Israel - We need to have a word

You know how a true friend is one who is candid? They tell you the truth even when you may not want to hear it.

Israel. I love you. But we have to talk.

It seems you have a new law—a death penalty law. Death by hanging; which feels particularly archaic and barbaric. It brings to mind the gallows of the old west, the Nuremberg trials, even the Book of Esther.

I suppose I should be thankful stoning wasn’t chosen.

Admittedly, Jews have a history with the death penalty.

The Torah prescribes it for 36 offenses, including murder, kidnapping, and severe religious violations like idolatry and breaking the Sabbath.

However, the rabbis of the Talmud sharply restricted its use. The Mishnah teaches that a court that executes once in seventy years is considered “destructive.”

And of course there is the principle associated with Maimonides: better to acquit a thousand guilty people than to put a single innocent one to death.

For this reason, for many centuries, Jews have not been enthusiastic about capital punishment.

Modern Jewish movements—Conservative and Reform—have explicitly opposed it. Orthodox Judaism has never embraced it in practice either.

As for the modern State of Israel, capital punishment has been carried out only once, in the case of Adolf Eichmann.

Until now.

Because this proposed law is not exactly for Israelis. More for Palestinians. Not exactly for crimes inside Israel proper, but in the West Bank.

It targets terrorism: a person who intentionally causes death with the aim of harming a citizen or resident of Israel, and with the intent of rejecting the existence of the state.

The law outlines two tracks: one in Israeli civilian courts, and another in military courts in the West Bank—courts that try Palestinians under military law.

In that system, the sentence could become mandatory: death, and that penalty only.

So not only would a mandatory death sentence be new in Israeli law, it would, in practice, apply almost exclusively to Palestinians.

There is a term for when one law applies to one group and another to a different group: two-tiered justice. A less polite word is discrimination.

History offers examples of such systems. None are remembered kindly. And Israel has long resisted being associated with such comparisons—for good reason.

You might think discrimination only cuts one way. It doesn’t. It's said we've lost the war when we become our enemy's image of us.

I remember learning that, in its time, the Torah was relatively progressive in its treatment of the stranger—precisely because Israel knew what it meant to be one.

“You are to have the same law for the foreigner and the native-born.” (Leviticus 24:22)

On this day, erev Pesach, it bears remembering.

The Israelites were subject to a different law than their taskmasters in Egypt.

It did not end well for Egypt.

Day falls

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Rain falls

snow falls

leaves fall

on the ground

gone;

Day falls

like a staple

in the carpet

hidden

sharp

felt

after 

a step.

The Junos

I generally don’t watch award shows. Haven’t for years. Contrary to what they claim, they’re not “best of” honours. They’re high-profile, glitzy promotional events—industry types networking and sizing each other up.

I used to watch the Oscars and Grammys when I was young. When you’re a kid, you’re still figuring out what’s worth caring about. As a teenager, I idolized rock stars. Award shows fed that need for validation, putting the performers I liked up on a pedestal.

Then I grew up. I stopped caring about entertainers, who by then seemed like egomaniacs chasing a buck, and got on with my own way of trying to make one.

It’s been decades since I could identify the latest crop of hitmakers. For me, it ended with hip hop.

Until this year.

My era of music seems to be having a moment, and that’s why I actually watched some of the Junos.

I wanted to hear Joni Mitchell, who—along with Leonard Cohen—is unquestionably the greatest songwriter this country has produced. There’s really no contest. She’s better than Neil Young. Better than Gordon Lightfoot. Even a notch above Cohen, because unlike him, she can sing.

In the end, Joni didn’t have much to say accepting her long-overdue lifetime achievement award. Not surprising, considering she nearly died from a brain aneurysm in 2015, losing the ability to walk or talk, and has been rehabilitating ever since. A lifetime smoker, she did offer one pithy line about it: it was the best thing that ever happened to her she said—it finally made her quit cigarettes.

The most poignant words weren’t hers. They came from Prime Minister Carney, the surprise presenter of her award. He said it’s not just that Joni is a great songwriter, it’s that her sensibility is uniquely Canadian—“geese in chevron flight,”(from Urge For Going) “a little money riding on the Maple Leafs,” (from Raised On Robbery) “a river to skate away on” (from River). In her songs, he said, she “drew a map of Canada” (from A Case of You).

And that’s when it hit me. This Junos felt different. It wasn’t just an awards show—it was a celebration of Canada, at a time when Canadian sovereignty feels under threat. The organizers nailed it.

Even Joni seemed to understand. Thanking the Prime Minister, she said, “We are so fortunate to have him. I’m living in the States, and you know what’s happening there… This man is a blessing. You guys are so fortunate.”

The pièce de résistance was the opener—a surprise performance by Rush, their first live appearance since the death of their legendary drummer Neil Peart in 2020.

And then, yesterday, Céline Dion announced she’ll return to the stage this fall in Paris after an absence of four years due to illness.

Before the show, Carney told reporters the world needs more Canada.

I think Canadians do too.

Beyond Narratives

Human beings are born storytellers. It's in our nature.

We tell stories to make sense of our experience. We tell stories to find reasons. We tell stories to explain. We tell stories to find meaning. We tell stories to connect with each other. We tell stories to amuse and entertain.

The popular writer Noah Yuval Harari describes storytelling as our superpower. It's this ability that fundamentally differentiates homo sapiens from the rest of the animal kingdom. It's allowed us to rise to the top of the survival heap. 

While animals only cooperate with their biological kin or in small packs, our species learned to cooperate with total strangers by telling stories. 

Telling stories has allowed us to collaborate on a mass scale. Pooling our various talents and skills we were able to learn from one another, share with one another, trade with one another and dominate as a species. 

Through stories we created social systems, societies, institutions and civilizations. We created mass market economies, countries, and international organizations.    

I was a storyteller once. Even published short stories and two novels. I wrote book reviews for the newspaper, and gave reviews as public lectures. 

And then it just stopped.

Not only did I lose my desire to write and publish stories. I lost my desire to read them. Up to that point I read about a novel a month. And fiction was all that I read. Then one day - it seemed like it happened overnight - I felt that I never wanted to read another novel again.

I couldn't explain why.   

It happened about ten years ago, so part of me thinks it had to do with donald trump, and his omnipresent brand of post-truth politics. Here for the first time was a politician who somehow defied narrative. 

His political ascendency was both a product of the imagination and made possible by a failure of the imagination. He was a creation of television, more fictional character than real, for years the target of  mockery and scorn, who was somehow becoming a reality to contend with. Many of us could hardly believe it was possible. 

Sometimes that happens. When something so outrageous impinges on normalcy, we fail to acknowledge it, and before we can, it's too late. 

With trump, the reality we were living became stranger than anything fiction could muster. A satire and absurdity worthy of a Simpson's episode. 

No work of fiction could compete with reality anymore. The lie of fiction - noble lies told in the service of art, beauty and truth - became eclipsed by the hollow, ill-intentioned lies and outlandish conspiracies we were hearing every day emanating from the Oval Office.  

What was the point of reading or writing fiction? It had lost the battle. 

I started reading only non-fiction to try to make sense of the world in which we were living. I read books on philosophy, politics, psychology and even physics. As reality became indistinguishable from fiction, I wanted to feel grounded again.

Those books, however, maintain a certain element of narrative, using cause and effect and chronology to analyze and explain the world. 

In recent years, I've gone a step further. 

I've been reading books on Eastern religion and spirituality. You might call these books anti-narratives. They explore the deepest most universal truths of existence by going beyond narrative. They are written with very little narrative structure, usually question and answer format, a guru responding to disciples. 

At root, the message is that narrative obscures truth. The fundamental purpose of narrative, like memory, is the construction of a particular "self", an identity in which one is a protagonist inside one's own story. According to Eastern wisdom this particular self is artificial and therefore false. It must be transcended in order to live fully and truthfully in the present.

Our emotions are not to be denied or avoided, they are not even to be understood or explained, as we do with the narratives we construct. They are simply to be experienced, accepted, and allowed to come and go, without attaching any meaning to them. 

Easier said than done for most of us. In the West we are conditioned to think of ourselves as the central actors in our stories. 

The realization and acknowledgement that each of us has an infinitesimally small part in a grand and complex eternal reality, can itself, be a source of meaning and liberation. And being fully present, in the moment, constitutes the way to live in reality as it truly is.  

A Self-Fulilling Prophesy

I'm indifferent about most countries, with two exceptions: Canada and Israel. I am a strong supporter of both. Canada, because it's where I live—where my ancestors fled persecution and where my family has planted roots for three generations. Israel, because it is the historical, cultural, and spiritual homeland of my people.

I care about Israel the way I care about Canada. I feel a certain responsibility for both, and I don’t always agree with the policies of either government. The difference is that I have a direct say in Canada’s policies, but not in Israel’s.

Treat Canada badly and I get angry. Same with Israel. Canadians recently got a small taste of what Israel has endured for decades: having its very right to exist questioned. I was outraged when trump suggested Canada should be the 51st state, and that our country exists only because of the United States. I realized the challenge to Canada's legitimacy as a country is the same kind of threat Israelis have been living with since 1948.

The difference is that Canada’s “right to exist” isn’t really in question—except in the mind of a delusional megalomaniac—and most people recognize that.

For Israel, the threat is more present and insidious. Questioning its right to exist carries the stench of the world’s oldest and most enduring hatred: anti-Semitism.

But the “right" of a country to exist is not, in itself, a meaningful concept. Human beings have an inherent right to exist; countries do not. Countries are human constructs—formed around shared economic, political, historical, or cultural interests. They come into being, and they pass out of it. In recent decades alone, the Soviet Union dissolved into fifteen states, and Yugoslavia into seven. No one questions their right to exist.

The question of Israel’s “right to exist” is therefore not a legitimate inquiry—it is propaganda. An attempt to delegitimize the country, driven by political hostility and hatred.

I also take issue with the term “Zionist” as it’s used today.

Zionism once had a clear historical and political meaning: the project of establishing a Jewish state in its ancestral homeland. That project was realized in 1948. After that, the term becomes less useful—and, in many contexts, counterproductive.

We don’t describe Italians through the lens of the Risorgimento anymore (the 19th century movement to unify Italy). Italy exists. To keep using the term would sound strange and inappropriate.

Yet we still speak of support for Israel as Zionism. As if the project is unfinished, its legitimacy unresolved. It opens the door to those who wish to question it. It is more accurate—and more normalizing—to speak in terms of Israeli citizens, or support for specific policies, as we would with any other country.

But the hostility Israel's opponents have shown is not just rhetorical. It has taken the form of proxy warfare, terrorism, and a pursuit of nuclear capability.

It is, to say the least, an uncomfortable reality for Israel.

And yet, stepping back to look at the last 50 years, a more complex picture emerges.

Israel has flourished—economically, technologically, and militarily. It has signed peace agreements with Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. It has built one of the most capable militaries in the world, along with layered defense systems like Iron Dome and David’s Sling. It also possesses the ultimate deterrent.

Iran, by contrast, has become increasingly isolated. Sanctions have strained its economy to the point of collapse. It has been labeled a state sponsor of terrorism and remains an international pariah. Internally, the regime has faced growing unrest which it has met with increased repression.

In broad terms, one country has been on the rise; the other, on the ropes.

But if you listened to Benjamin Netanyahu, you might think it was the other way around.

Netanyahu has been warning about an imminent Iranian nuclear threat for more than thirty years. As early as 1992, he suggested Iran was only a few years away from a nuclear weapon. The same warning appeared in his 1995 book. The timeline kept shifting, but the urgency remained.

It never materialized.

Under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran’s nuclear program was significantly constrained: enrichment capped at 3.67%, international inspections, strict reporting requirements. These concessions suggest the program functioned, at least in part, as leverage for sanctions relief.

That changed after trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018, with Netanyahu's urging. Since then, enrichment has reached 60%—approaching weapons-grade—and international oversight has diminished. What once looked like bargaining leverage now looks more like a hedge for regime survival.

To my mind, Israel was never under an imminent existential threat from Iran. The gap between rhetoric and reality was always considerable.

The war has further exposed the limits of Iran’s actual power, confirming what many suspected—that Iran was paper tiger. Much of its posture appears to have been projection, useful for a regime that relies on external enemies to justify itself.

But projection cuts both ways.

Over time, it can be internalized, shape public opinion and political ideology, turning hypothetical threats into real ones.

And that may be the deeper danger now in both Israel and Iran: that in preparing for the worst version of your enemy, you help bring it into being—a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Death, For Instance

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This is a time of video game wars,

the paradox of everything feeling both 

very close and very far away,

real and surreal, 

all at once: 

Death, for instance, 

which for most of us 

feels very far away,

now arrives from the sky

like a meteor on fire 

and images at light speed 

in your pocket;

And if you look closely

at the pixelated bits

shadows appear where 

people used to be, 

and you can see

the dreams of children

leaving their bodies.

19th Century Thinking and Butterflies

One thing the war with Iran has made clear is that 19th-century political thinking doesn’t work in the 21st century.

Actually, that way of thinking died in 1945. World War II was the last conflict where you could bomb an opponent into submission—and even then, it required devastation on a scale the world has never seen: roughly 75 million dead, including 50 million civilians, and the use of atomic weapons.

Since then, the pattern has been unmistakable. In Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and most recently in Ukraine, overwhelming military superiority has failed to produce decisive victory. Again and again, stronger powers have found themselves bogged down, stalemated, or strategically defeated by weaker adversaries.

The lesson is hard but clear: the capacity to “completely obliterate” an enemy—language used by trump and hegseth—by conventional force no longer translates into strategic victory.

At the same time, when a butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the world it can dramatically impact the opposite side. In this case the butterfly is a Shahed drone. The other side of the world is the Strait of Hormuz, and the dramatic impact is North American gas prices, food supplies, inflation and even employment.  

The past 75 years of global integration have made countries economically and politically inseparable. What happens in one region now reverberates everywhere. Power today is not just military—it’s systemic.

The paradigm has shifted. There is no returning to spheres of influence or clean geopolitical separation. Efforts at de-globalization—whether through trade barriers or political ruptures like Brexit—run up against a reality that is already too interconnected to unwind without enormous cost, especially to those attempting it.

The global system the United States helped build has become so deeply embedded that even it cannot dismantle it without harming itself. In that context, large-scale war is not just destructive—it is self-sabotage.

And that, ultimately, is the paradoxical good news.

Even the most powerful nations are constrained. “Might makes right” is no longer a workable doctrine. Durable outcomes require negotiation, coordination, and restraint.

Which is why the shortcomings of the United Nations feel so frustrating. Because in a world like this, its role is not optional—it is essential.

The most critical problems are no longer local. Poverty, conflict, and instability in one region spill across borders as migration crises. Disease spreads globally, as the COVID-19 made unmistakably clear. And then there's climate change.

There is no going back, and trump and his accolytes ultimately won't be able to do anything about it.