Earlier this year, the great Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua died at the age of eighty-five. Robert Alter—who, like the author’s other friends, knew him as “Buli”—offers a personal and literary perspective on Yehoshua’s work:

There is a prevailing notion in the Hebrew criticism of Yehoshua’s novels that they are all about Jewish history, Zionism, and the future of the nation. To this end, critics have dutifully unearthed national and historical motifs, freighted allusions to the Bible, and interrogations of the Zionist project. Some Hebrew critics have come close to turning his stories and novels into national allegories. None of this is altogether off the mark. What such readings miss, however, is the charm of his novels. They also forgo any explanation of how his work has kindled enthusiasm among Americans, Europeans, and others who could scarcely be expected to be much interested in Zionism, the Jewish people, and Jewish history. It’s worth remembering that Buli was also a comic novelist. Granted, the comedy of his fiction is offbeat, deadpan, and often concerned with the grimmest realities of life, from obsession to dementia. Still, reading Buli’s wry descriptions and bizarre scenarios, one often cannot help but smile.

The subject that powerfully engages Yehoshua as a writer is how a perfectly ordinary person can find himself edging by degrees into behaviors that are altogether unreasonable, on occasion grotesque, and, often, bizarrely comic.

Elsewhere, the comedy is in Yehoshua’s droll descriptions. His last novel, The Tunnel, vividly illustrates this. Though about the decline into senility of a character named Zvi Luria (yet another engineer), written when Buli himself was aging, it abounds in amusing formulations. Thus, Herod is referred to as “the admirable King Herod, who ruled our nation for almost 40 years, and was like the Office for Public Works and Israeli Roads rolled into one.”

Buli, needless to say, was urgently concerned with sounding the depths of his people’s bewildering and often murky history and trying to make out how Zionism might provide a viable response to the challenging ambiguities of the Jewish condition. . . . As a novelist, however, he often used the vehicle of fiction to indulge playfully in whimsical ideas and situations rather than polemics. His work reminds us that fiction can be entertaining, and perhaps should be, even when it is serious.

Critics of the American bombing raid on Iran have warned that it could lead to dangerous retaliation, and risk dragging the U.S. into a broader conflict. (How this could be a greater risk than allowing the murderous fanatics who govern Iran to have nuclear weapons is a separate question.) Yesterday, Iran indeed retaliated. Noah Rothman writes:

On Monday, Iranian state media released a high-production-value video revealing [the government’s] intention to strike U.S. forces inside neighboring Qatar. A bombastic statement from Iran’s Supreme National Security Council accompanying the video claimed that Iran had launched a salvo of ten missiles at the U.S.-manned Al Udeid Air Base, which “pulverized” American forces. In reality, the missiles seem to have all been intercepted before they reached their targets. No casualties have been reported.

In fact, the Iranians quietly gave Qatar—the Gulf state with which they have the best relations—advance warning of the attack, knowing that the Qataris would then pass it on to the U.S. Thus prepared, American forces were able to minimize the damage. Rothman continues:

So far, Iran’s retaliatory response to U.S. strikes on its nuclear program looks a lot like its reaction to the 2020 attack that killed the Revolutionary Guard commander Qassem Suleimani—which is to say that it seems like Tehran is seeking an offramp to avoid a potentially existential conflict with the United States.

Now, it’s important to note that this is only a face-saving climb-down if that’s how we want to interpret it. The only reason why we remember the Iranian operation aimed at avenging Soleimani’s death as a cease-fire overture is because we decided to take it that way. We didn’t have to do that. One-hundred-and-ten U.S. service personnel were treated for injuries as a result of that direct and unprecedented ballistic-missile attack on U.S. forces in Iraq. . . . The U.S. could have regarded that strike as an unacceptable precedent, but the Trump administration had made its point. By simply deeming deterrence to have been restored, the U.S. helped bring that condition about.

It appears that is precisely what the U.S. has done this time. Last night both Washington and Tehran announced a cease-fire, one that includes Israel. Whether it will hold remains to be seen; Iran already managed to get in a deadly, eleventh-hour attack on civilians in Beersheba. If Jerusalem knew such an arrangement was in the cards—and there is every reason to think it did—then its military activities over the past few days start to make a great deal of sense.

Since June 13, there has been some lack of clarity about whether Israel’s goal is to destroy Iran’s nuclear and ballistic-missile capabilities, or to destabilize the regime. Now it seems that the IDF has been doing precisely what it has done in the final phase of almost every prior war: try to inflict as much damage as possible upon the enemy’s military infrastructure before the U.S. blows the whistle and declares the war over—thus reestablishing deterrence and leaving its enemy’s offensive capabilities severely weakened.

In the next item, I’ll turn to some of the nonmilitary targets Israel chose.