Peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict had already been difficult to achieve before Hamas’s barbarous October 7 attack and Israel’s military response. Now it seems almost impossible, but its essence is clearer than ever: Ultimately, a negotiation to establish a safe Israel beside a safe Palestinian state.

Whatever the enormous complexities and challenges of bringing about this future, one truth should be obvious among decent people: killing 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 200, including scores of civilians, was deeply wrong. The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. It seems odd that one has to say: Killing civilians, old people, even babies, is always wrong. But today say it one must.

[Franklin Foer: Tell me how this ends]

How can educated people justify such callousness and embrace such inhumanity? All sorts of things are at play here, but much of the justification for killing civilians is based on a fashionable ideology, “decolonization,” which, taken at face value, rules out the negotiation of two states—the only real solution to this century of conflict—and is as dangerous as it is false.

I always wondered about the leftist intellectuals who supported Stalin, and those aristocratic sympathizers and peace activists who excused Hitler. Today’s Hamas apologists and atrocity-deniers, with their robotic denunciations of “settler-colonialism,” belong to the same tradition but worse: They have abundant evidence of the slaughter of old people, teenagers, and children, but unlike those fools of the 1930s, who slowly came around to the truth, they have not changed their views an iota. The lack of decency and respect for human life is astonishing: Almost instantly after the Hamas attack, a legion of people emerged who downplayed the slaughter, or denied actual atrocities had even happened, as if Hamas had just carried out a traditional military operation against soldiers. October 7 deniers, like Holocaust deniers, exist in an especially dark place.

The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity. It holds that Israel is an “imperialist-colonialist” force, that Israelis are “settler-colonialists,” and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors. (On October 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as “white” or “white-adjacent” and Palestinians as “people of color.”

This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the “oppressed” to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an “oppressor” to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as “white” and “privileged”; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of “exploitative capitalism” and in the Middle East through “colonialism.”

This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities—and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigor—has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians. When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts.

Indeed, it requires an astonishing leap of ahistorical delusion to disregard the record of anti-Jewish racism over the two millennia since the fall of the Judean Temple in 70 C.E. After all, the October 7 massacre ranks with the medieval mass killings of Jews in Christian and Islamic societies, the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1640s Ukraine, Russian pogroms from 1881 to 1920—and the Holocaust. Even the Holocaust is now sometimes misconstrued—as the actor Whoopi Goldberg notoriously did—as being “not about race,” an approach as ignorant as it is repulsive.  

Contrary to the decolonizing narrative, Gaza is not technically occupied by Israel—not in the usual sense of soldiers on the ground. Israel evacuated the Strip in 2005, removing its settlements. In 2007, Hamas seized power, killing its Fatah rivals in a short civil war. Hamas set up a one-party state that crushes Palestinian opposition within its territory, bans same-sex relationships, represses women, and openly espouses the killing of all Jews.

Very strange company for leftists.

Of course, some protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” may have no idea what they’re calling for; they are ignorant and believe that they are simply endorsing “freedom.” Others deny that they are pro-Hamas, insisting that they are simply pro-Palestinian—but feel the need to cast Hamas’s massacre as an understandable response to Israeli-Jewish “colonial” oppression. Yet others are malign deniers who seek the death of Israeli civilians.

The toxicity of this ideology is now clear. Once-respectable intellectuals have shamelessly debated whether 40 babies were dismembered or some smaller number merely had their throats cut or were burned alive. Students now regularly tear down posters of children held as Hamas hostages. It is hard to understand such heartless inhumanity. Our definition of a hate crime is constantly expanding, but if this is not a hate crime, what is? What is happening in our societies? Something has gone wrong.

In a further racist twist, Jews are now accused of the very crimes they themselves have suffered. Hence the constant claim of a “genocide” when no genocide has taken place or been intended. Israel, with Egypt, has imposed a blockade on Gaza since Hamas took over, and has periodically bombarded the Strip in retaliation for regular rocket attacks. After more than 4,000 rockets were fired by Hamas and its allies into Israel, the 2014 Gaza War resulted in more than 2,000 Palestinian deaths. More than 7,000 Palestinians, including many children, have died so far in this war, according to Hamas. This is a tragedy—but this is not a genocide, a word that has now been so devalued by its metaphorical abuse that it has become meaningless.

I should also say that Israeli rule of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank is different and, to my mind, unacceptable, unsustainable, and unjust. Settlers under the disgraceful Netanyahu government have harassed and persecuted Palestinians in the West Bank: 146 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were killed in 2022 and at least 153 in 2023 before the Hamas attack, and more than 90 since. Again: This is appalling and unacceptable, but not genocide. The Palestinians in the West Bank have endured a harsh, unjust, and oppressive occupation since 1967.

Although there is a strong instinct to make this a Holocaust-mirroring “genocide,” it is not: The Palestinians suffer from many things, including military occupation; settler intimidation and violence; corrupt Palestinian political leadership; callous neglect by their brethren in more than 20 Arab states; the rejection by Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, of compromise plans that would have seen the creation of an independent Palestinian state; and so on. None of this constitutes genocide, or anything like genocide. The Israeli goal in Gaza—for practical reasons, among others—is to minimize the number of Palestinian civilians killed. Hamas and like-minded organizations have made it abundantly clear over the years that maximizing the number of Palestinian casualties is in their strategic interest. (Put aside all of this and consider: The world Jewish population is still smaller than it was in 1939, because of the damage done by the Nazis. The Palestinian population has grown, and continues to grow. Demographic shrinkage is one obvious marker of genocide. In total, roughly 120,000 Arabs and Jews have been killed in the conflict over Palestine and Israel since 1860. By contrast, at least 500,000 people, mainly civilians, have been killed in the Syrian civil war since it began in 2011.)

If the ideology of decolonization, taught in our universities as a theory of history and shouted in our streets as self-evidently righteous, badly misconstrues the present reality, does it reflect the history of Israel as it claims to do? It does not. Indeed, it does not accurately describe either the foundation of Israel or the tragedy of the Palestinians.

According to the decolonizers, Israel is and always has been an illegitimate freak-state because it was fostered by the British empire and because some of its founders were European-born Jews.

In this narrative, Israel is tainted by imperial Britain’s broken promise to deliver Arab independence, and its kept promise to support a “national home for the Jewish people,” in the language of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. But the supposed promise to Arabs was in fact an ambiguous 1915 agreement with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who wanted his Hashemite family to rule the entire region. In part, he did not receive this new empire because his family had much less regional support than he claimed. Nonetheless, ultimately Britain delivered three kingdoms—Iraq, Jordan, and Hejaz—to the family.

The imperial powers—Britain and France—made all sorts of promises to different peoples, and then put their own interests first. Those promises to the Jews and the Arabs during World War I were typical. Afterward, similar promises were made to the Kurds, the Armenians, and others, none of which came to fruition. But the central narrative that Britain betrayed the Arab promise and backed the Jewish one is incomplete. In the 1930s, Britain turned against Zionism, and from 1937 to 1939 moved toward an Arab state with no Jewish one at all. It was an armed Jewish revolt, from 1945 to 1948 against imperial Britain, that delivered the state.

Israel exists thanks to this revolt, and to international law and cooperation, something leftists once believed in. The idea of a Jewish “homeland” was proposed in three declarations by Britain (signed by Balfour), France, and the United States, then promulgated in a July 1922 resolution by the League of Nations that created the British “mandates” over Palestine and Iraq that matched French “mandates” over Syria and Lebanon. In 1947, the United Nations devised the partition of the British mandate of Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish.

The carving of such states out of these mandates was not exceptional, either. At the end of World War II, France granted independence to Syria and Lebanon, newly conceived nation-states. Britain created Iraq and Jordan in a similar way. Imperial powers designed most of the countries in the region, except Egypt.   

Nor was the imperial promise of separate homelands for different ethnicities or sects unique. The French had promised independent states for the Druze, Alawites, Sunnis, and Maronites but in the end combined them into Syria and Lebanon. All of these states had been “vilayets” and “sanjaks” (provinces) of the Turkish Ottoman empire, ruled from Constantinople, from 1517 until 1918.    

The concept of “partition” is, in the decolonization narrative, regarded as a wicked imperial trick. But it was entirely normal in the creation of 20th-century nation-states, which were typically fashioned out of fallen empires. And sadly, the creation of nation-states was frequently marked by population swaps, huge refugee migrations, ethnic violence, and full-scale wars. Think of the Greco-Turkish war of 1921–22 or the partition of India in 1947. In this sense, Israel-Palestine was typical.

At the heart of decolonization ideology is the categorization of all Israelis, historic and present, as “colonists.” This is simply wrong. Most Israelis are descended from people who migrated to the Holy Land from 1881 to 1949. They were not completely new to the region. The Jewish people ruled Judean kingdoms and prayed in the Jerusalem Temple for a thousand years, then were ever present there in smaller numbers for the next 2,000 years. In other words, Jews are indigenous in the Holy Land, and if one believes in the return of exiled people to their homeland, then the return of the Jews is exactly that. Even those who deny this history or regard it as irrelevant to modern times must acknowledge that Israel is now the home and only home of 9 million Israelis who have lived there for four, five, six generations.  

Most migrants to, say, the United Kingdom or the United States are regarded as British or American within a lifetime. Politics in both countries is filled with prominent leaders—Suella Braverman and David Lammy, Kamala Harris and Nikki Haley—whose parents or grandparents migrated from India, West Africa, or South America. No one would describe them as “settlers.” Yet Israeli families resident in Israel for a century are designated as “settler-colonists” ripe for murder and mutilation. And contrary to Hamas apologists, the ethnicity of perpetrators or victims never justifies atrocities. They would be atrocious anywhere, committed by anyone with any history. It is dismaying that it is often self-declared “anti-racists” who are now advocating exactly this murder by ethnicity.

Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.

If the “settler-colonist” narrative is not true, it is true that the conflict is the result of the brutal rivalry and battle for land between two ethnic groups, both with rightful claims to live there. As more Jews moved to the region, the Palestinian Arabs, who had lived there for centuries and were the clear majority, felt threatened by these immigrants. The Palestinian claim to the land is not in doubt, nor is the authenticity of their history, nor their legitimate claim to their own state. But initially the Jewish migrants did not aspire to a state, merely to live and farm in the vague “homeland.” In 1918, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann met the Hashemite Prince Faisal Bin Hussein to discuss the Jews living under his rule as king of greater Syria. The conflict today was not inevitable. It became so as the communities refused to share and coexist, and then resorted to arms.

Even more preposterous than the “colonizer” label is the “whiteness” trope that is key to the decolonization ideology. Again: simply wrong. Israel has a large community of Ethiopian Jews, and about half of all Israelis—that is, about 5 million people—are Mizrahi, the descendants of Jews from Arab and Persian lands, people of the Middle East. They are neither “settlers” nor “colonialists” nor “white” Europeans at all but inhabitants of Baghdad and Cairo and Beirut for many centuries, even millennia, who were driven out after 1948.  

A word about that year, 1948, the year of Israel’s War of Independence and the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe”), which in decolonization discourse amounted to ethnic cleansing. There was indeed intense ethnic violence on both sides when Arab states invaded the territory and, together with Palestinian militias, tried to stop the creation of a Jewish state. They failed; what they ultimately stopped was the creation of a Palestinian state, as intended by the United Nations. The Arab side sought the killing or expulsion of the entire Jewish community—in precisely the murderous ways we saw on October 7. And in the areas the Arab side did capture, such as East Jerusalem, every Jew was expelled.

In this brutal war, Israelis did indeed drive some Palestinians from their homes; others fled the fighting; yet others stayed and are now Israeli Arabs who have the vote in the Israeli democracy. (Some 25 percent of today’s Israelis are Arabs and Druze.) About 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes. That is an enormous figure and a historic tragedy. Starting in 1948, some 900,000 Jews lost their homes in Islamic countries and most of them moved to Israel. These events are not directly comparable, and I don’t mean to propose a competition in tragedy or hierarchy of victimhood. But the past is a lot more complicated than the decolonizers would have you believe.

Out of this imbroglio, one state emerged, Israel, and one did not, Palestine. Its formation is long overdue.

It is bizarre that a small state in the Middle East attracts so much passionate attention in the West that students run through California schools shouting “Free Palestine.” But the Holy Land has an exceptional place in Western history. It is embedded in our cultural consciousness, thanks to the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, the story of Judaism, the foundation of Christianity, the Quran and the creation of Islam, and the Crusades that together have made Westerners feel involved in its destiny. The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, the real architect of the Balfour Declaration, used to say that the names of places in Palestine “were more familiar to me than those on the Western Front.” This special affinity with the Holy Land initially worked in favor of the Jewish return, but lately it has worked against Israel. Westerners eager to expose the crimes of Euro-American imperialism but unable to offer a remedy have, often without real knowledge of the actual history, coalesced around Israel and Palestine as the world’s most vivid example of imperialist injustice.  

The open world of liberal democracies—or the West, as it used to be called—is today polarized by paralyzed politics, petty but vicious cultural feuds about identity and gender, and guilt about historical successes and sins, a guilt that is bizarrely atoned for by showing sympathy for, even attraction to, enemies of our democratic values. In this scenario, Western democracies are always bad actors, hypocritical and neo-imperialist, while foreign autocracies or terror sects such as Hamas are enemies of imperialism and therefore sincere forces for good. In this topsy-turvy scenario, Israel is a living metaphor and penance for the sins of the West. The result is the intense scrutiny of Israel and the way it is judged, using standards rarely attained by any nation at war, including the United States.

But the decolonizing narrative is much worse than a study in double standards; it dehumanizes an entire nation and excuses, even celebrates, the murder of innocent civilians. As these past two weeks have shown, decolonization is now the authorized version of history in many of our schools and supposedly humanitarian institutions, and among artists and intellectuals. It is presented as history, but it is actually a caricature, zombie history with its arsenal of jargon—the sign of a coercive ideology, as Foucault argued—and its authoritarian narrative of villains and victims. And it only stands up in a landscape in which much of the real history is suppressed and in which all Western democracies are bad-faith actors. Although it lacks the sophistication of Marxist dialectic, its self-righteous moral certainty imposes a moral framework on a complex, intractable situation, which some may find consoling. Whenever you read a book or an article and it uses the phrase “settler-colonialist,” you are dealing with ideological polemic, not history.  

Ultimately, this zombie narrative is a moral and political cul-de-sac that leads to slaughter and stalemate. That is no surprise, because it is based on sham history: “An invented past can never be used,” wrote James Baldwin. “It cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay.”

Even when the word decolonization does not appear, this ideology is embedded in partisan media coverage of the conflict and suffuses recent condemnations of Israel. The student glee in response to the slaughter at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and other universities; the support for Hamas amongst artists and actors, along with the weaselly equivocations by leaders at some of America’s most famous research institutions, have displayed a shocking lack of morality, humanity, and basic decency.

One repellent example was an open letter signed by thousands of artists, including famous British actors such as Tilda Swinton and Steve Coogan. It warned against imminent Israel war crimes and totally ignored the casus belli: the slaughter of 1,400 people.

The journalist Deborah Ross wrote in a powerful Times of London article that she was “utterly, utterly floored” that the letter contained “no mention of Hamas” and no mention of the “kidnapping and murder of babies, children, grandparents, young people dancing peacefully at a peace festival. The lack of basic compassion and humanity, that’s what was so unbelievably flooring. Is it so difficult? To support and feel for Palestinian citizens … while also acknowledging the indisputable horror of the Hamas attacks?” Then she asked this thespian parade of moral nullities: “What does it solve, a letter like that? And why would anyone sign it?”   

The Israel-Palestine conflict is desperately difficult to solve, and decolonization rhetoric makes even less likely the negotiated compromise that is the only way out.

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Olso Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. In the same way, the decolonization ideology, with its denial of Israel’s right to exist and its people’s right to live safely, makes a Palestinian state less likely if not impossible.

The problem in our countries is easier to fix: Civic society and the shocked majority should now assert themselves. The radical follies of students should not alarm us overmuch; students are always thrilled by revolutionary extremes. But the indecent celebrations in London, Paris, and New York City, and the clear reluctance among leaders at major universities to condemn the killings, have exposed the cost of neglecting this issue and letting “decolonization” colonize our academy.

Parents and students can move to universities that are not led by equivocators and patrolled by deniers and ghouls; donors can withdraw their generosity en masse, and that is starting in the United States. Philanthropists can pull the funding of humanitarian foundations led by people who support war crimes against humanity (against victims selected by race). Audiences can easily decide not to watch films starring actors who ignore the killing of children; studios do not have to hire them. And in our academies, this poisonous ideology, followed by the malignant and foolish but also by the fashionable and well intentioned, has become a default position. It must forfeit its respectability, its lack of authenticity as history. Its moral nullity has been exposed for all to see.  

Again, scholars, teachers, and our civil society, and the institutions that fund and regulate universities and charities, need to challenge a toxic, inhumane ideology that has no basis in the real history or present of the Holy Land, and that justifies otherwise rational people to excuse the dismemberment of babies.

Israel has done many harsh and bad things. Netanyahu’s government, the worst ever in Israeli history, as inept as it is immoral, promotes a maximalist ultranationalism that is both unacceptable and unwise. Everyone has the right to protest against Israel’s policies and actions but not to promote terror sects, the killing of civilians, and the spreading of menacing anti-Semitism.

The Palestinians have legitimate grievances and have endured much brutal injustice. But both of their political entities are utterly flawed: the Palestinian Authority, which rules 40 percent of the West Bank, is moribund, corrupt, inept, and generally disdained—and its leaders have been just as abysmal as those of Israel.

Hamas is a diabolical killing sect that hides among civilians, whom it sacrifices on the altar of resistance—as moderate Arab voices have openly stated in recent days, and much more harshly than Hamas’s apologists in the West. “I categorically condemn Hamas’s targeting of civilians,” the Saudi veteran statesman Prince Turki bin Faisal movingly declared last week. “I also condemn Hamas for giving the higher moral ground to an Israeli government that is universally shunned even by half of the Israeli public … I condemn Hamas for sabotaging the attempt of Saudi Arabia to reach a peaceful resolution to the plight of the Palestinian people.” In an interview with Khaled Meshaal, a member of the Hamas politburo, the Arab journalist Rasha Nabil highlighted Hamas’s sacrifice of its own people for its political interests. Meshaal argued that this was just the cost of resistance: “Thirty million Russians died to defeat Germany,” he said.   

[Read: Understanding Hamas’s genocidal ideology]

Nabil stands as an example to Western journalists who scarcely dare challenge Hamas and its massacres. Nothing is more patronizing and even Orientalist than the romanticization of Hamas’s butchers, whom many Arabs despise. The denial of their atrocities by so many in the West is an attempt to fashion acceptable heroes out of an organization that dismembers babies and defiles the bodies of murdered girls. This is an attempt to save Hamas from itself. Perhaps the West’s Hamas apologists should listen to moderate Arab voices instead of a fundamentalist terror sect.

Hamas’s atrocities place it, like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as an abomination beyond tolerance. Israel, like any state, has the right to defend itself, but it must do so with great care and minimal civilian loss, and it will be hard even with a full military incursion to destroy Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel must curb its injustices in the West Bank—or risk destroying itself— because ultimately it must negotiate with moderate Palestinians.

So the war unfolds tragically. As I write this, the pounding of Gaza is killing Palestinian children every day, and that is unbearable. As Israel still grieves its losses and buries its children, we deplore the killing of Israeli civilians just as we deplore the killing of Palestinian civilians. We reject Hamas, evil and unfit to govern, but we do not mistake Hamas for the Palestinian people, whose losses we mourn as we mourn the death of all innocents.   

In the wider span of history, sometimes terrible events can shake fortified positions: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin made peace after the Yom Kippur War; Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat made peace after the Intifada. The diabolical crimes of October 7 will never be forgotten, but perhaps, in the years to come, after the scattering of Hamas, after Netanyahuism is just a catastrophic memory, Israelis and Palestinians will draw the borders of their states, tempered by 75 years of killing and stunned by one weekend’s Hamas butchery, into mutual recognition. There is no other way.

Two weeks ago, Hamas declared a “Day of Rage”—an invitation for Muslims to rise up worldwide and express their hatred of Israel and its works. “Head to the squares and streets,” one of its leaders, Khaled Meshaal, said from Qatar. Arabs should bum-rush the Israeli border, and Muslims everywhere should wage war. “You know your responsibility,” he said. The time to study jihad was over. “To all who teach and learn, this is a moment for the application.”

These words brought back waves of anti-nostalgia for anyone who watched the rise of the Islamic State almost a decade ago, like hearing an old song that you hate, or smelling a madeleine covered in mold. “Hamas is ISIS,” Israeli and American officials have said repeatedly since October 7. In 2014, the ISIS version of Meshaal’s call came from the organization’s chief terrorist, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani: “If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies.” The message was very do-it-yourself: “Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him.” Adnani’s speech kicked off a year of murder and carnage.

ISIS and Hamas differ in at least this way: When Hamas asks random strangers to go spree-killing in its name, few comply. On the Day of Rage, demonstrations filled public squares in various countries, and an Israeli diplomat was stabbed in Beijing. But the Day of Rage was mostly quiet. I spent the Rage afternoon in the Old City of Jerusalem, in case an uprising reached al-Aqsa Mosque. The Old City was quiet as a crypt. In fact, it was quieter than a crypt, and I know that because I spent part of it in a crypt—the Holy Sepulchre of Jesus Christ—and it was louder inside than out. I had a friendly conversation at normal volume with a Franciscan monk from Stuttgart, who remarked that the area had not been so empty since the darkest days of COVID.

[Read: Four misconceptions about the war in Gaza]

I can understand why Hamas and ISIS might look the same to a casual observer. And I understand, too, why the differences might seem picayune and pedantic, when the blood on the floor ultimately drains to the same place. But they are not the same—and the differences between them are likely to matter as this war proceeds.

My colleague Yair Rosenberg ably summarized what Hamas wants: a “struggle against the Jews,” a rejection of all “so-called peaceful solutions,” and mass murder, as a means to those ends. These characteristics are all very ISIS-like. What makes Hamas unlike ISIS are its more normal characteristics: Hamas is an ally of Iran, Qatar, and Syria; it won a plurality of votes in a 2006 election and based its legitimacy on that win; and it believes there is a patch of land called “Palestine” that it, as the leader of the Palestinian people, should rule.

These facts are so distasteful to ISIS that any one of them would be sufficient to declare Hamas’s leaders infidels and call for their slaughter. ISIS wanted to send Hamas to hell, and it said so openly.

ISIS’s monomaniacal focus on theology and creed led it to demonize one group above all others: Shiite Muslims, the sect that dominates Iran, its Lebanese affiliate Hezbollah, and the ruling party of Syria. ISIS’s hatred of the Shia is limitless. The Shia, according to ISIS, elevate saints and members of the Prophet’s household to the state of demigods. Many Sunnis believe this. ISIS just has no sense of humor about it and says that all the Shia, hundreds of millions of people, need to be killed. This view does not lend itself to a close alliance with Syria, Iran, or Hezbollah.

ISIS thought that saint worship gave the saints a share in the indivisible lordship of God. Another way one can, in ISIS’s eyes, split that lordship is to participate in a democratic election. Participation suggests that popular will deserves deference, and not God’s word alone. To run for office—even to vote—would “nullify one’s Islam,” according to ISIS, and send the democrat down a path toward “the religion of democracy.” One ISIS ideologue wrote that democrats followed a “deviant methodology of Hamas and their ruling by man made laws.”

Finally, Hamas wants a Palestinian state. “We are with the consensus of the necessity of establishing a Palestinian state on the June 4 borders,” Khaled Meshaal said in 2007. Hamas has further goals, of course—a global Muslim government, someday—and it happily associates itself with Muslim Brotherhood outfits in other countries. But it confines its immediate ambitions to Palestine, and the creation of a state there, on the model of states elsewhere, with a seat at the United Nations and the Arab League, and other normal stuff.

To ISIS, this concept fails on two counts. First, ISIS made clear that the era of these states had passed. The only Islamic replacement was a caliphate, which should ever enlarge, with no fixed borders. And it should recognize no peers or other authority, such as the UN, or the king of Jordan. Hamas does not deny the Qatari emir’s right to rule (and if it did, the emir would rapidly evict the group’s leaders from their roost in Doha).

Second, ISIS considers Hamas a nationalist movement. To call Hamas nationalist is jarring to the ear, if you are used to contrasting it with the Palestinian Authority, Hamas's straightforwardly nationalist Palestinian rival. But to ISIS, the two Palestinian factions are equally nationalist and equally damned. Hamas’s charter “assures all the nationalist trends operating in the Palestinian arena for the liberation of Palestine, that it is there for their support and assistance.”

The ISIS objection to Hamas on these grounds is deep: merely by acknowledging that there is something called the Palestinian people, and they might live in a Palestinian state owned by Palestinians, rather than by Muslims in general, is enough for ISIS to condemn Hamas’s followers as nationalists and infidels. The first leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, promised that his soldiers’ boots “will trample the idol of nationalism, destroy the idol of democracy, and uncover its deviant nature.”

Cole Bunzel of The Hoover Institution, an authority on jihadist factions, wrote last year that ISIS's leaders have treated the Palestine issue as a distraction from the theological and apocalyptic issues they consider primary. Muslims, one ISIS article claimed, had treated the liberation of Palestine an “idol,” and failed to notice that “the apostate Hamas movement” was a bunch of polytheists. The researcher Tore Refslund Hamming summarized ISIS’s initial reaction to Hamas’s attack, and it remains in line with these views. It scolds Hamas for its alliances with apostates and Shia. It takes exception to Hamas’s respect for borders, insisting that attacks should be global.

One almost wishes Hamas were ISIS. Hamas is pragmatic in a way that ISIS never could be. ISIS, by hereticizing all its neighbors, imposed limits on its ability to form alliances and negotiate. Hamas, by contrast, works with whatever states it finds useful—chiefly Qatar and Iran. Money speaks sweetly to its leaders, and it much more closely resembles a conventional state in the alliances it forms.

Hamas can activate loyalties that ISIS could not. ISIS spent enormous effort educating its followers about the evils of democracy and nationalism—even when those followers were eager to bring their nationalist buddies on board. First, they had to be indoctrinated. For Hamas, nationalist fervor is a useful tool, and it will not hesitate to win over, say, nonreligious Palestinians by downplaying its own extremism and playing up the nationalism that is now slightly more en vogue in the Arab world. If you wave a Palestinian flag and say you love Palestine, Hamas wants you on its team. ISIS wants you dead.

[Graeme Wood: A record of pure, predatory sadism]

Hamas also has a limit that ISIS did not. ISIS, in encouraging extreme intolerance of Shia and others, lost potential allies. But it could also exploit certain allegiances that existed broadly across the Islamic world. Many, many Sunni Muslims had some awareness of the theological tradition from which ISIS drew. All ISIS had to do was refer to it, and suggest that its natural conclusion was to pick up a rock or swerve one’s truck into a crowd. ISIS meant to appeal universally to Sunnis, and Hamas doesn’t have the same universal appeal—which is why Khaled Meshaal can call for an uprising, and the Muslim world rises up very modestly, like a cake without yeast.

Israeli officials have equated ISIS with Hamas partly for propaganda purposes, to attach their enemy’s name to that of the least likable of all groups to infest the planet in recent years. But in calmer moments, they will admit that the comparison is not exact. Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, the Israel Defense Forces’ spokesperson, said at a press conference on Monday that the IDF uses the equation between Hamas and ISIS because of “the elements of media, cruelty, and manuscripts”—the last of these, I think, is a reference to the tendency of each group to opine verbosely about its own greatness. I  think ISIS actually dominates Hamas in that last department.

But in use of cruelty, and eagerness to document their crimes, the groups are indeed twins. Just don’t overdo the comparison—and be glad, mostly, that it isn’t perfect.

As Israeli authorities have documented the results of the shocking attacks launched by Hamas earlier this month, it’s become clear many of the hostages taken back to Gaza by the Islamic militant group aren’t Israeli.

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Shortly after midnight on October 8, Mohammed Zubair, a fact-checking journalist based in Bangalore, came across a video on Twitter. Less than a day had elapsed since the Hamas attacks in Israel, but the caption on the post claimed that Palestinians had shot down four Israeli helicopters in Gaza. Zubair had seen similar footage dozens of times before—from the simulation video game Arma 3, passed off as visuals from the Ukraine war.

Zubair lives in close quarters with his parents, wife, and children; his only time for solitary concentration is when his kids are asleep. As part of his daily work routine, he scours the internet for fake news and propaganda for an hour after midnight. To him, October 8 felt different: The deluge of disinformation he spotted on Indian social media left him stunned. “The scale of misinformation this time was horrific and unimaginable,” Zubair told me.

A grim video of a beheading by a Mexican drug cartel was shared as an attack on Israeli citizens. A nine-year-old photograph of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his son, taken before the latter departed for his military service, was portrayed as the leader sending his offspring to war. Footage of a funeral staged in Jordan to evade a pandemic lockdown was misrepresented as Palestinians faking deaths in Gaza. A 2014 video of the Islamic State destroying a mosque in Syria was labeled as the Israeli bombing of a Palestinian mosque.

[Read: The war in Gaza is getting remixed in real time]

For the next few nights, Zubair found himself staying up until well after dawn, debunking the cascade of disinformation through his Twitter account, which has close to 1 million followers. According to him, roughly two-thirds of the disinformation about the conflict was coming from the Hindu right, which is one of the most formidable purveyors of propaganda in the world. Dispensing with complexity and real-world consequences, the disinformation machinery of the Hindu right has been operating in an amoral zone, treating the Israel-Hamas war as little more than an entertaining spectacle happening somewhere far away, and as a windfall for its Islamophobic agenda.

The Hindu-nationalist movement has for decades complained of alienation from India’s largely liberal press, where, it claimed, its ideological vision was given short shrift. With the advent of social-media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and messaging applications such as WhatsApp, the Hindu right had the tools to undercut the mainstream press and eventually overwhelm it.

The Hindu right’s communications machinery is extensive and organized. A digital army numbering in the tens of thousands imprints the movement’s desired narrative on India’s public, regardless of the facts. In 2018, while addressing the Bharatiya Janata Party’s social-media conclave, Amit Shah, then the president of the party and the country’s home minister since 2019, boasted, “We could make any message go viral, whether sweet or sour, real or fake.”

Zubair told me that the party’s famed information-technology cell was undergirded by a much larger unofficial trolling universe. The party taps low-paid techies with Hindu-nationalist sympathies to spread its message, for example. “For them, it’s additional pocket money to communicate ideological convictions they already share,” he said.

In 2017, Zubair, along with Pratik Sinha, founded Alt News, an independent website dedicated to combatting disinformation in India. Zubair and Sinha had both trained as engineers, and they shared an obsession with the seemingly uncontrollable epidemic of fake news in the country. What began as a three-person enterprise now has close to 20 employees and bureaus in two Indian cities.

As the website’s influence has grown, Alt News has attracted the ire of the Hindu right. In the summer of 2022, Zubair was imprisoned for more than three weeks on a government charge that a satirical tweet he’d posted several years prior had hurt Hindu sentiments. Sinha, who has been a strident critic of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his role in the 2002 violence in the western state of Gujarat, left the province fearing for his personal safety. The group has nevertheless carried on with work that has become perilous in India; according to Time magazine, Zubair and Sinha were among the favorites to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022.

Since the Hamas attacks, Hindu nationalists across India have held rallies in support of Israel, while in states governed by the Hindu right, pro-Palestine demonstrators have been arrested. The pattern is a striking anomaly for a country historically sympathetic to the Arab nation’s cause. In the Hindu-nationalist imagination, Israel and India occupy parallel positions—surrounded by Muslim enemies within and without. And the Hindu right approves of a country it perceives as a hard, militaristic, technologically advanced power that is ruthless in dealing with its Muslim foes.

The movement’s identification with Israel is, in many ways, perverse. Hindu nationalism took root in the 1920s, inspired by the rise of European fascism. In 1931, B. S. Moonje, the president of the Hindu Mahasabha, was deeply impressed by Benito Mussolini, whom he met on a visit to Italy. M. S. Golwalkar, the chief ideologue of the Hindu right, thought the “Final Solution” was a good lesson for Indians “to learn and profit by.”

The timelines of India and Israel track closely with each other: India gained freedom from British colonial rule in 1947, and the creation of Israel came a year later. Both countries were gripped with anxiety upon their founding, as civil conflicts raged in the background. But India and Israel were estranged for more than four decades; formal diplomatic relations would not be established until 1992.

As the largest nation to have shaken off colonialism, India saw itself as the leader of the postcolonial world. Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first and longest-serving prime minister, viewed the Palestinian cause through the prism of that wider anticolonial struggle. India had little history of anti-Semitism: A smattering of tiny Jewish communities had prospered in the country for centuries without facing any form of persecution.

In the decades following its independence, India remained militantly allied to the Palestinian cause. In 1975, India became the first non-Arab country to grant the Palestine Liberation Organization full diplomatic status. In 1983, Yasser Arafat, the charismatic leader of the PLO, received a rapturous reception during a visit to New Delhi.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought an era of free-market economics to India and a warming of its relationship with the United States. This shift in orientation set the conditions for India and Israel to establish diplomatic ties in 1992. Since then, the two countries have moved closer. “Over the years, we have seen a shift from India being pro-Palestine to more pro-Israel today,” Suhasini Haidar, the diplomatic-affairs editor of The Hindu newspaper, told me. “The relationship has been on an upswing.” More and more Indian Jews have been exercising the right to return; direct flights to Tel Aviv began in 2018.

Last year, India joined a Middle East partnership, comprising Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States, that pledged to address shared environmental and economic goals while reaffirming support for the Abraham Accords and other normalization arrangements with Israel. (The move led to a significant worsening of the country’s long-friendly relationship with Iran.) Defense ties are central to the entente between India and Israel. India is, by some distance, the largest buyer of arms from Israel; the country is seen as a dependable source of high-grade military technology. During the 1999 Kargil War—India’s brief conflict with archenemy Pakistan—Israel came to New Delhi’s rescue with immediate military assistance. (Israel has no diplomatic relations with Pakistan.)

Over the past decade, a close personal relationship between Netanyahu and Modi, both right-wing populists embodying a muscular nationalism, has strengthened the ties between the two nations. Haidar covered Modi’s first state visit to Israel in 2017. “It was a five-day lovefest,” she told me. “Netanyahu greeted Modi at the airport. They spent every waking moment together.”

Modi has borrowed from Netanyahu’s bold national-security doctrine. In 2019, a suicide bomber attacked an Indian paramilitary convoy, killing 44 people. Modi responded by striking deep into Pakistani territory. Later that year, during a national election in Israel, Netanyahu sought to buttress his foreign-policy credentials by putting up giant banners flaunting his relationship with Modi, an honor previously reserved for American presidents.

“Israel knows that the Hindu right glorified Hitler,” Haidar told me. “Both sides try to ignore that.”

Hindu nationalists have sought to use the October 7 attack on Israel to further their own domestic ideological ends. They point to the violence in Israel to emphasize the menace of Islamic terrorism, a theme they believe will play in their favor in national elections next year. The subject has proved politically beneficial for Modi in the past: The 2019 military strike against Pakistan, undertaken on the eve of the last election, transformed a sputtering campaign.

[Read: Violence is the engine of Modi’s politics]

Now the Hindu right’s media actors, from national news anchors to itinerant social-media trolls, are playing their domestic political games in a volatile global context. To an inflamed and polarized conflict in the Middle East, the Hindu-right media ecosystem contributes mislabeled videos and fake stories, further muddying the distinctions between true events and motivated falsehoods.

Not surprisingly under these circumstances, the claims that Hindu nationalists put forward are getting taken up by interested actors in other countries. Zubair, who spars online with the Hindu right all the time, now finds himself battling far-right influencers in Israel and the United States who peddle false information originating in India. Five days after the Hamas attacks, Sinha, Zubair’s Alt News co-founder, reflected on Twitter, “Hopefully the world will now realise how the Indian right-wing has made India the disinformation capital of the world.”

Wednesday's police operation in Brussels comes one week after an Islamic extremist shot dead two Swedes and wounded a third in the Belgian capital.

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.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

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

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

Conversations of Note

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about America’s influence on the present conflict?

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

He lists them:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Swedish authorities say the suspect had previously served a prison sentence in the Nordic nation, but have not released any specific details of the crime, nor length of sentence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A U.S. intelligence officer once told me that his boss would often send back his reports about Iranian terror operations with one crucial question: Why now? Why were the Iranians hatching this particular plot now, instead of last year or five years in the future? This question is good, and the answer is the beginning of any good strategic analysis. But the analyst was frustrated. Even in intelligence, it is possible to overthink things. “Why now?” he said. “Because they are a fucking terrorist group. And all they do, every day, is think of ways to kill Americans and our allies. Sometimes that’s all there is to it.”

Hours after Hamas broke through the Gaza barrier, I asked whether we were witnessing Step One of a plan that would perhaps involve Hezbollah and a front in the north—and even further moves that would threaten to break Israeli defenses altogether. Israel rapidly reinforced its northern border to prevent that, and according to reports, Hezbollah was warned that any shenanigans would be answered with the leveling of Damascus. Such phased escalations would have had their most devastating effect if they came when Israel was at its most confused and traumatized, and before it mobilized its reserves. Now that its reservists are in place, escalation seems unlikely to happen, at least not in the coordinated strategic way that could cause Israel’s collapse. (Northern Israel went on alert tonight after reported incursions into its airspace, but this did not amount to Hezbollah’s decisive entry into the war.) As the strategist Edward Luttwak has pointed out, Israel tends to start wars badly and end them well, because its strength lies in its reserves, and activating them and getting them on task takes a few days or weeks.

What is Israel to make of an enemy that launches an attack like this, and does not have an immediate Step Two? The more details that come out about what happened this weekend, the more it seems that the simple answer could be correct. In that way Hamas’s operation resembles 9/11 even more than the sneak attack that began the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In the days after 9/11, Americans waited in fear for a Step Two that never came. It took years to realize that al-Qaeda didn’t have a sophisticated strategy at all, which is one reason its central terror networks have been obliterated.

Read: Understanding Hamas’s genocidal ideology

Indeed, it is becoming clear that Hamas achieved what is sometimes called catastrophic success: a short-term victory so staggering that its leaders did not predict it and could not handle it even as it was happening, and whose massive long-term consequences are likely dire for Hamas.

The failure to predict its own success was, in retrospect, appreciable within hours. While the killing was ongoing, the “Saqer” unit issued a video. Saqer is “falcon” in Arabic. In the video, men attach themselves to primitive parasailing rigs, little more than lawnmowers with fans and parachutes attached. They float up, then float down into Israel to kill indiscriminately.

I gulped when I saw this airborne snuff film, which contained echoes of the Islamic State: the glorification of violence, the glee at shooting unarmed and defenseless people. Even more unsettling was the evidence of forethought. Hamas had planned the operation carefully. The group provided for drone footage, cameramen, and video editors. Premeditation means planning, and planning often means strategy.

Against that evidence, however, consider the slapdash videos emerging at roughly the same time, which document war crimes on a massive scale—and are as haphazard as they are savage. But I am referring not only to slapdash production values. The videos depict a military operation that had lost its discipline. They show homicidal and sadistic disorder, an operation that began with stealth and secrecy and devolved into chaos and mayhem. Some of the Hamas terrorists were well kitted with weapons and vests. Soon they were accompanied by what appeared to be men in ordinary civilian clothes, as if they were just going about their day and saw a chance to take part in a pogrom.

The killing did not “get out of hand”: Mass killing was the point of the operation from the start. But the manner of killing, and especially of hostage taking, has every mark of a military operation that outpaced its planners’ imagination. ISIS had strict media discipline. Many of the videos depicted war crimes, but only the war crimes ISIS wanted the world to see: executions, not rapes; explosions, not extortions.

Read: This will be a pyrrhic victory for Hamas

Hamas fighters recorded their own crimes against civilians, letting their literal and figurative masks slip. Twitter sleuths have already identified suspects who may someday be tried for their crimes. On CNN, the non-Hamas Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti tried to deny that those crimes took place. Without the videos, some might have believed him. The whole sick exhibition resembles, as many have noted, a raid from a bygone era, where individual raiders are left to dole out violence as they wish, and to take their own prizes. These prizes tend to be young women, weeping and soaked in blood. If ISIS based its violence on a cartoon version of early Islamic history, Hamas is basing its violence on the advice of Conan the Barbarian: “Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.”

The hostages, now human shields, seem to have been brought into Gaza in the most disorganized manner. Some were transported in golf carts, others on motorbikes. Some were filmed, and others not. The footage leaked in real time. Those who celebrated the day’s events noted that Israeli hostages (including small children) are valuable in trade for Palestinians in Israeli prisons. Hamas announced that it intends to execute hostages—who include, it bears repeating, small children and the elderly—on camera if Israel “targets civilian homes without advance warning” in its anticipated operation. If human shields and the flesh trade were the strategic purpose of the raids, it is again noteworthy that instead of spiriting the hostages as covertly as possible into a carefully prepared network of dungeons, Hamas seems to have delivered them onto city streets before jeering mobs. Many more hostages, it appears, were taken off-camera than on. But a day that started under control, with a coordinated surprise attack by literally thousands of armed men, does not appear to have ended that way.

Step One was to infiltrate Israel and commit crimes against humanity. Step Two—well, it’s not clear what Step Two is, and even Step One is looking half-baked. Terrorists gonna terrorize. On one hand, this would be, oddly, good news for Israel in the short term. An enemy incapable of discipline and coordinated strategic thought is a weaker enemy. On the other hand, an enemy without moral boundaries, who will kill unarmed old people, but not before commandeering their cellphones to stream their murder for their grandchildren, is not a promising partner in any kind of peace process. And an absence of strategic logic is little comfort when the undisciplined psychos are still at large, holding guns to the heads of children, and hiding out among 2 million vulnerable civilians just across the border.