Sunday roundup: Notes from the slaughter

Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim on Unsplash

Greetings,

And my apologies for not sending out a roundup for a few weeks. They take a surprisingly long time to research and write. But I should fit them in because they bring me (and you) new voices, which we most certainly need this week.

I have rarely felt such foreboding as I felt after the Hamas pogrom against Israeli Jews. Nazi-era massacres. A staggeringly incompetent right-wing government in Jerusalem. (I put up a piece about its multiple failures a few days ago). Antisemitism rising in the West. (I had a piece in the Spectator on that). The Israeli army storming one of the most crowded cities on the planet. And desperate Palestinians with nowhere to hide.

The older I get the less time I have for virtue signalling. I want to understand rather than posture. Hamas and Israel have armies at war.  The great war studies professor Lawrence Freedman asked how well either side could ally military means with political ends.

Not very well came his glum answer. Netanyahu had so depleted Israel’s southern defences that Hamas could go on an Islamic State-style killing spree.

Yet its campaign of mass murder was too successful. What can it do next, how can it broker a truce, Freedman asked in the FT. Answer came there none.