Long reads shortened
Demonstrators in Beirut holding pictures of senior Hamas leaders. Fadel Itani/AFP/Getty
“Our hands will reach them, wherever they are”
Shortly after the October 7 attacks in 2023, says Dov Lieber in The Wall Street Journal, Israeli intelligence set up a task force called NILI, a Hebrew acronym for the words “The Eternal One of Israel Doesn’t Lie”. The name, first used by Jewish spies in World War One, had a simple meaning: “no one identified in the attack would be forgotten”. Since then, the group has slowly but methodically built up a list of thousands of militants involved in the assault. They have pored over video footage recorded on the militants’ phones and GoPro cameras, interrogated Gazan detainees and combed through intercepted phone calls. And just as they did to the Palestinians who killed 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, they are hunting the perpetrators down.
“No participant is deemed too insignificant.” A man who was recorded driving a tractor through a border fence on October 7 was identified, located and blown up in an airstrike in Gaza two years later. A Hamas platoon commander was killed after a video showed his head poking out of a window during the assault on the Nova music festival. Those higher up the chain are targeted with similar vigour: Saleh al-Arouri, Hamas’s top operative in Lebanon, was killed in an airstrike on his old office in Beirut. Ismail Haniyeh, the terrorist group’s leader, was taken out with a bomb hidden in his room at a guesthouse in Tehran. The legality of these revenge strikes is debatable, to say the least. Hundreds of other Gazans charged with involvement in October 7 are in Israeli custody awaiting trial. But the Israelis are determined to track down every last attacker. “It will take time, just as it did after Munich,” said Mossad director David Barnea in 2024. “But our hands will reach them, wherever they are.”
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Property
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Heroes and villains
Grapevine Police Department
Hero
A Texas man who bravely tried out his Tesla Cybertruck’s “wade mode” – which supposedly enables the vehicle to steer through water up to 32in deep – by driving it straight into a lake. Somewhat predictably, the car stopped working and had to be dragged from the water by the local fire department. Police arrested the driver and charged him with, among other offences, “not having a valid boat registration”.
Hero
Susan Collins, a US senator for Maine, who this week cast her 10,000th consecutive vote in Congress. The Republican lawmaker, who hasn’t missed a single vote since taking office in January 1997, is facing a tough re-election in this year’s midterms. One thing’s for sure, says The Wall Street Journal: she “won’t be outworked”.
Getty
Heroes
Cows, which appear to be rather smarter than we thought. Researchers in France have discovered that the bovine beasts can recognise human faces and match them to familiar voices, and show a particular interest in people they have never seen before. It is, as The Times put it, a case of “Déjà moo”.
Villain
A largely unknown Trinidadian author who has won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for a work that appears to have been written by AI. Jamir Nazir’s The Serpent in the Grove is stuffed with ChatGPT-favoured words (“hum”) and sentence formulations (“it’s not x, not y, but z”), and was flagged as “100% AI-generated” by two leading AI detectors. Its metaphors are truly baffling, says Sean Thomas in The Spectator: the sun “beats until the roof talks back in a dry moan”; coffee grows on a slope that “wanted rain in teeth”. Some make no sense at all: “Doing is a treacherous bridge”; “First good rain after dry is a forgiveness the sky gives itself.”
Hero
Donald Trump, according to Republican senator John Cornyn, who tried to secure the US president’s endorsement in his primary race by proposing to rename a 1,800-mile federal highway in his honour. Cornyn, the party’s second in command in the Senate, said two weeks ago that Route 287 should be called Interstate 47 to celebrate the 47th US president, calling him the “most consequential” US leader of his lifetime. But even this act of genuflection wasn’t enough: this week, Trump endorsed Cornyn’s opponent.
Books
Evelyn Waugh in 1955. Kurt Hutton/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty
What The Guardian gets wrong about reading
The Guardian recently asked a panel of authors and critics to nominate their picks for the 100 Best Novels of All Time. The results, says Michael Henderson in The Spectator, are rather as you might expect. Some of the top spots were taken by worthy winners – Middlemarch, the “supreme novel of provincial England”, was number one. But we quickly run into problems. Toni Morrison’s A-level favourite Beloved is at number two. Really? Of all time? At three: Ulysses. Now look. We all love to show off, but please. “Either read for pleasure, or not at all.”
Where the list really gets into trouble is in its omissions. When a “Top 100” finds room for the Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, but no place for Evelyn Waugh, “one wonders about the judges’ sanity”. Waugh wrote the most beautiful prose in the 20th century. Excluding him is like “writing a history of jazz without reference to Duke Ellington”. Dangarembga may be a good writer, but putting her above, say, Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native only makes sense if you’re trying to “rewire the imagination of your readers”. It brings to mind Saul Bellow’s response to a colleague at the University of Chicago who claimed to be getting a taste for the literature of sub-Saharan Africa. “Remind me,” asked Bellow, “who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” Bellow, perhaps justly, doesn’t make the list, but nor do Philip Roth or John Updike, or, for that matter, Ivan Turgenev or PG Wodehouse. Of course, it’s wonderful to elevate overlooked voices. But determining a book’s value by the political acceptability of its author leaves you feeling like you’re “trapped in an undergraduate lecture room”.
The Knowledge Crossword
Global update
An Iranian gunship heading for a cargo freighter in the Strait of Hormuz last month. Meysam Mirzadeh/Tasnim News/AFP/Getty
A terrifying escape from Hormuz
The closing and re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz over the past 11 weeks has wreaked havoc on the global economy, says Sammy Westfall in The Washington Post. Nobody has been more affected by the “constant whiplash” than the 20,000-odd sailors stranded there. When the captain of one ship was urged by his bosses to risk the perilous six-hour journey through the mine-filled waterway, with promises that permission from Iran would be “squared away”, he didn’t immediately reject the idea. They were offering double pay. And his crew were already terrified of a drone strike: they slept in their lifejackets near their cabin doors to facilitate an easy escape, and had “go-bags” packed with food and passports.
The captain held a vote to see whether the crew wanted to take the risk. “If one says no,” he said, “we all say no.” Four times, they voted no. By the fifth vote, there had been enough pressure among the crew to produce a “domino effect” of yeses, and after the temporary ceasefire was announced in early April, they set off. Soon, two Iranian skiffs began tailing the ship. One crew member, looking through binoculars, shouted: “Get down, there’s a gun.” The crew scattered for cover as a “hail of bullets” hammered the vessel over a 20-minute period, shattering the bridge’s window, pockmarking the ship with dents and missing someone by a few feet as he crouched to send a distress signal. Eventually, the skiffs gave up. The ship’s crew made it out, bound for South America and grateful to have only faced gunfire.
Weather
Quoted
“A lot of clever people have got everything except judgement.”
Clement Attlee
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