This Normal Life — All about "normal" life in Israel

The Iran war is about China, not Israel

by Brian on March 22, 2026

It’s become practically normalized these days that ignorant influencers and populist politicians abroad will regularly proclaim that Israel dragged America into the war with Iran; that the Islamic Republic didn’t pose any “imminent threat” to the U.S.; that the war is illegal.

These armchair analysts claim that President Donald Trump has no idea what he’s doing – it’s all to cement his reputation as an international bully – and that the war will bring nothing but higher gas prices and soaring inflation to the U.S., all to support another country, Israel, which is pulling the strings.

What these pundits fail to realize is that there are actually two chessboards in play. It’s easy to see just the smaller one – the one where Israel had been threatening to go after Iran’s missiles and launchers and conclude that the U.S. had no choice but to join the fight, since U.S. assets in the region were going to get hit anyway.

But there’s a bigger chessboard here, and it involves China and the future of global hegemony. It’s where “the central question of the next 30 years is being worked out,” writes Haviv Rettig Gur, who opened my eyes to the two playing spaces, in The Free Press. It’s about “whether the American-led global order survives or whether China displaces it. Every significant American foreign policy decision, from the pivot to Asia to the tariff wars…is ultimately a move on this board.” It’s undoubtedly top of mind for Pentagon war planners and most likely for Donald Trump himself.

The war, from this perspective, is not really about Iran. Rather, Iran is the “most significant Chinese forward base outside of East Asia.” China’s control of Iran gives the Asian giant power over vital shipping lanes, with potentially only oil intended for China making it safely and consistently through the Strait of Hormuz.

Gur himself only internalized the China connection during an hour-long conversation he had with China expert Melissa Chen, managing director at Strategy Risks, on his podcast, Ask Haviv Anything. Gur, who started his journalism career in 2005 at The Jerusalem Post,

then summarized that conversation in a second, 30-minute podcast, which he subsequently wrote into the article that appeared in The Free Press.

Dozens of publications, from The Wall Street Journal to Foreign Policy, have since followed his lead to highlight the China-Iran connection.

The idea in a nutshell: Due to sanctions, Iran turned to China as its economic lifeline. Iran today sells 90% of its oil to China, often through clandestine means – with, as the BBC reports, barrels of oil allegedly relabeled as “Malaysian” to disguise their origin. The oil revenue covers around a quarter of Iran’s total budget, much of it allocated for military purposes.

In return, China provides the technology that runs Iran’s Internet and communications systems. Iran switched from the GPS used in most of the world to China’s BeiDou system. Rights groups have alleged that Iran’s brutal crackdowns against protesters have been fueled by Chinese facial recognition and surveillance tech, the BBC notes.

China was also reportedly in the process of supplying to Iran sophisticated anti-ship cruise missiles, capable of speeds exceeding Mach 3, engineered to evade the defense systems deployed on American carriers.

In this way, Gur writes, Iran “has made itself utterly dependent on China.”

Taking Iran down a notch – or ultimately enabling some sort of regime change or regime “alteration” ala the Venezuela model – would break China’s hold on Iran, and with it, Iran’s ability to test new Chinese equipment and to supply China with the oil it so desperately needs.

Will Israel be a beneficiary of this war? Of course. But when Iran began to rely on China so much, “it stopped being Israel’s problem and became America’s,” Gur emphasizes.

Yes, the Iranian mullahs have presided over a murderous regime that’s killed thousands, both directly and via proxies. And yes, the Islamic Republic’s slogan – “Death to America, Death to Israel” – is not mere words, as Iran has aptly proved in the wars to date. And yes, every day since Israel’s 12-day war in June 2025, Iran has been aggressively building more and more missiles to the point where defensive interceptors like the THAAD, Patriot or Iron Dome would simply have run out of projectiles.

But even for all that, this war would not have happened if the leadership of the U.S. were not fully briefed on the two chessboards.

The most surprising development in the war so far has been the fact that China has not come to Iran’s aid, “leaving its closest Middle Eastern ally to burn,” Gur writes.

Philip Shetler-Jones, from the Royal United Services Institute in the U.K., argues that Beijing is not “a superpower on the same level” as the U.S. “It is not equipped to protect its friends against this kind of action, even if it wanted to.”

“China does not view its ‘alliances’ in the same way the West does,” adds BBC China correspondent Laura Bicker. “It does not sign mutual defense treaties and will not come rushing to its ally’s aid.”

Ultimately, that abandonment “is a blow to Chinese soft power that no diplomatic offensive can easily repair,” Gur notes. America and Israel, on the other hand, have demonstrated they have “the will and capability to act decisively when [their] core interests are genuinely threatened.”

However the current war plays out, this imbalance may be the most important outcome. “America went to war in Iran because Iran made itself a Chinese weapon,” concludes Gur. “The loudest voices in the debate,” he adds, “are still arguing about the smaller chessboard. [But] the war is being fought on the larger one.”

I originally wrote about the Chinese component to the war in The Jerusalem Post.

Photo by KOBU Agency on Unsplash

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Missiles. Trump. Halacha

by Brian on March 7, 2026

in In the News,Politics,War with Iran

There was something surreal in Israel’s bomb shelters this past Shabbat. Many residents, especially in Jerusalem, are Sabbath observant. And yet, a good number of them had their phones in their hands. They weren’t just waiting to hear when they’d be released from the shelter but were actively monitoring the steadily incoming news alerts. Perhaps some were even distracting themselves with Facebook reels that had little to do with the day’s devastating developments.

Saturday, February 28, 2026, was, of course, the first day of the current war with Iran, run jointly by the U.S. and Israel. The morning attack was a surprise both for the Iranian leadership and for the Israelis who received an alert on their phones at 8:13 am while at the same time sirens blared outside. That first alert, however, was not a command to descend to our garage-level shelter: It was an announcement that the war had started, and we should be prepared.

The actual alert that missiles were on their way didn’t come until two hours later, during which time, remarkably, I fell back asleep. It was only then that halacha (Jewish Law) collided with modern technology. And in this case, missiles “trump” halacha.

The rules were set in place years ago but became especially relevant after Hamas’s invasion on October 7, 2023. The Israeli Chief Rabbinate instructed every synagogue to have at least one cell phone left turned on. Many shuls, including ours, went one step further and advised each and every congregant who was able, to carry a phone with them. At home, you could tune your radio to a “silent channel” that would only broadcast when there was something that needed immediate attention (like a soon-to-arrive missile).

The halachic rationale for all this was pikuah nefesh, the proscription that the preservation of life overrules every other Jewish Law. Although I’m pretty sure that doesn’t include doomscrolling TikTok and Instagram.

Once our shelter had filled up and the door had been closed, there was a knock from outside: Our niece Yona, who lives in the neighborhood and was praying at a nearby congregation, ascertained that our shelter was the closest.

And oh, “Can we join you for Shabbat lunch?”

That triggered another Jewish Law: hahnasat orhim – welcoming guests. Fortunately, we had ordered in for lunch from “Ron Makes Shabbos,” a wonderful weekend delivery service with a diverse menu, run by the eponymous Ron, a former IT logistics worker who decided he preferred making chicken poppers and BBQ long-cooked asado short ribs. He’s based in Beit Shemesh but delivers to us in Jerusalem, as well as to Modi’in and the Gush Etzion areas.

As we started to set the table with dips and drinks, the phone rang. That was odd: We’ve texted propitiously during previous missile emergencies, but we’ve never received a voice call.

It was our dear friend Sam who has, for the last week, been hospitalized in Jerusalem’s Sha’arei Zedek hospital to treat debilitating migraines.

“They’re kicking me out,” she intoned breathlessly into the phone. “They’re evacuating everyone who’s not a life-or-death case or who’s about to give birth.”

That made sense: The hospital had a clear need to make more beds available in case of a mass casualty event. Plus, they needed to move patients from the higher floors to the underground level where Sam was housed. Birthing, I learned later, took place in the parking lot.

“Could someone come and get me?” Sam cried into the phone.

Our 28-year-old son Aviv immediately volunteered.

“Do you want me to come, too?” I asked my wife, Jody.

“No, I’ll go,” Jody replied. “It’s better if there’s a woman there.”

Pikuah nefesh again: Jody never drives on Shabbat and Jewish holidays. Using her phone in an emergency was one thing, but getting in a car?

Sam’s situation was tough. Not only had they not gotten to the bottom of her headaches yet, but she was high as a kite from all the ketamine they were pumping into her body. As the nurse disconnected her IV, Jody asked her how Sam was supposed to deal with this sudden, unanticipated withdrawal. The nurse shrugged her shoulders. That was beyond her paygrade, apparently.

We tucked Sam into the guest room bed with the lights off and the window shades closed. I made kiddush (the blessing over the wine) for her in the makeshift home hospital room we’d set up, and Jody brought her some of Ron’s food. We then sat down for our own much delayed Shabbat meal.

We managed to get through the entire meal without another siren.

Tel Aviv wasn’t so lucky.

On one of the WhatsApp groups for our neighborhood, a former resident commented that she’d had to run down to her shelter 12 times already – essentially staying there the whole day. She then added, “I’m Shomer Shabbat [Sabbath observant]. What am I doing on my phone checking news updates anyway?”

But by this point, we all knew: pikuah nefesh.

Shabbat eventually ended, and the halachic considerations of using our phones evaporated at the 25^th hour. As for the rest of the week, I couldn’t tell you: This column was due on Sunday.

We know that in the first hours of the war, much of the Iranian leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were killed. There were missiles launched at Israel all night and into the next morning, and we spent many more hours in our bomb shelter. Will the war be over in a few days? Will the Jewish holiday of Purim be downgraded, if not canceled entirely, while Israel and the U.S. continue to decimate the strategic assets of the former the Persian empire?

All I can report is about this very strange, yet Jewishly empowered Sabbath, where the rules of engagement were dramatically different than nearly anything we’d experienced before.

I first posted about our first Shabbat of the Second Iran War in The Jerusalem Post.

Photo by Moslem Daneshzadeh on Unsplash

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What does Zionism mean to me?

by Brian on February 21, 2026

in In the News,Jewish Holidays and Culture,Politics,The Old Country

In many of my jobs I’ve held over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to interview executives, mostly not Jewish, overseas, on the phone or via Zoom. I would do my best not to indicate where I was based, other than the restrictions on my working hours that might not seem exactly 9-to-5 Eastern time. My being in Israel was not something I was embarrassed about; it just wasn’t a topic I needed to insert into an interview about, say, the classified advertising business.

From time to time, though, an interviewee would ask me where I lived, and I wouldn’t hold back. “Israel,” I’d reply confidently. The inevitable next question, given that they could tell I didn’t have a Hebrew accent, was what brought me to the Holy Land. My usual answer: “Zionism.”

Now, though, I’m not sure I’d be comfortable answering like that. Zionism has become a pejorative in many international circles.

That doesn’t mean I’m no longer a Zionist. On the contrary, I believe deeply in the right of the Jewish state to exist. But it got me thinking about what’s happened to the concept of Zionism over the past few years and how that impacts what I can and should say.

A recent survey by the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) found that only one-third of American Jews say they identify as Zionist, even as nearly nine in ten say they support Israel’s right to exist.

That confused dichotomy clearly stems from the misperception that being a Zionist means you must support whatever actions Israel’s current government takes.

That’s not the case at all. I, like most of my friends and peers, strongly oppose the policies of the Netanyahu-led gang of thugs, crooks, incompetents and racists. This government is beholden to its most extreme elements, and that’s contributing to a poisoned discourse.

Yet, at the same time, I support this country with all my heart. It has been my home for 31 years and has indelibly shaped my identity, even if my language skills never pulled their weight. There’s that old saw that in the Diaspora you have to spend most of your time “doing” Jewish – our Jewish life in California revolved around synagogue activities – while in Israel, it’s all about “being” Jewish.

In Israel, my wife, Jody, and I have been able to raise our family in an enveloping Jewish structure – calendar, school, language, culture. I value the way Israelis are always ready to help each other, even when they’re yelling; the way we came together after October 7 to fill in the gaps of an absent polity.

You don’t have to search for your Jewishness – as a majority, it’s all around you. Nor are we obsessed with the issues that animate Diaspora Jewish life. “You’d really have to scour the Israeli Hebrew press to even find mention of the word ‘genocide,’” wrote Shalem College’s Daniel Gordis on his Substack, referring to one of the hot topics of American vs. Israeli disquisition.

This confusion about Zionism dovetails with the ad paid for by Robert Kraft that aired during the 2026 Super Bowl. In it, David, a Jewish teenager, is taunted by his peers who place a “Dirty Jew” yellow sticker on his backpack. He is ultimately “saved” by Bilal, a Black student, who places a blue Post-it note (a reference to Kraft’s Blue Square Alliance) over the yellow stickie.

This depiction of the Jew as victim is wholly out of sync with the Zionism we Israelis feel. We may get rockets lobbed at us (all too frequently), but we see ourselves as strong, tough, possessed of agency.

Liel Leibowitz, writing in Tablet magazine, proposed an alternative ad. In it, we’re shown Hezbollah agents getting blown up by pagers, Israeli Air Force planes over Tehran, news reports on the deaths of Hassan Nasrallah and Yahya Sinwar. A little on-the nose? Absolutely. I wonder how it would have played among Super Bowl viewers?

“We have the honor of being hated by an axis of the perfidious, the despotic, the hypocritical, the cynical, the deranged and the incredibly stupid,” said Bret Stephens, New York Times columnist and one-time editor of The Jerusalem Post, at this year’s State of World Jewry talk in New York.

Zionism “was never supposed to make Jews comfortable,” noted Adam Scott Bellows, the CEO of the Israel Innovation Fund, in The Jerusalem Post. “It was supposed to make Jews durable.”

Joel Swanson, a scholar of modern Jewish history at Sarah Lawrence College, emphasized in another Post article that Zionism is not a static single-use symbol for believing Israel should exist. There are many types of Zionism: political Zionism, cultural Zionism, religious Zionism, revisionist Zionism.

“To say ‘Zionism’ without adjectives is already to erase its internal diversity,” Swanson wrote.

He pointed to the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, a committed Zionist who emigrated to Palestine. But, Swanson added, “He also advocated for a binational state, shared by Jews and Arabs…today, if you espouse Martin Buber’s views…without an emphasis on maintaining a Jewish voting majority, you are labeled an anti-Zionist.”

Nevertheless, I find Swanson’s thesis the most compelling: Zionism is multifaceted. I’m living proof – when I first moved to Israel, I was firmly in the religious Zionism camp. Over time, I became more of a secular, cultural Zionist. But I always had a place to fit in.

So, when I’m asked these days, “Why do I live here?” I will continue to answer, “Because I’m a Zionist.” I may have to explain a bit more; it’s not a simple one-line response anymore. But I’m not ready to give it up.

I first explained what Zionism means to me in The Jerusalem Post.

I was interviewed by Simon Anstey of ChaiFM in South Africa about what’s turned the term Zionism into a pejorative. You can listen to the podcast on his show The Homerun here:

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

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The reality slap

by Brian on February 7, 2026

in Cancer,Mindfulness,Reviews,Science

Psychotherapist Dr. Russ Harris was looking forward to welcoming his first child. But it wasn’t long after his son was born that he realized something wasn’t quite right. As the baby grew, he didn’t walk but scooted on his tush. He was barely verbal. By the time his son was two years old, Harris had a diagnosis: autism.

Harris descended into a deep depression – surprising, perhaps, given that Harris is a world leader in explaining ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) to the layperson. ACT weaves the practice of mindfulness into cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). I devoured his first book, “The Happiness Trap,” which has helped me on numerous occasions.

But Harris is also human, and his initial reaction was entirely understandable.

Harris wrote another book, this one about on his experience with his son. It’s called “The Reality Slap” and it’s based on a term that powerfully identifies what so shook Harris: The reality he expected for his life did not match the actual reality he now faced.

“The reality slap takes many different forms,” he writes. “Sometimes it’s so violent, it’s more like a punch: the death of a loved one, a serious illness or injury, a freak accident, a violent crime, a disabled child, bankruptcy, betrayal, fire, flood or disaster. At other times, the slap is somewhat gentler: that sudden flash of envy when we realize someone else has got what we want; those sharp pangs of loneliness when we realize how disconnected we are from others; that burst of anger or resentment over some sort of mistreatment.”

The concept of the reality slap spoke to me as soon as I read the line, “a serious illness.” It has since helped provide context as to why the last year has been so tough.

My “expected reality” was that I would be healthy well into my golden years; that my wife, Jody, and I would, as empty nesters, travel the world; that we would hike the Salkantay Trail to Machu Picchu; that we would be able to hoist our grandchildren into the air, if not effortlessly than effervescently.

Instead, I’ve spent the last 12 months first in declining then slowly improving health, ever since my cancer surged and eventually sent me to the hospital for six weeks until the miraculous CAR-T treatment knocked the cancer out.

Now that I’m feeling stronger – as I like to phrase it “trying to live a normal life in an abnormal body” – and I look back at the previous year, I realize that my own reality slap was made more personally painful by my inability – or perhaps my unwillingness – to accept that it had occurred in the first place.

That makes sense: For seven years, I was reassured I had an “easy cancer.” It was slow growing and, while I’d need treatment every once in a while, I “wouldn’t die from it but with it.” That all changed when it transformed from indolent Follicular Lymphoma to aggressive DLBCL.

I could no longer “watch and wait,” as I had been doing for most of those years. If it wasn’t treated quickly, I would most certainly die.

Reading Harris’s book, it’s clear that while “sometimes the slap quickly recedes into memory – a passing moment, a brief ‘rude awakening’ – at other times it knocks us senseless and leaves us wandering in a daze.” And the slap is just the beginning. “For once the slap wakes us up, we then face the gap.” And it can persist for a lifetime.

Indeed, one of the learnings I’m trying to integrate is not to expect that I’ll ever get back to 100% but to be OK with just 70%, while at the same time living with the uncertainty that, any given morning, I could wake up feeling 50%…or 80% of my old self.

“What do we do when we can’t close that reality gap?” Harris asks. Or when we can close it, “but it’s going to take a long, long time to do it. How do we cope in the meantime?”

For Harris, the answer is all about how to put the principles of ACT into practice. Using the framing device of a reality slap, he presents a variety of principles.

“Defuse” from thoughts like, “It will never get better” or “My life is ruined.” Shift from “I’ll never cope with this” to “I’m having the thought that I’ll never cope” (a classic meditation and ACT technique).
Focus on values: Given this life, this body and this situation, how do I want to live? Small actions, like a five-minute phone call, a short walk or a grandchild’s smile (even when you can’t roughhouse) can help. If you can’t get back to 100%, those values become the most important.
Expect setbacks and “re-slaps.” The reality gap will never fully close. You’ll have days when it feels hopeless. Relapse is the rule. Can you still build something meaningful within the changed landscape?
Someone exhorting you to “just be grateful” is never helpful. You need to grieve, then ask: What kind of person do I want to be in this reality?
Your reactions are normal human responses to loss and threat. They’re not signs of failure.
Acceptance is about making space for unpleasant experiences so you can move your life in directions that matter. It doesn’t mean saying, “I’m fine with the reality that I’m sick or weak.” Instead, tell yourself, “These limitations are here whether I like them or not. So, how can I treat my body, my partner and my friends in ways I won’t regret?”

“The Reality Slap” has given me new tools to cope with my own gap. I hope those tools will be helpful for you, too. I didn’t expect the last year – heck, I didn’t expect the seven years before that, either – but I survived. Harris’s framing of the slap has helped me to better understand what to do if I’m faced with another life-changing reality gap.

I first wrote about my reality slap for The Jerusalem Post.

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How I use AI for writing

by Brian on January 24, 2026

in In the News,Reviews,Technology

ChatGPT has taken over my life – in a good way.

Over the last few months, I’ve started to use AI tools like those from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic for an increasingly wide variety of tasks. Some are fairly straightforward – queries about TV show plot twists, translations from Hebrew to English – while others are more radical.

The most unusual: I record my therapy sessions, use a transcription tool to output the result to text, then plug that into ChatGPT with the prompt “summarize this text while highlighting any psychological insights.” Since ChatGPT knows and remembers me, it can generate helpful spins that complement (and sometimes exceed) the therapy itself.

But where I’ve been spending most of my artificially intelligent computer time has been with my writing. Not to actually write a complete article, mind you, but if I want sources on, say, “For how long can one use expired medications?” a ChatGPT query can surface answers and links remarkably fast.

Yes, you do have to check it, as AI chatbots are famously known to hallucinate, making up answers to please the prompter, but the more details I feed into my queries through follow-up iterations, the more accurate the response becomes.

That led me to wonder whether AI could help me with a massive ghostwriting project I’ve been working on. My client and I have been Zooming regularly for close to a year to brainstorm ideas for a business book. We’ve accumulated over 600 different topics comprising an intimidating 1,000,000 words.

That has, understandably, quite overwhelmed me. How could I ever make sense of so much data?

AI to the rescue.

Google’s NotebookLM product (LM stands for “large language model”) is designed for exactly that sort of task. You feed it your source data, and with the right prompts, it will spit back a coherent organization and order.

It took some tweaking: There’s a limit of 50 sources per project (I had twelve times that many) and, being a Google product, it refuses to accept files from archrival Microsoft. But once I’d taken care of grunt work, the project began to take shape – and to make sense.

NotebookLM suggested ways to tie the opening and the conclusion together. It chunked all those topics into a manageable dozen chapters. It wrote sample text. Eventually, I was able to generate a two-page executive summary to share with my client.

He loved the result. And why not? From his end, it was all familiar from our Zoom meetings. But from where I was sitting, it was a towering stress reducer. Now, I could simply follow the blueprint created by AI – and write.

Still, I worried that, when I sent that summary to my client, he might think to himself, “Gee, why do I need Brian? I’ll just let AI finish the book for me and save the hefty ghostwriting fees.”

Indeed, notes Lulu Meservey, former VP of communications for Substack and current CEO of PR firm Rostra, AI will be “very good at writing and the improvement could come very quickly.” We need to “prepare ourselves for that to happen.”

Newsweek is already getting ready. The magazine says it “is experimenting with AI-based tools to help journalists work faster, smarter and more creatively. But such tools must be used in an ethical way and under the full supervision of journalists.”

I assumed – erroneously, it turns out – that my newspaper colleagues would be writing purists, adamantly against any use of AI in their craft. A quick survey found that they all are using AI to one extent or another, from translating copy from other languages to writing and structuring interview questions.

I decided to try an experiment: I’d ask AI to actually write a chapter-by-chapter first draft of the book. It did a passable job but subsequently required hundreds of clarifying queries and substantial post-prompt editing. I’m happy to say that it was still my writing in the end; if I had submitted an exclusively AI-written book, it would have been embarrassingly mundane.

Can AI work for fiction? I’ve been noodling for years now on a science fiction book idea. It, too, has overwhelmed me.

Dr. Tuhin Chakrabarty, a Columbia University computer scientist, trained several large language models on the writing of a particular fiction author Han Kang, a Nobel laureate. Chakrabarty uploaded all of Han’s work, then fed the AI a description of a certain scene from Han that Chakrabarty had not included and asked the AI to generate it in the author’s style.

Chakrabarty next tasked several creative writing graduate students to complete the same mission. When he challenged a second group of students to compare the versions in blind tests, they “universally preferred the AI version to the imitations their peers had come up with,” The New Yorker’s Vauhini Vara reports. In another test, the readers “preferred the quality of the AI output in almost two-thirds of the cases.”

That gave me the courage to ask ChatGPT to brainstorm with me on my science fiction proposal. The AI came up with new story arcs and compelling plot twists. It suggested additional characters and even a love interest for my protagonist. Will I ask it to write a first draft? I haven’t decided yet.

But the bottle has clearly been uncorked, and the genie is not very quietly leaking out. While this may mean some people will find their employment trajectories severely curtailed, for all of us, our jobs will certainly change with the ascendency of the prompt. For writers, intensive editing will become as important as any initial out-of-the-box composing.

I decided, as a final task in my exploration, to ask AI the role it envisioned for itself in all this. “AI may never be a true ‘friend,’” ChatGPT demurred, “but it can be a real creative partner.”

That retort is no hallucination.

I first wrote about how I use AI for writing in The Jerusalem Post.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

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