6/27/2026

 Saturday, June 27, 2026

 1905 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was established at "The Continental Congress of the Working Class" in Chicago, Illinois;

1950 The US sent 35 military advisers to South Vietnam

1977 A 5-4 Supreme Court decision allowed lawyers to advertise

2018 Joseph Crowley was defeated in New York by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

2019 US Supreme Court ruled the Constitution doesn't prohibit partisan gerrymandering, allowing a ruling party to redraw electoral boundaries

2025  Donald Trump announced the suspension of the trade talks with Canada, also announcing new tariffs on goods crossing the Canada–United States border.

In bed at 9:15, up at 4:15; 0439 140/73/57 102 204.4, 0445 140/70/55; 58/70/55, sunny day ahead 

Morning meds at 6 a.m., and Eliquis at 7 a.m. and 6:15 p.m.

That strange man J. D. Vance made the news again by not only praising Richard Nixon for his "political genius," but also for pooh-poohing Watergate as only worthy of a 12 hour news cycle, and for this:

"It's not only that he got out of Vietnam, but he got out from a position of strength.   It's one thing to tuck tail and run; it's another thing to clearly define an objective, to accomplish that objective, and then to ensure that you don't allow "mission creep" to transform a victory into a defeat."

Vance must not have studied Vietnam War history at Ohio State or at Yale.  Is there anyone else anywhere who believes that the US pulled out of Vietnam "from a position of strength"?  Plus, Nixon had "a clearly defined objective" of winning the 1968 election when he used his partner-in-crime Henry Kissinger to get the South Vietnamese to withdraw from the Paris Peace Conference, thereby subotaging LBJ's efforts to end the war.  Then, Nixon kept the war going  from 1969 until 1973 when we withdrew, tucking tail and running, setting the stage for the inevitable fall of Saigon in 1975.   By the time we withdrew from Vietnam, America was at war internally, with riots in most of our cities, massive political protests and demonstrations on college campuses and in our cities, and bombings, including the Sterling Hall bombing on the UW-Madison campus.  On top of all that turmoil, between 1972 and 1974, the Watergate scandal, that J. D. Vance now dismisses as insignificant,  developed and also tore the country apart, with the pro-Nixon and anti-Nixon contingents despising each other.  Other than the Civil War, it was the worst period of polarization in the country's history up to the Trump Era, of which Mr. Vance is now a chief apologist.

Excerpts from Why Old People Cry, by Roger Rosenbalatt in this morning's NYTimes:

Old people cry a lot. I will see a sweet child in the street, watch a news story about a heroic rescue or catch sight of a peony or of a full moon, and my eyes will be awash with tears. Whatever it is that I am feeling seems expressible only this way. People weep for joy or sorrow. I do neither, consciously.   Something comes over me . . . .

Why do I tear up so often? I think it has to do with the past, how much past has built up inside me all these years. . . . And how suddenly the present becomes the past. Lifelong friends, here yesterday, gone today. . . So many things lost in a life, my life, yours. So much left to articulate yearning.  . .  Is that why I tear up? Because I’m so overwhelmed with life as I approach the end of it that I’m at a loss for words and all I can do is cry?

Whatever happened to your life long ago, whatever carousel you were on, reminds you of yourself, who also happened long ago. So you’re tearing up for all that is gone, all that monumental past, vast and variegated. These days, I have so much past behind and within me, it’s as if it bubbles over.

Whew!  I'm glad to learn I'm not the only one.  I can get overwhelmed with emotion and even sense my tear glands activated watching and listening to a concert or other performance, or seeing children pouring out of elementary school at the end of a school day, or seeing a dad or mom walking their children down the street, holding their hands.  With the small children, is it joy I'm experiencing, or fear for their futures?  All of that.

America and Israel.  One of the lead stories in the online edition of this morning's NYTimes is headlined "Israelis See Their Friendship With the U.S. Slipping Away."  The story related, in large part, to the victory of three patently anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian candidates in recent elections in New York City, "in the most Jewish city in the world, after Jerusalem.”  More broadly, 

"Americans’ sympathy for the Palestinians exceeded their sympathy for Israel for the first time in a New York Times/Siena poll in September. And 60 percent of Americans said that they held unfavorable opinions of Israel in a Pew survey in April, up from 42 percent in 2022."

I tried to sort out my own views on Israel a year ago today.  It wasn't easy: 

My journal entry on June 27, 2024 headed "Wikipedia, the ADL, and Israeli-Palestinian Relations:  My beliefs then, my beliefs still.

Wikipedia's editors have classified the Anti-Defamation League as “generally unreliable regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”  Wikipedia's volunteer editors wrote that the ADL is unreliable when it comes to the conflict “due to significant evidence that the ADL acts as a pro-Israeli advocacy group and has repeatedly published false and misleading statements as fact, unretracted, regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict. The general unreliability of the ADL extends to the intersection of the topics of antisemitism and the Israel/Palestine conflict.  The ADL expressed “concern and dismay by Wikipedia’s attack on ADL’s reliability on the topic of antisemitism and other issues of central concern to the Jewish community.”  The letter also accused Wikipedia of “stripping the Jewish community of the right to defend itself from the hatred that targets our community.”

According to another story in this morning's WaPo, the Israeli government blames the UN for the food shortages, increasing starvation, approaching famine, and difficulty in distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza.  

The worldviews of Israel and strong Israel supporters are radically different from that of the rest of the world.  The former accurately see Israel as a small democratic nation surrounded by enemies, the most powerful of which - Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and multiple militias -  seek to destroy it as a nation-state entity.  The feeling of constant existential vulnerability has predictably grown since October 7th.  Much of the rest of the world sees Israel as a strong, thriving, nuclear power, with one of the world's strongest militaries, engaged for decades in military occupation, racist and fascistic oppression, and ethnic cleansing if not apartheid, and now war crimes if not genocide against indigenous Arab Palestinians.  Because Israel is a self-created and self-defined Jewish state, populated mostly by Jews, and supported by most diaspora Jews, the relationship between the Jewish state and the Jewish nation, tribe, family, or people, i.e., Jews generally, is a subject always open to debate, often fierce debate.  I've been reading two books recently (and currently) about the issue.  The first is a collection of essays by Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State (1992).  The second is What Shall I Do With This People: Jews and the Fractious Politics of Judaism (2002) by Milton Viorst.

Leibowitz was an Israeli polymath, a deeply observant Jew, and a Zionist who was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1903 and moved to Mandate Israel in 1935 where he lived till his death in 1994.  Isaiah Berlin said of him:  "It is not so much his intellectual attainments and achievements as a thinker and teacher that have made so profound an impression on me . . . as the unshakeable moral and political stand which he took up for so many years in the face of so much pressure to be sensible, to be realistic, not to let down the side, not to give comfort to the enemy,  not to fight against current conventional wisdom . . . Of him I believe it can be said more truly than of anyone else that he was the conscience of Israel . . .  "  Milton Viorst was a journalist and a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs widely published in national and international journals.   Both writers address issues concerning the relationship between Jews and the Jewish state of Israel and, more basically, the issue of who is a Jew.  To Leibowitz, a Jew is one who practices halakhah, who observes the commandments found in the Torah and in the Oral Law.  "Apart from [the institutions of halakhic practices], Judaism does not exist."  He makes the point that other than halakhah, there is nothing, no commonality, that makes worldwide Jewry a definable, unique "nation." Viorst starts his book relating one of my favorite jokes about the inherent fractiousness of religions, about the Jew stranded on an island who builds his own town, but with two synagogues, one to pray in and one "I wouldn't set foot in!"  The title of his book comes from Moses's exasperated rhetorical question to God [Exodus 17: 4-6] when the Jews he led over Sinai were ready to stone him because of the hardships they were suffering.  Mostly it is a polemic against Jewish religious fundamentalism and religious nationalism and messianism.

It is in large measure this question of Jewish identity and the relationship between Jews, however self-defined and others-defined, and the State of Israel, that makes it difficult to assess the State of Israel, its governments, and its history, especially concerning the treatment of Arab Palestinians.  To many in our world, Israel, after 1967 and more especially after October 7th,  has become a pariah state, a state like South Africa under apartheid.  The response of many Israelis and their supporters is to call their critics antisemitic, biased, or simply bigoted against Jews.  Israel = Jews collectively and Jews collectively = Israel and therefore, opposition to Israel's policies and practices = hostility to Jews.

The situation is complicated by the remembrance of the Holocaust, the Shoah, the attempted annihilation of Europe's Jews not only by the Nazis but also by so many non-German, willing accomplices.  To be a Jew in this dangerous world is, I suspect, to be naturally and predictably at least somewhat wary, self-protective, watchful, and on the lookout with a tendency to "circle the wagons" when outside threats appear.  How these characteristics must be magnified in the case of Israeli Jews surrounded by enemies with both the will and the means to kill them and their children.  I, not a Jew,  not an Israeli, can never fully appreciate this.   Nonetheless, the tendency to circle the wagons when criticized too often leads to blame-deflecting, blame-shifting, and scapegoating, to a refusal to admit that Israel, like every other country, and Jews, like other people, can be guilty of very bad conduct.  How often have I thought, when hearing one excuse or denial or another from the Israeli government or IDF, 'I can't believe my own government, why should I believe Israel's?'  If Israeli Jews believe that every criticism of their actions springs only from the bigotry of antisemitism, they are relieved from the challenge of trying to assess the criticism honestly, to examine their consciences.  It also fosters a deep "us and them" culture, Jews and Gentiles, friends and foes.  Once we are relieved of the burden of self-assessment, of examining our consciences, our behaviors are prone to become only more offensive.  I think it was particularly perverse that Israel is blaming the United Nations humanitarian agencies for the inability to get humanitarian aid to the increasingly starving, increasingly diseased people of Gaza when all the evidence from journalistic and human rights agencies attest that the main causes of the problem are Israeli.

Like the Wikipedia editors, I do not believe the ADL is a reliable reporter on Israeli-Palestinian relations.  Nor do I believe AIPAC or the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Christians United for Israel, Hadassah, the Jewish Agency, or similar groups deeply devoted to supporting and defending Israel.  I do not believe Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing, racist coalition government and I do not believe the IDF.  Knowing what I know of my own government's duplicity (Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, the Afghan Report, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, spinmeisters, , . . .), how can I believe Israel's?

Furthermore, I can't believe that conflating opposition to Israeli policies and practices concerning Palestinians with antisemitism is: "good for the Jews."  How does tarring me and others opposed politically and morally to the oppression of marginal minorities with the slur of 'antisemite' or bigot help Jews generally?  How does it help the many Jews, in Israel and in the diaspora, who support the Jewish State's legitimacy and right to exist but are also opposed to major Israeli government policies and practices?  Although the numbers are dwindling, there is still a Left and a peace movement in Israel and a larger one in the diaspora, and they, like their opponents in and out of Israel, rely on or at least aspire to the support and goodwill of non-Jews like me.

My thoughts are not very coherent or logical; my thoughts about Israel, at least since its rightward turn with the election Menachem Begin and a Likud government in 1977 often are not.  But I hope it helps to try to write them down and see the non sequiturs in black and white so I can be like Flannery O'Connor who wrote to her friend: "I don’t have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again."

I've written elsewhere in these journal pages of Yeshayahu Leibowitz's arguments about Jewish "nationhood" being grounded only in halakah, or the observance of Jewish law found in the Torah.  He makes a pretty good case and I wish I had an index or could do a word search of four years' worth of journal pages, but I don't and I can't.  I need to pick up my collection of his writings again to see again how he justifies the right of Jews, mainly European Jews, to a nation-state of their own in land occupied by Arab Palestinians for centuries.

Surprise, surprise - the fruits of entrusting negotiating with the Iranians to those crack international negotators J. D. Vance, Jerod Kushner, and Steve Witkof.  More from the Times, Vague Language of U.S.-Iran Deal Comes Back to Haunt Peace Efforts:

The memorandum that the two sides agreed to calls for Iran to “make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels” through the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days. Crucially, it leaves “arrangements” and “best efforts” undefined.

Iran appears to have interpreted that language to mean that it can determine which route ships must take. Hours before its attack on the container ship, Iran had warned ships that the only route through the strait was through its waters, trying to stop vessels from using an alternate, U.S.-backed route on the southern side of the strait that hugs the coastline of Oman.

The interim deal “leaned on deliberately flexible language because that was probably the only way to get it over the line,” said Nicole Grajewski, an assistant professor at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po in Paris. “But flexibility only holds while both sides attach similar meanings to the same vague provisions.”

The vagueness of the interim agreement has led both sides to try to define facts on the ground to their advantage, before any uncertainties are resolved in a final deal, she added.