Einat Wilf—an Israeli scholar-turned-politician-turned-public intellectual—has recently released a volume of her collected essays. Titled Winning the War of Words, it addresses the challenges currently faced by the Jewish state, including the difficulty of defending Israel’s moral rightness in the face of misinformation and demonization. In his review, Matti Friedman has much praise and one caveat:

I have my doubts about [one] of Wilf’s observations about intellectual efforts on behalf of Israel: “while victory in this battle [to defend Israel], as in others, is not likely to be swift, with the proper resources, organization, and determination it is within reach.” I don’t think this is the case, just as I don’t think that eloquent explanations in the 1920s could have convinced Germans that Jewish bankers were not manipulating the financial markets for their own devious gain, or that skillful essays or speeches could have countered the idea in capitalist countries that Bolshevism was a Jewish plot. No “war of words,” however “skillful,” can defeat the anti-Jewish obsession that crops up with unfortunate regularity in world history, of which today’s anti-Israel fixation is merely the most recent incarnation.

Explanations of Israel’s complexities in the real world will have a limited effect not just because they are necessarily complicated, but because the Israel obsession—in the manner of obsessions—isn’t really about Israel at all, or about the real world. These pathologies can perhaps be tempered on the margins but cannot be made to go away.

Yesterday, the Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.