Dear friends,

Perspective in public affairs

Today’s news coverage has been dominated by International Court of Justice’s ruling on the charges of genocide that South Africa pressed against Israel. In handing down its ruling, the court did not order Israel to cease military operations in Gaza, while also insisting that Israel respect the United Nations’s Genocide Convention.

Israel’s adversaries are spinning the ruling one way; Israel’s supporters are spinning it another way. I have to say, I can’t bring myself to get very excited about either the case or the ruling. It’s not good that major multilateral institutions like the United Nations and the ICJ oppose the Jewish state so determinedly. But it’s been many decades since the UN has earned respect or legitimacy, so who could be surprised at such opposition?

For all sovereign, self-governing nations, this court does not have the power of enforcement and so its rulings are not binding, its reasoning is often plainly motivated by political considerations that distort its judgment, and its decisions are based in tenuous and fantastical canons of international law that are not democratically legitimate. But for Israel, there is a special additional set of reasons to discount the ICJ.

The premise of Zionism is that the Jews would again assume responsibility for themselves in history. No one else would vouchsafe and protect the Jewish people other than the sovereign Jewish state. This remains the case today. No one except Israel is duty bound to protect Israeli citizens. When they are threatened and bombed and rocketed and stabbed, no one else will come to their rescue. Israel must therefore keep the proper perspective about what’s truly essential for it to focus on and what isn’t. IDF operations in Gaza, deterring Hezbollah, preventing an Iranian nuclear threat are all essential areas of determined focus for Israeli political figures. The opinion of the ICJ is a statement of elite opinion—not irrelevant, and not unimportant, but not essential either.

That’s my own judgment. But the practice of distinguishing essential from non-essential is part of the Zionist legacy handed down to us from David Ben-Gurion. On that score, next week we’ll have a discussion about Ben-Gurion’s conception of statesmanship with the author of our essay this month, Neil Rogachevsky, together with the historian Avi Shilon and the author Ran Baratz. You can join us by registering here.

The human condition

On our podcast this week, Yehuda Halper joins me for another discussion about Maimonides. This time, our focus is on Hilkhot De’ot, a section of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah that analyzes the character traits that make up the framework for an ethical life. In so doing, Maimonides introduced a portrait of the human condition, suggesting a moral psychology that can be assessed, trained, and elevated, and a description of the human person as an embodied being with a physical presence. This is my second conversation with Halper on Maimonides. We’ll have two additional conversations about the most important medieval Jewish sage over the next couple of weeks.

From the archives

60 years ago on Wednesday, the Israeli spy Eli Cohen was arrested by Syria for espionage. Under the alias of a Syrian businessman, Cohen spent four years in Syria, developing relationships with prominent political and military figures and collecting intelligence for the Mossad. After being discovered in 1965, Cohen was tragically hanged four months later.

Cohen’s story, well-known in Israel, was popularized in the West a few years ago by a prominent Netflix show. In his review of that series, the Israeli journalist Matti Friedman finds that it deftly depicts the paradox at the heart of Cohen’s life, in which his Middle Eastern background made him an invaluable asset for the Jewish state but also estranged him from its upper-class and leadership.

With every good wish,

Jonathan Silver
Editor, Mosaic
Warren R. Stern Senior Fellow of Jewish Civilization