1 year of NonZionism

🎉🎉🎉

I started this blog last year with a simple dream: get to 1,000 subscribers by the end of the following summer. Thanks to you guys, I smashed that a while back, so I’ve upgraded it to 2,000. To get there, the next two months are going to be post heavy. So as to tailor my ‘content’ (gross) to the market, I’ve made a reader survey, just like a real big shot commentator. Please fill it in and help me grow.

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A neat little trick you can do to celebrate an occasion like this is to go over your old posts and retract any mistakes you made. This makes you look very humble and possessed of good epistemic standards while in fact ever more deeply entrenching your svengali-like hold over the minds of the bewitched readers meaning that you can just write any old nonsense and they’ll eat it up. Plus, you don’t have to come up with any new ideas, and you can stick in a tasteful paywall. It’s like having a little money printer at home, admittedly a very little one, but better than none at all. So, here goes.

Lebanon

I wrote here that, in the event of a probable war with Hizb’Allah, Israel would attack in such a way as to reduce large parts of Lebanon to Gaza-like status and that the result would be capital flight and the completion of the Lebanese death spiral. I also thought hundreds, and quite possibly thousands of Israelis would die too as Hizb’Allah unleashed its arsenal. I didn’t write that, precisely, but’s that certainly what I meant and thought would happen. Obviously, I was very wrong because I drastically under-estimated the IDF’s capabilities and my most optimistic hope for what they could achieve was much less than what they actually did.

In my defence, in this regard, I am in the same boat as something asymptotically close to the whole of the rest of the human race. All the talk two years ago was about how and why the once mighty IDF went from hero to zero. The consensus was that it was the result of relying on fancy-pants technology and smarts, while its enemies focused on strategy that made them immune to such tactics. More excitable people were calling for defunding the IDF entirely and replacing it with popular militias. Arguably, the biggest story of the past year has been the re-establishment of the IDF’s reputation as a very effective fighting force. There’s been a lot of talk about Israel’s doctrine of deterrence, which sometimes tends to devolve into portraying it as just an extended version of the Khan Yunis massacre, but really deterrence is more a function of competence than willingness to cause harm.

The twofold unexpected revelation of IDF competence, first in Lebanon and then in Iran, also means we have to change our assessment of the Gaza war. After October 7th, it seemed as if there was nothing we could realistically do about the broader Iranian threat, certainly not without mass casualties on our side, and, since doing nothing was not an option either, that meant going into Gaza. However, knowing what we know now about the options available to Israel’s leaders changes everything. Only the declassification of documents many decades from now will let us know precisely what were the calculations in the heads of those who lead us to our present quagmire, but it is hard to come up with a narrative that would vindicate the decisions made. This obviously represents a challenge, in certain respects, to my ideology of esoteric Bibi-ism. The basic premise there is that, if you have no good options, the best leader is the one with the bravery to do nothing. Invading Gaza and turning it to rubble with no plan for what to do with it after was the closest thing to doing nothing that appeared tenable after October 7th, but we know now that there were better options. How many better options were there before too?

MAGA grifters