A word that came up in Elliott Abrams’s discussion of the peace process was “unreality,” and perhaps the 20th-century writer most adept at describing similar kinds of unreality was George Orwell. Matti Friedman takes a close look at Orwell’s journalism and its relevance today, and especially at his memoir of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia—which happens to be one of my favorite books:

[B]ecause he told the truth as he saw it and was not seduced by fashionable opinion, because he preferred people to ideas, and because of his incomparably clear and urgent style, it is Orwell more than any other modern writer who remains the compass for those who hope to describe a bewildering world in clear English.

“Bewildering” is certainly one way to describe a Western intellectual scene that has responded to a murderous rampage by religious fanatics against Jews on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent war to defeat the culprits, by making excuses for Islamic terrorists while accusing the Jews of genocide. This might also be the right word to describe how a war in one small corner of the Middle East has morphed into a moment of cultural significance far beyond Israel’s borders.

Here Friedman, who is not only the author of his own excellent war memoir but the sharpest critic of what passes for Middle East reporting in the Western press, points to a key passage:

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. .  . . I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”

“All of this,” writes Friedman,

sounds as if it were drawn precisely from my own experience seven decades later working in the Western press in Israel: . . . we were expected to tiptoe politely around Islam’s two billion adherents and pretend the region’s key story was a group of six million Jews oppressing a minority, the Palestinians, who only wanted a peaceful state beside Israel.

At the moment, Hizballah’s superiors in Tehran probably aren’t giving much thought to the militia’s next move. More likely, they are focused on the fact that their country’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, along with the foreign minister, may have been killed in a helicopter crash near the Iran-Azerbaijan border. Iranians set off fireworks to celebrate the possible death of this man known as “butcher of Tehran” for his role in executing dissidents. Shay Khatiri explains what will happen next:

If the president is dead or unable to perform his duties for longer than two months, the first vice-president, the speaker of the parliament, and the chief justice, with the consent of the supreme leader, form a council to choose the succession mechanism. In effect, this means that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei will decide [how to proceed]. Either a new election is called, or Khamenei will dictate that the council chooses a single person to avoid an election in time of crisis.

Whatever happens next, however, Raisi’s “hard landing” will mark the first chapter in a game of musical chairs that will consume the Islamic Republic for months and will set the stage not only for the post-Raisi era, but the post-Khamenei one as well.

As for the inevitable speculation that Raisi’s death wasn’t an accident: everything I have read so far suggests that it was. Still, that its foremost enemy will be distracted by a succession struggle is good news for Israel. And it wouldn’t be terrible if Iran’s leaders suspect that the Mossad just might have taken out Raisi. For all their rhetoric about martyrdom, I doubt they relish the prospect of becoming martyrs themselves.