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A
Hey, it's John. I want to talk to you about Shopify. A lot of people talk to me about starting podcasts. This podcast is 10 years old. It's in a different place from a lot of podcasts because we're obviously part of a nonprofit institution and it's not a way that we are seeking to earn our livelihoods. But a lot of people look at this and say, this is something I can really do to create a business and run the business and do it in a really comfortable, practical and serious way. Gotta wear a lot of different hats when you start your own business. Can be very intimidating. But one of the things that I know from a lot of people is that if your to do list is growing and growing and growing and that list starts to overrun your life, you need a tool that not only helps you out, but simplifies everything that can be a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names to brands. Just getting started. You get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand style. You can accelerate your content creation because it's packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. You get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. Easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. And best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into Kaching. With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com commentary. Go to shopify.com commentary that's shopify.com commentary Hope for the.
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B
Expect the wor some.
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A
Preacher pain some die of thirst no.
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B
Way of knowing this way it's going Hope for the best expect the worst.
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A
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, October 10, 2025. I am John Pot Horz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, Executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe.
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C
Hi John.
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A
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi Seth.
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B
Hi John.
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A
And social media columnist Christine Rosen. Hi Christine.
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D
Hi John. Social media columnist. Wait, my title has changed?
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A
Oh, did I say social commentary? I didn't say social commentary, said social media.
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D
Little Freudian social media.
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A
We were discussing the evils of social media just before we came on the air, which we could simply talk about from now until the sun, you know, falls out of the sky and burns us all to death. So we'll, we'll forbear and instead talk about the major news of the day. Israel has pulled back to this first ceasefire line in the Trump plan, now controlling 58% of Gaza, but having backed off the shoreline, and as a result doing this at noon, Israel time today, the 72 hour clock ticks down to the release of the hostages. So that should be Sunday if I have my math, or Monday. What? Again, we don't do math here. So Monday, I guess, or before and what, why?
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B
To account for the seven hour difference though, then you gotta add and subtract.
- [04:20]
A
Now I'm like that, Now I'm like that image from the beautiful mind of all the numbers coming at Russell Crowe's head. You've lost me. So sometime soon the hostages are supposed to come out. And basically the celebrations in Israel are deep and heartfelt and completely understandable. And I think the joy at the release of the hostages is covering up some kind of vulgar decision that it would be vulgar to celebrate what I'm pretty sure we all agree is an Israeli victory in the two year war, which people aren't ready to grasp at yet. In part because I think a lot of the political spectrum in Israel, certainly in the United States, does not want to hand this victory to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. I think there may be a kind of overhang moment once the hostages emerge because obviously that is going to be a heart rending sight. I'm told that it's presumed that some of them are in conditions so dire that their families and the Israeli government will be doing what they can not to show them upon their release. And so, you know, it's a little like being the liberation from a concentration camp. It's not as though that, though the liberation of course is devoutly to be wished, the image of what has been done to the human beings there is not itself something to celebrate. And I'm putting mind to the fact that about six months after Gilad Shalit was released in 2011, after five years in captivity, I met him at a friend's apartment here in Manhattan. You'll note, by the way, that Gilad Shalit did not, unlike the character in the famous Israeli TV series Hatufim, which Seth wrote about yesterday, the show that inspired Homeland, about Hatufim, meaning hostages story about a bunch of hostages who come out of Gaza and become national celebrities in Israel. One of them becomes a leading politician. And then the question that is raised is whether or not in the course of the captivity, that person has been turned into a double agent. In Hatufim, they sort of emerge and become instant celebrities. Well, I met Gilad Shalit, and to say that he bore all of the behavioral scars of what had happened to him would be an understatement. It was very. It was deeply painful to be in his presence. He was a very shaken person, and we don't see or hear much about him. We haven't seen or heard much about him in the 14 years since he was released. And I think people should be prepared for the fact that the joy of the moment may be met next week with some real sense of grief and horror, because it's been a long time since we saw hostages come out. And we it was bad enough what we saw when we saw it, but they were certainly not, you know, they didn't have almost another year or whatever, eight or nine, what, however long it's been in captivity to be starved and beaten and treated however they've been treated and seeing no sunlight for years and all of that. So I don't mean sort of throw it a blanket over what should be a joyous moment, but, you know, ends of wars are very. Can be very emotionally complicated things. Okay, someone say something else. The ones I went in this direction, and I'm not even sure why.
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B
The one I think about the most since reading Elie Shirabi's memoir is Alone. Oh, hell, because they were as Sharabi.
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A
Ellie Shirabi's memoir, which just came out is called Hostage. Seth has written about it this week. We have a review of it in the current commentary by Michael Rosen. And the account in Hostage is to describe it as chilling is again, like a drastic understatement. It was as bad as you can imagine and worse to have lived through what Elisha Rabi and his fellow hostages lived through.
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B
And at one point he the few of them were that were being held together, included Alone Ohel. And they came to them and said, you3 or whoever are going home March 1st. And then they turned to Alon OL and said, you're scheduled for March 8th, but that's the second round and that nothing has been decided or agreed to on that yet. And Alone Ol collapsed in tears, according to Elishirabi, as one might expect anybody would in that situation, because apparently throughout the captivity, you know, they got very close to each other. All these captives obviously they went through the shared experience and they had lots of time to talk. And it emerged to me very clearly that that alone's great fear was being left alone in the tunnels, you know, sort of abandoned. And the, I think even as from the treatment that you get, which is, you know, they were getting at that point a moldy piece of pizza a day or two, aside from the horrible treatment, just the idea, I think you can just imagine what it must be like. The last tunnel that they were in before Elishirabi's release was like the worst they had been in yet. And there was no real toilet and there was no, you know, there were. Whatever it was, without going into the details, it, it was exactly. It was an underground dungeon, like a, it like a medieval, the medieval underground dungeon that you're picturing is what, literally what it was. And so, you know, thinking about him ever since has been, you know, he was, we were hoping that the last ceasefire that was sort of unintentionally torpedoed by Macron and Starmer and the whole push for Palestinian statehood, you know, that was another sort of torturous moment where it was like he, he might be released, he might be on the verge of being released and he's being kept there. So these are the people that they're bringing back now are the people who, you know, have been, feel abandoned and have been sort of left alone in the worst conditions without, you know, three others in the room with them to share the experience and to talk and stuff like that. And like ghosts, they're going to come back into society and it's going to be a very painful thing and also a very difficult thing because Israel, nobody has ever really had to integrate this many hostages before and nobody has really had to integrate a hostage population that ranged in age from the young to the old. And Israel is doing all this. So it really does encapsulate all of society. It's not just soldiers, it's not just, you know, able bodied men, it's. It's a whole of society effect that it has had that the hostage situation has had on the Israelis. And yeah, that, that's going to be a painful part of this and you know, and a long and a recovery for Israeli society more generally.
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D
Could I add that I think we've talked about this over the last two years, often on the podcast, particularly when there were American hostages, Americans being held hostage. Just how strange it was, the national cultural reaction, particularly in the mainstream media and the cultural left to the fact that Americans have been taken hostage by Hamas and their likely mistreatment. And I was struck yesterday and also horrified but not surprised to see the New York Times describe the hostages as leverage and a story that painted Hamas as having to have made a very difficult choice here and giving up their leverage. And I had this moment of blinding rage, like, human beings should never be leveraged. It's a war crime is what they did. They committed a war crime. And the idea that the paper of record in this country casually has a remark about human beings who've been tortured and held for two years, who are about to be freed are merely leverage to me signaled that again, the ideological battle continues in terms of challenging this sort of dehumanization that occurs and has occurred throughout this conflict.
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A
You're on the interesting thing, because I was just thinking about a pop culture reference point that people might be able to grasp. I mean, it seems very lowering maybe to mention it this way, but imagine like these scenes that we've seen innumerable times on cop shows or in cop mov or whatever, of a bank robbery or something like that, where the robbers take people hostage in the lobby of the bank. And you get that negotiation over the phone with the between. And it's a cat and mouse game with the negotiator and the. And the head robber, the hostage taker. And you know, he's clever and the cops are clever, and they're sort of saying, just let him go and we'll send in food. And what all of this point and the key thing here is this question of whether or not the negotiator can get the robber to feel some kind of commonality with him, think he's a good interlocutor, fair, all of that. And he then manipulates the robber to get stuff out of him. And then of course, the second that the final hostage starts walking out the door of the bank, where when the robber is still got a gun trained on him, on his back while he walks out, that's when the sniper shoots the robber and ends it. Because that negotiation was never real. The whole purpose of it is to save the lives in the bank. And what happens to the people who took the hostages is they probably need to die in the end because that last five seconds is still a danger to the last remaining hostage who was walking out. And no sentimental attachment can take place between the negotiator and the robber, because that would be a misunderstanding of what was going on here, which is that a monstrous thing has happened, somebody has done something that withdraws them not only from polite society, or from society, but even in some fundamental sense, from the right to live as part of our society, even if that person were to go to jail or to prison. And when you say that the way that we've been talking about, or the world has been talking about the hostages is dehumanizing to the hostages, you're exactly right that Hamas is like, we can't give up our hostages. That's our leverage. And you, you should be able to hear that. Say what you're saying, Christine, which is, that is monstrous. The very concept of referring to other human beings whom you have taken illegally, immorally, monstrously, you're torturing them. That, that it's okay to refer to them this way. It's not. You may want to use this language with them to keep them in the conversation, but you must never yourself surrender to the idea that this is acceptable because once again, you make it conceivable for others to think, oh, I'll just take some leverage when I do something bad. You know what? Here's a great idea. Here's a person, that person is my leverage. And you subsidize it and you get more of it. And the psyop of the last two years to make us start viewing this war, not us, but many people, not from the perspective of the attacked, that's Israel. Not from the perspective of the, of the real victims, that's the hostages, but from the perspective of the Gazans and from the perspective of Hamas, has been one of the most evilly triumphant revaluation of values that I have that, that we've ever seen. I saw yesterday, Harry Anton on, on CNN showing how at after the first week of the war in October 2023, Americans sympathized with Israelis over Palestinians by a margin of 48%. Yesterday, Palestinians more sympathetic than Israelis by 1%, meaning there's been a 49% shift over the two years. This is an unbelievably successful psychological operation pulled off on behalf of Hamas, on behalf of the hostage takers, on behalf of the evildoers. And I don't know how we're going to shake this. That's why I kept saying, and I'm going to repeat it. I repeat it every day. The only way out for Israel here was through. The only approach that can start changing these perceptions is Israel's victory and Hamas's and Gaza's humiliation. Because even though we, it's a culture of victimhood and we all supposedly love victims and we don't like, you know, strong people and all of that, I don't actually think that's true. I think the victims look like the victors and that's why people are always celebrating victims. Because you say I'm a victim and then you get all this press coverage. You don't really look like a victim, right. If you're, if you're a Harvey Weinstein accuser, you stop looking like a victim and you start looking like a winner, Something like that. Or a MeToo person who is, who is hurling, who has, you know, suddenly turned the tables on their tormentors. But this doesn't look like victimhood. But here we have this issue. Israel can only survive and thrive now if it convinces people that it has won and that it's, and its victory was righteous. And that's going to be a long struggle.
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C
But there is another element here in the victimhood thing which is once again, we thought we were going to avoid it. Social media, the, the endless footage, not all of it real, not most of it real, from Gaza, of Gazans, the children, from, you know, from wars, from, from any war in the region from the past 10 years. You often. But in any event, people having seen those images and online influencers having designated the people in them victims, I think that has been effective in terms of this psyop. I mean that's a huge aspect of this. Hi everyone, it's Abe. Fall always feels like a reset between back to school busier routines and shorter days. Finding time to cook could be tough. And that's why I love Factor. Their chef prepped dietitian approved meals make it easy to stay on track and enjoy food that is both comforting and delicious no matter how hectic things get. You can choose from a wider selection of weekly meal options including premium seafood choices like salmon at no extra cost. Even enjoy more GLP1 friendly meals and new Mediterranean diet options packed with protein and fats that are good for you. And now you can try Asian inspired meals with bold flavors influenced by China, Thailand and more for more choices to better nutrition. That's why 97% of customers say that factor helped them live a healthier life. Feel the difference no matter your routine? I do. And you can too. Eat smart@factormeals.com commentary50 off and use code COMMENTARY50OFF to get 50% off your first box plus free breakfast for one year. That's code COMMENTARY50OFF@FACTOR meals.com for 50% off your first box plus FREE breakfast for one year. Get delicious ready to eat meals delivered with Factor offer only valid for new Factor customers with code and qualifying auto renewing subscription purchase.
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A
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D
Well, but this is why it's not just social media. I think what was clear about this conflict in the same way that autonomous drone weaponry in the Russia Ukraine war or revealed to the world a new form of warfare that we will all have to contend with and unfortunately participate in, in the future. Short form video is the thing that did it with, with this battle because it wasn't just people posting stuff on X or on blue sky. It was tik tok. It was reels. It was. And the, as Abe says, the absolute inability to even determine where the footage was from or if it was AI generated, this will only increase at the same time that we know in the United States in particular, literacy rates are going down for adults and for children. And so the idea that we will return to this very brutal visual culture where truth and falsehood are difficult to discern, that is our future. And that does become a weapon of war. And we should understand it as such, and we should start thinking now about ways to combat it.
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A
In a very nihilistic way. You could say that we are seeing how this warfare happens in partisan terms by the ultra aggressiveness of the Trump administration in its pursuit of its own aims domestically, by which I mean that you have this asymmetrical effect, right, which is sort of like serious people want to put things in context and you can't understand something from 10 seconds of video and you have to lay it out and make it clear. And that's what it means to be. That's how policymakers work and that's how serious things happen. And all the, all the rest is nonsense. The Trump people have decided, at least domestically, that they are not going, that they believe, whether or not it's fair for them to believe this or not, that they were attacked in unprecedented ways, or that Trump was attacked in unprecedented ways using lawfare, using all these techniques, and people simply asserting things like that he was a criminal, that he was a rapist, that he was this, that he was that without support, without, you know, without conviction, whatever, and that they're just gonna do it back. And that's how you do it now. Like, it's fine if we don't know that Biden had a conversation with Merrick Garland saying go after Trump, but they think that that conversation happened. And so Trump's just going to do it in open and say, go after Letitia James in New York, go after Lisa Cook at the, at the, at the Fed. Go after James Comey. And that's one way of looking at this in a broader perspective, in a world in which everything is understood in 10 second sound bites, which is you don't have the opportunity to say, look what happened. How the Biden administration handled these things and dealt with this stuff was really sort of beyond the Pale went through the courts, the courts. Jack Smith mishandled the classified information thing and he indicted in the wrong way. And the judge in Florida, Eileen Cannon, let it go. And Tish James went too far with this and blah, blah, you know, he's overcharged. And, and now just like, no, they wanted to kill him, now we're going to go kill them. And maybe this is the future. In other words, the, in, in the communications context, Israel is always trying to make the case we're the good guys. You say a terrible thing happened at a hospital. We're going to spend 24 hours investigating it to prove that that didn't happen. And then we'll provide you with the evidence that it didn't happen, and you'll know that, no, we didn't hit the hospital. A Hamas rocket hit the hospital and they did it to themselves. But by the time Israel releases the report 24 hours later, the damage has already been done. And enough people believe that Israel struck a hospital that it starts to, you know, corrode their sense of who was right and who was wrong in the war, as opposed to somebody going out the minute that Hamas says Israel hit a hospital and says that's fake news. We're going to arrest, we're going to go into Gaza and arrest the reporter who said that, and we're going to torture them. If they don't stop, we're going to take them and we're going to torture them the way they're torturing the hostages. I'm not saying Israel's going to do that, but I'm saying in the world that you're describing, Christine, I don't know that the good guys, and I'm not even here saying that the Trump people are the good guys in this, by the way, but that people in a, in a conflict are going to have to use the weapons of war at hand. If they say no, we're going to fight by Marquess of Queensbury rules while you are playing Calvin Ball, then you're going to lose.
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D
But, but there's a, there's, there are different forms of loss, I would think, and I think in the Israel example, I would argue you still need the report. You want the report. It's, you're absolutely right that it's not going to catch up to the lie, that that will never happen because of the way that information flows now. However, once the report comes out, then you have, hopefully, honest people, honest brokers of information who then come out and say, well, let's, let's bring this up again. And look at this report and everything that you saw here, here, here and here was a lie. This is the truth. Now, will that persuade the absolute partisans? Of course not. But I think in the domestic context, with Trump, the, a huge number of the people who work for him and with him believe that that fact finding mission is not necessary anymore. And that's where I depart from. I understand his tactics. They're, they're not something I would do, but I'm not the President of the United States. The way he often says the way the system works. And this is particularly true with the judicial system. I mean, we have, we have correctly praised the way he's upended some of the diplomatic efforts he's made. I disagree on his efforts to do that with his tariffs. I don't think that's going to long term be a success for him. But there are arguments to be made for that. But when it comes to our justice system and when it comes to fact finding matters of truth in times of war, you actually can't skip that step. And if you do, that is a threat to the system for everyone long term. So that's where I think personal pursuits of people he perceived to be his enemies, he's allowed to do that. But how he does it and the kinds of charges brought and their legitimacy and how the courts respond are all very long term, very important issues to think about long after he's out of office.
- [31:47]
A
I don't deny that. But you're looking at it through the wrong end of the telescope. They don't care that what's important here is proper procedure and balance and keeping the system going. They're like, we're in a schoolyard or we're in a reformed schoolyard or we're in a prison yard and there are no rules and they fight with no rules and we're going to fight with no rules. It's terrible. It's a terrible thing that this is what's happened, in my view. But you can't entirely argue with the feeling that if you are a guy who had seven prosecutions going against him at once.
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D
Yeah. So go to therapy, like deal with that yourself.
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A
Well, he did low on our system. Well, I know, but his argument would be they blew up the system doing it. I didn't do it, but they blew up.
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D
They didn't because the system didn't always hand them victory, just like it won't hand Trump victory. The system actually held.
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A
Right. Well, I. But if you are the one who is under the lawfare attack, the attack since of course, is Andy McCarthy said the purpose of the lawfare attack is simply the process. Right. So you're like, okay, I have no choice but to go at the other guys the same way. Now, I'm not. Again, I'm not defending it. I'm really not. I'm trying to describe it, but I think in battlefield terms, if we take this conversation we're having and we say, here we are in a world in which evildoers can get tens of millions of people to shift their sympathies to them using these techniques that we are talking about that are so transformative of the way people now understand the world. You can complain about it, you can worry over it. We can write endless articles and books about the eat. We can talk about how to get our kids off their phones and, and all of that. Or, you know, if you're a general and I'm not, but I mean, if you're a general, you're like, well, I don't have time for the transformation of our society into a better and. Or re. The return of our society to a better and more wholesome place. I have to.
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D
They need a.
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A
Now.
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D
Yes. They need a rapid response. That's. That's absolutely true. And they didn't always have that. They got better at that throughout the prosecution of this conflict.
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A
Right.
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C
You know, I've been sort of banging this drum for a long time now, and people really don't like to hear it, and I understand why, but I think the. As the people call it, the information war, which we're really talking about, PR campaigns and psyops and things, is unique when it comes to Israel, as is so much else. And I'm of the belief, and I've been of the belief for a very long time that no rapid response would have done the trick anyway. Everything Israel asserts in its defense is jiu Jitsu'd against it. Every. Every debunked lie about it is buried, is further lied about and. And so on. So I think the, The. We talked about this a little bit yesterday. The way to win the information war is to win the war. And that's. That's the ugly way. That's a maddening way, It's a frustrating way, but I don't think there's. I don't see any other way about it.
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B
Yeah, I mean, I had a very similar thought yesterday when Bethany and I were invited to the Kennedy center showing the We Will Dance Again, which is the, you know, one of the films about victims of October 7th, but this one obviously focused on the Nova Music festival who, like, more than 10% of the attendees were killed or kidnapped, which is like an almost unbelievable number for a 3,500 person event. But this particular movie was on, a documentary was on the Nova. And I'm watching this and you come to this realization that I won't describe all the things I'm seeing because people can watch it if they want to watch it. And. But it is, you know, it is just, you know, dragging, you know, people getting dragged out of bomb shelters and cars and executed and stuff like that while they're, you know, the terrorists are filming it and laughing. And I thought about how, you know, you don't have to have. It's like there aren't really two sides to this information war because Hamas is putting out the videos of its own crimes, and then Hamas supporters are putting out videos of supposed Israeli crimes. But it's like the Israelis are like almost like a bit player in all this. Hamas is better at putting out its own evil than anybody else could possibly be because they're wearing cameras while they're carrying it out and they're videoing themselves doing this and they're broadcasting it on social media. And as it's happening, there actually isn't a way to beat that that you can't do to Hamas more than Hamas would do to you, and therefore more than Hamas would do to themselves in that respect. And therefore, if they can do that and still somehow, quote, unquote, win the information war, there isn't. You can't trump that. You can't do more to Hamas. And then the other thing that I was thinking was just that, you know, sometimes you wonder how you can tell that antisemitism plays into what's motivating people. And when you watch the film of what Hamas did and filmed themselves doing, you also come to the realization that the accusations against Israel got more and more ludicrous to match the reality of the evil that Hamas carried out. And so what you had were people who needed to believe that Hamas, that the Palestinians, in this case represented by Hamas, were the good guys. And therefore anything Hamas did, they insisted Israel did to the next level. And that becomes a kind of, you know, a kind of arms race, I guess you could. You could call it, or really just, you know, just like a funnel that spins and spins and, you know, and it's on its own axis. Like there's. Whatever Hamas does will just accuse Israel of doing slightly more. It's the reverse of, you know, the price of right. Price is right. Where you used to guess $1. You know, it's like, it's like, it's as if you would guess $1 more, you know, and that's what I was thinking, that watching all this stuff, which is just that no matter what Hamas does, there is a large contingent of the public that will say and believe and try to believe that Israel has done this and more. And therefore, the worse Hamas is, the more evil Israel is being made to look in the public eye because they are shown in the mirror.
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A
So let's go to back to the late 19th century and what are the stories of the rise of institutionalized anti Semitism over the two generations before Hitler's rise to power and the destruction of European Jewry? Right. Two fundamental major moments, one legal and one intellectual. Let's just say the legal was the trial, the trumped up trial against Alfred Dreyfus in France on charges that he was spying. And the fact that the idea was he was a conspirator and a conspiracy was created to make the case that he was a conspirator and the evidence was then buried or hidden and, you know, he was sent to Devil's Island. And a national spasm of anti Semitism in, in France was one of the responses to this, you know, sensationalist crime that was then exposed years later. But it was, in other words, a conspiracy was created to create a conspirator out of a Jew in the, in the, on the French army general staff. The other is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated document that said that the world's most powerless people, a people without a land, without a state, living as minority populations throughout Europe and the world, were secretly managing the levers of the financial world and controlling the lives of non Jews at a time when Jews were almost completely powerless. So you have a conspiracy adduced, a conspiracy created to adduce a conspiracy to create antisemitism and an image of Jewish power that was non existent, created to foment attacks on Jews to contain their power. This is where we are now. In many ways, just as you describe it, Israel's attacked and the world thinks two years later that Israel was the attacker. Hamas kidnaps babies and the world is asked to cry at the death of Gazan babies. Every one of those Gazan babies who died, if indeed Gazan babies have died. The blood is on the head of, you know, on the hands and on the head of Hamas who started the war. Here we are. What is the difference between.
- [43:01]
C
Yeah, well, you're sort of getting.
- [43:03]
A
What is the difference between 1895 and now the state of Israel is the difference. And that fact and the fact that Israel just beat the most sustained attack on Jews since the Holocaust makes all the difference in the world beyond all the difference in the world.
- [43:38]
C
This is what you're going back and in history made me think the Jewish state must exist because the Jews as a people can never win the information war and they couldn't win the pre Internet information war, they couldn't win the 19th century information war and now as I said, they can't win the postmodern information war either. But they can win the war and that is the difference.
- [44:16]
A
And they couldn't win the war then because they were stateless, powerless, they had no training and how to be.
- [44:23]
D
This is also why it's important to note that in this recent conflict the illusion of the distinction between Zionism and anti Semitism that we have talked about over and over and over again and that, that trying to close that gap is, is exactly why it's. They want anything that is Zionist to be seen as anti, as being, you know, a problem. And those, the definitions, the internationally accepted definitions of anti Semitism and all of the, you know, I'm just an anti Zionist, I'm not an anti Semite argument that we saw. That is an important distinction to think about in terms of how that not just the information war but the ideological battle about the state of Israel continues, particularly in the West. I mean this is is a different question in Israel itself but here in the west, particularly on campuses that have been radicalized, the claim of anti Zionism being distinct from anti Semitism, that question's been answered unfortunately on our campuses.
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Some cards are labeled no ding decline which means if you're not approved they won't hurt your credit scores. Download the Experian app for free today. Applying for no ding decline cards won't hurt your credit scores if you aren't initially approved. Initial approval will result in a hard inquiry which may impact your credit scores. Experian. I was reading Commentary's 80th anniversary is upon us. November 1945 was the first issue of Commentary. And I was looking at some of the early issues which feature an astonishing array of timeless names of writers, even though it was this small Jewish magazine in New York, George Orwell and, and Jean Paul Sartre and I mean, I can't serve dozens of people. And the young, relatively young Hannah Arendt, who was four or five years away from publishing her magnum opus, the Origins of Totalitarianism, which people now seem to remember her best for her scandalous Banality of Evil Eichmann in Jerusalem article. But in fact, the Origins of Totalitarianism is one of the great books of the 20th century, defining what the term means for all time. And she was a Zionist at. She was a. She was a Zionist activist. She worked in the Zionist movement, the liberal Zionist movement, the left designist movement, you might say, in Germany. And then when she came to the United States and she published a long article in Commentary, and I want to read you the end of it because it's very interesting. So Hannah Arendt in May 1948, this is important because it was published before magazine came out in April, as May issues do. So it was before the creation of the state in 1948. And it's about the very complicated politics that followed the UN voting for the partition of Palestine in November of 1947. Right. The partition plan was two states, Jewish and Arab, side by side. And the Arabs rejected it. Right. So the question is, was there going to be a Jewish state without the Arab state? And what Hannah Arendt, a Zionist, proposed or propounded as her answer was that there has to be a trusteeship. There should not be a Jewish state. There needed to be a trusteeship in place of the British Empire. The United States and others would be trustees for a Jewish homeland that would not have sovereignty. Okay, Trusteeship, which she writes, it would have the advantage of preventing the establishment of a sovereignty whose only sovereign right would be to commit suicide. So just before the creation of the state, one of the leading Jewish intellectuals in the world said that the creation of a sovereign Jewish state, its only possibility was committing suicide. What she said in response to the objection, that of course, that's crazy. What are you talking about is this paragraph. It is true that many non fanatical Jews of sincere goodwill will have believed in partition as a possible means of solving the Arab Jewish conflict in light of political, military and geographical realities. However, this was always a piece of wishful thinking. That seems fair, right? It's 80 years later, almost 80 years later. And partition did not solve the Arab Jewish conflict. In part because there was no partition, because the Arabs said no to an Arab Palestinian state. But it goes on. She goes on to say the partition of so small a country could at best mean the petrifaction of the conflict which would result in arrested development for both peoples, at worst signify a temporary stage during which both parties would prepare for further war. The alternative proposition of a federated state is much more realistic. It avoids the troublesome majority minority constellation which is insoluble by definition. A federated structure would have to rest on Jewish Arab community councils, which would mean that the Jewish Arab conflict would be resolved on the lowest and most promising level of proximity and neighborliness. A federated state finally could be the natural stepping stone for any later graded federated structure in the near east and Mediterranean area. More importantly, what she says is that the world of a Jewish state would be pinched, parched. It would be militarized. It would not be culturally. Here it is. The victorious Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever threatened borders, absorbed with physical self defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities. The growth of a Jewish culture would cease to be the concern of the whole people. Social experiments would have to be discarded as impractical luxuries. Political thought would enter around military strategy. Economic development would be determined exclusively by the needs of war. And all this would be the fate of a nation that no matter how many immigrants it could still absorb and how far it could extend its boundaries, would still remain a very small people greatly outnumbered by hostile neighbors. So I'm reading this out because on the one hand what she describes is what happened in one very pinched, parched misunderstanding of what it meant for a Jewish state to come into being. It has been a militarized state. Jews did have to learn how to fight, did have to subsume some economic realities into paying for an upgraded military, could not focus on the glories of Jewish culture, by which she means secular Jewish culture where people write novels and symphonies and things like that. And on the other hand, what has happened in Israel in the 78 years or 77 years since it came into being is a miracle. First of all, first world country that did develop a military, develop what appears now to be the world's best military, even though it's a nation of 9 million people. I mean our military is a greater military. But this, the. But the. But the Military achievements based on the small base of Israel's existence are, you know, beyond all imagining. And this failure of imagination to understand what it would mean for the Jewish people after two millennia to have a state, even if they were being pursued by Arabs, even if they were living in hostile territory, even if the world was hostile to them, that the enunciation would be that we are eternal, we are here forever, we know how to. We know for the first time we are in a position where we can defend ourselves against your depredations and that we will, if necessary, create new conditions on in the world that will make our freedom of movement and our ability to be ourselves possible in a way that living in the Diet, living in a diaspora for two millennia have not. I also bring this up because it speaks to the Jewish community in America. Now. Jewish Insider did a survey of people on October 7th, symposium of American opinion about October 7th. I participated in this. A bunch of other people did. And I noted, and I noted with some disgust that people who were tagged as democrats or call themselves democrats, politicians, people who worked as Jewish liaisons in Democratic administrations and stuff like that said we must always remember two things. On the one hand, we have to remember that we must. Zionism is very important. And on the other hand, we must retain our humanity and worry and think about the concerns and fate of the Palestinians in Gaza and their suffering and help alleviate their suffering. Because of course, we are supposed to reach out to the stranger and we are supposed to reach out to the. Or we are supposed to live, you know, in conjunction with the other nations. And that this vision, which is that this tiny, powerless people that make up 0.1% of the population of the earth that now have a nation that is among the smallest nations in geographical terms on earth, is responsible for taking care of Arabs, not Arab citizens, right? Not citizens of Israel, but Arabs and not citizens who are under some Israeli control like the Arabs of the west bank, but the Arabs of Gaza, from which Israel withdrew to a generation ago, 20 years ago, that Israel is responsible for their upkeep and their care when there are. When there are 2 billion Muslims on Earth and 500 million Arabs on Earth and 20 Arab countries on Earth, and that this population there hosts and is ruled by a government that wishes to destroy it and sent people through a fence to kill thousands of them in the hopes that it was going to start a conflagration that would take Israel out, that it wouldn't ignite Lebanon, that Hezbollah would come down from the north, and that maybe the Iranians would Start firing from the east. That it's not just that world public opinion makes it impossible for us to think clearly about Israel, but that liberal public opinion is increasingly making it impossible for. For us to think about this. Israel is not responsible for the people of Gaza. Israel left Gaza. Israel is not responsible. Food can flow. This can happen. That can happen. The other thing can happen. Whatever. You want to burnish your own sense of your own superiority, do that. That's fine, whatever. However Israel wants to handle this, Israel should handle us. But that American Jews at this moment should still be playing this game where they look in the mirror and they see a more powerful, a more settled. They think Israel is the United States and therefore should be going around feeding the world and helping their enemies and doing all of that. And Israel just fought a battle for its own existence, an existential battle for its own existence against a stronger country. That was Iran in, in many ways that who is the originator of this conflict and that we should still be here in the world of Hannah Arendt saying, you know what? Don't, don't give us a country. We can't really have one. It's going to be bad for us. And so. And if we have one, we're going to have to worry about the. We're going to have to worry and take care of the Arabs.
- [57:51]
C
There's also.
- [57:52]
A
John, I'm sorry, that was like a. I'm sorry, I just did one of these 55 minute monologues in regard to what Arendt said.
- [58:04]
C
I think it's entirely wrong in that Israel is not a militarized country. It's a democracy with a strong military. It has an extraordinarily thriving culture in all sorts of ways. Arts, technology, you name it. I mean, it's not, it's hardly that Israelis are so focused on the military that there is no energy or resources to put into anything else. And in fact, of course, in some sense, were they more focused two years ago on defense, that the horrible day might not have happened? I mean, that's how things. Thriving the country became in other areas. I mean, you know, they were booming in all sorts of arenas.
- [58:59]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [59:00]
B
And they also, from the beginning, the Zionist project was about creating a strong, successful country. Which is, which is the other thing, which it was not about. You know, well, if they give us a glorified refugee camp, you know, we'll huddle together, you know, we'll eat Israeli couscous and you know, in rations and whatever, you know, there's this. I have to go back and Find it, because it's one of my favorites. But there's this letter from jabotinsky in the 1920s where he says something to the effect of, you know, we can't be a country. The country we're trying to build can't survive and thrive forever. Getting Diaspora Jews to buy its Jaffa oranges, right? We can't be like this cutesy little Jew in the Middle east with our oranges and please buy our oranges and some bonds or whatever. Japan said in this letter that the lesson of, of Britain was that industrialization makes countries strong and that the nation of Israel, the state that we create, is going to change from being an orange exporter, you know, some kind of, you know, orange Republic, you know, as a play on banana republic, to being. We're going to have to create technology that the world is going to need, and we're going to have to make things that the world hasn't. Doesn't have yet. And he basically, this was like 1922 or something. Basically, you know, he kind of predicted startup nation, which is, you know, what Israel became. But this was 100 years ago. And he was saying, we have to, you know, it was 25 years, a quarter century before the state was officially founded, declared, we're going to have to be a startup nation. We're not going to. We can't just survive from year to year and figure out how to live paycheck to paycheck, so to speak. We're actually going to have to become a strong country and a powerful country and a country that produces things that the world really needs and make ourselves a really useful part of the international community. And so the Jews never, they never undercut their own expectations. They always, they always said, we're not going to just be right. We understood we're going to be a normal country. And for a normal country to be powerful, we have to do the things that a normal country, you know, has to do in order to be powerful.
- [61:42]
C
It's also.
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D
They were so successful at that. It's, it's. And we know this because decades of the BDS boycott divest sanction movement have failed to stop that growth because they've made so many different, in so many different areas, technology in particular. But in many other areas, they've been innovators, they've been successful. And the world actually has come to rely on a lot of Israeli products. And so that effort, look any. The mere existence of a Jewish state will always be a provocation to its enemies. And it has from day one that won't change. And the Israelis understand that. But the, I think the efforts, particularly from Western countries to delegitimize Israel from day one have just repeatedly failed. That is an optimistic story. All of these organized attempts to do this have not succeeded.
- [62:28]
C
And I just also want to say that Israel is also a varied country with a very varied culture. And this I think is due in part from the fact that the Zionists who founded it, there were so many strains of Zionism. It's not like it was just this one thing that was, you know, about a strong military. You know, there was all sorts of sort of competing, sometimes complementary aspects of it. And so the country was seeded with this sort of like variation of thought and self conception. But it all had in common, all of the strains, a belief in the state of Israel.
- [63:20]
A
And by the way, you make a point that we made two years ago trying to establish some kind of a factual beachhead against the idea that Israel is a settler colonialist country. That is, you know, no, it's like Utah. It's a white. They come in and they take over from the native Americans and, you know, have their own weird religion with their own weird culture and all of that and that. And that, you know, my idea, particularly when I came back from Israel in, at the end of November of 2023, having been around the country for a week and I have been there many times, I hadn't been there in a while and what, what hit me so hard and so that I would like every single idiot on college campuses in a tent to be trans, you know, like to go into a transporter booth on a Star Trek thing and be sent onto Diesengoff street in Tel Aviv is. It is the most racially diverse place on the planet Earth by our understanding or reckoning of what race means. The shading of skin color in Israel from the palest of gingers, from, you know, the pale of settlement to Ethiopians who are, you know, can be black as night. And every gradation in between people who come from lands where 25 to 30 different languages were spoken. Not just Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe in the pale of Settlement, but Mizrahi Jews from everywhere south of Spain, many of whom had to come because they were expelled from the countries that they had lived in once the state was created. And this melting pot among 7 million people and the mixing and the joining of people from Poland to people from Tunis and, you know, and the grandchildren of such people marrying other grandchildren of Russians and who married Ethiopians and all of that, that this image that people seem to have that Israel is the Upper west side of Manhattan and that everybody is wearing, you know, a kippah or has a beard and like, is walking around, you know, on and, or, you know, works for a hedge fund or something like that is so belied by the truth of this absolutely unique place on earth. And you know, just the injustice of this idea. And by the way, it's not just, you know, encampment people, as I say when I read these kinds of things about. Well, you know, we also have to. The, the Bible, you know, tells us that we need to, you know, we need to take care of the stranger and all of that. As Ruth Weiss said yesterday at a session I was at, at the Manhattan Institute, we are commanded at the very beginning of the Bible or, or Abraham is told by God that you, you must live among the nations. That is the fray. You must live among the nations. That doesn't mean, that means that Israel's ambition is not to take over other nations, is not to dominate other nations. It is to find a way to live among the nations. And this insistence on the part of people who are still conditionally supportive of Israel, that it is Israel's responsibility to the nations to make the nation say it's okay for Israel to live among them is, is a, is a, it's a kind of a blasphemy, but it's. The injustice is just beyond all reckoning and belief. And it shows a kind of lack of, not only vision, but a lack of spine, a lack of, a lack of willingness to say things that will get people who are in your social circle to, to attack you and you won't be able to attack, to want to make nice with everybody at a time when the last thing you should do is make nice with people who want to, who, who, Whose interest it is to discredit your own people and their own aspirations and the, and the purpose of the Jewish people as stated in their foundational text. You know, fine, if that's the way people are going to be, that's the way people are going to be. But Israel cannot pursue its future with them in mind. It must pursue its future by denying them their victory, by denying them the idea that they need, that Israel must live according to these standards that no other nation ever, ever, ever has to live up to. And that again, is why this war, this ending of the war, if it is an ending of the war, is such a triumph. Because they outlasted. They did not, they did not give in to this Worldwide battering of their national need for self defense and the preservation of the Jewish homeland. They put their heads down, they suffered the blows, they took various steps here and there to ensure that their one friend on earth, the United States, did not entirely turn its back on them. But they did not cave. And I won't say that about liberal Jews, I will not say that about democratic Jews. I don't see any evidence that those people did not cave. A lot of them caved. A lot of them caved in their souls. A lot of them caved in their hearts. Or they come up with some reason to say that Bibi Netanyahu is at fault for, you know, for. For the terrible way in which the war was conducted so that they can separate themselves from the fate of their people. And even so, if they need it because of what has happened here, if they need it, Israel will be there for them. If they need it. If things go really south in this country in the next 25 years, for some reason it becomes unsafe to live here in the United States, Israel will be there for them no matter what they say and no matter what evil theories they are willing to stomach and tolerate and either praise or ignore. Even if they vote for Zoram Hamdani in November, who just had a wonderful visit at a synagogue with anti Zionist Jews, Sotmer Jews in Williamsburg who want to destroy the Jewish state and consider it a blasphemy, even if they vote for that monster and this Jewish cover that he found for himself, Israel will be there for them. Christine, you have a recommendation?
- [70:49]
D
I do. I've been on a nonfiction kick for a little bit, and I'm about 75% of the way through this book. I'm gonna pivot back to fiction after this one. But for a very long time in American historiography, there have been these waves of, you know, social history, Native American history, colonial history. I mean, there are these battles, ideological battles. And what I've always missed is a really great history of the American west that can take all of the good stuff from a lot of those historiographical, scholarly battles and give us actually a great story. And that book has arrived, and so I'm going to recommend it. There's a historian of the west named Paul Andrew Hutton. He's written. He wrote a great book about the Apache wars. He's a wonderful historian, and he's produced this narrative, and it's called the Undiscovered Country. And what I love about it is that he. The device he uses to tell this very sprawling story he starts in the mid 18th century, ends at Wounded Knee. A lot of time to cover a lot of space to cover the moving frontier and the West. He uses biographical storytelling to sort of draw out all these different threads. So he talks about Daniel Boone, Red Eagle, Sitting Bull, Davy Crockett, names that are recognizable. But he just teases out from each of their stories, moving backwards and forwards in time, all of the ways in which the frontier, both as an idea and a concept, as a concept, the American west as a concept in American history matters.
- [72:20]
A
He.
- [72:20]
D
He really masterfully weaves in what for decades has been an interesting subfield in American history, the study of environmental history, which not about climate change, it's about mankind's impact on its own environment, how we shape things. We build dams, bridges, roads, train tracks. And how that story is also interwoven, both for good and ill, into the story of the American west and obviously the Native. The Native American story where he very. In a very sophisticated and interesting way, gives you a perspective on them as people and on individual rulers, choices that they had to make, and their own internal battles. And it's just. It's a wonderfully epic tale written beautifully, but that the device in particular of using these figures in history to tease out this very complicated story makes it just a wonderful read. So the Undiscovered country by Paul Andrew Hutton.
- [73:17]
A
Wonderful. We'll be back on Monday. So for Christine, Seth and Abel, and John Podhoritz, keep the candle burning.