Month: December 2023

Thoughts on the Israel-Hamas war, two months in

At its heart, as Amos Oz put it, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is fundamentally a matter of real estate: there is only one Palestine and there are two peoples who want it. The reason that both sides want the land so badly is that they have nowhere else to go. Jews have been forcibly expelled from so many countries over so many centuries that they see Israel as the only place where they can be safe. In the time that has passed since the creation of the state of Israel, the situation of the Palestinians has been shown to be little better: they might not be persecuted for their religion, but neighbouring Arab countries have shown no appetite for a mass influx of Palestinian refugees.

We can argue until the cows come home as to who has the stronger ancestral claim on the land and whose human rights have been violated by whom. But it boils down to this: in the long term, there are only three possible outcomes: ethnic cleansing whereby one side or the other is “driven into the sea” (a phrase often heard on both sides), a peace deal whereby both sides share the land and feel equitably treated (whether the “two state solution” or one of the various alternatives to it) or a stasis whereby violence continues indefinitely, perhaps ebbing and flowing in severity.

The 1993 and 1995 Oslo accords stated the objective of a peace deal. It’s reasonable to suppose that at the time, both a majority of Jews and a majority of Palestinians hoped that a listing peace could be created that would be accepted by both sides. But even then, there were contingents on both sides who had no interest in this and preferred to push for ethnic cleansing of the other side. For these contingents, it was better  to accept a violent stasis, however long it might last, if it meant avoiding capitulation. On the Palestinian side, Hamas exemplifies those who believe that the Jews should be expelled from Palestine. On the Jewish side, there are substantial numbers of people promote unlimited settler expansion and severe constraints on the liberties of Palestinians: they may not be terrorists in the way that Hamas are, but they are equivalent in their desire to subvert the peace process. In November 1995, with the ink scarcely dry on the Oslo accords, one of these Jewish equivalents murdered Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister who signed them.

Both of these camps are in profound agreement: they don’t want a peace deal on terms that could conceivably be palatable to the other side: you could call it an anti-peace alliance. And while both sides get very angry if you accuse them of intending genocide, they both use genocidal language and they both have the same goal: ethnic cleansing or complete subjugation of the other side. Right now, the alliance is the ascendancy, in control of the governments of both Israel and Gaza. In the early days after the Oslo accords, you might have considered these two camps as extremists. By now, in the aftermath of the October 7th attack,  they are mainstream – perhaps even in the majority in their respective peoples.

Both halves of the alliance must think that everything is going swimmingly well right now. Hamas is achieving the dream of every terrorist organisation, to provoke its opponents into acts of revenge and repression so horrible that anybody neutral considers them to be monstrous (for a clear analysis of this kind of mindset, read Louise Richardson’s What Terrorists Want, written in 2007 but still spot on today). The Israeli far right are in equally good shape, able to demonstrate to their followers that Hamas are monsters who must be eradicated at all costs – even if those costs include taking a large chunk of the civilian Palestinian population with them.

So how do I – born in the UK of Israeli parents, Jewish by race and atheist by religion – feel about supporting Israel in all this? For a start, I accept the fundamental Jewish argument of “we need a safe haven, and Israel is it.” I don’t believe for a moment that antisemitism has been consigned to history: even in supposedly liberal countries like the UK, it’s easy to detect classic antisemite language and behaviour both in the far right and the far left, while in most Muslim countries, antisemitism is a majority viewpoint. (By the way, Islamophobia is even more present in the West, a fact which doesn’t affect the argument here but shouldn’t be ignored).

But the way Israel is waging its war against Hamas is a godsend to the antisemite cause: it’s daily proof for everyone who considers Jews to be bloodthirsty monsters, giving credence to centuries of slanders from Christ-killing to the blood libel. If we want to persuade the world to hate us because we’re Jews, there’s no better way to do it than to massacre thousands of Palestinian civilians. It doesn’t matter whether individual killings are deliberate, collateral damage from operations against armed enemy fighters, or starvation by destruction of infrastructure. A civilian death is a civilian death. If flushing out a terrorist organisation requires the killing of tens of thousands of civilians and the destruction of their entire country, that isn’t self-defence, it’s revenge.

Sadly, it was a predictable response. Writing in Le Monde just a week after the Hamas attacks, historian Vincent Lemire described what he called “the double trap” set by Hamas: the military trap of enticing Israel into warfare in difficult territory and the moral trap of provoking Israel into an excessive response. The Israelis may have been smart enough to avoid the worst of the military trap, but they have fallen headlong into the moral one.

Unless both sides commit to peace, the cycles of violence in Palestine are doomed to repeat themselves. This may be the worst of the cycles in recent times, but it will not be the last – however much the Israeli military might wish to believe it so. The “war to end wars” idea didn’t work in Europe and it won’t work in Palestine either.

What Hamas did on October 7th was monstrous, and their continued holding of Israeli hostages remains so. But before I can support Israel in their war against Hamas, Israel needs to do three things: stop the mass killing of civilians in Gaza, reverse the settling of Palestinian lands in the West Bank and display some genuine intent to make peace on fair terms. The present Israeli government might conceivably do the first of those things. It looks unlikely in the extreme that they will do all three. I can only hope that some political cataclysm happens in Israel that will bring in leadership of a very different kind.

The Israelis are my people. I hope that one day, I can once again be proud of this. But I fear that’s a day I won’t live to see.

More reading:

Louise Richardson, What Terrorists Want, Random House, 2007 https://www.randomhousebooks.com/books/153951/

Le Monde article by Vincent Lemire https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2023/10/14/vincent-lemire-historien-depuis-l-attaque-du-hamas-contre-israel-nous-sommes-entres-dans-une-periode-obscure-qu-il-est-encore-impossible-de-nommer_6194355_3232.html (in French, paywalled)

Luxury baking: Mushroom and Comté tart

Luxury baking: Mushroom and Comté tart

For anyone old enough to remember the 80s and Bruce Feirstein’s Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche: this particular real man not only eats quiche but also loves making them. But I’m picky about what sort of quiche: I’m not particularly fond of the thick version that’s essentially pastry-coated set custard, possibly with a few flecks of bacon. The version I love has thin, crisp pastry and is packed with flavourful ingredients (the egg binds it all together, but isn’t the principal component of the dish) and it’s backed to a gorgeous golden brown.

I make a bunch of variations on this particular theme. This Mushroom and Comté tart is my all time favourite dish to serve to vegetarian guests, but I also make versions with different cheeses and various nuts, peppers or other vegetables. If I’m not serving vegetarians, I will often add bacon or chorizo; if in the mood for spice, different chilies and peppercorns can put in an appearance.

This recipe is on the luxury end of ingredients: the truffle oil at the end is very optional; Cheddar is a perfectly good substitute for the Comté, albeit with a different flavour profile. The dried porcini can get very expensive in the UK (we buy them in bulk during trips to Italy): a teaspoon or two of white miso paste will add plenty of extra umami at noticeably lower price.

With the aid of a side salad or two, the quantities here will serve six generously as a main course and, depending on how hungry your guests are, will do 8-12 for a starter.

For the pastry, I use a stand mixer to combine the butter and flour. You can also use a food processor, or you can just use your fingers; whichever you choose, try to keep the ingredients cold.

Pastry

  • 250g plain flour (preferably OO)
  • 2g salt
  • 125g unsalted butter, cold from fridge
  • 30g yoghurt (I used Greek)
  • 2 eggs
  1. Put flour and salt into a mixing bowl. Cut the butter into small cubes (perhaps 5mm) and add them.
  2. Mix the flour and butter until it reaches the texture of coarse breadcrumbs.
  3. In a small bowl, beat the eggs and yoghurt together, then add to the flour/butter mixture.
  4. Mix until well combined into a smooth dough. Knead a few times with your hands, wrap in cling film and put in the fridge, preferably for 30 minutes or more (this will develop the gluten which will make the pastry stretchy and easier to roll).

Filling

  • Dried porcini to taste (I use around 15-20g)
  • Olive oil for frying – perhaps 20ml
  • 1 medium red onion (could use brown; could use a larger onion – 200g peeled weight)
  • 400g chestnut mushrooms
  • 1 tsp paprika (or choose your favourite seasoning: I’ve used different chilies and chili flakes; the best was some peppercorns my daughter brought home from a holiday in Madagascar).
  • 1 tsp dried oregano
  • A handful of garlic chives (optional, or could choose some other herb)
  • Salt and pepper to taste
  1. Chop the onions finely
  2. Slice the mushrooms
  3. In a small bowl, cover the dried porcini in hot water and leave them for a few minutes to rehydrate
  4. In a deep frying pan or wok on medium heat, fry the onions until transparent
  5. Drain the porcini, add them and fry for another minute or so
  6. Add the sliced mushrooms, paprika and dried oregano; fry until they are cooked and most of the liquid has evaporated.
  7. Add the garlic chives, salt and pepper and mix; take off the heat

Final assembly

  • 200g Comté cheese (Gruyère works fine; so would Beaufort; Cheddar would be a good cheaper alternative)
  • 4 eggs
  • Butter for greasing the tart tin
  • Flour for rolling
  • 200 ml milk
  • 30g Parmesan, grated
  • Truffle oil (optional)
  1. Preheat oven to 200℃ fan
  2. Chop the cheese into cubes, around 1cm.
  3. Separate one egg: you’ll put the white into a small bowl and the yolk into a medium-to-large bowl. Put the other three eggs in with the yolk.
  4. Grease your tart tin with butter
  5. Roll out your pastry and line the tart tin. Prick the bottom with a fork.
  6. Brush the pastry with the egg white, then put any left over egg white in with the rest of the eggs.
  7. Beat the eggs; add the milk and mix; add the Parmesan and mix
  8. Scatter the cheese cubes evenly across the pastry
  9. Scatter the mushroom filling evenly across the spaces pastry, discarding any excess liquid.
  10. Pour the egg/milk mixture over to fill the remaining gaps
  11. Bake until the surface is a deep golden brown, around 35 minutes
  12. Optionally: drizzle the tart with truffle oil
  13. Serve lukewarm to hot. A little rocket, oil and aceto on the side makes a good garnish.
Going green(er): owning a Tesla, two years in

Going green(er): owning a Tesla, two years in

Like many people of our age, we’ve become more and more conscious of climate change and the world we’re bequeathing our children. We can’t claim to be paragons of green virtue – we’re still doing far too much flying to even approach this – but we have been taking some of the right steps, and two years ago, we made the leap and abandoned the internal combustion enging: our first electric car, a Tesla Model 3 Long Range, was delivered exactly two years ago, on 30th November 2021.

Here’s a potted assessment, not just of the car itself, but of the experience of owning and running a Tesla. The short answer is that I’ve loved it: the car is great and the charging infrastructure has worked superbly. That said, there’s plenty to criticise in the user interface, not in the basic “iPad on wheels” concept, but in many details which are either misconceived or just plain don’t work.

The car

The biggest surprise about the Model 3 was quite how good a car it is mechanically. Leave aside the technology bluster, the computer screen, the blistering acceleration: the Model 3 handles better than any other car I’ve owned. You get this overwhelming feeling that when you turn the wheel to point the car in a particular direction, the car will follow immediately and precisely. There’s no resistance to your hands, there’s no lag, there’s no discernible roll of the car’s body, not the slightest hint of  uncertainty. The response to your control is precise and immediate.

The big point of difference between the way you drive a Tesla and the way you drive petrol or diesel cars is the regenerative braking. When you start taking your foot from the accelerator, once you get to the point where the car is no longer accelerating, it gradually starts to brake. This means that you don’t really use the brake pedal at all in normal driving: your right foot acts as both parts of the  “go faster / go slower” control. You might think this takes some getting used to, but I didn’t find this: I was completely comfortable within minutes. And once you’re used to it, that combines with the car’s basic responsiveness to make it a real joy to drive.

As has been well documented, the acceleration is phenomenal. I’ve only floorboarded the car once, largely to see what would would happen – and the thing that transpired was the certainty that my back and neck would start complaining if I did it regularly. Effectively, you have an on-off switch which says “overtake now”. Weirdly, this means that I drive the Tesla far less aggressively than previous cars: knowing that I can overtake just about anything else on the road at will means that I don’t have to do any of the jockeying for position that drivers often do. There’s never a need to drive up close to someone’s bumper to prepare.

The modern features you expect work well, like electronic locking and remote boot opening (or trunk, as Tesla insist on calling it – one day, they might do a British English option). Having the car warm up to the right cabin temperature at the right time every morning is a genuine luxury. Admittedly, it took me a while to get used to abandoning the car key and simply wandering up to the car with a phone in your pocket, expecting it to unlock. And finally, we find the car very comfortable – the seats are supportive and adjust in all the right places.

Our home charger

Range anxiety – or not

Our biggest concern about going electric was range anxiety: we do a regular round trip to Devon of around 250 miles each way and we’re often a bit pushed for time, so spending hours charging the car en route isn’t an option. So before buying the car, we did the trip in a rented Model 3.

What we found is that the Tesla Supercharger network works extraordinarily well. The chargers are very fast indeed: it’s rare for us to spend more than 20 minutes charging the car. That’s a very small overhead on top of the ten minutes we’d spend on a stop for the toilet and either a drink or a brief stretching of legs (we’re old enough that any long car journey carries the risk of our backs stiffening up). Our overall journey time to Devon hasn’t changed materially.

The ultimate test of range anxiety was the 2,000 mile road trip we did around France this July. Supercharger coverage in France isn’t quite what it is in the UK, so we needed a bit more preparation in the shape of acquiring a Chargemap card, which gives you access with a single RFID card to almost all the other commercial chargers around. Several of the hotels we stayed at recharged the car for free overnight, and there was a nice surprise when it turned out that the city of Aix-en-Provence provides free EV charging in their public car parks (although, admittedly, these are pretty expensive in the first place).

The car’s satnav is particularly good at this: dial in your destination (or even a couple of destinations ahead) and it will plan your supercharger stops. Then, when you’re on the road and approaching your supercharger, it will precondition the battery for ideal charging performance.

When touring, it’s worth noting that some supercharger stops are far nicer than others in terms of what facilities there are in the environs. Our stop in Valence was perfect because it was at lunchtime and the Novotel has a really nice brasserie. The Beaune supercharger allows a lovely 10-minutes-each-way walk into the city’s gorgeous old centre. The Amiens supercharger was decidedly less pleasant, with a lot of car park to walk through to get to the nearest toilet, in a MacDonalds. We discovered, rather late in the day, that an icon on your satnav allows you to find superchargers on your route so that you can Google them and see which ones look more salubrious; similar functionality is available on the phone app if you know where to look, off the bottom of the Location tab.

The user interface

If the Tesla is an obviously good answer to the “EV versus petrol” debate, its user interface is far more controversial. Some people will love the clean design that results from getting rid of as many manual controls as possible and putting them into a single iPad-like flat screen to the right of the steering wheel. For others, this will be unfamiliar and thoroughly unpleasant.

I’m somewhere in between. I’m perfectly happy to have all the controls on single flat screen, but there are an awful lot of things wrong in the way Tesla have done it. The good thing is that for most routine stuff, whether it’s setting up the climate control, checking tyre pressures or playing music from a bewildering variety of sources, the functions are easy to find and all work pretty well.

The single biggest problem is that I’m 65 years old, so I need reading glasses (but not distance vision ones). The speed at which my eyes can refocus between the screen and the road is limited and most of the fonts are so small that there’s a great deal of the UI that I simply can’t use while the car is in motion. A couple of months after I bought the car, Tesla relased an upgrade to allow me to select a larger font size, but that made only a modest difference.

This would matter less if the voice recognition worked better. Whether because of my British accent or vocabulary or because of something more fundamental, most of the time, I simply can’t get the car to understand what I’m saying, even for apparently simple commands like “windscreen wipers off” or “play music from Tidal”. Worse, the car often misinterprets my commands and does something completely unexpected, which you really don’t want to happen when you’re driving at speed.

Even at rest with reading glasses, the font size is also an issue when doing satnav searches: too often, you get a list of choices which are too long for the search results box and therefore get abbreviated with a “…” on the end. The effect is that you’re being presented with up to a dozen search results which look identical and which, on a bad day, can be several hundred kilmetres away from each other.

Future self-driving

For me, the most blatantly stupid aspect of the UI is the decision to devote the most important real estate on the screen – the third of the screen on the side closest to the steering wheel – to a 3-D visualisation of the car AI’s view of its surroundings – vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists, lane or edge-of-road markings. I assume that the motivation is to encourage the idea that the car is so good at modelling what’s around it that one day, we’ll have enough confidence to let it drive itself for us (if any Tesla employees are reading this who know better, feel free to disabuse me and explain the reality).

The trouble is, the visualisation is comically inept. Cars and lorries appear and vanish at dizzying speed. There’s no consistency I can identify as to when I’m likely to see pedestrians and when I’m not. The effect is the exact opposite of what’s intended: if the current display is the best model Tesla can create of the car’s surroundings, I’m not going to touch self-driving with a bargepole. It really irks me that this useless display is taking up the prime screen real estate where what I actually want is a large, easily readable speedometer, with some extras like the current speed limit, my journey time so far, expected arrival time and expected battery level at arrival in a large enough size that I can read them quickly. And I really would have thought that after going to the same car park barrier every day for a year, the car would have learned that no, I’m not going to drive straight into its box of electronics, and no, it doesn’t need to beep at me.

Some statistics

We’ve driven 9,920 miles in the two years we’ve had the car – a smidgin under 5,000 miles per year. The car reports our total energy use at 2,846 kWh, or 287 Wh /mile. At our current overnight electricity price of around £0.185 / kWh, that’s ust over 5p of electricity per mile, which strikes me as staggeringly good. To be honest, at our relatively low mileage, depreciation and insurance are going to be a far more significant cost than fuel.

For our France trip, a mixture of superchargers, other paid-for chargers and some free recharges, we ended up spending €0.09 per mile; if you ignore the free recharges, the figure goes up to €0.11.

The buying process

I need to mention that during the process of purchasing the car, Tesla’s customer engagement was dire. Sure, the online screen to set up your account and select the options you wanted worked fine. But navigating their phone system was horrific, there was really no idea given of when the car might arrive, and it wasn’t pleasant to discover that the pickup point closest to my home got mysteriously discontinued at some point during the ordering process. For a £50,000+ purchase, I’d have expected someone to answer the phones and give me a bit of TLC. They didn’t.

My overall impression is that their view of customer service is that it’s a cost centre: their strongest desire is to get you off the line and stop costing them salaries. Ensuring that you get a good experience to associate with their brand doesn’t seem to something that bothers them.

In summary

Quite simply, the Model 3 is the best car I’ve ever owned. It’s lovely to drive, staggeringly fast, practical, comfortable, reasonably attractive and its fuel costs are incredibly low (particularly since I have solar panels at home). Its charging network is second to none.

It would be great if Tesla had a serious rethink about their customer engagement and dealt with the dafter bits of the user interface. But I guess you can’t have everything. So far, therefore, all things considered, I’m not suffering from anything resembling buyer’s remorse.