April 15, 2024: The Real War vs. the Meme War

Will Israel retaliate?; Israel’s Arab allies; Is WOL an IRGC front?

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The Big Story

The morning after we published our special edition on Saturday night, predicting that President Biden would attempt to dissuade Israel from “escalating” in response to an “appropriate” Iranian drone-and-missile attack that had been green-lit by Washington, Barak Ravid reported that the White House had responded exactly how we said it would. In a Saturday evening phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden reportedly told the Israeli leader that the United States would not support any Israeli counterattack against Iran. “You got a win. Take the win,” the president said.  

On Sunday, meanwhile, Reuters offered further confirmation that Washington had approved the Iranian attack, via a Turkish official who said that Tehran had shared details of its operation with Ankara, which shared them with the Biden administration. The Americans responded, according to the Turks, by conveying to the Iranians that their “reaction must be within certain limits.”

We reached out to Tablet’s geopolitical analyst for help understanding the events of the weekend. The rest of today’s Big Story is a lightly edited version of the email we got in response:

One of the most fascinating things to watch over the past six months has been the replacement of the brutal real war being fought between Israel and an Iranian proxy army in Gaza by a phony war that exists on social media and TikTok. 

In the real war, a force of several thousand armed men crossed Israel’s border and barbarically murdered over 1,000 Israelis and kidnapped several hundred back to Gaza to be held in subterranean dungeons and abused—in short, an act of primitive aggression that in any previous moment in human history would most likely have been a prelude to reducing the habitations of the barbarians to rubble before cutting the aggressors up into little pieces to be eaten by crows. 

However, a funny thing happened on the way to that result—which is desirable because dis-incentivizing barbarism protects not only the people who were attacked but all other potential targets from being raped and burned alive by barbarians. Namely, the “real war” in Gaza was replaced atom by atom with a fictional conflict whose events were ordered not by the reality on the ground but by the narrative demands of states and social media. What’s interesting and most often overlooked here is the often-determinative role of state actors in deciding which of the two Gaza wars is actually the “real” one.

In the real Gaza war, Israel was attacked by Hamas, which launched a cross-border surprise attack that took at least two years to plan and was aided by large numbers of Gazan civilians—the two categories, civilian and fighter, being interdependent and often functionally indistinguishable. In the virtual Gaza war, Israel aggressively bombed Gaza to rubble with the intention of committing genocide because Israelis are innately aggressive and genocidal. In the real Gaza war, Israel appears to have achieved an unheard-of one-to-one combatant-to-civilian kill ratio fighting an enemy that had dug itself into a densely populated urban landscape. In the virtual Gaza war, Israel bombed Gaza indiscriminately while deliberately targeting hospitals and aid workers and causing children to die of famine because of Zionist blood-lust. The technique is simple: inversion.

Which brings us to the American role in the conflict. Seen from the perspective of the “real” Gaza war, the United States has armed Israel while placing restrictions on how Israel can use the weapons it has provided. However, when it comes to the “virtual” Gaza war, the United States has largely done the opposite, with U.S. officials from President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken on down endorsing weaponized accusations that its putative ally is committing crimes against humanity, and USAID head Samantha Power (whose official motorcade once hit and killed a small child in Africa) enthusiastically accusing Israel of causing a famine. The intention of these accusations is to limit the scope and effectiveness of Israel’s response to the Iranian-sponsored barbarians. In other words, while the United States putatively sides with Israel in the real war, it backs Hamas and Iran in the virtual war.

The question of where one should set the exchange rate between “virtual” and “real” events—i.e., how many memes equals a bomb—is fun to play with. In the end, though, such playful questions can be answered through very tangible strategic calculations that, like the barbarism of the Hamas raid, would have been familiar to kings in the days of The Iliad. 

As much fun as it must be for American diplomats and planners to play at backing two sides in two versions of the same war, there is in fact only one war—meaning there is only one U.S. position here. The question of what that position is can be seen clearly from the Iranian attack on Israel. 

In the real war, Iran sent 300 drones and rockets, which were intended to destroy two major Israeli military bases and perhaps the country’s nuclear reactor at Dimona—an assault that would be rightly greeted by Israel, at minimum, with an attack that successfully destroyed Iran’s military bases and nuclear facilities. Israel clearly has the ability to pull off such an attack, which, given the slow, primitive nature of Iran’s drones and the unreliability of its missiles—half of which apparently crashed in various locations in the Middle East without being intercepted—would provide a strong counterpoint to Iran’s military weakness. 

America forbade such an attack. Instead, the United States put on a bizarre piece of Kabuki theater, in which Iran was instructed on what level of force could be directed at what targets, while Israel was told not to respond, while the United States advertised that its own forces—assisted by the mighty Jordanian Air Force (try not to laugh here)—had successfully repelled the Iranian drone force, which moved at the speed of a 30-year-old Isuzu subcompact. The point of this exercise was to advertise the new rules of the game in the American-run Middle East, which are that Iran gets to strike at Israel within limits set by the United States and that Israel is not allowed to strike back. Which would all be very funny, if the United States wasn’t also, at the same time, funding Iran’s nuclear weapons program. 

For observers of the Middle East pecking order, which means everyone in the Middle East, the message was clear: The United States will protect Israel, conditionally, for now, as long as Israel does what America says—but it will also protect Iran. Israel can act defensively, within limits, but not offensively. Iran can shoot Israel in the head, but Israel is allowed to wear a helmet. Israel cannot punch Iran. Even a schoolchild can correctly read the pecking order here: the United States, followed by Iran, followed by Israel and other minor provincial actors like the Palestinians and Lebanese. If this is an arrangement that the Israelis are happy with, they should by all means go along with it—and become Jewish versions of the Lebanese and the Palestinians, who, from a state power perspective, are two of the most wretched and dependent actors on earth. 

Why the Israelis—who by some accounts possess the fourth most powerful military force on earth, along with an arsenal of between 80 and 120 nuclear warheads and the world’s second or third-ranking tech complex after Silicon Valley and probably Seoul, South Korea—would see such an arrangement as beneficial defies any rational calculus I can come up with. Perhaps the Israelis believe that global antisemitism is such a strong force that it cancels out all of the aforementioned examples of Israeli prowess—in which case the Zionist idea, which seemed to have been proven right by the Holocaust, has in fact been proven wrong. Or perhaps the people leading Israel at the moment aren’t very good at this. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Why Edmund Wilson saw Judaism as key to America’s cultural survival

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The Rest

→Shortly before The Scroll closed today, Israel’s Channel 12 News reported that the Israeli war cabinet had decided to hit back “clearly and forcefully” against Iran, with a response coming as soon as Monday. We’ll have to wait to see what that means in practice, but the report noted that Israel will be coordinating its response with the United States and choosing targets designed to avoid escalation into a “regional war.” In other words, don’t get your hopes up.

→The Biden administration has rushed to spin U.S. and Arab participation in Israel’s defense against the barrage as a vindication of its “regional integration” strategy—one that obviates the need for Israeli offensive countermeasures. A wave of headlines from Sunday and Monday touted the White House line: “Israel Repelled Iran’s Huge Attack. But Only With Help From U.S. and Arab Partners,” read one headline in The Wall Street Journal; “How the U.S. Formed a Fragile Middle Eastern Alliance to Repel Iran’s Israel Attack,” read another. Don’t buy the hype. As Tablet’s Tony Badran put it in an email:

Hyping the role of the regional states, and of European allies, is designed to promote the administration’s (pro-Iran) “regional integration” framework and its associated “regional security architecture.” The message is that in Team Obama-Biden’s regional framework, Israel’s security, when it comes to Iran, is internationalized, not sovereign. Any Israeli action outside those parameters set by the United States are deemed illegitimate. One does not require much imagination to recognize that this is what the administration has in mind for Gaza: an internationalized security arrangement, modeled on Lebanon. The endgame is to deny Israel the ability to go after Iranian equities on its borders—let alone Iran itself. 

→But that’s not good enough for deterrence, as Michael Doran and Can Kasapoğlu argued in a 2022 essay for Tablet. Iranian offensive capabilities have developed in recent years toward “overmatch,” in the words of former CENTCOM commander Kenneth McKenzie—i.e., an ability to overwhelm defensive systems. (Although the Saturday attack was the largest ever in the Middle East, it represented only a fraction of what Iran could launch if it genuinely wanted to do damage—as evidenced by Hezbollah’s lack of participation). The fact of overmatch means that a “defense-only” security policy is insufficient, as Doran and Kasapoğlu explained: 

For Iran to halt its aggression, leaders in Tehran must believe that America and allied forces will respond to provocations by exacting an unbearable cost. To be truly persuasive, American and allied forces must have at their ready sufficient firepower to respond instantaneously, and they must also demonstrate a steadfast willingness to conduct offensive operations. Such a forward-leaning strategy has long been central to Israeli military doctrine, though with some recent lapses under American political pressure. It is easy to see why Israel has long emphasized offense over defense; as a proverbial “one-bomb country,” a large percentage of whose GDP is generated within a few square miles of Tel Aviv, Israel simply cannot afford to wait to see how many bombs or missiles make it through “Iron Dome” or the latest arrays of anti-rocket laser weapons—especially if there is any chance that even one of the missiles in question might carry a “dirty bomb,” let alone a nuclear warhead. The more sophisticated Iranian systems become, the more aggressively the Israelis must lean forward in order to maintain deterrence.

Read the rest here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/overmatch-iran-china-michael-doran-can-kasapoglu

→Quote of the Day, Part I: 

Israel’s strained relationship with the Biden administration also might be playing into Iran’s thinking, said Sanam Vakil, a Middle East expert at the U.K.’s Chatham House think tank. “I think the Islamic Republic has decided that if Israel and Iran are going into an escalatory cycle, it’s better to do it now, during the Biden administration,” she said. 

That’s from a Monday article in The Wall Street Journal, “Israel’s Next Move After Iran Attack Involves Complex Calculations.” 

→Quote of the Day, Part II: 

We have decided to create a new equation and it goes this way: from now on if the Zionist regime anywhere attacks our interests, assets, figures and citizens, we will reciprocally attack it from the origin of Iran.

That’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) head Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami, quoted in the same article.

→Image of the Day: 

That’s an illustration released by the IDF showing the origin points of the more than 350 drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles fired at Israel on Saturday—the largest-ever missile attack in the Middle East. Note the participation of the Houthis, over whom, according to the Biden administration, Iran does not exercise “full control.” 

→A real head-scratcher:

It almost seems like the behavior of a country that does not fear preemption or serious retaliation. 

→Within Our Lifetime, the Soros-funded, tax-exempt organization behind a wave of New York City protests named after Hamas’ “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation, participated Monday in “Flood Wall Street for Gaza,” an “economic blockade” of Wall Street. The protest was part of A15 Action, a coordinated global protest movement to “identify and blockade major choke points in the economy,” with local protest actions in dozens of cities around the United States and the world, including a blockade of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and of the highway outside of Chicago O’Hare International Airport. Also on Monday, British Iranian journalist Vahid Beheshti released what he claimed was a letter from the head of the IRGC intelligence organization titled “Supporting and encouraging Palestinian movements towards the political isolation of the Zionist regime” and referencing the April 15 protests. 

Beheshti claims the letter is proof that the IRGC is “organizing and supporting” the April 15 action; we haven’t seen authentication of the letter or an English translation, so we don’t know. But we do know that IRGC networks are active in several Western countries; in November, True North reported that an estimated 700 Iranian regime agents were active in Canada, while The Times of London identified more than a “half-dozen” groups active in the United Kingdom’s protest movement with ties to the Iranian regime and the IRGC. There’s been less reporting on IRGC activity in the United States, but that’s under an administration that hired an Iranian agent into the Department of Defense (where she remains today) and thanks to a press that, on foreign policy in particular, acts as a glorified messaging arm of the Democratic Party. Let’s just say we wouldn’t be shocked if it turned out that the American protesters chanting “Death to America!” and “Hands off Iran!” were not merely useful idiots but somehow connected to the Iranian regime. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, by Anita Kinney

UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky is taught a lesson about the sectarian power politics of his own progressivism

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Why Edmund Wilson Saw Judaism as the Key to America’s Cultural Survival

The great New Yorker and New Republic critic discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov and despised the federal income tax. He was also a passionate and erudite champion of the Hebrew language, Jewish culture, and the Jewish state.

By Shalom Goldman

From the early 1930s to the late 1960s Edmund Wilson was among the most influential literary critics in the English-speaking world. In the pages of The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The Nation, (and in scores of lesser journals and newspapers) Wilson addressed his learned and engaging criticism to what he termed “the intelligent skeptical reader.” But, while Wilson strove for an accessible writing style and endeavored to tackle subjects with wide appeal (the Civil War, the Dead Sea Scrolls) he did not intend for his readers to sit back and simply absorb the material. If you were a faithful and constant reader of Edmund Wilson, you were expected to work at the task: Read the book or books under discussion, see what other critics were saying about those books, and learn something about the history of the controversy that Wilson was either addressing or fomenting.

Wilson was famous for immersing himself deeply in the topics he wrote about, often taking up the study of foreign languages to write authoritatively about national literatures unfamiliar to American readers. In the early 1950s he took up the study of biblical Hebrew.

Edmund Wilson’s formal study of Hebrew began in 1952 at Princeton Theological Seminary. His interest in the Jews as a people had long preceded this linguistic endeavor. Wilson’s narrative of his initial involvement with the Hebrew language takes him back to his colonial American origins. On his mother’s death in 1951 he returned to the family home in Talcottville, New York, to go through her belongings. Rummaging in the attic he found the divinity school textbooks used by his paternal grandfather, Thaddeus Wilson, a prominent 19th-century Protestant clergyman. Among the books were Hebrew study texts, a Bible, and a grammar. As he described this moment of discovery in On First Reading Genesis, “I had always had a certain curiosity about Hebrew, and I was perhaps piqued a little at the thought that my grandfather could read something that I couldn’t, so finding myself one autumn in Princeton, with the prospect of spending the winter, I enrolled in a Hebrew course at the Theological Seminary, from which my grandfather had graduated in 1864.” That Wilson’s grandfather studied Hebrew was not at all unusual. All candidates for the Presbyterian ministry had to study Hebrew and Greek, a situation that remains today at some Presbyterian seminaries.

This rediscovery of a family legacy, and Wilson’s subsequent decision to study Hebrew language and literature merged two family intellectual traditions: his paternal grandfather’s preparation for the Presbyterian ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary, and his mother’s descent from the Mather family with its tradition of vast scholarly erudition, and a specific affinity for Hebrew studies. Cotton Mather’s Harvard thesis was on the question of whether Hebrew was the “original language.” His many works (50 books and pamphlets) were peppered with Hebrew words and phrases and he delighted in describing Harvard College as one of the “batei midrash” (the Talmudic study halls) of New England. At the death of his brother Nathan, Mather mourned the loss of a promising young scholar of Hebrew. But he was consoled in the certainty that Nathan’s knowledge of Hebrew would “ease his way into heaven.”

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Edmund Wilson visited Israel twice: in 1954, on assignment from The New Yorker to research the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls; and in 1967, on the eve of the Six-Day War. Both visits left a deep impression on him. His visit with S.Y. Agnon and his essay on that novelist and short story writer introduced Agnon to the American literary world. On the 1954 publication of Agnon’s collected works, Schocken Publishers issued a Hebrew language brochure in Agnon’s honor. The only non-Israeli included in the list of 14 literary luminaries who praised Agnon was Edmund Wilson.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin, a close friend of Wilson's, told the following delightful story about Wilson in Israel. “He went to Jordan and when he came back he had to pass through the Mandelbaum Gate. The Israeli passport officer looked at his passport, noticed it was Edmund Wilson, then said: ‘I think your dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls is not quite right. I think it should have been fifty years before.’ Wilson answered, and the supervising officer said: ‘Stamp Mr. Wilson’s passport. You can’t discuss the Scrolls here, not on the Government’s time.’ He talked to me about that afterward, saying, ‘Only in Israel would I find a passport officer who wished to question the date of the Scrolls!’ That amused him. It pleased him.”

From his first visit to Israel in 1954, to his death in 1972, Wilson was an enthusiastic supporter of the Jewish state, and often found himself defending its policies against the attacks of Jewish associates on the literary left. Literary biographer Leon Edel recounted a furious exchange in early 1967 between Wilson and Jason Epstein concerning Israel’s military situation. If the Israelis are in trouble, Epstein contended, it was because “they had a talent for causing trouble by being where they didn’t belong.” Wilson was shocked by Epstein’s response. Though Wilson’s support of Israel was nuanced, it was also powerful enough to arouse the ire of Edward Said and other supporters of the Palestinian cause.

Wilson was undeterred. A bannerlike inscription in biblical Hebrew hung over his desk in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and it was this phrase, Hazak Hazak Venithazek (“be strong and be strengthened” in Wilson’s translation), that is engraved on the base of his tombstone. Wilson was also known to use the phrase as a short grace before meals.

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The Hebrew exhortation, to be strong in one’s studies, had application across the full range of Wilson’s interests throughout the critic’s lifetime. Apparent in his literary essays is a sense of struggle with the historical material out of which a particular review or essay was crafted. In the Jewish intellectual tradition, he saw methods with which such a struggle might be conducted. His wife, Elena, noted that “to the very end of Edmund’s life, he would be found at his desk surrounded by Bibles and dictionaries, keeping with the new developments, deciphering the Old Testament and facsimile of fragment of the scrolls.” For Wilson, the centrality of the Bible, its cadences and its powerful images, were, as he noted, “part of the texture of our language: the culture of no other Western people seems so deeply to have been influenced by these: something in the English character, something mystical, tough and fierce, has a special affinity to Hebrew.”

Some of Wilson’s Christian friends, amused and bewildered by his obsession with Hebrew and Jewish history, often kidded him about it. After an article of Wilson’s was published in Commentary, John Dos Passos wrote him to say that he thought Wilson was “carrying out his role of uncircumcised rabbi very well.”

What Wilson saw in the Jewish intellectual tradition was an affirmation of the scholarly, and an openness to criticism. As a representative of an American cultural world that he believed was disappearing, he sought allyship in the Jewish tradition. In his mind, what was noble about the American tradition was its “Hebraic” element. In Jewish culture he saw the possibility of American renewal or, at the very least, cultural preservation.

Wilson was therefore all the more disappointed when he encountered American Jews who knew little about their own traditions. The Sixties, the last volume of his memoirs, is peppered with references to Jewish acolytes and visitors who knew woefully little about the Bible, the Hebrew language, or Jewish religious customs. Even close friends came in for criticism. Critic Alfred Kazin noted that “Wilson took every area for his own. He knew more Hebrew than I’ve learned since my Bar Mitzvah.”

Wilson, whose intellectual staying power was legendary, stayed with the study of the “sacred tongue” and achieved a degree of competence, if not mastery. It was his interest in Hebrew that led The New Yorker to send Wilson to Israel. An outsider who saw many aspects an insider could not see, Wilson brought a degree of detachment to the subject of the Dead Sea Scrolls that partisans of religious or academic dogma could not. Two testimonies illustrate this point. The first is from Israeli archaeologist and former IDF Chief of Staff Yigal Yadin on Wilson’s contribution to popularizing the discovery and implications of the Dead Sea Scroll. The second is from Hebrew University professor David Flusser on Edmund Wilson’s contribution to the comparative study of Judaism and Christianity.

In a review in The Times Literary Supplement, Yadin had this to say about Wilson’s New Yorker articles on the scrolls: “The Dead Sea Scrolls were not discovered by archaeologist but by the Bedouin, and their importance was brought to the knowledge of the world at large, again not by an archaeologist, but by a very scholarly amateur, Edmund Wilson.”

Yadin’s admiration for Wilson was reciprocated. Edmund Wilson met Yadin on his 1967 journey to Israel and described him as having “an extraordinary combination of high intelligence, informed authority and almost hypnotic persuasive charm.” On that same trip to Israel, Wilson met the “man he admired most in Israel," David Flusser, professor of comparative religion at Hebrew University. According to Flusser, an expert on Christian-Jewish relations in the formative periods of Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity, “Wilson’s book about the Dead Sea Scrolls raised questions which the scholars were forced to answer, and so it changed profoundly the course of research into Essenism and had an important impact upon the study of both ancient Judaism and the beginnings of Christianity. Wilson compelled the scholars to think ... he has written a book which is from many aspects a turning point in the research of the history of religion.”

While many other scholarly reviewers expressed indignation that Wilson had “blundered” into their territory and made errors of judgment, Flusser was able to see the significance of Wilson’s contribution. A “scholarly amateur” could bring insights to the discussion that seasoned experts might overlook or deliberately ignore. One biblical scholar who revised his thinking about Wilson’s contribution to the conversation about the Scrolls was James Sanders of Claremont College. “On first reading [The Scrolls From the Dead Sea] essays forty years ago," Sanders wrote, “I recall thinking that he did not get it quite right. By contrast, when read today his work seems not only engrossing and enthralling but also amazingly balanced and fair, given the fact that he was a self-avowed anti-religionist.”

In his occasional excursions into short fiction, Wilson also took up Jewish themes. In Encounter, Wilson published a short story, “The Messiah at the Seder.” In that story the Messiah appears in mid-20th-century Manhattan on the eve of Passover. He is invited to a Seder on the Upper West Side. There he discovers that the fractious and contentious participants at the Seder—which include a Freudian, a Marxist, and a religious thinker—are unable to accept that he is the Redeemer. Nor are they able to agree on anything else. And, when they come to terms with the reality of his mission to the world, they want to deny their ideological opponents a “share in the world to come.” This satire on the multiplicity of opinions in the Jewish world is anything but savage. The satirical effect is achieved with considerable subtlety and verve.

In the 1960s Wilson was dismayed at what he saw as the decline of reading and the shrinking of an audience for serious and accessible literary criticism. He was especially dismayed to meet Jews who knew little of their own culture, and found it difficult to accept that American Jewish intellectuals might be ignorant of their own cultural traditions. On making the acquaintance of American intellectuals of Jewish origin he would assume, often mistakenly, that they had some innate knowledge of Hebrew and Judaic lore. Jason Epstein remarked that Wilson “had convinced himself, completely inaccurately, that I knew Hebrew and could teach him something about it. I knew nothing about Hebrew, but whenever I saw him in those years, he would ask me whether I knew Hebrew or not. I suppose he assumed that in the interval between each occasion I had learned it, but that is what he was like.”

Wilson’s interest in the Bible, Hebrew, and the Jews persisted until the end of his life. Alfred Kazin, visiting the declining Wilson at his Cape Cod home, has left us this literary snapshot: “Edmund Wilson, the perfectionist, always correcting a word, a fact. Still obsessed with the word in his old age, bitterly disillusioned with America and shakily confronting the end. In his Wellfleet kitchen he (with more Hebrew than I could ever master) asked me—me!—what the Jewish religion could offer a man in his situation.”

Wilson left instructions for his funeral, requesting that Old Testament readings be central to the service. At the funeral, in June of 1972, several Psalms were read, as well as the concluding chapter of Ecclesiastes. Despite his frequent anticlerical statements and his declaration that he was “not a Christian,” Wilson requested that at his funeral there be the full ritual of the Presbyterian church in which he had been baptized. The church ceremony also had its Judaic aspects. Wilson’s cousin Charley Walker, the eminent Yale labor historian, opened his eulogy with the phrase “Shalom, Dear Edmund.”