Just three weeks before Hamas’s gruesome attack on southern Israel, the first anniversary of Iran’s “Women, life, freedom” movement quietly passed on September 16. Even in the heat of events in Israel, the women’s uprising was worth a lament: If the theocracy hadn’t subdued it, Iranians might have toppled the Islamic Republic; and among all the other salutary effects, Hamas’s onslaught against Israel could conceivably have been smaller and less ambitious, or might not have happened at all.  

Hamas, an offshoot of the Sunni Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, is an independent actor but has ties to the Islamic Republic that have grown substantially over the years. Its political head, Ismail Haniyeh, has often visited Tehran and Beirut, where other Hamas officials are in regular contact with the Lebanese Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful, operationally savvy proxy. As Iranians in ever larger numbers have rejected the Islamic Revolution and its theocracy, the clerical regime has sought affirmation and legitimacy abroad—an aggressive disposition that isn’t likely to abate until Iranian dissent finally triumphs.

Officially, the Iranian regime characterizes internal protests as foreign-inspired, but most of its insiders actually know that the Islamic Republic’s worst problems are homegrown. They are mournfully aware that Iranians have deeply absorbed secular and democratic values. But despite its frequent expressions, that popular discontent has not yet become a revolutionary challenge to the ruling elite.  

A revolution is a rare historical phenomenon that is impossible to predict. Its proximate causes—loss of confidence in institutions, a widespread feeling of unrelenting injustice, economic disparity, for example—can be found in many nations that don’t rebel. A revolution takes place only when a large swath of the public behaves irrationally, in the sense of confronting clearly superior power in ever increasing numbers and regardless of personal cost. Foreign powers cannot instigate a revolution (although Germany might get partial credit for sending Lenin back to Russia); they can, however, advance the hollowing of a despised autocracy. They can, at a minimum, let those who bravely oppose tyranny know that their struggle has the attention of the outside world, which seeks to support their courageous efforts.

Therein lies the principal question for the United States regarding Iran: Does Washington want to try to aid the Iranian people in their long, so far fruitless, quest to curtail tyranny in Tehran—and in doing so, help mitigate the threat that Iran and its proxies pose to regional security?

For decades now, American and European policy toward Iran has focused almost exclusively on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions. The diplomatic approach to this problem has now reached a dead end: Because of Hamas’s attack and Iran’s long-standing ties to the group, the White House just froze the $6 billion in Iranian oil revenues that it had recently unfrozen to secure the release of five dual citizens held hostage in Iran. The payment was supposed to be a prelude to future nuclear talks. Refreezing the funds has likely killed the principle—cash for atomic restraint—behind all the diplomacy since 2013, when U.S.-Iranian talks started.

[Read: I was a hostage in Iran. The deals are part of the problem.]

In truth, Iran will almost certainly get the bomb, and sooner rather than later. Neither diplomacy nor military intervention, which the United States and Israel have repeatedly decided against, seems credible. The Islamic Republic is already a threshold nuclear state that can quickly enrich uranium to bomb-grade. And so the best bet for neutralizing the menace of a nuclear-armed, virulently anti-American, expansionist, Islamist regime is regime change—or, if that phrase is too disturbing, a gradual but turbulent evolution from theocracy to democracy.

Democracy isn’t a novel idea in Persia: Its gestation there is older than in many lands where representative government has taken root in what was once considered barren soil. And Iranians have learned painfully why theocracy and monarchy aren’t appealing. Democratic passions helped fuel the revolution in 1979; their continuing vibrancy could end the Islamic Republic that resulted from it. Just look at the way the clerical regime has cracked down on dissent since the 2009 prodemocracy Green Movement pushed the theocracy, to quote Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, to “the edge of the abyss.” Recurrent protests have left the ruling clergy and Revolutionary Guard commanders to live in fear of an unexpected spark—rather like the death of the Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini last year—that might turn rational demonstrators into an irrepressible swarm.

America and Europe, which have foreign policies that blend liberalism with realism, are in a bind on Iran. Focused on the nuclear program to the detriment of all other issues, unwilling to use force to secure nonproliferation, unable to abandon the idea that commerce with the Islamic Republic can bring political moderation, uncomfortable with sanctions that hurt the Iranian people, and yet operating with a certain indifference, if not outright hostility, to actions that smell of regime change, the West has become feckless. And the truth about Iran—that it probably isn’t now in a prerevolutionary state, and that the Islamic Republic may perish only through slow rot—reinforces the inclination to do nothing.

Washington needs to step back from the nuclear question and focus instead on human rights and Iranians’ democratic aspirations. As should be painfully obvious to all by now, without political consensus, Washington simply cannot sustain any—let alone an effective—Iran policy. Democrats and Republicans need to figure out how best to aid the Iranian people in throwing off a regime that is a danger to them and to the region.

Developing a new approach will be difficult. Even before the presidency of Barack Obama, differences in sentiment—if not as acutely in approach—toward the Islamic Republic divided Democrats from Republicans. Liberals have tended to feel guilty about America’s past in Iran and often tried to recast U.S.-Iranian troubles since the Islamic Revolution as bridgeable misunderstandings; conservatives, for the most part, don’t negatively view U.S. cooperation with the last shah. If they regret anything, it’s that Jimmy Carter didn’t do enough to save him.

Before the atomic question took center stage, both sides occasionally reached out to Tehran to see if it wanted to improve relations. Republicans did so bizarrely and illegally with Iran-Contra in 1985–86 and hesitantly after the earthquake in Gilan in 1990. Democrats tried more optimistically, such as with Bill Clinton’s “genuine reconciliation” appeal to Iranian President Mohammad Khatami in 1998 and Obama’s letters to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in 2009.   

Before the 2013 interim nuclear agreement, the Joint Plan of Action, the two sides could find common ground in sanctions. The Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996, signed by Clinton and largely written by Republican congressional staff, really began the era of more effective economic measures against the theocracy. In his first term, Obama expressed annoyance with bipartisan sanctions measures but nevertheless signed legislation that significantly amped up economic pressure on Tehran.

This strained bipartisanship came utterly apart with the 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Obama brought a new approach to the Iran question, in part provoked by the enormous progress the Islamic Republic had achieved in developing a nuclear-weapons infrastructure (an enrichment site buried beneath a mountain was revealed in 2009), and by Obama’s belief that diplomacy, his personal touch, and the removal of punishing sanctions could gain a good-enough nuclear deal and significantly improve U.S.-Iranian relations. The American right’s profound disagreements with him, on a wide variety of issues, crystallized on the Iran question and the JCPOA, which received negligible Republican support. In 2018, President Donald Trump wiped out his predecessor’s most significant foreign-policy achievement by withdrawing the United States from the accord.  

[Read: Iran’s influence operation pays off]

Biden administration officials are quick to express their bitterness about Trump’s decision, which undoubtedly has complicated their lives. But assuming that the administration, congressional Democrats, and the liberal intellectual ecosystem have now realized that buying off the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions doesn’t have a promising future, the failure of this initiative may now allow the left and the right to move forward in common cause.  

Letting go of nonproliferation is the essential first step. The American right has effectively already done so, because no significant Republican has been willing to argue publicly for military strikes in some time (Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton have come close). Some on the right try to blur their intentions, suggesting that the military option is still viable if a reinvigorated sanctions regime fails. Given how far the Iranian program has advanced, however, the only conceivable remaining red line would be the actual construction of a nuclear device, which is effectively no red line at all: U.S. intelligence had no concurrent, helpfully precise idea when the Soviets, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, South Africans, Israelis, and North Koreans built their nuclear weapons. Unless the CIA gets really lucky, a rare occurrence, the denouement of the clerical regime’s atomic quest will likely be no different.  

If Trump triumphs in 2024, common cause regarding the Islamic Republic could be a nonstarter. Would Democrats have the stomach to work with Trump on Iran? And no one knows what Trump would do: He might bomb Iran; he might try to get the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, on the telephone and offer “the deal of the century”; or he might just ignore the Islamic Republic entirely (and offer Saudi Arabia a nuclear program with on-site uranium enrichment). If Trump wins reelection, the clerical regime could well take the opportunity to rapidly test a nuclear device—making regime change, however it arrives, the only possible path to get nukes out of the hands of Iranian Islamists.

As for the Democrats, team Biden has occasionally offered sincere words of support to well-known Iranian dissidents, but much like the Obama administration, it has never allowed regime atrocities—or Tehran’s new alliance with Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China—to intrude much into its rhetoric. Even now, regarding Hamas’s deadly onslaught against Israel, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has acknowledged that Iran is “complicit” in aiding Hamas’s growth into a deadly terrorist organization but has been careful to avoid invoking anything closer to a casus belli. Hamas just killed and kidnapped American citizens in Israel, but neither the Biden administration nor the Israeli government wants the war to expand into Lebanon, let alone Iran. The pattern is familiar from the American experience in Iraq: Iran’s allied militias launch devastating attacks, and the targeted nation is too busy putting out the flames to focus on the source of fire.

The administration also suffers from a lingering addiction to nonproliferation, the eternal hope that something down the road will break its way. The rougher the rhetoric against Iran, the more difficult for the theocracy to reciprocate a U.S. entreaty, and the more unpleasant for American politicians and officials to look past the regime’s wickedness toward some new nuclear “understanding.”

No matter what happens in 2024, Iran policy has reached an impasse—one that could allow it to become an exception to partisan politics and a place where Democrats and Republicans could together push harder for human rights and democracy than they push anywhere else in the Middle East. The easiest common ground will surely be sanctions.

Washington is overdue for a serious debate about why it sanctions the Islamic Republic. Sanctions can have a serious impact on a hostile country, but the United States should stop using them as its primary weapon of nuclear deterrence, as though they might stop the Iranian nuclear advance if only they were enforced more effectively, or if we traded them away for Iranian restraint. North Korea is a less scientifically advanced, less economically capable, more isolated country than Iran, and it still got the nuke.

Shifting the rhetorical focus of U.S. sanctions away from the nuclear question, and toward human rights and democratic freedoms, is both the morally and the geopolitically responsible thing to do. Such a move certainly will not meet with objections from the Iranian people. In the nationwide demonstrations in Iran in the years 2017–18 and 2019–20, which had economic catalysts, protesters had the opportunity to express disapproval of the American-led sanctions regime. Condemning Trump then was a global passion. And yet virtually no one in Iran—outside of the regime—publicly criticized the United States, its sanctions, or Trump. Given the vividness and spleen of Persian social media, we would’ve seen it.  

Terrorist sanctions ought, of course, to remain: If the clerical regime is targeting Iranian Americans, Iranian dissidents in the U.S., and former senior U.S. officials for kidnapping or assassination, Washington should mount a tidal wave of sanctions. Nor should a bipartisan consensus against Iran for its aid to Hamas be hard to come by.

Shifting the primary purpose of sanctions will perforce improve the way Washington talks about Iran. If Washington had an Iran czar at State and an Iran chief at the National Security Council, both spending a lot of time on Iranian oppression and dissent; and if the president, vice president, speaker of the House, and the Senate majority leader all used the bully pulpit, including regular meetings and official dinners with Iranian exiles who have traction in their homeland, Washington would give Iranians greater reason to hope and might even galvanize dissent. Czech President Václav Havel offered Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty a new, free home in Prague when Washington didn’t want to foot the bill in Munich for a reason. He knew from his own prison experience how decisive it was to hear voices of freedom when an autocracy drives one to despair.

Case in point: The clerical regime has tried repeatedly to eliminate the irrepressible dissident and women’s-rights advocate Masih Alinejad, now a resident in the United States. Khamenei, who rails against the toxicity of Westernization, is trying to kill her for cause. Women may well be the Achilles’ heel of the Islamic Republic, which is why Khamenei wants Alinejad dead.

In the absence of a bipartisan commitment to aiding Iranian dissent, the U.S. government has offered Alinejad little more than photo ops with the national security adviser and the secretary of state. Senior U.S. officials and their staff ought to give much more time and rhetorical support to Alinejad’s cause: They should speak about the Iranian regime’s abuse of women’s rights in interviews with the Persian services of Voice of America and Radio Liberty, and in regular speeches in English, too. The voice of the U.S. government echoes overseas, especially in Iran, where a deeply conspiratorial regime magnifies everything American officials say.  

[Read: The battle for Iran]

Washington should also bring exiled Iranian dissidents together to amplify their demands. In so doing, the U.S. government should not try to create an Iranian government in exile, or to elevate one dissident over another. Like most exile diasporas, Iran’s is diverse and can be bitterly fractious. Washington should strive merely to give Iranian dissidents a platform from which to speak, a venue for meeting, the opportunity to focus their discussions, and the security and travel expenses to make such gatherings possible. Expatriate discussions of the regime’s many crimes, injustices, and fundamental incompetence tend to drive the theocracy nuts. Washington should stoke that anxiety. Dissidents associated with the Iranian left used to keep their distance from the U.S. government; given the regime’s crimes, most no longer do.

A bipartisan human-rights-first policy might even consider cautiously using the CIA. Iranian dissidents and their families who have been battered to their breaking point, who can no longer operate inside the country without facing certain death, could benefit from exfiltration. Unlike most dissidents, who can do more inside a country than out, their contribution could continue if they and their immediate families survived. The Directorate of Operations, an impatient institution that is disinclined to engage in covert action, could nevertheless probably figure out how to do this. It could learn from the Israelis, who have demonstrated repeatedly that the Islamic Republic’s borders are operationally porous. Langley has far greater resources than the Mossad; it just needs volition, which comes only from a bipartisan coalition directing the DO, through the White House and the congressional intelligence oversight committees, to do what’s necessary.

Nothing more complicated or provocative for the CIA should be considered. The age of large-scale covert action is probably over. Perhaps if China drives American unity, and Tehran’s alliances with Beijing and Moscow become even more galling, then the ghosts of the 1953 CIA-backed coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh, which usually intrudes into how the left views CIA actions in Iran, might fade. But the overriding operational issues for outsiders thinking about agency activities should always be capacity and competence. If any CIA action is worthwhile, saving those who could die is a good place to start. If Langley can handle this, then a bipartisan consensus might develop behind more ambitious projects.

A lot of Iranian dissidents today appear to be in a funk. A year ago they hoped that the clerical regime might finally be cracking. But the theocracy once again proved its resilience. Enough young and middle-aged men, through faith, fear of failure, or personal reward, are willing to do terrible things in the regime’s security services to allow the theocracy to survive. But Iranian dissidents, as well as U.S. intelligence analysts and diplomats, who have a hard time seeing change over the horizon, should remain aware that revolutions can, in fact, come on quickly. In 1974, the writer Frances FitzGerald wrote a brilliant essay in Harper’s called “Giving the Shah Everything He Wants.” In it she foresaw many of the issues that drove the shah down in 1978 and 1979. Clerical Iran isn’t as hollow as the Pahlavi state was at the end, but popular anger and the loss of regime esprit are profound and growing. As Americans and Europeans should know from their own tumultuous histories, unexpected events do happen. What seems permanent can become perishable.

In any war, onlookers from far outside the conflict zone have to decide what to believe about what is happening. This sounds difficult in theory, and it’s even more so in practice.

This week, after a deadly explosion at the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, anybody checking social media for news would have immediately seen conflicting stories about what had happened. Initial news reports cited Gaza’s health ministry in asserting that the blast had come from an Israeli air strike. Almost instantly, counter-stories blaming the Palestinians went viral. On Wednesday, President Joe Biden said that data from the U.S. Defense Department had convinced him that the blast was caused by a malfunctioning Islamic Jihad rocket, and some open-source intelligence researchers cautiously agreed with that version of events. More detailed analyses are still pending, but a broader meaning of the hospital story has already been well established: It is “misformation” one way or another, circulated cynically to slander Israel or Palestine, depending on your worldview.

Some facts about the war are, of course, clear. In Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, terrorists killed some 1,400 people and took about 200 hostages. They then hijacked hostages’ social-media accounts to livestream their confinement and taunt their friends and family, producing images that shocked and horrified the world. Gaza health officials say that in the past two weeks, more than 3,500 Palestinians, including hundreds of children, have been killed by Israeli air strikes.

Further specifics and unconfirmed reports, though, are not just minor details. They’ve become powerful memes that influence the way people conceptualize the conflict. These are “memes” not in the sense of being funny or unserious, but in the sense that they are copied and pasted with abandon, and spread because of their emotional impact and narrative concision.

Sloppily sourced or bad information may be spread, in part, by malicious actors, but it gains added purchase because people are anxious and uncertain, and because they naturally gravitate toward stories that feel true in the context of their worldview. A report from the open-source intelligence group Bellingcat has debunked numerous widely shared stories about the violence in and around Gaza, noting that those incidents “did not require sophisticated image manipulation techniques” and “were simply miscontextualized and misrepresented, knowingly or unknowingly, by those who initially posted them.”

Take the claim that circulated just after Hamas’s attack: that the terrorist group had beheaded as many as 40 babies. This assertion was made on the front pages of tabloids and in Instagram posts from celebrities with millions of followers; it was even made reference to by Biden, before his staff walked it back in a later statement. The claim was reposted more than 100,000 times on Twitter, according to data collected by the disinformation researcher Marc Owen Jones, who is also an assistant professor of Middle East studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, in Qatar.

The story was a rumor treated as fact. The original report, from the journalist Nicole Zedeck of the Israel-based TV channel i24, was that soldiers had told her of the deaths of 40 babies and children. David Ben Zion, a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, also claimed that Hamas had “cut heads of children, cut heads of women.” Numerous news outlets made efforts to investigate the claim about the babies and children, and were unable to substantiate it. The IDF could not confirm it either.

Two days after Zedeck’s report, the Israeli military released images of what appear to be a dead infant and the charred body of a child. This produced another cycle of debate, with some participants making the argument that fact-checking the specifics of how babies had been murdered by Hamas was beside the point, considering that they had been murdered, and also that, per U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Hamas beheaded some of its victims. Others put the new photos through artificial-intelligence detectors in an attempt to discredit them, while 4chan users added to the chaos by making fake versions of the photos in an effort to undermine the originals. Conspiracy theorists jumped on an opportunity to deny that the Hamas attack had happened at all, or falsely claimed that Zedeck had made up the whole “40 beheaded babies” story on her own, as a deliberate lie.

Through all of this, the unsubstantiated details of the original beheading allegations retained much of their effect. A story that is so extreme and objectionable, Jones told me, captures the attention of people who might not otherwise be following the conflict. American onlookers didn’t have to know much to know this: There is no defense for something so despicable as beheading babies. Israel itself has used the 40-baby meme to rally support on social media. In a bizarre video (now deleted) that was posted to the @israel TikTok account, cartoon unicorns bounded around in front of a pink sky for a few seconds, until they were replaced by the message 40 INFANTS WERE MURDERED IN ISRAEL BY THE HAMAS TERRORISTS (ISIS).

This jarring combination of imagery and argument is a perfect example of the tone and logic of the current debate about the facts on the ground. After a historic church in Gaza was hit by Israeli bombing on Thursday, it was quickly looped in as a point of evidence for other arguments happening online. (“If they’ll bomb a church, they definitely bombed the hospital,” for example.)

It’s easy to conclude that social media has been failing us. (As a friend of mine recently put it, the platforms have never felt “more evil and unhelpful.”) That’s not because, as some have argued, none of the information that gets posted can be trusted. Despite obvious and egregious failures in attempting (or not attempting) to moderate news reports about this conflict, these sites are not the root cause of war’s confusion. Videos and images shared to social media can still be useful firsthand reports. And although misinformation spreads quickly on social media, so do critiques of official stories with possible holes in them.

Social media does, however, allow the information chaos to expand and fold back in on itself more quickly than ever before. It also lends itself to familiar vices: sarcasm and self-satisfaction. Human lives get remixed as trolley-problem hypotheticals, or as memes to make a point, even as we move further and further away from an accounting of actual events as they’re happening.

The protest began with a prayer. Several thousand Muslims knelt in rows before the Capitol building yesterday afternoon, their knees resting on the woven rugs they’d brought from home. Women here, and men over there, with onlookers to the side. Seen from the Speaker’s Balcony, this ranked congregation would have looked like colorful stripes spanning the grassy width of the National Mall.

“We are witnessing, before our eyes, the slaughter of thousands of people on our streets,” Omar Suleiman, the imam who led the prayer, had said beforehand. “We are witnesses to the cruelty that has been inflicted upon our brothers and sisters in Palestine on a regular basis.”

The prayer group was part of a demonstration hosted by more than a dozen self-described progressive and religious organizations to call for an Israel-Hamas cease-fire. After Hamas massacred more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians, in its October 7 attack, Israeli bombardments of Gaza have reportedly killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, the great majority of whom were also civilians.

[Peter Wehner: The inflection point]

Although the protest’s organizers spanned a broad spectrum of faiths and group affiliations, it appeared that a majority of the rally attendees were Muslim, judging by the sea of multicolored head scarves and traditional dress. But progressives of other faiths were there, too, waving the red, white, and green flag of Palestine. Rally-goers called for President Joe Biden and the United States to stop supporting Israel’s blockade and air assault on Gaza. (The first convoy of trucks carrying aid entered Gaza through Egypt this morning, the United Nations reported.) As I moved through the crowd, we heard speeches from Gazan expats and representatives from progressive groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, the Movement for Black Lives, the Working Families Party, and the Center for Popular Democracy.

“Enough is enough,” Alpijani Hussein, a Sudanese American government employee who wore a long white tunic, told me. He and a friend carried a banner reading BIDEN GENOCIDE. Every time Hussein, a father of four, sees coverage of children killed in Gaza, he told me, he imagines his own kids wrapped in body bags. “I’m a father,” he said. “I can feel the pain.”

For nearly two weeks, the world has watched, transfixed, as a litany of horrors from the Middle East has unspooled before our eyes. First, the footage from October 7: the tiny towns on the edge of the desert, bullet-riddled and burning. Parents shot, their hands tied. Women driven off on motorcycles and in trucks. The woman whose pants were drenched in blood. And approximately 200 people—including toddlers, teenagers, grandparents—stolen away and still being held hostage.

Then, more death, this time in Gaza. The body of a boy, gray with ash. Rubble and rebar from collapsed concrete buildings or their ghostly shells. TikTok diaries from teenagers with phones powered by backup generators. “They’re bombing us now,” the teens explain, somehow sounding calm. Almost half of Gaza’s population are under 18; all they have known is Hamas rule—the Islamist group took over in 2007—and a series of similar conflicts. A barrage of rockets fired by Hamas and other militants; a wave of air strikes from Israel.

But this time is different: Israel has never been wounded this way—October 7 represented the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust—and over the protest hung a frantic sense that the vengeance had only just begun. Hackles were up and, at one point, a police car drove by, sirens blaring. Two women near me clutched each other nervously, but the officer drove on without stopping.

[Conor Friedersdorf: A collection of narratives on the Israel-Hamas war]

Inside the Capitol, a plain consensus prevailed: Many members of Congress from both parties have opposed a cease-fire and expressed strong support for the U.S. providing military aid to Israel. But outside, things weren’t so simple; they never are. None of the people I met said they supported Hamas, and certainly not the recent atrocities. But many said that the violence cuts both ways. “Israel is a terrorist country in my eyes—what they’ve been doing to the Palestinians,” Ramana Rashid, from Northern Virginia, told me. Nearby, people held placards reading ISRAEL=COLONIZERS and ZIONISM=OPPRESSION. Many protesters told me they did not believe that Israel has a right to exist. At various points in the protest, the crowd broke into the chant “Palestine will be free! From the river to the sea!” (Whatever that slogan might mean for protesters—an anti-colonial statement or an assertion of homeland—for most Israelis it is clearly denying the Jewish state’s right to exist.)

“A cease-fire is the minimum to save lives,” a D.C. resident named Mikayla, who declined to give her last name, told me. “But what we really need is an end to the occupation.” Leaning against her bike, she shook her head no when I asked whether Egypt should open its doors to fleeing Palestinians. “If Egypt lets Gazans leave the Gaza Strip, then that is the definition of ethnic cleansing,” Mikayla said.

Other protesters I spoke with expressed concern only for ending the daily suffering of Gazans. The humanitarian crisis came first; the rest, the political stuff, would come later.

Sheeba Massood, who’d come with her friend Rashid from Northern Virginia, burst into tears when I asked why she’d wanted to attend. It was important to pray together, she told me. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Muslim, if you’re Palestinian, if you’re a Christian, if you’re Jewish,” Massood said, “we are all witnessing the killing of all of these children that are innocent.” Everything else, she said, was politics.

When I asked the demonstrators what might happen in the region, practically, after a cease-fire was enforced, most of them demurred. “I’m not a politician to know all the details and technicalities of it,” a Virginia man named Shoaib told me. “But I think just for one horrible thing, you don’t just go kill innocent kids.”

Every person I met was angry with Biden. The president has been unwavering in his support for Israel since October 7, and in an Oval Office address on Thursday, he reiterated his case for requesting funds from Congress for military aid to Israel. That same day, a senior State Department official resigned over the administration’s decision to keep sending weapons to Israel without humanitarian conditions.

[Read: Around the world, demonstrations of support, grief, and anger]

In his remarks on Thursday, Biden spoke of the need for Americans to oppose anti-Semitism and Islamophobia equally. Friday’s demonstrators, so many of whom were Muslim Americans, were not impressed with that evenhandedness.

“Mr. President, you have failed the test,” Osama Abu Irshaid, the executive director of American Muslims for Palestine, said from the podium outside of the Capitol. Ice-cream trucks parked nearby for tourists played jingles softly as he spoke. “You broke your promise to restore America’s moral authority.” Frankie Seabron, from the Black-led community group Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, led the crowd in chants of “Shame” directed at Biden. “This is a battle against oppression,” she said. “We as Black Americans can understand!” The crowd, which was beginning to thin, cheered its agreement.

As is generally the way, the program went on far too long. After two hours of speeches, the enthusiasm of an already thinned-out crowd was waning. The temperature dropped and raindrops fell, gently at first, then steadily. Finally, after organizers distributed blood-red carnations to every rally-goer, the group began the trek to the president’s house.

The demonstrators marched slowly at first up Pennsylvania Avenue, struggling with their banners in the driving rain. But as the remaining protesters got closer to the White House, the rain paused, and the sun peeked through the dark clouds. The protesters laid their flowers in the square before the White House gates—an offering and a demand for a different future for Gaza.