Near the end of last year, the famed British author of spy novels David Cornwell—known by the pen name John le Carré—died at the age of eighty-nine. In his fiction, and to a much greater extent in his public pronouncements, le Carré indulged in fashionable anti-Americanism, and, at the beginning of this century, blamed “neoconservatives” for “appointing the state of Israel as the purpose of all [U.S.] Middle Eastern and practically all global policy.” He also claimed that that “the Jewish lobby in America” tried to “claw him apart” following the publication of his 1983 novel on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, The Little Drummer Girl. Yet in 2019 he signed an open letter vowing not to vote for the Labor party on account of Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitism. And he gave a long interview in 1998 in which he professed an admiration for Jews dating back to his childhood, boasted of his sensitivity toward the “repulsive . . . anti-Semitism” of the British “chattering classes,” and spoke of Israel in glowing terms.

“So where,” asks Melanie Phillips, “lay the truth about John le Carré?”

He wrote The Little Drummer Girl, he said, to educate himself about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. To that end, he visited the Middle East to learn about it firsthand from both sides. However, from his description of this visit in his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, it was the Palestinians who entranced him. He writes of being embraced by their terrorist leader, Yasir Arafat, who placed le Carré’s hand on Arafat’s “Palestinian heart.”

He was clearly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Yet that cause is the destruction of Israel. Ignoring this, he invested both sides with moral equivalence which he appeared to think was a fair and just approach. Such equivalence was also the hallmark of his fiction, in which he presented Western intelligence services as just as amoral, cynical, and squalid as those of the Communist world.

But in any battle between good and evil, moral equivalence is neither fair nor just. Instead, it actually gives victory to the forces of evil. That’s because creating a morally level playing field inescapably makes the bad guys better than they actually are and the good guys worse. So injustice is inevitably done to the good guys, who lose out while the bad guys get rewarded.

In Britain, a number of people who eulogized le Carré after his death praised him for the moral sense they claimed illuminated his fiction. They did not mean by that his contempt for Soviet Communism. They meant instead his contempt for the West.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.