Henry Kissinger’s Religious Awakening

Having come to America as a teenager fleeing Nazi Germany, Henry Kissinger returned during World War II with the U.S. Army and was deeply moved after playing a role in liberating a concentration camp. Yet he has had little connection with Jewish life in his long career since then. Jeremy Rosen was thus surprised by what he found in the controversial former secretary of state’s most recent book:

At the age of ninety-nine, [Kissinger] has just published a new book, Leadership: Six Studies in World Leadership, describing the careers of leaders he admired—Konrad Adenauer of Germany, Charles De Gaulle of France, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat of Egypt, Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, and Margaret Thatcher of the UK. Significantly, he points out that they were all deeply religious, with the possible exception of Lee Kuan Yew. . . . He laments the erosion of moral purpose and the religious belief that often underpinned Western societies, and looks aghast at these divisive destructive features of American politics today.

Although some Jews like to claim him as one of ours, his whole career seems to have been an escape from everything Jewish.

The Nixon tapes have recorded him remaining silent as his [boss] excoriates Jews in general. When he returned from the war in Europe, he told his father, “Certain ties bound in convention mean nothing to me. I have come to judge men on their merits.” He told Golda Meir that he was an American first, a Nixonite second, and a Jew last. She replied that in Israel, they read from right to left! . . . In recent years, [however], he has been seen in Orthodox synagogues on the High Holy Days.

Read more at Algemeiner

More about: Decline of religion, Golda Meir, Henry Kissinger

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF