The House Oversight Committee held a hearing on November 13 on the subject of unidentified anomalous phenomena—that is, UFOs. Besides dropping some tantalizing crumbs for UFO obsessives, the hearing offered little information about alien life or bizarre enemy aircraft. Clare Coffey takes a hard look at the world of those obsessives and notes one of the most popular recent trends, which involves not science fiction but the mysterious antediluvian giants (in Hebrew, Nephilim) of Genesis 6:4:

It is easy to see why the Nephilim became a popular speculative touchpoint for UFO esotericists. The theory accounts for the high-handed way in which the UFO phenomenon seems to interact with its human targets, and provides a framework for many of the bizarre recurring motifs in UFO abductee accounts. . . . It offers a radically reworked vision of human history and the human present, as well as hints about the human future. It touches on the claims of major religions but, because it draws heavily on the apocryphal book of Enoch, incurs little danger of implicitly accepting the authority of any one religion.

But as you scroll through page after page, video after video, purporting to reveal the UFO–Bible–Nephilim connection and what it means, it is tempting to adopt the more capacious conclusion: that interest or belief in UFOs is purely and simply the search for a substitute for religion in a godless age. However, I do not think this is true.

How, then does Coffey explain these obsessions? As an escape from the mechanistic view of the universe provided by the scientific revolution—not as ersatz religion but as an antidote to science.

As the war in Gaza appears to be coming to close, writes Michael Milshtein, Israelis are left with “a sense of failure and bitterness” despite the IDF’s “military successes and strategic achievements.” Meanwhile, he writes, Gazans are likely to see the war as a “historic achievement,” and thus once more fall into the cycle of ecstasy and amnesia that Shany Mor identified as the key pattern in Palestinian understanding of the conflict.

Milshtein too acknowledges how much the present results resemble what preceded them, reminding us that Arabs and Israelis felt similarly after

the 1956 Sinai Campaign when, like in the current war, Israel was pressured by the United States to withdraw from conquered territories and bring the conflict to an end. The same applies to the Yom Kippur War, the second intifada, the Second Lebanon War, and the 2014 Operation Protective Edge [against Hamas]. Arab collective memory regards these events as achievements resulting from sacrifice and the ability to absorb severe blows, exhibit steadfastness (sumud), and make it impossible for Israel to declare decisive victory.

This phenomenon shouldn’t lead Israel to conclude it has been defeated but must be understood so as to formulate sober goals and courses of action in dealing with enemies in the region.

For now, there are no signs of soul-searching [among Palestinians] concerning the price of the war. Responsibility for the carnage and destruction, described as a nakba greater than that of 1948, is laid at Israel’s doorstep. This reflects a long-standing fundamental Palestinian flaw: a “bipolarity” with, on the one hand, fighting spirit and praise for the ability to harm Israel and, on the other, victimhood from the results of the war the Palestinians themselves started.