The War

Full of sound and fury.

First up, the obvious. The technical and logistic feats pulled off by Mossad, the IAF and whoever else was involved over the first few days were extremely impressive, perhaps the most impressive of their kind in the history of warfare. Having already pulled off an operation of similar quality in Lebanon, Israel has demonstrated that, adjusted for population and GDP, it has the most effective military capabilities of any country on earth.

The obvious question, then, in response to this is, what on earth is Gaza about? The question has two elements to it. First, what happened on October 7th, and, secondly what has happened since. The first part requires no elaboration; the second really requires no elaboration either, but I think some hasbara appreciators still read this blog (let’s see if we can do something about that), so let’s elaborate. Here’s a picture of Gaza:

Here’s another one:

And for fun:

Has Israel won yet? By it’s own admission, no, it hasn’t won at all. Estimated total economic cost of not winning anything is 400 billion dollars. Estimated diplomatic costs, who knows?

But muh based Hungarians must like us!

Or let’s take a concrete example. Today, a bunch of people got shot up at an aid distribution site, again. We shall assume the best case scenario for Israel, that it’s Hamas shooting them, or staging it or whatever. It’s - what? - 650 days now since the invasion; why can’t you secure an aid distribution site without people getting shot every day?

That’s enough elaboration, now for explanation. I think there are two aspects. The first is that some problems are just inherently more solvable through the application of intelligence and ingenuity than others are. After the 2006 Lebanon War, when Israel was strategically defeated and defaulted to blowing up civilian infrastructure until they could call it evens, the best minds were put to the task of decapitating and debilitating Hizb’Allah so that the military could work methodically through taking out its arsenal. It was a tricky problem, but a well-defined one, and, if you throw enough brainpower at it, you can do it. The same goes for Israel taking out Iranian air defenses and eliminating its top military commanders.

However, the problem of Gaza is at once much less intellectually stimulating and also much more sprawling: there are too many of these people, and where are they supposed to go? Or, to put it another way, Gaza isn’t the problem at all, it’s the solution. The problem, and I apologize here for boring those of my readers who don’t need the same thing explained to them over and over again, is that the Zionists decided to build a country (a) in the middle of the Muslim world (b) against the wishes of its inhabitants (c) right at the beginning of a regionwide population boom (d) in perfect timing with the importation of nationalism and anti-colonialism to the Arab world and (e) a bit before Islamic revivalism started kicking off. The Zionists made lemonade out of the lemons they insisted on stuffing in their mouths through the Nakba. The Nakba is why Gaza is crammed. Having considered all the options, the Israeli security establishment concluded that the best thing to do with the Gazans was to keep them penned up there, and it was, until it wasn’t.

Of course, some aspects of the Gaza problem were such that they seemed amenable to the application of smarts. That’s what the hi-tech fence was about. However, the problem of Gaza itself, whaddayagonna? You could, it is true, do what we’ve spent the past two years doing, but why would you do that unless you really had no choice? If the Hizb’Allah/Iran problem was like a really intricate Su Doku, then Gaza was more like clearing up the dog turd from your garden, ever day, forever. If you have to do it, the less you think about it the better.

That’s true, I think, but it’s not the decisive factor. Rather, if we divide Israel’s military actions into those where it is amazing and those where it sucks, there’s a more important pattern than just inherent difficulty: democracy.

The Hizb’Allah operation was secret; literally no-one predicted it, hence no-one knew about it. By definition, therefore, it was immune to democratic control. It was the platonic example of a policy conceived, developed and implemented without asking the eternal Jewish nation what they had to say about it. Same with the Iran plan, at least what was done on day 1. Conversely, day to day interactions with Gaza and the Palestinians before and after October 7th have been the central topic of Israeli politics forever. Any kind of long-term strategy, or middle-term strategy, or short-term strategy to rationally secure and advance Israel’s interests is impossible because it would have to be laundered in such a way to be explicable to the Israeli public and this can’t be done. So you get nothing at all. Just ‘a show of strength’, or ‘Jewish pride’ or ‘treating an enemy like an enemy’ or whichever you choose among the endless apish platitudes masquerading as thought that permeate Israeli discourse. Whereas for healthcare or education, attention in the Knesset is sufficiently distracted for the permanent state to run things more or less its way (for better and worse), on security questions, it can’t do anything much more than restrain Israel from self-immolating, so the strategy defaults to doing nothing, punctuated by basically random acts of ‘toughness’ until you can’t do nothing anymore, so you still do nothing, but kill 50,000 people as well, and then some more if the baboons aren’t satisfied.¹

Let’s turn back to the Iran war. As I said, it started well, and it’s going well. On the other hand:

Murtaza Hussain is a smart guy. He has a purple check, plus he reads this blog. I’m not sure if I trust him, but there is at least one data point in his favour:

It’s been grim in recent weeks seeing those few remaining hasbarists willing to humiliate themselves on outside media explain that it doesn’t matter that Ben Gvir or Smotrich are explicitly calling for the use of starvation as a tactic to force civilians to flee because they don’t set military policy. However, their task is now even harder because Katz is literally the Defence Minister and he wasn’t satisfied with one tweet:

What is the actual point of Katz? Sure, he’s the Defence Minister, but what does he actually do, what is his role? How does he contribute to the war effort? There’s an optimistic answer, and a less optimistic answer. The optimistic answer is that his job is to say retarded ape nonsense for a domestic audience of retarded apes, while the actual military gets on with it. The less optimistic answer is that his job is to harass and pester the IDF into actually doing retarded ape nonsense for a domestic audience of retarded apes. ‘Good job taking out there air defences! Is there some civilian infrastructure you could bomb? Not a hospital yet, but maybe a power plant or something?’. What’s the actual truth? Bayesian something or other says somewhere in the middle.

And it gets way worse than Katz. Just last week, the usual people, who in their infinite delusion actually think that they are in some way superior to Arabs, organized one of those conferences where they talk about all the territory they should conquer and all the people they should expel, regularly punctuated by cringe circle dancing.

Don’t worry, he’s not in the war cabinet.

This is parasitism in its very purest form. The obvious truth is that if Right Wing Israel was its own country, it would have a GDP per capita the same or lower than Iran, which means it would have an actual GDP about 1/9th as big. Possessed of no natural allies in the region and many natural enemies, it would have two choices, either (a) pick fights with everyone and then get destroyed in a war of attrition it had no chance of winning or (b) STFU and beg. The only reason that it is even conceivable for these people to talk and dance in pursuit of conquest and expulsion is because they share a country with other people upon whom, in exchange for their parasitism, they pour an endless litany of abuse, resentment, and libels.²

There is a certain natural balance in the world that tends towards stability. People who are intelligent and don’t have multiple personality disorders are not, as a rule, interested in aggressive ethnic chauvinism. Of course, plenty of people are not intelligent and do have multiple personality disorders, so aggressive ethnic chauvinism is widely popular, but states that use it as their operating system cannot leverage the resources to operatize it because their dumb and unproductive population can’t produce them, unless they luck out with oil. There was, it is true, Germany, but the general rule since the second agricultural revolution permanently changed the game is that military superiority and barbarism don’t go together, and that’s jolly lucky, providential even.

However, what happens if, for reasons of freak historical happenstance, your country doesn’t have a normal bell curve, and, instead, has a smart fraction far out of proportion to the population average?

Let’s go there

Israel is two things. The first is the decaying remnants of an ethnostate built by and for the Ashkenazim of the Russian empire. As a people of above average talents, the Zionists of the Second Aliyah and onwards reasoned quite reasonably that, if Bulgarians and Slovaks and who knows what else were going to get a country of their own, then they should too. Somewhat less reasonably, they decided to do it in the Land of Israel for reasons that, looked at in retrospect, appear quite delirious. They were not, perhaps, the wisest of their people, but they were the boldest, the most practical, those most possessed of virtu, and, when you are starting with an average of 112, you can afford to drop a few IQ points and still come out way ahead. Under the most trying circumstances, they did what they set out to do, and the country they made, while in no danger of becoming one of the world’s cultural titans, was pretty cool in many respects. I know about this country, truth be told, more from books than real life, but you can visit the old yishuvim of the Galilee built out of what was before desolate marshland (those that haven’t been wrecked by feral Breslov), and, yeah, respect.

A good bunch of lads

And, in addition to that, Israel is the bin of the Jewish people.

Now, I know, you think that’s a racist allusion because, while the large majority of Jews around the world are Ashkenazi, most of those in Israel are at least half MENA. Well, actually, no, it’s not an allusion, because I’m saying it explicitly. But I’m not just saying it, because it’s a lot worse than that. Take, for example, the Jews of Morocco. In Israel, they are a byword for dysfunction and squalor, but there’s no real reason why they should be worse than any other MENA Jewish population, indeed the reverse, given their higher proportion of Sephardi ancestry. However, the twist was that Moroccan Jews didn’t have Israel as their only option because there was also France. Unlike in Algeria, Moroccan Jews did not have French citizenship by default, but they could get it by various means. As rule, you needed good French and money, which are both decent proxies for an intelligence. About 30% went to France, and 60% went to Israel. What does a community look like when it starts off middling and then the top 30% gets lopped off? Well, probably their pre-eminent spiritual leader will be a transparent con artist who doesn’t even try to make his grift plausible to anyone with an IQ over 100, and is also a convicted criminal, and whaddayaknow?

Casablanca Synagogue. Sigh.

You can tell a similar story for just about any historical Jewish community. Sometimes the selection effects are more severe, sometimes less, but the trend is always the same. There’s not all that much anyone can do about this. You can’t make Israel any bigger, you can’t make Israel not a regional pariah under permanent military guard, you can’t make mandatory military service not a pain, you can’t make the weather in the part of the country where most people live eight months a year not intolerable for human beings. All you can do is con dumb people into not noticing, or thinking it’s a privilege or whatever, but that itself is the problem. You can try to ameliorate the problem through ideology. Selecting for fervour isn’t ideal, but it’s a lot better than selecting for hopelessness. On the other hand, if the prevalent ideologies are themselves dumb, then you’re probably just amplifying the problem. [Oh, but I suppose you משכיל בינה are some kind of exception to this trend you observe among others? Nope, I’m easily one of the least accomplished people in my extended family, and also a schizo ideologue, at least by inclination.]

Now, this isn’t necessarily the end of the world. Developed civilization is based on the division of labour, and Israel has, as we have observed, a mighty fine cognitive elite, so, in principle, it could all be fine. Whether that is so, though, is a logistical-political question. The second biggest thing that could go wrong in such a polity is if all the dumb people combine to form a political coalition. The first biggest thing that can go wrong is if they start winning. And that’s where we are.

Staring doom in the face

It’s still worse than that though. A political coalition needs some kind of ideology to tie it together. Israel’s kakistocracy has a very good one, it’s called Judaism. Here is Daniel Staesky: