{"id":1068,"date":"2006-08-08T06:48:12","date_gmt":"2006-08-08T11:48:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/cest-levy\/"},"modified":"2006-08-08T06:48:12","modified_gmt":"2006-08-08T11:48:12","slug":"cest-levy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/cest-levy","title":{"rendered":"C’est Levy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bernhard-Henri Levy wrote an excellent essay from and about Israel<\/a> in the NYTimes last Sunday:<\/p>\n

Zivit Seri is a tiny woman, a mother, who speaks with clumsy, defenseless gestures as she guides me through the destroyed buildings of Bat Galim \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u20ac\u009d literally \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c5\u201cdaughter of the waves,\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c2\u009d the Haifa neighborhood that has suffered most from the shellings. The problem, she explains, is not just the people killed: Israel is used to that. It\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u201e\u00a2s not even the fact that here the enemy is aiming not at military objectives but deliberately at civilian targets \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u20ac\u009d that, too, is no surprise. No, the problem, the real one, is that these incoming rockets make us see what will happen on the day \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u20ac\u009d not necessarily far off \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u20ac\u009d when the rockets are ones with new capabilities: first, they will become more accurate and be able to threaten, for example, the petrochemical facilities you see there, on the harbor, down below; second, they may come equipped with chemical weapons that can create a desolation compared with which Chernobyl and Sept. 11 together will seem like a mild prelude. For that, in fact, is the situation. As seen from Haifa, this is what is at stake in the operation in southern Lebanon.<\/p>\n

Israel did not go to war because its borders had been violated. It did not send its planes over southern Lebanon for the pleasure of punishing a country that permitted Hezbollah to construct its state-within-a-state. It reacted with such vigor because the Iranian President Ahmadinejad\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u201e\u00a2s call for Israel to be wiped off the map and his drive for a nuclear weapon came simultaneously with the provocations of Hamas and Hezbollah. The conjunction, for the first time, of a clearly annihilating will with the weapons to go with it created a new situation. We should listen to the Israelis when they tell us they had no other choice anymore. We should listen to Zivit Seri tell us, in front of a crushed building whose concrete slabs are balancing on tips of twisted metal, that, for Israel, it was five minutes to midnight.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As a bonus, he also manages to bring kaballah and rocketry together (a little easier at that permeable border than Pynchon’s merkabah mysticism).<\/p>\n

There’s also a neat article by Barry Rubin in the current ish of Foreign Affairs about Israel’s security strategy<\/a> (reg. required), written before the kidnappings by Hamas and Hezbollah. While it doesn’t predict the very current events, it does help explain the political and military evolution of Israel’s strategy of withdrawing from southern Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bernhard-Henri Levy wrote an excellent essay from and about Israel in the NYTimes last Sunday: Zivit Seri is a tiny woman, a mother, who speaks with clumsy, defenseless gestures as she guides me through the destroyed buildings of Bat Galim \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u20ac\u009d literally \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c5\u201cdaughter of the waves,\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c2\u009d the Haifa neighborhood that has suffered most from the … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “C’est Levy”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[17,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics-explicit","category-religion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-he","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":992,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/gaza-into-the-eyeball","url_meta":{"origin":1068,"position":0},"title":"Gaza into the Abyss","author":"Gil","date":"June 17, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"In the Washington Post yesterday, Charles Krauthammer had a column on the poor Palestinian family that got blown up on a beach in Gaza. After explaining that the explosion could not have been due to an Israeli shell fired in response to nearby rocket launches into Israeli neighborhoods, he writes,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Politics (implicit)"","block_context":{"text":"Politics (implicit)","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/politics-implicit"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":17957,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-671-rachel-tzvia-back","url_meta":{"origin":1068,"position":1},"title":"Episode 671 – Rachel Tzvia Back","author":"Gil","date":"March 3, 2026","format":"audio","excerpt":"Virtual Memories Show 671: Rachel Tzvia Back \"Persephone lives in the land of the dead for half a year, every year. Emotionally, psychologically, how does a living girl end up in the land of the dead? And that's what depression feels like.\" With The Dark-Robed Mother: A Memoir (Wesleyan University\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Art"","block_context":{"text":"Art","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/art"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/rachelbackcomp.jpg?fit=1200%2C731&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/rachelbackcomp.jpg?fit=1200%2C731&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/rachelbackcomp.jpg?fit=1200%2C731&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/rachelbackcomp.jpg?fit=1200%2C731&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/rachelbackcomp.jpg?fit=1200%2C731&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":441,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/puts-my-nba-preview-in-a-new-light","url_meta":{"origin":1068,"position":2},"title":"Puts my NBA preview in a new light","author":"Gil","date":"January 27, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"The Sports Guy has a new mailbag column, and it includes a letter that made me laugh like a retard:Q: Not that there is anything wrong with this, but have you ever noticed that most NBA team names sound like gay bars? 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I didn't mean for it to be that way, but that's what I do: 'Remember when we were like that, well, we're not like that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Art"","block_context":{"text":"Art","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/art"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/IMG_9409-e1523919177401.jpg?fit=1200%2C1063&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/IMG_9409-e1523919177401.jpg?fit=1200%2C1063&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/IMG_9409-e1523919177401.jpg?fit=1200%2C1063&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/IMG_9409-e1523919177401.jpg?fit=1200%2C1063&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/IMG_9409-e1523919177401.jpg?fit=1200%2C1063&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1064,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/good-and-bad","url_meta":{"origin":1068,"position":4},"title":"Good and Bad","author":"Gil","date":"August 5, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"The good news: Official VM just-about-closest-friend-in-the-world Ian just got promoted to Chief Petty Officer. 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