Wednesday, September 30, 2026
1938 Treaty of Munich forced Czechoslovakia to give territory to Germany. Chamberlain infamously declared "Peace for our time" upon his return to London.
1946 Twenty-two Nazi leaders, including Hermann Goering, were found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to death or prison at the Nuremberg war trials
2022 In defiance of international law, Vladimir Putin announced Russia's annexation of four Ukrainian provinces: Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia
2023 Bipartisan deal to avoid US government shutdown is signed just hours before the midnight deadline and provides funding for 45 days
In bed at 9:20, awake at 3, up at 3:20; 0335 203.4. 119/72/67; 62/69/61; rain expected most of the day.
Morning meds at 6:30 a.m. Entresto at 5:30 a.m. and p.m.
Some additional thoughts on Anti-Zionism-A Jewish History, Rabbi Aaron Tamares, and Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Yesterday I mentioned what Rabbi Tamares said about Jewish statehood and its effect on Jewish people, and what Leibowitz said about the effect the occupation of Palestinian land would have on the Jewish people and on the State of Israel. Both men could hardly have been more authentically, proudly, and lovingly Jewish. Neither can rationally be considered a "self-hating Jew." Leibowitz was a Zionist Jew, and Tamares an anti-Zionist Jew. Both reject the proposition that Jewish nationhood itself is redemptive or holy. Both, however, are deeply suspicious of turning political power into a religious absolute. In that sense, Tamares and Leibowitz belong to the same broad Jewish critique of nationalist idolatry, even though Leibowitz accepts the political state and Tamares is much closer to principled anti-nationalism. Benjamin Moser’s framing of Tamares fits that distinction: Moser presents Jewish anti-Zionists as arguing that Judaism is “older and larger than any single political project,” and Tamares is one of the clearest early examples of that ethical-spiritual critique of nationalism. The shortest way to put it is: Leibowitz says, “Have a Jewish state, but do not worship it.” Tamares says, “The very drive to become a state-centered nation may itself deform Judaism."
I do not believe in Judaism any more than I believe in the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised, or in the Protestant religions that consider Catholicism an Anti-Christ and 'the Whore of Babylon." I do believe, however, that all the major religions have some real value, call it what we may: spiritual, emotional, psychological, salvific, or redemptive. That certainly includes the profoundly rich depths of Judaism every bit as much as it includes Christianity, Islam, and even Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Baháʼí. and probably other "offshoots" of the majors. I certainly include Buddhism also, though it's not at all clear that Buddhism is a religion.
Have Judaism and the Israeli Jews been corrupted by the creation of the State of Israel, as Rabbi Tamares predicted, or by the occupation of the Palestinian territories, as Yeshayahu Leibowitz predicted? People will have very differing views on those questions, largely depending on where they stand, sit, or live, but I do note that the Jews in Palestine/Israel have been living with strife, warfare, and existential precarity for more than 100 years now, since the Jerusalem riots of 1920, the Jaffa riots of 1921, and the much more lethal riots across Palestine in 1929. I note too that it was precisely the arrival of the European Jews that precipitated the deadly strife. The long-established Jews in Palestine, mostly religious, had lived in peace with the Arabs pre-Balfour, as had the Arab Christians.
Israel has become, to a great many throughout the world, a pariah state, an apartheid state, an aggressive and oppressive state, and a chronic abuser of human rights. Its people have never truly lived in peace and safety. Every militant move intended to increase the security of its people has resulted in more strife, jeopardy, and precarity down the road.
This morning's NYTimes reports that all the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, save one, voted to force Trump to deliver a Human Rights assessment of Israel's behavior on the West Bank. All the Republicans, save one, voted against it. There is an ever-growing movement within the American population, especially among the young, to sever America's intimate relationship with Israel, to cut off military and economic assistance, and to punish its human rights abuses against Palestinians. If American allegiance ends, who will be in Israel's corner?
I know I am a pessimist (Being Irish . . ., etc.), but I long ago lost hope for Israel, at least since 1995, when Yigal Amir, the religious nationalist supporter of the settlement movement and opponent of Palestinian statehood, assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, and the people elected Benjamin Netanyahu to become leader. He has served as leader of Israel for 19 of the last 30 years, Israel's longest-serving prime minister. With the death of Rabin, and effectively, of the leftist Labor Party in Israel, all hope for any kind of statehood for the Palestinians ended. Excluding East Jerusalem, the Israeli settler population in the West Bank was about 138,600 at the end of 1995. By the end of 2024, Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics data show about 511,100 settlers. That is an increase of roughly 372,500 people, or about 269%. Put another way, the settler population is now about 3.7 times what it was when Rabin was assassinated.
The growth has continued since then. A 2026 report based on settler-group data says the West Bank settler population grew another 2.2% during 2025, again excluding East Jerusalem.
If we include East Jerusalem, the numbers are larger still. Peace Now estimated about 230,000 Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem by 2023, compared with about 140,000 in 1993. So by the mid-2020s, the combined settler population of the West Bank and East Jerusalem was on the order of three-quarters of a million people, depending on the exact year and counting method.
The West Bank has been carved up like a turkey. How do you realistically form a state out of what Israel has left of it? (I say nothing of Gaza, and what Israel has left of it.)
I write all these thoughts in the hours before daybreak, hoping for some coherence, but in any event trying to understand my ultimate thought that Zionism has been a bad idea, an unjustifiable goal from the beginning. I've read only the Introduction and first chapter of Benjamin Moser's book, but my thought on this matter preceded my purchase of the book. I expect my thoughts on this matter will become only more embedded as I read on. (I haven't addressed the question of whether being an anti-Zionist makes me an anti-semite, which is what Benjamin Netanyahu would charge, as he always does. But that's another subject.)
Quo tandem, Catalina? From this morning's NYTimes:
After Two Decades, U.S. Forces Leave Iraq to an Uncertain Future
U.S. forces formally withdrew from Iraq on Wednesday, ending a two-decade military presence that stoked years of devastating bloodshed, and leaves behind a battered nation struggling to unshackle itself from its two most powerful, and now warring, allies.
After toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003, the brutal dictator who ruled Iraq for nearly 24 years, American forces are making their second withdrawal from the country.
The U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation, which ended in 2011, left a country reeling from sectarian bloodletting and militant insurgencies that cost nearly 4,500 U.S. lives and killed more than 115,000 Iraqis, according to the most modest counts.
American forces ultimately returned three years later — this time to lead the international coalition fighting the Islamic State, the jihadist force that once seized swaths of Iraq and Syria and became notorious for its slaughter of Shiite Muslim Iraqis, public killings of hostages, and torture and enslavement of women from Iraq’s Yazidi minority.
Why am I reminded of King George's song from Hamilton?
You'll be back like before
I will fight the fight and win the war
For your love, for your praise
And I'll love you 'til my dying days
When you're gone, I'll go mad
So don't throw away this thing we had
'Cause when push comes to shove
I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love.
Tom Friedman reminds me of why I live with doom and gloom. From his latest column:
President Trump is such an awful human being that just writing about him feels degrading. . . .
Alas, though, when someone as morally warped as Trump — whose first secretary of state called him a “moron” — assumes this much unchecked power at the dawn of the Age of Artificial Intelligence, he can’t be ignored. Because right now Trump is leaving America exposed to dangerous viruses: digital, biological and diplomatic. Something bad is going to happen to us as a result. We and our children are going to pay for this, and not only at the gas pump.
He goes on to show how we are suffering and will continue to suffer under the incompetent, malign, delusional, and misanthropic leader we have placed in the White House, but I don't have the strength to carry on.
Still more on why I live with doom and gloom. I asked an AI chatbox this morning a series of question composed to determine to what extent, if any, I was correct in thinking that we may have already "passed the tipping point' in terms of losing practical human control over AI models: Here is a pared-down, but verbatim, record of the exchange, with my questions in italics and the responses in roman type:
Are AI "models" separate entities? How is one differentiated from another? A model is not normally a single physical machine sitting in one data center. Copies of the same model can run on many servers at once.
Could there be an almost infinite number of individual "models" of AI extant? Yes—at least in principle, the number of distinct AI models that could exist is astronomically large.
Once a model is created, can it be killed or destroyed? Yes . . . But “destroyed” is trickier than it sounds. Once a model has been copied, backed up, downloaded, replicated across servers, or distributed to other organizations or individuals, eliminating every copy may be very difficult or impossible. Deleting one deployed copy does not destroy the model if another copy of the same weights still exists somewhere else.
Could models be created that are indestructible? Could models, once created, create other different models? Yes to the second question; only approximately to the first. . . . But a model could be made extremely hard to eliminate by replicating itself widely across many independent servers, jurisdictions, devices, and storage systems. . . And yes. a model can be used to help create other models. That is already happening in several forms.
Would the increase in the number of data centers around the world increase the practical possibility of the creation on practically indestructible models? Not in absolute or mathematical terms, but as a practical matter, a matter of likelihood? Yes. As a practical matter, more data centers increase the possibility that a model could become extremely difficult to eliminate, though the increase is indirect rather than automatic. . . ,A model that exists only on one company’s servers can be shut down relatively easily. A model whose weights have been copied to hundreds or thousands of independently controlled systems in different countries is a very different problem. . . . For software, copying is much easier than biological reproduction, so distribution can happen extremely rapidly.
Is it thus possible even now that an ill-aligned model already exists, is very difficult to identify, and iwould be very difficult to erase, destroy, or control? Yes. It is possible now that a poorly aligned or deliberately modified model exists somewhere outside public view and would be difficult to identify or eliminate. . . . So a model could already exist that has been deliberately stripped of its safety training, fine-tuned for harmful purposes, and stored on private servers. . . . There is also now evidence that advanced models can behave in unexpectedly agentic ways under certain conditions. . . The unsettling feature of digital systems is that detection and destruction are asymmetric. Creating one copy is easy; proving that all copies have been found is extremely difficult. In that limited sense, your intuition is correct: we may already have crossed the point at which humanity can guarantee that every unwanted AI model could be found and erased. (The bolding emphasis added by me.)
And even "in that limited sense", I find that exchange "unsettling" indeed.
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