US
Eli Lake takes a look, following David Samuels’ NYT piece, at Obama’s “foreign policy guru” Ben Rhodes:
And this gets to a very basic error that has become a feature of the Rhodes-Obama mind-meld on foreign policy. What they oppose is not the foreign policy establishment, but often the Americans who lobby Congress for policies that displease that establishment. First and foremost on this list is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
And John Podhoretz gives his critical response to the same piece and to what it says about the Iran deal:
In an astounding New York Times piece by David Samuels, senior White House officials gleefully confess they use friendly reporters and nonprofits as public relations tools in the selling of President Obama’s foreign policy — and can do it almost at will because these tools are ignorant, will believe what they’re told, will essentially take dictation and are happy to be used just to get the information necessary for a tweet or two.
Israel
Ron Ben Yishai discusses the current problems facing Hamas as the IDF improves at detecting tunnels:
It currently seems that the military and political wings of Hamas, together with the State of Israel and the IDF, have no interest in an escalation, and everybody wants to avoid one. But Hamas's military wing is still entangled in the dilemma, and it will have to decide if it will risk losing its attack tunnels and search for a new course of action to strategically surprise Israel in the next round, or if it will take the route of the biblical Samson and destroy itself together with the Philistines. Or, in this case, the tunnel-finding Israelis.
Avi Issacharoff believes that Israel and Hamas are one misdirected shell away from war:
But the military wing, headed by Muhammed Deif and other extremists like Yahya Sinwar, is already singing different tunes regarding a terror attack that would cause a large number of Israeli casualties. These terrorist leaders argue that Hamas erred by not going on the offensive on the eve of 2014’s Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s war with Hamas, and they don’t want it to make the same “mistake” again.
According to the radical voices in Hamas, the group should begin with an opening strike that can be used to paint a picture of victory when the violence subsides. Only thus, they claim, will Hamas be able to say that it won.
Middle East
Uri Friedman describes the mind-blowing lack of medical personnel in Syria:
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a New York-based NGO, estimates that more than 350 medical facilities in Syria have been attacked—largely by the Syrian military but also by Russian fighter jets and other armed groups—and that more than 700 medical personnel have been killed. Over half of Syria’s 30,000 doctors are thought to have left the country since the conflict began. In 2015, PHR estimated that 95 percent of doctors in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city before the war, had either fled, been detained, or been killed. Not a single psychiatrist or psychologist remained for a population deeply scarred by war. And this is just an accounting of health-care professionals, not of the poor condition of hospitals, or the acute shortages of medical supplies, or the excessive burdens placed on nurses, technicians, and medical students.
The Economist sees the resignation of Turkey’s PM as a sign that Turkey has no room for moderates:
The bookish Mr Davutoglu, a former foreign minister, may have quietly sparred with Mr Erdogan on occasion, but generally tried to play down divisions. His ouster suggests there is no tolerance left for opposition to the president inside his party. It also reveals the price that Mr Erdogan is willing to pay to pursue his agenda. Within hours of his meeting with the prime minister, the Turkish lira plummeted by almost 4% against the dollar, the biggest such drop since 2008. Fears spread that the EU, which had found in Mr Davutoglu a sensible interlocutor and a channel to bypass his abrasive boss, would lose its appetite for engaging with Turkey… Mr Erdogan appears not to care.
Jewish World
A few days after Holocaust Memorial day, and a few days before Remembrance Day, here is Dr. David Shyovitz fascinating look into the medieval origins of the Kaddish:
While this original emphasis on punishment and purgation seems singularly inappropriate to commemorating the crises of recent Jewish history, perhaps something of the spirit of the Akiva story remains applicable. Rather than functioning solely as a passive acknowledgement of Divine omnipotence, medieval Jews understood the Kaddish to be a weapon in the Jewish liturgical arsenal, to be actively wielded by the living in service of the dead—even, or especially, in cases that God Himself had declared lost.
Perhaps in this season of mourning—for the students of Rabbi Akiva, said to have died during the period of the omer; for the victims of the Shoah; for the fallen soldiers of the State of Israel—the Kaddish Yatom’s spirit of defiant hope in the face of overwhelming opposition might still continue to resonate.
University of Chicago student Michael Sitver asks why Jews are the only non-protected minority on his campus:
Over the past few weeks I have been told that Jews “don’t count” as a minority. I have been accused of using anti-semitism to justify oppression. All I want to know is why my campus doesn’t treat anti-semitism with the same rigor with which it treats any other forms of bias.
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