Six months of war

The anniversary of an infamous day

IDF Chief of the General Staff LTG Herzi Halevi hold a situational assessment with the head of the Southern Command and other senior IDF commanders in Gaza, via Instagram.

Yesterday marked six months since October 7. I had planned to mark the day with a survey of the news and notable articles about the war. But yesterday evening, my dear friend Judith Levy surprised us by joining our Middle East 101 class to discuss the Oslo Accords. Our conversation was so interesting that it went on for three hours.

I very much wanted to share this conversation with all of our readers, but figured no one would have the patience to watch a three-hour video, some of which is a bit digressive. So I decided to edit it down to an hour-long podcast. I’m new to video and sound editing,¹so this has taken me a very long time. An excruciatingly long time. In fact, I’ve been working on this non-stop since last night, and it’s still not the way I want it. The transitions aren’t smooth, and the AI voice I created to narrate them is trying to shake me down—after every three sentences, it passive-aggressively replaces the word I want it to say with “jibber,” “jabber,” or “papaya,” then it tells me that if I don’t like it, I should upgrade my subscription plan to “pro.”

So Judith—you’re now “Papaya.”

I don’t want to spend another day futzing with this, so I’m just going to publish this highly imperfect version. Separately, in the next ME101 assignment, I’ll publish the full video. So if you’d prefer to watch the whole thing, or if you can’t make sense of the edited version, wait for that.

The first few minutes might be a bit confusing because we begin in medias res—it starts with André asking Judith a question about her master’s degree thesis, which treats the 1948 War of Independence. But we quickly turn to contemporary events:

I think you’ll find this a very interesting discussion. (I wouldn’t have spent a whole day trying to edit it if I didn’t think so.) So I hope very much that you’ll forgive the editing infelicities and listen to it through.

You’re going to receive the same podcast again, tomorrow, because I need to publish it on a different page if you’re to receive it in your podcast players. Just ignore it if you don’t listen to podcasts that way.²

I’m also sending some news updates, show notes, and comments on the news, below.

One more thing: John has to go out of town for work for a week, but once he returns, he’ll be back for a long while. Because you’ve already got a podcast to listen to today, we decided to publish the Elephant Cage we just recorded tomorrow.

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So far, Iran’s retaliation against Israel hasn’t materialized, but the Israeli journalist Hezi Simantov says Iran is probably preparing strikes against Israeli embassies. He also says that Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the deputy commander of the Quds Force in Syria and Lebanon, managed “the entire operation of smuggling weapons from Syria to Lebanon,” which suggests why Israel thought it worth the risk to kill him.