Aren’t We Clever! Alas, Israel Is Too Clever by Half
Living in the UK in the 1980s, we encountered a particularly British phrase we had hardly heard before: “Too clever by half.” The Cambridge Dictionary definition is “too confident in one’s intelligence, often in an irritating way that annoys others or leads to problems.” Others have defined it as “irritating and manipulating, rather than actually very clever.”
We and other Jews understood that epithet as antisemitic. Not exclusively against Jews, it was also employed to demean South Asians, East Asians, and West Asians (Arabs) who had “risen above their rank” as well, especially as those groups entered the higher echelons of the colonial metropolis, capped by the Prime Ministership of Rishi Sunak, of South Asian ancestry.
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was fond of Jews. Some of the key advisors of her neoliberal revolution, like Sir Keith Joseph and Lord David Young, were Jewish. But when she quarreled in the late 1980s with two Jewish cabinet ministers, Trade and Industry Secretary Leon Brittan and Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson, and they ultimately fell on their swords, the ugly tag surfaced in her party and beyond with a vengeance. Some hoped the replacements would not be more “ethnics” but “red-blooded, red-faced Englishmen.” Another Thatcher minister of Jewish origin, Edwina Currie, an outspoken and energetic personality, was disparaged as a “pushy Jewess” though she was a member of the Church of England.
Labour isn’t exempt from this either. Tony Blair and Keir Starmer confederate Peter Mandelson, a perennial smartest guy in the room, was appointed UK Ambassador to the United States in December, 2024, but quickly removed due to his ties with Jeffrey Epstein. Mandelson stands accused: “Clever man though he is, clever networker though he is, he [is] dangerous because he [has] no judgment about people.”
Clever and Famous
But come on. Can you really be “too clever?” I grew up in the heart of a very different cultural milieu, Canada’s Jewish community, and such a phrase would have been absurd. So many times we were reminded of Jews Sigmund Freud, polio vaccine originator Dr. Jonas Salk, composer Leonard Bernstein, and a panoply of Nobel laureates, including physicist Albert Einstein, novelist Boris Pasternak, biochemist Hans Krebs, economist Wassily Leontief. And the Canadians: Toronto’s first Jewish mayor Nathan Phillips, MP and NDP leader David Lewis, jurist Bora Laskin, author Mordecai Richler. All clever, all Jews. We prized learning; we prized acceptance, we prized normalization (unless we were cleverer than “normal”). And how we “kvelled” (reveled) when we found out that certain celebrities with non-Jewish-sounding names were really “of the tribe”: Bob Dylan, John Garfield, Joey Ramone, Scarlett Johansson, Billy Joel, Paul Newman, Natalie Portman. We debated whether having one non-Jewish parent still classified some of them as “real Jews.”
Within our community, “my son the doctor” was not a Jewish joke. In Canada, there was absolutely no such thing as too clever. In the shadow of the Holocaust, we self-comforted with the conceit that even if our small group had been persecuted, even if vestiges of antisemitism remained: aren’t we clever!
But, as it turns out, you can be too clever by half! Witness Israel.
As the nascent State of Israel grew, Jews’ attention turned to its Hollywood-burnished narrative and to its touted, sometimes exaggerated, occasionally false, accomplishments: “start-up country,” USB drives, LGBTQ rights in liberal Tel-Aviv (in Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh, not so much), “the only democracy in the Middle East” (only for Jews), baby breathing monitors, the Maccabee sports teams, the Israel Symphony Orchestra.
Even as world criticism of Israel ramped up in this new century, as “Israel Apartheid Week” became a thing on campuses, as we Jews ourselves began to find fault in or doubt, “the Jewish state” and “aren’t we clever” remained a fallback for the faithful.
An almost perfect example: Canadian Israel-supporters launched an oh-so-clever, impertinent public relations campaign in 2010. They titled it “Size Doesn’t Matter,” employing broad sexual innuendo, dispensing merch like buttons, stickers, even condoms. At the same time, booths touting the Tel-Aviv Pride parade appeared at LGBTQ+ events across the country, sparking pitched battles at Pride AGMs. Wrote the Canadian Jewish News:
“A centrepiece is the campaign’s cheeky first video, which can be viewed on Facebook and YouTube. It shows a Canadian woman telling her Israeli boyfriend, who appears to be naked, that ‘it’s small… I don’t think I could go there.’
The camera eventually pans to a map of Israel and ends with a website address.”
The campaign fairly quickly fell flat amid increasing Israeli ugliness and accusations of insulting gender bias. But the basic shpiel (or sales pitch) for the Israel fans remained: aren’t we clever!
My Identity
What are Jews to me? What is Israel to me? I could, as a few friends of Jewish lineage do, simply refuse on principle to identify as a member of any group, except as a human being, a citizen of the world. But I can’t and won’t. Like others cradled and nurtured in a community of what Nova Scotia novelist Ernest Buckler called “knitted warmth,” sorry, a piece of my heart is there. Just like I can’t divorce myself from my parents, my kids, my cousins, and the larger family from which I sprung and in which I grew up. I’m not obligated to go schmooze with them or dine at Toronto’s United Bakers Dairy Restaurant with them. I’m not obligated to sit down for Passover Seder with them and keep my mouth shut, if it drives me especially crazy.
However. If you do accept that you’re irrevocably part of a family or tribe, you can’t only take pride in their boast worthy accomplishments. You have to accept responsibility, feel shame, and attempt to do what you can to atone and remediate for their failures and bad behaviour. That’s why groups like Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), Global Jews for Palestine (GJP) and the Canadian Jewish Faculty Network (JFN) exist. That’s not self-hatred. That’s just realism.
I know some people with wicked, abusive parents. I know some people with wicked, exploitive children. They may try to distance themselves as much as possible from those wicked family members. But you can’t totally renounce your own, especially if they claim to be acting in your name, even if they break your heart. In fact, you owe it to good people the world over to denounce their behaviour.
As in other countries, we have a dilemma within the Canadian Jewish community. On the one hand, fifty-one percent (according to a recent poll) still self-identify as Zionist and in the midst of one of the worst genocides in this century, 56,000 Toronto Jews “walked with Israel” in May 2025. On the other hand, 49 percent (representing about 200,000 people) decline to identify as Zionist, and organizations like IJV have enjoyed a surge of thousands of adherents. Jewish protesters against Israel have taken over railway stations, intersections, and the Parliament buildings in Ottawa. As much as Jewish establishment organizations deny it, the community is highly divided, and growing more so, especially on the question of Israel.
Faced with this division in the community, and diminishing control, the “legacy” Jewish organizations police cohesion by force, punishing internal dissent. Not only are non-Jewish critics of Israel accused of antisemitism, Jewish mavericks too are insulted, isolated, mocked (as with the term “kapos” denoting Nazi-selected Jewish prisoner supervisors), doxed, and blackballed from jobs and community involvement. But much of the love-withholding offensive is more subtle and cultural.
One of the ways Israel and its avid supporters keep Jewish and non-Jewish people supportive of the State is with “Aren’t We Clever!” Especially during the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank.
I have been reminded time and again of how clever the Israelis are: the inflated reputation of Israel’s intelligence agencies (internal and external), its vaunted military achievements (without mentioning its nuclear arsenal or where the bullets, bombs, and bazookas come from), its (hyped) creativity in targeting Iran and Hizobollah, its (much embellished) tech prowess, the overstated and increasingly vanishing vibrant democracy (only for Jews), the “daring” raids by Israelis dressed as women or medical staff to snatch or kill targets in hospitals, not to mention the vaunted progressivism of Israel’s Supreme Court (which condones torture and allows inequality for non-Jews). Aren’t we clever!
During the current rampage against Gaza and the West Bank and beyond, as Israel consolidates its cred as a “pariah state,” the aren’t-we-clever tricks, rumours, and fables have only become more intense. It is said: “We” can closely surveil Palestinian society and use the intelligence (or the lies) about queers to blackmail or discredit them in their conservative communities. We can target Hamas leaders with meticulous accuracy (like blowing up buildings full of children). We can use “the Palestine laboratory” to sell “battle-tested” counter-insurgency and weapons to the rest of the world. We can assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists. We can plant a remotely-detonated bomb in a Tehran guesthouse killing Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. We can send a small explosive to give a “knock on the roof” before blasting in earnest. We can pinpoint (almost) the Hamas delegation in Doha for killing. We can have a special unit of the Israeli military tasked just with smearing Palestinian journalists and painting them as Hamas operatives, the better to justify their assassination. Aren’t we clever!
Some of the Israeli digital tools are soaked not only in blood and irony but in an abject cruelty that boggles the imagination. The “Lavender” AI system selects thousands of (alleged) Hamas officials to destroy (along with their families). Or the ploy where suspected militants (we know how inaccurate that is) are tracked until they get home, the better to include loved ones in their demise. Or drones luring Gazans outside using “various recorded sounds to trick their victims: a crying baby, a child screaming for help” in order to assassinate them. Aren’t we clever!
Especially galling is the exploding electronic equipment in Lebanon and Syria in Autumn 2024. I have personally heard Israel fans dining out on that one for a year. Israel found out that Hizbollah eschewed the use of cellphones and rather ordered pagers for adherents to use. Somehow the Israelis supplied or tampered with the pagers and walkie-talkies, and kaboom! The attacks killed 42 people, including 12 civilians, injuring 4,000 civilians, including children, on fingers, hands, and eyes, as well as shrapnel brain injuries. Jokes and threats about beepers have proliferated in the” Israeliverse” ever since. Aren’t we clever!
Even more deliciously clever are the nicknames Israelis have used for these tricks. The above tracking of the militants to their families is called “Where’s Daddy? The exploding pagers has been called “Grim Beeper.” The AI tool “Gospel” enables Israelis “to select targets to bomb is so profound that one former Israeli intelligence official called it a ‘mass assassination factory’.” Israeli comedian Benji Lovitt used the name of the 2014 Israeli campaign “Protective Edge,” that killed 2300 Gazans to joke about condoms. Let’s all have a good laugh.
The flipside of “aren’t we clever” is the century-old mocking barrage of “aren’t we stupid/ridiculous” disparagement of Palestinians, from the hoary Israeli sobriquet “Arab Labour” to denote crude incompetency or shoddy work, to the denial of starvation by pointing to chubby Gazans. TV personalities have even wisecracked that a large Gazan mother had eaten her baby. The photos of Israeli soldiers posing in Gazan women’s lingerie has garnered hilarity from Haifa to Beersheva and doubtless beyond. A recent study by the Canadian Jewish Faculty Network follows the hundreds of utterances of CIJA since 7 October 2023, showing a pattern of anti-Palestinian racism.
I remember as a teenager listening to Jewish comedians after the 6-Day War making uproarious but cruel fun of the newly hapless Arabs, who weeks earlier had been portrayed as diabolical killers out to snuff Israel. But the current anti-Palestinian racism outdoes even that.
Jewish Supremacism
This is all part and parcel of Jewish supremacism, not only in Israel but in the Diaspora. At its most extreme, we see Israeli cabinet minister Bezalel Smotrich widely reportedly saying that “International law does not apply to Jews. That’s the difference between the chosen people and the others.” Insofar as Jews are now considered “white,” Jewish supremacism is a subset of white supremacism. Israel recently opened its arms to the notorious British white nationalist Tommy Robinson, to the horror of even the British Board of Jewish Deputies, who said “Tommy Robinson is a thug who represents the very worst of Britain.” Like a Jewish Pope and Council of Cardinals, Netanyahu and his colleagues render absolution to a rogue’s gallery of racists and antisemites like Robinson, Viktor Orban and Geert Wilders, as long as they support Israel.
Alas then, there are more than a few problems with being too clever by half:
- The overriding conceit is that if Israel is clever enough, it can overcome all obstacles in its path. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner recently said that “Ingenuity, innovation, compassion” and “be exceptional” were all that Israel needed to do to redeem its frayed reputation. In fact, the never-ending conflict drives the technology and vice-versa. Canadian/American writer and political adviser Dan Senor is a prime spokesperson for this view, having popularized the phrase “Start-Up Nation” in his 2009 book of that name. He continues, with The Genius of Israel (2023). One reviewer opined of the former, “The book is filled with a gasping sense of wonder, which weakened the authors’ arguments.” As Israeli political economist Shir Hever has written, the genocide is both a factor and a symptom of Israel moving from start-up nation to shut-down nation. Even before 7 October, 2023, tech entrepreneurs were leaving or staying away, and as Hever amplified:
“Over 46,000 businesses have gone bankrupt, tourism has stopped, Israel’s credit rating was lowered, Israeli bonds are sold at the prices of almost ‘junk bonds’ levels, and the foreign investments that have already dropped by 60% in the first quarter of 2023 (as a result of the policies of Israel’s far-right government before October 7) show no prospects of recovery.”
- The over-use of technology, especially AI, in modern warfare is the author of multiple disasters. Independent experts reporting to the UN Human Rights Council in April 2024 said it well: “The shocking revelations of the use of AI systems by the Israeli military such as ‘Gospel’, ‘Lavender’ and ‘Where’s Daddy?’, combined with lowered human due diligence to avoid or minimise civilian casualties and infrastructure, contribute to explaining the extent of the death toll and home destruction in Gaza.” The Israelis were too clever by at least 70,000 Palestinian lives (including at least 23,000 children).
- A major downside of “too clever by half” is “too arrogant by half.” The Israelis running the show are so full of their self-regard that they ignore how their behaviour has turned them from the world’s darling to one of the world’s outcasts, likely permanently. For example, which brainiacs decided after recently seizing the Sumud flotilla that pulling tiny Greta Thunberg by the hair, beating her, making her kiss the Israeli flag, and wrapping her in it for photos was a good look? Only fanatics blinded by their own messianism. For such a small country, military and technological prowess will not bring it peace and contentment but only defeat.
- It’s not only the current Israelis running the show who are responsible, as if getting rid of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich will bring things back to “normal.” Arrogance and cruelty are a hallmark of the colonialism that is baked into the Israeli DNA. The current genocide is pre-ordained.
- Enemies teach one another; Palestinians resisting Israeli occupation have learned from their predicament absolutely ingenious ways not only to live from day to day but to survive in the most nightmarish of circumstances. Imagine what they could do if the bloodbath and occupation ended. The recent Nobel Prize in chemistry to Palestinian Omar M. Yaghi should give the world pause. Sumud isn’t just a clever watchword. It is a powerful, perhaps the most powerful, technology.
- You may be clever tactically, but it can lead you, proportionally, to be stupid strategically. Rather than applying the prodigious talents Israelis boast about to welcome equal rights from the river to the sea, they find ever more precocious ways to kill and maim and be hated. It’s called hubris. The ancient Greeks believed that those guilty of excessive pride and arrogance were punished by the gods for believing they were above the divines. Israel will be punished by the world for believing they were above international law, and like the “hubrisniks” of old, they will fall. •
