Some Earlier Updates Worth Reading from Jeffrey Goldberg
4. A friend of Goldblog who knows a great deal about the Middle East wrote in to point out a potential downside of the Iron Dome system, which is doing a very good job of protecting Israeli skies:
As I have watched the conflict, one of the things that has worried me has paradoxically been the effectiveness of the Iron Dome system.
Obviously, any weapons system that reduces civilian Israeli fatalities is a good thing. Let’s get that out of the way first and foremost: we are right to hail this marvelous new technology. But ideally, the Iron Dome would allow Israeli civilian leaders the space to make hard choices about what, exactly, they are to do with Gaza. I had the same hope for the Wall/Fence in the West Bank. Leaving aside for a moment the tricky issue of where the Wall/Fence was constructed, it nonetheless effected a stunning drop in suicide attacks in Israel proper. This, again, is a good thing. But instead of giving Israeli civilian leaders the space to make hard decisions about what to do in the West Bank, the Wall/Fence instead allowed most Israelis to forget about the West Bank and the Palestinians altogether. The Palestinians, out of sight, drifted out of mind as well.
But the problem of what to do with the people and the land Israel conquered in 1967 isn’t going away. In the near term, I very much hope Israel is able to stop the rocket attacks from Gaza. But in the long term, I hope the solution to Gaza will not be to simply build bigger and better walls — both on the ground and in the sky — while continuing to put off hard political decisions.
5. MIchael Wolff dissects Rupert Murdoch’s very strange tweet about Jewish publishers (the one that proves the point that a philo-Semite is an anti-Semite who likes Jews):