilled.

Item:

So. Much. Fulfillment.

Item:

TBF, he does look happy.

Item:

The world is a narrow bridge, and the ikar is not to be bumraped by a Breslov tzaddik.

Item:

I guess he was happy and fulfilled.

Defenders of Breslov like Daas Yochid will claim all movements are like this, because they are incontinent liars. In fact, you cannot find any Jewish group with the same number of high-profile scandals per capita, or even remotely close. I doubt you can find a gentile one, though it’s a big world. Like Daas Yochid, they will make the lunatic claim that they are better off being Breslov because they were even crazier to start with, but, in the real world, random Hiloni Israelis are not constantly getting exposed for running child sex abuse cults. All this is so silly. Likely in the absence of Breslov, a lot of these guys would be leading fairly meaningless lives with a lot of video games and weed, but that’s better. We’re just getting started though.

Heresy and sin

As Daas Yochid explains, Breslov is about more than artificially inducing a state of subhuman intelligence in yourself through spiritual exercises, it’s also about hiskashrus with the perfect tzaddik. Basically, you’ll never be good enough on your own and God is too far away for you to grasp, but luckily there is a wholly righteous man who is kind of God wink-wink, no of course I didn’t mean that literally, but, like, you can meditate over him and think about him all the time, and that will get you close to God, which he is … part of, wink-wink.

What Breslovers (really all Zoharists) love to do is say completely insane heresy and then, when you simply quote back what they said, demand that you engage in ridiculous apologetic to explain why they are actually monotheists while they just go around propagating their completely insane heresy to people who literally wouldn’t understand the apologetic interpretation even if it was put to them, which it never is. If you don’t engage in this demeaning game, it’s because you lack Ahavas Yisrael. They think this is very clever. It’s not, but lucky for them, you don’t need to be very clever.

Where does this theology come from? As I have explained, it was developed by followers of Shabtai Tzvi (with some contribution from the man himself) to explain what it meant for him to be the Messiah when all he really did was go around being weird and making gnomic statements. The rabbinate did not succeed in stamping out this theology, largely because many of its members were adherents or sympathisers, and it grew in different directions for a century and a half. Over time, the theology of divine mediation developed for Shabtai Tzvi was applied to a wider range of purportedly righteous leaders, sometimes without any particular messianic connotation. Eventually, the radical wing of the movement coalesced around Jacob Frank who flamed out and led his followers into formal adoption of Christianity. The moderate wing dumped the least sustainable part of its belief system, namely faith that Shabtai Tzvi specifically was the Messiah, and rebranded itself under the name Chassidim (a term hitherto applied among Ashkenazim to ascetics who had little if any connection to the new movement).

The Modern Jewish History series has stalled a bit, because the next installment is supposed to be about Maskilim, and I don’t know anything about them and needed to read some books and these books are boooooring. This is a shame because the episode after that one is going to be a banger about the cleaving of the Chassidic movement from the third generation onwards.

Many people have studied primary Chassidic texts and looked at Chassidim today and wondered what on earth they have in common. Here’s a somewhat annoying short video about that:

The answer is twofold, a good bit and a bad bit. The bad bit is that the normal thing happened with an idealistic movement once it gets followers. Being a tzaddik with followers is great, but being a rich tzaddik with a pimped-out chair and a fur coat is even better. Cynicism set in, and with it corruption and the general conversion of the movement into a business. The good bit (well, sort of) is that large sections of traditional orthodox Jewry threw in the towel and decided that it was better to get subsumed into Chassidus than hitch up with the yeshiva movement and be miserable all day. As they did, they brought in a lot of their vibe with them, and the Chassam Sofer became the real ideological cornerstone of the movement as it spread into Hungary. The synthesis was helped along by the Haskalah giving traditionalists and Chassidim a common enemy. Eventually, this tendency became Satmar-normative Chassidus of today, in which any appeals to primary Chassidic texts can be nicely batted away with a neat ‘the way of Besht is lost’ and everyone eats their kugel and it’s awesome.

The other tendency was the opposite, to try and go back to the original meaning of Chassidus. Again, this had a good side and a bad one. The revivalists were trying to overthrow corrupt and often tyrannical Rebbes whose courts were centers of intrigue and avarice, scarcely more edifying than those of a secular monarch (and with worse interior decor). The bad side is they also wanted to go back to authentic Chassidic theology, which is heresy. Breslov was the most extreme and deranged representative of this tendency, with its deification of their tzaddik unmatched until Lubavitch schized out following the Holocaust. It was also paradigmatically radical in some other ways. Nahman of Breslov didn’t just return to the earliest times of the movement, he wanted to go back further, and deal with some business the Besht had left unfinished.

That’s Yehuda Liebes, who is a heretic if ever there was one, but has a useful penchant for spilling the beans. Unsurprisingly, Nahman was condemned by more orthodox Chassidic Rabbis as a heretic, in response to which he drew on his roots and called them Erev Rav.

The idea of cleaving to a perfectly righteous man who alone is capable of saving you obviously parallels the central claims of the Christian religion. Some Jewish monotheists use this as a rhetorical weapon, but I think it’s wrong. First of all, there doesn’t seem to be all that great a deal of Christian influence on Sabbatean theology. The Zohar contains some recycled Christian exegesis, Cardoso smuggled in a bit of his youthful Catholicism, but mostly it’s an internal development, parallel to, but not deriving from Christianity. There seems to be something structural in the Jewish religion, or the Jewish people, where out of despair at living up to monotheism we kick against it and alight on the most primitive form of idolatry: the deification of human beings. Secondly, even if it is effective as a short-term tactic, it ends up compounding the real problem, which is the assumption that anything ‘Jewish’ that we came up with on our own can’t be a fundamental violation of the Torah, that we are immune from precisely the sin that we are very patently addicted to.

However, there certainly are parallels to Christianity here. Daas Yochid thinks it’s fine to cleave to the perfect tzaddik who is entangled in some kind of hard to define way with God as long as it makes you a better person at the end of it. OK, here’s David Wood:

If utilitarian considerations trump theology, then Christianity beats Breslov four million times over with spare change. And you don’t have to go to America for it, here’s the Israeli version:

These guys are kind of cringe (though they are working on it with their PR team), but they aren’t chimping out and running sex cults. If you want to help miserable people fix their lives and be productive, that’s your answer, and you can tap into practically limitless American funds to support this evangelisation.

But that’s not Jewish! Right, it’s not Jewish, but what is Jewish? Is it fulfilling the laws regardless of what you believe? Well, the nevi’im say the precise opposite, that fulfilling the laws while adulterating faith in the true God is not only worthless, but an offense in itself. OK, so maybe they got carried away with rhetoric from time to time, but they keep coming back to this point. They must have meant something. Have you thought about what is?

There is an interesting midrash:

דרש רבי פפיס וימירו את כבודם בתבנית שור. שומע אני, בשור שלמעלן תלמד לומר אכל עשב. אמר לו רבי עקיבה: דייך פפיס! אמר לו: מה את מקים וימירו את כבודם בתבנית שור אכל עשב בשור שלמטה. שומע אני, בשור שלימות השנה! תלמד לומר אכל עשב. אין לך מנול ומשקץ יותר מן השור בשעה שהוא אוכל עשב.

There is nothing more revolting than a cow chewing the grass then swallowing it, then spitting it up, then chewing it again, then swallowing it again, over and over. Yet, for this, of all things, did the Children of Israel spurn their Glory. The Satmar Rebbe explains: Jews can’t do Avodah Zarah properly. When the goyim do it, they build these beautiful temples, they play this incredible music, it has all this aura. But when you do it? You’re sitting in a filthy room, books full of nonsense and inane wordplay scattered about the desks, a stinking fatso next to you intermittently bursting into tears and giggling. Something deep within you refuses to give you the excuse. When you do Avodah Zarah, you do it lishmah.

We learn from Mishlei that the temptation of idolatry is like that of a woman. To become a Christian is to forsake your wife for a stone cold 10, with a PhD, and a dowry, and, for some reason, she is incredibly into you. You shouldn’t do it. It’s wrong. God is real, Jesus was just a man and now he’s dead. But if you do it, we know why. To choose Breslev is to forsake your wife for a diseased, whore with lesions on her face. You didn’t want better; you just wanted different. Desperately wanted it.

It’s Rosh haShanah tomorrow night. According to the Talmud, we are supposed to read the curses of Devarim beforehand. The prevalent custom is to do it two weeks beforehand, for reasons we shan’t get into here, but the basic point remains: you are going to be judged, be afraid. This is no joke.

As it happens, Breslovers like this passage. It’s where they hallucinated the belief that it’s a great mitzvah to be happy at all times. This is what we do: always read what it doesn’t say, always focus on what it doesn’t mean. The simple reading, that actually God is really serious about this monotheism thing, that He isn’t playing around, that He is not going to tolerate this, that He doesn’t care about whether you feel connected, He wants you to do what you’re told, that’s boring. Does that make you feel good? No, and that’s the real test.

This is not a joke. It’s not funny. If the Torah is true, for any conceivable meaning of true, we can’t do this anymore. We have to stop literally right now. God’s mercies are so incredible that it sometimes overwhelms one to think about it. After every chance we’ve been given, after each time we have thrown it back in His face, He still gives us more. But his mercies don’t get you off the hook indefinitely. He told us so in that book we claim to believe in, and He showed us too. Not so long ago. Isn’t that enough? Can’t we just do the right thing? When it’s this easy?

James I was the victim of a gay pederast in his teenage years and a very damaged person. In general, I think men who have a strong hatred of smoking are messed up one way or another (girls are different, they’re not supposed to like it). If you are one of those guys who starts manically coughing and gesticulating when someone lights up on the other side of the room, then you have my sympathy, but I have nothing other to say to you. However, the argument that even though smoking is totally awesome you still shouldn’t do it because it’s bad for you is a serious one, so we’ll start with that.

First of all, smoking* is genuinely extremely bad for you. It remains the gold standard for isolating cause and effect from correlational studies because the effect size is just that large. Reducing the prevalence of smoking* in society is one of the more effective public health interventions of the post-WW2 era. If you presently smoke*, then quitting is probably the single best thing you can do for your long-term health. All that is true and I don’t dispute it. I’m not some kind of crank or immature troll. You may be wondering why I put an asterisk next to ‘smoking’ though. We’ll get to it shortly.

The worst thing about smoking* is that it causes lung cancer. Here is a graph of lung cancer mortality in the United States over time.

As you can see, the decline in lung cancer rates clearly tracks with the declining acceptability and use of tobacco in wider society. Conversely, the rise of lung cancer correlates very clearly with the rise of … well actually it doesn’t at all.

Tobacco has been widely used among Europeans since the 17th century. Among indigenous Americans, it goes back a lot further than that. The general consensus among both primitive and civilized peoples was that smoking was good for your health. That’s actually kind of odd because in some ways smoking is kind of obviously not so great. If you have a cough and you smoke, then you will in short order have a really bad cough. It also makes your skin kind of dirty. That’s not a big deal, you can just wash it, but it makes it interesting that here was a centuries-long consensus that overall it was good for you. Of course, people can be wrong, but, when they are, you need a mechanism to explain why.

The steep and fairly terrifying rise in lung cancer in the 20th century has no correlation at all with use of tobacco. However, it has an extremely strong correlation with smoking cigarettes.

What is it that makes cigarettes more dangerous than smoking generally? The answer is largely that, with cigarettes, you can, and people generally do, inhale the smoke into the lungs. If you try doing that with a cigar or a pipe, you will probably literally fail and make a fool of yourself, but if you do somehow succeed, you won’t be trying it again in a hurry. This is why the invention of filters and ‘light’ cigarettes, once widely considered to be a healthier alternative for removing much of the tar, actually makes smoking worse for you. Here’s an old Vice magazine article with the goods:

Fifty years ago, tobacco companies started putting tiny holes in the paper filters in their cigarettes. Based on some dubious science, the companies claimed that these new “high-ventilation” cigs were healthier and smoother, pitching them as “low tar” and “light.” That kind of labeling was eventually outlawed, but the tiny holes remain—they’re now found in virtually every cigarette smoked today. Now, a new research review shows that not only do those tiny holes not make cigarettes any healthier, but they’ve likely contributed to a rise in a certain kind of lung cancer.

The cancer is called adenocarcinoma, and it occurs deep in the lungs. Today it’s the most common type of lung cancer, but that wasn’t always the case. Over the last 50 years, other types of lung cancer have decreased as smoking rates have fallen but, strangely, cases of lung adenocarcinoma have increased.

Researchers at the The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center and five other universities wanted to find out why. They pored through the existing literature—chemistry and toxicology studies, human clinical trials and epidemiological studies, and even internal tobacco company documents—and uncovered what they believe is the culprit behind the rates of lung adenocarcinoma.

Research shows that filter ventilation holes make the tobacco burn more slowly and at a lower temperature, which actually leads to relatively higher amounts of toxic substances in the smoke. Next comes a one-two punch: The filter blocks some of the addictive nicotine and the holes dilute the smoke with air, so some smokers compensate by taking longer, deeper drags to get more nicotine. The result? More chemicals getting forced deeper into the lungs where adenocarcinomas more frequently occur. Far from being a safer way to smoke, the filters (and their holes) actually make cigarettes more dangerous.

The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute

“Our data suggests a clear relationship between the addition of ventilation holes to cigarettes and increasing rates of lung adenocarcinoma seen over the past 20 years,” Peter Shields, a lung medical oncologist and deputy director of OSUCCC – James, said in a statement.

Why do people inhale in the first place? It’s because there’s a lot more permeable skin in the lungs than in the mouth, so more nicotine gets absorbed. But this is nevertheless an extremely disgusting practice. It’s like cutting a hole through your belly and jamming dinner directly into your stomach to get a faster hit. It is this practice which I above referred to as smoking*, but a better term is smooking, and it is that we shall use henceforth. Because doing this is both unsatisfying and highly addictive, the typical smooker does it 12 times a day, constantly assaulting their body for ever-diminishing returns.

So far, I haven’t actually said anything controversial in health orthodoxy, but here’s where it gets interesting. The obvious conclusion from this is that you should just not inhale. Smoke, don’t smook, but that is very much not the health orthodoxy. Let’s ask the internet:

Mayo Clinic

WebMD

American Lung Association

The general gist of it is this: yes, not inhaling is much better for you, but because cigars are so much stronger than cigarettes, it’s still bad for you. OK, fair enough, but you know what is not dozens of times stronger than a cigarette? A cigarette. Checkmate libs.

However, there is now a different type of snag: if you take an average cigarette and don’t inhale, it’s not fun. It just kind of tastes like you took some paper and floor sweepings, burnt them and sucked the smoke into your mouth, because that’s more or less what you just did. In other words, most commercially available cigarettes aren’t even made for smoking, all you can do is smook them. But all is not lost. American Spirit, Camel Yellows and, at a pinch, a Marlboro Red are eligible for smoking. Just rip off the filter, take the smoke in your mouth, let it sit for 5-10 seconds, and then push it out again, in smoke circles if you aren’t a spaz. It’s better to smoke a pipe if you have time for that, but these will do.

Is smoking in this manner still bad for health? Yeah to an extent, but it’s well within the range of activities about which a free adult should be able to choose whether or not to take the hit, because there are many benefits. First of all, it’s nice. Life is for living, not morbidly trying to stretch it out an extra week or two so you can have a few more minutes to lecture people about how they, too, should foreswear pleasures like some kind of giant longevity ponzi scheme (we’ll get back to that). Secondly, it boosts your brainpower giving you up to roughly the equivalent of a 6-point advantage in an IQ test. Thirdly, and most importantly, it decreases stress and, unless you do something really dangerous (like smooking), the best thing you can do for your health, and that of those around you, is to be less stressed.

A neat analogy is co-sleeping with a baby. Most reputable authorities strongly recommend against doing this because of a slightly elevated risk of suffocating your child. It’s true, there is an elevated risk. But what these studies don’t take into account is the elevated risk of crashing your car into a tree because you haven’t slept properly in four weeks, or getting divorced, or jumping off a bridge, or losing your job, or any of the other crazy things that happen to people when they are out of their mind from putting the baby to sleep fourteen times a night. You can cut the risk of co-sleeping down to pretty close to zero through various precautions (don’t drink, don’t do drugs, keep blankets far away from the baby’s face etc.), but there’s always a risk, and that risk is worth it. If you’re a billionaire who can afford a fleet of nannies and there are no tradeoffs, then it’s not worth it, but you’re not that.

Smoking is much the same way. Say you come home from work, and the baby has spent the last half hour dismantling the living room. You are exhausted and would rather put fifteen bullets in your head than tidy up two-dozen ripped-up napkins again. What do you do? Well, you could shout at your wife until she cleans it up, and she probably will, but slowly you hate each other that little bit more, and said baby has to grow up in a warzone. Or you could go outside and have a smoke. And then you come in and it’s not so bad. And if you want to tell me that’s assur, and I’m not frum then sorry I don’t care because I’m too busy having a smoke and it’s chill.

With that said, I think it’s good to have some rules to stop it becoming a bad habit. Here are mine:

1. No more than 2 cigarettes on any given day.

2. If I have a cold, complete ban until it goes away.

3. Once every 3 months, don’t smoke for a week to check I’m not addicted.

But you do you. What I want to finish with is something a bit more controversial. If a Jew wants something to illustrate the humane and decent nature of halacha he will generally reach for pikuah nefesh, the idea that saving a human life overrides even the most severe prohibitions in the Torah. And that’s true, it is beautiful, but over the past decade I have lived through two incidents of warped insanity justified by this very principle.

The first was Covid, when, long after the futility and absurdity of the whole affair was evident to any moderately thoughtful person, the most degrading and demeaning intrusions on human dignity were justified by appeal to the limitless obligation to schlep out the life of anyone who might be infected by someone who might be infected by someone who might be infected by me. I still remember vividly the wild eyes of the assorted people possessed as if by demons who felt they had the right to scream at a complete stranger because he wasn’t wearing his muzzle. And the whole time, Chassidim, precisely because they aren’t so into halacha, just ignored everything and it was completely fine. A few more people died than elsewhere, but still much less than at any other time in human history and it was worth it because life is for living.

The second, which I hope is starting to wind down, is the constant din of ever more outlandish calls for war crimes in Gaza and anywhere else the IDF is operating to save even one Jewish soldier, greeting each new piece of evidence that the IDF (and especially the IAF) is already doing everything short of deliberate murder (most of the time…) with even more crazed demands for more. למה יש מבנה עומד ברצועה? The only real response to this is ‘WTF is wrong with you?’, but the logic of pikuah nefesh (once you have established that it’s a ‘Jewish’ life and not a ‘human’ one to which it applies) is remorseless. It admits no claims of common sense; it doesn’t see the raised eyebrow. Any moral principle, no matter how beautiful, can become something ugly if it does not acknowledge a limit. It’s not just us. The evangelicals who demanded that Terri Schiavo be kept, not alive, but in a grotesque parody of life, who bounded through police barricades to squirt a water bottle into her gaping mouth, all meant well. They had an absolute principle to uphold.

The truth is that the battle for pikuah nefesh has already been won. There are exceptions - children with leukaemia, car crash victims - and they justify throwing a great deal of resources at them, but the average baby born can expect to get past 80. That’s plenty. I have lived long enough that a non-trivial number of people I grew up around are now dead; I have seen different ways of going out. I want to die of a heart attack. If there was some sort of way of ensuring that would happen rather than spending years sitting in my own shit until the nurse does her afternoon inspection, unclear on who I am or who these people are sitting around my bed, I would take it, even if it means shaving 10, maybe 20 years off my life. I am not Richard Hanania. I don’t have any kind of solution, let alone a simple one, to the novel moral problems thrown up by the unexpected triumph of medicine over the human condition, nor to the havoc it is wreaking on social institutions. I know suicide is assur. I can, though, at least, not pretend this change hasn’t already happened. To continue to priggishly demand that we do whatever it takes to live even longer is perverse. We won. Take the W, and kick back with a ciggy.

Appendix:

I can argue anything basically, but here’s the actual science. First from the National Cancer Institute:

Smoking 1-2 cigars a day, or even smoking a larger number with no inhalation is basically not bad for you at all. It’s surprising that cigarette smoking without inhalation is actually really bad for you, but I’m not sure the data is really useful because 1-19 cigarettes is not a meaningful category. 19 cigarettes a day is a lot!

Here is the Surgeon General

Nine cigarettes a day is still quite a lot, but this is still surprising given how harmless cigar smoking is. I can think of two explanations. The first is that people are self-reporting themselves as not inhaling when actually they are by accident. The second is that commercial cigarettes are just really bad for you because of all the other stuff they put in like the crunchy conspiracy theorists say. I must admit that the safe, science-supported thing to do is to only smoke cigars, but I don’t like cigars and they make me feel dizzy. צ’’ע.

Here’s the man himself dancing to it in the shuk.

Expect to hear it a lot more over the next month.

What’s the problem now? Oh, look, Maskil Binah is going to get on his hobby horse and nerd out. Here’s the problem you idiot.

אַשְׁרֵ֣י אָ֭דָם מְפַחֵ֣ד תָּמִ֑יד וּמַקְשֶׁ֥ה לִ֝בּ֗וֹ יִפּ֥וֹל בְּרָעָֽה׃

Stupid Anglos who don’t know anything will tell you that Religious Zionists are better than Charedim because they learn Tanach. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Sure, they learn the book of Joshua. They love that. And then they work their way inattentively through until the end of Melachim and that’s it, they’re done. Some of the special ones do read all of it, sure, just like some Conservative Jews keep Shabbos, but in general they don’t even know what they don’t know. They think the Tanach is a book about killing people, like a Reddit atheist, but with and that’s a good thing attached. That’s why their propaganda mimics not just what is specifically condemned by the prophets in semantic terms, but even specific linguistic nuances to a degree that is so uncanny that it just has to be providential, that God is telling us something. I’ve quoted this passage before, and now I’m going to quote it again. Go on, desubscribe:

שִׁמְעוּ־נָ֣א זֹ֗את רָאשֵׁי֙ בֵּ֣ית יַעֲקֹ֔ב וּקְצִינֵ֖י בֵּ֣ית יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל הַֽמְתַעֲבִ֣ים מִשְׁפָּ֔ט וְאֵ֥ת כׇּל־הַיְשָׁרָ֖ה יְעַקֵּֽשׁוּ׃ בֹּנֶ֥ה צִיּ֖וֹן בְּדָמִ֑ים וִירוּשָׁלַ֖͏ִם בְּעַוְלָֽה׃ רָאשֶׁ֣יהָ ׀ בְּשֹׁ֣חַד יִשְׁפֹּ֗טוּ וְכֹהֲנֶ֙יהָ֙ בִּמְחִ֣יר יוֹר֔וּ וּנְבִיאֶ֖יהָ בְּכֶ֣סֶף יִקְסֹ֑מוּ וְעַל־יְהֹוָה֙ יִשָּׁעֵ֣נוּ לֵאמֹ֔ר הֲל֤וֹא יְהֹוָה֙ בְּקִרְבֵּ֔נוּ לֹֽא־תָב֥וֹא עָלֵ֖ינוּ רָעָֽה׃ לָכֵן֙ בִּגְלַלְכֶ֔ם צִיּ֖וֹן שָׂדֶ֣ה תֵֽחָרֵ֑שׁ וִירוּשָׁלַ֙͏ִם֙ עִיִּ֣ין תִּֽהְיֶ֔ה וְהַ֥ר הַבַּ֖יִת לְבָמ֥וֹת יָֽעַר׃

Apart from the obvious echoes in multiple Israeli hits, it’s just ridiculous how on the nose it is. You want detestation of justice? Got it. Making crooked the straight? Got it. Building Zion in blood? Too easy. Its heads judging for bribes? Come on, this was yesterday. Its priests teaching for a price? Bro, do they do anything but that? Its prophets conjuring for silver. Yo, we got that.

But we are rabbinic Jews, so maybe we aren’t supposed to be looking at what the pesukim say. That’s what they keep telling me. What do Hazal do with it?1 Funnily enough, אשרי אדם מפחד תמיד appears in Gittin 55b at the beginning of the passage recounting material from the destruction of the second temple. I’ll quote liberally:

אמר רבי יוחנן, מאי דכתיב. אשרי אדם מפחד תמיד ומקשה לבו יפול ברעה. אקמצא ובר קמצא חרוב ירושלים, אתרנגולא ותרנגולתא חרוב טור מלכא, אשקא דריספק חרוב ביתר.

הוו בהו הנהו בריוני אמרו להו רבנן: ניפוק ונעביד שלמא בהדייהו. לא שבקינהו. אמרו להו ניפוק ונעביד קרבא בהדייהו, אמרו להו רבנן: לא מסתייעא מילתא. קמו קלנהו להנהו אמברי דחיטי ושערי והוה כפנא.

אבא סקרא ריש בריוני דירושלים, בר אחתיה דרבן יוחנן בן זכאי הוה. שלח ליה: תא בצינעא לגבאי. אתא. אמר ליה עד אימת עבדיתו הכי וקטליתו ליה לעלמא בכפנא. אמר ליה מאי איעביד, דאי אמינא להו מידי קטלו לי! אמר ליה חזי לי תקנתא לדידי דאיפוק, אפשר דהוי הצלה פורתא. אמר ליה: נקוט נפשך בקצירי, וליתו כולי עלמא ולישיילו בך, ואייתי מידי סריא ואגני גבך, ולימרו דנח נפשך. וליעיילו בך תלמידך ולא ליעול בך איניש אחרינא, דלא לרגשון בך דקליל את, דאינהו ידעי דחייא קליל ממיתא. עביד הכי. נכנס בו רבי אליעזר מצד אחד, ורבי יהושע מצד אחר. כי מטו לפיתחא, בעו למדקריה. אמר להו יאמרו רבן דקרו בעו למדחפיה. אמר להו יאמרו רבן דחפו פתחו ליה בבא נפק. כי מטא להתם אמר שלמא עלך מלכא שלמא עלך מלכא … אמר ליה מיזל אזילנא ואינש אחרינא משדרנא אלא בעי מינאי מידי דאתן לך. אמר ליה תן לי יבנה וחכמיה, ושושילתא דרבן גמליאל, ואסוותא דמסיין ליה לרבי צדוק. קרי עליה רב יוסף ואיתימא רבי עקיבא משיב חכמים אחור ודעתם יסכל איבעי למימר ליה לשבקינהו הדא זימנא.

אתרנגולא ואתרנגולתא חריב טור מלכא דהוו נהיגי כי הוו מפקי חתנא וכלתא מפקי קמייהו תרנגולא ותרנגולתא כלומר פרו ורבו כתרנגולים. יומא חד הוה קא חליף גונדא דרומאי שקלינהו מינייהו. נפלו עלייהו מחונהו. אתו אמרו ליה לקיסר מרדו בך יהודאי אתא עלייהו. הוה בהו ההוא בר דרומא, דהוה קפיץ מילא וקטיל בהו. שקליה קיסר לתאגיה ואותביה אארעא. אמר ריבוניה דעלמא כוליה אי ניחא לך לא תמסריה לההוא גברא לדידיה ולמלכותיה בידיה דחד גברא … אמר רבי אסי תלת מאה אלפי שליפי סייפא עיילו לטור מלכא וקטלו בה תלתא יומי ותלתא לילוותא ובהך גיסא הלולי וחנגי ולא הוו ידעי הני בהני.

אשקא דריספק חריב ביתר דהוו נהיגי כי הוה מתיליד ינוקא שתלי ארזא ינוקתא שתלי תורניתא וכי הוו מינסבי, קייצי להו ועבדי גננא. יומא חד הוה קא חלפא ברתיה דקיסר, אתבר שקא דריספק. קצו ארזא ועיילו לה. אתו נפול עלייהו מחונהו. אתו אמרו ליה לקיסר: מרדו בך יהודאי. אתא עלייהו.

To sum up, retarded arsim kept getting everyone killed by being retarded arsim. The Rabbis tried to stop them, but they didn’t listen, so the Rabbis sold them down the river and they all got killed. Not saying it was a good thing, but clouds and silver linings and all that. The literal precise ideology of Otzma Yehudit is condemned as being ומקשה לבו יפול ברעה. If you are in a position of public responsibility, you’re supposed to be afraid, not least because God has more than enough cause to let you be slaughtered.

[Parenthetically, I like to think that I know every ridiculous thing about religious Zionism, but I only found out this week that Dr. Michael Ben Ari has a book where he does a well akshully on the traditional rabbinic account of the Great Revolt. Part of it is clownish source-bending to argue that actually it wasn’t all the Rabbis who opposed the zealots, and that maybe the Talmud doesn’t mean to condemn the strategy of burning all your food and causing starvation. The other part is arguing that the rebellion was actually a dramatic success because it prevented assimilation into the Roman Empire and preserved the Jewish character. This raises alarming implications about what kind of outcomes these guys consider acceptable that may explain why they think their proposed strategy of chimping out against the world will not lead, by construction, to disaster.]

So where did Ben Gvir get this slogan from? It’s almost too bad to be true, but eventually you realise that nothing’s too bad to be true. It’s from a synth pop song by Eyal Golan. Here’s Eyal Golan:

In Judaism, you’re not supposed to have tattoos. But Eyal Golan is not one of those guys who restricts his sinning to the ritual elements of the law, nosireebob.2

I’m trying to not be inflammatory on the subject of Israeli demographic trends. It’s an important subject and requires sensitive treatment so as not to scare the libs. But geez it’s not easy.

He’s also a genocidal baboon, because of course.

But maybe it’s not that bad. Surely, they know it’s just a pop song by a sex criminal, they don’t actually think it’s like a religious principle or anything? WRONG.

Sure sounds like he’s quoting a pasuk. Who is this guy? Well, he runs a yeshiva which is a sort of Frankenstein’s monster of Sharabian kabbalah and Breslev, and they have a lot of options where you can buy tikkunim for whatever’s wrong in your life for a small fee, or, even better, a big one.

Notice that, in this charming medley, he also found space for אל תירא ישראל אל תירא כי גור אריה אתה. That’s not a pasuk either. It’s a song by Avihu Medina from the 1970s that sacrilegiously applies biblical-style language that you would expect to refer to God to the Israeli nation and its military might. This is the OG version:

Kind of lame, but still in the general ballpark of civilized humanity. However, Avihu Medina was oppressed by the euronormativity of Labour Zionist Israel. Here is an updated version for the new Israel that glorifies ugliness without constraint.

Good job we don’t have LEFTISTS pushing us around anymore making us be depraved and goyish. Anyway, what was I saying? Here’s another mashup, this time of what Religious Zionists’ WhatsApp statuses looked like two years ago.

Do they know it’s not a real pasuk? Do they even know what the question means? I did a little poll of religious Zionist youth. About 70% thought it was from tehillim. How did this crummy song become so popular in the Israeli Right in the first place anyway? What’s the worst possible reason you can think of? Yep, it was when Aryeh Deri was convicted of taking bribes as a government minister, because, you see, he’s called Aryeh, gettit? And he took bribes which the Torah says is … uhh …. look a LEFTIST and he’s Ashkenazi, gettim.

That’s enough. What are we supposed to even do with this mess, this absurd, hideous dumpster-fire of a religion cannibalising Judaism without even putting in an ounce of the effort Reform once did in asserting plausible deniability? Here’s a nice gemara:

אמר רבי אלעזר עם הארץ מותר לנוחרו ביום הכיפורים שחל להיות בשבת. אמרו לו תלמידיו רבי אמור לשוחטו. אמר להן זה טעון ברכה וזה אינו טעון ברכה. אמר רבי אלעזר עם הארץ אסור להתלוות עמו בדרך שנאמר כי היא חייך ואורך ימיך על חייו לא חס על חיי חבירו לא כל שכן. אמר רבי שמואל בר נחמני אמר רבי יוחנן עם הארץ מותר לקורעו כדג. אמר רבי שמואל בר יצחק ומגבו.

No, you shouldn’t take it literally, but you should take it seriously.3

There are, however, different varieties of antisemitism, inasmuch as there are different ways of explaining how or why Jews are the main problem in the world. Back in the gaye old times of the alt-right, the most popular, at least formally, was that of Prof. Kevin MacDonald. However, after getting mogged by Nathan Cofnas asking basic questions about evidence and causal inference, MacDonald’s prestige went into decline. Anyway, his theory is rather convoluted and requires making admissions (for example about high Jewish IQ) that most antisemites would prefer not to make. As his star was waning, there was a brief flirtation with Michael E. Jones, but this was far from perfect. First of all, if you aren’t a particular kind of TradCath, it doesn’t get off the ground (Jews promoted the Reformation, and the American Revolution and modernity, how, err, terrible). Secondly, it’s pretty insane.1 Thirdly, you no longer get to say ‘run a physiognomy check’ anymore as a dunk on Twitter.

So, in due course, antisemites converged on a different version of antisemitism, that basically combines the old school Talmudjude tradition with various elements of modern antizionism. A good representative of the synthesis is Will Sexton, but it’s all over the place nowadays and it goes like this:

1. Judaism has no theological content in the normal sense. There’s a vague inyan to affirm belief in one God, but after that you can believe pretty much whatever including the most unhinged, blasphemous guff and outright schizoid rambling, and it’s totally fine and no-one is allowed to object to it. Just believe whatever motivates you to be a committed Jew and it’s gravy.

2. The actual doctrinal content of Judaism is that Jews are innately superior to gentiles, and that the Land of Israel belongs at all times to Jews and anyone else who lives there can either get lost or get killed. God is subservient to Jews, or maybe Jews are really God in some sense.

3. Judaism has no concept of ethics at all outside the bounds of its own community. Gentiles are looked at as either rivals or objects to be exploited to whatever degree is possible. When Jews are weak, it’s permissible to be nice to them, but only for the sake of Jewish wellbeing.

4. Any Jew who rejects any part of the above is not representing Judaism, but is, whether he knows it or not, reflecting western values that are alien to the Jewish tradition itself.

That’s a pretty damning assessment and, if true, would justify a fairly high degree of animosity towards Jews, and, arguably, the legal proscription of their religion. We have a bit of a problem, though, because there is a growing, confident, and increasingly ascendant movement within Judaism that argues the following:

1. Judaism has no authoritative theological teaching in the normal sense. There’s a vague inyan to affirm belief in one God, but after that you can believe pretty much whatever including the most unhinged, blasphemous guff and outright schizoid rambling, and it’s totally fine, and no-one is allowed to object to it. Just believe whatever motivates you to be a committed Jew and it’s gravy.

2. The actual doctrinal content of Judaism is that Jews are innately superior to gentiles, and that the Land of Israel belongs at all times to Jews and anyone else who lives there can either get lost or get killed. God is subservient to Jews, or maybe Jews are really God in some sense.

3. Judaism has no concept of ethics at all outside the bounds of its own community. Gentiles are looked at as either rivals or objects to be exploited to whatever degree is possible. When Jews are weak, it’s permissible to be nice to them, but only for the sake of Jewish wellbeing.

4. Any Jew who rejects any part of the above is not representing Judaism, but is, whether he knows it or not, reflecting western values that are alien to the Jewish tradition itself.

Colloquially, this movement is known as ‘Kahanism’, which is not misleading, but is a bit inaccurate. Kahana was more a prophet of the movement than its theoretician, and, whether for form’s sake or otherwise, included some conventionally religious elements within his call to arms. The avatar of the movement, of course, is disgusting pig, Itamar Ben Gvir. Already, it is far safer within orthodox Judaism to be an ally of this tendency than an opponent. The safe bet is it will continue to grow.

The prevalent form of antisemitism, therefore, has as a fairly valuable advantage the fact that it is partly true, and becoming progressively truer with the passage of time. This does not per se justify antisemitism, because Judaism, considered as such, is not the world’s biggest problem and wouldn’t justify the kind of obsessive and prurient attention antisemites give it, but, even so, this is a relatively strong factual base to work with. Many ideologies have to make do with much worse.

Where does this variety of antisemitism come from? Based on the above, one might say it is simply, as its proponents allege, a response to Jewish behaviour, but nothing is actually a simple response to anyone’s behaviour in that respect, let alone the behaviour of people in another, albeit rather disruptive, country half the world away. Someone has to shove it in your face and tell you how to understand it. Of course, as is ever the case, it’s possible to trace back the new antisemitic synthesis to many sources, but I believe the most important of those was an eccentric Israeli Chemistry Professor, Israel Shahak. And with that we get to the subject of our article.

Shahak’s main work Jewish History, Jewish Religion, is a book I would encourage Jews to read, because I think it’s valuable to read hostile caricatures of your own group. It’s not a book I’d encourage gentiles to read, because I don’t think it’s a good thing to read hostile caricatures of other groups. Unfortunately, reality generally works the opposite way round. Even so, I was rather surprised to find the following in Edward Said’s foreword:

If Said had said ‘this is a well-written and cogently argued polemic against Judaism which inspires in its moral urgency’, I would have disagreed because, as we shall see, I think the book is badly written, badly argued and possessed of profound moral imbecility, but I would have known what Said meant. To say the book is a ‘succinct history of … Judaism’ that towers over so many others isn’t even in the right genre of approbation. It would be like declaring Dan Burwami the foremost scholar of Islam.2 If this is what a Palestinian moderate who opposed (at least some forms of) terrorism and was willing to consider (at least some forms of) territorial compromise thought was a helpful way of going about understanding the enemy, then that’s a good data point in support of it all just being completely hopeless.

This book sucks

Israel Shahak has been described as ‘the last Israeli liberal’; a more precise and illuminating definition would be libtard. Another obvious thing about him is that he had Asperger’s. You’re not supposed to diagnose stuff like this over the internet, but sometimes you’re allowed.

The upshot is that Israel Shahak was the Jewish equivalent of a Portlandia character who spends all his time shrieking at normy well-socialised libs who celebrate Thanksgiving when it’s a festival celebrating genocide and the dispossession of Native Americans. The idea that a Jew, having discovered the ghastly truth, could do anything other than dedicate his life to exposing the foul nature of Rabbinic Judaism was incomprehensible to him, and so his worst ire was focussed on the ‘fake liberals’ who let him down. In the book, Begin gets a mere five mentions, Likud only two and the Irgun, none at all. There is a bit more treatment of Gush Emunim, but mostly Shahak concentrates on pouring excrement on the true villains: Martin Buber, Moses Hess, Leo Rosten. He is particularly outraged that any gentile could be philosemitic: just look at them!

I’ll content myself with citing two passages. They are, naturally, particularly egregious examples of Shahak’s method, otherwise I wouldn’t have chosen them; but there are more than a hundred cases in the book where the same techniques of argument by non-sequitur and perverse innuendo are employed.

In the first example, Shahak describes the reception of a particular passage in Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, in which he briefly recapitulates the Aristotelian theory of race differences. Basically, if you grow up somewhere that’s too cold (like Turks or Franks) or too hot (like Nubians), you come out all messed up, but if you grow up in the Mediterranean, you come out just right. This theory seemed to track relative social development in the Hellenistic era pretty well, but didn’t work so much when the Roman empire expanded northwards. It came back into fashion in the early Middle Ages when Aristotle was massive, plus Islam and the Italian states were killing it and northern Europe reverted to savagery. Strictly speaking it’s not clear that this theory actually counts as racism, since it’s really a particularly extreme form of environmentalism, but, regardless, it’s not comfortable for enlightened audiences, even 100 years ago, to read that Africans are intermediate between monkeys and people. So in Friedlander’s translation of 1925, he translated the Arabic word hyper-literally as Cushite, which would leave the less attentive reader in the dark about who was being referred to. Shahak has a massive libout out over this egregious deviation from scholarly accuracy and concludes by saying this:

If I were to answer the ‘question’ of why a Conservative or Reform Rabbi (or, more rarely, even an Orthodox one) might support the Civil Rights movement even though Maimonides thought black people were subhuman, a few possibilities come to mind. First, in the majority of cases, they just didn’t know. Despite Shahak’s incomprehensible claim that Guide for the Perplexed is a ‘most important and necessary work of Judaism’,3 very few Jews, including learned Jews, have ever read it. Nor do they need to because most of the book is either (a) resolving contradictions between medieval Aristotelianism and the Bible, which is all a moot point today, (b) explaining historical reasons for the mitzvot based on the Nabatean Agriculture, a fake book of zero value in understanding Bronze Age near-East religion or (c) stuff that honestly doesn’t seem to make a great deal of sense and the scholars say has an esoteric meaning, and they’ll get back to us any day now on what that is. Even among those Jews who did read it, many likely did so in the English translation (not a dishonourable thing since the work was composed in Arabic, not Hebrew) and so didn’t realise Maimonides was a big racist. Secondly, among those civil rights Rabbis who had read the work and realised what was up, the great majority probably didn’t care at all. Guide for the Perplexed has at least half a dozen imprecations against ‘those who are foolish as women’ and believe in the atomic hypothesis. Nevertheless, none of the moderns who see in Maimonides’ philosophical struggles something of value to the modern Jew have a difficult time accepting the standard model of particle physics.4 As I just hinted, Maimonides’ views on women were quite stridently, err, Islamic, and these were expressed rather more frequently than his views on Black people, and yet, somehow, JTS went co-ed regardless. Finally, among the vanishingly small number of Jews who found it necessary to reconcile Maimonides’ theory of race with their own beliefs, maybe they just came up with something. Taken literally, Maimonides’ climactic theory would imply that white and black Texans were equally monkeyish and the solution would be to move them all to Boston, so maybe, if we hunt around enough, we’ll find a scholar at Hebrew Union College who scribbled that in his notebook.

Shahak, though, ignores all of that and jumps to the most unreasonable and idiotic ‘explanation’ possible, namely that the liberal rabbinate engaged in ‘hidden enjoyment’ of Maimonides’ racism while using blacks for their own nefarious aims. This is the ‘paranoid reconciling hermeneutic’ so beloved of rightoids, but with Shahak’s own neurodivergent twist. If Shahak spends a frantic evening combing through Maimonides and then gets a juicy racism quote and obsesses over it for the next four years, then that’s just what any other reader would do. The whole concept of ‘hmm, don’t like that, turn the page’ just doesn’t register with him.

I want to add here that I was recommended by a number of readers to look at Shahak, so I do have to ask: what book were you reading? Like, this sucks. It really sucks. Is this convincing to you? Isn’t it obvious that it’s very silly? I kind of feel like doing a Fuentes rant about goyim, but I’ll restrain myself. Next example:

Some background for you readers who don’t know how to ask ChatGPT questions and rely on me to do it for you. Bergman was co-founder of Brit Shalom, the best-known organisation advocating a Jewish-Arab binational state. He responded to the 1929 massacres of Jews at the hands of Palestinian Arabs by insisting that it meant Jews needed to work harder to reach rapprochement, and condemned the principle of ‘Hebrew Labour’ in Zionist enterprises that he (and the Peel Commission) believed lay behind Arab resentment. After 1948, he accepted defeat, but continued to campaign for reconciliation with local and regional Arabs. If anyone is a peacenik gaylord, it’s him, and Hazony wrote a book about how his gang were subversive traitors.

But that’s not good enough for Shahak. Akshully, Bergman was an advocate of ‘expulsion, racism and genocide’. The evidence is that in 1914-15 he advocated expulsion of Palestinians to Iraq. At the time Bergman was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, and he didn’t come to Palestine until 1920, so, if it was true, it would only prove he changed his mind, but I (OK, AI) have been unable to find any evidence it is true. I’m a little bit loathe to accuse Shahak of outright lying, because in all other cases of him saying something totally ridiculous there’s some factual crumb which he could use as a motte to retreat to. However, whatever it is (and Shahak basically never cites anything, even though the book has 15 pages of mostly useless endnotes), it’s definitely not enough to substantiate the clear libel being made here.

That’s Bergman, but remarkably what he says about Kaufman is even more ridiculous. Here’s what he’s referring to:

To take a recent and remarkably close analogy, there’s a well-known and affable, if somewhat slippery, Christian apologist called William Lane Craig. As part of his job, he had to explain what was up with the Book of Joshua, and his explanation is basically a combination of (a) if God says it, it’s OK (b) it was a mercy to Canaanite children to be killed before they reached the age of moral responsibility and faced eternal damnation. Famously, Dawkins used this as an excuse to chicken out of a debate he was likely to lose. Now, there’s a bunch of things you could say about Lane Craig’s argument. At the very furthest reaches of plausibility, you might argue it makes him dangerous because if he ever got schizophrenia and thought God was telling him to kill the children of MS-13 members he wouldn’t have a moral objection. However, obviously, it would just literally be stupid to call him ‘an advocate of genocide on the model of the Book of Joshua’ today. So it is with Kaufmann. Unlike Bergmann, he wasn’t a big peacenik, but he was moderate enough, leaning towards territorialism as a way of avoiding conflict with Arabs, and comfortable with partition. Maybe his justification, such as it is, of the Israelite conquest is condemnable, but it’s not advocating genocide.

So, with that out of the way, I want to turn to another passage:

I’ll start by pointing out everything wrong with this passage, in which Shahak exhibits the same kind of basic failures of intellectual competence we have seen.

1. It is stupid and dickish to imply that Elazar Shazar secretly agreed with the metaphysical racism of Chabad because he maintained contacts with and interest in the religious community of his youth including its leader. Clearly Shazar wasn’t an ‘ardent adherent’ of Chabad in the normal sense of the term because he was secular. Shazar was a moderate dove and gave no indication of being a racial supremacist. Even if we take a maximal interpretation of his interest in Chabad philosophy, he could simply have taken the view of Hillel Zeitlin, that what Chassidic thought says about the dignity and importance of the individual Jew can simply be expanded to the dignity and importance of all mankind, a popular current in 20th century Jewish thought, and with plenty of exponents today.

2. It’s pointlessly inflammatory to call Schneerson the Fuhrer of Chabad.

3. The fact that Schneerson would not visit Israel was not one of the main reasons he was widely criticized in the orthodox world.

4. Shulamit Aloni was not an impartial witness, but a far-left anti-religious activist (which is, of course, her right).5 In a controversy in the 1990s over (still unsubstantiated) claims that doctors at Sha’arei Tzedek hospital were given pamphlets telling them not to treat gentiles on the sabbath, she mentioned in testimony that she had it on good authority that something similar was distributed among soldiers during the Lebanon war. She mentioned nothing about Chabad, or this propaganda being ‘stepped up’.

5. Schneerson was, if anything, pro-black, and while he did not acquit himself very well in the run up to the Crown Heights riots, the local black community acquitted itself much worse. Among liberal-leaning Chabadniks, there is a widespread belief that Schneerson invented food stamps.

And yet, check this out:

That’s Ben Gvir being treated like a rock star at one of their heretic conventions. Here’s him arriving at the belly of the beast:

This is a well-documented phenomenon. Many have pointed out that Schneerson substantially modified the original misanthropy of Chabad philosophy in favour of a paternalistic and friendly racial supremacism, much like Rav Kook, but ordinary Chabadniks in Israel don’t want to hear that. What they do want to hear is Schneerson’s genius argument that to save one Jewish soldier, it is obligatory to kill infinity gentile civilians. Not one, not one hundred, not one million: as many as it takes. The story of how Chabad and Breslev got locked into an ever-escalating battle to see who could come up with the weirdest justifications for murder while grinning inanely is for another day, but it’s very much something that has already happened (even if it’s likely far from over). If anything, in retrospect, Shahak looks like he’s underplaying it. The people who let it happen, and still more those who assisted it, messed up big time, and, at some point, comeuppance is due.

Shahak provides a hostile caricature of Judaism, a product of a vindictive and spiteful mind, on the brink of a kind of madness, if not over it. But there’s another term for a caricature: failure mode. And Judaism is failing; it’s failing very badly, much worse than anyone could have predicted only a few years ago, except, of course, Shahak.

I thought it might be appropriate now to go through Shahak’s book, chapter by chapter and divide out the nonsense from the critiques that have bite. I always regret committing to these kind of series, but I guess it’s one more thing to regret.

5

This meme is widely shared, apparently by people who think it’s a confession, not an accusation.

Stanislas Richard

1) Why do you think Western leftists, and, really, leftists everywhere, are so obsessed with Palestine? I live in Chile, and here it is the only topic on which an unorthodox opinion, basically, disagreeing with the idea that a unified, democratic, secular state “from the river to the sea” (sic!) is feasible or even a good idea, will get you expelled from polite society.

This is an easy question. Within the Left there are three heuristics used to work out which is the good and which is the bad side in a conflict: (a) powerful (bad) vs. weak (good); (b) white (bad) vs. dark (good); (c) allied to America (bad) vs. opposed to the imperial hegemon America (good). This seems a bit stupid, and it is, because leftism is stupid, but if you rephrase it a bit I don’t even think most leftists would disagree with this characterisation. Different parts of the Left emphasise the three heuristics to different degrees, so when they conflict they will disagree. For example, is Russia the baddy because it’s big, or is Ukraine the baddy because it’s allied to America? When that is the case, different leftist activists cancel each other out, instead of reinforcing each other, and the movement as a whole loses interest. Israel is the one issue where all three heuristics give the same answer. At some level, hasbarists understand this, which is why they are always spamming people with pictures of Yemenite Jews and Falashas, and, while you or I might find this too cringe to contemplate, I think it actually does work a bit.

This also helps us understand why the Left was once mostly pro-Israel. Back then, Israel was perceived as good because it opposed English imperialism, and was standing up to the whole Muslim world. The second heuristic was less explicitly racialised, so Jews got points as a minority, even if they were whiter.

2) In your opinion, what does it mean to be an HBD liberal (I was made to understand that this is roughly your stance on things)?

I am not an HBD liberal, because I am not a liberal, but an HBD liberal is just a liberal who believes in HBD. Every liberal should be an HBD liberal, because HBD is true. It’s like being a ‘the world is round liberal’ or ‘salt is a compound of sodium and chlorine liberal’. As to what it actually entails, the biggest difference is that you no longer take disparate impact as evidence of discrimination. If there is a high IQ field in which Asians dominate and there are hardly any Blacks, then this is not evidence of injustice, it’s evidence of justice.

Deszcz
Would like to hear your thoughts about Dara Horn without having to wait for the book chapter.

Geez. Think of it like this. Most westerners are sympathetic to Palestinians when they see pictures of them crying outside wrecked buildings in Gaza, but they weren’t sympathetic to them when they were rampaging around kibbutzim kidnapping grannies. I guess ‘people love dead Palestinians’.

In other words, there’s a general bias in western morality towards victims and against victimisers. You can make the argument that this has gone too far, and we should rebalance moral norms to give more weight to qualities like competence, fitness or strength, and maybe I agree to some extent, but that isn’t what Dara Horn wants, she wants moral sentiments to be rebalanced specifically for the benefit of Jews. Jews should be loved when they are victims, and they should also be loved when they are running a 60-year military occupation. It’s not good enough for gentiles to apply their general standards of ethics consistently to Jews, they have to arbitrarily alter them in line with whatever is good for Jews. And what’s worse is that they already do do that, but it’s not enough! If liberal standards were applied consistently, Israel would already be a pariah state (unless it drastically changed its policies), but European countries fudge the issue because of Holocaust guilt and a certain degree of philosemitism. But that’s not enough to satisfy Dara Horn. Westerners aren’t allowed to merely bend their moral principles to favour Israel, they have to openly trample on them.

Zeb Naybar
Was Zionism actually a secret conspiracy by antisemitic goyim to shred the fabled verbal IQ of Ashkenazis by creating a movement that would facilitate their intermarriage with the arsim?

Hmm.

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It’s a good book, well-written, fast-paced and thought-provoking. Mirsky does a good job of balancing his admiration for Rav Kook as a man (justified) and thinker (dubious), with his evident discomfort about how mad it all is, without making his editorial voice unduly intrusive. I recommend you read this book. Maybe even worth buying it if that’s what you’re into. Here ends the book review section of the article. Now for my thoughts.

1. It’s easy to mock Religious Zionism, and fun too. I think it’s also a great mitzvah, but I’m biased in the same way that the hilltop guys are biased when they say it’s a great mitzvah to burn houses. Regardless, it’s all too easy. There’s Motti Elon, who even by the standards of homosexual sex offenders is an off-putting person and somehow became their inspirational guru for a decade. There’s Kahana, there’s Scheinberg, there’s Tal, there’re the other ones who it was never proven so it’s improper to name names, there’s all the crazy stuff they said during Covid, there’s the way they get dumped on all the time by Charedim and just take it, there’s that thing where they try to do Chassidus and take away literally every good aspect of it (there’s a lot of that), there’s the extreme level of confusion about what shirts are designed to do. There’s a lot. But Rav Kook is different. At the time, everyone - except for the real scum of Meah Shearim - understood he was different, and, no matter what he said, Charedi Rabbinical leaders always emphasised that, as a man and a scholar, he was off limits. I think that’s right. I hadn’t realised that, as well as Shaul Lieberman ז’’ל, he was also the teacher of Binyamin Levin, who did as much for Jewish scholarship as any 20th century gadol. It’s a shame that Rav Kook’s plan for a genuinely rigorous yeshiva curriculum never got anywhere institutionally, but, even so, he more than earned his own gadol card. Taking him on needs to be done not only with kid gloves, but something more like awe. Obviously, I’m not the man to do it, but someone absolutely has to, because Kookism has to go, properly go. The absolute maximum status he should have is something like Avraham Abulafia. I recall once that I was in a Satmarer house, and he had a Rashba or something and had scratched out the מוסד הרב קוק logo on the spine with a screwdriver. At the time, I thought it very extreme, but I think it’s closer to the right balance than where we are today.

   

2. It’s generally appreciated that Rav Kook had a messianic turn of thought, but what Mirsky brings out well is that his confidence (not hope) in imminent universal redemption wasn’t just some aspect of his philosophy that you can analyse along with the others, it was the whole thing. The reason why his philosophy seems to contain so many intractable contradictions is that it literally does, and deliberately so, because Rav Kook saw the messianic process as consisting of the resolution of those contradictions. In the absence of a messianic process actually existing, it is impossible to reconcile all of the different sides of Kookism, so it is strictly impossible to be an authentic Kookist. Those minority strains today that emphasise his humanism, his demand for the highest ethical standards, his boundless benevolence are no less authentic than the majority strains which emphasise the absolute obligation to impose Jewish sovereignty on holy soil, the ontological superiority of Jews to all mankind, and the necessity of teleological suspension of the ethical to achieve redemption. On the other hand, they are no more authentic either, and appealing to the ‘correct’ reading of Kook has no value beyond its ability to influence public perception, something that in practice seems to be extremely limited. The truth is quite otherwise: Kookism is a failed messianic movement. The attempt to keep it going after the messianic promises were not fulfilled inevitably involves, at the very least, pervasive intellectual corruption. In practice, it would seem to entail much worse than that. There is precisely one response to the work of Rav Kook that allows you to preserve your intellectual decency, and that is to say that he was wrong. Only after that are you permitted to start inquiring about whether there were some things about which he was right. This is an indispensable act of mental hygiene and very urgent.

3. Rav Kook’s big idea was that the great opposed movements of his era, to wit liberalism, nationalism, and religious traditionalism, all had aspects of a higher truth that would be unified in the messianic era. From liberalism he valued the freedom of the individual and the opposition to tyranny, from nationalism he valued the call to a higher good and the diversity resulting from each nation pursuing its calling according to its talents, and from religion he valued the reverence for the divine and the insistence on objective moral truth. He thought that, because the messianic process was inevitable, the weaving of these three strands into a higher combined truth was also inevitable. However, since the messianic process did not come, there is nothing inevitable about this process. It is just as likely that from liberalism you get shallowness and trash culture, from nationalism you get cruelty and the lust for conquest, and from religious tradition you get ignorance and narrowness of thought. That is, approximately, what is actually happening in Israel, certainly more so than Kook’s proposed synthesis. Kook himself, though a man of frenetic action, was not a successful institution builder. In that way, he was a type quite familiar to those who have spent any time in the utopian wing of Israeli religious-politics. Like all prophets of inevitable historical processes, he faced the difficult question of what role concerted human action actually has in these processes, and, from a practical perspective, he flubbed it. What he gave was a vision for others to take up later as Judea and Samaria miraculously (as it appeared) fell into our lap, Labour Zionism unravelled, and Mizrahi voters granted the Right electoral dominance. But these were all historical phenomena that Kook didn’t think about, let alone predict. Kookism, from its very beginning as an actual social movement, was a kind of cargo cult of an already failed vision, a fact that was substantially obscured by the fact that the man running the cargo cult was his own son.

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It takes a greatness of soul to build fabulations the way Jason Arday did. You need a Promethean spirit to decide to create yourself again out of nothing, and real courage to bet your entire being on lies that can so easily be disproven. But you are small and cowardly and you will spend all your life scurrying around in the undergrowth of the world, never poking out your head to look at the sky, and the thing that happened to Professor Jason Arday will never, ever happen to you.

Wrong. Jason Arday was a nasty, vindictive bully who on at least two occasions used the police to silence journalists and academics trying to expose his misdeeds. While incessantly portraying himself as the victim of a racist society, Arday knew perfectly well that all the institutional power in the United Kingdom was on his side, and that he could get away with it forever (if it wasn’t for that pesky Substack). More broadly, Arday’s whole career was an act of violence against the natives of the United Kingdom who are expected to pay for the privilege of being abused and libelled. If you are going to treat blacks as religious objects and throw money at them, at least pay them to do something other than hurl abuse at those footing the bill. There is no evidence he felt any guilt about his life of crime, because he didn’t.

Nasty, vindictive, lying, thieving bullies can still possess greatness of soul though, maybe, but we know that Jason Arday didn’t because when he was exposed, he did the smallest, shittiest thing he could possibly have done under the circumstances and murdered himself. He knew that this would rescue his reputation in large sections of a sick, mad society, and, what’s more, he knew that it would pull the rug out from those trying to leverage his exposure to claw back some measure of sanity in the university system, or - one can only dream - pare down the system of racially-based exploitation that disfigures the western world (the one that actually exists), and he did it anyway. These are evil ends and, whatever else he was thinking too, he intended them on the general principle that the known consequences of action are intended.

Had he possessed greatness of soul, there are plenty of things he could have done. He could have said, ‘you got me, and I don’t regret a thing because what’s yours, cracker, is mine’. He could have made a tell-all biography about how he conned dopey libwomen with self-evidently ridiculous lies and then reinvented himself as a based anti-woke black man. GB News would have given him his own show for sure unless he went too far and started ranting about Jews. Or he could have done some other zany thing that I, a man of no especially big soul, couldn’t even conceive of. Failing that, he could have turned off his phone and gone on holiday. 1.4 million should buy you a few years’ sabbatical, but if that’s made up too, he could always just go work at Sainsbury’s.

Enough of that then, but we’re just getting started. There are the centre-right jerks who say the real villain of the piece is Cambridge University for promoting him beyond his competence which is the ‘bigotry of low expectations’ (maybe you should … let’s not finish that thought). Of course they are villains, but their victims are literally everyone else in the world except Jason Arday who had to live in a planet that is dumber, and more unjust for their decision to appoint him. Arday was not victimised by being given money and acclaim to write total nonsense that he couldn’t be bothered to even write himself. That’s stupid, what are you even talking about? Hey Cambridge University, I’m a bad person, a racist and a bigot, can you victimise me by giving me £80,000 a year to doss around writing nonsense and being a jerk to my students? It’s the only punishment worthy of my crimes. Can you not see how dumb this is? No, of course you can’t, and then you wonder why everything is the way it is.

And then I read this by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, and because when I lie down right now my throat somehow simultaneously feels like sandpaper and has gloop all over it that chokes me, here I am in the middle of night writing, yet again, the most incredibly obvious stuff.

This is the moment that generated Hanania, Cofnas, and others — resentful, ambitious, young, and coming back with a vengeance to defeat wokeism once and for all through the superior tools of scientism, empiricism, etc., defeating the master with the master’s tools. He, too, did not care about Arday at all. He was fighting wokeness because he wanted Cambridge. That is what he cared about and wanted.

I’m sorry, what? WHAT? Why should Cofnas have cared about Jason Arday, a liar, a thief, a bully, a parasite, and also just a completely ridiculous person, a man Cofnas had never met and had no reason to think about at all except for all of the above? Even if you want to claim that the media coverage went overboard (which you shouldn’t think at all), Cofnas didn’t do any of that. All he did was write an article with completely true information that had been provided to him by others who were too scared (justifiably so) to bring it to public attention themselves. In the most literal sense possible, Cofnas did absolutely nothing wrong.

As it happens, Cofnas has been a consistent critic of madness and stupidity on the Right, sadly very much not limited to race mysticism, but including it. He is also an Ashkenazi Jew married to a Korean, which, based on my religion, I can’t condone, but should absolve him of any imputation of racial bigotry or even ethnocentrism. However, even if that wasn’t true, he still did nothing wrong. There is no moral complexity here at all. Arday lived a life of villainy, and capped it off with one last act of irredeemable villainy. Cofnas wrote a correct blogpost. That’s it. If you think there is moral complexity, something has gone very wrong for you. It is true, and no-one can deny it, that Arday’s wife and kids have been victimised, no doubt his friends and other family too, but there is precisely one man who victimised them, and he is dead.

Why am I so angry about this? Some might claim the question is misprised, as if me being angry about something requires a local explanation. I’ll leave you to judge, but in the great mess of lies and illusions that Sam Kriss says we all live in, my subjectively-felt reason for being angry is because people say things like this.

I understand the sentiment, but it’s just not true. I know this because, almost literally every day, I benefit from research at a university.

• I am very interested in Hebrew pronunciation, and by far the best book on the subject is by Geoffrey Khan, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge. You can literally read it for free online! His student, AD Hornkahl, has also published amazing work you can read for free too.

• The best and most illuminating work on Talmud and halacha today is created by Robert Brody, professor at the Hebrew University. His edition of Rav Natronai’s teshuvot, on its own, is more of a contribution to Torah scholarship than anything that has come out of a yeshiva in 50 years. I have also read things that have massively increased my understanding by Vered Noam (University of Tel Aviv), Shulamit Elitzur (Hebrew University), Menachem Kehana (Hebrew University), Yair Furstenberg (Bar Ilan University), Moshe Halbertal (Hebrew University), Martin Goodman (Oxford University), Adiel Schremer (Bar Ilan University), Yair Lorberbaum (Bar Ilan University), Ishai Rosen-Zvi (Tel Aviv University), and David Stern (Harvard University) among others.

I’ve also learned some very interesting and important things from people outside universities, but, in complete honesty, nowhere near as much. I’ve also found that academics are almost always very gracious in answering unsolicited questions by randomers emailing them. Conversely, I have been involved in efforts to promote scholarship outside of universities and they almost always end in fiasco. Of course, there’s no shortage of nonsense in Jewish Studies about queer subjectivities in the Tosefta, but if you want to know what classic Jewish texts mean, or even just read editions of them that aren’t basically useless, academia is your friend, and almost your only friend. I’ll desist now from going on a rant about yeshivos, but I’ll add that this is even more true now than it was in the recent past. Dovid Weiss haLivni and Shaul Lieberman זצ’’ל spent their time at JTS, but now the institution produces almost exclusively nonsense, and much the same is true of Pardes, Hadar or the Hartmann Institute.

I appreciate that Jewish Studies is in a better state than a lot of other subjects for various contingent reasons (and this, perhaps, provides the best justification for the State of Israel), however, I think that most nerds who are into something and have made a real effort to become knowledgeable about it will end up with more or less the same verdict. If the research isn’t being conducted in universities, it isn’t being conducted anywhere else either. In certain areas of science, there are always Google and Facebook, but the politicisation there isn’t all that much better.

There is a widespread belief on the Right that universities are a lost cause, and one should search elsewhere for civilizational salvation. Life in Israel has convinced me that the more or less the opposite is true. At least in certain circumstances (whether or not they are replicable anywhere else), the Right can win by doing an end run against the educated classes, and what they will do with it is implement the relentless promotion of ignorance, boorishness, ugliness of every conceivable kind, unhinged ethnonarcissism, and the cannibalisation of religion into a repulsive horror. If something doesn’t come along to replace Bibi as the mechanism for reining all this nonsense in, it will flame out in a mad rush of violence our descendants will have marked upon their head.

Universities, however, can be saved, or saved enough. Who, exactly, is saner on the Israel-Palestine than Benny Morris? What else except a university would have given him the space and funding to be sane? Everywhere, even in the most disastrous ivory tower bastions of gay, race communism, there are honest nerds doing honest work that makes the world a little bit more comprehensible to other nerds. I shan’t say that is the only thing that matters, for that would be nerd supremacism, but it is a thing that matters, and to some extent is doable. Every real scholar who is left alone in his study to write is a victory, and every Jason Arday fired is a victory too. He got exactly what he deserved. Scratch that, he didn’t get 1% of what he deserved, because he wasn’t just a liar, a thief, and a bully, he was an existential criminal, waging war on the mind, and thus the dignity of humankind. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.1 That he was far from alone in this is no excuse. Justice isn’t any less justice because the guilty, as a general rule, prosper. Some have pointed out that Nathan Cofnas’s plan for fixing society won’t work. I agree, it won’t work. The only thing that will work is complete disenfranchisement of the entire population to turn this whole ghastly machine we call politics off, and no-one knows how to start doing that because Moldbug quit in the middle and started writing slop. So what? Nathan Cofnas did, for the world, and whether he knows it or not, a hesed shel emet.

It’s not really a book actually. It’s a collection of articles. I found it in my Mum’s house and it took a couple of hours. If you have a couple of hours and find it in your Mum’s house, I’d recommend it, but you probably won’t learn a lot. The main thing I learned is that I learned nothing at all because nothing is different. I’m wondering, in fact, whether I may just be a leftist after all. I started saying I was a leftist a year or so ago when an Israeli was talking to me about his political opinions and I needed a quick way to make him walk away in disgust. Then I adopted it as an artful pose: ‘oh so the left are the real racists eh?’😎. But, actually, maybe I am just a leftist after all, because I don’t just agree with Amos Oz about most things he wrote, I could have written them (if Amos Oz was untalented and addicted to internet humour and childish insults). I’ve tried to explain what is so uniquely revolting about the Israeli Right’s mixture of limitless victimhood bitching and desire for infinite violence, which they do not merely combine, but turn into a reinforcing cycle. But why do I bother when he said it already?

Or what about how the special kind of unmerited pride rightoids exhibit when they promise security and Jewish power, and then just provide fantasy slop that blows up into self-destruction on contact with reality?

Or how the Right is wholly parasitic on the achievements of the secular Ashkenazim upon whom they throw endless maledictions and hate:

Or the NonZionism take on Palestinian nationalism:

Or that pervasive feeling of doom, the feeling that the one thing Jews did that we can be kind of proud of is becoming, by means of the urges it itself unleashed, a monster, that nagging mental murmur which I have tried to articulate in various ways:

So maybe I should just post Amos Oz quotations from now on? It would be more dignified. But the goycattle won’t pay for that, so, instead, I will write a bit about how I'm not like Amos Oz, or on why, if we agree on all these things, he was a Zionist and I am a NonZionist.1

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