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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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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.

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Israel is at war, and has ordered a complete siege of Gaza after Hamas’s surprise attack on Saturday. Hamas is holding at least 150 hostages, and more than 900 Israelis and more than 600 Palestinians have been killed. As we continue to follow these developments, we’ll take a step back today to focus on Hamas, its aims, and its influence on the region.

Header: What Is Hamas?

Hamas, an Islamist fundamentalist group formed in 1987 as an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, has controlled the Gaza Strip since it won Palestinian legislative elections in 2006—the last time elections were held in Gaza. These elections took place a year after Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza. In 2007, Hamas ousted its rival political party, Fatah, from the strip during a military conflict within Gaza. Hamas is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Israel, the European Union, Canada, Egypt, and Japan.

What are the group’s long-term goals? First, “what every political party would want in their own country … ascendancy and supremacy,” the historian Arash Azizi told me. “It wants to be the most popular Palestinian party.” Second, Hamas is a member of the Axis of Resistance, Azizi noted. As he explained in The Atlantic yesterday, this unofficial alliance of groups supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran includes Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and several Iraqi and Syrian militias. These groups share key goals, Azizi explained: “the destruction of Israel” and the driving out of all the Jewish people living in the country. Finally, despite the fact that Palestinians “are amongst the most secular societies in the Arab world,” Hamas—a Sunni Islamist party—also wants “an Islamic society.” How it prioritizes between these three goals is a different question, Azizi noted.

The group seeks the elimination of Israel as a country—a point of contrast between it and the Palestine Liberation Organization. (The PLO’s official position holds that a Palestinian state could be created in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, though the former PLO chairman Yasser Arafat walked away from American-led negotiations meant to create such a state.) Taken as a collective, Hamas is “a Palestinian nationalist, anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic, and Islamist organization,” Azizi said. But “like all parties in the world, Hamas is not united … There are certainly parts of Hamas that do not have these more extreme goals.” Some factions, particularly those linked to the devout Palestinian middle class, are “not interested in fighting the Israelis this way, or in alliance with Iran,” he said. “Under the right circumstances, they might even accept, form, and run a state of Palestine without the destruction of Israel … But clearly the faction [of Hamas] that Iran has given a lot of power to is not the latter faction.”

The Hamas charter of 1988 laid out a brazenly anti-Semitic mission. The charter stated: “The Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: ‘The Day of Judgment will not come until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’” As The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, noted in 2014, “This is a frank and open call for genocide, embedded in one of the most thoroughly anti-Semitic documents you’ll read this side of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Hamas issued a new charter in 2017, which retains the group’s refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist but removes some of the boldest anti-Jewish statements from the 1988 version. However, many Hamas officials have espoused equally strong anti-Semitic statements in the years since this new charter was released.

Key to understanding Hamas is the fact that its goals and those of the Gazan people are not necessarily in alignment. The Gazan people live under an Israeli blockade, backed by Egypt, that severely restricts the movement of goods and people in and out of the region; under Hamas rule, Gazans have reported repression and arbitrary arrests, and Human Rights Watch has chronicled what it calls systemic abuse on the part of Hamas in Gaza. In recent years, Gazan citizens have shown growing discontent with Hamas’s policies. According to The Times of Israel, a 2022 poll found that 53 percent of Gazans agree at least somewhat that Hamas should stop calling for Israel’s destruction; a 2022 Palestinian public-opinion poll found that 71 percent of Palestinians believe there is corruption in Hamas institutions. “We have no idea” how much of the population of Gaza Hamas represents, Thanassis Cambanis, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, told me, because “there have not been elections there in decades. They’re not a unifying national movement.”

Azizi also reminded me that when Gaza held its last election, in 2006, only 44 percent of Palestinians voted for Hamas: “It won the election by a plurality, not a majority.” Right now, Azizi argued, Hamas is likely more popular in the West Bank than it is in Gaza; “it’s the force that has been fighting Israel, the country that has been putting Gaza under siege, but at the same time, people of Gaza look at Hamas and see a corrupt ruling authority.” Some Palestinians within Gaza have repeatedly protested Hamas, particularly over the past six months, Azizi noted. The Palestinian public-opinion poll from 2022 found that 54 percent of Gazans believe they cannot criticize Hamas’s authority without fear.

Hamas does not represent the whole of the Palestinian people—far from it. But observers of these attacks shouldn’t ignore the role of the broader Israeli-Palestinian relationship. “The decades-long delusion that Israel could ignore, manage, shrink, or simply forget its conflict with its Palestinian neighbors has been a costly blunder,” Azizi wrote in The Atlantic yesterday. “The Iranian regime is arming Palestinians and driving them toward its own murderous agenda vis-à-vis Israelis. But Israel’s continued subjugation of Palestinians is what allows such a festering wound to exist in the first place, giving Tehran an easy issue to exploit.”

What does Hamas want from this latest, unprecedented round of attacks? A spokesperson for the terror group has said that it wants to “liberate all Palestinian prisoners” from Israel and end Israel’s “provocations” in the West Bank and Jerusalem, specifically at Al-Aqsa Mosque. But the experts I spoke with struggled to understand how Saturday’s brutal attacks will help Hamas achieve its stated aims. “It’s hard for me to put my analytical hat on and figure out why Hamas would view this in their interest, because it’s so surely going to be terrible for them and for all the people in Gaza and probably the West Bank as well,” Cambanis told me. “It somewhat defies my 20 years of understanding how they operate.”

“This Hamas victory might prove Pyrrhic,” Natan Sachs wrote in The Atlantic on Saturday. “In fact, Hamas itself might have been surprised by the extent of its initial success. The trauma in Israel today should give pause to those thinking that Israel will simply acquiesce to a short tit for tat. As bad as things have been in Gaza in the past two decades—and they have been terrible—the coming weeks could prove even worse.”

Related:

This war isn’t like Israel’s earlier wars. Is Israel at war with Iran?

The October 7 attacks on Israel by the Palestinian terror groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are being compared to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. In fact, with more than 600 Israelis dead at the time of this writing, the proportional death toll is several times higher than that of 9/11, and the factor of surprise is arguably greater than at Pearl Harbor.

But 9/11 and Pearl Harbor weren’t just tragic attacks. They were casus belli for seismic wars. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has declared his country to be heading into “a long and grueling war.” The air attacks he ordered in Gaza have already resulted in hundreds of Palestinian casualties. Will October 7 also lead to a broader conflagration in the region? Most important, can Israel rightly consider itself to be engaged in a shadow conflict with Iran?  

Many commentators scoff at bringing Iran into an analysis of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. The sentiment is understandable. Some Beltway pundits name-drop Iran primarily to drive their own agendas. And the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not primarily about Iran: It is rooted in Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories, its brutal siege of the Gaza Strip, and its deprivation of dignity to millions of Palestinians under its rule.

Nevertheless, Iran has meddled enough in internal Arab politics that no proper analysis of October 7 can ignore its role. Hamas has occasionally gotten some cash and political support from countries such as Turkey and Qatar. But Turkey has extensive security relations with Israel, and Qatar has previously acted as a mediator with Israel and officially stands for the two-state solution. Only one state in the world doesn’t just give Hamas money but also lends significant military and political support. It is also the only state in the world still promising to fight Israel to total destruction: the Islamic Republic of Iran.  

More important than material support, Tehran offers Hamas membership in an anti-Israel club with forces arrayed across the region. The Axis of Resistance counts the membership of Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon (right on Israel’s northern borders), and various Iraqi and Syrian militias. As others have pointed out, Tehran’s arming of these forces with its advanced missile technology has changed the face of warfare in the region. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the militia that now holds much of the economic and political power in Iran, coordinates all of these forces via its external operations wing, the Quds Force, whose footprint extends over the region and to places as far away as Paraguay and the Central African Republic.

Does all of this mean that Iran had a direct hand in planning the October 7 attacks? A White House official has concluded that it’s “too early” to make such claims. But senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah have suggested that IRGC officials gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday. The operation, whatever its details, must have taken months of preparation, and Hamas would almost certainly not simply surprise Tehran with something on this scale. Some coordination seems the very minimum. Of the analysts saying so, not all are your usual D.C. Iran hawks. Ali Hashem, a Lebanese Al Jazeera correspondent who is an expert on the IRGC’s regional alliances and used to work for the Hezbollah-friendly channel Al Mayadeen, has said that the attacks were “probably an axis decision.”

[Read: A message from Iran]

The Iranian regime has shown resolute support for the attacks. It organized fireworks celebrations in Tehran’s Palestine Square. Members of parliament shouted “Death to Israel” in the Majlis. Yahya Safavi, a former top commander of the IRGC (1997–2007) and currently a top adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, spoke in no uncertain terms: “We support this operation, congratulate Palestinian fighters on it, and are sure that the Axis of Resistance will back it too.” Ali Akbar Velayati, another top adviser to Khamenei and a longtime former foreign minister, also lent his support, writing to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad leaders: “This victorious operation will surely facilitate and accelerate the collapse of the Zionist regime.” The IRGC’s media outlets are meanwhile busy publishing posters, some in Hebrew, brandishing messages such as we told you to sell your homes in the Zionist regime before it’s too late and anti-Semitic cartoons portraying Israeli Jews fleeing the country.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the jewel in the crown of Iran’s axis, has backed the Hamas attacks strongly and exchanged fire with Israel in the north. But, crucially, Hezbollah attacks have so far been limited to Shebaa Farms, a small strip of land that Lebanon considers its own territory (most countries count the strip as part of Syria’s Golan Heights, currently under Israeli occupation) and not Israel proper. Having come close to total destruction after its 2006 war with Israel, Hezbollah knows a full-on conflict could be suicidal.

One reason the attacks are surprising to so many is that, for months, the trend in the Middle East has been toward diplomatic reconciliation and the smoothing-over of rifts. Despite its murderous record, the Syrian regime was readmitted to the Arab League; Turkey has had a rapprochement with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt; and Iran has restored diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia. In his annual “Islamic unity” speech this week, on the occasion of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, Khamenei expressed support for this reconciliation trend: “If Iran and countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan adopt a common position on fundamental questions,” Khamenei said, “oppressive powers won’t be able to interfere in their domestic affairs or foreign policy.” The three countries Khamenei named were all U.S. allies not usually on good terms with Iran; Cairo doesn’t have diplomatic ties with Tehran, and those between Iran and Jordan are very limited. Both have had relations with Israel for decades, as they were the first Arab countries to recognize the Jewish state.

But in the same speech, Khamenei left no doubt as to where Tehran stands on Israel. The supreme leader claimed that the “Zionist regime” was full of “hatred” toward all of its neighbors and pursuing a goal of dominating the region “from the Nile to the Euphrates.” He went on to promise that “the Zionist regime is dying” and warned countries seeking to normalize ties with Israel that they were “making a mistake … betting on the losing horse.” Israel, he said, is “a cancer that will be uprooted and destroyed by the people of Palestine and forces of resistance in the region.” Shortly after the October 7 attack, Palestinian leaders, including Hamas’s Ismail Haniya and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Ehsan Ataya, issued explicit messages to Arab countries seeking normalization with Israel, warning them in strikingly similar tones.

Saudi Arabia might appear to be receptive to this messaging. Its foreign ministry’s statement following the attacks carefully avoided condemning Hamas and instead reminded Israelis of “repeated warnings of the dangers of the explosion of the situation as a result of the continued occupation, and deprivation of the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights, and the repetition of systematic provocations against its sanctities.” But Riyadh has hardly needed Iran to determine this position, which has been Saudi Arabia’s historical stance, and which it has never said it would change: No recognition of Israel so long as Palestinians remain stateless.

[Read: The Israeli-Saudi deal had better be a good one]

Therein lies the real dilemma for the Israeli government. The decades-long delusion that Israel could ignore, manage, shrink, or simply forget its conflict with its Palestinian neighbors has been a costly blunder. Netanyahu imagined that he could sustain the occupation of the West Bank without hampering the country’s continued diplomatic and economic success. But as other Israelis have long warned, this was a bubble ultimately due to burst. The Iranian regime is arming Palestinians and driving them toward its own murderous agenda vis-à-vis Israelis. But Israel’s continued subjugation of Palestinians is what allows such a festering wound to exist in the first place, giving Tehran an easy issue to exploit.

Allying with Tehran, doing its bidding, and bringing terror upon innocent Israeli civilians will not bring Palestinians any positive outcomes. Seven million Jewish Israelis and the State of Israel are not going anywhere, and so long as Palestinians don’t seek a strategy predicated upon coexistence, they will find no path forward. We have been here before: During the Second Intifada of 2000–05, the murders of Israeli civilians by Hamas and other Palestinian factions served only to weaken Israel’s pro-peace camp and lay the ground for the rise of the far right. A similar outcome today will not be in either society’s interest. Nor will it help the Iranian people, many of whom have long shown their opposition to the regime’s anti-Israel obsession, and some of whom are already protesting the regime’s support for the Palestinian attacks. They have no interest in a conflict with Israel.

As he was hurrying to the northern front on Saturday, a reserve senior officer of the Israel Defense Forces told Haaretz: “We were living in an imaginary reality for years.” He was talking about Israeli intelligence failures, but an equally imaginary reality is that Israelis can have normal lives so long as millions of Palestinians don’t. We can only hope that responsible actors in the region and beyond can bring about a cease-fire in the days ahead, before the conflagration gets any bigger. But in the long term, countering Tehran’s murderous agenda will require a durable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself.