On Wednesday night, as the guest at a banquet in New Haven, Connecticut, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir made light of his waistline—a rare joke from a man whose utterances are more often vile than funny. Even so, he managed to blend the two. He said that when he assumed office in 2022, he took steps to make the food served to Palestinian inmates in Israeli prisons less abundant and less palatable.
Finding someone whose politics you don’t like and using some flimsy excuse to put him in handcuffs is the kind of thing dictators do.
The man who murdered at least 15 people with his truck on Bourbon Street last night was flying the black banner of the Islamic State from his truck, according to the FBI. Police shot 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar dead at the scene. So far little else is known about the suspect, but since ISIS flags are not standard options in Ford F-150s, it is reasonable to presume that the driver—a U.S. Army veteran—committed mass murder as an homage to the Islamic State.
In the last scene of Terrence Malick’s 1973 film, Badlands, a recently arrested spree killer is sitting handcuffed next to a state trooper. Unperturbed by the prospect of the electric chair, the killer compliments the trooper’s state-issued Stetson. “You’re quite an individual, Kit,” the trooper says.
The fall of Aleppo this weekend surprised even the residents of Aleppo, so you can imagine how flabbergasted foreign analysts were, from thousands of miles away. As recently as a week ago, the Syrian civil war seemed to have reached a dismal equilibrium: The Syrian government controlled most major cities, including Aleppo, and had ceased progress in retaking insurgent enclaves in Syria’s north and east.
In 2008, Yahya Sinwar—then an inmate in Israel’s Eshel Prison—developed a brain tumor. An Israeli surgeon operated on his head and saved his life. Today, Israel announced that one of its snipers had done the opposite. Photos of the Hamas leader’s body, half-sunk in rubble and dust in Rafah, show a massive head wound. Sinwar’s killing ends a one-year manhunt but not the invasion that his decision to attack and kidnap Israeli civilians last year all but guaranteed.
On Monday, Tucker Carlson wrapped up the seventh in a series of speeches to right-wing Australian audiences. To attend the event, I had to walk under a bright-pink sign acknowledging that the “traditional owners” of the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre are an Aboriginal people, the Wurundjeri Wol Wurrung. Judging by the speech I heard, this sign was not put up at Carlson’s request.
This week, Israel released an appalling video featuring five female Israeli soldiers taken captive at Nahal Oz military base on October 7. Fearful and bloody, the women beg for their lives while Hamas fighters mill around and alternately threaten to kill them and compliment their appearance. The captors call the women “sabaya,” which Israel translated as “women who can get pregnant.
On April 1, Israel killed Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior official of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, by attacking Iran’s consulate in Damascus. Iran spent the next two weeks promising revenge, and the world tried to imagine what form that revenge might take. Missile strikes on the Golan Heights? Bombing an Israeli embassy? (Iran has practice at this one.
Updated at 2:05 p.m. ET on March 23, 2024
A decade ago, when foreign fighters were flowing into Syria, the Islamic State’s capital, Raqqa, became a sort of Epcot of global jihad: New arrivals from different nations clustered together in their national groups. If you were a recent arrival from France or just wanted to know where to get a croissant, you could visit a café full of French people and ask. Tens of thousands of foreign fighters came from places as distant as Chile and Japan.
Updated at 2:05 p.m. ET on March 23, 2024
A decade ago, when foreign fighters were flowing into Syria, the Islamic State’s capital, Raqqa, became a sort of Epcot of global jihad: New arrivals from different nations clustered together in their national groups. If you were a recent arrival from France or just wanted to know where to get a croissant, you could visit a café full of French people and ask. Tens of thousands of foreign fighters came from places as distant as Chile and Japan.
At the height of the Iran-Contra affair in 1986, Saturday Night Live featured a now-classic skit in which Ronald Reagan (played by Phil Hartman) doddered around the Oval Office whenever a journalist or tour group showed up, then snapped into evil-genius mode when they left the room. “Casey!” he barks at CIA Director William Casey. “The TOW missiles and grenade launchers will leave for South Africa at 0800 hours!” He performs lightning-quick mental arithmetic to improvise funding for a covert op.
Yesterday, a drone thought to be launched by Iranian proxies killed three American soldiers in Jordan, on the Syrian border. All talk now is of escalation. President Joe Biden said the United States “shall respond,” adding that the response would occur “at a time and in a manner [of] our choosing.” For once I would like to hear a world leader vow to devastate the enemy in a manner and time of the enemy’s choosing.
Waiting to obtain justice from an international tribunal is a bit like waiting for the messiah: You are not likely to find what you’re looking for anytime soon, but the pastime remains popular. Today the International Court of Justice announced its first ruling in a case brought by South Africa against Israel, alleging genocide in Gaza. South Africa had sought a preliminary ruling that would force Israel to stop fighting while a full case could be heard.
Recently, I drove along Israel’s northern border, west to east. To my American sensibility, it is the best road trip in Israel—a 90-minute version of a trip that would take many hours on California back roads—from the ocean through scrubby hills and finally to the Golan Heights.
Maresuke Nogi was always his own toughest critic. Emperor Meiji trusted him and appointed him to high military posts in Japan: general in the imperial army, governor-general of Taiwan. But we all make mistakes, and Nogi’s lapses gnawed at him. Twice he requested the emperor’s leave to commit ritual suicide. Each time, the emperor refused.
Early this morning, Hamas and Israel agreed to a hostage deal: 30 children and 20 women will return to Israel, in exchange for five days of cease-fire and 150 Palestinians who are in Israeli custody and have been accused or convicted of serious crimes. Each additional 10 Israeli hostages freed will buy another day of respite from fighting.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is now the highest-ranking American official to suggest that the Palestinian Authority—which governs the West Bank, under Israeli military supervision—should take over Gaza. Last month, he told a Senate committee that it would be good for an “effective and revitalized Palestinian Authority to have governance and ultimately security responsibility for Gaza,” where the PA has been powerless and unwelcome for the past 15 years.
Earlier this week, while walking through central Jerusalem, I heard a chant in the distance. War has driven away tourists, and in a tourist city without tourists, sounds carry far. The discernible portion of the chant was a single word in Hebrew, akshav—“now.” I followed the sound to Safra Square, where a crowd had gathered, yelling in sorrow and fury, to protest the kidnapping of more than 240 people, most of them Israelis, by Hamas.
A U.S. intelligence officer once told me that his boss would often send back his reports about Iranian terror operations with one crucial question: Why now? Why were the Iranians hatching this particular plot now, instead of last year or five years in the future? This question is good, and the answer is the beginning of any good strategic analysis. But the analyst was frustrated. Even in intelligence, it is possible to overthink things. “Why now?” he said.
War is a perpetual concern in Israel, but it has been decades since Israelis have had to wonder whether today might be the day that their borders will be overrun and their enemies will go building to building deciding whom to slaughter. Early this morning, a few Israeli military outposts and settlements saw an apparent preview of that nightmare—an operation by Hamas that could be a daring single-day raid or the start of a regional war of a scale not seen since 1973.
When news comes out that someone has suffered an email breach, my first instinct is to pity them and practice extreme charity. I don’t remember any emails I wrote a decade ago, but I’m sure there’s something in there appalling enough to sour my relationships with every friend, ex, or co-worker I ever had. Give me your email password, and I will ruin your career.
In 2019, a Russian foreign-policy hand told me that his country had intervened in Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad for reasons that were, he said, “pedagogical.” Putin had watched the Bush and Obama administrations insert themselves into Iraq, Libya, and Syria, leaving messes in each. Now he would teach America how to intervene right: swiftly, decisively, and without sermonizing about “democracy,” “human rights,” and suchlike twaddle.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died in June 1989, just months after issuing a fatwa ordering the murder of Salman Rushdie and all others involved in the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. Fatwas cannot be rescinded posthumously, which is why ever since then, this fatwa has hung in the air like a putrid smell, inhaled deeply for inspiration by devout followers of Khomeini and his successors. On Friday, a man stabbed Rushdie in upstate New York.
The executive branch’s system of classification is among the weirdest aspects of the American government, and sometimes it seems as if those best equipped to understand it are people with a background in obscure religious practices—say, Roman Catholic sacramental theology—rather than journalists or lawyers.
The United States killed the leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a drone strike this weekend in Kabul. I already kind of miss him. Zawahiri came from an older generation of jihadists—he was 71—and was in many ways the kind of terrorist one wants. For a decade or more he had no known good ideas. He told young upstarts to shelve their own good ideas, and never got around to them. He was a black hole of charisma.
Yesterday Vice President Kamala Harris briefly caused a significant portion of the social-media world to think that she was hopelessly liberal or simply out of her mind. At a recorded roundtable event in the Eisenhower Executive Office building, she introduced herself by saying, “I am Kamala Harris; my pronouns are she and her, and I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit.
A most predictable rocket attack hit Odesa today—announced shortly before it happened by an air-raid alert on my phone, but also a full day before, when Russia and Ukraine struck a tentative deal to let Ukraine ship grain from Odesa and two other ports. This morning, rockets landed at the port itself, which was soon in flames. Russia could not let a point of accord pass without spicing it up with discord. Let no agreement blossom into celebration.
A most predictable rocket attack hit Odesa today—announced shortly before it happened by an air-raid alert on my phone, but also a full day before, when Russia and Ukraine struck a tentative deal to let Ukraine ship grain from Odesa and two other ports. This morning, rockets landed at the port itself, which was soon in flames. Russia could not let a point of accord pass without spicing it up with discord. Let no agreement blossom into celebration.
“I know that there are many who disagree with my decision to travel to Saudi Arabia,” President Joe Biden wrote last week in an op-ed in The Washington Post. Among those disagreeing is the publisher of The Washington Post, who denounced Biden for “going … on bended knee” (surely he meant “meeting on bended knee,” unless Biden is flying to Jeddah from Tel Aviv on a magic carpet) to “shake the bloody hand” of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.