At the end of September, when Israel’s campaign to destroy Hezbollah was reaching its height, I met one of the group’s supporters in a seaside café in western Beirut. He was a middle-aged man with a thin white beard and the spent look of someone who had not slept for days. He was an academic of sorts, not a fighter, but his ties to Hezbollah were deep and long-standing.

“We’re in a big battle, like never before,” he said as soon as he sat down. “Hezbollah has not faced what Israel is now waging, not in 1982, not in 2006. It is a total war.”

He talked quickly, anxiously. Only a few days earlier, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, had been killed in a bombardment of the group’s south-Beirut stronghold, and my companion—he asked that I not name him, because he is not authorized to speak on the group’s behalf—made clear that he was still in a state of shock and grief. Israeli bombs were destroying houses and rocket-launch sites across southern Lebanon, in the Bekaa valley, and in Beirut; many of his friends had been killed or maimed. He had even heard talk of something that had seemed unthinkable until now: Iran, which created Hezbollah around 1982, might cut off support to the group, a decision that could reconfigure the politics of the Middle East.

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When I asked about this, he said after an uneasy pause: “There are questions.” He said he personally trusts Iran, but then added, as if trying to convince me: “It’s as if you raised a son, he’s your jewel, now 42 years old, and you abandon him? No. It doesn’t make sense.”

He kept talking rapid-fire, as though seeking to restore his self-confidence. The resistance still had its weapons, he said, and the fighters on the border were ready. Israel’s soldiers would dig their own graves and would soon be begging for a cease-fire.

But his speech slowed, and the doubts crept back. He mentioned Ahmed Shukairi, the first chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, who said shortly before the outbreak of the 1967 Six-Day War, “Those [Israelis] who survive will remain in Palestine. I estimate that none of them will survive.” Shukairi’s vain illusions were not something to emulate. “I don’t want to be like him,” the man said.

It took a moment for the historical analogy to register: He was telling me that he thought Hezbollah, the movement he was so devoted to, might well be on the verge of total destruction. We both paused for a moment and sipped our tea. The only noise was the waves gently washing the shore outside, an incongruously peaceful sound in a country at war.

“This tea we’re drinking,” he said. “We don’t know if it’s our last.”

A shop in eastern Beirut on September 23 (Myriam Boulos / Magnum)

Two months of war have transformed Lebanon. Hezbollah, the Shiite movement that seemed almost invincible, is now crippled, its top commanders dead or in hiding. The scale of this change is hard for outsiders to grasp. Hezbollah is not just a militia but almost a state of its own, more powerful than the weak and divided Lebanese government, and certainly more powerful than the Lebanese army. Formed under the tutelage of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, it has long been the leading edge of Tehran’s “Axis of Resistance,” alongside Hamas, the Shiite militias of Iraq, and the Houthi movement in Yemen. Hezbollah is also the patron and bodyguard of Lebanon’s Shiite Muslims, with a duly elected bloc in the national parliament (Christians and Muslims are allocated an equal share of seats). Hezbollah smuggles in not just weapons, but billions of dollars from Iran. It runs banks, hospitals, a welfare system, and a parallel economy of tax-free imports and drug trafficking that has enriched and empowered the once-downtrodden Shiite community.

Hezbollah has long justified reckless wars against Israel with appeals to pan-Arab pride: The liberation of Palestine was worth any sacrifice. But the devastation of this conflict extends far beyond Hezbollah and cannot be brushed off so easily. Almost a quarter of Lebanon’s people have fled their homes, and many are now sleeping in town squares, on roads, on beaches. Burned-out ambulances and heaps of garbage testify to the state’s long absence. Many people are traumatized or in mourning; others talk manically about dethroning Hezbollah, and perhaps with it, Lebanon’s centuries-old system of sectarian power-sharing. There is a millenarian energy in the air, a wild hope for change that veers easily into the fear of civil war.

A few stark facts stand out. First, Israel is no longer willing to tolerate Hezbollah’s arsenal on its border, and will continue its campaign of air strikes and ground war until it is forced to stop—whether from exhaustion or, more likely, by an American-sponsored cease-fire that is very unlikely before the next U.S. president is sworn in. Second, no one is offering to rebuild the blasted towns and villages of southern Lebanon when this is over, the way the oil-rich Gulf States did after the last major war with Israel, in 2006. Nor will Iran be able to replenish the group’s arsenal or its coffers. Hezbollah may or may not survive, but it will not be the entity it was.

I heard the same questions every day during two weeks in Lebanon in September and October, from old friends and total strangers. When will the war stop? Will they bomb us too—we who are not with Hezbollah? Will there be a civil war? And most poignant of all, from an artist whose Beirut apartment was a haven for me during the years I lived in Lebanon: Should I send my daughter out of this country?

A café in Beirut on September 20 (Myriam Boulos / Magnum)

On a sunny morning in early October, I drove south out of Beirut on the highway that runs along the Mediterranean, toward the border with Israel. Just outside the city, dark smoke trails became visible on both sides of the road—last night’s air strikes. New ones appear every morning, like a visual scorecard of the war’s progress. There were other cars on the road at first, but beyond the coastal city of Sidon, the highway was empty.

My driver, visibly anxious, drove more than 90 miles per hour. Yellow Hezbollah banners fluttered in the breeze, alongside brand-new martyr billboards that read Nasrallah Aat (“Nasrallah Is Coming”)—a play on his name, which means “victory of God” in Arabic. We passed several charred and overturned cars. On the northbound side of the road, dozens of abandoned but undamaged vehicles were parked on the shoulder. These had been left by families fleeing the war in the south, my Lebanese fixer explained; they had run out of gas and apparently continued on foot. Her own family had fled the south in the same way.

After a little more than an hour, we reached the outskirts of Tyre, an ancient city in southern Lebanon. It is usually a lively place, but we found it eerily deserted, with shattered buildings marking the sites of bombings here and there. We passed some of the city’s Roman ruins, and for a moment, I felt as if I’d been transported into one of the Orientalist sketches made by 19th-century European travelers in the Levant, an antique landscape shorn of its people.

We had been directed by the Lebanese army—which maintains a reconnaissance and policing role in the south—to go to the Rest House, a gated resort. There, on a broad terrace overlooking a magnificent beach, we found a cluster of aid workers and TV journalists smoking and chatting under a tarp, with their cameras set on tripods and pointed south. This was as close as any observer could get to the war. Beyond us was an undulating coastline and green hills stretching to the Israeli border, about 12 miles away. There, just beyond our vision, Israeli ground troops were battling Hezbollah’s fighters, near villages that had been turned to rubble.

I was staring out at the sea, mesmerized by the beauty and stillness of the place, when a whooshing sound made me jolt. I looked to my left and saw a volley of projectiles shooting into the air, perhaps 200 yards away. They vanished into the blue sky, angled southward and leaving tufts of white smoke behind them. I felt a rush of panic: These must be Hezbollah rockets. Didn’t this mean Israel would strike back at the launch site, awfully close to us? But one of the Arab journalists waved my worries away. “It happens a lot,” he said. War is like that. You get used to it, until the assumptions change and the missiles land on you.

Not far away, camped out on the Rest House’s blue deck chairs, I found a family of 20 refugees who had left their village 11 days earlier. One of them was a tall, sweet-faced 18-year-old named Samar, dressed in a black shawl and headscarf, who sat very still as she described the moment when the war got too close.

“I saw a missile right above me—I thought it would hit us,” she said. “I felt I was blind for a moment when the missiles struck.” Everything shook, and a rush of dust and smoke made it hard to breathe. Five or six missiles had hit a neighboring house where a funeral was under way, killing one of the family’s neighbors and injuring about 60 others. “It was as close as that umbrella,” she said, pointing to the poolside parasol about 15 feet from us.

The whole family fled, then returned a few hours later to get some belongings, only to be blasted awake that night by another Israeli strike that shattered the remaining windows of the house. They all ran to the main square of the village and huddled there, praying, until dawn, when they drove to the Rest House. They have not been home since. They live on handouts from aid workers and journalists, and do not know if their house is still standing.

I heard stories like these again and again across Lebanon, from families who had fled their homes and some who were reduced to begging. The displaced are everywhere, and they have transformed the country’s demographic map. In the west-Beirut neighborhood of Hamra, a historically leftist and secular enclave, you now see large numbers of women in Islamic dress. I saw them in Christian neighborhoods, in the mountains, even in the far north. You can almost feel the suspicion that locals direct at them as you walk past.

Some locals have welcomed displaced people and offered them free meals; others have turned them away, and many landlords have ripped them off for profit. “Everybody is saying, ‘Why do you come and rent in our civilian neighborhoods? You are endangering everybody around you,’” a friend told me in the northern city of Tripoli. The danger was real, and it could be seen in the evolving pattern of Israeli strikes, which moved from Shiite enclaves to what had been considered safe areas in the mountains and the north. Hezbollah’s fighters appear to be leaking out of the danger zone, blending in with the refugees, and Israel has continued to track and strike them.

Some refugees have fled their homes only to stumble into even more dangerous places. Julia Ramadan, 28, was so frightened by the bombings in Beirut that she retreated to her parents’ apartment, in a six-story building on a hillside in Sidon. The area is mostly Christian, and dozens of southerners had also sought shelter there. Two days after she arrived, Julia spent several hours distributing free meals to other war refugees with her brother, Ashraf. She was home with her family when a missile slammed into the building.

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“With the second missile, the building started to shake,” Ashraf told me when I met him later. A powerfully built man who works as a fitness trainer, he had bandages on his foot and arm. “With the third and fourth, we felt the building starting to collapse.”

Ashraf instinctively turned and tried to use his body to shield his father, who was sitting next to him on a couch in the family’s living room. The building gave way, and father and son found themselves alive but trapped under the rubble. It took eight hours for rescuers to dig them out, and then they learned that Julia and her mother were among the dead. At least 45 people were killed, according to Lebanon’s health ministry (locals told me the number was 75). Israeli officials later said a local Hezbollah commander and several operatives were in the building.

One of the first to arrive on the scene was Muhammad Ahmed Jiradi, a 31-year-old whose aunt, uncle, and cousins lived in the building. He told me he could hear the screams of the people pinned under the wreckage. One of them was his uncle, saying that his wife and children were dead. Jiradi tried frantically to move the broken concrete and steel, but he had no tools, and could manage little. Many of the trapped people died before they could be rescued, their screams gradually fading.

“I saw my aunt pulled out,” Jiradi told me. “Her guts were spilling out; her head was gashed. This is the last image I have of her. I always thought of her as so beautiful. My mother wanted to see her. I said no. I told her, ‘Her face was smiling.’ But it’s not true.”

Jiradi told me these things in a listless monotone as we sat in armchairs in his spartan apartment. He had run out of money to pay for rent and food for his wife and children. He talked nonstop for an hour, periodically repeating, “I can’t take it anymore.” He said this not with any visible pain or emotion, but with the glazed look of someone who has lost all hope.

The Lebanese border with Israel as viewed from Ebel El Saqi, Lebanon, on September 10 (Myriam Boulos / Magnum)

Whom do the Lebanese blame for these horrors? When I asked, many of them gave me scripted answers: the Zionist enemy, of course. But some Lebanese told me that they did not want to die for the Palestinians. This was an indirect way of criticizing Hezbollah, which started this new round of fighting by launching rockets at Israeli civilian targets the day after the October 7 massacre, ostensibly to show solidarity with Hamas.

“I don’t know who started this war,” Jiradi told me. “I just want to live in peace.”

That may sound neutral, but in Lebanon, where Hezbollah has called for resistance to Israel at any cost, the absence of ideological fervor can be a tacit refusal to comply. People often voice fatigue in private, where they aren’t worried about being accused of siding with the enemy. But I even saw it on a few highway billboards. It’s Enough—We’re Tired, one of them read. Everyone in Lebanon knows what that means.

One afternoon, my driver, a 56-year-old man named Hassan from southern Lebanon, showed me a picture on his phone of a demolished house. It was his own, in the village of Bint Jbail, near the border with Israel. He had spent decades building it, and now the Israelis had bombed it into ruins. I expected him to erupt in anger at Israel, but then he told me why it had happened: Several Hezbollah fighters had sought shelter in his house, and Israel had targeted them there. He made clear that he held Hezbollah responsible for his loss.

Some Lebanese welcome the strikes on Hezbollah, despite the harm done to civilians. “The Israelis—it’s unfortunate that civilians are dying, but they are doing us a great favor,” a businessman from the north told me. He asked not to be named for fear of reprisal. “I was at a meeting today, and we were all saying, ‘It’s getting worse, but the worse it gets, the faster we will be out of this.’” In the same conversation, this man described his own close call with an Israeli air strike—an experience that did not lessen his hunger to see Hezbollah destroyed.

Hezbollah is keenly aware of its domestic vulnerabilities. In early October, its media wing made a bid for public sympathy by organizing a tour of the worst-hit parts of the Dahieh, the dense south-Beirut district that is home to its headquarters. By 1 p.m. that day, about 300 journalists, many of them European, were clustered together in the war zone, dressed in helmets and flak jackets, patiently waiting for their Hezbollah guides.

The Dahieh usually swarms with people, but the bombings had emptied it. We followed our Hezbollah minders through the cratered streets, many of the reporters excitedly snapping pictures of a place we’d been unable to see until now. At each bomb site, a Hezbollah official stood up and delivered a speech declaring that only civilians had been killed there, innocent women and children murdered by the Israeli “terrorists.” (They did not take us to the places where Hassan Nasrallah and other commanders had been struck.) Reporters thrust out microphones to record his every word. Some clambered over the mountains of rubble, still smoking in some places, greedily edging one another out to get the best shots.

At one site, I saw a man slip past the crowd to get into his auto-repair shop. I walked up and asked him if we could speak. He told me he’d chosen this moment to check on his shop after hearing about the Hezbollah media tour, “because I know the Israelis will not bomb you guys.”

He was right. The Israeli drone operators probably watched the whole weird show from the sky. You can hear the drones buzzing loudly overhead all day and all night in Beirut. Some people told me the noise kept them from sleeping. People jokingly call them Umm Kamel, or “Kamel’s mother,” a play on the name of the MK drone type. It is an effort to domesticate a reality that is very frightening to most Lebanese: Israel could strike them at any time. After the man from the Dahieh repair shop made his comment, I found myself looking up at the sky and wondering how I registered on the Israelis’ drone screens. Could they see my American phone number? Was I, as a U.S. citizen and a journalist, a moving no-kill zone?

Israel’s surveillance technologies have brought a new kind of intimacy to this war. In September, Israel detonated thousands of pagers it had surreptitiously sold to Hezbollah months earlier, wounding the group’s members as they went about their daily routines. Some of the victims were struck in their groins, perhaps even emasculated, because they had their pager on their hip. Others lost eyes and hands. I spoke to a doctor at one of Lebanon’s best hospitals, who described the chaos of that day, when dozens of young men were admitted without registering their names—a violation of the usual protocols, but Hezbollah was not going to give up its members’ identities. Another doctor told me he received several men wounded by pagers who were all listed only as “George,” a typically Christian name. He let it pass.

Even Israel’s efforts to minimize civilian casualties have created a weird closeness with the enemy. Most people I know in Lebanon watch the X feed of Avichay Adraee, an Arabic-speaking Israeli military official who posts warnings about upcoming strikes. But the Israelis also place calls to individual residents in endangered areas. I spoke with a 34-year-old woman named Layal who told me that many people in her southern village, including her parents, had received calls from Israeli officials telling them to evacuate. “But some people do pranks, pretending to be Israelis,” she told me, and that caused confusion. I must have looked baffled, because Layal added—as if to explain—that some of the pranksters were Syrian refugees. Many of the refugees loathe Hezbollah, which sent its fighters to bolster the Syrian regime during that country’s brutal civil war.

Layal told me that one of her neighbors, a woman named Ghadir, had gotten a phone call in late September from someone who spoke Arabic with a Palestinian accent. “You are Ghadir?” the voice said. She denied it. The caller named her husband, her children, the shop across the street. Every detail was correct. The caller told her to leave her apartment. Ghadir reluctantly did so, and that night her entire building was destroyed in an air strike. Layal fled soon afterward, without waiting for a phone call; when I met her, she was living in a rented house in the mountains.

That night, from the dark roof-deck of my Beirut hotel, I watched orange flames burst upward from the city’s southern edge, the aftermath of an air strike. It looked like a volcano erupting. Sounds of awe came from a cluster of young Lebanese at a table next to me; they held up their cellphones to capture the scene, posted their shots to social media, and went back to their cocktails.

A vendor from southern Lebanon selling fruit in Beirut on September 24 (Myriam Boulos / Magnum)

Hezbollah has a violent history inside Lebanon, and its domestic enemies are now sniffing the wind for signs of weakness. One of them is Achraf Rifi, the former head of one of Lebanon’s main security agencies. Almost two decades ago, Rifi’s investigators helped identify the Hezbollah operatives who had organized the murder of a string of Lebanese public figures, starting with former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005. That bombing destroyed an entire block on Beirut’s seafront and killed 23 people. Rifi’s dogged police work publicly exposed Hezbollah’s willingness to kill anyone who got in its way. It also put him on the group’s target list.

Rifi is 70, with an austere, stiff-backed manner, and he lives in an elegantly furnished apartment in the center of Tripoli. When I went to see him there, he walked me out onto the terrace and pointed down through the evening gloom at a red traffic barrier on the far side of the street. That spot, he said, was where a car packed with 300 pounds of TNT was parked when it exploded in August 2013, one of two simultaneous bombings in central Tripoli that killed 55 people. Rifi told me the car bombing was a joint operation by Hezbollah and Syrian intelligence, and it was intended to kill him. He was inside at the time, and was shaken but not seriously injured.

Rifi knows both parties to this war well: Not only was he the target of that Hezbollah bombing, but as the head of the Internal Security Forces, he became familiar with Israeli spycraft by dismantling 33 Israeli cells inside Lebanon (three of them were in Hezbollah). Fighting Israeli espionage was one of the few objectives he and Hezbollah shared. Rifi told me that Israel’s successful infiltration of Hezbollah, which helped it kill many of the group’s senior leaders, became possible during the years the group spent fighting in Syria to protect the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Off their home turf, Hezbollah’s soldiers were exposed to Israeli surveillance. The Syrian war also created opportunities for self-enrichment and corruption within the organization—a problem that worsened with Lebanon’s subsequent economic collapse, as newly needy people could be tempted to spy in exchange for Israeli money.

Rifi told me he thought that about 20 percent of Hezbollah commanders in the middle and upper ranks had been killed in Israel’s operations this fall, including some of the group’s most effective leaders. He said he thought the bleeding would continue. As a critic of Israel, he would not have hoped to see Hezbollah disarmed this way. But the job is being done.

“The Iranian period is finished, I think,” Rifi told me. “In Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen.”

He may be right. The death of Nasrallah—the most powerful figure in Lebanon—felt like the end of an era to many people, and it ignited a frenzy of anxious speculation about what will happen next. Hezbollah’s defeat, if it comes, is by no means sure to bring peace or order. Day after day, I heard people ransack past chapters of Lebanon’s history for clues about the future.

One night in Tripoli, I listened to a group of friends argue for hours over an exquisite meal at a farm-to-table restaurant called Crop. (Lebanese restaurateurs have learned to take wars in stride.) One of the guests, a local city administrator who had spent years abroad, delivered an acerbic speech about Lebanon’s failure to cohere as a country. “I don’t see anyone who believes in a nation called Lebanon,” he said. “I see the Christians, the Sunnis, the Shia, the Druze—each is loyal to his own community or party. There is no public interest.”

A young historian named Charles al-Hayek interrupted and began to argue passionately that Lebanon was not past hope. The country had special traits that set it apart from other Arab countries: traditions of religious diversity, democracy, higher education, individual and public liberty. These could help Lebanon forge a more enlightened social compact.

A third guest began to argue that Lebanon needed a powerful leader with Western support to beat back the Iranian project and find a new way forward. Hayek shook his head impatiently. The Arab world, he said, was always clamoring for a rajul mukhalis—literally, a “man who finishes things.” This quest for a charismatic leader had always ended in tyranny, Hayek said. The same was true of Lebanon’s sectarian appeals to foreign patrons—France for the Christians, Saudi Arabia for the Sunnis, Iran for the Shia. The country must learn to stand on its own, Hayek said, and the end of Iranian hegemony could provide an opportunity.

At another dinner, this one in Beirut’s Sursock district, the hostess—a glamorously dressed woman in early middle age—asked everyone at the table to describe their best- and worst-case scenarios for Lebanon. One guest invoked the possibility of civil war, and another said: “Civil war? Come on, civil wars are expensive. We don’t have the money.” People laughed. But he wasn’t kidding. Lebanon’s economic collapse is so severe that the country’s political factions—which, apart from Hezbollah, have not fought for decades—lack the guns and ammunition to sustain a serious conflict.

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At one point, the hostess glanced impishly around the room and said: “Please, I want to know who is the best urologue in Beirut.”

Why? someone asked.

“Because I will ask him who has the biggest balls in Lebanon, and that man will rescue us.”

People laughed. But again, it wasn’t just a joke. Many Lebanese I spoke with were desperate for a deus ex machina, and they seemed to want much more than a politician in the familiar mold. The country’s financial straits, together with the explosion that devastated the port of Beirut in 2020, have exposed the depravity of Lebanon’s political class. As one Lebanese friend told me, you go into politics in Lebanon to make money, not to serve the public interest. Corruption isn’t a by-product; it is the essence of the system. As a result, the talk about a new leadership has tended to revolve around the Lebanese army, often described as the country’s last intact national institution. The wish of many is for someone who will assert the army’s power against Hezbollah, smash the whole corrupt political system, and build a better one: Al rajul al mukhalis.

Lebanon’s power brokers have been deadlocked since the previous president’s term expired in 2022—no one has yet succeeded him—and the Biden administration has been pressing for a new election that might empower a government willing to challenge Hezbollah. The Lebanese presidency is reserved for a Maronite Christian (each of the top leadership jobs in Lebanon’s government is assigned by law to a particular religious community). The current head of the army, Joseph Aoun, qualifies. But even if an election could be held—which is hard to imagine in the chaos of this war—Aoun’s powers would be constrained by the Lebanese power-sharing system.

I relayed some of the conversations I had heard about the yearning for a military intervention to a retired senior officer in the Lebanese army who is close to Aoun and familiar with his thinking. We met in an officers’ club in the mountain town of Baabda, near the army’s headquarters, on a green hillside property that once belonged to a Kuwaiti princess. Through the boughs of cedar trees, we had a glorious view of Beirut far below, and the Mediterranean beyond.

The officer, clean-shaven and in civilian dress, told me that the army would never stray from its constitutionally defined role. Even if Hezbollah were substantially weakened, taking it on would spark a civil war. I asked about the possibility of disarming Hezbollah—the fervent aspiration of its domestic rivals and foreign adversaries. He said, “The only one who can disarm Hezbollah is Iran.” And that, he said, could happen only in the context of a political settlement between Iran and the United States, its most powerful enemy. Those were sobering words. In essence, he was telling me that Lebanon has no say in its own future.

As of now, no one knows for sure how much strength Hezbollah has left. Despite the battering of its top ranks and decision makers, it has a powerful corps of fighters in southern Lebanon who can operate independently. But with time, the officer told me, “Hezbollah will feel the lack of money. This will be the biggest problem. And when the Shia go back to the south, who will rebuild?”

A tent housing displaced Lebanese in Beirut, photographed on October 2 (Myriam Boulos / Magnum)

As I flew out of Beirut, I could see smoke rising from ruins not far from the airport. Middle East Airlines—Lebanon’s national carrier—is still operating, but other companies are no longer willing to take the risk. It has become so difficult to buy an outbound ticket that some people are sleeping outside the airport, hoping for cancellations. Others talk of fleeing by boat to Cyprus if things get worse. More than 300,000 Syrian refugees who fled to Lebanon during their country’s civil war have escaped back across the border over the past month, a testament to the depth of their fear.

As the plane banked and rose from the Beirut airport, passengers could see the Mediterranean on one side, glittering in the sun. But visible in the other direction, just beyond the runway, was something that offered a hint about the war now raging in Lebanon: a cluttered patch of warehouses and shacks that had arisen gradually during the 1980s, built by Shiite migrants from the south, with little or no oversight by the state. Now they store commodities of all kinds that are flown in and out of the country free of any taxes or tariffs. A shadow economy, made possible by Hezbollah’s enforcers, has gradually enriched and sustained the broader Shiite population.

That arrangement has been essential to Hezbollah’s power, and it has tied the lives and livelihoods of most of Lebanon’s Shia to the revolutionary creed of the Iranian regime. Many fear that if they lose Hezbollah, they will be left defenseless. Some of the elders still remember the days when most Shia were mired in rural poverty, mistreated not just by Lebanon’s other sects but by their own semifeudal overlords.

But their faith in Hezbollah is being tested. One Shiite woman who fled the south and is now living in a rented home in the mountains confided her disappointment to me. “A Hezbollah guy called us to say ‘What do you need?,’ but he didn’t have much to offer,” she said. “Just pillows. I asked for medicines for the kids, but they didn’t bring anything to us. Before the war, Hezbollah said they had an emergency plan. Where is the plan?”

Some people made bitter comparisons with Hezbollah’s reaction to the 2006 war it fought with Israel. Back then, the group’s leaders had quickly rolled out an energetic construction campaign, promising to rebuild every home that was destroyed. Young volunteers with clipboards surged into Shiite districts within hours of the cease-fire, delivering cash and food and supplies. Hardly anyone expects that to happen again. If the refugees’ needs continue to go unmet, Hezbollah could lose support. Might that make possible a new era in Lebanon, free of Tehran’s dictates?

Hezbollah loyalists rarely share their feelings with outsiders. But I got a glimpse of the atmosphere inside the group from a young woman whose brother, a Hezbollah fighter, had been killed in an Israeli air strike in late September. I met her through a friend in the mountain town of Aley, where she had taken refuge.

Her brother’s name was Hamoudi, and he was an unlikely militant. “He didn’t pray,” his sister told me. (She asked that I not reveal her name or the family’s surname.) “My mother said, ‘You will not become a martyr; you don’t pray.’” Some in the family—which is very loyal to Hezbollah—said Hamoudi seemed almost an atheist. “He didn’t read the Quran,” his sister said. “He listened to music. It’s haram”—forbidden—“to touch girls,” but Hamoudi, a burly 25-year-old with rosy cheeks and an infectious smile, loved women and didn’t try to hide it.

He was a film producer and editor and had taught himself the trade, working his way up from production assistant to camera operator and lighting designer. He started his own firm, doing social-media reels for restaurants and clothing companies and coffee shops. When he moved from the family’s southern village to Beirut, he found an apartment, not in the Dahieh, but in the more cosmopolitan Hamra district, where he often stayed out late partying with friends.

His sister showed me pictures and videos on her phone: Hamoudi swaying to music in the car, getting a haircut, voguing on the beach. “He was my friend, my brother, my secrets box,” she said, her eyes brimming with tears. “The one I go to first in my sadness and my happiness.”

Hamoudi had always been torn between the family tradition of muqawama—resistance—and the lure of Beirut and its glamor. Only at the end of the summer did he return to the family home in the south. By then, Israeli air strikes had become more frequent, the news ever grimmer. A 17-year-old friend in the family’s village was badly injured when a pager exploded in his hand in mid-September, she said. The boy’s father was killed soon afterward. On the day Nasrallah was killed, she called Hamoudi and asked him to come to Beirut to comfort her. He said he couldn’t. It was on that same day that he formally joined Hezbollah as a fighter, his sister said.

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Hamoudi seemed resigned to his death as soon as he joined. He even washed himself as martyrs are meant to, and made a martyrdom video, she told me—whether because everyone around him seemed to be dying, or because he had been assigned a mission, she didn’t know. But the very next day, an Israeli bomb struck the house where Hamoudi and two other Hezbollah fighters were sheltering, killing them all. The sister told me she suspected it even before she got the news. “I felt something,” she said. “Years before, he had a motorcycle accident, and I felt something the second it happened. This time, the same.”

Hezbollah issued a poster bearing Hamoudi’s picture and his name, with looping Arabic script declaring his martyrdom. You see these posters all over the Dahieh and in southern Lebanon these days, always with new faces. Hamoudi’s family has not yet been able to hold a funeral, because their village is still so dangerous. “When we see his grave, that day he will die again,” his sister said. “It will feel like the first day.”

Hamoudi’s sister is a devout Muslim and a supporter of Hezbollah. I have met many women like her in Lebanon, and I vaguely expected her to deliver a speech about the coming victory of the resistance, or to assure me that she would never give in. But as she wiped her tears away, she said nothing of the kind.

“I’m thinking to leave the country,” she said.

Over the weekend, a group of Arab American and Muslim American leaders in Michigan appeared onstage at a Donald Trump rally and urged their communities to vote for him. The outreach might be working: A recent poll showed Trump with a narrow lead among Arab American voters.

This is shocking, but hardly surprising. It’s shocking because Trump’s stated policies—on Palestine, on political freedom, and on the very presence of Muslims in America—are antithetical to so much of what most of these voters believe in. It’s unsurprising because we Arab and Muslim Americans have a long tradition of merciless political self-sabotage.

In 2000, angered by the sanctions against and bombing of Iraq, the use of “secret evidence” in deportation proceedings against Arab and Muslim immigrants, and especially the carnage of the Second Intifada, many liberal Arab Americans—myself included—decided not to vote for Al Gore and turned instead to Ralph Nader, himself a prominent Arab American. If the point was to advance Arab political interests, our protest was a pathetic failure. The election of George W. Bush led directly to the catastrophic 2003 invasion of Iraq, a strategic disaster that continues to resonate in the Middle East, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Arab civilians.

This time around, the primary grievance is the Biden administration’s support of—or, at least, inability to end—Israel’s invasion of Gaza and, now, its widening wars in Lebanon and Iran. Once again, the impulse is to express our anger and “punish” the politicians responsible by withholding a vote for them. In an election with only two viable candidates, however, there is no difference between not supporting Kamala Harris and actively supporting Trump. And a quick review of the most important issues on which there’s a consensus among Arab and Muslim Americans demonstrates that a second Trump term would be dramatically worse than a Harris presidency.

[Read: What would a second Trump administration mean for the Middle East?]

Start with Trump’s signature issue, immigration. Nothing in Harris’s agenda would restrict immigration from Arab or Muslim countries. Trump offers the precise opposite. One of his first acts as president was to institute a “Muslim ban,” flatly prohibiting the entry of nationals from a list of seven majority-Muslim countries. President Joe Biden rescinded that executive order; Trump has vowed to reinstate and possibly expand it.

Moreover, Trump’s likely attack on Temporary Protected Status, especially for Haitian immigrants, is ominous for a number of Arab and Muslim communities whose members currently qualify, including Afghans, Somalis, Yemenis, Syrians, and Sudanese. With a stroke of Trump’s Sharpie, all of them could find themselves stripped of this protection—and included in his promised “bloody” mass deportations. Efforts to extend Temporary Protected Status to Lebanese nationals, entirely plausible under a Harris administration, would be dead in the water under Trump. Defending his decision to endorse Trump, an imam in Michigan declared that the former president “promises peace.” He plainly does not. The Washington Post has reported that, according to six sources, Trump recently told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “do what you have to do” militarily in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. The notion that Trump would prioritize the interests of Arab civilians is simply absurd. This is a man who has repeatedly used the word Palestinian as an epithet against his (in many cases Jewish) Democratic political opponents.

Trump already has a long, instructive, and highly discouraging record on these issues. As president, he moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and issued a statement recognizing Israel’s sovereignty in the contested holy city. He recognized Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, in direct contravention of the United Nations charter’s rule against the acquisition of territory by war. And he slammed shut the Overton window on Palestinian independence and a two-state solution, which had been a matter of bipartisan consensus since the end of the Cold War. His “Peace to Prosperity” plan, released in January 2020, invited Israel to annex 30 percent more of the West Bank. Such a move would leave the remaining Palestinian territory surrounded entirely by Israel, and therefore incapable of meaningful sovereignty. The primary effect of this crude document was to create a permission structure for Republicans to support wide-scale Israeli annexation of the West Bank and dispense with supporting Palestinian independence.

Harris, by contrast, has been categorical in her support of a real two-state solution that would mean the end of the occupation that began in 1967. The vice president has clearly stated that Palestinians and Israelis need to reach a peace agreement that affords them “equal measures of prosperity and freedom.” Trump has never spoken of Palestinians and Israelis enjoying equal measures of anything.

[David A. Graham: Trump’s new racist insult]

Trump’s anti-Palestinian bias extends to the home front. Arab and Muslim Americans have been emigrating to the United States in large numbers since the late 19th century in search of a better life characterized by liberty and democracy. And yet Trump’s whole campaign, and his entire agenda, amounts to an assault on those ideals. He has consistently singled out pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses as part of a “radical revolution” that he has pledged to eliminate. According to The Washington Post, he told a group of Jewish donors in May that he is determined to deport pro-Palestinian students and “set that movement back 25 or 30 years.”

Our communities are overwhelmingly aghast at the U.S. government’s ongoing support for Israel’s military campaigns. I share the sentiment. But channeling that anger into support for Trump would be an exercise in the most rarefied gullibility and naivete. Far from promising peace, Trump threatens war on “the enemy from within.” Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, particularly those with pro-Palestinian sentiments, are likely to be high on the list of targets. We need to learn from the lessons of our own history. When we try to punish the politicians who have disappointed us without taking a serious inventory of the likely consequences, we usually just end up hurting ourselves.

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The phrase election integrity sounds noble on its face. But in recent years, election deniers have used it to lay the groundwork for challenging the results of the 2024 election.

A few months after Donald Trump took office in 2017, he signed an executive order establishing the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.” The Brennan Center for Justice wrote at the time that “there is strong reason to suspect this Commission is not a legitimate attempt to study elections, but is rather a tool for justifying discredited claims of widespread voter fraud and promoting vote suppression legislation.” That proved prescient. Although there is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2016 or 2020 elections—or in any other recent elections, for that matter—Trump and his allies have fomented the narrative that such interference is a real problem in America, employing it in the illegal attempt to overturn the 2020 election and their reported plans to claim that the 2024 race is rigged.

As part of this strategy, right-wing activists and lawyers have organized initiatives under the auspices of election integrity, warping the meaning of those words to sow distrust. Through her Election Integrity Network, the right-wing activist Cleta Mitchell has been recruiting people—including election deniers who will likely continue to promote disinformation and conspiracy theories—to become poll workers and monitors, in an effort that was reportedly coordinated with members of the Republican National Committee. Poll watching in itself is a timeworn American practice, although it has been misused in the past; now, however, election-denial groups are sending participants to polling places under the presumption that fraud is taking place.

More recently, Elon Musk—in addition to his own brazen efforts to get Trump reelected—has invited X users to report activity they see as suspicious through an “Election Integrity Community” feed, an effort almost certain to trigger a flood of misinformation on the platform. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Election Integrity Unit has gone to great lengths to seek evidence of fraud; in one case, nine armed officers reportedly appeared with a search warrant at the door of a woman who had been working with a Latino civil-rights organization to help veterans and seniors register to vote.

The RNC, especially under the influence of its co-chair Lara Trump, has taken up “election integrity” as an explicit priority: As she said at a GOP event over the summer, “we are pulling out all the stops, and we are so laser-focused on election integrity.” Her team created an election-integrity program earlier this year and hired Christina Bobb, who was later indicted for efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Arizona (she has denied wrongdoing), as its lead election-integrity lawyer. As The New Yorker reported earlier this month, the RNC plans to staff a “war room” with attorneys operating an “election-integrity hotline” on Election Day. Such initiatives have helped inject doubt into a legitimate process. Despite the clear lack of evidence to suggest fraud is likely in this election, nearly 60 percent of Americans already say they’re concerned or very concerned about it, according to a recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll; 88 percent of Trump supporters said they were concerned about fraud (compared with about 30 percent of Kamala Harris supporters).

The “consistent, disciplined, repetitive use” of the term election integrity in this new context is “designed to confuse the public,” Alice Clapman, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, told me. A sad irony, she added, is that those who use this framing have done so to push for restrictions that actually suppress voting, including strict voter-ID laws and limitations on early ballots, or to threaten the existence of initiatives to ensure fair voting. Many of the same activists promoting “election integrity,” including Cleta Mitchell, organized a misinformation campaign to undermine a bipartisan state-led initiative called the Electronic Registration Information Center, which was created in 2012 to ensure that voter rolls were accurate. Multiple states eventually left the compact.

The term election integrity isn’t entirely new—Google Trends data suggest that its usage has bubbled up around election years in recent decades. But its prominence has exploded since 2020, and the strong associations with election denial in recent years means that other groups have backed away from it. “Like so much charged language in American politics, when one side really seizes on a term and uses it in a loaded way,” it becomes “a partisan term,” Clapman told me. Now groups unaffiliated with the right are turning to more neutral language such as voter protection and voter security to refer to their efforts to ensure free elections.

Election deniers are chipping away at Americans’ shared understanding of reality. And as my colleague Ali Breland wrote yesterday, violent rhetoric and even political violence in connection with the election have already begun. This month so far, a man has punched a poll worker after being asked to remove his MAGA hat, and hundreds of ballots have been destroyed in fires on the West Coast. Election officials are bracing for targeted attacks in the coming days—and some have already received threats. If Trump loses, the right will be poised—under the guise of “election integrity”—to interfere further with the norms of American democracy.

Related:

The swing states are in good hands. The next “Stop the Steal” movement is here.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Vann R. Newkirk II on solidarity and Gaza The closing case against Trump How the Trump resistance gave up

Today’s News

Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser, was released from federal prison after completing his four-month sentence for being found in contempt of Congress. Vice President Kamala Harris's speech tonight—which she says will be her campaign’s closing argument—will be delivered from the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., the same location where Trump spoke on January 6, 2021. Israel’s Parliament passed two laws yesterday that include provisions banning UNRWA, a UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, from operating in the country. Israel has accused several members of UNRWA, which distributes the majority of aid in Gaza, of participating in the Hamas attack on October 7.

More From The Atlantic

The end of Francis Fukuyama “Dear James”: My colleague repeats herself constantly. Revenge voting is a mistake, Gal Beckerman argues. The people who don’t read political news Under the spell of the crowd

Evening Read

Michael Laughlin / AP

The Worst Statue in the History of Sports

By Ross Andersen

Earlier this year, the Lakers unveiled a Kobe Bryant statue with oddly stretched proportions and a too-angular face. It made Bryant look like a second-rate Terminator villain, and to add insult to injury, the inscription at its base was marred by misspellings. In 2017, fans of Cristiano Ronaldo were so aghast at a sculptor’s cartoonish bust of the legendary footballer that they hounded him into making a new one.

It gives me no pleasure—and, in fact, considerable pain—to report that Dwyane Wade’s statue may be the worst of them all.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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The Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov was a zealous defender of all human rights, but there was one he spoke about as a first among equals: the right to emigrate. This was, he wrote, “an essential condition of spiritual freedom.” The power to vote with your feet, to exit if you so choose, gave the individual a veto over the state. So many other rights are important for an open society—expressing your political views, worshiping freely, assembling without constraint—but all have much less meaning if (as in the Soviet Union) you can’t even decide where to live.

I find myself, in these nail-biting days before the election, prioritizing in much the same way. What rights matter most? What conditions are necessary for a democratic society to exist and persist? What material makes up the floor on which we all stand?

The freedom to dissent ranks near the top for me—and reading the recently published memoirs of Alexei Navalny, an intellectual descendant of Sakharov, only made it seem more precious; you can pay with your life under a government that cares little for this freedom. Luckily, we in the United States live—for the time being—in an open society, and if you want to know what dissent looks like in such a society, the past year has offered a pretty good illustration. The American left, in its anger over the administration’s laissez-faire approach to Israel—and in response to the horror taking place in Gaza—has protested loudly, disruptively, and without cease. Certainly there have been excesses, but these activists have also shown very clearly that, in a democracy, protest can shift opinion (if not yet policy).

But I’m also afraid that these dissenters—progressives and, crucially, hundreds of thousands of Muslim Americans in those all-important Midwest swing states—are approaching the election with a self-defeating plan, one they surely think of as a continuation of this protest. It is not. By neglecting to consider democracy’s basic conditions, they might end up undermining their ability to ever protest again.

They are livid over Kamala Harris’s steady military support for Israel, and they are grieving over the tens of thousands of civilians killed in Gaza. We have all spent a year watching unrelenting carnage—and for Arab American voters in particular, the victims in the rubble are (or could be) friends and family members. Their attitude is not just ideological. It is visceral. It is personal. “I feel very guilty,” one Michigan voter, Sereene Hijazi, told The New York Times. “A lot of Arab Americans feel guilty because, like, we’re here, we’re safe, but it’s our tax dollars that are killing our relatives and people we know.” As a response, Hijazi has made her choice for 2024: the third-party candidate Jill Stein.

[Read: How the Trump resistance gave up]

This is the plan: Either opt out of voting, choose a third-party candidate, or pull the lever for Donald Trump, all as a form of protest. Any of these choices would, if they happened on a large enough scale, have the effect of swinging the election to Trump. If that seems unlikely, consider the fact that one activist is already taking credit for pressuring a national newspaper to pull a Harris endorsement. Nika Soon-Shiong, the daughter of the owner of the Los Angeles Times, has said that her father’s controversial decision was “an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children.” (Patrick Soon-Shiong has denied that his daughter had any influence over his move.)

For some, their protest vote or abstention will be a matter of revenge, punishing Harris for her position. And as an emotional reaction to mass death, this is understandable. But these voters would also be punishing themselves. Regardless of whether you think Trump would do more to protect Palestinian lives—an absurd notion, on the evidence—a more fundamental issue is at stake.

Many of Harris’s rallies have been interrupted by demonstrations. A protest was set up outside the Democratic National Convention to demand that a pro-Palestinian speaker be allowed to address the delegates (a request that was denied). Campuses have been boiling over with encampments, occupations, and physical confrontations. If this year of protest has not nudged policy much—though Harris’s rhetoric is noticeably different from Joe Biden’s in many respects—it has lodged the issue of Gaza in the American consciousness. A recent Pew poll from early October found an uptick since last December in the number of Americans who think Israel has gone too far in its military response.

In other words, protest matters. But we should not take for granted that we will always be able to protest. Trump has made it clear how he views dissent. He has mused about throwing protesters in jail. He wants to revive the 1792 Insurrection Act so he can sic the military on those who might object to his policies. His defense secretary Mike Esper said that Trump proposed shooting demonstrators in the legs during the 2020 protests over the killing of George Floyd.

This avowed, even gleeful, willingness to violently suppress any dissent from what Trump calls the “enemy within” is the main reason 13 of his own former staffers signed a letter warning about Trump’s “desire for absolute, unchecked power.”

[Read: The people who don’t read political news]

Back in May, when Biden was still the Democratic candidate for president but the progressive anger was no less intense over Gaza, Jewish Currents, a progressive magazine, organized a panel discussion for those on the left unsure of how they might vote in the upcoming election. One comment, from Waleed Shahid, the former spokesperson and communications director for Justice Democrats, cut through the tone of sorrowful worry. When he was asked whom he would vote for if he was living in a swing state, he didn’t hesitate with this answer: “When you’re voting for an elected official in this country, you are voting for the conditions under which you would organize.”

Those conditions should be front of mind; they make everything else possible—and there is only one way to guarantee them.

To those who think that Trump would prove to be a better choice for peace in the region and the fate of Palestinian lives, I’m not sure what to say. His entire approach to Israel can be boiled down to what he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a call this month: “Do what you have to do.” Forget caring about Palestinian lives; he has reduced the very word Palestinian to a slur, lobbing it at his political rivals. I would like to remind Amer Ghalib, the Muslim mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, who is endorsing Trump because of the former president’s vague promise to “end the chaos” in the Middle East, of two words: Muslim ban. This policy of excluding anyone from a Muslim country, even tourists, from entering the United States is now one Trump wants to expand.

And if this isn’t convincing enough, remember that there are factions that would apply pressure on President Harris over this issue. If the country is inching toward a more pro-Palestinian stance, the struggle will take place within the Democratic Party. Harris is movable. Who among the Republicans will put pressure on Trump to care about Palestinians? Tom Cotton? Marco Rubio? Stephen Miller?

Gazans are still dying. And this makes it hard to think first about maintaining democratic norms. The instinct is to scream, which in this case might mean choosing Stein or Trump or no one at all. But a scream is a reflex, not a strategy. The left and those who care about the Palestinian future need to live to fight another day on this issue, and to do so they need to exist in a country where it is possible to fight at all.

The Knesset passed a bill on Monday banning the UN agency for Palestine refugees from operating in Israel.

In April 1952, W. E. B. Du Bois stepped onto the stage of the ballroom of the Hotel Diplomat in Midtown Manhattan. His beard was grizzled and he was still working out how to lecture through new dentures. In a word, he was old. During his long life, he’d witnessed the dawn of Jim Crow and the glow of the first atom bombs; the slaughter of the Comanche and the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States. Wars had broken and reshaped Du Bois’s world, and he had recently been one of the most prominent victims of the Red Scare, ordered to surrender his passport because of his Communist organizing. Yet here he was, preparing to deliver new insight and optimism to the audience before him.

“I have seen something of human upheaval in this world,” he told the crowd, recalling “the scream and shots of a race riot in Atlanta” and “the marching of the Ku Klux Klan.” But his recent travels had taken him to a place that had shaken him: the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazis had razed the ghetto in 1943, slaughtering more than 50,000 people on the night before Passover to crush a rebellion by the Polish Jews being held captive there. When Du Bois got there, in 1949, the city was still being rebuilt. Speaking at the behest of Jewish Life magazine—now Jewish Currents—Du Bois said the visit had helped him reconceive the “Negro problem” as part of a larger constellation of global struggles against oppression. He had been cured of a “certain social provincialism” and sought a way for “both these groups and others to reassess and reformulate the problems of our day, whose solution belongs to no one group.” For Du Bois, the path forward was simple: solidarity.

Du Bois’s vision has been deeply influential in the decades since he delivered his “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto” speech. Similar sentiments moved Jewish students to take buses to the Mississippi Delta in the summer of 1964, and brought both Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali to oppose the Vietnam War. Solidarity spurred students and people of color to call for American divestment from apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, and has more recently brought Black activists to Standing Rock. The notion of global minorities and underclasses sharing common cause was provocative in 1952, but is now a constant in progressive circles, and has a special force among mainstream Black American institutions and politics, regardless of ideology.

But the past year has thrown Du Bois’s prescription into crisis. Most Americans expressed horror and sympathy for the Israeli victims of Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7, the deadliest assault on Jews since the Holocaust. Since then, Israel’s counterassault against Hamas in Gaza has killed thousands of civilians and caused a dire humanitarian crisis, all with the backing of the United States. As about 100 hostages still languish in captivity, the horror and sympathy remain. But the continued violence in Gaza has strengthened, among many, and especially among many Black observers, another feeling: solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Many of the resulting protests against Israel’s conduct, and statements of empathy for Palestinians, have been met with censorship by universities and state governments, and with derision and dismissal by the media. This has been particularly true for expressions of solidarity that are based on the Black experience in America, which have often been disparaged as unsophisticated and inauthentic. “The identification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with America’s race problem was hardly made in America,” the historian Gil Troy argued in Tablet magazine. “It is a recent foreign import,” air-dropped onto a gullible populace.

Of course, the American South is not the Middle East, and there are limits to every comparison. But it is not simplistic or facile to, while acknowledging differences, also see structural similarities over time and space, or to believe that, in a world connected by language, finance, and technology, our systems and ways of being are related. The Black experience has been usefully analogized to the Jewish struggle over the years, and we have clear documentary evidence of the ways that systems of anti-Black and anti-Semitic oppression have been borrowed and translated from one to the other. To claim kinship between Black and Palestinian peoples is merely to apply the same logic. Solidarity means recognizing the parallels and shared humanity among the three groups, and working to create a world that does so as well.

But efforts to create that world are now in danger of being snuffed out. The dehumanization and marginalization of Palestinians in American discourse and media, as well as denunciations of the use of concepts such as “intersectionality” and “decolonization” in relation to Israel, among even liberal commentators, have dovetailed neatly with the ongoing conservative backlash against “wokeness” and Black history. All the while, anti-Semitism is worsening in America and beyond. The fate of multiracial organizing and democracy in America is inextricably bound up with the fates of people halfway around the world.

Can solidarity survive the onslaught in Gaza?

Left: A draft of W. E. B. Du Bois’s speech “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto” from April 1952. Right: Du Bois (Special Collections and University Archives / University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture).

First, some words about that onslaught. Israel responded to Hamas’s brutal incursion, in which assailants killed more than 1,200 Israeli citizens and captured hundreds as hostages, with an offensive that has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, an estimate from the Gaza Health Ministry. (Hamas runs the ministry, but the World Health Organization and the United Nations consider its numbers generally reliable.) As of April, nearly 23,000 of those fatalities were identifiable by names and identification numbers issued by Israel. According to some experts, if people who die from disease or injury, as well as those found buried in rubble, are included, the true toll could be much higher. War is war, and the great, unavoidable tragedy of war is civilian death. But unavoidable is not synonymous with purposeful.

The Israeli campaign has, as a matter of strategy, regularly and knowingly subjected Palestinian civilians to violence. The Israel Defense Forces have targeted Gazan health-care facilities as civilians were being treated and sheltering there, claiming that militants use the facilities and that hostages were held in them (an explanation that the U.S. State Department has backed up as credible). Israeli air strikes have devastated Palestinian refugee camps, including a strike in Rafah in May that killed dozens of civilians along with two top Hamas commanders.

The UN and the U.S. Agency for International Development have both concluded that Israel blocked shipments of food aid to Gaza, a finding that under both U.S. and international law should make continued weapons shipments to Israel illegal. (The Biden administration rejected the finding, but has since written a letter demanding that Israeli officials improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza within 30 days.) The IDF has struck the same UN-backed school building five times, saying it was targeting militants. According to the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 129 Palestinian and Lebanese journalists and media workers have been killed, making this the deadliest period for journalists since the group began keeping records in 1992. Last month, Israel shipped 88 unidentified Palestinian bodies back to Gaza in the back of a truck. And earlier this month, the United States launched an investigation of allegations of widespread sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees, months after video depicting an alleged sexual assault at the Sde Teiman detention camp leaked on social media.

Those who survive are facing the depths of deprivation. Almost 2 million people in Gaza are hungry or starving. For pregnant women, stress and terror are contributing to a spike in preterm births, and doctors describe seeing stillbirths, newborn deaths, and malnourished infants. Deteriorating public-health conditions have resulted in a wave of contagious skin diseases among children, and what the UN calls a “frightening increase” in Hepatitis A infections. The WHO is rushing to vaccinate Palestinians against polio after Gaza’s first confirmed case in a quarter century. This is a human catastrophe, documented and verified over the past year by the United States and other countries, the international diplomatic and legal community, nongovernmental organizations, reputable news outlets, and, not least, Palestinians themselves.

A recent poll by The Economist and YouGov shows a steady drop in American sympathy toward Israel, and a corresponding rise in sympathy toward Palestinians; earlier polls have shown that a majority of Americans disapprove of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and want America to send humanitarian aid to Gaza in lieu of more weapons to Israel. Yet one demographic group that broke early in this direction was Black Americans. In a New York Times/Siena College poll taken in December 2023, Black respondents already overwhelmingly supported an immediate cease-fire, and were much less likely than white respondents to endorse any action that endangered more civilians. Altogether, Black respondents were more likely to sympathize with Palestinians than with Israel, and more likely than not to believe that Israel was not “seriously interested in a peaceful solution.” In a June CBS News poll, nearly half of Black respondents said they wanted the U.S. to encourage Israel to completely stop its military actions in Gaza, while only 34 percent of white respondents did.

These sentiments aren’t limited to young activists and leftists. Even moderate and legacy Black institutions have expressed them. In June, the NAACP called on the Biden administration to stop shipping weapons to Israel, arguing that the president “must be willing to pull the levers of power when appropriate to advance liberation for all.” In February, the Council of Bishops, the leadership branch of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, called for an end to American support for Israel and an immediate cease-fire. Noting both the connection of Black folks to Palestinians and the historical linkages between the Black and Jewish plights—and the deep theological affinity of Black-liberation thought with the story of the ancient Jews—the AME statement said that “the cycle of violence between historically wounded peoples will not be dissolved by the creation of more wounds or through weapons of war.” The statement also accused the United States of “supporting this mass genocide.”

In January, more than a thousand Black pastors—representing congregations totaling hundreds of thousands of mostly working-class Black people—urged President Joe Biden to push for a cease-fire. The leaders made a pragmatic case: They feared that Black voters, typically reliable backers of the Democratic Party (and Biden in particular), might not show up to the polls in November if the deaths in Gaza continued. But they also made a moral argument based in solidarity: “We see them as a part of us,” the Reverend Cynthia Hale of Ray of Hope Christian Church in Decatur, Georgia, told The New York Times. “They are oppressed people. We are oppressed people.”

This sympathy toward Palestinians is shared widely across Black communities—by Black activists, commentators, clergy, and white- and blue-collar professionals of all age groups. Identification with the Palestinian cause stretches back well before the current conflict, showing up in polls as early as the 1970s. This solidarity is based on a number of factors, but the main one is obvious: Black people see what is happening to Palestinians, and many feel the tug of the familiar in their heart.

Attempts like Hale’s to analogize the experiences of Black people with those of Palestinians have often been met with a simple insistence that they are wrong; that they have confused things; that relations between Palestinians and Israelis are too complex to allow any comparison. In 1979, at the United Nations, the chief Israeli delegate, Yehuda Blum, chided leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil-rights organization founded by Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy, for calling for a Palestinian homeland. “Understandably, they are less knowledgeable about the Middle East conflict than other parties,” Blum said.

In 2020, during the height of America’s purported “racial reckoning,” the Haaretz commentator Nave Dromi wrote that there were simply no commonalities between the struggles of Black Americans and Palestinians, claiming that Palestinians “don’t want genuine peace, in contrast to blacks in the United States, who do seek to live in peace with their American compatriots.” In 2021, in the pages of this magazine, the writer Susie Linfield said that the concept of “intersectionality” had been improperly applied to analogizing the Black and Palestinian struggles, in a way that can “occlude complex realities, negate history, prevent critical thinking, and foster juvenile simplifications.”

It is true that analogy has its limits for any political situation, and that, especially among journalists, nuance and context are crucial components of the arsenal of understanding. But often, regard for “complexity” in this particular conflict means treating its history as one hermetically sealed off from the rest of human experience, which in turn short-circuits any attempt to make common cause with Palestinians.

The short-circuiting has only accelerated since October 7. Shortly after Hamas’s attack, Rabbi Mark H. Levin wrote in The Kansas City Star that the argument that Black Americans and Palestinians have parallel experiences is “a popular but false analogy.” According to Alexis Grenell in The Nation, “When outsiders collapse the Palestinian cause into, say, the struggle for Black Lives or LGBTQ rights—while framing that position as virtuous because it’s ‘simple’—it’s not only wrong but counterproductive.”

Behind these objections is, perhaps, the very real fear of anti-Semitism—of Jews facing a unique scrutiny born not of compassion, but of hate. And it is indisputably the case that such singling-out does animate odious worldviews, that Hamas has justified its actions with anti-Semitism, and that the group has committed brutal and unspeakable acts. But instead of isolating Jews, solidarity actually situates the state of Israel within a much larger story, one in which brutality is all too common. And standing with oppressed people—including Palestinians, many of whom dream of a future without Hamas—does not require them to be universally righteous; this would in itself be a unique scrutiny.

Still, the fear of anti-Semitism has empowered those who would quell expressions of solidarity, and who were hostile to the idea long before October 7. In the past year, the insistence on Palestinian-Israeli relations as an inscrutable cipher, and the rejection of attempts to analogize the Black and Palestinian situations, have contributed to a broader aversion to multiracial organizing. In November 2023, the Free Press’s Bari Weiss made this argument explicit in an essay about college campuses: DEI efforts, she argued, were tantamount to “arrogating power to a movement that threatens not just Jews—but America itself.”

Since the 1960s, student protesters have often borrowed from the logic and language of Black protest, and many left-wing organizers on campuses have compared the Black and Palestinian experiences. During the invasion of Gaza, as universities became the locus of pro-Palestinian protest, many on both the left and the right saw the activism as proof that students’ minds had been warped by left-wing orthodoxy. Universities targeted their own protesting students with police crackdowns, canceled commencement addresses, and conspicuously revised speech and conduct codes, while politicians sought to pass laws that would ban forms of free expression, including an executive order from Texas Governor Greg Abbott that requires universities to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that could reasonably see students expelled for criticizing Israel. Many ostensibly stalwart defenders of the First Amendment have found themselves tongue-tied.

This environment has invigorated people who were already calling for crackdowns on “wokeness.” The right-wing activist Chris Rufo used the backlash against student protests to try to oust administrators at elite universities who were too friendly toward diversity and other presumably leftist causes. Many other commentators have assailed DEI, decolonization, and critical race theory, often without taking care to define or assess how much currency in our discourse these terms actually have. The Black intellectuals who helped spin solidarity into real practice are often summoned, solely for the purpose of exorcism. All of these names and theories have been stripped of meaning and context and stewed down to a mush. The objective is not understanding or coherence, but convenience, turning solidarity into a Black bogeyman to destroy.

It should be noted that W. E. B. Du Bois was an early contributor to The Atlantic, and in 1901 risked his fledgling academic credibility to write a story for the magazine defending Reconstruction—when the magazine’s editorial leadership decried the era as a mistake. That essay became the cornerstone of Du Bois’s most famous work, The Souls of Black Folk, in which he first elucidated the concept of the “color line,” which animated his 1952 address in the Hotel Diplomat. It should also be noted that, like many other Black scholars, he saw a mirror of the Black experience under that color line in the historical plight of Europe’s Jews, and explicit links between Nazi policies and Jim Crow. As Hitler began to build the machinery of industrialized genocide, and much of Europe and white America refused Jewish refugees from Germany, historically Black colleges and universities continued to sponsor visa applications. The Black press, early and without equivocation, saw the brewing catastrophe for what it was.

In the years leading up to the Warsaw Ghetto speech, Du Bois had been an ardent Zionist who believed that the creation of a Jewish state would lend legitimacy to Pan-African projects like Liberia, which had been founded as a colonial “promised land” for formerly enslaved Black Americans. But the Liberian project did not provide the promised liberation—indeed, it subjected local people to enslavement, subjugation, and war instead, all at the hands of a colonial elite and foreign companies—and Du Bois’s reluctance to acknowledge that failure was one of his great hypocrisies.

But in his later years, Du Bois followed his own logic to a more ecumenical approach, one that viewed all subjugated peoples as part of a connected global movement. This expansive view of solidarity, as embraced by many in the Black diaspora, did not require that groups have identical struggles or historical contexts in order to create common cause. Rather, it was based on the shared experiences of oppression, dehumanization, and lack of self-determination, especially at the hands of the American empire.

In this context, many Black observers witnessed years of Palestinian suffering, subsidized by American tax dollars and arms shipments—even as Black neighborhoods and schools were deprived of investment—and concluded that something familiar was going on. Many Black intellectuals criticized Israel for its role in conflicts with its Arab neighbors in the 1950s and ’60s, and for allying with apartheid South Africa. For those who were not scholars in foreign policy, there was a constant stream of news images showing meager conditions in Palestinian refugee camps, and forced or restricted movement. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote of his own trip to the region in 2002: “I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us Black people in South Africa.”

Arguments that the conflict is too complex to compare with other global systems—to the Black experience in particular—have always rung hollow, especially given that both Jim Crow and South African apartheid were often characterized by their defenders as too singular for outsiders to comprehend. In the 1960s, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an agency devoted to maintaining white supremacy, sent speakers across the country to deliver a set of talking points called “The Message From Mississippi.” In those remarks, the speaker would complain that “the North seemed to know all the answers to our problems without having and knowing the problem,” before explaining patiently that Jim Crow was necessary and right. But this kind of time-wasting and complexification did not stop the northerners who heeded the call to participate in Freedom Summer. They did not need advanced degrees in segregation to know that what they saw on the news was wrong.

One effect of the prominence of the war in Gaza in American media over the past year has been a belated demystification. The deluge of images of flattened buildings, dismembered bodies, and grieving families does not present a conflict that is singular or arcane, but one that is frustratingly, appallingly familiar. After the May air strike on Rafah, the videos and photos that emerged were horrific—and not the least bit “complicated.” The victims were not “human beasts,” as the Israeli general responsible for overseeing Gazan aid described Hamas militants and the Palestinian civilians who celebrated on October 7, but mothers and children, dazed and broken. They deserve the same empathy and protection as any other people, and have been denied it by a constant stream of dehumanization, including decades of rhetoric painting Palestinians as backwards, uncivilized, and incompatible with “Western” values. This is a tactic Black folks know all too well.

In November 2023, Israel’s deputy speaker of the Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, a member of the governing Likud party, shared on social media his belief that the campaign had been “too humane,” and demanded that Israel “burn Gaza now no less!” Last winter, two members of far-fight ultranationalist parties—Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is a vocal proponent of illegal settlement and annexation in the West Bank, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a leader in the Jewish-supremacist movement—called for the expulsion of all of the residents of Gaza. Shortly after the Rafah strike, Nikki Haley, the former Republican candidate for president, visited an artillery post in Israel and wrote Finish Them on an artillery shell. Instigated by extremist leaders and unfettered by the law, Israeli settlers in the West Bank have engaged in a campaign of ruthless violence and dispossession against Palestinian residents, even as the Israeli military has ramped up operations there that have killed hundreds of Palestinians.

Given all this, when Black folks who were raised on stories of lynchings and the threat of obliteration—stories of the Tulsa Massacre, of the quelling of Nat Turner’s Rebellion, of the Red Summer—look at Gaza, how could they not see something they recognize?

Rafah, May 5, 2024 (Hatem Khaled / Reuters)

When Du Bois gave his 1952 speech, Israel was a new state with an uncertain future. The Holocaust was not yet a matter of memory but a matter of present urgency, and across Europe, Jewish refugees still made temporary homes in displaced-persons camps. Du Bois had wept for victims of lynchings in the United States, and his grief was naturally extended to Jews who had lost family members, and who feared mightily about their ability to exist on this Earth as a people.

The Holocaust is more distant in time now, but not much more distant than Jim Crow, which is to say that it is living history, and that the staggering pain of genocide—and the attendant anxiety about future erasure—remains an essential part of how those of us seeking to build a global moral community should understand the world. That requires understanding the shock and profound loss of the global Jewish community on October 7. Solidarity demands that right-minded global citizens reckon with the stubborn persistence of anti-Semitism in the world, and its resurgence in the past few decades.

Solidarity does not demand, however, that they endorse another massacre, or the continued subjugation of another people. In fact, it demands the opposite. “A truly intersectional approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Susie Linfield wrote, “would, of necessity, incorporate the Jewish people’s torturous history of expulsion, pariahdom, statelessness, and genocide.” This is undeniably true, and would then logically make an imperative of standing in solidarity with any group facing such circumstances.

The widespread backlash against that imperative is perhaps the chill in the air preceding the storm of the next four years, auguring a world of warring tribes, of us versus them. Trumpism, the ideology that backs the most authoritarian crackdowns on student protests and free speech, is hostile to Jews and Palestinians, and positions solidarity as the main enemy to a state built purely on the pursuit of self-interest. Already, this is a world where Palestinians are marginalized in the media and in policy, and one where neo-Nazis are emboldened and anti-Semitism continues to rise. Americans have always believed themselves to be at the moral center of the world, and here they have a case. The militarism and dehumanization endorsed by so many Americans are important exports, as are the American armaments that have killed thousands of Palestinian children before they could experience the wonder of learning to ride a bicycle.

This may all sound like an anti-war argument in general, and it is. Reeling from the horrors of the World Wars and the atomic age, Du Bois grew preoccupied with finding a solution to war itself. He came to understand that domestic systems of oppression and global wars shared a common root of systematized dehumanization, manufactured by the global color line. For Du Bois, true peace was the only way forward, and it required “extend[ing] the democratic ideal to the yellow, brown, and black peoples” across the world.

Several other Black leaders reached similar conclusions in their intellectual lives, ultimately linking global pacifism to the project of racial egalitarianism. In the years before his death, King, operating from his framework of the “three evils” of poverty, militarism, and racism, came out to oppose the Vietnam War. “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government,” King said in his best-known denunciation of the war. He spoke specifically of Black empathy with the Vietnamese. “They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met,” he said. “They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.”

What would Du Bois have said about the tragedy in Gaza? Over his long career, he worked to build a coherent philosophy on the basic principle of seeing all humanity as worth saving. He contradicted himself, made grievous errors, and often fell short of his own ethics in this quest. By the time he found himself speaking in the Hotel Diplomat, he’d amassed enough conflicting views to be his own best interlocutor. But he always professed, as found in his “Credo,” a belief “in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls; the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.”

Du Bois’s guiding principle was not so different from the founding ethos of the abolitionist magazine that had helped catapult him to fame. In 1892, Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the founders of The Atlantic, gave an unambiguous definition of the American idea that his magazine contemplated: “emancipation.”

Emerson’s view was forged at a time when abolitionist arguments were censored in some institutions, abolitionists could be lynched if they journeyed to the wrong corner of America, and the supposed savagery and bloodthirst of the American Negro was the predominant moral argument for keeping him in chains. Emerson made a choice that was then bold and unusual among the white literati: to view Black people as humans, and to rebuild his philosophy around that conclusion. Emerson chose solidarity, and wrote against the scourge of slavery. He did so because emancipation, that American idea, demanded it.

Today, emancipation still demands much of us. It requires that we create a world in which the Holocaust could never happen again, which by definition means a world in which a holocaust could never happen again. It would also necessarily be one in which there would be no mass killings in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, no famine in Sudan, no children held in cages at the American border, no steady procession of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, no killing of thousands of children in Gaza.

America is clearly failing miserably in that work. The ascendant political ideology gripping both parties views solidarity with suspicion, a suspicion that colors our global realpolitik. The United States remains committed to providing the bombs that kill children, even while—somehow—calling for a cease-fire.

“Where are we going—whither are we drifting?” asked Du Bois in 1952. On the one hand, we have solidarity. On the other, ruin.

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It took 25 days, but in the early hours today, Israel responded to Iran’s salvo of missiles earlier this month. The operation, named “Days of Repentance,” was the most significant attack on Iran by any country since the 1980s. The Iranian regime’s years of waging a shadow war on Israel have finally brought the violence home, something the regime had repeatedly promised its people it would avoid.

The attacks were significant, and likely to cause considerable damage. At least four officers of the Iranian army, serving in missile-defense units, were killed. Nevertheless, Iran is relieved that its worst fears didn’t come true. A day before the attacks, Israel had used intermediaries to warn Iran about them, to make sure they wouldn’t cause massive casualties, Mostafa Najafi, a security expert in Tehran with connections to the regime’s elites, told me. He said the attacks weren’t “as vast and painful as Israeli officials had claimed” they would be. Israel did not target Iran’s infrastructure, such as its oil and gas refineries, nor did it assassinate political or military leaders.

Because of this, Iran has an opportunity to call it quits by giving a weak enough response that wouldn’t invite Israeli retaliation. Iran can stop the tit for tat, if it’s willing to resist the hard-line voices that want the country to escalate and even widen the conflict.

[Read: Iran is not ready for war with Israel]

Life in Tehran has quickly sprung back to normal. The city’s streets were clogged with traffic as usual on Saturday, the first day of the week in the country. Although all flights had initially been suspended, Tehran’s two main airports are back in operation.

“I believe Iran will respond to the attacks,” Afifeh Abedi, a security expert in Iran who is supportive of the government, told me. “But I doubt there would be escalation,” she said. “Countries of the region will stop this, and the U.S. will try to manage the situation.”

Abas Aslani of the Tehran-based Center for Middle East Strategic Studies agrees. “The evidence doesn’t currently point to a broader war,” he told me. “But this doesn’t necessarily mean that Iran won’t respond.”

I also spoke with two senior Iranian politicians, a conservative and a reformist, both of whom requested anonymity for fear of reprisals. They said that Iran wasn’t looking to broaden the conflict now. Iran and the U.S. had implicitly agreed to allow a limited Israeli strike followed by no significant Iranian response, the conservative figure, who is close to the parliamentary speaker, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, told me.  

The reformist politician, who has served in cabinet-level roles before, said that the diplomatic efforts of Iran’s minister of foreign affairs, Abbas Araghchi, helped ensure that the Israeli attacks were restricted to the military targets. Araghchi visited about a dozen nearby countries in the past few weeks, and he is believed to have asked them to put pressure on the U.S. and Israel to keep the attacks limited.

Across the region, there is broad opposition to widening the conflict. Saudi Arabia condemned the latest Israeli attacks on Iran as “a violation of its sovereignty and a violation of international laws and norms” and reiterated its “firm position in rejecting the continued escalation.” Similar condemnations have been issued by Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, Algeria, Mauritania, and, farther afield, Switzerland, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the Maldives. Jordan, which is a neighbor of Israel’s and signed a peace treaty with it 30 years ago on this very day, also confirmed that no Israeli strikers had been allowed to use Jordanian airspace. Trying to maintain neutrality, Jordan had previously helped Israel defend itself against Iranian drone and missile attacks.

[Read: Iran cannot be conciliated]

Iran knows that its future prosperity and success rely on economic development, which is actively hurt by its isolation from the international economy and its current war footing. Yesterday, the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, a G7 initiative that helps enforce global anti-money-laundering rules, declared that it was going to keep Iran on its blacklist alongside only two other countries, North Korea and Myanmar. On Saturday, the U.S. dollar was selling for 680,000 Iranian rials, a historic high. These are not problems you can solve by fighting Israel.

Yesterday, in a rare candid moment, Ghalibaf acknowledged the stakes: “Sadly, our economy is not doing as well as our missiles. But it should.”

And yet, Iran is still a long way from taking the necessary steps to drop its anti-Israel campaign, overcome its international isolation, and focus on its domestic problems. Currently, any deviation from the anti-Israel orthodoxy leads to quick backlash by the hard-liners. Last month, the Assembly of Scholars and Instructors at the Qom Seminary, a reformist-leaning body of Shiite clerics, issued a statement that condemned Israel’s ongoing attacks on Lebanon while calling on it “to go back to its legal borders before the 1967 aggression” and urging the “formation of an independent Palestinian state.” This endorsement of the two-state solution incensed the hard-liners, some of whom called for the assembly to be shut down, but its position has been defended by the reformist press.

And some hard-liners are clamoring for all-out war with Israel.

“The Zionist regime is on decline, and Iran won’t let this attack go without a response,” Hossein Shariatmadari, the editor in chief of the hard-line daily Kayhan, told me. “Our response will be ever more decisive and crushing.”

Shariatmadari is known for outlandish pronouncements. Najafi, who tends to be more levelheaded, also believes that the Iranian-Israeli clashes are set to continue “in the medium term, especially after the U.S. elections.”

Some supporters of Israel also hope that the conflict will escalate. Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank, said on X that Israel must now prepare for the “next phase” of its strategy: helping Iranians overthrow their regime, followed by “decisive decapitation strikes.”

As long as Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is alive and in power, the country’s attitude toward Israel will not decisively shift. But he is 85, and, in preparation for an eventual succession struggle, the regime’s different factions are already squabbling over the country’s future direction. The hard-liners are not as politically powerful as they once were. They lost the presidency recently and are being marginalized in other institutions as well.

“The likes of Shariatmadari don’t matter to anyone,” the conservative politician told me. “Iran is set to change.”

If Iran wants to avoid a war, it can’t change fast enough.