This is, by far, the best take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that I’ve heard. It’s between a Jew and a Palestinian, but both of them are converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which means that they’re less interested in winning a debate and more interested in coming to a common understanding, even though they are approaching it from completely opposite sides. It also means that they’re willing to say things that the hardliners on both sides of the conflict would consider heretical, and own up to their own side’s mistakes and shortcomings. Really fascinating stuff, with none of the bloviating lies, manipulative gaslighting, or emotional hyperbole that characterizes so much coverage of the conflict these days. You’ll probably get more out of it if you’re a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but even if you’re not, I highly recommend giving it a listen.
Author: Joe Vasicek
Joe Vasicek is the author of more than twenty science fiction books, including the Star Wanderers and Sons of the Starfarers series. As a young man, he studied Arabic and traveled across the Middle East and the Caucasus. He claims Utah as his home.
Navigating Woke SF, Part 5: Where do things stand now?
So it’s been almost exactly two and a half years since I posted my first “Navigating Woke SF” blog post, where I demonstrated an anti-conservative bias in the responses I was getting to my traditional short story submissions, and predicted a cultural backlash against the woke moral panic of our times. Those predictions are now playing out all around us, from the Bud Light boycott to the last few Disney/Pixar bombs to the unlikely success of movies like The Sound of Freedom, which is still showing in theaters in my area.
To no one’s surprise, the institutions like Disney that have already been captured by the woke intersectional left have been tripling- and quadrupling-down on their woke insanity, as we see in movies like The Marvels and Disney’s live action Snow White. Which has opened up some wonderful opportunities for conservative-minded publishers and creators to outflank them, as we see with the Daily Wire’s competing release of Snow White:
Indeed, the anti-woke backlash in the mainstream culture has gotten so bad that South Park recently lampooned it with an episode where all of their characters were replaced by “diverse women.” I didn’t watch the full episode, but the clips I saw from it were absolutely hilarious—and directly over the target.
So with all of that brewing in the cultural mainstream, where do things stand in our particular little corner of it? Namely, science fiction publishing and the traditional short story markets?
Well… let me tell you a story. It begins earlier this year, when I decided that I wanted to take some of the money I’ve been earning with my indie-published book sales and subscribe to one of the traditional science fiction magazines. For a writer like me, it’s a legitimate business expense, and it seemed like a nice way to support the genre, as well as build my science fiction collection.
I decided to go with Clarkesworld, because even though they are woke, they seemed to be less woke than most of the other major magazines. The particular brand of diversity they like to emphasize is on publishing non-US authors, especially Chinese authors, who tend to write stories that are neither woke nore anti-woke, which can be a real breath of fresh air. Seriously, there is some really fascinating science fiction coming out of China these days, which is definitely worth checking out, and Clarkesworld, to their credit, tends to publish a lot of good Chinese authors.
So I subscribed to Clarkesworld magazine and began to receive a physical issue each month, which I added to my currently-reading pile and slowly read through. But I began to notice something disturbing with each issue: namely, that even if the story itself wasn’t particularly woke, there would always be some woke element thrown into it. For example, the story might be a weird western adventure tale, but one of the characters would randomly mention their LGBTQ wife. Or the story would be a far future space opera, and one of the characters would casually drop that they were trans, even though it had nothing to do with the story.
At the same time as all of this was happening, I discovered this interesting podcast where a former Dreamworks animator discusses how he left the company after learning that the Dreamworks executives were explicitly trying to use their movies as a form of social engineering for the woke agenda. The mechanism for this social engineering was what I found particularly interesting: namely, that they would associate the movie’s villain with some specific aspect of culture/religion that they were trying to villify, and associate the good guys with those aspects of the woke agenda that they were trying to push. In the example given in the podcast, they literally had the villain shout “the family is the basic unit of society!” at the climax of the story.
According to the former Dreamworks animator, this is especially true of sequels for popular franchises and IPs. For example, Wreck-it Ralph is a really fun and well-told story about a “bad guy” from a video game trying to become a hero, and becoming one when he sacrifices himself to save a misfit character from another video game, who turns out to be that video game’s queen. Really charming, really good story. But Wreck-it Ralph 2 throws all of that out of the window, turning Ralph into a simp and Venelope into a liberated girl boss, and crapping on all the traditional Disney princesses at the same time. The message was laid on pretty thick, and the result was a garbage movie.
Which made me wonder about Clarkesworld, because that particular social engineering technique is EXACTLY what I was seeing in almost all of the Clarkesworld stories. The thing is, I couldn’t tell if it was deliberate or unintended. I can totally believe that the Clarkesworld editors would tell their authors “we love your story, but we want you to add just this small woke element to it, and then we’ll publish it.” There are enough desperate authors out there who would probably do exactly that, if it meant receiving an acceptance from a pro-paying market after getting so many disheartening rejection letters.
But personally, I think it’s more likely that the authors are throwing in these elements themselves, without any explicit direction from the editors. That is, the authors are so desperate to be published by these woke traditional magazines that they’re not only self-censoring the stuff that they don’t think the editors will like, but they’re adding woke elements just because they know it will increase their odds of getting accepted. Which to me, is just sad.
Honestly, I wish that the more conspiratorial option were true, and that Clarkesworld has a devious social engineering agenda that they push onto their stories. That would be better than the alternative, which is that the literary science fiction field has been so thoroughly captured by the left that authors are adding woke elements to their stories without getting any feedback, direction, or urging from the editors and publishers, just because they know these stories won’t go anywhere without them.
So how is a conservative (or at this point, even a non-leftist liberal) supposed to navigate the field? At this point, I really don’t think there’s any way to do it except to go indie, or to go with Baen (which is itself independent of the Big 6 Big 5 Big 4+1 Big 3+1 whatever the New York book publishing establishment is called these days, after the Simon & Schuster sale). There may be some other small publishers that, like Daily Wire, are driving into the smoke of our cultural institutions’ Götterdämmerung, but within the science fiction field, I don’t think any of them are big enough to offer much more than what you’ll get by going indie—except, perhaps, with the opportunity to get in early with the up-and-coming next generation of editors and publishers, who will eventually replace the dinosaurs that currently dominate the field.
But that’s a big gamble that may never pay off, because the science fiction field has been dominated by leftists since at least the mid-60s, to the point where most subgenrese of science fiction are now synonymous with woke. After all, if the authors themselves are inadvertently telling stories that use social engineering techniques, not because the editors are making them, but because that’s the only way to get published, the rot runs very, very deep. And even during the “morning in America” moment in the 80s, when science fiction pulled back from the leftist crap to give us classics like Ender’s Game, there was still a thread of the wokeism in stuff like the sexuality in the Vorkosigan books, or the environmentalism in Hyperion (which I love, don’t get me wrong… but yeah, Dan Simmons is a bit of a tree-hugger).
The point that I’m trying to make with all of this is that, when it comes to the woke agenda, science fiction is a thoroughly captured field. That’s what this last episode in navigating woke SF says to me. If that ever changes, it will be after most of the traditional markets like Clarkesworld collapse and the major awards like the Hugos and Nebulas go defunct, because until that happens, everyone in this particular field is still going to be in denial about the anti-woke cultural backlash. That’s just how deep the woke goes. So until then, if you’re a non-woke author like me, the only way to navigate the field without compromising your values is to go full indie, at least when it comes to short stories.
What about supporting the arts? At this point, instead of subscribing to a particular publication or magazine, I’ve decided to make a short list of non-woke authors I want to support, and to buy their books as soon as they come out. One of those authors is Andrew Klavan, who writes more in the mystery/thriller genre than science fiction, though his Another Kingdom trilogy is quite good. I’m reading his latest Cameron Winter mystery right now, and it’s quite good. I highly recommend it.
I was on a podcast!
Episode 316 of the Blasters and Blades podcast, on creating realistic geopolitical organizations in a fictional world, is now out on the feed and on YouTube. Check it out!
This was a fun conversation, though it’s worth noting that we recorded it before the October 7th massacre in Israel, which definitely would have changed the tone and focus of the conversation. We haven’t recorded part 2 yet, so if there’s any particular thing you want us to discuss in more depth, get those comments in and we’ll do our best to respond!
“Quantum Worlds” cover reveal
Behold!
This is the first story I wrote with ChatGPT, about… a struggling science fiction magazine editor who decides to embrace AI instead of fighting against it, and revolutionizes everything. So of course, it makes sense that the cover would be patterned after Clarkesworld’s iconic covers, since I basically wrote it in response to them closing down submissions to all AI-assisted stories.
It’s out for free now, if you want to check it out. Enjoy!
Hey Tolkien—why didn’t the eagles just fly the ring to Mordor?
I think most writers can relate to this—especially those of us with really long series.
This guy gets it
As I said previously, this is the defining moral conflict of our times.
From the Book of Mormon:
7 And now I write somewhat concerning the sufferings of this people. For according to the knowledge which I have received from Amoron, behold, the Lamanites have many prisoners, which they took from the tower of Sherrizah; and there were men, women, and children.
8 And the husbands and fathers of those women and children they have slain; and they feed the women upon the flesh of their husbands, and the children upon the flesh of their fathers; and no water, save a little, do they give unto them.
9 And notwithstanding this great abomination of the Lamanites, it doth not exceed that of our people in Moriantum. For behold, many of the daughters of the Lamanites have they taken prisoners; and after depriving them of that which was most dear and precious above all things, which is chastity and virtue—
10 And after they had done this thing, they did murder them in a most cruel manner, torturing their bodies even unto death; and after they have done this, they devour their flesh like unto wild beasts, because of the hardness of their hearts; and they do it for a token of bravery.
11 O my beloved son, how can a people like this, that are without civilization—
12 (And only a few years have passed away, and they were a civil and a delightsome people)
13 But O my son, how can a people like this, whose delight is in so much abomination—
14 How can we expect that God will stay his hand in judgment against us?
Moroni 9:7-14
The atrocities that we saw by Hamas on October 7th were on exactly the same level as the atrocities in the closing chapters of the Book of Mormon. The only thing we haven’t heard about is cannibalism, both of Hamas fighters against the victims, and of the hostages fed with the flesh of their own children—but frankly, it wouldn’t be surprising, given the scope and nature of the atrocities we already know about.
And yet, there are significant numbers of people in the West who approve of the jihad against the Jewish people? Truly, we are swiftly passing from a “civil and delightsome people” to a “people… without civilization.”
The defining moral conflict of our times
In just ten days, this comedy skit has gotten about 1.2M views on YouTube, and probably a lot more on X. It’s gone viral for a couple of reasons: first, because it makes fun of celebrities, who most of us Americans now love to hate; and second, because most of us who have watched it feel like we’re in a similar position, thanks to the way social media makes celebrities and narcissists of us all.
I can sympathize with the confusion of most Americans, who feel like the recent escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict came out of nowhere, and don’t really know who’s right. The last big “current thing” was probably the Russo-Ukraine war, and most of us have since come to the conclusion that there are no good guys in that conflict, only innocent civilians and impoverished taxpayers who’ve been bilked out of billions and billions of dollars while our insanely corrupt politicians vow to fight to the last Ukrainian.
Here’s the thing, though: you shouldn’t have to pick a side to be able to declare, without any misgivings or doubts, that this is evil:
Unlike most Americans, I am not unfamiliar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I studied it for four years in college, interned briefly with a major K-street foreign policy think tank, and traveled both to Israel and the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria. At the time, I was very pro-Palestinian.
My school (Brigham Young University) was actually more conservative and a lot more fair to the Israeli side of the conflict than most universities, but even back in the 2000s the entire American academic establishment had a very anti-semitic bent, and the things I didn’t learn—the lies of omission, especially about the history of anti-semitism in the Arab world—could fill volumes.
The other thing that red-pilled me away from my pro-Palestinian stance was the realization that Islam teaches that it is virtuous to lie to the unbeliever in order to further the cause of Islam. This principle is called “taqiyya,” and when you realize that everything we as kaffirs think we know about Islam has been transmitted to us by someone who was taught to lie to us about Islam, it makes a lot more sense. Not all Arabs are Muslim, and within Islam there are a lot of sects and divisions, but all of them share this principle of taqiyya, and the overwhelming majority of Palestinians are Muslim.
Back in my pro-Palestinian days, there were a number of things that I had to either ignore or chalk off as anomalies in order to maintain my pro-Palestinian views. Things like the insane popularity of Hitler’s Mein Kampf all across the Arab world, perhaps only rivaled by the Qur’an. Things like the fact that generations of Palestinians who have never even set foot in the disputed territories demand the “right to return,” while Arabs displaced from other conflicts, such as the Syrian civil war, have no qualms about picking up and leaving their ancestral homelands. Things like the fact that Hamas, Fatah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian terror groups deliberately target civilians, whereas Israel goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties. Can you imagine what would happen if the Israelis used their own people as human shields the way that Hamas does? Hans… are we the baddies?
As someone who spent a significant portion of his life studying this conflict, and has since had a 180 degree change of view, the October 7th massacre was extremely clarifying. All those things that I used to chalk up as anomalies now fit into place in a way that makes me wonder how I didn’t see it before. The biggest of these has to do with the anti-semitic origins of Palestinian nationalism in the first place. Before the Balfour Declaration, which started the ball rolling for the formation of a Jewish state on historically Jewish lands, there was no concept of a Palestinian nation. Indeed, until the 20th century, the concept of the Westphalian nation-state was foreign to the Arabs, who instead tended to identify with their local community or tribal affiliation. From the beginning, Palestinian nationalism was created and deliberately cultivated as a means of accomplishing exactly what Hamas did on October 7th: the slaughter and ethnic cleansing of the Jews.
Which is not to say that the people we call “Palestinians” were not themselves violently displaced by the wars in 1948 and 1967. Unlike what some conservative commentators have said in recent weeks, these people were not “squatters,” but legitimate inhabitants of these lands. Indeed, many of them are descendants of the ancient Jewish people who converted to Christianity, and thus remained on the land after the Romans pacified Judea in the first century AD and drove their fellow Jews from their homeland. It’s a very ancient and complex conflict, which is why I can sympathize with Ryan Long’s comedy sketch.
But what’s happened with the Palestinians is the same thing that’s happened with the blacks and BLM, the American Indians and the decolonization movement, gender dysphoria victims and the transgender movement, same-gender attracted peoples and the LGBTQ+ movement, and women generally and radical feminism. It all follows the same pattern. First, the radical left identifies a minority which they can pretend to champion as an “oppressed class.” Then, once they have established themselves as representing that particular group, they redifine that group’s cause to fit into their grand goal, which is to overthrow Western civilization and establish a Marxist utopia.
Let’s be honest. There are only two ways that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can end. The first is for every Israeli Jew to meet the same end as the victims of the October 7th massacre, or to be violently and permanently driven from their land. The second is for the vast majority of the Palestinians to be resettled somewhere other than the so-called Palestinian Territories, and for Israel to annex those lands. The October 7th massacre didn’t kill the two state solution, so much as it revealed that it was never a viable solution to begin with. How could it, when Hamas—and by extension, those who support Hamas—view the state of Israel itself as an “occupation” of their lands?
Of course, history never truly has an end, so the default is for the current state of affairs to continue in a metastable state until it is either displaced by an outside force, or ceases to be metastable. From 1973 to the present, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was metastable, which allowed the myth of the two state solution to take hold. The so-called “peace process” itself became an industry, and a lot of people built profitable careers by propagating this myth. At the same time, the ant-semitic forces that want to cleanse the Holy Land (and ultimately the world itself) of all Jewish blood also propagated this myth, because so long as the Palestinian people remained in refugee camps instead of being resettled elsewhere, the conflict could continue.
But now, the situation has changed. We are living through the midst of a fourth turning, where conflicts such as this one are no longer metastable, and the old order itself comes crashing down. According to Strauss and Howe, who developed the theory of generational turnings and secular cycles, fourth turnings always start with a lot of chaos and confusion, but somewhere in the middle an event or development happens that brings moral clarity to the conflict, which in turn brings everything into focus.
In the Civil War cycle, this event was the Emancipation Declaration. Slavery was always a major underlying issue to the conflict, but until Abraham Lincoln clearly and unambiguously identified it as the war’s main cause, the war spiraled from a gentleman’s contest on the shores of the Manassas to a bloody chaotic conflageration engulfing the whole nation, and the Union lost almost every battle. After the Emancipation Declaration, the Union won almost every battle until the South was firmly defeated and the 13th amendment made every state a free state.
In the last fourth turning, this event was the holocaust. World War II started as a series of border disputes between the expansionist Axis powers and their neighbors, but after the conflict when global and it became clear that the Nazis wanted nothing less than the extermination of the Jews (and Roma and Slavs and…), moral clarity was achieved. That’s why the Great Power cycle ended with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the past two weeks, and now I firmly believe that the October 7th massacre was the event that brought moral clarification to our own fourth turning. Therefore, the moral conflict of our times comes down to this: should the Jews (and by extension all “oppressor” classes, including straight white males) be liquidated in the name of “justice,” “equity,” and “decolonization,” or should we reject the Marxist utopia, return to God, and preserve God’s ancient covenant people—the Jews?
The third world war has probably already begun. This is the defining moral conflict of our times. There will be no return to the status quo ante: the Israeli-Hamas war will continue to expand until there is a decisive victory on the one hand or the other. We are still in the early stages where this particular armed conflict can be contained, but make no mistake: the forces arrayed against Israel, both foreign and domestic, are also arrayed against the West. I hope that the Israel-Hamas war ends before it spirals into a global conflageration, but even if this particular conflict isn’t the volcano, it lies on the same moral fault line.
What should that mean for us, who aren’t directly involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Should we send over billions of dollars in military aid to Israel, and ultimately put boots on the ground in that conflict? I don’t know about that, but I do know that we need to repent and return to God, both as individuals and as a nation, and that we need to call out evil for what it is, especially what we saw on the October 7th massacre. But we shouldn’t stop there. We should call out the evil behind every element of the anti-semitic Leftist agenda, and not just those parts that have to do with the Jews. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the castration and mutilation of gender-confused children, the ongoing slaughter of the unborn, the naked racism of the so-called “anti-racists,” the LGBTQ+ grooming happening in our schools—basically, every social justice cause that has ever been championed by the people now championing the cause of Palestine and Hamas.
This is our moment of moral clarity. Will we stand against evil, or will we fail to call it out for what it is? The October 7th massacre of Israeli Jews by Hamas terrorists was evil—arguably, more evil than the holocaust itself. Whatever else you believe, if you can’t come out and say that, you are, indeed, one of the baddies.
Back from Coeur d’Alene
It occurs to me that most of my posts in the past month have either been extremely doom-and-gloom, or they’ve been excerpts from some of my most recent work. This probably gives the impression that I’m huddled in a corner somewhere, black-pilled and traumatized, and seeking some sort of an escape through my writing, when really, that is not the case.
In fact, the main reason I haven’t posted more is because I’ve been so busy with life and family. It’s been a really great year for us, with a new baby and a bunch of cross-country road trips that have been a lot of fun. I’ve also been testing out a lot of AI writing techniques, and while that has really invigorated my creativity in a major way, it’s also taken me away from things like this blog, which is why you haven’t heard as much from me.
If I were still on social media, I have no doubt that I would be doom-spiraling right now, what with everything that’s happening in the world. Even without social media, I’ve been glued to the news sites I follow, checking for hourly updates on the war with Israel (which I really do believe is the opening stages of World War III). But that’s actually not very new for me: back in high school, I was the same way, following the news every day from the public computers at my school library. The 9/11 attacks happened on the first day of school for me, but in the last couple of months of the previous school year, I remember being frustrated that no one seemed to be taking this Osama Bin Laden guy more seriously, especially after the USS Cole and Kenya embassy bombings. Then the summer came, and I mostly goofed off, but as soon as school got started I was back to following the news on a daily/hourly basis.
So I’ve got a lot of experience with taking scary news in stride and not letting it totally consume my life. In fact, that’s the main reason I follow things like this so closely: so that when the unthinkable happens, I can face it without getting shocked or overwhelmed. And recent posts to the contrary, I’m not black-pilled at all. In fact, I tend to believe that I was put on the Earth at this specific period of time for a reason, and not just one that was imposed on me: that at some point, before I was born, I was given a choice between this and some other era, and I specifically chose this time to be born. Maybe I’m just imagining it, but it would not at all surprise me if that turned out to be the case.
In any case, we just got back from our last family road trip of the year, this time up to Coeur d’Alene to spend some time with Piper’s brother and his family, as well as my in-laws, who joined us on the trip. We had a really good time! Our daughter had a blast playing with all her cousins, especially the ones about her age right now. We also got to see her cousin’s baptism, so that was really good. Provo to Couer d’Alene is about an 11 hour drive, which is not quite far enough to justify getting a hotel, but for a 7 month-old and a 3 year-old, it was pretty hard. We’re all glad to be home now.
My wife is super busy working on her PhD. Specifically, she’s getting a paper ready for a major conference she hopes to attend with the rest of her lab. Her paper is on using AI to generate useful cross references across a body of work (eg Shakespeare, Jane Austen, The Bible, etc), and she’s developed a method that cuts down the cost of creating a cross reference set by upwards of 50%. But for the next couple of days, she’s going to be really busy with all of that.
Meanwhile, I’ve been taking care of the kids while the grandparents are on another road trip out to Omaha. It hasn’t been that bad, but I’ve also been pretty swamped with work, which one of the reasons I’ve been neglecting this blog. I have a bunch of ideas for posts I’d like to share, but no time to get to them, though hopefully that will change soon. Here are some of the posts I’d like to write:
- A part 4 to my Navigating Woke-SF series. I recently had some experiences with the woke SF publishing world that have made me rethink things in a way that y’all would probably find very interesting.
- An update to my generational cycles of grimdark and noblebright theory. This is one of the things I’ve been thinking about, and I’m starting to think that some of my basic premises in that post were wrong, or at least not entirely accurate, requiring an overhaul.
- A lot of thoughts on AI and writing. This has been my main focus for the past couple of months, and I have thoughts. Many, many thoughts.
- More thoughts on geopolitics and current events, especially on the trajectory of the unfolding global conflict and what it all means on a moral and spiritual level. But I think I should hold off on posting too much about that, since I’ve already spent so much time on it already.
Which of those things would you like to see next? I can’t promise anything, but I do want to spend more time on the stuff that followers of this blog actually want to read. In the meantime, I’ll try to intersperse a few quick update posts like this one, and get back into the habit of regular blogging.
How the Israeli-Hamas war will likely turn into WWIII before Christmas
The purpose of this post is not to pick any particular side or advocate for any particular action, but to give a back-of-the-napkin analysis of the current situation on the ground in the Middle East and project where it will likely go in the coming days and weeks. My goal is to approach the geopolitics of this conflict from a realist perspective and not let my own biases led to “wishcasting” or “doomcasting,” but these are just my own opinions, and I don’t have any special knowledge of the situation: just what I’ve been following from open source newscasts and political pundits.
What authority do I have to speak on this subject, besides just being a guy on the internet? In 2010, I double-majored in Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science from BYU, but please don’t hold that against me: I’ve since come to realize that most of what I learned in university is a lie, either of commission through the Islamic principle of taqiyya which states that it is morally virtuous for a muslim to lie to a kafir in the service of Islam (and guess where we kafirs have learned everything we think to know about Islam), or a lie of ommission, perpetuated by things like the history of anti-semitism that the American academic establishment studiously chooses to ignore. I also speak and read Arabic, spent a summer living, traveling, and hitchhiking in the Middle East, had two Palestinian roommates in college, and briefly interned as a research assistant in a major K-street foreign policy think tank, though I was fired early for having moral principles.
I’m going to assume that the reader is familiar with the basic history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as the events of the past week. The situation on the ground is changing quickly, and the fog of war is certainly beginning to thicken, but my understanding of it is as follows:
Israel is mobilizing an army of several hundred thousand soldiers for a ground invasion of Gaza, while the Israeli air force is striking suspected Hamas targets throughout the Gaza strip. Meanwhile, Hamas continues to launch several hundred missiles per day at Israeli targets, though it appears to be rationing munitions as it prepares for a protracted conflict.
With that said, Hamas is clearly targeting civilians while using their own people as human shields, whereas Israel is targeting Hamas while evacuating civilians from staging areas such as Sderot. That’s an important distinction, not only for moral clarity, but for the war for global public opinion, which is currently the most important aspect of this conflict.
Israel’s five war goals, as stated by PM Netenyaho, are: 1) defeat any terrorists remaining in Israel, 2) launch a massive offensive operation, 3) contain the conflict to Gaza, 4) expand support in the international community, and 5) solidify national unity.
Goal 1 has mostly been achieved, though there are still sporadic reports of gunfights with isloated Hamas terrorists still on Israeli soil. However, the border fence has been secured, and so far as I can tell, no new terrorists are crossing over.
Goal 2 is currently pending. The airstrikes are brutal and ongoing, but the real offensive is going to begin with the ground offensive, which is clearly with days or even hours of beginning. In fact, it may have already begun.
Goal 3 is much more tricky. Hezbollah in the north is reported to have 150,000 rockets aimed at Israel, and has issued statements of solidarity with Hamas. Some skirmishes and artillery exchanges on the northern border have already occured. In addition, Israeli forces have exchanged fire with Syrian forces across the Golan Heights, and just this morning, Israel struck the Damascus airport, preventing a shipment of Iranian arms from entering the conflict zone.
So it seems very unlikely that Israel will achieve goal 3, especially since Hamas’s primary objective right now is likely to draw in other elements from the Arab world. They’re already calling for a general jihad, so it would not surprise me if we see a major escalation across Israel’s other borders. It’s not a question of if, but when.
As for goals 4 and 5, Israel currently appears to be experiencing a level of success that I have not seen since I started studying this conflict. The sheer savagery with which Hamas has raped and murdered women and children has, I believe, strongly shifted sympathies in the West toward Israel. Also, unity among Israelis has also never been higher, by all appearances exceeding the unity I saw here in the US in the days after the 9/11 attacks. However, the situation is very dynamic, and changing by the hour. As the shock and horror of Hamas’s atrocities passes out of the news cycle, I expect that most people in the West will either revert to their prior opinions, or put the conflict out of mind.
In the Arab world, however, I suspect that it’s just the opposite. What Hamas lost in terms of public relations with the west, they have probably gained with most Arabs. Anti-semitism runs deep throughout the entire Arab world, and the proportion of Arabs who view Jews as non-people is probably as high or higher than the proportion of Germans who did so in the years leading up to WWII. But the blow to Israel’s reputation for invincibility has now been shattered by Hamas, which now makes this conflict an existential one for both parties. If Hamas survives the conflict with any capability to prosecute terrorist attacks, that reputation will be permanently shattered, inspiring thousands of other Arabs to take up arms until Israel dies by a thousand cuts. Therefore, Israel must eradicate Hamas completely before the war expands to other fronts, and the tide of global opinion turns against Israel as images of dead and wounded Palestinians drowns out the images we’ve already seen of raped and murdered Israelis.
I suspect that Hezbollah is waiting until Israel commits itself to a ground offensive in Gaza before they open a second front in the north. That will be the time when Israel is weakest, especially if they’ve already spent most of their munitions on Gaza. That’s probably why Israel hasn’t launched the ground offensive already. Will Israel launch a pre-emptive strike against southern Lebanon, the way they did against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the ’67 war? The biggest risks with that are 1) a failure or partial success that commits too many forces to the north, before Hamas has been sufficiently defeated, and 2) losing the public relations battle, which is already guaranteed to happen eventually, given the steps they must take with the ground invasion of Gaza.
When—not if, but when—the northern front to this war opens up, Syria and Lebanon will almost certainly be drawn into the conflict. Jordan and Egypt will likely try to stay out of it for as long as they can, since among the Arab states, they are more closely aligned with the West than they are with Iran. Until this summer, Saudi Arabia was also aligned against Iran, but that began to shift when both countries joined the BRICS alliance. Saudi Arabia has also been making overtures with China, who appears to be siding tacitly with the Palestinians against NATO and the West.
Will Iran be drawn into this conflict? If it becomes protracted, almost certainly yes. I suspect they will enter it by launching a surprise attack on a US aircraft carrier, either with a drone, or with a Russian hypersonic missile. If they can sink a US aircraft carrier, that would be a major blow to our own military reputation, which would represent a tremendous victory in itself. Based on what we’ve seen in Ukraine about the effectiveness of drones in modern warfare, our Cold War-era aircraft carriers could prove to be as big of a liability as the Maginot Line, when the history of WWIII is written. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The way to prevent Iran from being drawn into this conflict is to eradicate Hamas swiftly and completely, bringing the war to a decisive close before the Iranians have fully mobilized. But Hamas is deeply entrenched, having used the billions of dollars of foreign aid they’ve received over the years to prepare for exactly this eventuality. So the Gaza offensive is like to strike fast and hard, without much regard for civilians such as we’ve seen from Israel in the past. Because of how this will shock global opinion, Israel has only a narrow window in which to carry it out.
In other words, this Hamas-Israel war is not likely to turn into a long, drawn out war of attrition, such as we’ve seen the Russo-Ukrainian war become. It’s also not likely to become a frozen conflict anytime soon. As for a ceasefire, that’s just not in the cards; the stakes for both sides are too existential, and the window in which Israel has to act is just too narrow. It’s going to be brutal.
But here’s the problem from the American perspective: our economy is so strained, and our fuel and weapons stockpiles are already so depleted that if we send too much military aid to Israel, we risk giving China an opening to attempt an invasion of Taiwan. If we don’t aid Israel, however, and that northern front opens up before Israel has eliminated Hamas, then the odds of this spiraling into a regional war begin to approach 100%. We can try to deter Iran by sending in more aircraft carriers, but to what degree have those military platforms become liabilities instead of assets, given how technology has changed the nature of war? It only took about a dozen well-placed bombs to sink four of Japan’s aircraft carriers in the Battle of Midway. How many cheap Iranian drones will it take to sink one of ours? But if we take the neocon path, that opens up China to take Taiwan, or Russia to bleed us out in Ukraine and precipitate the collapse of NATO, which appears to be their ultimate goal.
And then there’s the situation on our southern border, which has been completely overrun. How many terrorist cells have already come over, and become embedded in our territory? How many of them will be activated if the Israeli-Hamas war expands, as it almost certainly will? Will a Hamas-style terrorist attack on American soil strengthen our resolve, or shatter it?
Given these realities, I’m having a hard time seeing how we avoid WWIII—if indeed, it hasn’t broken out already. The battle lines will probably be drawn between US/NATO and the BRICS alliance, since the financial/economic divisions appear to be aligned with the geopolitical ones. And with all the financial and geopolitical blunders we’ve made since the pandemic, it appears that we’ve set ourselves up for exactly this scenario. Seriously—if I’d written all this as a novel, with our southern border overrun, our strategic petroleum reserves depleted, our shamefully disastrous pullout from Afghanistan, a hot proxy war with Russia depleting our military reserves, and the botched pandemic response and lockdowns driving massive inflation and a supply chain collapse, it would have rightfully been panned as a trash. And yet, this is the clown world we currently find ourselves in.
Before WWIII goes nuclear, I expect it will go cyber. I have no idea what that will look like, but it’s probably best to prepare for extended power blackouts and loss of basic infrastructure. Also, if I were China or Russia, when this conflict does go nuclear I would strike the US with a barrage of high altitude EMPs and watch the Americans eat each other. That would certainly force the troops to go home.
How do we prevent any of these scenarios from unfolding? The only way that I can see is for Israel to destroy Hamas before Christmas—but even that isn’t a guarantee, if we become so overextended that China decides to take Taiwan as a result. So if WWIII hasn’t indeed already started, I think we will almost certainly be in WWIII before Christmas.
If you’re smarter than me, please tell me how I’m wrong.
Thoughts on the recent escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
For the last couple of days, I’ve been going back and forth on whether to write this post. It’s not something that’s directly in my wheelhouse, and few things turn me off to other writers and artists more than when they feel a need to publicly post their every knee-jerk reaction to the political issues of the day.
But there are a few reasons why I think it would be a mistake not to post my thoughts about the recent Hamas attacks on Israel, and the new war that has broken out in the region. First, it’s a major watershed event, certainly for Israel, and probably for the rest of the world as well, especially if it spirals into a regional and ultimately a global war (which seems increasingly likely).
Second, I’ve actually had a lot of personal experience in the region, having traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories, studied in Jordan, learned Arabic, and majored in Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic from BYU in 2010. Longtime readers will recognize the influence of all of these studies and travels on my work, especially on my earlier novels such as Desert Stars and Bringing Stella Home.
What the Hamas attacks have confirmed to me is that everything I learned in university about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a lie, sometimes of commission, but mostly of ommission. Compared to most schools, Brigham Young University’s MESA program is actually very ideologically balanced. But it wasn’t until after I graduated that I learned about things like taqiyya, which is a principal of the Islamic religion that it is virtuous to lie to the unbeliever in the service of Islam (and guess where all of us Kafirs get our information about Islam). Also, we never delved very deeply into the history and development of anti-semitism. As a result, when I traveled to the Middle East, I was shocked to discover that Mein Kampf is still one of the bestselling books in the Arab world. At the time, I thought it was kind of funny, but not anymore.
So the heinous attacks by Hamas on the music festival and the various towns kibbutzim in southern Israel haven’t shattered my illusions, so much as they have given me a great deal of moral clarity. And I have to say that after seeing what the Palestinians have done to these women and children, targeting, raping, slaughtering, and decapitating them, I cannot help but feel that Israel is justified in making sure that something like this can never happen again—even if it means violently displacing millions of Palestinians to bring this generations-long conflict to an end.
The two-state solution is dead. Land for peace is dead. So is any solution that would involve integrating these pre-civilizational savages into Israeli society. My younger, more naive self would argue “yes, but Hamas doesn’t represent all the Palestinians! In fact, Hamas is an authoritarian regime!” But my older, wiser self who lived through the pandemic knows that authoritarian regimes can only exist because the people living under them comply with their rule. The reason Hamas is has been in power in Gaza for more than a decade is because this wanton slaughter of Israelis is what most of the Palestinians want. Because of that, I don’t see how any lasting peace can be made, unless either Israel or Palestine is destroyed as a nation.
This is a huge shift in my own personal thinking on the conflict, because as recently as ten years ago, my sympathies lay mostly with the Palestinians. But the actions of Hamas and the Palestinian people this last weekend have forever shattered those sympathies, and none of the footage of the bombings in Gaza is going to win my sympathy back. Not after what Hamas did to those Israeli women and children.
And when I see the activists and protesters here in the US flying Palestinian flags and protesting “in solidarity” against the “occupation,” I cannot help but wonder: is this what they want for me and my family? Do the people who consider themselves part of the self-described “resistance” against capitalism, colonialism, and “whiteness” secretly want to force me to watch while they decapitate my children, rape and murder my wife, and finally murder me? Or perhaps it’s not so secret anymore, since these people are putting pictures of paragliders in their event fliers.
If you “stand with Palestine” after the events of this past weekend, I have to assume that you are either willfully ignorant, or a pre-civilizational savage who answers only to force. Perhaps both. Either way, I will never stand with Palestine again.