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Since I sort of semi promised a post about the previous war and then didn't really follow up on it I had hoped to at least provide one for the inevitable next one, but since Trump likes wars on weekends because of the stock markets and I do not use my phone/computer on Saturday you don't get anything too live, sorry. And frankly might know more than me since I'm only now catching up on the news.
The first war was a pretty big shock, we were woken up by an earthquake siren (Israel has been overdue a major earthquake for a few centuries now) which was followed by a text message clarifying that there was no earthquake, but we had attacked Iran.
This time around was, uh, well they evacuated the embassy Friday so it wasn't really a big surprise. On the other hand it's already been a month of will they won't they. We had a siren early morning, went down to the bomb shelters, came back up, went back down, came back up, went back down, came back up. "Iran trying to raise our average life expectancy by forcing us to do some cardio" was the joke (perhaps funnier for the people not doing eight flights of stairs each time...). At some point in the afternoon the early warning systems came up (I don't know why they weren't initially up) so we were able to have advance warning that a siren might be coming shortly instead of having to run immediately each time.
One of the things I realized trying to write a post about the previous war and am running into again with this one is that aside from the personal angle there's not so much of interest I can share because we just don't know anything. Like this would be a more valuable post if I had interesting geopolitical takeaways rather than just "wow I don't know what's going to happen guess we'll find out haha".
I still remember the Iranian protests in 2009 and how they came to nothing, and the many many protests between then and now, so it would be pretty incredible if finally 16 years later something actually changed.
(The timing is, uh, interesting from a Jewish perspective since we're celebrating a prior defeat of a person from Persia who tried to wipe out the Jews this Tuesday/Wednesday. In the moment it does mean the celebrations planned for tomorrow in the schools are all cancelled since everything is closed)
I wondered why the attack happened on a Sabbath, but it being the week of Purim makes sense. Per Google:
Trump’s team is doing a Pascal’s Wager that it’s worth supporting Israel religiously, as well as politically. This will make the anti-Zionists and antisemites “big mad” as the kids say. I do wonder if this strike counts under the original Persian decree of Xerxes that the Jews be allowed to defend themselves; in the Book of Esther, a decree written in the king’s name and sealed with the royal signet ring cannot be revoked.
As for the direction of the Middle East and Levant going forward, I want to see Iranian blood money dry up and see the region incentivized to peace by the siren song of capitalism.
The people in the middle east are not going to like Israel more after another Israeli war of aggression. Meanwhile the rest of the world gets a continued reminder of what a warmongering and alien state Israel is. More Americans supported Palestine than israel in a poll for the first time in the US. That number is going to take a big jump.
Alien? You mean, alien as in unlike the famously peaceable USA and other countries well-known for spending their prime doing absolutely no wars of aggression?
It bears repeating that in no world is Israel ever going to be more alien to "the rest of the world" than the Muslim countries, save for perhaps other Muslim countries. The fargroup-outgroup distinction is in full force, and Israel is, as always, not the so-alien-they're-not-really-thought-about fargroup.
Having been to both (as a rootless piece of Euroslop who spent close to a decade in the US), I would say Turkey felt much less alien than Israel, and the latter's pervasive militarised Manifest Destiny frontier society vibes had everything to do with this.
My experience is exactly the opposite (though I'm an red-blooded American, so "militarized Manifest Destiny frontier society" was the name of my childhood daycare. If anything, this attitude is the thing I find most endearing about Israel--it's very American). Replace the Hebrew with Spanish, and Tel Aviv might as well be Miami. I was shocked at how normal the modern-development areas of Israel were (Jerusalem is a completely different beast, though still not that alien. It's like somebody air-dropped a million Brooklyn hipsters into an ancient middle eastern city).
And while I love Turkey, and think Istanbul is one of the greatest cities in the world, it feels decidedly less familiar to me as a westerner. The ubiquitous street animals, while charming, give a distinctively foreign/third world vibe. The cult of Attaturk is bizarre in an authoritarian way I'm very unused to. And as you get further into the countryside and the culture gets more conservative, fewer and fewer people drink and the women become ever more covered up and socially isolated, increasing the cultural distance. Israel's got its own share of alien ultraconservative religious zealots, but they're less visible/prominent in my memory. To top it all off, there's a certain afterimage of European imperialism to much of the urban environment in Turkey, similar to places like Egypt, Cuba, and much of Africa. Everywhere you look, you see beautiful old buildings constructed by the British or the French or the Germans in richer times, surrounded by cheap, local concrete boxes. That vibe of decay and living off the fumes of past glory and foreign investment is almost entirely absent from Israel.
I should say that in Israel I have only been to Jerusalem and the West Bank, so I can't comment on the reportedly more "normal" state of, say, Tel Aviv. What left impressions were patrols of machine gun toting conscript girls (admittedly good fanservice) on every corner, random coffeeshops with walls dedicated to pictures of patrons who are currently serving in the military (and steep discounts to soldiers), checkpoints, body scanners, locked-down city quarters and the "countryside" being a patchwork of creepy culty settlements and Arab villages enclosed in Berlin wall lookalike concrete slabs, among many others.
On the other hand, in Turkey... yeah, the Atatürk cultism was a bit out there, and I should say I haven't ventured far outside the European part (including however places like Edirne, not just Istanbul), but you can see the same sorts of stray cat populations all over Greece. The fancy buildings are mostly Ottoman, if sometimes imitating European imperial idiom. I don't think not drinking is more alien than Jewish dietary laws, and to my German-influenced eyes most of the US was plenty weird about alcohol (arguably more so than Istanbul, where I had several bottles of Efes with local tweens in a well-trafficked public square without a problem).
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