Dwelling, Together, on Common Ground

The only way forward is to agree

I can’t be at the march in D.C. today because I’m still infectious from Covid, but I wish I was there because I wanted to show up for the Jews, Israel, and the Peace Bloc. I wanted to literally stand for the things that serious people can agree on:

1. Right of Israel to be a Jewish and democratic state

2. Right of Palestinians to have a democratic state west of Jordan

3. Condemnation of Hamas’ slaughter, rape and desecration of civilians, especially on October 7

4. Need for the immediate return of all the hostages: young, elderly, infirm: all kidnapped in a war crime

5. Rights of all people to worship and love as they choose

6. Condemnation of the antisemitic violence, rhetoric, and vandalism seen at rallies and in attacks across the world

7. Condemnation of any Islamophobia from whatever community on whatever platform

Some people say they want to overthrow the capitalist neo-liberal world order and this moment is an opportunity. It is pretty clear that capitalism has extreme and pernicious effects on people and environments, so I have sympathies with that perspective. But at no point in the process of overthrowing can we capitulate to intolerant, repressive governments and I have not seen anyone make a case — compelling or otherwise — of how to get to a post-capitalist world order that values human dignity through a particular course of action in Gaza.

I have strong opinions on the makeup and beliefs of the current Israeli government. I have personally protested against Bibi and his cronies, as did a massive proportion of the Israeli public every week over the last year. Indeed those protests continued until the country was thrown into war on October 7. I wish the Palestinians could protest their governments without being killed for it. I wish Americans had come out against Trump in similar numbers for similar lengths of time.

I think there are reasonable differences on how to safely disengage from the Occupation on the West Bank. And we can differ on exactly how Israel can rescue the hostages and dismantle the jihadist terror group sworn to its destruction less than 50 miles from most of Israel’s population. Certainly the civilian deaths caused by Israel’s attempts to root out Hamas behind their human shields are tragic. We can debate whose hands that blood stains, we agree that it needs to stop.

I’m still not sure how to deal with the elected government of an autonomous territory that brutally assassinated its opposition and has refused to hold elections for 16 years — a terrorist gang that has parasitically sucked all the humanitarian aid to leave Palestinians in refugee camps while it builds military installations under hospitals and otherwise uses the people as human shields.

What is clear, though, is that the forces of hate and intolerance profit by ongoing death and conflict. They profit not only in the Middle East — and, as I’ve discussed, this is not simply a Palestine-Israel problem — but across the world. In repressive countries this is a distraction, in democratic countries it’s a division. Only by dwelling on our common ground and resolving our problems can we actually improve this world. And, on that, I hope we can agree.

Shalom, Salaam, Peace

wickey-nl, wiki commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Israel-Palestine_peace.svg

If You Don’t Think the Conflict Is Confusing, You Don’t Understand What’s Going On

And, if you are confused, here’s some explanation

In Part 1, I tried to speak a little bit for myself and lots of Jews I know, just to express some of what we’re feeling. Here in Part 2, I’ll try to explain how I see the complicated conflict as it is playing out politically and then in Part 3 I’ll try to explain the four completely different times that people are living in.

Some people think that the Israel-Hamas conflict is simple: whoever demonstrates more dead babies online wins. Dead and wounded babies are horrible, but — not least in the age of bot armies, AI, and a complete lack of platform moderation — this is obvious nonsense. But, in a sense, they are right. After all, one unchecked bulletin from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry about a hospital blast largely derailed a peace visit from President Biden.

The reason that the actual conflict around Gaza right now is so perplexing is that it exists simultaneously on three different physical scales. Individual, national, and global. Two of them are materially simple, one is extremely complex.

Online we are flooded with images of the individual. All news boils down to babies. Babies are injured or killed. It’s appalling and simple: Killing babies is wrong, anyone who hurts babies or supports people who do, must be a monster. We register our outrage. Our brains are wired that way. We don’t have room for nuance when we’re empathizing with wounded infants. The bots and troll armies know that humans work that way, the platform owners make money from the “engagement” — the cycle of outrage continues.

On a global level it’s also relatively simple. There are those who believe in the liberal world order — that all lives are worthwhile, that gender, race, religion and sexuality should not affect agency — and there are those who believe in the selfish pursuit of power. Yes, America and Europe have far more faults than they admit to but, as Winston Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” Again, it’s easy to see why selfish powerful people like Vladimir Putin or Ali Khameini use arms, information technology and anti-diplomacy to murder, destroy, and foster division.

On a national level things are impossible: the contemporary Middle East almost intractable. There are a few places that the two radically different scales of individual and global intersect in a way that helps autocracies profit from mass audiences. The most notable one is the area of the eastern Mediterranean around Israel.

It’s notable because, unlike India which gained its independence from Britain a year earlier and which also saw a (much larger) shameful mass emigration of Muslims, Israel has been in a constant state of existential threat since 1948. And, because Israel is the birthplace of Christianity, the homeland of the Jews and a holy city for Islam, it’s both a three way flashpoint and the home to the greatest density of foreign media in the world.

As most Israelis and most Jews around the world well know, there can be no lasting peace without a rapprochement with the surrounding nations and the Palestinians. And, as Amos Oz pointed out, the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is a struggle of "right against right.”

But, as Oz also pointed out, talking on the national level in 2002, there are two wars in the region “One is a just war, and the other is both unjust and futile.” For him, as for the majority of Jews around the world, struggles for Palestinian autonomy are just, terrorist attacks on civilians are unjust. He was talking at a time before most of the Arab monarchies and autocracies had even reached an uneasy peace with Israel — where we were a month ago.

Unfortunately, a situation where Saudi Arabia had good terms with Israel was an untenable threat for Saudi’s major rival for regional power. Whether Iran gave a specific go ahead or or just a general green light, they were fully behind the massacre of October 7. Iran directly runs Hezbollah, the terror organization across Israel’s northern border in Lebanon and funds Hamas, the terror organization that runs Gaza.

So Hamas vs Israel is a proxy war between Iran and the United States to make a point to Saudi Arabia to add to the proxy wars they are fighting in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Nigeria, and Lebanon. if it helps bring the whole world to war and takes the United States out of Ukraine and Iran’s business, so much the better.

But the complications of the actual facts on the ground over the last century are overruled on the one hand by misguided fervor and on the other, photos of babies. It’s so much easier to fix things in other places. It’s so easy to blame the hated foreigner, of another religion. It’s much harder to love your neighbour, fix your own government, learn about geopolitics, and reform the information stream.

At least that’s what Putin, Khamenei and Ismail Haniyeh are banking on.

I Think This Is How Your Jewish Friends Are Feeling

Part One of a response to the aftermath of the October 7 massacres

Not just Israelis, but Jews around the world are feeling angry, bereft and scared right now. Israel the country is literally shut down, psychologically traumatized, and under attack by Hezbollah from the North. It has a citizen army and is mobilized for war in the South which means that everyone knows someone whose life is on the line.

The People of Israel, “Am Yisrael,” comprises barely 15 million Jews around the world, so when half of us are in deep anguish, we feel it as a family, but we, in the diaspora, also feel it because, after the most brutal attack on Jews since the Nazis nearly annihilated us, people are on the streets of London, New York, Sydney, Los Angeles, never mind Beirut, Tunis, Tehran, or Amman, calling for the further death of Jews.

This is part one of three notes I’ve written to try to make sense of the most traumatic Jewish moment in the past 50 years. I’ve tried to write them for my friends who are adjacent to the conflict, trying to give a sense of the nuances of the situation, but also the deep pain on both sides. I want to talk about how I’m making sense of it from the middle of the progressive Jewish experience — which is the majority Jewish experience. I want to explain how we feel in the aftermath of the October 7 massacres, as someone who has worked for human rights in general and, for Palestinian rights and co-existence in the Middle East in particular, from a very Jewish angle.

I’ll get more things wrong than usual. But I know you — and any friends you send these to — will forgive me. It’s a difficult time.

Part one explains how I am feeling now — and I think I speak for a few friends and family — almost two weeks on from an attack that was filmed on GoPros and streamed for posterity by Hamas. I want to send this out before shabbat arrives in New York.

Part two explains why the contemporary politics of the conflict are so complicated. If you think they’re simple, you don’t understand.

Part three explains how the historical worldview of the different sides of the conflict are totally different and, in many ways, incompatible.

At the moment, though, Jewish families around the world are feeling many things, most importantly, perhaps, four things.

1. Anger and sorrow about our brothers and sisters who were savagely killed, brutalized, or taken hostage on October 7.

2. Fear that we Jews are being dehumanized by those we thought were our friends, being blamed for a conflict deliberately provoked by a Hamas’ terror attack. Fear that we are in danger from the rising tide of hatred that afflicts the simple-minded on both sides, blaming Jews — and Muslims — for genocide.

3. Deep empathy and grief for the innocent Palestinian and Israeli civilians who are dead, wounded, captive, under constant threat and who continue to die every day as rockets fly.

4. Profoundly weary that hatred is flourishing. Far from the peace that most of us have worked so hard to achieve, antisemitism is spiking, the Middle East is alight again, and neither Israel nor the West are any refuge from the pogroms and Jew hatred we thought we had moved on from.

On top of these four visceral feelings, we’re all caught up in the information war. Reasonable people are talking irresponsibly, and unreasonable people are reveling in the havoc they can wield. We’re unsurprised that ideological media is spewing its predictable, unhelpful pablum, and we’re angry that, after a decade of conspiracy theories, virulent sexism, anti-vaxxing, climate denial, election denial and murder manifestos, algorithmic platforms of user-generated ad content are still able to proliferate hate for profit.

And we feel betrayed by supposedly reliable fact-based media who too often feed the frenzy, instead of getting to the facts and condemning the hatred. The thoughtless repetition of the Hamas press release about the rocket and the hospital before any fact-checking was done was just the most egregious moment of White Christian privilege by outlets (BBC, Sky, New York Times, CNN) that will not be the first target of the hate their headlines stirred.

As well as provoking angry anti-Israel and anti-Jewish demonstrations around the world, those headlines sabotaged President Biden’s visit to Jordan which could have been the key to minimising this conflict.

I’m going to go and hug my family, as Jews across the world are doing with added poignancy these days. Because it feels like a strange and ominous world we’ve brought them into. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” — we have a lot of work to do to bring that arc back the right way.

Shabbat Shalom

AI Is Revolutionary, But Let's Take a Quick Breath

We need to deal with the inhuman at a human pace

We’re already living in a time where our collective inability to deal with eco-grief — and move past denial to sustainable future — threatens our entire planet. Our first contact with AI is threatening to do the same. AI will radically change our world and we need to come to terms with that. Life without iPhones, social media, or the internet is now almost unimaginable to those under 30, and AI will quickly display change an order of magnitude greater.

Every single piece of digital information that you can send, receive or imagine sending or receiving can now be — or very soon will be — duplicable or fakeable in real time. Your child’s voice, your lover’s video FaceTime, your accountant’s signature, your favourite password all replaced and reused. Whatever tenuous human control we individuals ever had over the internet in the face of the massive tech giant algorithms will dissolve.

However, this is not a piece about the dangers of AI, or even a piece about its promises. There are many places you can go to read the latest thinking about the phenomenon but they are almost instantly outmoded and outdated. That’s because one of the three main significant aspects of AI is its exponential growth. In 6 years it has increased in speed and scope from being a game-winning concept to a game-changing reality.

Imagine an ad studio and a focus group that was able to use billions of existing data points to modify both the efficiency of the focus group as well as the efficiency of the message almost instantly. Imagine how rapidly and effectively it could hone the ad’s message. Every experience that takes humans 10,000 hours to reach mastery will take an AI five minutes.

The second attribute of AI which changes it from just the Amazon or Facebook algorithms on steroids, is its ability to generate language. One of the names for the particular types of AI that we have now is GLLM (pronounced “Golem”) and which stands for Generative Large Language Models. The point about those is that not only that they learn by imitating, but they can also generate human-like language which gives computers new skills and, paired with the ethics-free environment of user-generated content platforms (known, bizarrely, as “social” media), will lead to even further toxicity from Musk, Zuckerberg et al.

The third aspect of AI, which is almost impossible to grasp, is its ability to scale. Until now, algorithms have been specific and, even if vast, have been limited to particular outfits. Even though their properties are largely unknown and, despite some lawsuits, unaccountable, Bing, Google, Amazon are recognizable outlets with proprietary algorithms. The new AIs will transcend those like Google dwarfed Ask Jeeves.

AI is going to take advantage of the ubiquitous availability of personal data that no one ever talks about (credit score data, behavioral data, location data, etc.). This wealth of readily available data will empower autonomous agents to "test and learn" how best to persuade people to do almost anything. We will see countless numbers of companies start using this super-powered ad-tech this year. — Shelly Palmer

There’s real reason to suspect that the AI on Google for example, would eventually “talk” to the AIs on other platforms. In fact, that’s exactly what the AI boom has grown out of, the ability of different fields and different programs to form their output in a way that allows them to talk to one another. At the moment, there’s not a good understanding of how AIs could or would communicate with each other, but it’s a simple emerging property that will inevitably come.

It’s extremely human to understand our dreams and aspirations for the future in terms of what we know now and what we’ve grown up with. But working through our eco grief is helping us shape our understanding of a changing world. Knowing that we will grow older in a world with an irreparably changed climate and whose population has doubled since 1973 (and also doubled between 1950 and 1987) can allow us to take action to save this crowded planet. Knowing that AI will transform our coming decades will help us be a central part of that transformation.

For the moment, AI doesn’t think, it just imitates. And if it does gain some form of self-consciousness we can hope that orthogonality will mean that its superhuman abilities will give it superhuman ethics. But, at a pace much faster than we (or our religions) have dealt with our eco-anxiety we must face up to, and overcome our AI-fear. If we don’t embrace and shape the fact that AI will transform pretty much every aspect of society whether political, economic, cultural it will transform them despite us, rather than for our benefit.

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Happy 2023!

This has been my first newsletter post of the year because I’ve barely written for myself. Instead, I have spent much of this year as a small and part time, but busy, part of setting up Shtetl: Haredi Free Press.

It’s a new 501c3 nonprofit news organization providing independent coverage of Ultra Orthodox Jewish communities in the New York area. My friend Larry Cohler-Esses wrote about it for the New York Daily News and I hope to write more about why this particular black hole of news at the heart of one of the world’s great news cities is so particularly fascinating.

I also did write this piece for its launch, explaining the name, “Shtetl.”

Sci-Fi Bylines: Most of the bylines I’ve produced so far this year have been my regular monthly SF reviews for Book and Film Globe (you can listen to them all, too, I think) I think my favourite books have been the new ones from Ann Leckie and Annalee Newitz, but some interesting ones all around.

Photo by Gili Getz

Climate Justice: Climate is a religious matter. If you want to read about the intersection of Judaism and Eco-anxiety — which is the type of effort I think we should rapidly make to deal with AI — my friend and colleague Rabbi Laura Bellows wrote a wonderful piece about the Spiritual Adaptation workshops she puts on for Dayenu.