I read the responses of the panel of experts assembled by The Guardian to the question “How should the U. S. respond to the Israel-Palestinian Crisis?” with a sort of grim amusement. Here are the experts and their responses:

Joshua Leifer: ‘The US has the power to stop the bloodshed’

Alex Kane: ‘Biden is giving the green light to an extremist coalition’

Yousef Munayyer: ‘The laziest thing the US can do is condemn Palestinian violence yet ignore the causes’

Libby Lenkinski: ‘Retain a sense of humanity for all innocent people’

Noura Erakat: ‘The US is a central part of the problem

I presume you get the gist of it.

Israel is not the ally of the United States. It is a client of the United States but it is a client like no other of which I am aware that dictates the terms and conditions of the relationship. In terms of U. S. politics support for Israel is a valence issue.

Consequently, Mr. Leifer is wrong. Yes, the U. S. could “stop the bloodshed” by bombing Gaza and the West Bank, Israel, or all of the above into oblivion but that isn’t what he means and in any event that won’t happen. Israel will not change their course of action if we say “Pretty please” and, as I note, support for Israel is a valence issue. We won’t hold our military assistance hostage to a change in Israeli policies.

Mr. Kane apparently does not read the U. S. news media. What he interprets as a “green light to an extremist coalition” (he means Israeli coalition) is interpreted by some in the U. S. as a green light to Palestinian atrocities.

Mr. Munayyer is correct. Condemning Palestinian violence and ignoring Israeli actions over which we have no influence is the laziest thing we can do. It’s also our most likely course of action.

Ms. Lenkinski’s remarks are a lament. I agree. It’s worthless and provides no guidance for action but I agree.

Noura Erakat is operating under the misapprehension that the Israelis would do things differently without U. S. support, verbal or material. Where’s her evidence? I don’t believe that is the case. Quite to the contrary the Israelis don’t need our permission and will do what they will regardless of what we say or do.

Injecting ourselves into the war is the last thing we should do. It is of no benefit to us and we’ll get blamed by somebody regardless. There is literally no upside.

The conflict is an instantiation of what happens when two peoples claim the same territory based on made up history, supported by their holy books. The panel’s reaction illustrates why we should not involve ourselves in such arguments in any but the most lofty terms.

Today is the 110th anniversary of my father’s birth. To my sorrow he did not live half that long. Like me my dad was a storyteller and just recently it was impressed on me that if my father’s stories were to be learned by the younger generations of my family it would be up to me to tell them. I’m going to make a concerted effort to tell my father’s stories.

I don’t recall whether I’ve told this one before or not. One day when my dad was about 14 years old (I assume shortly after his father’s death but before his grandfather’s death), his mom wanted to go down to the drugstore—not an enormous distance away but too far to walk. She didn’t drive. So, in characteristic style, he told her that he would take her to the drugstore. He had never driven before.

He went back into the garage and started up the old Model T that had been sitting idle since his dad’s death. He drove his mother the several blocks to the drugstore and at one point noticed that the car was handling oddly. He saw something rolling in front of the car. It was the car’s right front wheel which had somehow become detached.

Shortly thereafter my grandfather bought my dad a brand new Model A which he drove to high school and, I presume, to college. I assume that at some point he got a driver’s license—Missouri had been requiring them since 1903, one of the first states to do so.

If you infer from that story that my dad was headstrong and fearless, you would be correct.

I wanted to take note of one passage in Gerard Baker’s Wall Street Journal column concerning the Second Yom Kipper War:

Third, as this war escalates, it is important to understand that the savagery is essential to Hamas’s goals. Their wanton bloodlust is designed to work twice over. They murder, rape and mutilate Israelis, knowing that in its response Israel will wreak havoc on Palestinians. Israel, unlike its enemies, will do what it can to avoid punishing the innocent. But innocents will suffer, because Hamas has positioned them precisely for this purpose.

The terrorists’ objective is truly indiscriminate destruction. For them a dead Jew is a bonus, but a dead Palestinian is a trophy they can parade before credulous Western media to convey some supposed moral equivalence between their depravity and the actions of a beleaguered state seeking to preserve its very existence.

The highlighting is mine. I think that Mr. Baker is imposing his own assumptions and values on the Israelis. The Israelis believe in “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” not in “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” or “turn the other cheek”. In addition the majority of Israelis are or are descended from people who fled the Middle East and North Africa following the expulsions from Egypt, Iraq, Iran, etc. following World War II. Said another way their views may be more like those of the Palestinians than different from them.

The question will be whether the Israelis decide to stay their hands for strategic reasons. On that I have no idea.

I think that Mary Anastasia O’Grady is engaging in wishful thinking in her latest Wall Street Journal column:

I am reminded of the observation attributed to Winston Churchill that “Americans will always do the right thing, after having exhausted all the alternatives.” The right thing to do about the migration crisis is to return to a U.S.-led pro-growth agenda for the Western Hemisphere. Unfortunately all other alternatives aren’t yet exhausted.

Where she is mistaken is that South and Central Americans suffer from bad government, government for the benefit of the lucky few. There is literally nothing we could do or could have done to change that.

Our Central American neighbors have never really trusted us. From 1890 to 2010 we’ve used military force or our intelligence services against them more than 50 times. Our advice falls on deaf ears. Everything we say or do is suspect.

Many years ago the rationale behind the Israelis’ policy was explained to me like this.

Imagine that the Palestinians stopped defending themselves from Israeli attacks. The situation would become quiet. Over time and as trust between the Israelis and Palestinians was rebuilt, the conditions for both the Israelis and Palestinians would improve. It would be easier to commute from Gaza to Israel. The Israelis would not need to man the checkpoints that control transit.

Now imagine that Israelis stopped defending themselves from attacks by Hamas or Hezbollah. Thousands would be killed. All of the Jews in Israel would be at risk.

In other words the situations are not symmetrical.

Conditions are much worse now than when I had that conversation. The Israelis are more nationalistic and more of them are committed to uprooting the Palestinians from what they regard as “Greater Israel” than used to be the case. Every terrorist attack makes the case stronger.

I don’t agree with everything that Carlos Roa has to say in his piece at The National Interest but there is one passage I wanted to share:

The United States, traditionally Israel’s staunch ally, is also in a precarious situation. That Washington also didn’t see this attack coming speaks ill of its intelligence capabilities, especially in signals intelligence. The Biden administration will find itself under fire. Only mere days ago, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan argued that “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades now.” On the same day, Semafor revealed that Iran built a significant influence network that reached deep into the U.S. foreign policy apparatus. Finally, the administration’s decision to release $6 billion to Iran in exchange for five American hostages hostage will only face harsher criticism in the coming days; it is not unlikely that some of that money funded or otherwise supported Hamas’ current operation. Pressure to support Israel will be immense, complicating an already delicate situation with a public already tired of supporting conflicts abroad.

He refers to the conflict as the “Simchat Tora War”, in reference to the holiday on which the initial strikes fell and to the Yom Kippur War of fifty years ago.

Much has been said of Israel’s intelligence failure and I think that seeing a U. S. intelligence failure as well is a bit of a stretch. Just how responsible are we? It would be nice to think that our intelligence apparatus is tracking intelligence all over the world but I privately think that our Middle East intelligence in particular is awful and we are highly dependent on the Israelis there. Said another way if they didn’t know it, we wouldn’t know it.

Whether that should be the case is a different subject but I think it has been the case for a very long time.

Anyway, I think there will be a lot of fault-finding about this conflict. People will blame the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Iranians, and us (under the “no sparrow falls” theory). They will blame the Biden Administration and the Trump Administration and, probably, every U. S. administration of the post-war period.

Although I think we should support Israel in its struggle against Hamas and, I guess now, Hezbollah, I think we should do so in lofty, general terms. Israel is quite capable of defending itself. The more noise we make, the more we send unneeded and unrequested munitions or air and naval support, the more likely it becomes that the United States will be drawn into the conflict. We should avoid that.

The editors of the New York Times call for immigration reform:

It is difficult to find an issue that more exemplifies the dysfunction of American government today than immigration.

In the past year, more than a million people have entered the United States through the southern border, overflowing shelters and straining public services. Most of the newcomers claim asylum, a status that allows them to be in the country legally but leaves them in limbo. They often must wait years for their cases to be heard, and it can be a lengthy process to obtain legal permission to work.

This nation has long drawn strength from immigration, and providing asylum is an important expression of America’s national values. But Congress has failed to provide the necessary resources to welcome those who are eligible and to turn away those who are not. Instead, overwhelmed immigration officials allow nearly everyone to stay temporarily, imposing enormous short-term costs on states and cities that the federal government hasn’t done enough to mitigate.

concluding:

President Biden announced on Sept. 20 that his administration will extend temporary work permits to nearly half a million Venezuelans, a concession to intense pressure from Mr. Adams and other state and city leaders from his own party who find their communities overwhelmed.

That will help some businesses that are desperate for more workers. But Mr. Biden’s reluctance is understandable; expanding work authorization without addressing America’s broken immigration system will do little to deter people from trying to cross the U.S. border unlawfully or to seek asylum, and it gives Congress a pass.

Some Republican leaders have stepped up to offer help. Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah and Gov. Eric Holcomb of Indiana wrote an essay in The Washington Post in February offering to sponsor immigrants, citing more than 300,000 job vacancies between the two states. “In meaningful ways, every U.S. state shares a border with the rest of the world, and all of them need investment, markets and workers from abroad,” they wrote. “That border can remain an embarrassment, or it can become a big asset to us once again.”

For that to happen, leaders in Congress will have to do their part. It’s been a decade since Congress has seriously considered immigration reform. Both parties have missed opportunities to do so, the Democrats most recently at the end of 2022. The party had a narrow majority in Congress but failed to pursue a compromise bill that would have increased funding for border security as well as expanding capacity to hear and decide asylum claims quickly. The future of DACA, a program for those who were brought to the United States as children, is also in doubt, despite its broad public support.

The White House is limited in the actions it can take; Mr. Biden may have exhausted what he can do through his executive authority. Until Congress decides to take meaningful action, America will continue to pay a price.

I agree that Congress has been remiss in not acting. I attribute part of the problem to Congress’s attachment to omnibus bills that address multiple issues in one piece of legislation, many of which may have nothing to do with solving the problems the legislation is intended to address.

The editors are playing fast and loose with the facts, however. The number of people who have crossed our southern border since the beginning of 2023 is nearly 1.5 million according to U. S. Customs and Border Protection. The percentage of those who have been admitted has grown in recent year.

This

In July there were more than two million open positions, for example, in construction, hospitality and retail, and the current system keeps out many engineers, computer programmers and scientists.

is misleading. I would submit that the proportion of “engineers, computer programmers and scientists” coming across our southern border is minuscule. Most have, at most, the equivalent of a high school education if that. Furthermore, I would assert that the very large number of phony asylum applications is inhibiting the acceptance of legitimate asylum-seekers.

I think that the Congress should enact several distinct bills in, probably, this order:

• Legislation to deal with the crisis at our southern border
• Legislation to address the plight of those who’ve been called “dreamers”, e.g. individuals brought to the United States illegally as children
• Legislation to regulate individuals working in the United States illegally

The easiest probably being the second. It is my understanding that such legislation has been blocked in the interest of omnibus legislation to address immigration.

I also believe that all of the unaccompanied minors encountered at our southern border should be returned to their countries of origin. What we’re doing now amounts to kidnapping them.

The costs of what we are doing now are substantial, billions of dollars a year, much of which is falling on local governments that are not prepared to shoulder them. Beyond that there are the costs that millions of new workers impose on the previous cohort of immigrants and native born Americans trying to enter the workforce. Econ 101 demonstrates pretty conclusively that the present supply exceeds the demand.

I am quoting with permission a comment made at James’s first post on Israel’s war against Hamas (and Hezbollah?):

This is really bad. There are videos of Hamas militants going through houses and executing civilians, and pulling people out of cars and slitting their throats, then taking women and children hostage. It’s got the vibes of Bucha.

I don’t know when the last time something similar happened – when enemy forces were rampaging unchecked in Israeli towns – the last time something similar happened could be as far back as 1948.

This was a massive intelligence failure by the Israelis, and that will likely have domestic political implications. This is especially the case since Israel’s long-standing policy of dividing Palestinian politics is partly responsible for Hamas having a stranglehold on Gaza.

The scale, timing, and execution of the invasion suggest it took months of planning and preparation, all with a high degree of secrecy. Combined with the fact that it just happens to take place on the 50th anniversary of the 1973 war, it’s clear this wasn’t – as some suggest – some quickly cobbled together response to recent events at Al Aqsa.

I suspect that whatever limitations Israel had on the use of force will now be rolled back. It seems likely that Hamas is taking hostages to use as bargaining chips and human shields.

As a political matter, I doubt Israel will settle for anything less than the destruction of Hamas after this. The public will demand it. That means an Israeli invasion and the implications of that are likely to be very bad, not only for the civilians in Gaza, but also for the region generally. The chances of escalation to also have a war along the Lebanese border are not trivial IMO.

The commenter is a regular commenter here and formerly worked in U. S. military intelligence. As you can see the comment was prophetic in that the war already appears to be expanding to the Lebanese border.

I agree materially with his comment. I don’t think we can predict what the intelligence failure portends for Israel internally. I have read claims that the Israeli intelligence services have been organizing opposition to Netanyahu. That could add fuel to the fire. Questions abound:

• Will the conflict spread to the West Bank?
• To Egypt or Syria?
• Will it spread here?