I feel the criticisms of the Old Testament in the quote in the footnote are unwarranted. The Old Testament is very explicit on the need to be kind to the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner. It says that they are recipients of God's care and that God will avenge mistreatment of them.
I was just talking to a friend about that. I think the essay has such a relentless tempo that by the end it's built up such a head of steam that it's hard to know in the midst of it if she's cutting corners.
Wiki tells me Weil was a Jewish convert to Catholicism, so maybe there's some pent up animus there.
It's a common theme in Weil's writing. I recently wrote about how she traces the true inspiration for Christianity back to Ancient Egypt and how her rejection of the Jewish roots of Christianity may be a subversive challenge to anti-Semites: https://maryjaneeyre.substack.com/p/how-everything-is-connected
Yes, the Old Testament does say those things, but it also has prescriptions for holy war, examples of political murders, and much else. The current war between Israel and Gaza could almost have been scripted out of the book of Joshua.
My objection is to the claims about views and treatment of the less fortunate. It is not accurate to say that misfortune was viewed as a sure sign of sin or that it required contempt.
"It is not accurate to say that misfortune was viewed as a sure sign of sin " according to a lot of the prophets in Old Testament, or the story of Joseph, or Noah, or Sodoma and Gomorah, and lots of others, it was.
That there are exceptions, sure. It's a big book, all over the place.Buth those are central stories, and some of the most well known, not just some peripheral messages.
Even the human condition's toil is explained as a result of the Original Sin (and a curse from God because of that).
Could you explain how the story of Joseph identifies misfortune as a sure sign of sin? Certainly misfortune is explained as connected in some way to sin (as with original sin), but the quote implies individual responsibility for specific misfortune.
This is a recurring thing, with Simone Weil. In her "Letter to a Catholic Priest," for example, she speculates that "Israel learnt the most essential truth about God (namely, that God is good before being powerful) from foreign traditional sources, Chaldean, Persian or Greek, and thanks to the exile." A lot of this feeling seems to come from wrestling with some of the more bloodthirsty parts of the Old Testament. In wishing to repudiate them, she ends up with too clear-cut a narrative about where the violent aspects of religion come from and who ought to be blamed for them.
Perhaps, as Damir notes, this was related to feelings that Weil may have had about her own Jewish heritage. On the other hand, though, Weil also seems to have retained the feelings of an outsider to Catholicism, refusing baptism on grounds that the ritual serves to create an insider/outsider distinction that is wrong in itself. She held some very complicated positions.
Well, Jewish religion (as practiced) millenia after the New Testament remained tribalistic and with a transactional and legalistic view of God and good.
Not so much universal as tribalistic ("I will make you a great nation, bless those that bless you, and curse anybody that curses you"). After going about this, it tacks on a line about how "people's of Earth" will be blessed, but, again "through you [the nation]".
And of course tons of other cases of sin bringing misfortune, from the Original Sin, to killing the whole population of Earth except Noah, to the explicit warnings of the prophets about exactly that.
Regarding Gaza war, I am curious what your view is on what is afoot, and how Biden misunderstands it? And how he misunderstands how power works?
My understanding of Biden's view is that he is a realist, and he understands that peace is impossible there because Palestinians are not united; Arafat was the closest they have had as a Gandhi or MLK like leader, but even he lacked the courage to negotiate peace with Israel before the second Intifada. I believe he worried he would be assassinated were he to accept a settlement. So, there is not much one can do but hope deterrence helps secure peace till as long as possible.
I also think all terrorist organizations last a long time, but suddenly implode when they cross a line. The Tamil Tigers did that when they assassinated Rajeev Gandhi in 1991; overnight they lost all support from India and it was just a matter of time before Sri Lanka army destroyed the organization. For Al Qaeda September 11 was the line they should not have crossed. For Hamas, I think October 7 was the line. I don't think they will survive as leaders of the Palestine cause. And if they do, I worry that Palestinians will never get a state. Iran could also be crossing a line if they are not careful; their leadership already extremely unpopular in Iran, could end up losing power altogether. Yes, there will be many lives lost etc., but how else can you eliminate theocracy?
Lovely essay. I take some issue with the work fallenness. I think that word is too tainted by the Christian tradition. You interpret it in a secular way closer to the Buddhist tradition of suffering as the human condition that can only be escaped only through enlightenment and exit from the cycle of life. I interpret the word fallenness not as our being subject to force, violence, or suffering, but in the way it's defined by Christianity, which is that we are all born bad or evil and have to supplicate to a magic outside power to have any chance at not being evil in the world. I think that's the source of many of the ills of Euro derived culture. A true curse. A deep blocker for healthy self-understanding, wisdom, and generosity of spirit.
For sure, I'm no Buddhist and don't believe we're all going the Bardo and back until we achieve enlightenment. As one who doesn't claim any version of enlightenment, I'm not going to claim I've got the path to wisdom and generosity of spirit. But I'm 100% certain the path is not through abdicating all responsibility and believing the only path to purity or holiness is supplicating to a magic fairy. That framing structurally blocks you from truly seeing yourself or others. The wisdom I've found has in many ways been driven by secularized and westernized learnings from various strains of Buddhism. In fact, my take on fallenness is more or less directly taken from Pema Chodron. One of my favorite quotes from one of her talks:
Behind all hardening and tightening and rigidity of the heart, there’s always fear. [to your point, shared by the Buddhists, that the default is force, violence, and suffering, which engenders fear in us from the start] But if you touch fear, behind fear there is a soft spot. And if you touch that soft spot, you find the vast blue sky. You find that which is ineffable, ungraspable, and unbiased.
Perhaps because there is nothing worth fearing. Which does not preclude assessing a threat to lives you love, and confronting it with force if necessary.
I do happen to subscribe to enlightenment, when taken to a level much deeper/higher. If we consider “The true hero, the subject, the center of the Iliad is force,” can we extend that to imagine love as a force? We don't understand it now, just like we don't really understand the other forces of gravity, electro-magnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces. But we understand them more than we did five centuries ago. Imagine an enlightenment which includes love as more than a tenet of certain spiritual traditions, but a wisdom that can move mountains. And like the other forces, it applies everywhere, even beyond our precious little planet. The universe is large, we know. It's taken a long time for it to grow us, a supposedly higher species. But if we are not able to keep life on this planet, or even this planet, from destruction, the forces do not disappear, nor does Love. There will always be hope, and 'life' in some other galaxy continues. So tragedy becomes comedy. But let's continue to not let the curtain down on this production just yet.
"The world is not a morality play where the just fight the evil, where oppression and resistance are the touchstones to a moral order." This is close to a Christian view of the world. In the Bible, justice is not something that people are born to or achieve by some process of natural maturation. Justice is the product of grace, pronounced over one due to the merits and suffering of Christ and revealed in this life late and imperfectly. It is not that there is no moral order, but that the order is too big to be explained by the sides in any merely earthly struggle.
The question is, how can one live justly in a violent world? The secular must have an answer to that question, but there is only so much that the secular can explain.
Can you go further in defining and specifying justice? I also don’t really understand what people really mean by grace. Is justice a gift from God in this context? If so, I still have no idea what is meant.
To lay my cards out: I’m not sure I have a working definition of “justice” that makes sense to me. And so to live justly in a violent world — I’m not sure I can even fathom what that would be.
What I find so gripping in reading the Greeks — as the Iliad and not the Gospels are Weil’s focus here — is that they seem to do fine without having justice (or injustice) wrapped up in the violent world. It’s not a question that seems to occur to them, even as they describe suffering quite well.
I should clarify that there is a love that those far from God can show. However, it falls short of God's standard in a way that the love of the redeemed does not. Yet the world is a better place for having Socrates and others like him.
Justice in this context is conformity to the divine standard of love for God and neighbor. Justice (or righteousness) is a gift first of standing before God and secondly of supernatural obedience in the life.
I can't speak to Homer's view of justice. Socrates certainly seemed to think it was important. Surely there is in Weil's critique of the one using force the implication that reflection on justice and prudence is a good thing and that we neglect it at our peril?
I appreciate how both you and Mr. Schiffman were able to apologize and get back on track. That takes courage, and civility. Qualities too often lacking in our worlds virtual and non. Thank you both for your considered discussion.
Quite literally, military conquest is where history begins. It almost certainly happened for the first time somewhere in ancient Mesopotamia roughly six thousand years ago, which is where the story of the fall is set. Mere coincidence? Perhaps, but not necessarily: https://shorturl.at/xmf1D
Read the Fagles translation and one other (Kimon Frères i believe). Thank you for fragments of Wiles essay. Interesting thesis I think, but fundamentally wrong and one garnered by an ignorance of a distillation of the lessons Greece absorbed over thousands of years, approximate as it is in geography to what was the cradle of civilization- those even more ancient cultures in what I consider to be a great irony of a label- the so called “Holy” lands. And observers of the insanity of religious wars, and thus only culturally connected to “The Greek Church” - mostly for the ceremonies and the after parties.
Have observed the bad behavior of men who revert to violence to impose their will on others. Weak. Observed boys preparing to show allegiance to their country by sacrifice. Who, it occurs to me never read the Guns of August - or all quiet on the western front, and so accepted unquestionably or fatalistically that they had no more chance to escape death than the dehumanized people across the world they were sent to fight.
No, I think the driving undercurrent that drives conflicts and war is the fear by the chess players who sacrifice everyone’s blood but their own, is that awareness, a growing consciousness on the part of the pawns they want to use who ultimately will just refuse to participate.
The truest thing about the violence that is the hallmark of mankind that I ever heard was not when I was standing at the top of the burial mound at Thermopylae with my father, the burial mound of the three hundred (and guess what? Other Greek troops), were the words very young but (made) ancient veterans of the Vietnam war in a small trailer park in Texas, off the single largest army base at the time - that the purpose of being soldiers was simply this - to die.
Sacrifices to dead gods.
We may very well all die in the fires of an ultimate battle, but it won’t be because humans embrace violence, only that some do.
Read past the Iliad to the Odyssey - and The Aeneid? The human impulse is to explore, maybe not always do just a bit better, but to try in our stumbling imperfection to something higher. Not the violence
'Endless pummeling" ? It will end when the hostages are returned and Hamas is no longer a fighting force... same as in other wars. 'Ostensiby defend'... against 'Ostensible' rockets? No... the rockets are real and the defense need is real.
I do feel you are avoiding your tonal contribution in using 'ostensible' which usually functions to imply that the 'real' reason is a purpose more nefarious than 'defense'. Same with 'endless' which implies no goal. C'mon... spit it out.
I think the Biden folks don't understand deterrence at all. They think they're going to defend, but they may get war. As for "endless," go on, you tell me how it ends.
As for "spit it out," do some research on my writing before you run your little mouth.
It does not 'end'. It staggers along like an unhappy marriage in a family home that neither can leave. It is reluctantly 'managed' until one side or the other abandons its fundaments goal.... or at minimum Iran does.
As for my 'little mouth'... that's funny. It took so little to have you escalate and activate the much deplored internet hissy fit. If we can't keep it cool here, no chance in the Mid East.
Fair enough, apologies for the hissy fit. I’m not a fan of policing of discourse on the issue of the Gaza War. I’m no expert on the Middle Wast, but have tried to write honestly and openly about the war here on WoC, not pulling punches. So being accused of nefarious intent set me off.
On the issue at hand, I think Biden, like Obama, has deep misunderstandings of what’s afoot, and about how power works. And if there is wider war, that’s going to be very much his fault. This is, incidentally, completely unrelated to America’s relationship with Israel. It’s much bigger than that relationship.
No problem. Sorry about the 'nefarious'... didn't intend to smear you with that... it was just a linguistic thing about how the tail meanings the word 'ostensible' often has.
Biden/Obama appeasement might be very dangerous. I think that Israel and Iran both no longer believe that U.S is reliably married ideologically and emotionally to Israel.
U.S / Israel relationship is veering towards the transactional as U.S foreign policy becomes more fickle in the winds of domestic emotional drivers. Without full confidence in U.S, Israel will go to war. It knows it can probably win wars but cannot win a fever of forever skirmishes... while under the long term threat of Arab population growth.
I feel the criticisms of the Old Testament in the quote in the footnote are unwarranted. The Old Testament is very explicit on the need to be kind to the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner. It says that they are recipients of God's care and that God will avenge mistreatment of them.
I was just talking to a friend about that. I think the essay has such a relentless tempo that by the end it's built up such a head of steam that it's hard to know in the midst of it if she's cutting corners.
Wiki tells me Weil was a Jewish convert to Catholicism, so maybe there's some pent up animus there.
It's a common theme in Weil's writing. I recently wrote about how she traces the true inspiration for Christianity back to Ancient Egypt and how her rejection of the Jewish roots of Christianity may be a subversive challenge to anti-Semites: https://maryjaneeyre.substack.com/p/how-everything-is-connected
Though I respect passion in defense of a thesis, her’s is a flawed theory based on a self-limiting premise.
Yes, the Old Testament does say those things, but it also has prescriptions for holy war, examples of political murders, and much else. The current war between Israel and Gaza could almost have been scripted out of the book of Joshua.
My objection is to the claims about views and treatment of the less fortunate. It is not accurate to say that misfortune was viewed as a sure sign of sin or that it required contempt.
"It is not accurate to say that misfortune was viewed as a sure sign of sin " according to a lot of the prophets in Old Testament, or the story of Joseph, or Noah, or Sodoma and Gomorah, and lots of others, it was.
That there are exceptions, sure. It's a big book, all over the place.Buth those are central stories, and some of the most well known, not just some peripheral messages.
Even the human condition's toil is explained as a result of the Original Sin (and a curse from God because of that).
Could you explain how the story of Joseph identifies misfortune as a sure sign of sin? Certainly misfortune is explained as connected in some way to sin (as with original sin), but the quote implies individual responsibility for specific misfortune.
This is a recurring thing, with Simone Weil. In her "Letter to a Catholic Priest," for example, she speculates that "Israel learnt the most essential truth about God (namely, that God is good before being powerful) from foreign traditional sources, Chaldean, Persian or Greek, and thanks to the exile." A lot of this feeling seems to come from wrestling with some of the more bloodthirsty parts of the Old Testament. In wishing to repudiate them, she ends up with too clear-cut a narrative about where the violent aspects of religion come from and who ought to be blamed for them.
Perhaps, as Damir notes, this was related to feelings that Weil may have had about her own Jewish heritage. On the other hand, though, Weil also seems to have retained the feelings of an outsider to Catholicism, refusing baptism on grounds that the ritual serves to create an insider/outsider distinction that is wrong in itself. She held some very complicated positions.
Well, Jewish religion (as practiced) millenia after the New Testament remained tribalistic and with a transactional and legalistic view of God and good.
New Testament is what changed all that.
So Weil was on to something there.
I must read more about her. Thank you for this.
> The Old Testament is very explicit on the need to be kind to the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner.
And yet it's also very tribalistic and nationalistic, and glorifies war against enemies and such most of the time.
It has those elements you mention, but they're not central, the way they are in the New Testament.
Could you explain how the Abrahamic promise of universal blessing factors into your view of what is central to the Old Testament?
Not so much universal as tribalistic ("I will make you a great nation, bless those that bless you, and curse anybody that curses you"). After going about this, it tacks on a line about how "people's of Earth" will be blessed, but, again "through you [the nation]".
And of course tons of other cases of sin bringing misfortune, from the Original Sin, to killing the whole population of Earth except Noah, to the explicit warnings of the prophets about exactly that.
Thank you for the wakeup call, Damir. Our separateness from these messes around the globe, messes using our munitions, is blinding here in the U.S.A.
Great column, thank you!
Regarding Gaza war, I am curious what your view is on what is afoot, and how Biden misunderstands it? And how he misunderstands how power works?
My understanding of Biden's view is that he is a realist, and he understands that peace is impossible there because Palestinians are not united; Arafat was the closest they have had as a Gandhi or MLK like leader, but even he lacked the courage to negotiate peace with Israel before the second Intifada. I believe he worried he would be assassinated were he to accept a settlement. So, there is not much one can do but hope deterrence helps secure peace till as long as possible.
I also think all terrorist organizations last a long time, but suddenly implode when they cross a line. The Tamil Tigers did that when they assassinated Rajeev Gandhi in 1991; overnight they lost all support from India and it was just a matter of time before Sri Lanka army destroyed the organization. For Al Qaeda September 11 was the line they should not have crossed. For Hamas, I think October 7 was the line. I don't think they will survive as leaders of the Palestine cause. And if they do, I worry that Palestinians will never get a state. Iran could also be crossing a line if they are not careful; their leadership already extremely unpopular in Iran, could end up losing power altogether. Yes, there will be many lives lost etc., but how else can you eliminate theocracy?
Lovely essay. I take some issue with the work fallenness. I think that word is too tainted by the Christian tradition. You interpret it in a secular way closer to the Buddhist tradition of suffering as the human condition that can only be escaped only through enlightenment and exit from the cycle of life. I interpret the word fallenness not as our being subject to force, violence, or suffering, but in the way it's defined by Christianity, which is that we are all born bad or evil and have to supplicate to a magic outside power to have any chance at not being evil in the world. I think that's the source of many of the ills of Euro derived culture. A true curse. A deep blocker for healthy self-understanding, wisdom, and generosity of spirit.
Except I’m not sure I subscribe to enlightenment, nor do I yearn for release. The secular fallenness I’m describing is more like Hobbes.
How does one reach healthy self-understanding, wisdom, and generosity of spirit?
For sure, I'm no Buddhist and don't believe we're all going the Bardo and back until we achieve enlightenment. As one who doesn't claim any version of enlightenment, I'm not going to claim I've got the path to wisdom and generosity of spirit. But I'm 100% certain the path is not through abdicating all responsibility and believing the only path to purity or holiness is supplicating to a magic fairy. That framing structurally blocks you from truly seeing yourself or others. The wisdom I've found has in many ways been driven by secularized and westernized learnings from various strains of Buddhism. In fact, my take on fallenness is more or less directly taken from Pema Chodron. One of my favorite quotes from one of her talks:
Behind all hardening and tightening and rigidity of the heart, there’s always fear. [to your point, shared by the Buddhists, that the default is force, violence, and suffering, which engenders fear in us from the start] But if you touch fear, behind fear there is a soft spot. And if you touch that soft spot, you find the vast blue sky. You find that which is ineffable, ungraspable, and unbiased.
Perhaps because there is nothing worth fearing. Which does not preclude assessing a threat to lives you love, and confronting it with force if necessary.
I do happen to subscribe to enlightenment, when taken to a level much deeper/higher. If we consider “The true hero, the subject, the center of the Iliad is force,” can we extend that to imagine love as a force? We don't understand it now, just like we don't really understand the other forces of gravity, electro-magnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces. But we understand them more than we did five centuries ago. Imagine an enlightenment which includes love as more than a tenet of certain spiritual traditions, but a wisdom that can move mountains. And like the other forces, it applies everywhere, even beyond our precious little planet. The universe is large, we know. It's taken a long time for it to grow us, a supposedly higher species. But if we are not able to keep life on this planet, or even this planet, from destruction, the forces do not disappear, nor does Love. There will always be hope, and 'life' in some other galaxy continues. So tragedy becomes comedy. But let's continue to not let the curtain down on this production just yet.
Simple kindness to fellow man?
By becoming more like Jesus
By following Buddha's Eightfold Path: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path
Yes. I’d go a bit further. But yes.
Further how? I can imagine at least a few things you might mean!
To simply not neglect the least of us. Something beyond religiosity.
"The world is not a morality play where the just fight the evil, where oppression and resistance are the touchstones to a moral order." This is close to a Christian view of the world. In the Bible, justice is not something that people are born to or achieve by some process of natural maturation. Justice is the product of grace, pronounced over one due to the merits and suffering of Christ and revealed in this life late and imperfectly. It is not that there is no moral order, but that the order is too big to be explained by the sides in any merely earthly struggle.
The question is, how can one live justly in a violent world? The secular must have an answer to that question, but there is only so much that the secular can explain.
Can you go further in defining and specifying justice? I also don’t really understand what people really mean by grace. Is justice a gift from God in this context? If so, I still have no idea what is meant.
To lay my cards out: I’m not sure I have a working definition of “justice” that makes sense to me. And so to live justly in a violent world — I’m not sure I can even fathom what that would be.
What I find so gripping in reading the Greeks — as the Iliad and not the Gospels are Weil’s focus here — is that they seem to do fine without having justice (or injustice) wrapped up in the violent world. It’s not a question that seems to occur to them, even as they describe suffering quite well.
I should clarify that there is a love that those far from God can show. However, it falls short of God's standard in a way that the love of the redeemed does not. Yet the world is a better place for having Socrates and others like him.
Justice in this context is conformity to the divine standard of love for God and neighbor. Justice (or righteousness) is a gift first of standing before God and secondly of supernatural obedience in the life.
I can't speak to Homer's view of justice. Socrates certainly seemed to think it was important. Surely there is in Weil's critique of the one using force the implication that reflection on justice and prudence is a good thing and that we neglect it at our peril?
The Greeks had justice, but it’s alien to what we mean when we say the word colloquially. It seems to be more to do with “balance”.
As to Weil, I puzzle at her usage of justice there. Is she speaking of the Christian or Greek version? It’s hard to tell.
What is your own motivation for discussing foreign policy?
The Golden Mean? I would say that it is a lingering reflection of the divine standard in the darkened heart of man.
I appreciate how both you and Mr. Schiffman were able to apologize and get back on track. That takes courage, and civility. Qualities too often lacking in our worlds virtual and non. Thank you both for your considered discussion.
Quite literally, military conquest is where history begins. It almost certainly happened for the first time somewhere in ancient Mesopotamia roughly six thousand years ago, which is where the story of the fall is set. Mere coincidence? Perhaps, but not necessarily: https://shorturl.at/xmf1D
Read the Fagles translation and one other (Kimon Frères i believe). Thank you for fragments of Wiles essay. Interesting thesis I think, but fundamentally wrong and one garnered by an ignorance of a distillation of the lessons Greece absorbed over thousands of years, approximate as it is in geography to what was the cradle of civilization- those even more ancient cultures in what I consider to be a great irony of a label- the so called “Holy” lands. And observers of the insanity of religious wars, and thus only culturally connected to “The Greek Church” - mostly for the ceremonies and the after parties.
Have observed the bad behavior of men who revert to violence to impose their will on others. Weak. Observed boys preparing to show allegiance to their country by sacrifice. Who, it occurs to me never read the Guns of August - or all quiet on the western front, and so accepted unquestionably or fatalistically that they had no more chance to escape death than the dehumanized people across the world they were sent to fight.
No, I think the driving undercurrent that drives conflicts and war is the fear by the chess players who sacrifice everyone’s blood but their own, is that awareness, a growing consciousness on the part of the pawns they want to use who ultimately will just refuse to participate.
The truest thing about the violence that is the hallmark of mankind that I ever heard was not when I was standing at the top of the burial mound at Thermopylae with my father, the burial mound of the three hundred (and guess what? Other Greek troops), were the words very young but (made) ancient veterans of the Vietnam war in a small trailer park in Texas, off the single largest army base at the time - that the purpose of being soldiers was simply this - to die.
Sacrifices to dead gods.
We may very well all die in the fires of an ultimate battle, but it won’t be because humans embrace violence, only that some do.
Read past the Iliad to the Odyssey - and The Aeneid? The human impulse is to explore, maybe not always do just a bit better, but to try in our stumbling imperfection to something higher. Not the violence
'Endless pummeling" ? It will end when the hostages are returned and Hamas is no longer a fighting force... same as in other wars. 'Ostensiby defend'... against 'Ostensible' rockets? No... the rockets are real and the defense need is real.
Ostensibly, in the sense of *only* to defend, and not to participate in the war that unfolds after.
I do feel you are avoiding your tonal contribution in using 'ostensible' which usually functions to imply that the 'real' reason is a purpose more nefarious than 'defense'. Same with 'endless' which implies no goal. C'mon... spit it out.
I think the Biden folks don't understand deterrence at all. They think they're going to defend, but they may get war. As for "endless," go on, you tell me how it ends.
As for "spit it out," do some research on my writing before you run your little mouth.
It does not 'end'. It staggers along like an unhappy marriage in a family home that neither can leave. It is reluctantly 'managed' until one side or the other abandons its fundaments goal.... or at minimum Iran does.
As for my 'little mouth'... that's funny. It took so little to have you escalate and activate the much deplored internet hissy fit. If we can't keep it cool here, no chance in the Mid East.
Fair enough, apologies for the hissy fit. I’m not a fan of policing of discourse on the issue of the Gaza War. I’m no expert on the Middle Wast, but have tried to write honestly and openly about the war here on WoC, not pulling punches. So being accused of nefarious intent set me off.
On the issue at hand, I think Biden, like Obama, has deep misunderstandings of what’s afoot, and about how power works. And if there is wider war, that’s going to be very much his fault. This is, incidentally, completely unrelated to America’s relationship with Israel. It’s much bigger than that relationship.
No problem. Sorry about the 'nefarious'... didn't intend to smear you with that... it was just a linguistic thing about how the tail meanings the word 'ostensible' often has.
Biden/Obama appeasement might be very dangerous. I think that Israel and Iran both no longer believe that U.S is reliably married ideologically and emotionally to Israel.
U.S / Israel relationship is veering towards the transactional as U.S foreign policy becomes more fickle in the winds of domestic emotional drivers. Without full confidence in U.S, Israel will go to war. It knows it can probably win wars but cannot win a fever of forever skirmishes... while under the long term threat of Arab population growth.
But we can do both. They’re not mutually exclusive.