If 10/7 was Israel’s 9/11, as many of the country’s leaders have said, the meaning of the comparison is not self-evident. Its implications still have to be worked out, and they might lead to unexpected places.

The horror is comparable, but the scale isn’t. The 1,000 or more civilians butchered on Saturday by Hamas are, relative to Israel’s population, many more than the 3,000 killed in the United States by al-Qaeda; a proportionate number of dead on 9/11 would have been close to 40,000. Al-Qaeda, a transnational group based in the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan, had the ability and will to strike terror anywhere in the world, but it could not destroy the United States. Hamas threatens Israel’s very existence—both in principle, according to the genocidal goals set out in its founding manifesto and subsequent statements, and also in practice, as an arm or ally of the more powerful entities in the region that share its aims, Hezbollah, Syria, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Facts like these suggest that the analogy has no more value than most historical comparisons.

And yet something makes Israelis reach back to September 11, 2001. The facts are different, but the feelings are the same: profound shock, unbearable grief, humiliation, rage, and solidarity. Shock because nothing this terrible had ever happened before, even to Israel. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, like the George W. Bush administration, seemed to discount evidence of a coming attack—a failure of intelligence and preparedness that was, perhaps, at bottom a failure of imagination. Solidarity demonstrated in the spontaneous effort of ordinary Israelis, without waiting for official directives, regardless of ideological differences, to save and comfort one another. Ours didn’t last long; neither will theirs. May the memory endure as a reproach to the stupidity and tribalism that plague Israeli politics and ours.

“Let there be no doubt: The United States has Israel’s back,” President Joe Biden said on Tuesday at the White House. He reported having just told Netanyahu by phone, “If the United States experienced what Israel is experiencing, our response would be swift, decisive, and overwhelming.” It sounded like unconditional support, a green light for Israel to respond as violently as the U.S. did after 9/11. But Biden also told Netanyahu, “Terrorists purposefully target civilians, kill them. We uphold the laws of war. It matters. There’s a difference.” This sounded like a warning in the form of flattery: Democratic countries like ours don’t kill civilians—so don’t. NBC News later reported, “Biden was more direct than in previous calls that the Israeli military should take pains to avoid civilian casualties.”

At around the same time as the leaders’ phone call, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, was telling troops massed for an offensive on the Gaza border, “I have released all the restraints.” As he spoke of the accounts of murders and beheadings of children, women, and elderly Holocaust survivors, Gallant’s face was clenched with rage. He had already ordered “a complete siege” of Gaza that would cut off fuel, power, water, and food. “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” the defense minister said. As of Wednesday, according to Palestinian and international sources, more than 1,000 people in Gaza were dead, the majority of them civilians, including entire families buried under the rubble of air strikes.

After 9/11, Israelis essentially told Americans, Now you know. In fact, most of us knew almost nothing and had to spend years learning by painful experience. If Americans now have anything useful to tell Israelis, it would be: Don’t. Don’t let your justified fury replace reason. Give vent to rage, but think coldly—avoiding civilian casualties is in your self-interest. Don’t storm into Gaza without a plan for afterward. Don’t imagine that overwhelming military force can solve an immensely complex historical and political problem. Don’t continue to ignore or inflame Palestinian grievances in the West Bank, even if they’re raised by people who celebrated Israeli deaths.

Don’t poison your national unity, as Bush did ours, by using the crisis for partisan advantage; Israel’s new unity government is a good sign. Don’t squander your moment of global legitimacy, or assume that the world’s support will last a day longer if news emerges of mass civilian deaths in Gaza, or believe that its loss wouldn’t matter. It matters that democratic countries, which have criticized the Jewish state but know the difference between Israel and Hamas, are now expressing outrage, just as the same countries’ support mattered when Ukraine was brutally invaded by Russia. “It was very important not to be alone,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said yesterday, extending his solidarity to Israel. This is more than the Netanyahu government, which has been carefully neutral on Russian aggression, deserves from Ukraine. Vladimir Putin is holding his cards close on Israel and Hamas. Zelensky understood, as Netanyahu didn’t, that Russia, Iran, and Hamas will land on one side, and Ukraine and Israel on the other.

America should have its friend Israel’s back while conveying unpleasant truths to its face. After Saturday it’s clear that two things, apparent contradictions, have to be accepted at the same time: A group that seeks Israel’s destruction must be destroyed, and Israel’s cruel treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories only helps that group’s cause. It’s impossible for Israel to live in peace alongside Palestinians who will never accept its right to exist, and it’s impossible for Palestinians to accept a fate of permanent subordination. To address these together will require profound change from both sides. It’s beyond the ability and will of the current Israeli government, and on the West Bank, a sclerotic Palestinian government, weakened by its own corruption and by continued Israeli domination, is just as useless Perhaps, out of this horror, better alternatives will emerge.

President Joe Biden’s core foreign-policy argument has been that his steady engagement with international allies can produce better results for America than the impulsive unilateralism of his predecessor Donald Trump. The eruption of violence in Israel is testing that proposition under the most difficult circumstances.

The initial reactions of Biden and Trump to the attack have produced exactly the kind of personal contrast Biden supporters want to project. On Tuesday, Biden delivered a powerful speech that was impassioned but measured in denouncing the Hamas terror attacks and declaring unshakable U.S. support for Israel. Last night, in a rambling address in Florida, Trump praised the skill of Israel’s enemies, criticized Israel’s intelligence and defense capabilities, and complained that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had tried to claim credit for a U.S. operation that killed a top Iranian general while Trump was president.

At this somber moment, Trump delivered exactly the sort of erratic, self-absorbed performance that his critics have said make him unreliable in a crisis. Trump’s remarks seemed designed to validate what Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that focuses on the Middle East, had told me in an interview a few hours before the former president’s speech. “This is the most delicate moment in the Middle East in decades,” Murphy said. “The path forward to negotiate this hostage crisis, while also preventing other fronts from opening up against Israel, necessitates A-plus-level diplomacy. And you obviously never saw C-plus-level diplomacy from Trump.”

[Franklin Foer: Biden will be guided by his Zionism]

The crisis is highlighting more than the distance in personal demeanor between the two men. Two lines in Biden’s speech on Tuesday point toward the policy debate that could be ahead in a potential 2024 rematch over how to best promote international stability and advance America’s interests in the world.

Biden emphasized his efforts to coordinate support for Israel from U.S. allies within and beyond the region. And although Biden did not directly urge Israel to exercise “restraint” in its ongoing military operations against Hamas, he did call for caution. Referring to his conversation with Netanyahu, Biden said, “We also discussed how democracies like Israel and the United States are stronger and more secure when we act according to the rule of law.” White House officials acknowledged this as a subtle warning that the U.S. was not giving Israel carte blanche to ignore civilian casualties as it pursues its military objectives in Gaza.

Both of Biden’s comments point to crucial distinctions between his view and Trump’s of the U.S. role in the world. Whereas Trump relentlessly disparaged U.S. alliances, Biden has viewed them as an important mechanism for multiplying America’s influence and impact—by organizing the broad international assistance to Ukraine, for instance. And whereas Trump repeatedly moved to withdraw the U.S. from international institutions and agreements, Biden continues to assert that preserving a rules-based international order will enhance security for America and its allies.

Even more than in 2016, Trump in his 2024 campaign is putting forward a vision of a fortress America. In almost all of his foreign-policy proposals, he promises to reduce American reliance on the outside world. He has promised to make the U.S. energy independent and to “implement a four-year plan to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods and gain total independence from China.” Like several of his rivals for the 2024 GOP nomination, Trump has threatened to launch military operations against drug cartels in Mexico without approval from the Mexican government. John Bolton, one of Trump’s national security advisers in the White House, has said he believes that the former president would seek to withdraw from NATO in a second term. Walls, literal and metaphorical, remain central to Trump’s vision: He says that, if reelected, he’ll finish his wall across the Southwest border, and last weekend he suggested that the Hamas attack was justification to restore his ban on travel to the U.S. from several Muslim-majority nations.

Biden, by contrast, maintains that America can best protect its interests by building bridges. He’s focused on reviving traditional alliances, including extending them into new priorities such as “friend-shoring.” He has also sought to engage diplomatically even with rival or adversarial regimes, for instance, by attempting to find common ground with China over climate change.

These differences in approach likely will be muted in the early stages of Israel’s conflict with Hamas. Striking at Islamic terrorists is one form of international engagement that still attracts broad support from Republican leaders. And in the Middle East, Biden has not diverged from Trump’s strategy as dramatically as in other parts of the world. After Trump severely limited contact with the Palestinian Authority, Biden has restored some U.S. engagement, but the president hasn’t pushed Israel to engage in full-fledged peace negotiations, as did his two most recent Democratic predecessors, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Instead, Biden has continued Trump’s efforts to normalize relations between Israel and surrounding Sunni nations around their common interest in countering Shiite Iran. (Hamas’s brutal attack may have been intended partly to derail the ongoing negotiations among the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia that represent the crucial next stage of that project.) Since the attack last weekend, Trump has claimed that Hamas would not have dared to launch the incursion if he were still president, but he has not offered any substantive alternative to Biden’s response.

Yet the difference between how Biden and Trump approach international challenges is likely to resurface before this crisis ends. Even while trying to construct alliances to constrain Iran, Biden has also sought to engage the regime through negotiations on both its nuclear program and the release of American prisoners. Republicans have denounced each of those efforts; Trump and other GOP leaders have argued, without evidence, that Biden’s agreement to allow Iran to access $6 billion in its oil revenue held abroad provided the mullahs with more leeway to fund terrorist groups like Hamas. And although both parties are now stressing Israel’s right to defend itself, if Israel does invade Gaza, Biden will likely eventually pressure Netanyahu to stop the fighting and limit civilian losses well before Trump or any other influential Republican does.

Murphy points toward another distinction: Biden has put more emphasis than Trump on fostering dialogue with a broad range of nations across the region. Trump’s style “was to pick sides, and that meant making enemies and adversaries unnecessarily; that is very different from Biden’s” approach, Murphy told me. “We don’t know whether anyone in the region right now can talk sense into Hamas,” Murphy said, “but this president has been very careful to keep lines of communication open in the region, and that’s because he knows through experience that moments can come, like this, where you need all hands on deck and where you need open lines to all the major players.”

[Read: ‘The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades’]

In multiple national polls, Republican and Democratic voters now express almost mirror-image views on whether and how the U.S. should interact with the world. For the first time in its annual polling since 1974, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs this year found that a majority of Republicans said the U.S. would be best served “if we stay out of world affairs,” according to upcoming results shared exclusively with The Atlantic. By contrast, seven in 10 Democrats said that the U.S. “should take an active part in world affairs.”

Not only do fewer Republicans than Democrats support an active role for the U.S. in world affairs, but less of the GOP wants the U.S. to compromise with allies when it does engage. In national polling earlier this year by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, about eight in 10 Democrats said America should take its allies’ interests into account when dealing with major international issues. Again in sharp contrast, nearly three-fifths of GOP partisans said the U.S. instead “should follow its own interests.”

As president, Trump both reflected and reinforced these views among Republican voters. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization, the United Nations Human Rights Council, the Paris climate accord, and the nuclear deal with Iran that Obama negotiated, while also terminating Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade talks. Biden effectively reversed all of those decisions. He rejoined both the Paris Agreement and the WHO on his first days in office, and he brought the U.S. back into the Human Rights Council later in 2021. Although Biden did not resuscitate the TPP specifically, he has advanced a successor agreement among nations across the region called the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. Biden has also sought to restart negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, though with little success.

Peter Feaver, a public-policy and political-science professor at Duke University, told me he believes that Trump wasn’t alone among U.S. presidents in complaining that allies were not fully pulling their weight. What makes Trump unique, Feaver said, is that he didn’t see the other side of the ledger. “Most other presidents recognized, notwithstanding our [frustrations], it is still better to work with allies and that the U.S. capacity to mobilize a stronger, more action-focused coalition of allies than our adversaries could was a central part of our strength,” said Feaver, who served as a special adviser on the National Security Council for George W. Bush. “That’s the thing that Trump never really understood: He got the downsides of allies, but not the upsides. And he did not realize you do not get any benefits from allies if you approach them in the hyper-transactional style that he would do.”

Biden, Feaver believes, was assured an enthusiastic reception from U.S. allies because he followed the belligerent Trump. But Biden’s commitment to restoring alliances, Feaver maintains, has delivered results. “There’s no question in my mind that Biden got better results from the NATO alliance [on Ukraine] in the first six months than the Trump team would have done,” Feaver said.

As the Middle East erupts again, the biggest diplomatic hurdle for Biden won’t be marshaling international support for Israel while it begins military operations; it will be sustaining focus on what happens when they end, James Steinberg, the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told me. “The challenge here is how do you both reassure Israel and send an unmistakably tough message to Hamas and Iran without leading to an escalation in this crisis,” said Steinberg, who served as deputy secretary of state for Obama and deputy national security adviser for Clinton. “That’s where the real skill will come: Without undercutting the strong message of deterrence and support for Israel, can they figure out a way to defuse the crisis? Because it could just get worse, and it could widen.”

In a 2024 rematch, the challenge for Biden would be convincing most Americans that his bridges can keep them safer than Trump’s walls. In a recent Gallup Poll, Americans gave Republicans a 22-percentage-point advantage when asked which party could keep the nation safe from “international terrorism and military threats.” Republicans usually lead on that measure, but the current advantage was one of the GOP’s widest since Gallup began asking the question, in 2002.

This new crisis will test Biden on exceedingly arduous terrain. Like Clinton and Obama, Biden has had a contentious relationship with Netanyahu, who has grounded his governing coalition in the far-right extremes of Israeli politics and openly identified over the years with the GOP in American politics. In this uneasy partnership with Netanyahu, Biden must now juggle many goals: supporting the Israeli prime minister, but also potentially restraining him, while avoiding a wider war and preserving his long-term goal of a Saudi-Israeli détente that would reshape the region. It is exactly the sort of complex international puzzle that Biden has promised he can manage better than Trump. This terrible crucible is providing the president with another opportunity to prove it.

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Since taking office, Vice President Kamala Harris has struggled to communicate her vision and the nature of her role to both the press and the public. As President Joe Biden, the country’s oldest-ever president, eyes reelection, questions about Harris’s readiness to step in as president if needed are urgent, if also seemingly taboo among Democrats. My colleague Elaina Plott Calabro profiled Harris for the November issue of The Atlantic, following her to Africa and around the U.S.—and even, in a first for a reporter during this administration, to the vice president’s residence. I called Elaina to discuss Harris’s public persona, why she’s had trouble communicating her success, and what she’s like outside Washington, D.C.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Understanding Hamas’s genocidal ideology Nikki Haley is the new Ron DeSantis. The new AI panic The journalist and the fallen billionaire

Trouble Breaking Through

Lora Kelley: You write in your profile that, at earlier points in Harris’s career, “communication wasn’t a matter of rhetoric. It was just laying out the facts.” Now she’s in an arena where compelling rhetoric counts. Why has that transition been difficult for her?

Elaina Plott Calabro: Earlier in her career, Kamala Harris was a prosecutor in Alameda County and a district attorney in San Francisco. You are not looking to your DA for sweeping, inspiring speeches in the way you might, say, your U.S. senator. Communication as DA is so much more technical and fact-based. As Harris has gotten further away from that level of politics and moved onto a national stage, she’s found it more difficult to frame her communication in a way that captures the tangible nature of her success.

It’s not just Harris who is having trouble breaking through to voters right now. This is something that President Biden is struggling with as well. One prominent Democratic pollster recently told me that they’re mystified about what it takes to reach Americans at a communications level. In this post-2016 era, a lot of politicians, not just Harris, are struggling with how to achieve visibility in a time when Donald Trump can say one thing and it seems to dominate the airwaves for days.

Lora: In what contexts does Harris thrive?

Elaina: When Harris can talk one-on-one with people, hear their concerns and stress the ways in which her administration is working for them, and then bring what she’s learned back to Washington, that’s where she feels most effective and comes into her own as a politician. We’ve seen her do a lot more of that lately.

In one of the most telling conversations I had with her, she told me about a commencement speech that she once gave at the law school at UC Berkeley. She urged the students there to “embrace the mundane.” One reason that she doesn’t have a public presentation that immediately captivates people is that she sees her job as something that takes more than theatrics to do right. She takes seriously—and prefers to spend her time on—the slower-burn, day-to-day work she feels is needed to actually effect change.

Lora: You observed that Harris tends to play especially well outside of Washington. Why is that?

Elaina: In Washington, we tend to have a pretty static idea of what it means for a vice president to be successful. It’s obviously a very nebulous role, but if you look back at old headlines from past administrations, news outlets would often frame vice presidents as sort of the liaison to Capitol Hill for the White House.

Kamala Harris was never going to be Joe Biden’s anchor to Washington. President Biden started his first Senate term before she was even 10 years old. So her first several months on the job, she was also trying to figure out what role she could play. Once she was able to start getting out into the rest of the country, she came into her own. On the trail, she connects very visibly with regular people. She’s very warm and personable. When she’s actually on the ground with voters, she comes across as an entirely different politician from the existing caricature of her as someone unsure of herself who speaks in word-salad locutions.

Lora: You wrote that “perceptions of Harris appear to be frozen in 2021.” Do you think there’s anything she can or will do to change the way that people perceive her ahead of 2024?

Elaina: Kamala Harris had not been on the national stage for that long when she entered the White House. The Lester Holt interview she did in 2021 was very defining for her simply because it was one of the first major yardsticks by which people could measure her. The narrative that came out of that interview, in which she was viewed as unprepared and flippant, became really hard for her to get out from under. As one of her former aides told me, narrative is a very difficult thing to change.

Her willingness to talk with me, and to invite me to the residence, was emblematic of a desire on the part of her team to get her out there and engage more with the press as the campaign gets under way. They’re putting her in a position where more Americans are seeing her, and trying to create moments that can define the shape of her vice presidency, two and a half years after the one moment that has otherwise largely defined it.

Related:

The Kamala Harris problem The woman who led Kamala Harris to this moment

Today’s News

In a landmark move, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and National Unity leader Benny Gantz have agreed to establish an emergency wartime government. Republicans have narrowly nominated Representative Steve Scalise as speaker of the House; a full vote on the House floor has been delayed. Hurricane Lidia made landfall in Mexico as a Category 4 storm yesterday evening.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: The Mississippi is losing its fight with the ocean, Nancy Walecki writes. A combination of drought and sea-level rise has sent a wedge of salt water moving up the river.

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Evening Read

Getty / The Atlantic

Cancel Amazon Prime

(From 2021)

By Ellen Cushing

Today is Prime Day. Imagine trying to explain that to an alien or to a time traveler from the 20th century. “Amazon turned 20 and on the eve of its birthday, the company introduced Prime Day, a global shopping event,” reads Amazon’s formal telling of the ritual’s 2015 origins. “Our only goal? Offer a volume of deals greater than Black Friday, exclusively for Prime members.” The holiday was invented by a corporation in honor of itself, to enrich itself. It has existed for six years and is observed by tens of millions of people worldwide. I hope you are spending it with your loved ones.

Prime Day is a singular and strange artifact, but then again, so is Prime, Amazon’s $119-a-year membership service, which buys subscribers free one-day shipping, plus access to streaming media, discounts at the Amazon subsidiary Whole Foods, and a host of other perks. Prime is Amazon’s greatest and most terrifying invention: a product whose value proposition is to help you buy more products.

Read the full article.

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