Monthly Archives: December 2023

Multiple Standards.

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            Liz Magill, until recently the president of the University of Pennsylvania, said that anti-Semitic speech should be restricted when it is “directed and severe, pervasive.”  Claudine Gay, still President of Harvard University,[1] said the line should be drawn when speech “becomes conduct” (i.e. action).  So, help me out.  Wearing a white sheet with eye-holes on a campus would be “speech,” but burning a cross would be “conduct”?  How about chanting “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Judenrein”? 

John McWhorter[2] argues that a far lower threshold for action exists when it comes to Black people at a university.[3]  How so?  Discourse has long held that White people hold the power in American society.  Power makes them, if not invulnerable to affront, perfectly capable of absorbing a challenge and even fighting back.[4]  Blacks, however, are not seen as resilient. 

Administrations have learned to speak out and act out, against anything that may make Black people “uncomfortable.”  McWhorter cites the Ilya Shapiro incident at Georgetown[5] and the Dorian Abbot incident at M.I.T.[6]  This, says McWhorter, “means treating Black students as pathological cases rather than human beings with basic resilience who understand proportion and degree.”[7]  To “train young people, or any people, to think of themselves as weak is a form of abuse.”  Hence, the low expectations for Black people on many college and university campuses constitutes the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and even “racism.”  

To the contemporary historian, it could appear that political Progressives view Blacks as a group as having been damaged—perhaps irretrievably damaged–by slavery and the legacy of slavery.  Hence, Blacks today cannot be held to the same standards as other people.  This view is reflected in the different standards of taking offense and of resilience discussed by McWhorter.  It also appears in the outcome of some hiring decisions (notably in academia).  Then, public efforts to “assist” Blacks often turn out to be social welfare bureaucracies that merely “administer” Black clients.  The outcome of such “help” can be disastrous for the intended beneficiaries, especially when compared with the older Black tradition of struggling against the Powers-That-Be.[8]  Moreover, some Progressives view Asian-Americans with suspicion for showing what an oppressed people can do with the aid of strong families and a strong culture. 

[1] I’m assuming that the Board at Harvard had some tight-lipped law firm run everything Gay has ever written or said through a plagiarism-detection program.  No more shoes to drop.  Still, see Carol Swain’s seething op-ed in the WSJ, 18 December 2023. 

[2] For the bare bones, see: John McWhorter – Wikipedia 

[3] John McWhorter, “Training People to Think They Are Weak Is a Form of Abuse,” NYT, 17 December 2023.  The “soft bigotry” bit is from a speech by President George W. Bush. 

[4] “Jews are seen in some quarters as white and therefore need no protection from outright hostility.”  Bunch of things to un-pack there.  First, “seen as white”?  Jews ARE white and always have been.  Second, “outright hostility” is OK so long as it is directed against Whites?  Who argues that position?  Asking for a friend. 

[5] See: Ilya Shapiro Quits Georgetown’s Law School Amid Free Speech Fight – The New York Times (nytimes.com)  McWhorter later refers to a 2020 incident at USC.  See: How USC’s Dr. Greg Patton Accidentally Ignited an Academic Culture War – LAmag – Culture, Food, Fashion, News & Los Angeles.  He does not cite the Joshua Katz incident at Princeton.  See: Joshua Katz (classicist) – Wikipedia 

[6] See: Dorian Abbot – Wikipedia  “The barrage of negative press and public outrage resulting from Abbot’s cancellation led MIT to hold two forums at which faculty were polled on two free speech questions. That a large majority felt that their voices are constrained at MIT revealed the need for decisive action.”

[7] See: Controversies about the word niggardly – Wikipedia 

[8] Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (1999). 

Cancel Culture.

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            German public opinion scholar Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann (1916-2010) grew up in easy circumstances, then got a hard lesson.  Her family had money and gave her a first-rate education.  That education included a year spent on study-abroad at the University of Missouri (1937-1938), where she studied American media and journalism.  George Gallup’s opinion-polling methods particularly interested her.  So did Walter Lippman’s book Public Opinion (1922).  Returning to Germany, she got her Ph.D. in 1940. 

            In 1946, she married a Christian-Democrat politician, Erich Neumann (1912-1973).  Together, they founded post-war Germany’s first public opinion research organization in 1947.  She rose to great prominence in her field, teaching at a German university (1964-1983), serving as president of the World Association for Public Opinion Research, and holding a visiting appointment at the University of Chicago (1978-1991).  In 1990-1991, the question of how anti-Semitic, how pro-Nazi or anti-Nazi, she had been, came out in the open at Chicago.  Political Science professor John Mearsheimer, nobody’s idea of a marshmallow, found her answers unpersuasive.  Some student protests followed.  Her invitation to teach was not renewed. 

            Her chief scholarly contribution came in an idea called “the Spiral of Silence.”[1]  Noelle-Neumann argued that “not isolating himself is more important [to an individual] than his own judgement”, meaning his perception of how others in the group perceive him is more important to himself than the need for his opinion to be heard.”[2]  That is, nobody wants to be in the minority, so if one set of beliefs appears to be dominant, then people will adjust their own opinions, either by following the crowd or just keeping silent.  Being noisy and grabbing attention can define the perception of which opinion is dominant. 

            This insight lies at the heart of the debate over “cancel culture.”  Back in the day some eminent speakers who had been invited to speak at colleges and universities encountered resistance from students who held a different intellectual perspective on various issues.  Demonstrations, protests, and petitions demanded that the invitation to speak be cancelled.  Often, colleges and universities caved-in to these demands.[3]  Hence, the origin of the term “cancel culture”: if you don’t like what somebody has to say, then silence and shame them. 

Here are a few examples.  In Spring 2014, it was announced that former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would give the commencement address at Rutgers University.  Weeks of protest by some students and faculty followed.  In early May 2014, Rice withdrew.  During Spring 2016, at least seven speakers withdrew from invited appearances after protests at various colleges or were shouted down.[4]  In March 2017, the conservative scholar Charles Murray tried to speak at Middlebury College.  Protests disrupted the talk, which was moved to a more secure venue.  Then Murray and his college hosts had a hard time leaving the campus, with one professor receiving a concussion. 

The recent and current intimidation and censorship generally comes from the left.  However, as every political science professor knows, Noelle-Neumann’s “Spiral of Silence” is rooted in her own experience of conformity in Nazi Germany.  It just doesn’t stop there. 

[1] Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann, “The spiral of silence: a theory of public opinion,” Journal of Communication, vol. 24 (2): 43–51. 

[2] Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann, “Turbulences in the climate of opinion: Methodological applications of the spiral of silence theory”, Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 41 (2): 143–158. 

[3] See: “Wine-sod! Dog-eyes! You have the heart of a deer!” Iliad 1.224–226. 

[4] List of Disinvited Speakers at Colleges (businessinsider.com)   

Full Speed Ahead.

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            At the height of its mobilization during the Second World War, the United States possessed a vast industrial and demographic advantage over both its foes and friends.  In particular, it could build and man warships and war planes in greater numbers and at a much faster pace.  To take one example, the Japanese losses of aircraft carriers and of combat pilots at Midway in June 1942 could not be swiftly replaced. 

            Now the shoe is on the other foot in any non-nuclear confrontation between the United States and China.[1]  China possesses a vast industrial base that is firmly under the control of the government.  A Sino-American war over Taiwan could begin as a naval war in the Western Pacific.  China has powerfully developed its ship-building capability, while the American ability has badly wasted over many years.  In China, there is a shipyard that can produce in one year as many ships as American yards have launched in the last nine years.  No, those ships, like many other products, are not as good as high-end Western products.  However, Chinese industries have been improving quality.  On top of that, in the Second World War, German soldiers were generally better than Red Army soldiers.  The Red Army just had a lot more soldiers. 

In the United States, the defense budget as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), has slid from 8.9 percent during the Vietnam War to 4.6 percent during the Afghanistan-Iraq War to 3.1 percent today.  Declining defense spending has led to a wasting defense industrial base.  That is, the ability to produce weapons to meet needs. 

After 1990, the end of the Cold War and falling defense budgets caused the Pentagon to give defense contractors a strong shove toward consolidation.  Furthermore, a series of small-scale wars encouraged arms manufacturers to limit productive capacity to what was needed to serve a just-in-time delivery model.  One effect has been endemic cost-overruns.  Another has been a stretching-out of delivery times.  Doubling production of anti-tank missiles will take four years, not the originally projected two years.  There’s an up to six year lead-time in the production of anti-ship missiles already promised to Taiwan. 

It will take time to set this right.  Productive capacity includes manufacturing capacity, supply chains, and skilled personnel.  All have been thinned out over the last thirty years.[2]  Other economic changes of the time have similarly shrunken the U.S. manufacturing base in general.  Moreover, weapons production sometimes requires highly-trained specialists, so training may take a long time.  As a result, it will not be easy to shift key resources from non-essential to essential industries.[3] 

It took better than thirty years, along with some fundamental social and economic changes, to arrive at this situation.  Just reversing course doesn’t seem like a workable solution.  Facetiously, Wall Street Journal columnist Greg Ip raises the possibility of just handing the problem to Elon Musk. 

The essence of the issue lies in risk: could the U.S. Navy risk battle with the Chinese navy if it meant taking losses that would be hard to replace in a timely fashion? 

[1] Greg Ip, “U.S. Struggles to Build Up Its Military Might,” WSJ, 7 December 2023. 

[2] The same thing happened in Great Britain between the world wars.  This contributed to appeasement. 

[3] During the Covid lock-downs in New York City, it finally occurred to people that many activities combined in an economic “eco-system.”  The same goes for the arms industry, in particular, and all industry, in general. 

AI call home.

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            Initially the plaything of the very rich, now cars are everywhere in the world.  The first time I saw a cordless phone was in the movie “Wall Street” (dir. Oliver Stone, 1983); recently I saw a newspaper picture of a displaced Palestinian family in Gaza riding on a donkey-cart with the obese “pater familias” talking on his cell-phone.  The point is that all useful new technologies tend to become cheap and widely available.[1] 

            Today’s rapidly emerging technologies include artificial intelligence (AI)[2] and “synthetic biology.”[3]  Some people foresee the dawn of a new golden age.  “What dreams may come” true?  Great scientific breakthroughs, leading to cures for diseases, are vaunted.  International co-operation plus AI might end world poverty and hunger, or climate change.  “There seems no obvious upper limit on what’s possible.” 

Other people feel more alarm than glee.  The fact that a new technology is useful, cheap, and widely available doesn’t guarantee that all its effects will be beneficial.  Cars run on carbon; cell-phones facilitate bullying, among other harms.  Then there are “guns of the hand.” 

Probably the most intense concern among the lay public is the fear that AI will escape human control, that we will end as slaves of the machine that we—“they” once it has happened and people are looking for someone to blame—have created.[4]  We’ll all have to shape up according to the dictates of a Vegan-eating, Alcoholics Anonymous-belonging, Pilates-loving, classical music-listening, PBS-watching, and armed-to-the-teeth-with-nuclear-weapons super-computer named Pythia. 

There is another, more realistic, fear.  What if “AI” does NOT escape human control?  What if it falls into the “wrong” hands as well as into the “right” ones?[5]  Criminals, terrorists, and countries or companies gone “rogue” are all drawn to the immense possibilities of “AI.”[6] 

One solution might be to restrict the legal right to develop AI and its off-shoots to “responsible certified developers.”  This could be backed by some international apparatus of audits, controls on the transfer of the most advanced computer chips, and regulating the flow of information on the internet.   It’s difficult to imagine how this would work effectively in a world of competing nation-states, a still very open world economy, and intractably curious scientists.  The proliferation of nuclear weapons is one example of the difficulties. 

Even if regulation limps behind any kind of innovation, it is worth asking “How can we guide technology in a way that allows us to benefit from its extraordinary promise without being destroyed by its exceptional power?”[7] 

[1] Mustafa Suleyman, with Michael Bhaskhar, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Biggest Dilemma (2023).  OTOH, we’re less than a quarter of the way into the 21st Century, so who knows? 

[2] See: Artificial intelligence – Wikipedia 

[3] On the latter, see, for starters: Synthetic biology – Wikipedia 

[4] We have been prepped for this fear by popular culture.  See the seminal works: “2001: Space Odyssey” (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968); “Colossus: The Forbin Project” (dir. Joseph Sargent, 1970); “The Matrix” (dir. The Wachowskis, 1999); and “Ex Machina” (dir. Alex Garland, 2014).  The threat resonates most powerfully with liberal arts faculty.  Many deans would fail the Voight-Kampff Test.  Blade Runner – Voight-Kampff Test (HQ) – YouTube 

[5] Who has the “right” hands?  The European Community?  UNESCO?  The Sackler family?  OK, the Fed. 

[6] I’m reading William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984), so none of this seems far-fetched to me. 

[7] David Shaywitz, review of The Coming Wave, WSJ, 7 November 2023. 

My Weekly Reader 6 December 2023.

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            American political leaders confronted two important questions in the late 1940s and early 1950s.[1]  On the one hand, where did the central front in the Cold War lie, in Western Europe or in East Asia?  After 1945, the presence of the Red Army rendered democratic government in Eastern Europe a lost cause.  Western Europe, including the most heavily industrialized parts of Germany, formed an essential part of American security.  Economic revival in Western Europe would stabilize democratic government as a bulwark against further Soviet expansion.  From 1947 to 1949, the United States had dueled with the Soviet Union over the fate of Western Europe.  First the Marshall Plan had provided critical aid to Western European economic recovery.  Then the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) offered an American guarantee of military security.  Without firing a shot, the Americans had slapped the Soviets silly. 

            Yet there were critics of this policy of “enlightened self-interest.”  Most of the post-war Western European governments leaned distinctly to the left.  Marshall Plan aid seemed to be subsidizing a Socialism far to the left of anything the New Deal had done.  Paradoxically, it also sought to revive trading partners who would soon enough become competitors on world markets.  At the same time, some people saw America’s future in an orientation toward Asia.  Hence, the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War (1949), combined with insurgencies in Indochina, the Philippines, and Malaya threatened future interests. 

            On the other hand, had the New Deal sated the American public’s appetite for expanded government and reform, or did there remain important things that should and could be done?  President Harry Truman, like his eventual successor Lyndon Johnson, ardently supported the accomplishment of the New Deal, yet saw it as incomplete.  After his election as president in his own right in November 1948, Truman sought to complete the New Deal by establishing national health insurance, repealing the Taft-Hartley law restraining labor unions, regulating agricultural prices, further shifting income from the wealthy to the working class, and taking steps against racial discrimination.  From 1945 to 1952, Truman would press for this “Fair Deal.” 

            Here, too, the Truman policy met critics.  Worse, the president misjudged his times.  The New Deal had rested upon a coalition of liberal Eastern Democrats with conservative Democrats in the South and West.  Some wildly mistaken actions by Franklin D. Roosevelt had weakened that coalition.[2]  The war had forced a degree of national unity; peace allowed the divisions to re-emerge.  The “Fair Deal” was dead by mid-1950: the New Deal would not advance. 

            In June 1950, Communist North Koreans invaded South Korea.  A Cold War that Americans had believed to be European; politico-economic, rather than military; and in the process of being won, revealed itself to be global and centered in Asia; military; and on the edge of being lost.  It was not what many people had hoped. 

            The New Deal would stand, being neither expanded nor rolled back.  America would fight wars in Asia against Chinese proxies.  Basic American policies into the 1960s were set in cement during 1950. 

[1] Aaron Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Strategy (2000).  Nick Bunker, In the Shadow of Fear: America and the World in 1950 (2023) offers a recent popular take. 

[2] Notably his attempt to pack the Supreme Court and his attempted “purge” of Democratic legislators who had opposed him. 

Thought Experiment 1.

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Much of world opinion appears to believe that Hamas has a “right” to win.  Israel is pressed to limit or pause or end its attack on Hamas, but Hamas is not pressured to end its resistance to Israel or to surrender. 

Does Hamas have a “right” to win?  If so, on what grounds? 

First, Israel is powerful and Hamas is weak.  Many “right-thinking people” reject the judgement of Thucydides on this matter as immoral.  Whoever is “stronger” is reflexively assumed to have the worse cause.[1] 

Second, at its founding, Israel committed a great crime against the Palestinians.  The Arabs in general were resolutely anti-Zionist; the Palestinians mostly emphatically so.  Israel fought for its survival.  In the process, many Palestinians fled the fighting or were driven out.  Israel conquered territory not assigned to it in the League of Nations partition plan.[2]  The refugees were not allowed to return.  Israel has continued to commit the same crime against Palestinians on the West Bank.  The settlements on the West Bank are progressively expanding.  They seem to be intended to make it impossible for the Palestinians to remain.  As one Israeli politician said years ago: “The Palestinians already have a country; it’s called Jordan.” 

Third, it doesn’t matter to many Palestinians (or foreigners) that the West Bank is under a totally different government than is Gaza.  Hamas is a Palestinian nationalist organization, not just the “de facto” governing power in Gaza. 

To understand all is NOT to forgive all.  Still, understanding is widely accepted as a good thing.  In the wake of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors did not want to remain in Europe, especially in Eastern Europe.  In Eastern Europe, various national governments combined anti-Semitism with Stalinism.  The gates of Western countries were partially closed to Jewish immigrants.  Jews huddled in camps for Displaced Persons or wandered around in search of surviving family members.  Going to Palestine and helping to found a Jewish state offered an alternative.  A Jewish state would never turn away Jews in any future surge of anti-Semitism. 

The ending of the Second World War unleashed massive forced-movements of populations across Europe.  Poles were kicked westward to fit within the boundaries of a redefined Poland.  People of German ancestry fled the revenge of the people Germany had abused during the war.  Slave laborers and Prisoners of War held in Germany headed either homeward or westward.  Over time, all were absorbed or re-absorbed into countries struggling to recover from war.  From a callous Zionist point of view, displaced Palestinians would naturally be absorbed by neighboring Arab countries.  Too often ignored is the corresponding expulsion (and depredation) of perhaps as many as a million Jews living in Arab countries after the foundation of Israel. 

            Finally, a two-state solution was possible from 1948 to 1967, but Egypt and Jordan wanted the West Bank and Gaza—and all Palestine–for themselves. 

[1] Perhaps this feeling is a projection onto international relations of popular judgements about domestic politics.  Perhaps it is the Marxist influence.  However, it is very unhistorical.  It conveniently leaves aside the examples of the American Civil War, the Second World War, and the Cold War.  In all those cases, Right and Might were one. 

[2] Yes, I know: “it’s called the United Nations.”  You really think that there is any significant difference, aside from the huge number of nations created after 1945 who batten on the organization like flies? 

Pre-venge.

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Deep minds have considered the subject of revenge.  Heinrich Heine said that “We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged.”  John Dryden said “Beware the fury of a patient man.”  This probably is the inspiration for Walter White.[1] 

Is there such a thing as pre-venge?  Googling, I found that there is a 2016 movie with this title.[2]  Apparently, but I don’t care, it is also the title of a “Transformers” episode.[3] 

Continuing to Google, I found the following definition: “The act of taking, or an action taken against someone or something, ostensibly in retaliation for another act that has not yet been committed; pre-emptive action characterized as revenge.”[4] 

The dictionary definition isn’t entirely accurate.  In particular, it confuses “pre-venge” with “pre-emption,” as in actually preventing something from happening by striking the first blow.  It doesn’t really get at the idea that if a person thinks another person is going to do something to them AND they can’t prevent that thing from happening, then they’re entitled to get in their own shot when they can.  So, not pre-emption, which would involve forestalling the expected attack. 

In either case, pre-emption or pre-venge, how can one be absolutely certain that something is going to happen?  Contingency being what it is. Can you be justified in acting on a presumption that something will happen?  Presumption plays hob with cause-and-effect. 

The law deals with some aspects of this in its doctrine on self-defense.  “In the U.S., the general rule is that ‘[a] person is privileged to use such force as reasonably appears necessary to defend him or herself against an apparent threat of unlawful and immediate violence from another [person]….When the use of deadly force is involved in a self-defense claim, the person must also reasonably believe that their use of deadly force is immediately necessary to prevent the other’s infliction of great bodily harm or death.”[5] 

So, the “danger” must be “immediate” and “unlawful.”  The trouble here is that this law deals only with physical violence.  Lots of things for which one might seek revenge are not “unlawful” or “violent.”  They are just wrong or immoral or an abuse of power relationships.

Further, “According to The Language Report, the word has been in use since the late 1990s.”[6]  Why since the late 1990s?  And who coined the term?  Answering that last question would be like trying to find out who—other than baseball catchers with the facemask actually on, wore their baseball cap backward.  Purportedly it was a Mexican-American kid in Los Angeles,[7] but I’ve seen archival film of WWII German tank crews wearing their similar-looking caps backward in 1943.[8]  So, might just be a young-guy reflexive thing.  Might even have started in New York in the 1890s with bowler hats, but nobody could tell that they were on backward. 

There’s an old—Italian?—saying that “revenge is a dish best tasted cold.”  In this sense, “pre-venge” would be like hitting the drive-through window at McDonald’s on the way home from work. 

[1] Walt’s Deal With The Schwartzs | Breaking Bad – YouTube 

[2] Prevenge – Wikipedia. 

[3] Prevenge – Transformers Wiki (tfwiki.net) 

[4] prevenge – Wiktionary, the free dictionary.    

[5] Self-defense (United States) – Wikipedia 

[6] Ibid. 

[7] William Gibson, Pattern Recognition. 

[8] Going off on yet another tangent, the movie “Battle of the Bulge” (dir. Ken Annakin, 1965, who also directed “The Planter’s Wife,” 1952) does NOT show youthful German tankers wearing their caps backward. 

Hot Take on the Middle East.

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            It appears from the news on the Devil Box that the American-Israeli captives taken by Hamas are not getting released in a speedy fashion.  This is so in spite of the eager role played by American officials in brokering the cease-fire in Gaza and the exchange of the detained.  Thing is it reminds me of the American embassy people held prisoner by the Iranians during the benighted Carter administration.  They didn’t get released until Reagan had been inaugurated.  Out of spite.  So maybe William Burns and Antony Blinken are embarrassed and scratching their heads that Hamas is holding onto the Americans.  “Don’t they understand that they are embarrassing the most powerful nation in the world?”  Sure they do.  It’s just that the Iranians are running Hamas.  Another chance at spite.  Probably need an expert on Persian culture (and not just a historian who will talk about the coup in 1953) to explain the role of spite in Iran. 

            Countries have foreign policies for their own advantage, not for the advantage of other people.  Israel always understood this truth.  Americans seem to have lost sight of the “self-interest” part of the “enlightened self-interest” formula that inspired the Marshall Plan.  Or perhaps it’s just the pull of Empire. 

            Now Biden has turned on Israel.  His motive appears to be advancing his own self-interest in November 2024.  He’s always been a time-server, a person who follows the course of thought at any given period, rather than a person with fixed convictions.  Now the Democratic Party is splintering over support for Israel’s brutal self-defense.  This change will not threaten Israel’s survival over the short run.  It will threaten Israel’s survival over the long run.  So, Israel is going to go in search of one or more new great power patrons.  (I’m looking at the Henry Kissinger obit on the front page of the Times as I write this.)  Will Israel pull along any of the Arab states in the process?  Who would you prefer to have as an ally, Israel or Iran? 

            How did Hamas get all the missiles it fired at Israel into Gaza in the first place?  Probably they smuggled them in through Egypt onboard the big semis hauling in food, medical supplies, building materials, and gasoline.  So, now that “humanitarian” relief is running in again, is Hamas bringing in more missiles, more ammunition, more explosives?  If so, I suppose you could call it “inhumanitarian” relief.  And is the UNRWA an objective ally of Hamas? 

            The Palestinian Authority (PA) seems to me to be a kleptocracy.  It won’t do anything to seriously rock the boat because that would interfere with the money-making.  This passivity has extended—so far, but who knows for how long—to dealing with the aggression of Israeli “settlers” on the West Bank.  That aggression isn’t new.  It’s been going on for years.[1]  Hamas’s attack on Israel and the subsequent trading of it’s prisoners for Palestinians in Israel’s jail has made Hamas increasingly popular on the West Bank.[2]  So, put the PA in charge of post-war Gaza, rather than let the League of Nations or Israel take over?  “Eeez joke, yes?” 

[1] On the origins of settlements, see: Revisionist Zionism – Wikipedia  In terms of political parties, Revisionists founded Herut, then changed the name to Gahal, then joined with some other small groups to create Likud.  Benjamin Netanyahu is the current leader of Likud.  Menachem Begin and Itzhak Shamir were previous leaders.

[2] Christina Goldbaum and Hiba Yazbek, “In West Bank, Trust in Hamas Only Deepens,” NYT, 30 Nov. 2023.