Will Israel Attack Lebanon Next?

Plus, New York Times spins “robust” Democratic bench; three first ladies; Columbia; Harvard

Jill Biden’s Vogue interview is covered further down in today’s newsletter.

Will Israel attack Hezbollah in Lebanon next after defeating Hamas in Gaza?

It’s a question high on people’s minds at the moment. Here are three different views:

First, Elliott Abrams, a shrewd and experienced national security official who served in the Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump administrations and who visited Israel in June. He writes in a July 1 blog post for the Council on Foreign Relations: 

In a war, Israel would defeat Hezbollah. The degree of Iran’s own involvement is uncertain, especially if the United States plays a role in deterring Iran and if need be giving Israel strong support—from resupply to missile defense. But the costs to Israel of such a war even with very strong U.S. support would be immense. My own view is that there will not soon be such a war, because Iran built Hezbollah as a deterrent against an Israeli attack on its growing nuclear program and will not “waste” it for any other purpose (at least until it can field nuclear weapons).

Second, the current Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, in a July 1 appearance at the Brookings Institution:

One of our primary objectives from day one – since October – was to do everything we could to make sure that this conflict didn’t spread, didn’t escalate, including and notably to the north, to Lebanon, to Hizballah, and then maybe beyond.  And so this too is a place of intense focus.  And I think you have a paradox in this moment, which is that at least in our judgement none of the main actors actually want a war.  Israel doesn’t want a war, although they may well be prepared to engage in one if necessary from their perspective to protect their interests, but they don’t want one.  I don’t believe Hizballah actually wants a war.  Lebanon certainly doesn’t want a war because it would be the leading victim in such a war.  And I don’t believe that Iran wants a war, in part because it wants to make sure that Hizballah’s not destroyed and that it can hold onto Hizballah as a card if it needs it, if it ever gets into a direct conflict with Israel.  So on the one hand, no one actually wants a war. 

On the other hand, you have forces – momentum that may be leading in that direction and which we are determined to try to arrest.  You have as you said, Suzanne, 60,000 or so Israelis who have been forced from their homes in northern Israel.  Israel has effectively lost sovereignty in the northern quadrant of its country because people don’t feel safe to go to their homes.  You have many Lebanese in southern Lebanon who have also been chased from their homes.  And absent doing something about the insecurity, people won’t have the confidence to go back.  And that requires two things.  It requires first and foremost, of course, stopping the firing across the border that’s endangering people, but it also requires an agreement reached through diplomacy to try to deal with some of the elements that are causing this ongoing insecurity, including making sure that forces, for example, are pulled back so that they can’t endanger people every single day and that people have the confidence to proceed. 

Here, again, the United States has been deeply engaged in trying to advance this diplomacy, but it also underscores why a ceasefire in Gaza is so critical.  Hizballah, of course, has tied what it’s doing to the situation in Gaza and has said that if there’s a ceasefire in Gaza, it will stop firing into Israel.  Now, that’s – it shouldn’t be firing to begin with.  It’s wrong in and of itself.  But it’s also a reality.  So it only underscores why getting that ceasefire could also be critical to further enabling the diplomacy to try to create conditions in which the diplomacy can really resolve this problem, get people back to their homes in Israel, in southern Lebanon, and have something that’s more enduring in terms of keeping things calm. 

Third, the chairman of the Israel Defense and Security Forum, Brigadier General (reserve) Amir Avivi, who said in a July 1 briefing: “If they are looking to fight, the big danger is that they will attack first.”

With civilians already evacuated from the Israeli north, “Why wait?” Avivi asked. “We’re in a war, let’s finish this.”

“It always matters in a battlefield who has the initiative, and we need to make sure that we are really the ones controlling the initiative and timing,” Avivi said. 

“Now, there are people who say, you know, let’s wait, let’s try to organize, maybe let’s wait two years and have more munitions, maybe build the forces, but we have to understand that in two years, maybe we’ll have Iran nuclear. In two years, maybe we’ll find in Lebanon hundreds of thousands of militia from all over the Middle East that will move to Lebanon. We cannot really know what will happen in two years,” Avivi said. “And also, to me, it doesn’t make sense to say to the Israelis of the north, go back home, while Hezbollah is in full capability, rebuild your lives…and then in two years saying to them, okay, go back to the hotels and see their cities destroyed again.”

“Once you destroy the main proxies of Iran, the ability to deal with them afterwards is much bigger,” Avivi said. 

Avivi said that Hezbollah is part of a Lebanese state that has electricity plants, airports, seaports, “It needs to be very clear that if Hezbollah shoots centers in Israel or shoots, let’s say, electricity plants and so on, Israel will destroy all the infrastructure in Lebanon in a way that will take them back to the Stone Age.”

Avivi is not some fringe figure; he wrote a book that was a No. 1 national bestseller in Israel, and he meets regularly with top Israeli politicians including Prime Minister Netanyahu. He might sound unreasonable to American ears and even some Israeli ears given that Israel’s previous ventures into Lebanon didn’t exactly end well. But sending Israelis back to the North with Hezbollah still in place is an October 6 mentality. And Avivi’s point that Israel will be in a much better position to take on Iran after Hezbollah is defeated and dismantled, rather than left intact to menace Israel, makes some sense. 

I’m not advocating, I’m just reporting, and I have a lot of respect for Elliott Abrams,  but I think Americans underestimate the degree to which the Israeli discussion is about things like “do we invade Lebanon now or two years from now, and when we do, do we go all the way to Beirut or just to the Litani River,” rather than “ceasefire now” or not. The Israeli parliament is not a Cambridge, Massachusetts, City Council meeting.

Some of this may be determined by internal Israeli factors and some of it may be influenced by American policy, election timelines, and the speed of arms shipments. 

New York Times on the Democratic bench: A front-page news article in today’s New York Times reports: 

The situation is all the more striking because the Democratic Party, which has long positioned itself as a forward-looking party of the young, has what its operatives and activists view as the most robust class of next-generation leaders in a very long time.

Many are more seasoned than Mr. Clinton and Mr. Obama were when they won the White House: the governors Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Gavin Newsom of California, JB Pritzker of Illinois, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan; the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries of New York; the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, and Vice President Kamala Harris, who won praise with a staunch post-debate defense of Mr. Biden.

“The Democratic bench has never been more stacked at the local, state, federal levels,” said Lis Smith, a senior party strategist.

This is so wrong it’s funny. The New York Times, which only a few days ago was assuring us that any portrayal of Biden as doddering was the result of “manipulated”  “misleading videos,” now wants readers to believe that the Democrats have a strong bench?

Of the eight politicians the Times mentions, five of them—Beshear, Newsom, Pritzker, Shapiro, and Buttigieg—are white men. A substantial portion of the Democratic electorate thinks it’s about time for a not-white-man president, or at least has a hard time seeing the logic for leapfrogging a white man over the sitting vice president, Kamala Harris.

Of the eight, only two have run for president already, Buttigieg and Harris.

Buttigieg gets some diversity points for being openly gay, but his experience as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and as transportation secretary are not typical preparation for the presidency. 

Harris got little traction with voters in her own presidential bid, has burned through staff as vice president, and has failed at the job Biden gave her of stemming migration from Latin America. As a prosecutor in California, she earned a reputation as highly political. She has a habit of saying highfalutin things that, when you think about them, don’t make sense. 

The other six have no presidential campaign experience yet, and voters may not find them particularly likable, relatable, or impressive. 

Andy Beshear’s father, Steve Beshear, was also governor of Kentucky. Andy Beshear cut the state income tax from 5 percent to 4.5 percent but failed to meet the conditions to cut it down to 4 percent. Plenty of southern states have a zero percent income tax, so 4.5 percent, by comparison, is nice but not exactly heroic. He boasts of making Kentucky “the electric vehicle battery capital of the United States,” but plenty of Americans who aren’t Democratic donor types still aren’t sold on the electric vehicle transition.

Newsom has the baggage of California, which has lost people and businesses to lower-cost, lower-regulation alternatives such as Texas. When a lot of Americans think of California these days they picture shoplifting gangs and drug-abusing homeless people in San Francisco.

Pritzker, an overweight Jewish billionaire whose sister is senior fellow of a Harvard governing board, can look forward to being blamed for every violent crime that happened in Chicago during his governorship.

Shapiro, also Jewish, has demonstrated spinelessness in actually achieving more school choice in Pennsylvania, as Bill McGurn wrote this morning in the Wall Street Journal.  

Jeffries is black and from Brooklyn. He spoke well at the big pro-Israel rally in Washington in November 2023. I like him and think he has a bright future, but most of America has never even heard of him, he has no executive experience, and as a member of the House, he’s voted for just about every unpopular piece of inflationary Biden legislation.

Gretchen Whitmer has been a conventional tax-and-spend governor of Michigan, and while Detroit has recovered a bit of vitality, its vacant lots make San Francisco and Chicago look like great urban success stories. Like other high-tax, high-regulation, Democrat-led northern states, it’s losing jobs and people to other places. 

Anyway, the real power centers of the Democratic Party, the runners-up the past time around and the Senate leader, remain old people with limited national electoral appeal: Senate Majority Leader Schumer, 73; Senator Bernie Sanders, 82; Senator Elizabeth Warren, 75. Obama and the Clintons have name recognition and clout. If there were a battle-tested, widely respected, well-known non-Biden candidate fully charged and ready to go, he or she would be on the ticket already. 

I guess the point of the Times story is that if Biden had decided not to run again, there could have been a primary with all these people and some others, and debates, and they’d all have gained some experience and name recognition and the most capable one would have won. I guess that’s conceivable, but it’s also conceivable that they could have all spent a lot of money on negative ads tearing each other down, while the “progressives” united behind some fantasy candidate like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Or they all could have lurched left in efforts to win endorsements from Sanders and Warren, who still carry a lot of weight with Democratic primary voters. So “the i-dea,” as Joe Biden would say, that the Democrats would be in so much better shape if he’d have bowed out sooner seems as delusional as the notion that Biden’s decline is all just a bunch of manipulated or misleading video.

Columbia unbecoming: The House Committee on Education and the Workforce has released the full batch of text messages among senior Columbia College administrators, and they are ugly.

As the committee press release puts it: “Several exchanges engaged in antisemitic stereotypes regarding Jews and money. One message stated, ‘Amazing what can do’ as panelists referenced an October 2023 op-ed on antisemitism by a campus rabbi, Yonah Hain.”

“Jewish students deserve better than to have harassment and threats against them dismissed as ‘privilege,’ and Jewish faculty members deserve better than to be mocked by their colleagues,” said the chairwoman of the committee, Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina. “These text messages once again confirm the need for serious accountability across Columbia’s campus.”

One Jewish student leader at Columbia, Elisha “Lishi” Baker, posted on social media: “The evil of today’s antisemitism is that when we’re painted as spoiled/privileged, discrimination against us is denied. Apparently, we have no right to complain because… we successfully created a community center for ourselves….we might be alone but we are not going anywhere. We will not apologize for building our community, nor will we stop calling out discrimination against us.” 

Three first ladies: Jill Biden has a cover interview in Vogue: “We know what’s at stake. Joe is asking the American people to come together to draw a line in the sand against all this vitriol….this anger and animosity and divisiveness…it’s not who we are.”

The Vogue writer, Maya Singer, goes on, “And on the other side? Pick your poison. Christian nationalist, nativist, racist, misogynist, queerphobic, neofascist, techno-authoritarian—they boil down to the same idea, which is that some group or other ought to dominate everyone else.”

This is pretty funny: It’s Biden who’s against vitriol, animosity and divisiveness but the sympathetic profile writer manages to paint all the non-Biden voters as a bunch of neofascists? Maybe Singer wasn’t listening to the first lady carefully enough about the animosity and divisiveness? Or maybe she was listening a little too attentively, and credulously, when Jill Biden said, “our democracy is on the line in this election.” Denounce divisiveness all you want, when you say a vote for your political opponent is a vote against democracy, people might have difficulty following the logic, or at least wonder about the consistency.

The styling of Biden in white is reminiscent of the New York Times magazine cover from the 1993 Michael Kelly article on Hillary Clinton and the politics of virtue.

At least with Melania Trump and the “I really don’t care, do u?” jacket she wore to visit detained children in a Texas border town, there’s less sanctimony.

Harvard latest: From the Harvard Gazette, the university organ, comes a link to an article about a Harvard scholar, Chika Okafor: “Okafor’s doctoral project is expansive and ambitious, addressing several major social and economic problems, including economic inequality, rising incarceration rates, and, of course, climate change.” Of course!

Under the headline, “What If We’re Telling the Wrong Story About Climate Change,” the article quotes Okafor as saying, “What I’m trying to see in my research is if there is a different way of talking about climate change that could have a much greater impact on generating the amount of public support that is required to mitigate the worst effects.”

The article then goes on:

 In the context of news reporting, this might look like increasing the number of stories about how to reduce environmental degradation, cut greenhouse gas emissions, and mitigate the consequences of climate change, without reducing the level of coverage on climate disasters. Disaster stories are important insofar as they elicit an emotional response and underscore the importance of taking action. But they don’t tell us how to act, which can lead to a sense of helplessness.

We might also add sections with possible solutions to stories about climate-related issues. There are many approaches, but the key is to emphasize opportunities for progress, to avoid painting a picture of such doom that our audience simply gives up and tunes out.

That’s strange because “news reporting,” as traditionally understood, isn’t meant for “generating…public support” or “telling us how to act.” Those roles are more appropriate for politicians and activists. The danger is that when the reporters see their job as “generating…public support” or “telling us how to act,” they wind up being tempted to distort reality in a way that renders them less trustworthy. For example, if a political reporter sees his or her job as generating support for President Biden and telling people to vote for Biden, the reporter might wind up discounting evidence of Biden’s decline as “manipulated” or “misleading.” And sometimes “how to act” isn’t really clear; it involves tradeoffs and choices that need to be sorted through depending on values and compromise between people who are affected. The idea of news reporters arrogating those decisions to themselves is terrifying, because no one elected them, they tend to be more left wing and less humble than the general population, and they tend to have little training, knowledge, or experience in substantive matters, especially economics. 

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