A Certain Idea of America, page 26
This wasn’t “soldiers morally brutalized by war who, in a frenzy, butchered people.” Butchering people was the aim. It is what they set out to do. This wasn’t cruelty as an offshoot; it was cruelty as an intention.
This sadism was strategic. It’s meant to force something.
I have been troubled by, angered by, Israel for years—expanding settlements, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s high-handedness with American political leaders, his party’s embrace of an ignorant populist nationalism. I feel no shame at this and am certain I am right. But you can’t see what we have seen this week and not feel—how to put it?—a reawakened sense of affiliation with this suffering people, a sympathy reborn; as an American Catholic I am experiencing it as a renewed sense of loyalty to kin. And if you can’t feel any of these things, or appreciate how they might be justified, and if you instead use this occasion to say Israel deserves it as the price of its sins—sorry, wrong word, they don’t even know what sin is—then you are a walking, talking moral void.
I’m not going to dwell on the Squad, or the Ivy League student groups that declared support for Hamas. Except to say, about the latter, we seem to be raising a generation whose most privileged and educated members appear to be incapable of making moral distinctions. They made me think of the Oxford Union vow, in 1933, not to fight for king and country: High-class dopes always get it wrong. In Oxford’s defense, when World War II came many of them did their part. These guys are apparently upset they might not get jobs on Wall Street. What cold little clowns.
I will only quickly say of Mr. Netanyahu that I think of him as I thought of Boris Johnson, a bad man who is bad because he thinks politics now is beyond bad and good; you don’t even have to make a choice, there’s nothing in being “good”; it’s all about you and your quest for power and greatness. It never occurs to them not to be selfish because the self is all. This is how he divided his country over domestic questions, alienated his armed forces, stigmatized functioning establishments, and left his country vulnerable to the epic intelligence and security failure that is now his legacy.
“Nothing in Israel Is the Same as It Was Two Days Ago,” read a Monday Haaretz headline on a column by Linda Dayan. “Everyone trusted that the state would protect us,” she wrote. Everyone thought Israel was as strong as in the past. But its enemies saw it wasn’t.
I am worried for Israel. Here I speak of my fears.
It is impossible to me that the savagery was not the strategy; the sadism the terrorists delivered was intended to do something, elicit a particular response.
What? We can’t be sure, but there are many possibilities. Maybe the terrorists and Iran, their masters, want to leave Israel with no choice but to go at Hamas by pummeling, then taking and occupying Gaza. That will be a terrible battle—a wracking and, in the end, a hand-to-hand, door-to-door fight. Maybe the point is to bleed Israel there, focus it there, and allow the world in coming weeks and months to absorb the gruesome pictures that will surely follow, as innocent people, including children, are among the collateral casualties. Almost half the population of Gaza is under eighteen.
Maybe they hope to see Israel preoccupied in Gaza while they open second and third fronts, with Hezbollah moving in from Lebanon, or the West Bank suddenly engaged.
Here is what I hope: that Israel be deliberative, farsighted, cautious. If that means slow, then slow.
Caution isn’t rousing or bold, and it certainly isn’t satisfying. It doesn’t bestow on the grieving any sense of justice. But the famously dangerous neighborhood has never been more so, and one senses that Israel’s enemies think this is their moment. Israel must make itself safer and move against Hamas without starting World War III.
The Israelis should reach out in every way, including diplomatically, in their grief. Is the peace deal with Saudi Arabia still gettable? Do everything to get it. Might Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman enjoy saving them? Let him.
They must look to internal stability and security—fortify, build up defense positions, firm up security and intelligence on the borders and internally. Replenish arms and ammunition, continue making arms available to the people. Israelis have to begin feeling secure in their homes again. Do everything possible to proceed in attempting a return of the hostages. Be frank about this.
Continue to unmuddy the moral waters. What Hamas did was stone evil. Tell the world and show the world, over and over.
For now they must bury the dead and mourn. But something else. There is something Israel has shown to a heroic degree each day since that terrible Saturday morning.
It has led with its heart.
On a Zoom call this week a man living with his family in Israel told Americans a story. One of the young women killed at the rave was from Brazil. Her mother and sister flew in for the funeral. But someone on WhatsApp sent out word, a fear that no one else would be there to mourn. So the man’s teenage son jumped in his car and drove, and he had to stop twenty-five minutes from the site, traffic at a standstill, because…seven thousand or eight thousand people showed up, having heard that the family might be alone. My eyes filled as I heard it, and fill again as I write.
What a people. Hearts like that can awe and move the minds of the world.
THE RAPE OF THE ISRAELI WOMEN
December 7, 2023
At first I didn’t understand. Among Hamas’s crimes of 10/7: little children and babies murdered, some burned to death; children forced to watch parents chased, beaten, and shot. Old couples murdered in their homes; families who’d taken refuge in safe rooms burned out and killed. Hamas attempted to behead a kibbutz worker, and killed old women standing at a bus stop. Women were abused—raped, it seemed certain. But I didn’t understand why, from day one, the last received such emphasis. Defenders of Hamas kept demanding proof and claiming there was no evidence. It was as if they were saying, Sure, we behead people and kill infants but raping someone, that’s crossing a line!
But now I understand what was done. It was grim and dreadful, but it was also systematic and deliberate. And since there’s going to be a lot of 10/7 trutherism—there already is—we have to be clear about what happened.
In the days after the attack, chaos reigned in the attack areas. At least twelve hundred people had been murdered, their bodies scattered through kibbutzim and on the site of the Nova music festival. The crime scene was huge; the priority was identifying the dead and informing their families. Documentation of crimes was incomplete, forensic evidence not always recorded, evidence perishable. The testimony of witnesses, body collectors, and morgue workers came in unevenly. It has built and is becoming comprehensive.
A stunning report appeared last weekend in London’s Sunday Times, by reporter Christina Lamb. Bar Yuval-Shani, a fifty-eight-year-old psychotherapist treating the families of victims, told Ms. Lamb she has been told by several witnesses of rape at the music festival. A police commander told Ms. Lamb, “It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning, and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people.” Ms. Lamb quotes Yoni Saadon, thirty-nine, a father of four and shift manager in a foundry who was at the music festival. He said he hid as a young woman was raped, and saw Hamas fighters capture another young woman near a car. “She was fighting back, not allowing them to strip her. They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her.”
“We didn’t understand at first,” Ms. Lamb quoted Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a Hebrew University expert on international law, who heads a commission into the Hamas crimes. She said survivors arriving at hospitals weren’t asked about sexual abuse or given rape kits, but those who volunteered to collect bodies started reporting that many of the women were naked and bleeding from the genitals. The commander of a unit of a volunteer religious organization that collected the remains of the dead told Ms. Lamb they collected 1,000 bodies in ten days from the festival site and the kibbutzim. “No one saw more than us…. It seemed their mission was to rape as many as possible.”
Israel Defense Forces sources told the paper that Hamas fighters caught in Gaza reported in police interrogations that they had been instructed by superiors to “dirty” and “whore” the women.
A few days after the Sunday Times report came one on the mounting evidence of violent sexual abuse from BBC correspondent Lucy Williamson. Several of those involved in collecting and identifying the bodies of the dead told the BBC that they had seen “multiple signs of sexual assault, including broken pelvises, bruises, cuts and tears, and that the victims ranged from children and teenagers to pensioners.” Video testimony of an eyewitness to the music festival, shown to journalists by Israeli police, “detailed the gang rape, mutilation, and execution of one victim.” The BBC saw “videos of naked and bloodied women filmed by Hamas on the day of the attack.”
The gallant gents of Hamas were filming their own war crimes.
Israeli police have privately shown journalists filmed testimony of a woman at the music festival. She describes Hamas fighters gang-raping a woman and then mutilating her. The last of her attackers shot her in the head. She said the men cut off parts of the woman’s body during the rape. In other videos, Ms. Williamson writes, women carried away by the terrorists “appear to be naked or semi-clothed.”
Reuters on December 5 quoted an Israeli reservist who worked at a makeshift morgue. “Often women came in in just their underwear,” she said. “I saw very bloody genitals on women.” Reuters spoke to seven people, first responders and those dealing with the dead, who attested to the sexual violence. Reuters quotes written testimony from one volunteer, who said he saw dozens of dead women in shelters: “Their clothing was torn on the upper part, but their bottoms were completely naked.”
This Monday a meeting at the United Nations laid out proof of the violent abuse. In The New York Times, reporters Katherine Rosman and Lisa Lerer quoted the testimony of Simcha Greinman, a volunteer collector of remains at the kibbutzim. He said the body of one woman had “nails and different objects in her female organs.” A person’s genitals were so mutilated “we couldn’t identify if it was a man or a woman.” Other women had mutilated faces. The head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police was asked how many women were abused. He said, “I am talking about dozens.”
If half of this testimony is true, then what was done to the women at the music festival and in the kibbutzim wasn’t a series of isolated crimes. It happened at scale, as part of a pattern, and with a deliberateness that strongly suggests it was systematic. The rape, torture, and mutilation of women looks as if it was part of the battle plan. Hamas used sexual violence as a weapon.
Why has the progressive left in the West, for two months now, been disbelieving, silent, or equivocal about what Hamas did to women? One answer is that the progressive left hates Israel and feels whatever is done to Israelis is justified. Another is that the sick brutality of Hamas’s actions undercuts its position in the world, undercutting too the cause they falsely claim to represent, that of the Palestinian people. Why have women’s groups of the progressive left been silent? Because at bottom they aren’t for women; they are for the team.
All of this makes more remarkable the exchange between Dana Bash of CNN and Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal of Seattle. Ms. Bash pressed Ms. Jayapal on why she wasn’t condemning what had been done to women on 10/7. Ms. Jayapal was evasive, tried to redirect, said rape is “horrific” but “happens in war situations.”
“However,” she said, “I think we have to be balanced about bringing in the outrages against Palestinians.”
Balanced? How do you balance a story like the horrors of October 7? You don’t, you just find and tell the truth. Some stories don’t have two sides. This is one of them.
Why is it important? Because it happened. Because it reveals something about the essential nature of Hamas and reflects its ultimate political goals. Progressives admiringly quote Maya Angelou’s advice that when people show you who they are, believe them. October 7 was Hamas showing you who they are. Believe them.
AI IS THE Y2K CRISIS, ONLY THIS TIME IT’S REAL
November 30, 2023
Recently while sharing a meal an acquaintance said something arresting. We were speaking, as happy pessimists do, about where the twenty-first century went wrong. We’re almost a quarter-century into it, it’s already taken on a certain general shape and character, and I’m not sure I see much good in it beyond advances in medicine and science. He said he was working on a theory: The twenty-first century so far has been a reverse Y2K.
By 12/31/99 the world was transfixed by a fear that all its mighty computers would go crazy as 23:59:59 clicked to 0:00:00. They wouldn’t be able to transfer over to 2000. The entire system would have a hiccup and the lights go out. It didn’t happen. Remedies were invented and may have saved the day.
It is since 2000, the acquaintance said, that the world’s computers have caused havoc, in the social, cultural, and political spheres. Few worried, watched, or took countering steps. After all, 2000 turned out all right, so this probably would, too. We accepted all the sludge—algorithms designed to divide us, to give destructive messages to kids, to addict them to the product—passively, without alarm.
We are accepting artificial intelligence the same way, passively, and hoping its promised benefits (in medicine and science again) will outweigh its grave and obvious threat. That threat is one Henry Kissinger warned of in these pages early this year. “What happens if this technology cannot be completely contained?” he and his co-authors asked. “What if an element of malice emerges in the AI?” Kissinger was a great diplomat and historian, but he had the imagination of an artist. AI and the possibility of nuclear war were the two great causes of his last years. He was worried about where this whole modern contraption was going.
I’ve written that a great icon of the age, the Apple logo—the apple with the bite taken out of it—seemed to me a conscious or unconscious expression that those involved in the development of our modern tech world understood on some level that their efforts were taking us back to Eden, to the pivotal moment when Eve and Adam ate the forbidden fruit. The serpent told Eve they would become all-knowing like God, in fact equal to God, and that is why God didn’t want them to have it. She bit, and human beings were banished from the kindly garden and thrown into the rough cruel world. I believe those creating, fueling, and funding AI want, possibly unconsciously, to be God, and think on some level they are God.
Many have warned of the destructive possibilities and capabilities of AI, but there are important thoughts on this in a recent New Yorker piece on Geoffrey Hinton, famously called the godfather of AI. It is a brilliantly written and thought-through profile by Joshua Rothman.
Mr. Hinton, seventy-five, a Turing Award winner, had spent thirty years as a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto. He studied neural networks. Later he started a small research company that was bought by Google, and he worked there until earlier this year. Soon after leaving he began to warn of the “existential threat” AI poses. The more he used ChatGPT, the more uneasy he became. He worries that AI systems may start to think for themselves; they may attempt to take over human civilization, or eliminate it.
Mr. Hinton told Mr. Rothman that once, early in his research days, he saw a “frustrated AI.” It was a computer attached to two TV cameras and a robot arm. The computer was told to assemble some blocks spread on a table. It tried, but it knew only how to recognize individual blocks. A pile of them left it confused. “It pulled back a little bit, and went bash,” knocking them all around. “It couldn’t deal with what was going on, so it changed it, violently.”
Mr. Hinton says he doesn’t regret his work, but he fears what powerful people will do with AI. Vladimir Putin might create “an autonomous lethal weapon”—a self-directing killing machine. Mr. Hinton believes such weapons should be outlawed. But even benign autonomous systems can be destructive.
He believes AI can be approached with one of two attitudes, denial or stoicism. When people first hear of its potential for destruction they say it’s not worth it, we have to stop it. But stopping it is a fantasy. “We need to think, How do we make it not as awful for humanity as it might be?”
Why, Mr. Rothman asks, don’t we just unplug it? AI requires giant servers and data centers, all of which run on electricity.
I was glad to see this question asked, because I have wondered it, too.
Mr. Hinton said it’s reasonable to ask if we wouldn’t be better off without AI. “But it’s not going to happen. Because of the way society is. And because of the competition between different nations.” If the United Nations worked, maybe it could stop it. But China isn’t going to.
I found this argument, which AI enthusiasts always make, more a rationale than a thought. If China took to hunting children for sport, would we do it? (Someone reading this in Silicon Valley, please say no.)
What is most urgently disturbing to me is that if America speeds forward with AI it is putting the fate of humanity in the hands of the men and women of Silicon Valley, who invented the internet as it is, including all its sludge. And there’s something wrong with them. They’re some new kind of human, brilliant in a deep yet narrow way, prattling on about connection and compassion but cold at the core. They seem apart from the great faiths of past millennia, apart from traditional moral or ethical systems or assumptions about life. C. S. Lewis once said words to the effect that empires rise and fall, cultures come and go, but the waiter who poured your coffee this morning is immortal because his soul is immortal. Such a thought would be familiar to many readers but would leave Silicon Valley blinking with bafflement. They’re modern and beyond beyond. This one injects himself with the blood of people in their twenties in his quest for longevity; that one embraces extreme fasting. The Journal this summer reported on Silicon Valley executives: “Routine drug use has moved from an after-hours activity squarely into corporate culture.” They see psychedelics—ketamine, hallucinogenic mushrooms—as “gateways to business breakthroughs.”
