In 2000, the New York Times published an excerpt from Norman Podhoretz’s book My Love Affair with America, a book that bears the delightful subtitle The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative. This excerpt contains no explicit reference to the author’s Jewish upbringing, but it’s hardly a coincidence that the robust enthusiasm for America he expresses therein is a defining feature of neoconservatism, a movement largely founded and led by those like Podhoretz whose parents and grandparents were East European Jewish immigrants. Jews, of course, and despite everything, have particular reason to be grateful to the United States. Since tomorrow is Independence Day, this seems like especially timely reading:

[E]ven a lifelong radical like the philosopher Bertrand Russell could say of his own country that “Love of England is very nearly the strongest emotion I possess.”

I feel much the same way about America, land of my birth, “land that I love.” (I can still hear those words being belted out every week on the radio by Kate Smith, a big star of the 1940s, in her signature song, “God Bless America.”) But I only plumbed the depths of this feeling in the course of being driven, almost against my will, to defend the country with all my might against its ideological enemies on the left from the late 1960s on. These were people who had been my own political allies and personal friends up to the point where they were seized by a veritable hatred of America; and it was because I could not stomach the terrible and untrue things they were saying about this country that I wound up breaking with them.

Beyond being defended by a counterattack against its assailants and an exposure of their misrepresentations and slanders, America deserved to be glorified with a full throat and a whole heart.

That is exactly what I want to do here through telling . . . the story of how and why my love affair with America developed, how it ran into a rough patch, and how it then emerged with all doubts stilled and reservations removed, leaving me uncharacteristically full of optimism and good cheer. America, according to some who have preceded me in their attitude toward it, is “God’s country.” This is, as the pages that follow will attest, a judgment with which I have no inclination whatsoever to disagree.

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:

The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:

An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.