The life of Shaul Magid, now a professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth, captures something of the Jewish experience in the second half of the 20th century: growing up on suburban Long Island, and from there joining the counterculture, which led him successively to the Jewish renewal movement, to a haredi community in Israel, to the radical religious Zionism of the West Bank, and finally back to Jewish renewal and writing justly admired scholarly works on Hasidism. Now he is also one of the leading voices in Jewish studies calling for the termination of Israel and urging Jews to worry less about anti-Semitism. His latest collection of essays describes some of his spiritual peregrinations while setting forth a political position he calls “counter-Zionism.” Daniel B. Schwartz writes in his review:

“To say it plainly,” [Magid] writes, “while I am not against the State of Israel, I am not in favor of it functioning as an exclusively ‘Jewish’ state.” This sentence raises too many questions to qualify as plain speaking. . . .

[S]urveys have consistently shown that the plurality of world Jewry that lives in Israel wants the state to remain “Jewish” in some shape or form. Nor is there substantial support for a binational solution among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Most Israeli Jews and Palestinians who advocate for a single state “from the river to the sea” envision not any kind of shared sovereignty but a state where either Jews or Palestinians will dominate. Magid’s counter-Zionism is not so much a political program as it is a utopian posture or attitude.

It is easy to valorize exile from the perch of an Ivy League university set on a sylvan campus in the charming town of Hanover, New Hampshire; the German Jews deported from Hanover, Germany, in 1941 probably felt differently. Nonetheless, a book that took the pains to work out a positive philosophy of exile based on deep engagement with a broad spectrum of Jewish thought would have been well worth reckoning with. But that is a book that these “essays from a distance” [as the book’s subtitle puts it] only gesture at.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.