Eli Lake On Israel, Anti-Semitism, Kanye

We hash it out and find some common ground.

Eli is a journalist and friend. He’s a former senior national security correspondent for The Daily Beast and Newsweek, and a former columnist for the Bloomberg View. He’s now a reporter for The Free Press, a contributing editor at Commentary Magazine, and the host of his own podcast, The Re-Education. I thought I should have a strong Israel supporter to come on and challenge my recent columns.

You can listen right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on the West Bank settlements, and Trump’s record on Israel — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: Eli raised as a latchkey kid in Philly; his leftwing Jewish parents; turning neocon in college during the ‘90s PC wars; Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose a formative book; Eli’s love of rap from an early age; Tribe Called Quest and the Native Tongue movement of “rap hippies”; Black Nationalism; David Samuels’ story on white kids driving hip-hop; Kanye’s genius and grappling with his anti-Semitism; the bigotry of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot; Nietzsche’s madness; the persistence of Jew hatred across history and cultures; dissidents in the Catholic Church; Augustine; Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah; the faux sophistication of conspiracy theorists; Bob Dole as a Gen Xer; envy and resentment over Israel’s success; the First Intifada; Labor Zionism; Ben-Gurion and Arab resistance; Menachem Begin; Netanyahu’s dad; the IRA bombing British leaders; Arafat walking away from Camp David; the Second Intifada; 9/11 and Islamofascism; the Iraq War and Abu Ghraib; the settler movement and Judeo-fascists; Jared Kushner; the Abraham Accords; Arabs serving in the Knesset; Israel withdrawing from Gaza and southern Lebanon; the evil of Hamas; Yossi Klein Halevi; the IDF’s AI program; the tunnels and 2,000-lb bombs; Dresden; John Spencer’s Understanding Urban Warfare; Rafah; Trump’s vanity; Soleimani and the Damascus embassy; and the US supplying weapons to Israel.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Next up: Kara Swisher on Silicon Valley. After that: Adam Moss on the artistic process, George Will on Trump and conservatism, Johann Hari on weight-loss drugs, Noah Smith on the economy, Nellie Bowles on the woke revolution, Bill Maher on everything, and the great Van Jones! Send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s episode with Neil Young:

You discussed an early pioneer of gay rights, Dorr Legg, whom you didn’t know about, and I have to admit I didn’t either, despite Legg being from Ann Arbor, where I grew up. That bastion of liberal university culture may have its woke excesses (which are indeed quite bad), but that same liberalism also gave us gay rights, or at least hastened the arrival of gay rights. In fact, Ann Arbor in 1974 had the first openly gay elected leader in the country: Kathy Kozachenko. There were two other gays on the city council at the time, but they didn’t come out until after they were elected. Still, that’s pretty good progress for 1974.

The cynic in me thinks that if Pete Buttigieg were to run for city council in Ann Arbor in 2024, he’d never win, because he lacks the requisite preachy, trans-confrontational attitude needed to win over the new generation. And that’s despite him serving as mayor of nearby university town South Bend. It’s just a theory that reflects my cynicism, I guess.

Another listener writes:

I believe you mischaracterized Bayard Rustin as not being on the left. Oh yes he was! I believe he was a lifelong socialist, a former Communist Party member, a pacifist and a Quaker (granted, so was Whitaker Chambers at some point).

I’m glad you brought up Chambers. I know people who sought to discredit him and gay-bait him. I think he definitely had a gay past, but what was the story there?

Richard Goldstein: I’d forgotten about him. I used to read him in The Village Voice and I couldn’t stand him!

With respect to Rustin, my point was that he was more a liberal than a leftist. Here’s a guest rec for a topic previously broached by a listener:

Regarding Michael Oakeshott, one potential guest could be Matthew Sitman of Commonweal and the “Know Your Enemy” podcast. I suspect y’all could have a wide ranging discussion about faith, conservatism, and intellectual life.

As you may know, Matt was the literary editor of the old Dish and I love him deeply. But maybe I should ask someone more soaked in Oakeshott’s full work, as this reader suggests:

If you do decide to ever host a guest on the subject of Oakeshott, you can’t do better than my old professor Paul Franco — the man who literally wrote the book on Oakeshott. And he’s not just great in this area of study; he taught a class called “Liberalism and Its Critics,” which introduced me to some amazing philosophers.  He’s not super famous, but I know he’d be an amazing guest.

Yeah I know Paul. His was the only dissertation on Oakeshott before mine. Good rec. We’ll definitely set up an Oakeshott pod soon.

Here’s a reader dissent over my reaction to Scotland’s hate-speech law:

So, hang on, let me get this (cis) straight. Democratically-elected Scottish parliament overwhelming passes an update to an existing racial hate-crime law to include additional protected characteristics, such as age, disability and religion. Anti-trans activists are beside themselves that gender identity is now also protected. When asked if misgendering could constitute a hate crime under the law, the Minister for Victims and Community Safety says “No, not misgendering, not at all.” Anti-trans activists are confused by this, so they deliberately misgender people on social media and report themselves, desperately trying to stir up controversy where there was none. The police point out that no law was broken. And now … we’re supposed to feel like the anti-trans crowd are still the victims? Okay then.

The law remains awfully vague, but my reader is right that early tests of it suggest it cannot really stand up — but the thousands of informants reporting on their neighbors for hate crimes is deeply disconcerting. I suspect we won’t know for sure until the news dies down and some poor, non-famous person gets criminalized for an opinion. I would happily repeal every single hate-crime statute.

On my latest piece on Gaza, many more dissents continue from the main page. First up:

If you want to lead with pictures, then let’s pick a few that don’t involve bombs, but instead the aftermath of face-to-face encounters between Hamas and Israeli citizens on October 7th:

These atrocities were done with intention and took an enormous amount of time and energy to personalize. Let’s talk about that, shall we?

The Dish did — right after 10/7 — and later defended Israel against the “genocide” canard. From the very beginning, my disgust at and loathing for Hamas has been perfectly clear. Another dissent comes from a reader in Israel:

I, too, was shocked and saddened by the WCK accident and I have been glad to see those responsible removed from their positions and expect them to be prosecuted. I share your concern for the conditions that allowed that tragedy to happen, and I hope it does not happen again.

But I am very frustrated with your high-minded judgments that come from a place of total safety and security. You don’t understand the lethal proximity of this war (as evidenced by your constant comparisons to America post-9/11). You don’t have to face the consequences of the war’s prosecution. You don’t have to worry about your kids getting killed by rockets, which are still coming out of Gaza. Like so many others, you are looking at the reality of war in real-time HD and are horrified, and, as a result, you are placing Israel squarely in the camp of “Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.”

For the people who do live here — including me, and the parents of the teenage brother and sister in my building who were killed at the Nova festival — you suggest that we must somehow prosecute this impossible situation differently; that we must be permanently decent in the face of true evil; that we must always turn the other cheek; that we must always show good faith first; that we must give up security in the hope that doing so will engender less radicalism when all the evidence points in the exact opposite direction. That is very thin gruel indeed.

Israeli policy, you believe, is that “the entirety of Gaza and the West Bank” should be subject to Israeli sovereignty and populated by extremists? Come on. You know that even among Israel’s hard right, there is no real political support for resettling the Gaza Strip, and most of the Israelis in the West Bank aren’t extremists. I know because some of them are in my book club. They aren’t even religious. They’re just people living in a house, and to a woman, they would give up their home and move out if it meant real peace. The vast, vast majority of Israelis would love nothing more than to give the Palestinians land for peace. What they see instead is that, when they withdraw from territory, the situation gets far worse. They’re dealing with an intractable enemy who is hell-bent on their destruction at any cost.

You call the IDF “trigger-happy” because it killed its own hostages. This is both ignorant and terribly offensive.

You cannot possibly imagine the immense pressure these soldiers are under. These young men are angry, yes, but more importantly they are surrounded on all sides by an enemy whose cynicism and manipulation know no bounds. Calls in Hebrew begging for help have been recorded and played around the city. Grenades ready to blow have been hidden inside hostages’ real belongings. Recorded cries of babies have likewise been strategically placed to lure compassionate soldiers into a booby trap, and real children have been used as lookouts.

Estimates from IDF generals place the rate of friendly-fire deaths at around 20-25% of all IDF soldier deaths. That isn’t because they’re fucking trigger happy. It’s because when you’re fighting a combatant this spectacularly evil, in addition to all the other horrors of urban warfare, it’s just not possible to accurately distinguish friend from foe every single time.

You mention that Israel has dropped five hundred 2,000 pound bombs in Gaza, and the way you frame it, it’s as if you are skeptical they were necessary to penetrate Hamas tunnels if so many of the tunnels are still intact. This is patently absurd. There are now thought to be possibly 450 miles of these tunnels. Sometimes, yes, massive bombs are actually necessary to get that far down. Have they gotten all the tunnels? No, and many more tunnels have been destroyed using other, more pinpoint solutions when possible.

In fact, many Israeli combat engineers have been killed trying to destroy tunnels at close quarters. Leaving these tunnels in place for Hamas to regroup and continue hiding is hardly an option, but destroying every tunnel using these bombs would utterly wreck the entire Gaza Strip, far more than the destruction it’s already seen. If Israel was truly careless about wantonly dropping these large munitions, why ever put their soldiers in harm’s way to take them out more accurately?

What do you think they should do instead? This seems like the classic case of, “I think someone is doing something wrong, but I don’t have any ideas for how it should be done right.” You’re not an urban warfare expert. You don’t know how or why or when these kinds of munitions are used; you just don’t like the collateral damage that happens when they are. Understandable, sure — neither do I. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t necessary.

I take your points. I do. But it’s nuts to say I support Israel always turning the other cheek. And the dead end the Israelis now find themselves in is one that many predicted, and that Netanyahu dismissed. And please. Stop prettifying the settler movement.

One “urban warfare expert” in particular, John Spencer, is getting many shout-outs from readers, including this one: “Maj. John Spencer has marveled at the fact that Israel has maintained a ratio of 1.5:1 for civilian casualties to combatant casualties when a ratio of 9:1 has been seen in recent such battles.” And another:

The claim that informs your whole piece is that Israel is being trigger-happy, led by emotion, etc. Actually, to quote John Spencer, “Despite the unique challenges Israel faces in its war against Hamas, it has implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other military in history.”

Another dissent:

I think this is a very difficult topic, and emotions run high when you see the amount of destruction and despair occurring in Gaza to innocent civilians. Urban combat is something the vast majority of us have no expertise in, let alone an easy way we can learn about it. It’s not like the immigration debate where you can easily look up statistics. I’ve had a hard time analyzing the war myself, often going back and forth. (For example, did Israel need to use so many destructive bombs like you pointed out; and did Israel do enough to allow aid into Gaza? I think no.)

So I think you make some goods points, but for such a complex issue, you’re too one-sided. For example, Hamas prevented civilians from leaving zones that Israel said to evacuate, even shooting their own civilians and, in one egregious action, “Roadside bombs along the Salah al-Din highway were meant to scare people off so that others would stop fleeing south but ended up hitting a convoy of vehicles carrying civilians, and killing more than 70 people.” How many civilians were directly or indirectly killed by Hamas and not Israel?

And another:

Could the IDF have done more to reduce civilian deaths? Yes, but there are trade-offs, and it would likely have meant more IDF casualties. A comparison to similar urban campaigns in Iraq is instructive. If we accept Hamas claims of about 30,000 deaths in Gaza, and IDF claims of having killed 10,000 militants, it implies a civilian to militant death ratio of 2 to 1. A recent article in Foreign Policy by Barry Posen estimates that the ratios were higher in US-led operations in Iraq. For example, in Mosul in 2016, the ratio was about 2.5 to 1.

And let’s not forget the US dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to avoid what were likely to be hundreds of thousands of American deaths in a land invasion of Japan. Civilian deaths are unfortunately inevitable in wars.

As I’ve now been forced to say countless times: equating Israel’s war on Hamas with the great power conflict of the Second World War is silly. This is asymmetric warfare. Another reader is at loss:

I keep reading stuff like your column — a very persuasive criticism of Israel — and then ask myself what Israel should do now, and find I have no answers. Leaving Hamas in power of a Gaza that is rebuilt with generous aid will empower Hamas, leaving Israel in far more danger than we ever were from Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. Leaving Hamas in power but under a tight blockade would leave the people of Gaza living in utter destitution indefinitely and would leave the hostages trapped in that hell.

Should Israel tighten their rules of engagement and make a real effort to provide aid to the civilian population while going ahead and finishing the job? Even with the best will in the world, an assault on Rafah would lead to massive civilian casualties. There are no good options. We need public opinion in the Middle East to turn against Hamas as clearly as public opinion in the West has turned against Israel. The only positive thing I can say is that I believe Joe Biden’s heart is in the right place.

I think Israel should take Rafah — and demonstrate how it can do so while evacuating civilians and providing aid and food to civilians. This next reader criticizes Israel:

I reject the premise that Hamas, after October 7, should have expected Israel to unleash the near nuclear-type devastation they have on Gaza. Israel promotes itself as a civilized, moral, and rational society. Perhaps Hamas was guilty of believing Israeli propaganda, expecting a war and invasion, but not the total annihilation they are getting.

Back to defending Israel:

You highlight the (despicable) videos of IDF soldiers mocking victims and celebrating the destruction of mosques as evidence of the IDF’s depravity — and this conduct is 100% wrong. But it’s so obviously not even close to the videos live-streamed by Hamas (and some Palestinian civilians) on October 7 as they murdered and maimed 1,200 people.

Israel is at war to bring back the 150 hostages Hamas is still holding in their terror dungeons (likely half of whom are already dead, likely some of whom are pregnant via rape). To mention the American citizen in the WCK convoy tragically killed by the IDF without acknowledging the five American (or any of the other) hostages languishing below ground for over six months reeks of a double standard.

Israel is at war so that hundreds of thousands of civilians who have been displaced in the north and south can go back to their homes without fear of being slaughtered in their beds. Israel is at war to stop the rockets and missiles that Hamas and Hezbollah have been firing at Israeli civilians for six months. Just because, as you wrote in one response to a reader, Hamas doesn’t have the “capacity to carpet bomb Israeli cities” does that mean Israel should continue to let Hamas and Palestinian Jihad and Hezbollah indiscriminately fire rockets without attempting to target the locations — yes, schools, homes, and hospitals — where the rockets are stored?

Hamas had an army of almost 50,000 organized fighters at the start of the war, launched close to 20K rockets at Israel, and stockpiled ammunition, guns, landmines, rocket launchers, and many other weapons. Their “capacity” may not be as sophisticated as that of the IDF, but it’s a distortion of reality to pretend Hamas doesn’t have a robust military infrastructure.

You assume Israel is motivated by the shock and horror of 10/7, but I wonder if Mexico was shooting rockets at Texas how you would expect the US government to respond? I think it’s fundamentally flawed to expect America not to retaliate because we’re “stronger” than Mexico, so I ask you to consider why you think Israelis have to live with Iranian proxies trying to kill them when it’s highly unlikely that you would ever suggest the same for yourself in a similar position.

I don’t believe my response will change your view or convince you that the IDF is a moral army doing its best under impossible circumstances. But I am writing because I think your opinions, while understandably coming from a place of heartbreak and horror for the Palestinians (much of which I share), further incentivize Hamas and perpetuate this conflict. This war will end when Hamas immediately surrenders and releases all the hostages. Any article, including yours, that doesn’t acknowledge this reality just perpetuates propaganda designed to force Israel to surrender before its enemy is defeated.

Another reader wants to see Sam Harris back on the Dishcast:

First, I want to thank you for your continued commitment to lower-case L liberalism. I’ve been reading you since 2020, and your coverage of the issues of the day has been what I think is the best example of willingness to respectfully yet forcefully debate and engage on contentious topics. (I agree with some readers that you’ve been talking about the trans stuff a little too much, but for me it’s only a quibble.)

Even though I am an Orthodox Jew who is by and large supportive of the current war against Hamas, your coverage has been critical of Israel in a way I think has been fair and evenhanded. Though I don’t always agree with your conclusions, I appreciate the way you think and write about the issue. Keep up the important work.

Since the horrific attacks of 10/7, I’ve thought that one of the clearest thinkers about the morality and ethics of the war has been Sam Harris (who, coincidentally, is how I found you in the first place). I would love to hear the two of you in dialogue about the issue if there’s room in the podcast schedule.

One more email for the week:

You are the only critical voice of Israel I can read. I can’t get into the muck of Twitter or even traditional media (though I do read the WSJ every day because, well, whatever). I just want to tell you your writing on Israel breaks my heart because of the content, not the position. I’m not saying keep it up, because I hate it, but I read it because I trust you and your heart. Thank you for doing what you do.

Also, your new puppy looks wonderful.

He’s the best, and staring at me right now, demanding his walk. But Dish comes first!

Thanks as always for the tough dissents and other emails. They matter to me and Chris as much as my own views. We’re determined to keep this site open to all views and perspectives. Yes, I’m biased, of course I am. But the Dish tries to be balanced as well. Thanks to the many eloquent readers who make that possible.

As always, keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.

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