I am an oddball. I like to work on Christmas.

I don’t know how it is now, but when I was younger and worked for newspapers, variously in Africa, Britain and the United States, I always volunteered to work over the holiday and loved it. There was a special Christmas camaraderie, often more than a little nipping at the eggnog, and the joy to know that senior staff weren’t around — and, especially, to know that they weren’t needed. We, the juniors, could do it.

When you were unimportant otherwise, being in charge of a daily newspaper was the kind of Christmas gift one savored. It was a case of being news editor, city editor or chief correspondent for a day.

The senior editors were gone, and the junior staff had the run of the proceedings. Lovely fun, it was.

But not every worker is happy to labor on the great day. Consider the parish priest.

Once, I stayed with my wife, Linda Gasparello, at The Homestead, the grand hotel in Hot Springs, Virginia, where Washingtonians have been spending Christmas since the 1800s.

Having feasted happily but unwisely on Christmas dinner in the hotel’s baronial dining room, we felt the need for a little drive and perhaps a walk. We fetched up at The Inn at Gristmill Square in Warm Springs. The town abuts the hotel’s 2,300 acres and is a delightful contrast, small and cozy.

At the bar was the local Episcopal priest. He was enjoying a little bottled Christmas cheer. Together, we had some more of what had brought him to his relaxed state and, looking dolefully at me, he said, “I love my job. I love my parishioners. But Christmas is so hard on a parish priest, that is why I am here with my friend,” he indicated the bartender.

He explained that apart from the additional services, he was expected to call on many families, attend many parties, eat lunches and dinners, and visit the sick and attend the everyday pastoral work of his office. The poor father was exhausted and enjoying Christmas in his private way, far from the madding crowd.

Clearly, this was nothing like the lark of working on newspapers at Christmas. But we shared more cheer, and he told me of how the real Christmas for him was in his daily pastoral work. He also liked working on Christmas, just that his lasted all year and got a bit hectic toward the 25th of December.

I marvel at Christmas. How it grips the whole world. How transcendental it is. How it sweeps up denominations. How Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and animists get into the spirit of it.

Also, I marvel at how Christmas has been modified globally to fit the Northern European tradition, with snow and mistletoe and songs that often have no religious relationship — like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or “White Christmas.”

My mother — who, like me, grew up in Africa — was against what she saw as the cultural appropriation of Christmas by the snowy European influence. She insisted on covering the house in ferns and other greenery, which she cut and hung on the 24th of December. Not an hour earlier. The 12 days of Christmas began for her on Christmas Eve and extended to Twelfth Night. Decorating earlier was heresy.

In vain, I pleaded for cotton wool snow, even though there was no snow in Bethlehem, and told her there was no greenery in the desert.

“Good King Wenceslas” was, it is believed, the Duke of Bohemia, now the Czech Republic. But to us in Africa, in the summer in the Southern Hemisphere, the snow lay deep and crisp and even in our imaginations.

That is the miracle of Christmas. It is for everyone, celebrated in its own way across the continents, inside and outside of Christendom.

Christmas is the world’s happy place. Enjoy!

The trouble with history is that no one can agree on what happened. That is how historians can wrangle over events  2,000 years ago — or two months ago.

Prominent historians become more famous when they feud with other prominent historians. One such feud, which became very public, was between the British historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and A.J.P. Taylor over the origins of World War II. They went at it as only academics can.

The trouble worsens when fiction enters, and fiction always enters and distorts.

Fiction doesn’t let the facts stand in the way of a good story. The Greeks did it with Homer, which has continued ever since.

But the greatest muddier of history was William Shakespeare, whether it was the demonization of Richard III and the two young princes in the tower, or whether Marc Antony was a great orator, or whether Cleopatra was a gorgeous seductress. We mostly got what we think we know about these historical figures from Shakespeare or some other creative writer.

The playwright George Bernard Shaw couldn’t leave Cleopatra alone either. He also had a go at Joan of Arc and muddied the history there, not that it has ever been clear — history never is.

Historical fiction is historical distortion by definition, which gets steroidal when movies are involved.

Two recent movies are opposed in the degree of historical truthfulness the directors, both British, have cared about. Christopher Nolan gave us “Oppenheimer,” which is extraordinary in its fidelity to the facts and even mood. “Oppenheimer” captures the ethos of a congressional hearing precisely.

Ridley Scott made “Napoleon” without interest in Napoleon besides a sort of comic-book acquaintance with his subject.

He was, it would seem, more interested in what happens when a cannon takes out a horse than facts about the niceties of the little Corsican’s extraordinary career. Also, he based much of the storyline on Napoleon’s relationship with Josephine and little on his administrative ability, which was the underpinning of his military success and made modern France.

Napoleon made life difficult for filmmakers because he was a romantic figure, even in England, when he was at war with the English. Witness how his affair with Josephine has taken on legendary proportions as one of history’s great love affairs. Or his defeat at Waterloo.

There is a puzzler: Waterloo was a great victory for England and its allies, but in idiomatic English, Waterloo has become a metaphor for defeat. A belated victory for Napoleon.

Then there is the general’s name. Why does history call Napoleon by his first name? Wellington had a first name, too: It was Arthur. Does anyone know or care that he was Tory prime minister twice or that he was from Ireland? Nobody thinks of Napoleon and Arthur.

No, Bonaparte carries off the honors and continues to win the information war long after his death.

The two inaccuracies that bother historians most about Scott’s film are that Napoleon didn’t witness the guillotining of Marie Antoinette and the French didn’t launch artillery at the pyramids, nor did they blast the nose off the Sphinx.

Another challenge is historical fiction on television — much of it produced by the BBC.

The BBC has an edict that casting must reflect the current multiracial face of Britain. This results in Black and Asian courtiers and noblemen romping around England in the time of Henry VIII. So long as the story and the acting keep to the high standard, which has been established by BBC drama, I don’t mind. It is just actors, and many of them are excellent. However, what will young people, who don’t learn much history, make of this?

We don’t expect that something similar would happen in Japanese TV drama, like English noble ladies and gents romping around the divine emperor’s medieval court, nor would we expect to see Hollywood’s finest cavorting in China’s Forbidden City.

It intrigues me that history can become so malleable in the writers’ and filmmakers’ hands. Scott is said to have dismissed one critic because he wasn’t there and wasn’t entitled to comment.

While many, like Scott, believe it is OK to mess with the facts, another set of historical vandals has passed judgment on the past and wants to punish heroes of yesteryear for what they did as judged by today’s standards. Those revisionists are busy tearing down statues and trashing all kinds of figures to serve posthumous justice.

Bringing down the marble or bronze is a current obsession with what passes as history, whether we get it right or not.

Henry Kissinger has died age 100. I remember him through his archrival, James Schlesinger.

April 24, 1980, was a bleak day for the United States. It was the day we lost helicopters and eight men in the desert during Operation Eagle Claw, the failed attempt to rescue the hostages held by Iran.

Two Washington titans were out of office, chafing at their distance from power, their inability to take action and the attendant sense of impotence. They also disliked — no, hated — each other.

These giants were Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger. Kissinger had been a national security adviser and secretary of state. He shaped geopolitical thinking for the latter half of the 20th century. He informed foreign policy as no other has.

Schlesinger had been the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, director of the CIA, secretary of defense and the first secretary of energy.

I had started covering Schlesinger as a journalist when he was at the AEC in 1971, and we formed a friendship that would last until his death.

I created The Energy Daily in 1973 and later Defense Week, high-impact newsletters dominant in their fields at the time. I wanted to know what was going on with the failed rescue attempt. Although Defense Week was weekly, we frequently put out daily supplements. Along with The Energy Daily, these were hand-delivered in Washington. We got the news out fast.

I had helped Schlesinger create the Department of Energy as a sounding board and, at times, as the public voice of his frustration with the Carter administration — where Schlesinger, a Republican, didn’t always fit.

I called Schlesinger to get the story on that fateful day in the Iranian desert. He astounded me by telling me that he was in close contact with Kissinger. “Henry has better sources than I do on this,” he said.

I remember that sentence verbatim because it was extraordinary to hear Schlesinger refer to Kissinger by his first name. I had never heard it, and, except for that day when I heard Schlesinger refer to Kissinger as “Henry” all day, I never heard it again. Before and afterward, it was always just “Kissinger,” often preceded by a derogatory qualification.

“Henry may know.” “I’ll ask Henry.” “Let me see what Henry has heard.” Schlesinger had an open line to Kissinger, asking questions on my behalf all day.

I assumed that the rift between two of the most formidable figures in Washington was bridged. Some said this animosity went back to their time at Harvard.

Certainly, it reached its zenith during the Nixon administration when both men were high officeholders with considerable input into national policy.

In 1984, Kissinger published one of the volumes of his memoirs. I asked Schlesinger if he had read the book. (He seemed to read everything.) He responded with a string of invective against Kissinger. Obscenities often flowed from Schlesinger, but this was epic. So much for first names and respect that one day of entente.

When Kissinger famously told The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn at a party that he was a “secret swinger,” he wasn’t far off. Kissinger loved the social world and his place in it.

By contrast, Schlesinger entertained sparingly at his modest home in Arlington, Virginia. My wife, Linda Gasparello, and I were there frequently, and it was always takeout Chinese food and lots of Scotch.

In all the years I knew him, Schlesinger only came to my home once, although I must have gone to his scores of times — especially toward the end of his life when he liked to talk about the British Empire with me and European history with Linda.

That one visit to an apartment I had in the center of Washington wasn’t pure socializing either. The deputy editor of The Economist, the legendary Norman Macrae, was the guest of honor. Schlesinger, then secretary of energy, was keen to meet Macrae, so he and his wife, Rachel, came.

In government, Kissinger thought Schlesinger was too hardline, too reckless in his attitude toward the Soviet Union, Iran and, later, Saddam Hussein. Schlesinger thought Kissinger’s reputation was overblown and he enjoyed the machinations of negotiation without regard to the end result.

I never formally met Kissinger. But at a dinner in Washington where Kissinger had spoken and was taking questions afterward, someone at my table asked me to ask his question on the grounds that asking questions was my job.

I thought it was a stupid question, but I asked it anyway. Kissinger glowered at me, so everyone could see who had asked the question, and declared, “That is a stupid question.”

Last week, British bestselling author Simon Winchester wondered aloud whether we have too much information — so much so that it impedes our thinking.

At the Providence Athenaeum in Rhode Island, he spoke about his new and compelling book, “Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic.”

Winchester wondered whether the great minds of antiquity, who gave us what was to become Western civilization, weren’t assisted by having no legacy; weren’t boxed in by previous thinkers.

These men — including but not limited to Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Euclid, Archimedes, Hippocrates, Thucydides and Sophocles — were the founding fathers of Western philosophy, science, history and theater.

The list is awesome, and the idea of a kind of zero-sum game in thinking is intriguing. How did they do it, starting with so little knowledge in circulation around the Mediterranean about 2,500 years ago?

Winchester — who apologized for a tendency to get off the subject — mused on whether they would have been able to reach such towering intellectual heights if they had their heads stuffed full of what passes as knowledge in today’s world.

Of course, Winchester, a great purveyor of knowledge — and a lot of fun stuff — doesn’t believe we should turn into know-nothings, he just raises an interesting question: How did it happen?

Winchester first worked as a journalist for the British newspapers the Guardian and then the Sunday Times. His journalism took him around the world from Northern Ireland’s Troubles to the numerous slums of Bangalore (now Bengaluru).

In his book, he tells the story of how one woman changed the lives of otherwise hopeless children in the Bangalore slums by teaching them to read and speak in English, an official language of India. The results were that these urchins went on to great success inside and outside India and in many callings.

In fact, not only is Winchester’s book about learning, but it is also hugely endorsing of scholarship. He reveres libraries, and during his remarks he ran through a list of the great libraries of the world from the library of the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal to the Great Library of Alexandria to the eccentric London Library, of which he is fond, less famous than the British Library.

In pondering the effects of knowledge, Winchester mentioned parenthetically how we are losing our sense of direction. This hit home for me, as my wife had a sharp sense of direction until she started using Google Maps.

In Africa, when I was a boy, the Africans could tell time with accuracy by a quick glance at the sun. This fascinated me. But when they got watches, that skill seemed to decline. Also, farmers everywhere used to determine the pH of soil by testing it on their tongues. Now they must send it to a lab.

My favorite historical story about immaculate creation through ignorance is about James IV of Scotland, an erudite and progressive monarch. During his rule, compulsory education was introduced in 1495, and the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh was established in 1505.

James IV also had a keen interest in language and religion. He thought infants without parental or other influence would naturally grow up speaking Hebrew. To prove his point, he sent two infants in the care of a deaf and dumb woman to the island of Inchkeith. Some reports were that as they grew, the children could communicate with each other with grunts and their own words, but they spoke no language — let alone Hebrew.

Let me assure you that Simon Winchester, writer of books which inform (like the one about the assembling of the Oxford English Dictionary, “The Professor and the Madman,” which became a runaway success around the world), doesn’t propagate absurd theories, but they intrigue him. Ditto myself.

If you want great information, superb anecdotes and splendid writing, I suggest you read Winchester’s “Knowing What We Know.” You will know even more when you have read this work and your mind won’t be cluttered, just better stocked.

This is a horror story.

It is a story of unmitigated suffering and death from despair. It is the story of our veterans, who are 57 percent more likely to take their own lives than those who haven’t served their country.

Every day in the United States, an average of 17 veterans commit suicide. Those who have served in special combat force units, like Navy SEALS, are a little more likely to die this way than regular forces.

These veterans are suffering and dying in plain sight. Veterans, whether they have seen action or not, are ending lives by their own hands — hands that willingly took up arms to serve.

There is a clear and present crisis in the deaths of those who have borne the battle, heard their country’s call, and who die, often alone in despair.

Around Veterans Day, we remember them, but what do we know of them?

More veterans have taken their own lives in the last 10 years than died in the Vietnam War. Frank Larkin, chairman of Warrior Call, an organization that asks anyone who knows a veteran to call them from time to time and ask, “How are you doing? What do you need? Can I get help for you?” But primarily to convey the comfort of knowing “you are not alone.”

However, the problems are beyond loneliness and the well-known precursors to suicide: drug abuse, alcoholism, joblessness and broken relationships.

New research shows that what ails these sad heroes isn’t just psychological and moral despair but physical brain damage — minute tears in the brain that CT scans don’t pick up.

A leading researcher into brain injury and concussion, Dr. Brian Edlow, professor at Harvard and associate director of the Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery at Massachusetts General Hospital, said these tears are only discovered in postmortems when the brain tissue is put under a powerful microscope.

The cause of these tears, Edlow told guest host Adam Clayton Powell III in a special Veterans Day episode of the television program “White House Chronicle,” are blasts that troops experience on the battlefield and in training — massive concussive blasts, over and over again. Those concerned emphasize that the victim doesn’t have to see combat to suffer damage, it happens in training as well.

Sometimes the tears are a result of a physical head injury like a soldier’s head hitting the inside a tank or a blast throwing a soldier against a wall. Still, mostly it is the shockwave, according to Edlow.

“Just to appreciate the scope of this problem, if you look at the post-9/11 generation, those who answered the call to serve after September 11, 2001, over 30,000 active-duty and veteran military personnel have died by suicide during that time period, which is four times more than the number of active-duty personnel who died in combat,” he said, adding that the “extent of the suicide problem is humbling.”

Larkin said that two-thirds of those who commit suicide have never been to a VA hospital or sought institutional help.

For Larkin, the story is personal. His son Ryan, a decorated Navy SEAL who served for 10 years with four active-duty deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, was a suicide.

Ryan returned from active duty a changed young man, 29 years old. He was moody, didn’t smile and showed classic signs of depression. His family couldn’t get him out of it, and his brain scans were negative. After a year, he took his own life.

Earlier, Ryan had asked that his body be used for medical research. Postmortem diagnosis at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center revealed substantial brain damage that wasn’t detectable during the year before his death, his father said.

“The system didn’t know what to do and it defaulted toward psychiatric diagnosis,” Larkin said.

Referring to scans and other techniques now in use to examine the brain, Edlow said, “We simply are not accurate enough to detect these sub-concussive blast-related injuries.”

Ryan’s tragedy is repeated 17 times a day — and that figure doesn’t account for those who die in deliberate accidents and are otherwise not reported as suicide, Larkin said.

While medical science and the military catch up, all we can do, as Larkin said, is to check on a veteran, any veteran. You could save a life, bring a man or woman back from the precipice.

This article is based on remarks the author made to the Association of European Journalists annual congress in Vlore, Albania, last week.

I am a journalist. That means, as it was once explained to me by Dan Raviv of CBS News, I try to find out what is going on and tell people. I know no better description than that of the work.

To my mind, there are two kinds of news stories: day-to-day stories and those that stay with us for a long time.

My long-term story has been energy. I started covering it in 1970, and, all these years later, it is still the big story.

Now, that story for me has been joined by another story of huge consequence to all of us, as energy has been since the 1970s. That story is artificial intelligence.

Leon Trotsky is believed to have said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” I say, “You may not be interested in AI, but AI is interested in you.”

Just as the Arab oil embargo of October 1973 upended everything, AI is set to upend everything going forward.

The first impact on journalism will be to truth. With pervasive disinformation, largely emanating from Russia, establishing the veracity of what we read — documents we review, emails we receive — will be harder. The provenance of information will become more difficult to establish.

Then, it is likely that there will be structural changes to our craft. Much of the more routine work will be done by AI — things like recording sports results and sifting through legal documents. And, if we aren’t careful, AI will be writing stories.

One of the many professors I have interviewed while reporting the AI story is Stuart Russell at the University of California, Berkeley, who said the first impact will be on “language in and  language out.” That means journalism and writing in general, law and lawyering, and education. The written word is vulnerable to being annexed by AI.

The biggest impact on society is going to be on service jobs. The only safe place for employment may be artisan jobs — carpenters, plumbers, and electricians.
Already, fast-food chains are looking to eliminate order-takers and cashiers. People not needed, alas.

The AI industry — there is one, and it is growing exponentially —likes to look to automation and say, “But automation added jobs.”

Well, all the evidence is that AI will subtract jobs almost across the board. Think of all the people around the world who work in customer service. Most of that will be done in the future by AI.

When you call the bank, the insurance agency, or the department store, a polite non-person will be helping you. Probably, the help will be more efficient, but it will represent the elimination of all those human beings, often in other countries, who took your orders, checked on your account, helped you decide between options of service, and to whom you reported your problems or, as often, voiced your anger and disappointment.

The AI bot will cluck sympathetically and say something like, “I am sorry to hear that. I will help you if I can, but I must warn you that company policy doesn’t allow for refunds.”

On the upside, research — especially medical research — will be boosted as never before. One researcher told me a baby born today can expect to live to 120 — another big story.

As journalists, we are going to have to continue to find out what is going on and tell people. But we will also have to find new ways of watermarking the truth. Leica, for instance, has come out with a camera that it says can authenticate the place and time a photo was taken.

We are going to have to find new outlets for our work where people will know that it was written and reported by a human being, one of us, not an algorithm.

Journalists are criticized constantly for our failings, for allegedly being left or right politically, for ignoring or overstating, but when war breaks out, we become heroes.

I salute those brave colleagues reporting from Gaza and Ukraine. They are doing the vital work of finding out what is going on and telling us. Seventeen have been killed in Ukraine and 34 in Gaza. They are the noble of our trade.

When you see a sleek new Tesla in a parking lot or hear an announcement of a utility committing to solar or that work is proceeding with converting steel-making from coal to electricity, you might think oil and natural gas are on the ropes, that coal has left the utility scene and the new, green world is at hand.

Yes, yes, yes, Herculean efforts are underway in advanced countries to curb the use of fossil fuels. But those fuels are still dominant and will remain so for a long time. World oil consumption is now at 97 million barrels a day. It is set to rise before it falls back.

In the United States last year, according to the Energy Information Administration, natural gas accounted for 39.9 percent of electricity production; coal, 19.7 percent; nuclear, 18.2 percent; and renewables, the rest, although these are coming on fast.

A study released this month by the International Energy Agency in Paris predicts world oil production will peak in 2030. Maybe. But one by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries also released recently, says this won’t occur until 2045 or later.

One way or another, oil remains the big enchilada of fossil fuels. Gradually, it may yield to natural gas, which has become a vital part of the U.S. and global electricity scene. Eventually, it will become essential as a maritime fuel.

Oil has been phased out of U.S. electricity generation, except for emergencies. But natural gas has become the bridge, if you will, to the renewables, mainly wind and solar.

Though under threat, coal is still a vital part of U.S. electricity generation. In China and India, its share is 50 percent and rising.

Although oil may peak in 2030 or 15 years later, it is going to be the critical transportation fuel for decades. Even if electric cars take over, and light trucks and some buses do likewise, it will be a long time before ships, trains, inter-city trucks, and airplanes give it up.

New cruise ships will be powered with natural gas, and some of the larger, older ones are slated to make the conversion. But for the rest of the global maritime fleet, that isn’t going to happen.

There are about 55,000 merchant ships traversing the world’s oceans. Hardly any of them will convert to compressed natural gas, which is much less polluting than the oil now burned at sea, mostly residual or diesel.

The reason they won’t convert is prohibitive cost; bunkering is a problem, too. Major new infrastructure is needed to support compressed natural gas as a maritime fuel.

Aircraft have an acute problem of their own. It arises from the way jets spew pollution at altitude, making them a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions.

While it isn’t certain how many aircraft there are in the world, estimates put large aircraft at around 23,000, and if absolutely everything that is flyable with an engine is added, it may be close to double that number.

The airlines, airframe makers, and engine manufacturers are desperately seeking solutions, but so far, nothing viable has emerged. Batteries are heavy and draw down quickly; hydrogen doesn’t have the energy density and is highly flammable.

No new technology is on the horizon, but more people are flying, and that number appears to be exponential. Up, up, and away is now an expectation for even people of modest income.

The surviving usefulness of fossil fuels globally presents U.S. policy-makers with a dilemma: It is the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer. It has a surplus of natural gas for export as liquified natural gas (LNG). The United States produces 12 million-plus barrels of oil a day, but well short of the 19 million barrels a day the nation consumes. Ergo, there is a security advantage in increasing domestic oil production, which alarms the Biden administration.

LNG exports are important not only because of their profitability but also their stabilizing effect on world markets, as demonstrated by the Ukraine crisis.

It behooves the United States to up the production and export of natural gas while continuing downward pressure on domestic oil consumption. A simple enough proposition, except that environmentalists and the administration would like to reduce natural gas consumption and production.

New England, for example, tried to starve out gas by not installing delivery pipelines. Now, LNG that should be flowing overseas to stabilize and reduce coal consumption is going to the Northeast, a costly and futile attempt at curbing greenhouse gases.

Damn those fossils! You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them.

Many years ago, I was mugged in Washington.

I was looking for an informal club of the kind that sprang up after hours around big newspapers. These “clubs” were usually just an apartment with beer, liquor and card games for those who finished work after midnight.

The club I was looking for was on 14th Street, then considered a bad part of town. I never got there: I was jumped and punched by a group of teenagers, who threw me to the ground and took my wallet.

My colleagues at The Washington Post brushed it off as my fault, a self-inflicted wound — no excuses for my nocturnal wanderings.

I was bruised and felt ashamed of my stupidity. But Barry Sussman, an editor, said, “Llewellyn, you didn’t mug yourself.”

It is a sentiment that comforted my shaken self then and has stuck with me. Incidentally, Sussman was the unsung hero of the Watergate story: He edited the reporting as it came in.

My initial reaction to the carnage in Israel was, “What happened to Israeli intelligence? Where was the vaunted Mossad? By extension, where was the CIA, known to work closely with Mossad?”

Once on the Golan Heights, an Israel Defense Forces officer stood with me and boasted about how, with American-supplied gear, the military could listen to telephone calls in Jordan or watch a Syrian soldier on the plain below leave his tent to pee in the night.

So where was the surveillance, and what of human intelligence?

Thousands from Gaza went to Israel every day to work. Surely someone would have seen something; someone would have blown the whistle on Hamas’ intention to wreak mayhem on innocent Israelis — 1,400 were butchered.

Anthony Wells, a retired intelligence officer and author who uniquely served in the British and American intelligence services, told me in an interview on the television program “’White House Chronicle” that the administration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was partly to blame. He said the prime minister had leaned toward Hamas, ignoring the Palestinian Authority and sometimes ignoring Mossad. This, plus political unrest in Israel over Netanyahu’s plan to curtail the power of the Supreme Court, added to the intelligence failure.

But Israel didn’t mug itself.

The planners of the industrial-scale murder of Israelis at a music “festival for peace,” of all things, had to know that Israel would take terrible revenge; that the hurt to the people living in the Gaza Strip would exceed the hurt brought to Israel; that the vengeance would be swift and terrible.

I have noticed that where there is long-enduring hatred, as between the Greeks and the Turks, the Protestants and the Catholics in Northern Ireland, and the Shona and Ndebele in Zimbabwe, hating has its own life. People come to love to hate, to revel in it, even to find comfort in it.

Hatred is also taught, handed down through the generations.

In the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Arabs have come to treasure their suffering and to love their hating. But, as Wells told me, wars of vengeance have a price: Witness the U.S. response to 9/11 with the invasion of Afghanistan.

The suffering on both sides in the Israel-Gaza conflict is hard to process. The screaming of wounded children, the hopelessness of those who won’t be whole again, the agony of those who pray for death as they lie under rubble, hoping only for quick release.

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process is now put asunder. It went on too long without peace.

David Haworth, the late English journalist, said, “I’m tired of the process, where is the peace?” Exactly. Now, it may be decades away as Israel digs in and the Palestinians ramp up their devotion to victimhood.

The blame game for what happened is in full swing: anger at the intelligence failure; the national distractions in Israel, initiated by Netanyahu; and the slow response by the Israel Defense Forces.

I must remind myself over and over again, as my heart goes out to the people of Gaza and the generations that will pay the price, that Israel didn’t mug itself: It was invaded by terrorists for the purpose of terror.

My parting thought: The mass killing of the kind in Israel and Ukraine diminishes all of us. It makes the individual, far from the slaughter, feel very insignificant — and lucky.