Reflecting on the subject of Jews and power, and the particular discomfort that many Jews appear to have with the military power Israel uses to defend itself from those who would destroy it, Ruth Wisse shares a joke:

Two Jews in a wagon are traveling along a narrow country road when suddenly their horse rears to a stop. A boulder is blocking their path. The Jews begin trading ideas on what they ought to do. As they sit there deliberating, another wagon approaches from the opposite direction and stops across from them. Two peasants jump down, roll up their sleeves, and heave the rock out of the way.

“There’s goyish thinking for you,” says one Jew to the other; “Always with force.”

The joke, which comes from an early-20th-century Yiddish humor collection, is but one example of a whole category of Jewish jokes, which, as Wisse explains, reveal much:

What better way to introduce the thorny question of “Jews and power” than with those who turned the problem into a joke on themselves? These Yiddish humorists had good reason to think themselves more advanced than the surrounding peasantry: they were literate, well-educated, and nonviolent, qualities representing a higher stage of civilization. The premise of both jokes is that, unlike those others, Jews of their kind do not resort to force. Yet in each case they, not the peasants, are the butt of the humor, precisely because they don’t use physical means—not when they’re appropriate to remove the obstacle and not when they’re necessary to confront the threat.

These jokes are wonderfully witty tributes to a society whose learned jokesters were so intellectually agile they could hold contradictory ideas without losing their moral balance or their sanity. They are also insiders’ jokes. In turning the jokes on themselves, the humorists acknowledge that the vaunted habit of talmudic thinking is useless when physical effort is called for; that nonviolence, however praiseworthy, can become contemptible cowardice when others aggress against you. In their own idiom, these Jews pass judgment—affectionate censure—on their unsuitable relation to power.

Yesterday I saw an unconfirmed report that the Biden administration has offered Israel a massive arms deal in exchange for a promise not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Even if the report is incorrect, there is plenty of other evidence that the White House has been trying to dissuade Jerusalem from mounting such an attack. The thinking behind this pressure is hard to fathom, as there is little Israel could do that would better serve American interests in the Middle East than putting some distance between the ayatollahs and nuclear weapons. Aaron MacLean explains why this is so, in the context of a broader discussion of strategic priorities in the Middle East and elsewhere:

If the Iran issue were satisfactorily adjusted in the direction of the American interest, the question of Israel’s security would become more manageable overnight. If a network of American partners enjoyed security against state predation, the proactive suppression of militarily less serious threats like Islamic State would be more easily organized—and indeed, such partners would be less vulnerable to the manipulation of powers external to the region.

[The Biden administration’s] commitment to escalation avoidance has had the odd effect of making the security situation in the region look a great deal as it would if America had actually withdrawn [from the Middle East].

Alternatively, we could project competence by effectively backing our Middle East partners in their competitions against their enemies, who are also our enemies, by ensuring a favorable overall balance of power in the region by means of our partnership network, and by preventing Iran from achieving nuclear status—even if it courts escalation with Iran in the shorter run.