September 19, 2024 : Issue #76
WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse
WELCOME
The only vote that may matter in the coming election: further thoughts on Israel/Palestine; W.H. Auden and Errol Morris on History; and the launch of a new series surveying Errol’s ads.
* * *
The Main Event
CURRENT AFFAIRS
The Thing that Has Me Worried
(The Only Vote that May Matter in the Coming Election)
Much has been being made (with entirely justifiable exasperation on the part of everybody else) of the way that the only votes that are actually going to matter in the upcoming presidential election will be those from six or seven swing states (or “PaWiNevMiAzGaNc” as Jon Stewart has taken to calling their conglomeration),
and for that matter in that regard those of the few tens of thousands of so-called undecided voters in those states.
Alas, though, things are even worse than that, because if truth be told, there is really only one vote that is going to matter—or, okay, let’s say three votes—those of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the two neo-fascist pillars of his cabinet and continuing rule, National Security minister (and West Bank czar) Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich.
It’s not just that the three of them are going to continue to block progress towards any sort of cease fire agreement in Gaza, President Biden and candidate Harris’s increasingly Zenovian and Groundhog Dayish bleated assurances that we are getting ever closer to such an agreement notwithstanding, a state of affairs that by itself stands to undermine Harris’s support among crucial segments of her coalition.
Rather, it’s that as the actual November election nears, Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, and Smotrich (all of whom would much rather see a Trump victory) will have every incentive to engineer some sort of October surprise of their own. Say, by unilaterally annexing the West Bank, or heedlessly marching into the Al Aqsa mosque atop Jerusalem’s Temple Mount (third holiest site in the entire Islamic world), flanked by armed militias and IDF forces, so as to summarily evict all the Muslim pilgrims, or some such similar provocation. (Or maybe, given the last few days’s provocations in Southern Lebanon, we will be seeing a full-scale invasion there.) All of it at any rate precisely designed to incite a Third Intifada uprising on the part of the Palestinians, a descent into wild mayhem that itself could and would be used as pretext for further escalations. And all of which would in turn inevitably (and intentionally) lead to widescale disruptions on American campuses, designed to split the Harris vote and buttress Trump’s law and order appeal at the very last minute before the November vote.
The possibility of such a dire scenario playing out seems to me increasingly likely, but only because Biden, and barring Biden (who truly does seem congenitally paralyzed in this regard), Harris, have been unwilling to forcefully inoculate themselves against the prospect by doing what they should have been doing all along (and not just for reasons of realpolitik—because it has long been the right and moral thing to do, the thing that majorities of Americans and even an apparent majority of Israelis have been calling on them to do): to demand an immediate end to the Gaza War (including a mutual release of the hostages on both sides) OR ELSE.
It seems to me that we are fast coming on Kamala Harris’s Reverend Wright moment, one where she needs to make a speech, perhaps before a synagogue congregation (or at very least give an interview, perhaps to some Jewish journal) in which she explains that America’s knee-jerk ironclad support for the most neo-fascist elements in contemporary Israel’s ever-rightward drift toward an apartheid system, stretching “from the river to the sea,” can no longer be taken for granted. She needs to explain how she thinks we got to the currently ever more desperate pass (how until a year ago, Netanyahu was Hamas’s dearest ally, cynically seeing to the funneling of millions of dollars to their Gaza regime precisely as a way of upending any wider Palestinian entity capable of negotiating for peace), and what needs to happen next. She needs to insist, both to Israelis and to her own Jewish-Zionist supporters (who incidentally may no longer even constitute a majority of American Jews, certainly not of younger American Jews), that what she is saying has everything to do with the continuing survival of any sort of Jewish state in the Middle East, something she fervently supports, but a future that is being relentlessly undermined by the current Israeli regime which seems intent on devolving the country into some sort of Masada-pariah endgame. And that for that reason, again precisely as a means of securing the continued longterm existence of a secure Jewish presence in the Middle East, the US may eventually need to consider imposing an arms embargo and suspending the American policy of automatically veto-shielding the current Netanyahu/Ben Gvir/Smotrich regime from UN Security Council oversight, pending the immediate end of the current Gaza War (with its manifestly horrendous and indefensible toll on the local population) and the ongoing upsurge in West Bank depredations.
We are not demanding regime change in Jerusalem. The Israelis can do whatever they want. But so can we.
After which, the calculus behind a Netanyahu/Ben Gvir/Smotrich October Surprise will itself have been entirely upended. They can do what they will, but they will have been put on notice in advance, and the Harris-Walz campaign (and the world at large) would enter any ensuing crisis on a much more stable footing.
*
Further Reading
Or, for starters, further viewing and listening: this extraordinarily frank public scolding of the German foreign minister (Germany’s failures to confront the Netanyahu regime being if anything even worse than our own) by Jordan’s foreign minister Ayman Safadi:
Link here.
Kind of amazing that that did not get more play in the US, given how pertinent the comments could likewise be seen to be to the Biden/Harris regime’s current impasse. For more on the cascading damage the ongoing US/Israeli “bear hug” is doing to our other Middle Eastern allies across the board, and how they in turn are responding, see the University of Michigan’s Juan Cole’s recent dissection of those developments in the most recent Tom Dispatch, which culminates:
To sum up, the ligaments of American influence in the Middle East are now dissolving before our very eyes. Washington’s closest allies, like the Jordanian and Saudi royal families, are terrified that Biden’s bear hug of Netanyahu’s war crimes and the fury of their own people could, in the end, destabilize their rule. Countries that, not so long ago, had correct, if not warm, relations with Israel like Egypt and Turkey are increasingly denouncing that country and its policies. And the alliance of U.S. partners in the region with Israel against Iran that Washington has long worked for seems to be coming apart at the seams. Countries like Egypt and Turkey are instead exploring the possibility of forming a regional Sunni Muslim alliance against Netanyahu’s geopolitics of Jewish power that might, in the end, actually reduce tensions with Tehran.
That things have come to such a pass in the Middle East is distinctly the fault of the Biden administration and its position — or lack of one — on Israel’s nightmare in Gaza (and now the West Bank, too). Today, all too sadly, that administration is wearing the same kind of blinkers regarding the war in Gaza that President Lyndon B. Johnson and his top officials once sported when it came to the Vietnam War.
Now, I am not oblivious to the complexity of the political considerations undergirding Kamala Harris’s hesitancies in confronting all of this even if she wanted to (the fear that she might lose more Jewish votes generally overall than gain crucial votes among Arab-Americans, say, in Michigan, and for that matter younger voters generally). In the best of all possible worlds, maybe she could continue to forestall any recalibration till after she wins the election. My point is in part that the choice may not be hers, and that furthermore, it is precisely the job of a would-be leader to lead and not simply to cower.
Having said that, just the other day I was reading a new column by Brandeis professor Robert Kuttner over at The American Prospect (which he co-founded and co-edits, a commentator whom I have long respected and whose sympathies have generally tended to align with my own) to the effect that the complications facing Harris in the current tangle are not just domestic-political but also reflect a precipitous recent narrowing of room to maneuver in Israel/Palestine itself, as of course has been both Netanyahu and Hamas’s intent all along. (In this regard, I am reminded of Lech Walesa’s frequent observation that it is an awful lot easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup than the other way around.) “What Might a President Harris Do On Israel?” Kuttner asks in his piece‘s headline. “A different course on the Middle East is urgently needed,” he answers in the piece’s subhead, “and harder than you might think.” Whereupon he launches into a sobering tour d’horizon of the current Landscape in the Midst of Battle (well worth reading in its entirety), before concluding,
So even if Harris’s goals on Israel-Palestine are preferable to Biden’s, there is only so much that she can do. It will take a biblical miracle for the current mess to morph into a regional settlement with the long-sought two-state solution.
Though he then still goes on to acknowledge how “The beginning of that miracle has to be the exit of Netanyahu.”
*
Speaking of thinking harder about things that are harder than you might think, I was also struck the other day by a long piece that appeared in The Guardian. Many of you will have heard of or watched the ongoing Showtime Couples Therapy series in which an exceptionally calm, engaged and empathic real-life therapist takes on a succession of real-life couples evincing and grappling with their various actual knotted impasses (a truly odd ritual, when you think about it, but also somehow truly affecting). Anyway, it turns out that the therapist in question, Dr. Orna Guralnik, is an expatriate Israeli, and that in at least one instance, in 2022, one of the couples she was dealing with included a Palestinian woman named Christine.
They kept in touch after the show ended, and since 7 October, they have spent more than 30 hours, on video calls and in person, discussing their views and applying some of the frameworks of couples therapy to engage with difficult subjects without the conversation breaking down. In the process, they have also developed a friendship.
That from the introduction to a series of extended excerpts from transcripts of that process which made up a thoroughly engrossing albeit at times utterly exasperating long feature in The Guardian the other day. Oy and aye: what a mess—the history, the history, all that god-damned history—and yet, still, maybe….
Do give it a look.
* * *
Speaking of Which
W.H. AUDEN & ERROL MORRIS ON HISTORY
Veterans of this Cabinet may remember my own very first response to the events of October 7 last year and how I ended up quoting one of the initial stanzas from W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” to wit:
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
That last quatrain in particular has continued to thrum through my mind across the entirety of the almost full year since as one of the most telling diagnostic utterances on the ongoing disaster (recall that Auden’s father was a doctor)—but even when I first cited it, an undertow thrum had also been tolling away inside me.
And here I have to change registers and note how one of the privileges of my life has been my ongoing friendship with the deliciously heterodox documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. (Long story, another time.) But oy, what a kvetch. Whenever I get back in touch with him following any sort of extended abeyance, asking for starters how things have been going, he declares, “Oh, can complain,” and proceeds to do so, operatically, and at length, regarding matters sometimes personal, sometimes professional, sometimes historical, sometimes downright cosmological—though never less than volubly entertaining, up to a point.
So much so (I feel sorry for God, in anticipation) that over twenty years ago, when I was attempting to launch a sumptuous twice-annual print journal of my own, to be entitled Omnivore, I invited Errol to contribute a regular aphoristic column, under the rubric of “The Grump.” He’d never before ventured any professional writing, but he was game, and he submitted a first effort, entirely in character, for the first (and eventually only) issue of the journal (which never quite made it out of the prototype stage, though issues of that prototype can still be purchased at one place and one place only, which is here). Errol alternatively credits and blames me for having launched him on what would become a substantial book-writing side-career (Believing is Seeing; Wilderness of Error; The Ashtray; etc.)—as may you as well. But anyway, here was that first effort of his, circa 2002:
All of which, alas, is likewise pertinent to the current moment.
Not that Errol is any sort of postmodern relativist imp, splashing about in the impossibility of any sort of achievable truth. On the contrary, he insists on the latter, while recognizing how vexingly difficult its pursuit may be. That conviction—the urgency of circumventing denial and establishing the true name for things—has been a central passion behind many of his best films (for example on Robert McNamara, Donald Rumsfeld, Stephen Bannon, or before that, Abu Ghraib, and for that matter ever since his first procedural, The Thin Blue Line) and here it comes bubbling forth once again in his latest (just premiered at the Venice Film Festival and subsequently at Telluride), Separated, a scathingly probing dissection of the bureaucratic chains of responsibility (and obfuscation) behind the early Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents, a cynical tactic that resulted in close to 5,000 state-sponsored kidnappings in just a few short months, with devastating results lingering to this day. See a passage here and join me in urging the powers that be over at MSNBC to hurry up and get the thing out in front of the wider public that so urgently needs to see it, before the coming election!
* * *
Speaking further of which (in yet a further change of register)
The Launch of another new occasional series
ERROL’S AERIE
Some (perhaps more) of you will remember how last week we launched what will be becoming an occasional retrospective of Robert Krulwich’s recent collaborations with various animators, of which many more anon.
Today, in counterpoint, in the spirit, I suppose, of (now) three old alte kakers reminiscing, we launch a countervailing retrospective of Errol Morris’s commercial work. As some of you may already know and the rest of you are about to find out, for decades now Morris has been financing the ongoing existence of his Fourth Floor documentary production company by helming a prodigious variety of often quite riotous (and sometimes just plain gorgeous) conventional corporate commercial campaigns. Every few weeks, with the maestro’s permission, we’ll take another gander, starting with the representative smattering below:
“The Mosquito”
“Young at Heart”
”Friends”
”Kites”
As we say, more anon.
* * *
ANIMAL MITCHELL
Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive
animalmitchellpublications@gmail.com
* * *
*
Thank you for giving Wondercabinet some of your reading time! We welcome not only your public comments (button above), but also any feedback you may care to send us directly: weschlerswondercabinet@gmail.com.
Here’s a shortcut to the COMPLETE WONDERCABINET ARCHIVE.