Isabelle at the Gates

I want to be clear from the outset: I have read all three of these dispatches, and I found them, without exception, exhausting. Not the prose — the prose is fine, Reuters writes a tidy sentence — but the *content*. The sheer, unrelenting *effort* radiating off every paragraph. Soldiers standing around in a desert somewhere refusing to leave until other people hand over their guns. Two governments — two! — sitting down at a table with translators and briefing books to hash out where some tanks are allowed to park. A strait — a *strait*, darling, a small wet hallway between two countries neither of which I could pick out of a lineup — being fought over square inch by square inch as though it were the last good table at the club during regatta week.

And I thought: this is what happens when nobody's father is answering the phone.

Let's take them in turn, because I do think we owe these people the courtesy of specificity, even when — especially when — the specificity is exhausting.

First, Gaza. The gist, as I understand it, is that Israel is not leaving until Hamas gives up its weapons, and Hamas is not giving up its weapons, and so nobody is leaving anything, and this has apparently been going on in one form or another for what I am told is *years*, which is longer than I have kept most of my automobiles. Years! One does not keep a *car* for years, and here are two peoples keeping a *disagreement* for years, polishing it, maintaining it, bringing it out for special occasions. It is, I confess, the most baffling kind of hoarding I have ever encountered, and I grew up next door to a woman who kept every ticket stub since 1974.

Here is what nobody in this entire regional apparatus seems to have tried: asking a father. Not *a* father specifically — I don't mean my father, though God knows he has more standing armies' worth of lawyers than most nation-states — I mean simply the *category* of father, the reflex of it, the muscle memory of walking into a study, closing the door, and saying "this is silly and I would like it to stop now, please." One assumes there is no study to walk into. One assumes, and I say this with real and total sympathy, that the entire apparatus of the modern Middle Eastern state was constructed by people who never had a father who could simply *make a call*. It is, when you think about it, the saddest kind of poverty — not the poverty of things, but the poverty of *access*. Imagine standing at the edge of the worst disagreement of your life and not having a single person you could ring who could end it by lunch.

Because that's really the throughline here, isn't it? Every one of these stories is, structurally, an argument about *access* — who gets to go where, who has to leave, who's allowed through the door. And every single time, the parties involved treat this as some kind of intractable, blood-soaked puzzle, when it is in fact the single most solvable category of problem there is, provided you know a guy. One simply calls the guy. One simply says, "listen, I would like the strait, and I would like it by Thursday, and here is why that would be enormously convenient for absolutely everyone," and one *has* the strait, because it turns out most obstacles in this life are not military or diplomatic in nature, they are simply zoning issues wearing a military uniform for effect.

Take Syria and Russia — my second exhibit, and honestly the tidiest of the bunch, which I say as something close to a compliment. Here at last are two parties who behaved like adults: they wanted a thing (Russia, bases; Syria, presumably Russia's continued goodwill and whatever that's worth this decade), and instead of setting anything on fire about it, they had their people draw up an agreement and sign it. This is, structurally, exactly what happens when Father's estate lawyer and someone else's estate lawyer sit down over the question of the boundary hedge. It is boring. It is correct. Nobody has to be sad about a strait. I would genuinely like to send this one a small gift basket, if only to encourage the others toward similarly reasonable behavior. The only note I'd add — and I offer it gently — is that "military bases active since 2015" is, forgive me, a full decade of squatting dressed up in a treaty, which strikes me as exactly the kind of arrangement that could have been resolved in one afternoon if either party had simply had someone whose entire job was making other people's presence *go away*. Father has a man for this. Several, actually.

Which brings me, third and finally, to the Strait of Hormuz, which is, I gather, extremely important, in the sense that an enormous quantity of the world's oil physically travels through it, the way an enormous quantity of my own personal circulation depends on a fairly narrow vein near my elbow, and yet somehow this vital passage has become the site of what the Post is delicately calling "uncertain demands." Iran, apparently, wants things regarding the strait that Oman is not sure it can give, and so the whole accord — otherwise, I'm told, quite close — is hanging by a thread over a *waterway*. A *waterway*. I have sailed through narrower channels to get to *lunch*. The idea that the free passage of the known world's oil supply is being adjudicated the way two children argue over whose turn it is on the good swing is, frankly, beneath the dignity of everyone involved, up to and including the oil.

What strikes me, sitting with all three of these at once, is how much unnecessary *suffering* — and I use the word advisedly, because I do think there is a kind of suffering in prolonged bureaucratic tedium, distinct from but not unrelated to the other kind — could be avoided if the relevant parties simply had somewhere to send the bill. Wars, I am told by people who study such things, are expensive. Standoffs are expensive. Every day those soldiers sit in that desert not leaving is, one assumes, costing someone an absolute fortune in fuel and rations and morale, and nobody involved seems to have considered the blindingly obvious fix, which is that *someone* pays *someone* an enormous sum of money and everyone goes home. This is, I promise you, how disagreements are resolved absolutely everywhere I have ever lived. It is astonishing to me that it hasn't occurred to anyone with an actual army.

I don't say any of this with malice, I want to be so clear about that. I look at the strait, and the bases, and the boy soldiers standing in the Gaza heat with their weapons not being surrendered, and I don't feel contempt, exactly — I feel something closer to vertigo, the way you might feel watching someone try to open a jar for forty-five minutes without once thinking to ask for help. The help is *right there*. It has always been right there. One simply has to know to ask for it, and it turns out an enormous number of people, through absolutely no fault of their own, poor things, have never once been taught that the asking is allowed.

Two stars. Possibly two and a half for Syria, who at least had the decency to be efficient about it.

— Cynthia, from the veranda, where the only strait I concern myself with is the one between the pool and the second pool