Remembered today as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Jabberwocky, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a/k/a Lewis Carroll) also produced important books and essays on mathematics and formal logic. Adam Roberts, as an admirer of the former works, decided to read the 1897 Symbolic Logic, Part I—and came across the following example of deduction:

No Jews are honest;
Some Gentiles are rich.
Some rich people are dishonest.

Adams responds:

No Jews are . . . hang on a minute. What?

But, look: one particular instance of anti-Semitic generalization surely doesn’t mean that Carroll himself hated Jews. Surely this is just one example of the ways that the background radiation of 19th-century British anti-Semitism fed through into particular texts. It’s not as if Carroll goes on and on about Jews in his dry little book about inductive logic. Is it?

To Roberts’s dismay, the Jews continue to return in such sample statements as “No Gentiles say ‘shpoonj,’” “No Jew is ignorant of Hebrew,” and “Some Jews are rich,” although he reports nothing else as nakedly bigoted as “no Jews are honest.”

Tamir Hayman analyzes the latest reports about an offer by Hamas to release three female soldiers in exchange for 150 captured terrorists, of whom 90 have received life sentences; then, if that exchange happens successfully, a second stage of the deal will begin.

If this does happen, Israel will release all the serious prisoners who had been sentenced to life and who are associated with Hamas, which will leave Israel without any bargaining chips for the second stage. In practice, Israel will release everyone who is important to Hamas without getting back all the hostages. In this situation, it’s evident that Israel will approach the second stage of the negotiations in the most unfavorable way possible. Hamas will achieve all its demands in the first stage, except for a commitment from Israel to end the war completely.

How does this relate to the fighting in Rafah? Hayman explains:

In the absence of an agreement or compromise by Hamas, it is detrimental for Israel to continue the static situation we were in. It is positive that new energy has entered the campaign. . . . The [capture of the] border of the Gaza Strip and the Rafah crossing are extremely important achievements, while the ongoing dismantling of the battalions is of secondary importance.

That being said, Hayman is critical of the approach to negotiations taken so far:

Gradual hostage trades don’t work. We must adopt a different concept of a single deal in which Israel offers a complete cessation of the war in exchange for all the hostages.