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Question of the Week

Many observers are characterizing the recent attack on Israel as that country’s 9/11. On reflection, what did you learn from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and America’s responses to it?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, and related subjects are far too complex to tackle comprehensively here. So I have tried, this week, to present a range of narratives about Hamas’s attacks and how Israel is responding, if only to underscore how differently the conflict is understood by different people.

My colleague Graeme Wood, who traveled to Jerusalem, described what he found to Radio Atlantic host Hanna Rosin:

There are aspects of rah-rah patriotism. There’s also an ongoing sense of trauma. I mean, the number of people who died, the grisly fashion in which they died. It’s something that every Israeli has been seeing, and has really understood it. I mean, it is so shocking to the conscience, and so close to the lives of so many people here that I think it’s gonna be a while before people have processed this tragedy, this atrocity at that second level.

What you do have, though, is a political consensus and a military consensus that I think appeared relatively quickly after October 7, when Hamas broke through the Gaza wall and killed over 1,000 people. And that consensus is that, whatever else is true, Hamas cannot exist … I haven’t found, I think, almost any Israelis, except for extreme doves, who disagree … As a corollary to that, they also agree that that requires going into Gaza, and depending on who you ask, rooting out Hamas, killing its leaders, or possibly just leveling the whole place, which is something that I’ve heard a number of Israelis say.

Writing in The Times of Israel, Haviv Rettig Gur offers an explanation for that near consensus among Israelis, rooted in how some of them understand “the enemy”:

That enemy is not the Palestinian people … The enemy is not exactly Hamas either, though Hamas is part of it. The enemy is the Palestinian theory of Israelis that makes the violence seen on October 7 seem to many of them a rational step on the road to liberation rather than, as Israelis judge it, yet another in a long string of self-inflicted disasters for the Palestinian cause ...

The Palestinian strategy of terrorizing Israeli civilians is old, older even than the Israeli conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. When the PLO was founded in 1964 with the goal of driving the Jews from the country, the West Bank was still ruled by Jordan and the Gaza Strip by Egypt. The PLO adopted terrorism as the basic strategy for Palestinian liberation not in anger, but because it had just witnessed the astonishing success of the Algerian National Liberation Front in using such terrorism to drive the French from Algeria in 1962. And it goes back further still. Organized Palestinian violence against the Jews in 1920, 1929, the so-called Arab Revolt of 1936–39—all followed the same basic theory: The Jews are an artificial, rootless polity removable by sustained violence, so sustained violence must be deployed to remove them.

This Palestinian vision of Israelis is taught to Palestinian children as the basic truth of the Palestinian struggle. The contrast between “rooted” Palestine and “artificial” Israel is a major theme of Palestinian identity. The consequences of this longstanding vision and strategy has been nothing short of shattering for Palestinians … One can seek out the ideological roots of Hamas’s strategy of brutality in 20th-century decolonization movements or in theologies of Islamic renewal. But that history is mere background decor to the essential point—that this is a brutality that explodes against peace processes as much as against threats of annexation. No peace and no withdrawal will satisfy this impulse or grant Israeli Jews safety from the kind of wild, joyful hatred displayed on October 7. And that brutality has now made itself too dangerous to be tolerated.

In the n+1 article “Have We Learned Nothing?,” David Klion echoes a line of argument I’ve seen repeatedly––that the comparison to 9/11 is apt and Israel is poised to repeat America’s mistakes:

The scale of Israeli casualties, which are still being tallied, greatly exceeds the casualty count of 9/11 as a percentage of the society in question. The scale of the intelligence failure is likewise comparable; all sides are united in wondering how Israel’s lavishly funded, reputedly sophisticated security state managed to miss a border incursion of this magnitude. 9/11 was America’s greatest humiliation since Pearl Harbor, and Hamas’s incursion is Israel’s greatest humiliation since the Yom Kippur War, a full fifty years ago. (In at least one respect, the analogy fails: it took mainstream US media years to begin to acknowledge that George W. Bush had failed to protect American lives, while Netanyahu’s failure is already a topic of fierce public debate in Israel, where Haaretz and some members of the military elite are calling for the prime minister’s resignation.)

But I also can’t remember a time since 9/11 when emotion and bloodlust overwhelmed reason as thoroughly as they do now, including among liberal elites in media and politics. The lasting impact of the 9/11 attacks was a kind of collective psychosis that overcame most Americans, and perhaps especially those in the DC–NYC corridor charged with crafting and enforcing conventional wisdom, who had witnessed the attacks up close … These were the conditions in which it was possible to sell the public, including leading liberal outlets, on a destructive imperial adventure in Iraq that virtually everyone now acknowledges was premised on false intelligence and wildly hubristic ambitions.

While I concur that the Iraq War was a catastrophic mistake, Ross Douthat’s analysis of America’s reaction to 9/11 is closer to my own:

The United States arguably fought four wars after Sept. 11: A regime change operation in Afghanistan aimed at both Osama bin Laden and his Taliban enablers, a global campaign to disrupt and destroy Al Qaeda, a war in Iraq aimed at toppling Saddam Hussein and (in its more expansive moments) planting a democracy in the heart of the Middle East and, finally, a war against the Islamic State that emerged out of the wreckage of our Iraq policies …

Some lessons probably don’t apply to the current moment at all—particularly the elements of American folly that reflected our universalist overconfidence hyped up by our unique post-Cold War position as a globe-bestriding superpower. In 2003 we imagined ourselves capable of remaking the Middle East and, indeed, the world, on a scale that today’s Israel, a small country set about with enemies, is extremely unlikely to envision.

Other lessons do apply, but not in any simple way. For instance, one basic lesson you could take from America’s post-9/11 disasters is the importance of restraint in moments of maximal emotional trauma, of thinking it through and counting the cost rather than just obeying a do-something imperative. Among all the various factors that led us into Iraq, one shouldn’t underestimate the impulse that we just hadn’t done something big enough in response to the terror attacks, that the Afghanistan intervention alone wasn’t enough to satisfy our righteous rage or prove our dominance. And you can see this as a temptation for the Israelis now, with the horror so fresh—an impulse to reject anything that smacks of half-measures or limitations, to wave away the risks of civilian casualties or regional chaos, to treat any hesitation as a form of cowardice.

But not every aggressive path America took after 9/11 looks mistaken in hindsight. The long-term debacle of our Afghanistan occupation doesn’t make our initial decision to topple the Taliban unwise. The moral failures of our interrogation program don’t mean that we were wrong to take a generally aggressive posture toward Al Qaeda and its satellites. Setting out to destroy the Islamic State’s caliphate rather than seeking stable coexistence was a correct and successful call.

What about America’s influence on the present conflict?

Bob Wright argues that U.S.-backed efforts to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel were bound to seem threatening to three Middle East actors with the power to destabilize the region.

He lists them:

1) The Palestinian people. The prospect of normalized relations between Israel and Arab states had for decades been thought of as leverage to be used on behalf of the Palestinians. The Arab states were to withhold diplomatic recognition until there was a deal between Israel and the Palestinians that ended Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its blockade of Gaza. So giving Israel the big prize of Arab recognition before that—as both Trump and Biden favor—reduces the chances of the Palestinians ever being liberated from the humiliating subjugation they’ve endured for generations.

The iconoclastic Israeli journalist Gideon Levy this week characterized Israel’s attitude toward the issue like this: “We’ll make peace with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and the Palestinians will be forgotten until they’re erased, as quite a few Israelis would like.” Whether or not that is indeed the way many Israelis thought of the Trump-Biden normalization drive, it’s only natural that Palestinians would assume as much …

2) Hamas. Biden’s Saudi-Israel normalization deal would steer large amounts of money and other resources to the Palestinian Authority—Hamas’s western-backed rival for influence among Palestinians …

3) Iran. There’s no evidence that the Iranians conceived or orchestrated the attack on Israel, but they may have given it their approval. And in any event it’s unlikely that Hamas would have undertaken the attack had the envisioned consequences not seemed at least consistent with the interests of Iran, its long-time supporter. So it’s important to understand how threatening Biden’s proposed Israeli-Saudi deal seemed to Iran. The deal would have given the Saudis a guarantee that America would assist them if they wound up in a war. Iran no doubt feared that this guarantee would embolden the Saudis and also make them more likely to prevail over Iran in the event of war. More broadly, the whole normalization drive, including Trump’s Abraham Accords, seemed aimed at consolidating what Iran sees as an anti-Iran coalition: Israel, the US, and several wealthy Sunni Arab states.

In contrast, David Leonhardt argues that America’s waning global influence played a part in the attack:

Russia has started the largest war in Europe since World War II. China has become more bellicose toward Taiwan. India has embraced a virulent nationalism. Israel has formed the most extreme government in its history. And on Saturday morning, Hamas brazenly attacked Israel, launching thousands of missiles and publicly kidnapping and killing civilians.

All these developments are signs that the world may have fallen into a new period of disarray. Countries—and political groups like Hamas—are willing to take big risks, rather than fearing that the consequences would be too dire. The simplest explanation is that the world is in the midst of a transition to a new order … The United States is no longer the dominant power it once was... Political leaders in many places feel emboldened to assert their own interests, believing the benefits of aggressive action may outweigh the costs …

“A fully multipolar world has emerged, and people are belatedly realizing that multipolarity involves quite a bit of chaos,” Noah Smith wrote … Zheng Yongnian, a Chinese political scientist with ties to the country’s leaders, has similarly described the “old order” as disintegrating. “Countries are brimming with ambition, like tigers eyeing their prey, keen to find every opportunity among the ruins of the old order,” Zheng wrote last year.

Of course, that could all be wrong! In The Washington Post, Shadi Hamid prudently urges epistemic humility:

The search for truth, even if one finds it, should not involve rigidity. We are all a product of our environments. When it comes to Israel and Palestine in particular, we bring our own preconceptions to any debate—our own selective read of history and our own developed sense of injustice. This is not about a disagreement over facts; it’s about how to interpret them … It should be possible to acknowledge two things at once. We can—and must—condemn Hamas’s heinous acts against Israeli civilians while refusing to forget that Israel has been a perpetrator of a brutal occupation against Palestinians. Some will condemn this as “bothsidesism,” but there are, quite literally, two primary parties to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, each with competing—and, sadly, irreconcilable—narratives. How could it be otherwise? Talking about atrocities after the fact is a minefield. In a time of war, doing it well requires precisely the kind of presumptive generosity toward the other “side” that war itself militates against.

That’s it for today––see you next week.

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The Republican is expected to back a plan to temporarily empower the acting Speaker, Patrick McHenry.

Jordan McSweeney was handed a minimum prison term of 38 years for murdering the law graduate.

Just as there are stages of grief, there are stages of war. Not yet two weeks after Hamas’s surprise attack, Israel is still in a raw, early stage. My colleague Graeme Wood, who arrived in Jerusalem this week, described it to me this way: “Israel is still reeling from the trauma of the attack on October 7. That manifests in a number of ways. And one is that there’s a certain amount of Israeli policy that is driven right now by wrath.”

Israeli officials insist that they are targeting Hamas, not Gazan citizens. But the situation on the ground for Gazan citizens is dire—a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions, according to the United Nations and other agencies. Wood told me that, among many of the Israelis he’s interviewed, the prevailing attitude is a dangerous if understandable combination of anger, fear, and mourning.

The atrocities committed against Israeli citizens on October 7 were especially inhumane. And, as one Israeli I talked with put it, this society’s worst nightmare is vulnerability. What happens when a nation makes crucial wartime decisions while still processing the shock and anger over what they’ve experienced?

In today’s episode, we discuss the state of Israel with Wood, who frequently reports from the Middle East. I spoke with him shortly after a devastating explosion at a hospital in Gaza, and amid the widespread expectation that Israel will soon send ground troops into Gaza.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[MUSIC]

Hanna Rosin: Just as there are stages of grief there are stages of war. And Israel is in an early one.

[TAPE]

Graeme Wood: Israel is still reeling from the trauma of the attack of October 7; that manifests in a number of ways. And one is that there’s a certain amount of Israeli policy that is driven right now by wrath.

Rosin: Wrath. A combination of anger, fear, mourning and revenge. Which, given the circumstances, seems like a dangerous place to be.

This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. Today, as war in the Middle East is getting more intense, we look at what happens when a nation makes critical wartime decisions in this state of mind. And how they move from there, to step two, a stage that’s more strategic, more practical, maybe even conciliatory?

As President Joe Biden was on his way to visit Israel, I spoke with Graeme Wood, an Atlantic staff writer who has been reporting in the Middle East in recent months. We reached him in Jerusalem on Tuesday.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: Graeme, you have landed in Israel. Can you just talk about some of the things that you’ve seen and encountered this week?

Wood: Well, I actually landed in Jordan, so the first thing that I noticed was it was difficult to get to Israel. There were so many rockets that were coming out of Gaza that airlines understandably pulled back. So I flew into Jordan, landed there, and then went by land into an Israel that was very different from the one that I left last time I was here, just a month ago.

Rosin: And what do you mean, it’s different? What were some of the things that you noticed immediately?

Wood: First of all, getting to Jerusalem, which is a city that’s usually filled with pilgrims, filled with tourists. It is eerily quiet in a lot of places that I’ve only known to be absolutely chock-full of people.

The other thing that’s really amazing to note compared to a month ago is, a month ago, it seems like ancient history, but we’re talking about convulsions of politics and huge rifts in Israeli society that were playing out in the streets, mostly of Tel Aviv, over the efforts of the government to remake how Israeli politics work. And there’s an unsettling consensus that has replaced that unsettling division where it went from totally divided to a unity that is really weird to feel in this place. And it happened in the snap of the fingers.

Rosin: And what is the mood of that unity?

Wood: So there are aspects of rah-rah patriotism. There’s also an ongoing sense of trauma. I mean, the number of people who died, the grisly fashion in which they died. It’s something that every Israeli has been seeing, and has really understood it.

I mean, it is so shocking to the conscience, and so close to the lives of so many people here that I think it’s gonna be a while before people have processed this tragedy, this atrocity at that second level.

What you do have, though, is a political consensus and a military consensus that I think appeared relatively quickly after October 7 when Hamas broke through the Gaza wall and killed over a thousand people. And that consensus is that, whatever else is true, Hamas cannot exist.

And I haven’t found, I think, almost any Israelis, except for extreme doves, who disagree with that point.

And as a corollary to that, they also agree that that requires going into Gaza, and depending on who you ask, rooting out Hamas, killing its leaders, or possibly just leveling the whole place, which is something that I’ve heard a number of Israelis say.

Rosin: Okay. So that right there is incredibly complicated, like those distinctions are important. When people say “rooting out Hamas,” what do you hear?

Wood: Yeah, so “rooting out Hamas” means rooting out the ruling structures of Gaza. You know, Gaza was abandoned by Israel to the fate of being ruled by Hamas 15-plus years ago. And so getting rid of Hamas means getting rid of the government of this occupied territory. So it’s a huge undertaking. And given how much Hamas has dug in, militarily—Hamas itself says there’s 500 kilometers of tunnels that it controls under the Gaza Strip.

Those tunnels—filled with weapons; they’re smuggling routes—they may have as many as 200 Israeli hostages in them right now. It’s simply impossible to root out Hamas, whatever that phrase means, without actually going into the Gaza Strip, which Israel has been extremely reluctant to do and now it’s understood by everybody that, yeah, that’s going to happen. And it’s going to be bloody on both sides.

Rosin: By going in, you’re talking about a ground invasion.

Wood: That’s what’s expected. Yes. And there’s every indication that Israel is planning to do exactly that. What I think most surprising to most people is that it hasn’t happened yet.

Rosin: So far there have been a lot of airstrikes and thousands of Gazans killed. What is Israel’s goal in that phase of the attack?

Wood: Israel’s goal right now seems to be to do what can be done before the invasion takes place. That is, first, the clearing out of a civilian population from the northern part of the Gaza Strip, specifically Gaza City, which they’ve been calling up people’s cellphones, dropping leaflets. And in both cases, the message is: We’re coming in. And we’re going to kill the leaders of Hamas. We’re going to destroy Hamas.

So, what’s already happened is horrible beyond belief, and what’s coming next will probably be worse.

Rosin: Always in these situations, there seems to be just this gap between the rhetoric and what happens on the ground. If you tell civilians to flee, where do they actually go?

Wood: Yeah. And when I said before that Israel is still reeling from the trauma of the attack of October 7, that manifests in a number of ways. And one is that there’s a certain amount of Israeli policy that is driven right now by wrath.

It’s vengeance. It’s an understanding that we have to do something. We have to get rid of Hamas. And the phases of that operation, an operation that will almost certainly last months, maybe years. The reckoning of what those phases are going to be, is incomplete. And if you ask Israeli officials: “Who’s going to run the Gaza Strip once you’ve gone into it? Are you simply going to be the governing authority there with your boots on the ground forever?”

The answer that you get is something like: “We don’t know. Don’t ask that question. We’re at the stage right now of just realizing we had to go in against our wishes. We didn’t want to have to go in, but we have to go in.” And questions about what happens next, it’s some version of: It’s unpatriotic to ask. It’s untoward to ask. But they themselves kind of admit that we’re not really sure about that. All we know is that we have to go in and the operations of Hamas on October 7 have forced us to do that.

Rosin: So there is, as far as you can say, no step two. There’s just step one: Root out Hamas in whatever way we have to do that. That’s as far as we’ve gone.

Wood: I mean, I’m sure within Israeli planning, there are different ideas about how to proceed. but it’s not something that Israel has come out and said, We know how this is going to look. All they’ve said is, We know where it ends. It ends with the total annihilation of Hamas and, possibly for years to come, the hunting down of every single person who was involved in these atrocities.

Rosin: You use the word wrath. Why do you use that word?

Wood: I think that there is no other word for it other than wrath. I mean, there is a belief that the response has to be maybe proportionate, maybe even disproportionate.

The other day, I was in Sderot, which is one of the fairly large communities that was attacked. There were 30, 000 people in it as of a week and a half ago. Right now. They’ve all been transferred elsewhere. The Israeli government has let some journalists in and has brought out politicians, members of these communities. And there was one guy, who was from Kibbutz Be’eri, which lost on the order of 100 people, I think. And seemed like a nice guy. He described himself as being in favor of peace. He described his community as being one that welcomed cooperation with Gazans before, and he said, “I’m still in favor of peace, but that place needs to be leveled.”

He used the word leveled. That’s a view that I think is not uncommon. And it’s very hard to hear, because the view that Israel is going to annihilate Gaza is different from the one that the Israeli government wants to put out there. The Israeli government wants to say that we are going to annihilate Hamas, and in so doing, we will actually liberate the people of Gaza who have been under the thumb of, Hamas. And yet there are Israelis all over—not just the ones who are directly affected by the destruction of their communities along the Gaza border—who use language that is annihilationist.

Rosin: So what do you make of that? I mean, that feels like it has big implications if someone who describes himself as previously believing in peace is now more extreme than his own government.

Wood: Yeah, I think, we’re still in a phase where this mode of wrath is the dominant one. There is also a phase that will have to come that is more practical—more practical and more moral, too. I mean, the flattening of Gaza would be an unspeakable tragedy and crime.

So, I think what happens next is, surely an invasion, but after that, a kind of, reengagement of Israel’s reality principle, which means understanding that Gaza, in the end, unless terrible crime is committed against it, is going to still be a place that is Muslim. It’s going to be Palestinian, and it’s going to have to have some kind of modus vivendi with its neighbor, Israel.

Right now that thought, it’s unthinkable, I think, for a lot of Israelis, because of the anger that they feel, the pain that they feel. I don’t know when that shift is going to happen, but it’s going to have to coincide with the realities of a military mission—remember that Israel was in Gaza. There were settlements there until more than 15 years ago and Israel left because it decided that it was not good for the continued health of Israel as a Jewish state. So that reality will not have changed, but at the moment, most Israelis I speak to, including government officials, don’t want to imagine that moment.

They are saying simply that: There’s one sole objective right now, which is to destroy Hamas and then whatever comes after that, well, we’ll figure it out once that moment comes. But Hamas’s destruction is the only thing we’re going to think about until then, monomaniacally.

Rosin: Yeah. Wow. So Israel has no step two at the moment. Does Hamas? That’s after the break.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: I want to switch to talking about Hamas. When the Hamas militants bulldozed through the fence, puncturing the myth that the Israeli military is invincible. That’s what happened initially. Do you have a sense, on Hamas’s side, if there was a step two, what that step two would be? What did they expect out of all of this?

Wood: Yeah, when the attack initially happened, when you see this incredibly well-planned, stealthily planned operation unfold, you wonder where it all leads. And so it started off with trained Hamas fighters breaking through the fence and, with startling ease, taking over military outposts of Israel. It ended with ordinary citizens of Gaza coming through and looting Israeli towns on that border. So we’re talking about not a disciplined military force, but people coming through and stealing children’s bicycles and solar panels and stuff from Israelis’ houses after those Israelis have been murdered or burned alive.

It’s still not clear exactly how much of this was planned or which aspects of it were planned or what was expected by Hamas, but it seems quite possible that Hamas was just way more successful than it expected to be and that its people—and those who joined in once the fence was down—were way more savage than they expected to be.

Rosin: What about the hostages? Because that seems like a strategy. I don’t know if it’s an intentional strategy, but it’s certainly become important as this all unfolds.

Wood: Yeah, the state of the hostages is probably the aspect of this that Israel has least come to terms with. When I spoke earlier of the fact that there is still this traumatic stage that the country was in, everybody in Israel remembers the very long period years ago when Gilad Shalit was captive by Hamas in Gaza. This is an Israeli conscript who was kidnapped from the Kerem Shalom border post, and then kept in some horrible dungeon for years while there was an effort to negotiate his freedom. Which came at the cost of freeing over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.

This galvanized the whole country. I mean, you’d see images of Gilad Shalit on the street in Jerusalem. And then there was one guy, it was one guy who for years, was one of the major political causes in Israel. And now we’ve got almost 200 Israelis—and not all of them, not even most of them, I believe, soldiers—who have disappeared into Gaza. And the idea of there being 199 Gilad Shalits is inconceivable.

Hamas already said that if civilian dwellings are destroyed without warning by Israel, then they will kill hostages. They will kill them on camera. So Hamas, of course, considers them valuable. And, again, the processing is still going on. I think, on the Israeli side, I haven’t heard too much about exactly what the calculation is going to be.

Releasing 1,000 prisoners per hostage release is not sustainable. I have no idea how Israel is going to make this calculation and proceed. And I have no idea how Hamas is either.

Rosin: You mentioned that before this there was a raging debate over the soul of Israel, sort of internal civil war, would they remain a democracy?. Now it sounds like what we hear from inside is that the current government of Benjamin Netanyahu is collapsing, or its support is collapsing. What does that mean, or what could that mean?

Wood: Yeah, so if you asked Israelis a month ago what’s the biggest issue, then everybody knew that it was the question of judicial reform and the follow-on effects of that. Whether the right-wing government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, would be able to change the Israeli political system so it would be less constrained by the results of a far more liberal judiciary. And everybody knew that that was important.

So what the effects of the Hamas attack on October 7 are, are simply cataclysmic for the country’s politics. First of all, nobody cares about judicial reform anymore. That is simply on the back burner. It will not be taken up until the war is finished. Second of all, the hatred of the Israeli government, and maybe even more than that, the Israeli state, is very difficult to exaggerate. And I’m talking about people who were once knee-jerk supporters of Netanyahu, very eager to watch him succeed in the judicial overhaul, feel like they were just betrayed. Netanyahu had—for a long time, one of his value propositions to the Israeli people was that he had presided over a period of peace.

And the failure of Israel to secure its citizens on October 7 has left people absolutely livid. There were Israelis who, rather than getting the response of an [Israel Defense Forces] commando unit coming to their homes and freeing them within minutes or even an hour, were waiting 10 hours. Ten hours! You can drive back and forth, top to bottom in this country in 10 hours. And somehow these people were left at the mercy of terrorists who burned them to death.

And for Israelis who thought that, At least we have safety; at least we’re in a country where the lives of Jews are taken seriously, protected—apparently the government can’t even do that. And what was it doing in the meantime?

They’re furious to think that there was political bickering taking place, there was safeguarding of political reputations, while Israelis were left defenseless, simply defenseless. And the anger is just indescribable from all sides at this government. Their reputations are toast.

Rosin: So we just don’t know where that will lead, but we know that for now. What about the future leadership of Palestinians?

Wood: If Israel’s threat is followed through, and I have a little doubt that they will do this, then the leadership of Hamas will be hunted. They’re already hunted. And Israel will make it impossible for them to govern Gaza. The rest of the Palestinian leadership, of course, in the West Bank of the Palestinian Authority, led by Abu Mazen, who’s in his 80s.

The Palestinian Authority is, of course, an enemy of Hamas. They lost the power struggle with Hamas, and they will be the sort of last Palestinian power structure that’s standing if Hamas is dismantled, as Israel promises. But first of all, the Palestinian Authority has many enemies within the Israeli state and within Israel, to say the least, and it’s not clear that they could stand up to control Gaza, given that they had lost the power struggle there before. So there’s a great big power vacuum. This is part of the mess that Israel has not publicly reckoned with because it is so convinced that nothing else matters other than getting rid of Hamas. Whatever could come next, whatever mess we have, it can’t be worse than having a government on the border with an armed military unit that will do what it just did again. So, yeah, finding out the future of Palestinian leadership is one of those cans that Israel seems to be kicking down the road.

Rosin: Before this, there were reports of Israel moving closer to Saudi Arabia, glimmers of a realignment in the Middle East. Where is that now, and how does this change that realignment?

Wood: Israel had normalized relations with a number of Arab states—UAE, Bahrain, Morocco—and there was talk of Saudi Arabia being the next, more than talk. I mean, Saudi Arabia and Israel have quietly had this security relationship that has actually been pretty cordial. They share as an enemy the Islamic Republic of Iran. And there is some question about whether Israel would make peace with diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia.

And the possibility of that normalization, which was set to be one of the great achievements of the Netanyahu government, it’s absolutely impossible right now. There’s no way that that could happen, simply because there’s hundreds, thousands of Palestinians who are being killed.

And the only reason that Saudi Arabia could have contemplated normalization with Israel was that the last 10 years have been relatively quiet. I mean, there hasn’t been the mass production of horrible images of Arab death in Gaza and the West Bank. Now there is, which means that any Arab country that was contemplating joining the crew of Arab countries that are friendly to Israel has to step back or risk incurring the wrath of their own people, which could mean the change of the regime in some of these countries, Saudi Arabia being one. Even some of the countries that are already at peace with Israel, such as Egypt. Egypt and Jordan have to wonder what the price might be of that peace if the war continues to be as horrible as it looks like it will be.

Rosin: Well, that for Hamas maybe counts as an accomplishment. I mean, watching Israel move towards Saudi Arabia, even if the immediate on-the-ground strategy seems nihilistic, maybe there’s a broader strategy that makes sense.

Wood: Yeah, I’ve even heard Israeli government officials say that Saudi Arabia has changed so much in its posture toward jihadism, formerly winking at it, being associated with intolerant versions of Sunni Islam. And now Israeli officials will say, We were about to make peace with a moderate Muslim country called Saudi Arabia, and Hamas tried to destroy that.

So it’s a sentence that I never expected to hear. But that is, in fact, one of the effects of the October 7 attacks and their aftermath, is that Israel’s attempts to make peace with countries like Saudi Arabia just are going to be put on hold, as Hamas would prefer.

Rosin: Graeme, thank you so much for joining us from there, and good luck.

Wood: Thanks, Hanna.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was engineered by Rob Smeirciak. The executive producer of Atlantic Audio is Claudine Ebeid, and our managing editor is Andrea Valdez. I’m Hanna Rosin. We’ll be back with new episodes every Thursday.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The ongoing drama over electing a speaker of the House is not about governance. It’s about giving Republican voters the drama-filled reality show they voted for and want to see—even at the expense of the country.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Self-checkout is a failed experiment. What conservatives misunderstand about radicalism at universities Hezbollah watches and waits. Four misconceptions about the war in Gaza

What the Voters Wanted

Like many Americans, I have been both fascinated and horrified by the inability of the Republican majority to elect a new speaker of the House. I admit to watching the votes like I’m rubbernecking at a car wreck, but perhaps that’s not a good analogy, because I at least feel pity for the victims of a traffic accident. What’s happening in the House is more like watching a group of obnoxious (and not very bright) hot-rodders playing chicken and smashing their cars into one another over and over.

As I watch all of this Republican infighting, I wonder, as I often do, about GOP voters. What is it that they think will happen if Jim Jordan becomes speaker? Jordan has been in Congress for 16 years, and he has almost nothing to show for it. He’s never originated any successful legislation, never whipped votes, never accomplished anything except for appearing on Fox and serving up rancid red meat to his Ohio constituents and MAGA allies.

And therefore, as speaker, he would … what? Order up more impeachments, perhaps of Biden-administration officials? Shut down the government? Pound the gavel and prattle on for hours in his never-take-a-breath style? (Jordan’s the kind of guy who probably would have interrupted the Sermon on the Mount.) Perhaps from a position of greater power, he could more effectively assist Donald Trump in undermining yet another election in 2024.

Maybe that’s why Trump endorsed him for speaker.

Is that what Republican voters really want? Apparently so; as my friend Sarah Longwell, the founder of the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project, told my Atlantic colleague Ronald Brownstein, “Even if he doesn’t make it, because the majorities are so slim, you can’t argue that Jim Jordan doesn’t represent the median Republican today.”

And that is the part we tend to overlook when we’re focused on the drama inside the Capitol: The disorder in the GOP caucus is not some accident or glitch triggered by a handful of reprobates, but rather a direct result of choices by voters. The House is a mess because enough Republican voters want it to be a mess.

This accusation might seem unfair: Jordan is just one member from a super-red (and blatantly gerrymandered) district, and many of his Republican colleagues are furious about this humiliating bungle. But right-wing voters have shown no inclination to punish people such as Matt Gaetz and other political vandals; indeed, Gaetz and his like-minded colleagues are rapidly becoming folk heroes in the Republican Party.

It’s not much consolation to recognize that the Republicans are now the party their voters want them to be. Their antics endanger us all, especially during multiple international crises when the United States needs to be unified and effective both at home and abroad. But to treat the GOP as merely dysfunctional is worse than a distraction; it is a fundamental error that offers the false hope that a mature and governing majority is somehow within reach, if only Jordan or Gaetz would get out of the way.

The real problem is that many Republican voters have now completely internalized the cynicism of Trump and the GOP opportunists around him, and they draw no connection between national politics and the ongoing health and security of the United States. These voters rely on everyone else (including those Americans they deride as the “deep state”) to keep the country functioning. They vote for masters of performative nonsense, such as Jordan and Gaetz, who do nothing for the “forgotten” working families in the places that the MAGA movement claims have been left behind by the rest of us.

The twists and turns of the Trump years, in which many elected Republicans became big spenders, critics of law enforcement, and apologists for the Kremlin, illustrated that MAGA voters have almost no interest in anything like conservatism, or even in coherent policy. Instead, they want to indulge resentments and grievances that have little to do with government and everything to do with boredom and dissatisfaction in their own lives. A few years ago, I wrote a book about how such voters project that anger and sourness onto everything around them. Their ennui spurs their desire to see chaos, so they argue that the existing order needs to be shaken up, or burned down, or defunded.

They think this way because they have never had to live under a government that has actually been shaken up, burned down, or defunded. Jordan and his colleagues (who have made entire careers out of encouraging such nihilism) are poor leaders but good politicians. They deliver what their voters really want: show trials and passion plays, and, mostly, to see other people unsettled and angry. These citizens vote not for determined legislators with complicated plans—that stuff is just so boring—but for entertaining rogues who can liven up the Fox prime-time hours.

Years ago, I thought that Republican voters would demand changes from the party if the GOP lost enough elections. But even losses don’t seem to matter in a party that is clearly more comfortable with performance art centered on imaginary grievances than with actual governing. The shenanigans of the past two weeks might even cost the Republicans control of the House in the next election—that’s one reason Jordan’s colleagues are trying to stop him—but that political collapse might not matter to right-wing voters. They’ll get another episode of their favorite show—and for them, maybe that’s enough.

Related:

The threat to democracy is coming from inside the U.S. House. Jim Jordan could have a long fight ahead.

Today’s News

President Joe Biden visited Tel Aviv and backed Israel’s claims that it had no involvement in the al-Ahli Arab Hospital attack in Gaza City. A 4.2-magnitude earthquake struck Northern California, affecting Sacramento County and sections of the Bay Area. The Venezuelan government and opposition party have struck a deal to work toward fairer elections in 2024.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: The insurance industry’s climate math is brutal, Zoë Schlanger writes. Sometimes, an uninsurable town can become uninhabitable.

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Evening Read

Courtesy of Matthew Cox / The Atlantic

The Con Man Who Became a True-Crime Writer

By Rachel Monroe

Last April, I received an odd email from a man named Matthew Cox. “I am an inmate at the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in Florida,” he wrote. “I’m also a true crime writer.” He had one year left on his sentence and was “attempting to develop a body of work that will allow me to exit prison with a new career.” He included a story about a fellow inmate who’d been ensnared in a complicated currency-trading scam, hoping that I’d write about it for The Atlantic.

“This is fascinating,” I replied. I didn’t mean the currency-trading scam, which was too procedural for my tastes, but Cox’s own trajectory. He described himself as “an infamous con man writing his fellow inmates’ true crime stories while immersed in federal prison.” I’d never had a possible subject pitch his own tale so aptly. I wasn’t entirely sure that was a good thing.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Beware the language that erases reality. Five reasons the FBI failed to prepare for January 6 Let the activists have their loathsome rallies.

Culture Break

Illustration by Ben Kothe. Source: Getty.

Read. In Wellness, Nathan Hill recounts a love story, but also much, much more.

Watch. Wes Anderson’s renditions of Roald Dahl’s short stories (streaming on Netflix) ask us to think actively—even skeptically—about what we’re seeing.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Lately, as I’ve been indulging my habit of watching vintage television from the 1960s and ’70s, I’ve noticed how often I encounter William Windom. He was a mainstay of my childhood television days, and when I mentioned him on social media, I realized how many folks out there remember him as fondly as I do. He was a remarkable character actor (the other night, I saw him on both Mannix and Barney Miller), and he even brought some gravitas as the president in Escape From the Planet of the Apes. Many of us of a certain age, however, remember his starring role in My World and Welcome to It, based on the humor and cartoons of James Thurber, which ran for only one season yet is still beloved by many.

But I will always have a soft spot for Windom because of two roles. One, famous among Star Trek nerds like me, was his 1967 turn as Commodore Matt Decker, the tormented Starfleet officer who loses his ship and crew to an alien doomsday machine. He was also the star of one of Night Gallery’s best stories, a 1971 segment titled “They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar,” about a man facing loss and nostalgia as he enters middle age. “Tim Riley’s Bar,” written by Rod Serling, was a different kind of episode for Night Gallery, and it was nominated for an Emmy.

Movie stars are great, but give me a solid character actor like Windom any day.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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