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Robert Menendez has held on to his Senate seat and retained the loyalty of many Democratic colleagues through past scandals. But, given the current political environment and the gravity of the charges he now faces, many fellow Democrats have had enough—and voters might turn on him too.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

What’s the alternative to a ground offensive in Gaza? The great underappreciated driver of climate change A humanist manifesto

Undermining the High Ground

Yesterday afternoon, a couple of hours after pleading not guilty to the charge that he had conspired to act as an agent of a foreign government, Senator Robert Menendez announced that “the government is engaged in primitive hunting, by which the predator chases its prey until it’s exhausted and then kills it. This tactic won’t work.”

The senior senator from New Jersey’s plea—and subsequent defiant statement—came just a few weeks after he pleaded not guilty to three separate counts of corruption. Menendez and his wife, Nadine, were accused of accepting bribes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for helping the government of Egypt and several businessmen. The original indictment was quite dramatic, peppered with talk of more than $500,000 of stashed-away cash and photos of gold bars found in his New Jersey home. Within hours of Menendez’s indictment, several state leaders, including the governor, called on him to step down. But Menendez is fighting hard against the allegations, even as colleagues turn on him.

Menendez has positioned himself as a victim, and has invoked identity politics in trying to defend himself. “It is not lost on me how quickly some are rushing to judge a Latino and push him out of his seat,” he said shortly after his initial indictment was announced. He has also accused “those behind this campaign” of smearing him as part of their political agenda: “For years, forces behind the scenes have repeatedly attempted to silence my voice and dig my political grave,” he said in a statement last month. “Menendez has been using explicitly Trump-y talking points in his defense,” my colleague David Graham, who has covered the Menendez charges, told me.

The Menendez imbroglio puts the Democrats in a difficult position. The party has enjoyed some moral high ground as Donald Trump faces various criminal indictments. But having a member of their own party facing such galling corruption charges—and saying in his own defense that, essentially, the deep state is out to get him—may not only undermine that high ground, David said. It may weaken Democrats’ case against Trump’s own statements about being the victim of deep-state machinations, and it could damage voters’ faith in the Democratic Party.

This is not Menendez’s first time facing federal bribery charges: In 2015, he was accused of receiving gifts and some $750,000 in campaign donations from a Florida eye doctor. Those charges resulted in a hung jury, and ultimately the judge declared a mistrial. Menendez was able to maintain his seat through the turmoil, and he denied any wrongdoing. His colleagues, by and large, stood by him. But this time, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy called on Menendez to resign almost immediately after his indictment, and other state Democratic leaders soon followed. Cory Booker, the junior senator from New Jersey who has called Menendez a mentor and friend, urged his colleague to step down a few days after the indictment. Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, meanwhile, has reportedly confronted Menendez in the halls of Congress (or, more precisely, on an escalator) to tell him to resign. More than half of Senate Democrats have called on Menendez to resign, though Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has been more reserved. “The Senator has made it clear that he is innocent and will not resign from his position as the senior U.S. Senator for New Jersey,” Robert Julien, a spokesperson for Mendendez’s office, told me in an email.

Part of the reason that many of Menendez’s colleagues are turning against him this time, David explained, has to do with the relative severity of the charges. Bribery charges are never a great look, but the charges Menendez currently faces cut to the core of his committee work in the Senate, accusing him of using his position as the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to work on behalf of a foreign power.

The calculations are likely political too: The last time Menendez faced bribery charges, Republican Chris Christie was the governor of New Jersey. If Menendez had given up his seat, Christie could have appointed a Republican in his place. Now the state has a Democratic governor in Murphy, who would presumably appoint a Democrat to replace him, David explained. Even so, Democrats are anxious about introducing uncertainty when they have such a razor-thin majority over Republicans in the Senate. Democrats have become more and more obsessed with beating their Republican opponents. That fixation on winning comes at a cost, David said: “If you are so focused on beating Republicans that you’re willing to look past corruption allegations, you ultimately undermine yourself, even if you can win the next election.”

But whether Menendez can actually win his next election is still a major question. He is a savvy backroom fighter, David explained, which has helped him stay in power in the cutthroat world of New Jersey politics. “There’s lots of backstabbing in ways that are totally legal, but not necessarily savory,” he said. Menendez has hung on through turbulence, but whether he can make it through this scandal intact will be, in part, up to the courts. It will also be up to voters.

Menendez’s trial is scheduled to begin on May 6, about a month before the primary race for his Senate seat. So far, Menendez has made no public indication that he won’t run for reelection. But his odds are not looking promising. He is being trounced in polls by Andrew Kim, a member of the House of Representatives who announced his campaign for Menendez’s seat the day after the senator was indicted. Menendez is innocent until proven guilty, but his constituents might just be ready to move on.

Related:

Bob Menendez never should have been senator this long in the first place. The case against Bob Menendez (From 2015)

Today’s News

A third former Trump-campaign lawyer, Jenna Ellis, pleaded guilty in the Georgia election-interference case. Israel escalated attacks on targets in Gaza, including a refugee camp. The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said that more than 700 people were killed in a 24-hour period. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer has dropped out of the Speaker of the House race, just hours after becoming the nominee.

Evening Read

Fryderyk Gabowicz / picture-alliance / dpa / AP

Britney Finally Tells Her Story. It’s Dark.

By Spencer Kornhaber

One of the most disturbing parts of Britney Spears’s story has long been the way people talk about her. As soon as the pop star was released from the legal guardianship of her father in November 2021, ending a 13-year ordeal that she has described as torture, some onlookers asked whether one of the most successful women on Earth could handle living as an adult. In barroom chitchat, meandering podcasts, and online comment sections, you can now find people claiming that freeing Britney—allowing her to, for example, choose how she spends her money or what she eats for dinner—was a mistake. They cite alleged evidence of erratic behavior such as the recent video that the 41-year-old Spears posted of herself dancing sexily with prop knives.

Usually such skeptics speak in a conspiratorial tone, indicating that they think of themselves as radical truth-tellers defying the pink-uniformed groupthink of the #FreeBritney movement. But Spears’s new memoir makes clear that this shaming and second-guessing, using the language of care and concern, is deeply conventional. She portrays herself—including with the title The Woman in Me—as battling the media expectation that she remain trapped in girlhood, virginal and helpless.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Shawn Fain’s old-time religion The Axis of Resistance has been gathering strength. Hands off Shakespeare.

Culture Break

A former inhabitant of the Chagos Archipelago—expelled when the U.S. built its military base there in the early 1970s—and his granddaughter in Port Louis, Mauritius. (Tim Dirven / Panos Pictures / Redux)

Read. A new book from Philippe Sands, The Last Colony, tells the story of the Chagossians, an island people who were expelled from their homes by the British and Americans.

Watch. The Pigeon Tunnel (streaming on Apple TV+) tries to capture the essence of John le Carré. It’s one of our critics’ 22 most exciting films to watch this season.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Washington has been sending military assets to the region for 'deterence purposes'.

For the first time since 2006, the Lebanese are again facing the prospect of a devastating war with Israel, on the back of the current conflict in Gaza. Much of the population does not want, and knows it cannot afford, such a war. Lebanon is still in the throes of an economic collapse that began in 2019. Yet Hezbollah, which dominates Lebanon’s political scene, seems moved less by what its countrymen want than by the strategic priorities of its sponsor, Iran.

The Iranians have worked painstakingly in the past decade to build up a redoubtable deterrence capability on Israel’s borders with Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza. Hezbollah realizes that a full-scale conflict might weaken its hold over Lebanon and will try to avoid such an outcome. But ultimately, the party will follow Iran’s lead.  

Earlier this year, Hezbollah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, began referring to a “unification of the fronts” strategy. The idea was that Iran-backed armed groups, joined into the so-called Axis of Resistance, would coordinate operations against Israel, especially in defense of Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem such as the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Last May, amid clashes in Gaza between Islamic Jihad and Israel, Nasrallah described what this meant in practical terms: “The real headline for the resistance response in Gaza is [the creation of] a joint operations room for the resistance groups.”

Collaborative planning and operations have been facilitated by the fact that leading Hamas officials have relocated to Lebanon in recent months, most of them regarded as representing the pro-Iran, pro-Hezbollah wing of the organization. Ziyad al-Nakhalah, the head of Islamic Jihad, which has long had close ties to Iran, is also based in the country. Although support for the Palestinian cause is at the heart of Iran’s and Hezbollah’s identity, many Lebanese, Shiites among them, remain wary. They recall with trepidation how their country suffered during the Palestinian armed presence from the late 1960s to the early ’80s, particularly when Israel’s retaliation against Palestinian attacks destroyed Shiite villages. That Hezbollah has not factored this into its calculations is surprising.

[Read: Is Israel at war with Iran?]

For Hezbollah, one reason for overlooking the domestic discontent may be that throughout the Middle East, Iran’s effort to increase its influence is succeeding. As far back as the early ’80s, Iran understood that if it empowered and backed cohesive armed groups in fragmented societies, especially Shiite groups, it could then push them into the commanding heights of states even where Shiites were not a majority. Hezbollah was the most successful example of this model, but Iran also replicated it in Iraq in the decade after the 2003 U.S. invasion; in Yemen, where it has supported the Houthis; and in Syria, where it backs the Alawite-dominated regime of President Bashar al-Assad.  

The Iranian strategy is not entirely sectarian so much as it is linked to a revolutionary vision of Islam and an ideology of “resistance” directed against the United States, Israel, and conservative Arab countries in the region. From the start, the Iranians sought to build relationships with Sunni Islamist groups, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. As the French scholar Bernard Rougier wrote in his book Everyday Jihad, Iran’s ambassador in Beirut helped bring radical Sunni Lebanese and Palestinian clerics together to create the Association of Muslim Scholars in early 1982.

What took place on October 7 was part of a broader effort by the Axis of Resistance to expand its sway over the Palestinian cause. The Biden administration has said it’s seen no evidence of Iranian involvement in the Hamas attack, but the point may be a semantic one. Hamas’s leadership in Gaza, including Yahya Sinwar, as well as the organization’s senior official in Beirut, Saleh al-Arouri, are close to Hezbollah, as is the Islamic Jihad’s al-Nakhalah. Even if the Hamas operation was tightly compartmentalized, Hezbollah must have been aware of aspects of the plan, which means the Iranians were too.

In the past two decades, Iran has taken advantage of U.S. missteps in the Middle East. The U.S. invasion of Iraq eliminated Sunni dominance in the country, allowing Shiite parties with ties to Tehran to seize power. Successive administrations, starting with Barack Obama’s, disengaged from the region. As Obama told The Atlantic in a 2016 interview, “The competition between the Saudis and the Iranians—which has helped to feed proxy wars and chaos in Syria and Iraq and Yemen—requires us to say to our friends as well as to the Iranians that they need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace.” As he saw it, the ensuing equilibrium would allow the United States to refocus on regions more vital to its interests.  

Obama’s words must have been music to Iranian ears—a U.S. president acknowledging Tehran’s stakes in the Middle East while downgrading the U.S. role there. The Iranians took advantage of American disengagement to develop their regional alliances. At the head of this effort was Qassem Soleimani, the leader of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, whom the United States assassinated in January 2020. In Iraq, he cemented ties with militias in the Popular Mobilization Forces, formed in 2014 to fight the Islamic State. Last week, a leading PMF militia, Kataeb Hezbollah, whose leader was assassinated alongside Soleimani, announced that it had joined Hamas’s “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation against Israel and would increase efforts to target the United States.     

Similarly, the conflict in Yemen, which began in 2014, allowed the Iranians to develop relations with Ansar Allah, better known as the Houthis, whom they supported in order to put pressure on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. The Houthis are not, strictly speaking, an Iranian proxy force, but they are a part of Iran’s regional network of militias and have close ties with Hezbollah. The Houthis launched cruise missiles and drones either at Israel or at U.S. ships in the Red Sea last week, demonstrating that they are part of the coalition of forces Iran can call on if the Gaza war spreads.

[Read: Hezbollah watches and waits]

In Syria, the Iranians also retain the option to strike Israel from across the Golan Heights. Kheder Khaddour, a scholar of Syria at the Carnegie Middle East Center, told me, “Iran is redeploying [pro-Iranian] militias from northern Syria, including Aleppo, to the country’s south” for a possible conflict there. Israel has bombed the Damascus and Aleppo airports, almost certainly because it anticipates that Iran will open a Golan front in a wider war and use the airports to ferry in weapons.

The Axis of Resistance has shown that Israel is vulnerable—and that if Washington can be made to fear becoming embroiled in a regional war, it will press Israel not to attack Axis members. A week after the October 7 operation, the Israeli journalist Barak Ravid revealed that Iran had warned Israel that, although it did not seek a regional conflict, any land invasion of Gaza would bring about an Iranian intervention. The Biden administration is conducting back-channel talks with Iran, suggesting that the message reached Washington too.

The Americans surely want to avoid another Middle Eastern war in the run-up to the presidential election next year. President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel was partly an effort to hold back the Israelis. He warned them to be “deliberate” and to ask “very hard questions” about whether the path they were on would lead to their desired objectives. Hamas’s release of two American hostages and two Israelis seems to indicate that a broader arrangement may be in the works. But the real message of the past two weeks is that Iran has an extensive network in place to back up its challenge to U.S. priorities in the Middle East.

One evening not long ago, I was doomscrolling on social media, wading through the detritus of our present moment: Videos of terrorists in Israel decapitating a man with a garden hoe. A clip of Donald Trump being cruel and narcissistic. Footage of mobs physically assaulting some lone stranger they disagree with, pummeling him as he lies prone on the ground.

These are all products of the rising tide of dehumanization that has swept across the world. The famous dates of our century point to this great unfolding of barbarism—September 11, 2001; January 6, 2021; October 7, 2023. The causes of this rising culture of dehumanization are almost too many to count: tribalism, racism, ideological dogmatism, social media. All this amounts to the steady evisceration of the moral norms that can make our planet a decent place to live—and their gradual substitution with distrust, aggression, and rage. Dehumanization is any way of seeing and acting that covers the human face, that refuses to recognize and respect the full dignity of each person.

Then, as I was scrolling, I came upon a short video of an interview that the author James Baldwin gave many decades ago. “There may not be as much humanity in the world as one would like to see, but there is some,” he said. “There is more than one would think.” He spoke with gravity and moral conviction, his eyes boring into the interviewer, who was off-camera. “Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you,” he continued. “What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide for yourself not to be.”

[Adrienne LaFrance: The coming humanist renaissance]

Here, amid the corrosive flow of dehumanization, was the very image of a defiant humanist. Here was a person who had organized his life around the great humanist endeavors: To try to see others in all their complexity and depth. To try to see yourself with humility, self-awareness, and compassion. To try to act in ways that are considerate, just, and discerning. Above all, to try to see the world from another person’s point of view.

In these violent, vicious times, this humanist gospel of curiosity and respect for others may seem hopelessly woo-woo and naive. But I assure you that humanism is a hardheaded and practical way of being. The ability to understand the people you’re dealing with is practical. Leading with respect and curiosity is practical. Rabidly, the dehumanizers lead us down a death spiral of animosity and distrust. Bravely and effectively, the humanists try to brake that descent. At the center of every healthy family, organization, and nation is a core humanistic skill: the capacity to see others deeply, to understand them, and to make them feel seen, heard, and understood.

We sometimes talk about democracy as if it’s just about voting, and the stuff that happens in legislatures. But, at its core, liberal democracy is a series of concrete human encounters: persuasion, argument, negotiation, compromise. It’s one viewpoint encountering a bunch of other viewpoints in hopes of finding some positive way forward. For liberal democracy to function, we must be able to understand one another to some degree, to see one another’s viewpoints, to project respect across difference and disagreement. All of this requires humanistic wisdom.  

More mundanely, humanistic wisdom matters in your professional life. To work well with others, you have to show that you see them and recognize their worth. In a 2021 study, when the consulting firm McKinsey asked business executives why employees were quitting their firms, the executives said it was to make more money elsewhere. But when researchers asked the employees themselves why they quit, the most common answer was that they didn’t feel recognized and valued by their managers. They didn’t feel seen.

So how good are you at these humanist skills? Most of us are not as good as we think we are. William Ickes, a personality psychologist at the University of Texas at Arlington, has found that strangers having their first conversation read each other accurately only about 20 percent of the time—and that even friends and family read one another accurately only 35 percent of the time. Many of us spend our days awash in social ignorance. You probably didn’t need an academic study to tell you this. How often have you felt stereotyped and categorized, misheard and misunderstood? Do you really think you don’t regularly do this to others?

Why aren’t we good at seeing one another? For starters, we’re egotistical. We don’t see others because we’re too busy presenting ourselves. And some people are so narcissistically locked into their own viewpoint that they can’t be bothered to see yours. Maybe you’ve heard the story about the guy standing by a river: A woman standing on the opposite shore shouts at him, “How do I get to the other side of the river?” He bellows back, “You are on the other side of the river!”

But we can get better. How? Well, if you are a young person, take as many courses as you can in the humanities. That’s where you go to learn about people. If you can’t understand the people around you, not only will you be miserable but you will make them miserable, too.

The humanities also train people to pay close attention to one another, the way actors do. “Actors walk through life so different because we have to be an observer,” the actor Viola Davis once told an interviewer. “The way someone puts their head down if you say a certain word. And you think, ‘Why did they do that? Is it something in their past?’”

The actor Matthew McConaughey once told me something similar. When he’s trying to get into character, he said, he looks for some small gesture that epitomizes the character’s overall nature, and then he expands out from there. One character might be a “hands in his front pockets” kind of guy. He goes through life hunched over, closed in. When he takes his hands out of his pockets and tries to assert himself, he’s going to be unnatural, insecure, overly aggressive. McConaughey also tries to see every scene from his character’s point of view. A killer is not thinking, “I’m a killer.” He’s thinking, “I’m here to restore order.”

The novelist Zadie Smith has been a consummate humanist since she was a little girl. A few years ago, she wrote a piece for The New York Review of Books in which she recalled that, as a child, she was constantly imagining what it would be like to grow up in the homes of her friends. “I rarely entered a friend’s house without wondering what it might be like to never leave,” she wrote. “That is, what it would be like to be Polish or Ghanaian or Irish or Bengali, to be richer or poorer, to say these prayers or hold those politics. I was an equal-opportunity voyeur. I wanted to know what it was like to be everybody.” What a fantastic way to train yourself not just to be a novelist but to be capable of seeing others as well.

The paramount humanist goal is to learn to see people the way Rembrandt saw people. Not all of the subjects of Rembrandt’s paintings are remarkable, but as the late novelist Frederick Buechner once observed, even the plain faces “are so remarkably seen by Rembrandt that we are jolted into seeing them remarkably.” Humanism is built on this kind of reverence for the person, and on the recognition that everyone you meet is superior to you in some way. People are not problems to solve but mysteries whose depths can never fully be plumbed.

The hard sciences can tell us about our physical realities. Humanism focuses on the subjective realm—the way each person takes events and molds them into a point of view. Big data can help social scientists make generalizations about populations of people. But the humanist tries to see the subjective layer of one particular person, to understand this unique individual who, like you, is probably doing their best to see the world with more understanding, wisdom, humanity, and grace.

But how, specifically, can you understand the subjective workings of another person’s mind? Well, you don’t want to peer at them; you want to engage with them. Looking at a person is different from looking at a thing because a person is looking back at you. I’m getting to know you at the same time you’re getting to know me. To truly see someone else, you have to be willing to be seen. Thus the quintessential humanist activity is quality conversation.

How good a conversationalist are you? Again, probably not as good as you think you are. A group of people making a series of assertions at one another is not a good conversation—it’s a terrible conversation. A good conversation is an act of joint exploration. Somebody floats a half-formed idea. Somebody else seizes on the nub of the idea, plays with it, offers their own perspective based on their own memories, and floats it back so the other person can respond.

Arthur Balfour was an early-20th-century British statesman known for his skill at this kind of conversation. Balfour, his friend John Buchan observed in his autobiography, “would take the hesitating remark of a shy man and discover in it unexpected possibilities, would probe it and expand it until its author felt that he had really made some contribution to human wisdom.”

During World War I, Buchan, a Scottish novelist, would take American friends to lunch with Balfour: “I remember with what admiration I watched him feel his way with the guests, seize on some chance word and make it the pivot of speculations until the speaker was not only encouraged to give his best but that best was infinitely enlarged by his host’s contribution. Such guests would leave walking on air.”

The humanist wants his conversations to be storytelling conversations. In white-collar jobs, we spend our days in what the psychologist Jerome Bruner called “paradigmatic mode”—producing a strategy memo, or a legal brief, or a PowerPoint presentation. The language is impersonal. Paradigmatic thinking is great for understanding trends and making the case for a proposition. It is not great for getting to know a person or connecting with them. Paradigmatic mode is a way of communicating without having to expose anything real about yourself.

What’s necessary for understanding people is narrative thinking. Stories capture a person’s character and how it changes over time. Stories capture how a thousand little influences come together to shape a life, how people struggle and thrive, get knocked about by lucky and unlucky breaks. People also just speak more freely when you get them to tell stories about themselves. The journalist Kate Murphy, in her book You’re Not Listening, describes a focus-group moderator who was hired to figure out why people go to grocery stores late at night. But instead of asking that question directly, she asked people to tell her a story about the last time they went to a grocery store after 11 p.m. A shy, unassuming woman who had said little up to that point raised her hand and responded, “I had just smoked a joint and was looking for a ménage à trois—me, Ben and Jerry.” The woman didn’t just talk about grocery stores; she told a story and offered a glimpse into her life.

As we get to know one another, we should aspire to be historians of one another. Every person you meet is an accumulation of the people, choices, and events that came before them, as well as the events of their childhood and their more recent past. If we want to see someone well, we want to know about their childhood, about the institutions that formed them, about their traumas and accomplishments. In our conversations, we should be exploring the depths of one another’s histories. What happened to you in childhood that makes you still see the world from the vantage point of an outsider? What was it about your home life that makes celebrating holidays important to you? Why is asking for favors hard for you? You appear to have it all and yet feel insecure—why is that?

Emotional intelligence can be developed, like athletic ability. Yes, people are born with a certain innate temperament and capacity, but you can get more emotionally proficient with practice. The key trait of a dehumanizer is emotional crudity. A humanist, on the other hand, has learned complex emotional responses.

Consider the capacity we call empathy. Some people see empathy as a formless gush of emotion. You open your heart, and empathy pours out. In fact, empathy consists of three distinct social skills. First, mirroring—accurately reflecting the emotions of the person in front of you. Second, mentalizing—using your own similar experiences to project a theory about what the other person is going through. Third, caring. Con artists are good at understanding what’s going on in others’ minds—but we don’t call them empathetic, because they don’t care. To care, you not only have to understand another person; you also have to perform an action that will make them know you understand how they feel.

People who are truly empathetic don’t just do things that are comforting to themselves; they do the very specific things that are comforting to the person in need. Rabbi Elliot Kukla tells a story about a woman who, because of a brain injury, would sometimes fall to the floor. “I think people rush to help me up because they are so uncomfortable with seeing an adult lying on the floor,” she told Kukla. “But what I really need is for someone to get down on the ground with me.” Sometimes you just need to get down on the floor with someone.

“Every epistemology becomes an ethic,” the educator Parker J. Palmer once wrote. “The shape of our knowledge becomes the shape of our living; the relation of the knower to the known becomes the relation of the living self to the larger world.” Palmer was saying that the way we attend to others determines the kind of person we become. If we see people generously, we will become generous. If we see them coldly, we will become cold. And if we see them stupidly and viciously … well, we wind up with the world we’re living in now.

“Recognition is the first human quest,” the journalist Andy Crouch writes in his book The Life We’re Looking For. Babies come out of the womb looking for a face that will see them, know them, attend to their needs. When attention is not forthcoming, babies appear devastated. Maybe you have seen those “still face” experiments on YouTube in which researchers tell moms not to respond to their child’s bids for attention. The babies coo and cry out, but the mothers just sit there, with no expression on their face. At first, the babies are uncomfortable; then they squirm, wail, and dissolve into misery. Even at that early age, feeling unseen is an existential crisis.

The agony is the same for adults. Every society has what the philosopher Axel Honneth called a “recognition order.” In a healthy society, everybody is recognized to some degree. But in an unhealthy society, like the America of today, recognition is doled out to the few—the rich, the good-looking, the athletic, the successful. “When a society treats the mass of people in this way, singling out only a few for recognition, it creates a scarcity of respect, as though there were not enough of this precious substance to go around,” the sociologist Richard Sennett has written. When people feel ignored, they tend to lash out. They become lonely, isolated, and hypersensitive to slight. “When attention is depleted, there can be no heightened passion, no true friendship, no love,” the philosopher Talbot Brewer wrote recently in The Hedgehog Review.

The only way out is the humanist way: To create more attention. To distribute it more fairly. To shine our full attention on those in darkness—which these days is pretty much everybody.

I’m trying to hold up an ideal here, the way of the modern humanist. I’ll close with a few of my role models. One is the essayist and poet David Whyte. The ultimate touchstone of friendship “is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self,” Whyte observes. Rather, “the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”

Another is Frederick Buechner, the novelist I quoted earlier about Rembrandt. At age 9, Buechner lost his father to suicide. He shut down emotionally, unable to confront his grief. But eventually he came to realize that the problem with shutting yourself off from the harshness of reality is that you wind up shutting yourself off from other people and the beauty of life. “What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we fear more than anything else,” he wrote in his book Telling Secrets. “It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are … because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier … for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own.”

[Read: Can humanism save us?]

Every person is sacred. Every person deserves to be seen, and given just and loving attention. We may later decide that the person we are looking at is venal or cruel or wicked—but at least we will have tried to fully understand them before making those judgments. The rot that pervades our democracy comes in large part from our failure to do this. Despite the prejudices of the postmodern ideologues, history shows us that it’s possible to enter into a compassionate understanding of people who are different from ourselves.

In our age of creeping dehumanization, humanism seems like the right banner to raise. It points us to the posture, the skills, the way of life that make us fit servants to the world—caring and effective co-workers, teachers, citizens, lovers, and friends.

This essay is drawn from David Brooks’s How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.

From the suggestion to create an international coalition to fight Hamas to a warning to Iran, here's everything Emmanuel Macron said during his visit to Israel.

When has killing more Palestinians ever resulted in better security for the Israeli society?

Lack of fuel and lifesaving treatment puts 130 premature neonates in danger in the Gaza Strip.

Survivors of the 1982 massacre by an Israel-backed militia in Lebanon say what Gaza is going through is even worse.

I was born and raised in a war. I spent the first 20 years of my life in Afghanistan following the U.S. invasion. The war was always just a few months older than I was.

I have lost friends and family to war. I have seen my neighbors’ dead bodies. I know how it feels to learn that a bomb blast has damaged your school; to sleep and live with the sounds of gunshots and explosions, the sirens of ambulances and fire trucks; to suddenly flee when your neighborhood is targeted; to seek shelter when nowhere is safe.

I am far from alone in this. Children have always been victims of war—of religious conflict, armed interventions, fights between autocracies and democracies. When war comes, children suffer. That doesn’t mean we should accept their suffering as part of the cost of war. It means that their suffering is horrifyingly common.

[From the September 2022 issue: I smuggled my laptop past the Taliban so I could write this story]

As a child, I was taught how to protect myself, how to find safe spots under tables when my school and home were under attack. My siblings, my friends, and I learned how to run and escape targeted zones. We learned how to protect ourselves when we didn’t have our parents and elders by our side. We knew which time of day our city might be bombed. We avoided taking certain roads, thought to be full of land mines, in the hope that we could keep all of our limbs, unlike our neighbors’ kids. We learned to cover our heads with our hands and lie down if there were explosions. We learned to stay away from the windows of our classrooms. Our day-to-day was a gamble; we had to win every day.

In 2020, Save the Children, an international humanitarian organization, reported that an average of 25 children had been killed or injured in conflicts daily during the preceding 10 years; most of them were from countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria—poor nations with broken infrastructure and health-care systems, where millions of children live in nonstandard homes or tents, or on the streets. The First and Second World Wars were devastating for children. In the conflicts of the 21st century, hundreds of thousands of children have been killed, wounded, kidnapped, beheaded, raped, recruited by armed forces, or brutally disabled, losing limbs, eyesight, hearing, skin, parts of their face. Girls, in particular, are targets for violence. Many children in war zones experience some mix of anxiety, depression, aggression, behavioral disorders, loneliness, insecurity, and psychosomatic symptoms, and engage in self-harm, according to Save the Children.

I knew war before I was 5 years old. I’ve known its horrors from as far back as I can remember. After two decades of conflict, I fled Afghanistan for America during the chaotic U.S. withdrawal, as the Taliban returned to power. Because of the way the war fell apart, I was separated from my mother, my sister, and many other family members. The trauma is still with me. Even now that I live in a much safer country, I still feel scared.

[Read: The children Russia kidnapped]

My story is the experience of millions of children subject to war. Earlier this year, the United Nations reported that 1,500 children have been killed or injured in Ukraine since Russia invaded the country last year. The Israeli government has not said exactly how many children were among the approximately 1,400 people killed by Hamas on October 7, but we know that many were among the murdered. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described having seen images of a baby “riddled with bullets … young people burned alive in their cars or in their hideaway rooms.” And officials have said that nearly 30 Israeli children are among the more than 200 people believed to have been taken hostage in Gaza. Of the thousands of Palestinians killed so far in Israel’s retaliatory air strikes on Gaza, more than 2,000 have been children, according to officials in Gaza. Approximately half of Gaza’s more than 2 million residents are children, and many of them did not have access to basic food, water, electricity, and medicine even before the war started, because of a blockade by Israel and Egypt. Now many of them lack safe shelter too, and the humanitarian situation is only getting worse.

In the mid-20th century, international humanitarian law was put in place to protect civilians, and in particular children and women, in war. But too often, that means little. I wish there were more laws and other support systems to save children around the world who live in war zones, and the mothers, grandmothers, and sisters who are protecting them.

Children are too young to protect themselves from war. Their trauma is not an individual issue; it is society’s job to keep them safe. When children suffer, we have failed as a society. We cannot save one child by killing another.

There are those who see a nonviolent way forward in Gaza right now: A cease-fire, an exchange of prisoners for hostages, a UN protectorate. I envy them, whatever clear answer they might have to how Israel should respond to the massacre of more than 1,400 Israelis and the kidnapping of more than 200 others by a fundamentalist terrorist organization that rules over and hides among an impoverished civilian population of 2 million people. I envy those who know exactly how Hamas can be stopped without any more killing, any more suffering, for any more people in Israel and Gaza.

Because I don’t.

I have dedicated much of my professional life to seeking peaceful change in this conflict, trying to listen to and understand Israelis and Palestinians and find ways to work toward peace or justice or coexistence or mutual understanding or anything better than what there is now. For eight years, starting in 1996, I worked for Seeds of Peace in Jerusalem, promoting peaceful conflict resolution with hundreds of young Palestinians and Israelis, their families, and their communities. I’ve spent the years since researching, writing, and teaching about Israeli-Palestinian peace-building. So many people whom I love and admire are now caught in this nightmare, including Vivian Silver, a 74-year-old Israeli peace activist who disappeared from Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7 and is presumed to have been kidnapped, and the families of numerous friends in Gaza. I see no way out of the nightmare so long as Hamas continues to rule the Gaza Strip, and no viable way to remove it from power without an Israeli ground offensive.

I’ve read some thoughtful pieces explaining why a ground offensive is a terrible idea. I agree. A ground offensive will inevitably add more dead and wounded and bereaved Israelis and Palestinians to the already unbearable tallies of the unspeakable Hamas killing spree and the Israeli bombardment of Gaza that has killed more than 3,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Even if Israel takes every possible precaution to protect civilian lives in Gaza—and the U.S. government must continue to pressure the Israeli government to that end—more innocent people there will be killed, harmed, and displaced. Hamas has no doubt prepared fortifications, traps, ambushes—it has had years to plan for its chance to capture and kill IDF soldiers on its territory. Hezbollah may use an Israeli ground offensive as a pretext to widen the circle of death and destruction to northern Israel and southern Lebanon, if not beyond.

[Read: What is Israel trying to accomplish?]

I’ve read thoughtful pieces demanding an immediate cease-fire. I share the values of those who are calling for it. I do not think and have never thought that killing innocent people, deliberately or inadvertently, is a way to achieve justice or peace. On a visceral level, I want my friends and family and their friends and families to survive, to be protected, to be safe—in Gaza, in the West Bank, and in Israel. All of the violence and suffering and abuse that Israelis and Palestinians have inflicted on each other over generations has led only to more hatred, more violence, and more suffering. All I have ever dreamed of, prayed for, worked for, in this context, is an end to it all.

And that’s the problem. I don’t see how the cycle of hatred, killing, and suffering ends while there is a fundamentalist terrorist organization explicitly dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews—read its 1988 founding charter; the message is not subtle—equipped with legions of fighters ready to kill and die to achieve its goals, an arsenal of missiles, and a powerful state sponsor, Iran, that enables its violence and shares its explicitly genocidal agenda.

Neither the organization, its ruthlessness, nor its agenda is new. Hamas used terrorist violence to undermine every round of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization since the early 1990s—and succeeded, with the assistance of Israel’s oppressive occupation and settlement of Palestinian territories and the terrorism of Israeli extremists. But Hamas has just demonstrated an upgraded capacity for murder and mayhem, developed across 16 years of territorial control over Gaza—notwithstanding Israel’s blockade, multiple devastating wars, and the suffering Hamas has inflicted on the population it claims to represent.

October 7 was not a run-of-the-mill terror attack committed by a secretive cell; it was a sophisticated militarized assault by several thousand heavily armed men seeking to kill and kidnap as many Israelis as possible before dying as martyrs, as 1,500 of them reportedly did. That attack was accompanied by the launching of hundreds of missiles into Israel (some falling short and leading to Palestinian deaths that Hamas must consider “collateral damage”).

To be clear, it was also not a conventional military assault. Once Hamas cadres breached Israel’s defenses, they had complete freedom of choice. They could have sought out exclusively military targets. Instead, they did the opposite, murdering and kidnapping entire families of defenseless civilians, continuing the carnage over hours and days, until they fled back to Gaza, were captured, or were killed.

Hamas views its attack as a historic achievement, and that means it is only a matter of time before it will attack again. Israel’s strategies of containment (“quiet for quiet”), suitcases of cash from Qatar, and deterrence all failed. Hamas has no interest in peace negotiations, despite the wishful thinking that has afflicted some analysts in the past. The only way to prevent further attacks of this kind is to render Hamas physically incapable of executing them.

As President Joe Biden and many others have rightly cautioned, the U.S. made grave mistakes in its response to 9/11, including the invasion of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the attack, and an ill-fated 20-year attempt to build a democracy in Afghanistan without committing the necessary resources. But the original U.S. military response to the murder of 3,000 people—the invasion of Afghanistan, the reduction of al-Qaeda’s capacity to mount operations, and the removal of the Taliban government from power—was no mistake. It was the definition of military necessity. Israel faces a situation that is, if anything, more acute, because Hamas’s fighters are located not on a different continent but right next door.

[Read: Understanding Hamas’s genocidal ideology]

There is no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A responsible Israeli government would prepare a political strategy for the day after this war, one that empowers Palestinians who wish to end the conflict by creating a path to dignity, security, and self-determination for their nation—and the U.S. government should demand no less of its ally. Of course, the current Israeli government is no “partner for peace,” but Israel’s voters are likely to punish the politicians responsible for the debacle of October 7, 2023, just as they did after the Yom Kippur War, 50 years before. Unfortunately, though, no one can vote Hamas out of power.

The only way to avoid a ground offensive is to provide a realistic strategy for removing Hamas’s ability to attack Israel on this scale again. That alternative must be convincing not to liberal observers in the West, but to the actual decision makers in Israel, who disastrously failed to protect their citizens on October 7. If anything is clear in hindsight, it is that cease-fires do not provide sustainable security: Hamas used the years since the 2021 cease-fire to prepare its 2023 assault.  

An Israeli ground offensive is a grim prospect, which will cost even more Israeli and Palestinian lives, with no guarantee of success. I say this with deep sorrow—but I have yet to hear any credible, effective alternative.