The war between Israel and Hamas has progressed at such speed, with body counts mounting by the hour, that it can feel like the chasm of human grief it is leaving behind has gotten relatively little attention. In Israel, the society I know better, every individual seems to be connected to someone who was murdered or has been kidnapped. In Gaza, death surely feels inescapable. I have been worried about this reverberation of pain almost from the moment I learned what Hamas had done—that a grief this overwhelming will harden people such that generations will have to pass before any political resolution feels remotely possible.

“The whole country has PTSD,” was the first thing the Israeli writer Etgar Keret texted me a week after the attack. I realized that he was the person I most wanted to speak with. Keret has long been an impish figure on the Israeli literary scene, writing very short, absurdist stories for three decades, contemporary fairy tales that are allegorical and often gut-punching. What Keret hasn’t tried to do is be the voice of Israel. Unlike a generation of writers before him who were comfortable with this role—famously, Amos Oz, David Grossman, and A. B. Yehoshua—Keret is more concerned with how humans survive being human. Possibly, this is why his stories have had such universal appeal, regularly featured on This American Life.

Since the October 7 attack, Keret has been writing what he calls “war notes”: short thoughts, observations, and outlines of stories jotted down as if on scraps of paper meant to be shoved deep in a pocket or thrown away. One of them, “Signs of Life,” found its way onto the front page of Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s largest paid daily newspaper, and a version even appeared in English on the actor Molly Ringwald’s Instagram feed. Keret composed the paragraph-long text for a young girl whose father had been killed. “Close your eyes, and allow yourself, just for a moment, to simply feel the pain. To hesitate. To be confused. To feel sorrow. Remorse,” he wrote. “You still have your whole life to spend persecuting, avenging, reckoning. But for now, just close your eyes and look inward, like a satellite hovering over a disaster zone, searching for signs of life.”

I spoke with Keret about how to find these signs of life. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Gal Beckerman: Israelis are used to dealing with terrorist attacks—it’s been a part of their reality for a very long time. But this felt different, and I’m curious if you can articulate why.

Etgar Keret: I think the experience of every Israeli citizen on that Saturday was this terrible intimacy with the war. At first there was a real lack of information, which left two points of view. Either the point of view of a family trapped in a room calling live to the television channel, saying “Send help, I can hear them murdering someone outside; they’re entering; they’re throwing a grenade here; my daughter is already dead.” And you hear this live, so you’re in this point of view of somebody who’s being massacred. And the other point of view was on Telegram, where you could see Hamas massacring people. But this was at such a primal level—not about territory, not about ideology. This was the plan, to bring the killing to us. Many times, people say to the survivors, “I can’t imagine what you felt when you were there.” But in a weird way, when I go and meet families who survived the attacks on the kibbutzim, I almost feel that I was there with them.

The idea behind putting it all on Telegram as it was happening, it was almost like presenting the pilot episode of a genocide, that every Israeli who sees would think they’re next: I’m burning this house down. I’m murdering this woman. I’m coming for you. The people they massacred, among them were Bedouin, Israeli Arabs, Filipino workers who help elderly people, Thai agricultural workers. It was about murdering in the most horrible way all the people who are in this area.

Beckerman: This must be having a profound effect on people’s psyches right now.

Keret: That’s why I described it to you as the entire country suffering from PTSD. I was on the street and I saw someone’s kid imitating the sound of an alarm siren, and his father snapped at him, and you could see that the kid didn’t understand what his father wanted from him; he was just making a sound—woo woo woo. I heard a fight between a parent and their child, and the child said, “Daddy loves the soldiers more than he loves me.” You can really feel it with children that they are aware their parents are acting strange. They don’t understand where they are. Where is their open heart?

Beckerman: What other kinds of responses are you seeing from people you know?

Keret: There is this feeling that reality has changed and that we have to adapt. And the people I appreciate the most are doing it slowly. The right answers don’t jump out at them. Here’s one story, for example.

There is this guy on my street who I like. He works with kids and teenagers, where he teaches them robotics with Legos. And the other day he calls me, and he never calls me, and he starts speaking, and in the beginning, I didn’t even understand what he was talking about. And then gradually he says that he’d been volunteering with a group of teenagers who are Israeli Arabs—Palestinian citizens of Israel. So he had been working with them for two years, and they grew very close together. And he said they were one of the most amazing groups and they won a championship. They went overseas. And he was their coach, so they were a little bit like a family. And then he called me, basically, just as he was looking at those kids’ Facebook pages. And there were photos taken from Telegram of horrible, graphic things—I don’t even want to repeat—of people being murdered in horrible ways, and he says he sees them posting them and kind of saying, Haha, you know, Yeah, shows them. And when he talked to me, I felt that on some level, he could say, I’m an Israeli; they betrayed me. But he wasn’t talking like that at all. It was a little bit like a parent discovering that his child is a sex molester or something, or enjoys watching snuff films. It was really like this searching thing, like, What didn’t I understand? How do I explain this?

Beckerman: How do you approach this as a writer, as an artist? What do you see as your tools for helping?

Keret: My parents were Holocaust survivors. And I think in many ways, they almost trained me for this moment. I had learned that the world can turn and change really quickly. One of the things my mom told me, she said, when everything’s stable, you can lean on whatever you want. But when things start shaking, lean on yourself—connect to your emotions; be reflective. And another thing that my father told me has become a mantra, even when I speak with people in the kibbutzim. When I was a child, I wasn’t the smartest kid. They had taught us about the Holocaust in school, and one day I asked my father if the Holocaust was the worst time of his life. And he said to me, “There are no good times and bad times. There are only hard times and easy times.” And he said, “All my life, I ran after the easy times. But one thing I have to admit: It was the difficult times when I’ve learned about myself most.” And I think that there is something to that. This will never justify all the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians that are happening these days.

I haven’t been writing any stories. Instead, I write these crazy notes. One was a synopsis for a story about an alien world whose energy comes from the pain of human beings, and then suddenly one of their power plants shuts down, and they say, “We need much more juice.” So they release the October 7 attacks and then we’re bombing Gaza, and then, you know, all the dark parts of town are suddenly lit.

I’m thinking that the only thing we can win from this opportunity is to reflect, to reboot. When you look at Israel and Palestine, we’ve been in the same loop pretty much since [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu came to power. Netanyahu believed in this policy of divide and conquer. And the idea is, If I keep Hamas, if I give it a little strength, it will be a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority; maybe it will be a way of stopping a Palestinian state. But this is an idea that is like a pagan ritual in which Hamas attacks us, we attack them, then we shake hands and another suitcase with money comes from Qatar. He believed that he could dance with the devil, and now this exploded in our face.

Beckerman: It seems to me, though, that what has been special about your war notes is that they look past politics to the human beings who are suffering now, at their grief.

Keret: When I visit with the survivors of the kibbutzim, I don’t talk about politics at all. I feel as if I’m coming as a representative of humanity—failed humanity, but still, humanity—in the sense that I come there as somebody who has been left intact, a guy who can laugh at a joke, some proof of existence. And I really feel that I don’t have anything to give to them, you know, talent-wise, just this idea of trying to conduct some kind of dialogue or perspective that is not hatefully reductive, but that allows for ambiguity and confusion.

Beckerman: Was this the motive behind the war notes?

Keret: It started with me just writing things that I saw. I go to meet the kibbutz people, and the woman that shows us and takes care of us, she has a baby on her hip. And she keeps going around and doing stuff with the baby on her. I have a herniated disc, so I noticed this. We were there for more than four hours, and all the time she had the baby. And when she walked us to the car, I wanted to say something nice. So I said, “Oh, your baby didn’t cry even one time; you’re so lucky to have such a baby.” “No, no, it’s not my baby,” she said. “The baby belongs to a woman whose family was massacred, and she’s not functional. So somebody said, ‘Will anyone take the baby?’ So I took the baby.” So it’s basically kind of writing those things down. Just to be sure that, later on, I won’t think I made them up, you know?

Beckerman: But you’re sharing them, like the one that Molly Ringwald shared on Instagram and that Yedioth Ahronoth, the Israeli newspaper, ran on the front page?

Keret: This particular note, the first person I sent it to was a teenager whose father was murdered. And she read it, and then told me she read it at his funeral. And it’s strange, because, you know, when I looked at Molly posting, you know, there is something about this text, because it says Look inside you; try to see what you’re feeling. Everybody thinks it’s about him or her. But I was writing for a girl whose father was murdered.

[Read: I was a child in a war]

Beckerman: Do you think there’s something about ephemeral writing? It’s not meant to be published necessarily; it’s writing almost in its purest form, where it’s providing a kind of catharsis, but it’s not about polishing it or making it perfect for someone else.

Keret: Right now, these feel like notes in the sense that there is some kind of raw energy or an attempt to remind myself of this moment. But it’s all a bunch of thoughts and anecdotes. I can tell you one. Some of the kibbutzim were really hit hard, like places like Kfar Aza had a huge massacre. But there were kibbutzim like Nir Am that were attacked, but no one was kidnapped and the attackers were held off from entering the kibbutz. And when I came to read to the children of the kibbutzim, there was this really nice dad from one of the less affected kibbutzim, and he said to me that he basically moved to the kibbutz a very short time ago from the city. And he said that when he went with his wife, he saw a beautiful house he loved, in Kfar Aza. And his wife said, “No, I want to be in Nir Am; it’s easier with the car.” And he said, “Yeah, but this is a nicer house.” And somebody said to him, “Look, you know, a nice house. Every house is nice. But it’s nicer when the people living in it are happy. Do what your wife wants.” And then he said, “I listened to my wife, and all my family is alive. And if I would have moved to Kfar Aza, I’d be in hell right now.” I think of these things because my parents were Holocaust survivors; this arbitrariness was familiar to them, the things that you did that saved you, the things that you did that would cause your death.

And the thing about kibbutzim, these are communities that don’t always respect privacy. At one gathering, a group of kibbutz members said to a young girl, “Come on, come on, tell him what you said when you heard the terrorist, when you heard him outside.” And she said, “No, no, no, I don’t want to.” They said, “No, come on, tell him, it’s funny.” So this girl told me about the moment when she heard terrorists inside the house shooting. She whispered when she told me this, but her thought was, There are so many books that I haven’t read yet. I don’t want to die stupid.

There are dozens of stories like this. So for me, I think that all those stories that I collect, they’re kind of proof of humanity. Saying, like, these are not victims, they’re people living; they’re doing pranks; they’re making fun of each other.

Beckerman: They still have humor.

Keret: It’s not even humor, because it’s not funny, but it’s acknowledging some kind of humanity in an inhuman situation. And my mom, we lived in a city where everybody was of Iraqi descent. So my mom was really one of the only Holocaust survivors in our town. And whenever they would ask her to come to Holocaust-memorial ceremonies to speak as a survivor, she would say, “I think you got it wrong. I passed the Holocaust. I don’t work in the Holocaust.” She resisted this idea of the Holocaust as a grand event, a giant jigsaw puzzle, and that her role was to be a tiny piece. She said, “No, I’m a human being. I will not be reduced to these stories. You can shoot children in black-and-white; I’ll stay in color.”

In the year leading up to the invasion of Iraq, technocrats in Washington deployed their laptops and prepared for war. Their plans for the governing structures that would replace Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship filled bulging white papers, organizational flowcharts that spilled across thick binders, and dense memoranda for managing esoteric ministries.  

Israel is on the brink of testing a far different approach to regime change. Its leaders have announced a desire to dismantle the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip. Rather than entering battle with a carefully constructed blueprint for what might follow victory, though, they are winging it, improvising in the dazed aftermath of a devastating massacre that left its military and political leadership in a state of shame and confusion. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government announced its war aims before it had fully sketched out how it might effectively realize them.

But the Israeli operation faces the same question that ultimately vexed the American project in Iraq: What comes next? Removing murderous Islamists from power solves one problem, but it creates another. Who will govern Gaza after Hamas?

Thus far, the Israelis have answered the question only in the negative. Although some of the ultranationalists in the Netanyahu government openly fantasize about reoccupying Gaza, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has said that his government won’t pursue that path, which would come at a financial, military, and moral cost that Israel apparently doesn’t want to bear. But the alternative to a postwar occupation of some sort is lawlessness, which would permit Hamas’s return, thus undermining the very purpose of the war.

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

To understand how Israel might better approach the day after, I spoke with veterans of Israel’s security establishment, including a former prime minister, a former national security adviser, and a former head of Mossad, as well as longtime diplomats and analysts in Washington. I asked them to imagine a plausible endgame for Gaza. What I found was both a surprising degree of consensus on a plan for life after Hamas, and a lack of faith in the current Israeli government’s ability to execute it.

There’s a counterfactual history of Gaza that contains a vision for a way forward. In late 2008, at the very end of his time in office, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced his plans to leave his post, to head into the political wilderness. At that moment of transition, Hamas, which had only recently won control of Gaza, launched a fusillade of rocket attacks against targets in southern Israel.

Olmert considered his options. His preferred course of action was regime change, a military campaign that would have eliminated Hamas’s leadership once and for all. But his defense minister and the military’s chief of staff rejected the plan, and let the press know of their opposition. “They already started to leak that Olmert wants to carry on the war in order to prolong, to cancel, his formal retirement and carry on,” Olmert told me. Worried that overruling the objections would look self-serving, he backed away from his plans.

Instead of ejecting Hamas from power, the Israelis bombed Gaza for 22 days, what the military referred to as Operation Cast Lead. But in the course of considering regime change in Gaza, Olmert began to discuss what might come next. “I started to talk with the Americans and the Europeans to bring to Gaza, at the end of the military operation of Israel, an international force to be a caretaker for a period of a few months. To clean it up completely, to stabilize it, and to prepare it for the incoming of the Palestinian Authority security forces.”

In some ways, this vision is more plausible today than when Olmert first imagined it in 2008. Israel has spent the past decade deepening its relations with Arab states in the Gulf, which have been unnerved by Iran’s rise and eager to collaborate with Israel’s tech sector. These countries share Israel’s abiding animosity toward the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement of which Hamas is a part, and consider it a profound threat to their own regimes.

Under the aegis of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Dennis Ross, the veteran diplomat, has co-written a proposal to have the U.S. enlist the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan to serve as Gaza’s temporary stewards, bankrolling its reconstruction and providing a security force that supplies a semblance of order. According to Ross, the goal is to turn Gaza “into a place where development and modernization is the aim, not resistance.”

It sounds fanciful, but Brian Katulis, the vice president of the Middle East Institute, who possesses a large network of contacts in governments across the region, described to me a pitch that the Israelis might use to effectively induce their participation: “‘Look, we’re gonna go after these extremists who are a threat to you. But at the end of all of this, there will be some form of a very qualified two-state solution for the Palestinians. We want you to get behind it.’ And you’d paint a vision of the Middle East that wasn’t naive and Pollyannaish, but something that matches up with where they were going already, which is regional integration.”

There are practical reasons for these countries to join. Egypt, for instance, wants its own firms to win massive construction contracts. And Olmert, who has talked with officials from these countries, believes they would be happy to be seen as Gaza’s savior. “The Israeli operation will cause outrage, so that will be an excuse for them to come in, to really start to rehabilitate Gaza,” he told me.

Still, reconstructing Gaza promises to be an enormous, thankless, expensive task, given the likelihood that it will consist of large stretches of rubble and that pockets of armed Hamas fighters will remain. “There’s a risk of terrorists coming back and overthrowing civilians,” Eyal Hulata, who served as Israel’s national security adviser during the premierships of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, told me.

The precondition of Arab states’ participation is that it would be time-limited and that it would culminate in handing over Gaza to the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank. The Israeli public is justifiably skeptical of the PA, hardly a bastion of effective governance—and lacking in legitimacy. When I mentioned the possibility of the PA playing a constructive role to Hulata, he joked, “Maybe when there’s a new president and reform and God comes down from heaven and there’s a messiah …” But then he conceded that there’s no viable alternative.

Whatever its many faults, the PA has a security force, some 31,000 members strong, trained and funded by the U.S. military. Israel does not fully trust the PA, but at least the country has a relationship with its leadership and some faith in its ability to perform basic functions. This force would need to double in size during Gaza’s period of Arab stewardship to have sufficient manpower to secure Gaza. “It’s a difficult task, but not an impossible one, given that the United States has overseen this type of force in the West Bank now for 15 years,” Michael Kopolow, of the Israeli Policy Forum, told me.

But the viability of a plan like Ross’s depends on the execution of the war. Although Arab countries might be theoretically attracted to playing the part of Gaza’s savior, their willingness to participate might erode during a brutal war that infuriates their own publics.  

And there’s a danger that Israel’s attack on Gaza will destroy the basic infrastructure of governance, complicating any postwar occupation. An Arab coalition could supply money and soldiers, but it would need to rely on Gaza’s technocratic class of civil administrators. This group has been part of the existing Hamas regime, and many are Islamists, but they aren’t gun-touting militants. Qatar, with the assent of the Israelis, has partially paid their salary. They have the competence to distribute aid, pick up trash, and run hospitals—to supply Gaza with a modicum of postwar order. These civil administrators could lend the occupying force some legitimacy in the short term.

This plan isn’t that far removed from what Gallant, the defense minister, has described as the Israeli plan—which has the army leaving Gaza at the end of the war. But Netanyahu would never be able to implement it. His government has long sought to cast aside the PA to appease the settlers and religious zealots in his coalition, who regard it as a primary obstacle to their biblical vision of Greater Israel.

The problem for Netanyahu is that the PA would never want to assume power in Gaza without substantially bolstering its position in the West Bank. It would almost certainly demand stringent constraints on settlement expansion and promises of greater autonomy, measures that Netanhyahu and coalition partners abhor. Gidi Grinstein, who runs the Reut Group, a think tank in Tel Aviv, told me that Netanyahu is once again his own worst enemy. “With his policies on the one hand in the West Bank, Netanyahu is destroying policies on the other hand in Gaza.”

Given that Israel doesn’t want to occupy Gaza—and that its current government would reject its transfer to Palestinians—the question is, does Netanyahu truly want a total victory? In the most plausible (and most familiar) scenario that I heard described, the Netanyahu government prematurely ends its invasion, under pressure from the Biden administration, to restore stability in the region and in the global economy.

Israel could leave Gaza, claiming a partial victory. It could point to evidence that it decimated Hamas leadership, dismantled bunkers, and destroyed its enemy’s arsenal. The Israelis might not achieve their stated goal of regime change, but they will have demonstrated their power and restored a measure of deterrence.

Forced to contend with the continued reality of Hamas, Israel would scramble to erect a raft of pragmatic security measures to further insulate the nation. There’s talk among Israeli officials of surrounding Gaza with a thick buffer of bulldozed territory, perhaps a mile wide. One former official suggested to me that it might be a kill zone, where any Palestinian who set foot would be shot on sight. Such insulation would be accompanied by the implementation of long-standing plans to upgrade security at the Rafah border crossing into Egypt. This would include investment in state-of-the-art technology to screen vehicles headed into Gaza. Israel might demand that international inspectors, preferably Americans, oversee the inspection of incoming traffic.

[Read: Israel is walking into a trap]

Other Israelis suggested that the campaign to destroy Hamas wouldn’t end with the ground invasion. Israel would continue to kill Hamas leadership with the dedication depicted in the movie Munich. “No matter if they are in Gaza or if they are in Alaska, okay, they have to be eliminated,” Olmert said. Zohar Polti, who ran the Ministry of Defense’s bureau of planning, described how Israeli might keep dispatching special forces into Gaza to act on intelligence to foil attacks on Israel. “That’s very similar to what we’re doing in the cities of the Palestinians, after we see that the Palestinian security services are dealing with, let’s say, a loss of control.”

But Efraim Halevy, a legendary head of Mossad, vented his anxieties about any failure to achieve Israel’s stated aims. Although he abhors the Netanyahu government—and doubts the wisdom of its strategy and the competence of the officials charged with executing it—he told me that failure would likely further demoralize the public, which was severely fractured before Hamas’s invasion. Failure to eradicate Hamas would make it nearly impossible to reassure refugees from the townlets and kibbutzim in the south—200,000 of them, by one count—to return and rebuild. In the recriminations that would inevitably follow the war, the political anger provoked by Netanyahu’s judicial reform might return, only this time stoked by a sense of total despair.

Many Israelis told me that they were haunted by a photo of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, taken after the end of Operation Guardian of the Walls in 2021. After 11 days of Israeli bombing, Sinwar emerged into the daylight, sat in a plush armchair surrounded by rubble, and posed for the camera with a defiant smile. “If you fail in this, it could well mean that what you have intended to achieve, you achieve the opposite,” Halevy told me. “You will be the one who ends up with no cohesion and no will to fight.”

In the midst of such gloom, I also thought I detected muffled hints of hope. Israelis almost universally invoked the unexpected aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the other cataclysmic lapse in the history of the nation’s defense, so searing that it scrambled the politics of both Israel and its neighbors. Some of the Jewish state’s old enemies finally accepted its existence. Fervent hawks in Israel became ambitious peacemakers. No Israeli was willing to stake their reputation on the rise of a new alignment, but they all wanted to believe in its imminence, beyond the carnage.  

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.

Reports say the eight men, who worked at a private firm in Qatar, were arrested last year.

Qatar has a unique role leading sensitive negotiations but it comes with a huge risk.

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

Because I don’t.

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

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

[Read: What is Israel trying to accomplish?]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Understanding Hamas’s genocidal ideology]

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

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

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

Benjamin Netanyahu has always known what he wants his political epitaph to be. “I would like to be remembered as the protector of Israel,” he told the journalist Fareed Zakaria in 2016. “That’s enough for me.” The longest-serving Israeli prime minister has repeated this refrain for more than a decade, in English and Hebrew. It is the core case he has made for himself to the Israeli people, part of a winning electoral argument begrudgingly credited even by some of his critics. You may not like me and you may not trust me, he would imply, but only I can keep you safe.

“The ability to spot danger in advance and prepare for it is the test of a body’s functioning,” Netanyahu once said on an Israeli talk show. “The Jewish nation has never excelled at foreseeing danger. We were surprised again and again—and the last time was the most awful one. That won’t happen under my leadership.” He concluded to applause: “This is what the state of Israel expects from me, and this is what I’ll do.”

Today, following the worst anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust, that promise has been irrevocably broken. The myth that Netanyahu assiduously cultivated about his leadership stands exposed as a self-serving fiction, and he will be forever remembered as the security hawk who presided over the greatest security failure in Israeli history. He will never be elected prime minister again.

That’s because the October 7 attack did not just strike at the heart of one politician’s mythos but at the core of his country’s founding ethos. The Hamas massacre has been likened by many to 9/11. But its existential import for Israelis is far worse. When President George W. Bush presided over the response to the worst terrorist attack on American soil, the country rallied behind him. Most voters did not think his administration could plausibly have anticipated such an audacious plot, and gave Bush a pass for not stopping it. But Israel was founded precisely because the Jewish people have long experienced devastating assaults—and the state was meant to prevent them.

[Keren Yarhi-Milo and Tim Naftali: The lessons Israel failed to learn from the Yom Kippur War]

In other words, unlike America, Israel exists to stop the next pogrom. But over the past two weeks, its people have been subjected to an endless stream of images that evoke Jewish history’s worst traumas: parents killed in front of their children, kids cowering in closets, families burned alive, terrified young people hiding in piles of leaves while death squads circle around them. “I’m a child of Holocaust survivors,” one Israeli woman told reporters. “I grew up hearing stories of the camps. I thought those were the worst stories. These stories are worse. And I think that’s the hardest thing for me. I never thought I would live to see something worse than the stories I grew up with.”

Americans could not imagine a coordinated mass-casualty attack on civilians; Israelis imagined it every day. Netanyahu told them that as long as he was in charge, they would not have to worry. It was a lie.

Israelis do not forgive failures to secure their safety. Golda Meir left politics after the debacle of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Israel lost nearly 3,000 soldiers following a surprise Egyptian and Syrian attack. Her name is reviled by some in the country to this day. But what happened on October 7, 2023, was worse than what happened on October 6, 1973. Meir lost soldiers—people who had purposely put their lives on the line. Netanyahu lost civilians—the people the state and its soldiers were supposed to protect.

The polls reflect the public’s outrage. In response to Hamas’s slaughter, Israelis have rallied around the flag, but not around Netanyahu. In one survey of Jewish Israelis, 86 percent of respondents—including 79 percent of government supporters—said that the catastrophic assault from Gaza was a failure of the country’s leadership. Fifty-six percent said that Netanyahu should resign after the current war ends. Electoral polls are even bleaker for the prime minister. The latest survey has the current hard-right coalition shrinking to just 42 seats out of 120, compared with 78 for the opposition—an astonishing collapse. Only 29 percent of voters said that they felt Netanyahu was still fit to be prime minister.

This anger has reverberated in the streets. Victims and survivors have berated government ministers during hospital visits to the wounded. The headquarters of Likud, the ruling party, was defaced with fake blood and pictures of Israeli hostages. Netanyahu himself reportedly aborted a speech to army reservists after some in the crowd heckled him. Eighty percent of Israelis want him to publicly take responsibility for the events of October 7, something he has not done.

Israelis have good reason for their disillusionment. Seen in hindsight, the litany of Netanyahu’s failures is long. By his own admission, he purposely propped up Hamas as a counterbalance to the more moderate Palestinian Authority in order to keep the Palestinian public divided and prevent a negotiated two-state solution. In partnership with Washington, Netanyahu facilitated the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars from Qatar into Gaza in an attempt to buy quiet from Hamas. Intelligence officials now believe that some of this money was used to fund the group’s terrorism. Netanyahu also increased permits for Gazans to work in Israel; some of the permit holders may have provided intelligence used to plan the attacks. In 2011, the prime minister released more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners—including convicted mass murderers—in return for one Israeli soldier held hostage by Hamas. This decision encouraged further kidnapping attempts, culminating in the successful abduction of some 200 Israelis this month. One of the prisoners released in 2011 was Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza today.

And the rot runs deeper. Since returning to power in December, Netanyahu has spent months shredding Israel’s social solidarity and projecting weakness to its foes. He provoked unprecedented domestic unrest with his coalition’s deeply unpopular attempt to gut Israel’s judiciary, pitting the country’s people against one another. He fired and then unfired his defense minister for warning that the plan was causing divisions that were undermining Israel’s security. And when the prime minister wasn’t hobbling his more competent officials over their internal dissent, he was empowering incompetent ones. He spent years driving out career civil servants and replacing them with ideological cronies. To maintain his tenuous hold on power while on trial for corruption, he personally facilitated the entry of a far-right alliance into Parliament, then gave its inept and inexperienced members key positions. This is how Israel ended up with Itamar Ben-Gvir, an anti-Arab demagogue who was rejected by the Israeli army because of his radicalism, as national-security minister.

Put another way, the disaster of October 7 was the overdetermined outcome of years of Netanyahu’s poor choices. In the end, the man known as “Mr. Security” failed by his own standard, and he failed to fulfill the fundamental expectation of his fellow citizens.

Whether Barack Obama or Donald Trump, the greatest politicians are great self-mythologizers: They tell a story about themselves and compel others to believe it. For decades, Netanyahu was the pied piper of Israeli politics, and his promises of security were music to Israeli ears. But today, that song is drowned out by air-raid sirens and the cries of murdered Jewish children echoing from the soil.

Last Tuesday, some of the world’s most prominent news organizations spread word about a terrible tragedy unfolding in the Gaza Strip. Images of a blast at a hospital were beginning to circulate on social media. The Palestinian health authorities claimed that Israel was responsible for the death of some 500 civilians. Because the details were extremely murky, it was impossible to tell who had caused the explosion or how many people had died. And yet some of the most reputable names in news media sent push alerts that broadcast Hamas’s claims far and wide.

“Hundreds feared dead or injured in Israeli air strike on hospital in Gaza, Palestinian officials say,” wrote the BBC. “At least 500 people were killed by an Israeli airstrike at a Gaza hospital, the Palestinian Health Ministry said,” wrote The New York Times.

Along with others, these news outlets ascribed these details to Palestinian authorities, thereby doing the minimum to ensure that their readers would understand where the claims originated. But both push alerts would have led reasonable readers to conclude that these statements must basically be true. Both talked about “Israeli” air strikes. Both uncritically reported that many hundreds had died. Neither explained in their push alerts that the health  authorities—and all other authorities—in Gaza are controlled by Hamas, the Islamist organization that had brutally killed more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians, in a recent surprise attack on Israel.

[Peter Wehner: The inflection point]

News of the supposed Israeli strike quickly had huge real-world consequences. The king of Jordan canceled a planned meeting with President Joe Biden. Mass protests broke out in cities across the Middle East, some culminating in attacks on foreign embassies. In Germany, two unknown assailants threw Molotov cocktails at a synagogue in Berlin. A wider regional war seemed to inch closer.

But as more details about the blast emerged, the initial claims so credulously repeated by the world’s leading news outlets came to look untenable. Israel released what it said were recordings of Hamas operatives discussing the blast as the misfire of a rocket launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. (The group has denied this version of events.) A live video transmission from Al Jazeera appeared to show that a projectile rose from inside Gaza before changing course and exploding in the vicinity of the hospital; the Israel Defense Forces have claimed that this was one of several rockets fired from Palestinian territory. Subsequent analysis by the Associated Press has substantially corroborated this. In addition, pictures of the site taken by Reuters showed a small crater that, according to independent analysts using open-source intelligence, is inconsistent with the effect of munitions typically used by Israel. It came to look doubtful that the missile had directly hit the hospital; as a BBC team investigating the blast reported, “Images of the ground after the blast do not show significant damage to surrounding hospital buildings.” Even the death toll itself has come to be in doubt: U.S. intelligence agencies now estimate that 100 to 300 people died—a horrific loss but one that is inconsistent with the claims made by Hamas.

By Wednesday morning, a fresh consensus started to emerge among experts. “The evidence this morning, though NOT conclusive by any means, points more towards a failed rocket launch than an Israeli air strike,” Shashank Joshi, the defense editor of The Economist, posted on X (formerly Twitter). By evening, U.S. security agencies had analyzed the available evidence and come to an even more certain verdict: “We feel confident that the explosion was the result of a failed rocket launch by militant terrorists and not the result of an Israeli airstrike,” Mark Warner, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote on X. Officials in France and in Canada concurred. A number of observers who are critical of Israel and had at first condemned the attack subsequently acknowledged that initial reports had likely been mistaken.

[Hussein Ibish: The reckoning that is coming for Qatar]

Finally, this morning, The New York Times acknowledged the extent of its error in an editors’ note. “The early versions of the coverage—and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert and social media channels—relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified,” the newspaper admitted. “The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was.” And it concluded: “Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation.” (CNN and other news outlets have not yet followed suit in apologizing for their own, very similar, missteps; a BBC statement on the topic applied only to a correspondent’s words, and not its push alerts or the initial reporting on its website.)

The cause of the tragedy, it appears, is the opposite of what news outlets around the world first reported. Rather than having been an Israeli attack on civilians, the balance of evidence suggests that it was a result of terrorists’ disregard for the lives of the people on whose behalf they claim to be fighting.

In the absence of major new facts pointing to a different conclusion, this means that the Palestinians who died at the hospital in Gaza should be added to the already grim death toll for which Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad bear responsibility since the surprise attack on Israeli civilians. That judgment also makes the misleading reporting by the world’s most influential journalistic outlets one of the most consequential media failures in recent history. As Ted Lieu, a progressive member of the House of Representatives, posted on X, the “news organizations not only got it wrong” in spectacular fashion, but in “their rush to judgment caused other nations to wrongly interpret the hospital blast.”

[Listen: What’s next in Gaza]

Such a glaring example of major outlets messing up on a very consequential event helps explain why trust in traditional news media has been falling fast. As recently as 2003, eight out of 10 British respondents said that they “trust BBC journalists to tell the truth.” By 2020, the share of respondents who said that they trust the BBC had fallen to fewer than one in two. Americans have been mistrustful of media for longer, but here, too, the share of respondents who say that they trust mass media to report “the news fully, accurately, and fairly” has fallen to a near-record low.

Journalists and media executives understandably tend to apportion blame for their failings elsewhere. If people no longer trust quality outlets, the fault must lie with the “misinformation” they encounter on social media. But such an easy allocation of responsibility won’t work when, marching in unison, major news organizations seem to have fouled up in as blatant a way as they have over this past week.

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One week ago, Taylor Swift’s concert film, The Eras Tour, opened in theaters across the country. Within days, it had become the most successful concert film of all time, grossing more than $90 million in North America on its first weekend. I spoke with my colleague David Sims, who covers culture for The Atlantic, about what the success of the movie says about the future of movie theaters, and what made right now such a good time for Swift to release it.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Biden’s inflection point Another domino falls in Georgia. You can learn to be photogenic.

Hard to Repeat

Lora Kelley: There has been a lot of dire news about the future of movie theaters in recent years. Are blockbuster theatrical releases for movies such as Barbie and The Eras Tour a sign that theaters are on the up again?

David Sims: These hit movies are a sign of rebound. There has been a general sense of positivity regarding ticket sales lately, especially after sales reached historic lows early in the pandemic. Barbie and Taylor Swift, in particular, appeal to young people, whom Hollywood is obsessed with getting into the theater.

Audiences are responding to stuff that is a little different from the cinematic universes and franchises that Hollywood has been very reliant on for the past 10 years. Interest is declining in superhero movies and long-running franchises. But rather than that meaning the end of big ticket sales in Hollywood, other movies are filling the gap.

Lora: What can a movie theater offer that streaming cannot?

David: The Eras Tour could easily have been released as a TV series on a streaming service. But Taylor Swift, quite smartly, seemed to realize that the group experience is very crucial to her fandom—We’re all in it together; we all get all the references; we understand the contours of the tour and the eras—and that this would be best experienced in a movie theater. The magic of the theater experience is always going to be that you’re in a dark room with lots of other people who are enjoying it, and you all enjoy it together.

Taylor Swift partnered with the theater chain AMC, which is basically functioning as a distributor. If you distribute through a studio, it takes a large cut of your money. Instead, Swift went to AMC and said, Why don’t you just put this in theaters directly, and I’ll get about 57 percent of ticket sales, which is a good deal. The amount of pure profit you can make with a successful movie remains staggering. Releasing something on streaming or home video, you can make money. But there’s a reason movie-theater releases have been the primary model for 100 years.

Lora: Taylor Swift is obviously extremely famous, and she’s proved skilled at mobilizing her own following. Is her approach to this movie replicable, or is this a one-off phenomenon?

David: Taylor Swift is possibly peerless in terms of universal recognition and cross-generational appeal. In three days, Eras became the most successful concert film ever made. But I don’t think this project is a one-off. There are other celebrities who have great means who can try things like this. The concert film of Beyoncé’s tour, Renaissance, is coming out in theaters on December 1. Her tour is over, so it’s more of a capper. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift has a tour that is still happening—it’s hard to go see it, and it’s expensive, but it’s still going on.

Concert movies do not usually do very well at the box office. But for musicians, there’s basically no downside to it. You are paying very little to film your concert. You put it in theaters, and then you get the money. And people who couldn’t see your concert live get to access it, which is nice.

Also, Hollywood has been on strike for almost six months. A lot of movies have been cleared out, because the striking actors can’t promote them. Taylor Swift’s team came in and basically said, If we put out a movie right now, we will be the biggest story of the month in cinema. The timing part of this may be hard to repeat.

Related:

Taylor Swift did what Hollywood studios could not. The 22 most exciting films to watch this season

Today’s News

Jim Jordan lost his third vote for speaker of the House and is no longer the party’s nominee. President Joe Biden is requesting $106 billion in emergency funding from Congress primarily to aid Israel and Ukraine, as well as for U.S. border security. Kenneth Chesebro became the second former Trump lawyer to plead guilty in the Georgia-election case.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Louise Glück wrote with authority, Emma Sarappo explains. The poet loved using myth, history, and legend in her verse Work in Progress: Turns out you can tame inflation without triggering a recession, Rogé Karma writes. Will the Federal Reserve accept the good news?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Guy Le Querrec / Magnum

AI Is About to Photoshop Your Memories

By Charlie Warzel

Google’s latest Pixel phones, the ad wants you to know, come standard with a suite of new generative-AI photo-editing tools. With a few taps, you can move people around in the frame like the mom does with her son, or use the “Magic Eraser” to get rid of a pesky photobomber. “Best Take,” a feature that snaps a bunch of images at once and isolates each person’s face, allows you to merge photos so that everyone appears to be perfectly looking at the camera at the same time. Combined, these features mostly reflect the photographer’s intent at the time of capture. But is the end result … real?

Of course, there’s nothing particularly scandalous about editing a family photo. Anyone sufficiently trained in Photoshop has been able to do something similar for decades; likewise, smartphones and photo apps have long offered the ability to touch up a picture until it’s transformed, even “yassified.” Yet tools like Magic Editor will likely soon become standard across devices, making it dramatically easier to perfect our photos—and thus to gently rewrite small details from our lives.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The reckoning that is coming for Qatar Yes, the U.S. can afford to help its allies. If you ever speak in public, follow this advice.

Culture Break

Guy Le Querrec / Magnum

Listen. The late, great American composer Carla Bley’s 1977 record, Dinner Music.

Watch. Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of David Grann’s best-selling Killers of the Flower Moon (in theaters) explores the rot beneath the myth of American exceptionalism.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

As Israel and Hamas sink deeper into conflict, Doha finds itself in a delicate position. As a long-standing backer of the Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar has huge influence over the movement’s Palestinian affiliate, Hamas. That offers a significant opportunity in the short run. Doha’s deep connections with the Gaza-based Islamist group make Qatar a central player in the current diplomatic game. But for exactly the same reason, Doha faces the looming risk of being called to account over its record of support for such radical Islamist groups, and especially for Hamas.

Doha has a long history of serving as a broker, and in the past, this has often worked well for the Gulf state. By allowing the Taliban to establish a Doha office, Qatar provided the U.S. with a channel for negotiations with the group. Doha thus facilitated the agreement to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan concluded under the Trump administration and carried out by President Joe Biden in 2021.

Qatar hopes to play a similar role now. Doha has provided a home for much of Hamas’s exiled political bureau, including its de facto leader, Ismail Haniyeh. Qatar has also been a major underwriter of Gaza’s economy ever since Hamas seized control of the area, in 2007. With the consent of Hamas’s adversaries—including the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, the United States, and even Israel—Qatar has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars each year to the enclave. Among other things, that cash covered the payroll for government employees, which put food on the table for a crucial number of Gazan families despite a virtual blockade by Israel and Egypt.

[Read: Israel is walking into a trap]

At the same time, Qatar has long been a key U.S. partner in the Middle East. And before the Abraham Accords, which normalized Israel’s relations with some of Qatar’s Gulf Arab neighbors, the main Israeli diplomatic presence in the region was a trade office in Doha that operated for several years in the late 1990s. In the present crisis, neither Egypt nor Turkey has displayed enthusiasm for acting as a go-between with Hamas. So Qatar is trying to maintain its privileged position of being a useful interlocutor to both sides.

But that diplomatic advantage may prove short-lived. After the hostage situation concludes—whether it ends in tragedy or with negotiated releases involving possible prisoner swaps—Qatar is likely to face severe pressure and criticism. Because of the brutality of its attack on southern Israel, Hamas has forfeited even the pragmatic acceptance it formerly had among Western countries, which now widely view the group as an extreme terrorist organization akin to al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Qatar’s dalliance with Islamist groups has long been the primary means for Doha to project influence in the Arab world, particularly through state support for Al Jazeera Arabic. After 2011, Qatar came to believe, and Al Jazeera Arabic confidently predicted, that a wave of Islamist governance would sweep in with new Arab democracies. Instead, the elected Brotherhood government in Egypt proved even more unpopular than the Hosni Mubarak dictatorship. Islamists lost elections in Libya and Tunisia. In Syria, the Brotherhood was reduced to the margins.

[Listen: What’s next in Gaza]

With the Brotherhood’s decline in prestige and power, Qatar’s bet has yielded precious few returns. And now Hamas’s disastrous rebranding in Western eyes could well force a reckoning with Doha’s irresponsible strategy. The Qataris may be forced to choose between their precious ties to Washington and their long investment in Hamas. American pressure could even push Qatar to expel the Hamas leaders and cadres living in Doha.

But Qatar still holds one trump card: its connection to the Pentagon. During the regional dispute that began in 2017 and resulted in a three-year boycott of Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt, President Donald Trump initially accused Doha of financing terrorism. But the Department of Defense saw things very differently: Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base, which is home to the forward headquarters of U.S. Central Command, was the hub for the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Eventually, the Pentagon’s perspective prevailed, and the U.S. pressed for an end to the boycott.

Qatar’s leverage is straightforward. The country financed the building of, and largely funds the maintenance of, the base at Al Udeid, yet it agreed to allow the U.S. to operate the facility under de facto extraterritorial jurisdiction—as if Al Udeid were sovereign American territory and not Qatari. Small wonder, then, that the Defense Department regards this as an irreplaceable asset, strategically vital for U.S. interests.

[Read: How the Palestinian Authority failed its people]

In the probable reckoning, Doha will again rely on this indispensability to avoid accountability. But after Hamas’s horrifying killing spree in southern Israel, even that may not be enough. And it will not help Qatar’s case that its official statement after the October 7 attack on Israel put the whole blame for the bloodshed on Israel and did not criticize Hamas. This was in stark contrast to almost all of the other Gulf Arab countries.

Ultimately, Qatar could actually benefit from being compelled to abandon a failed regional policy of backing religious and populist radicals that, like Hamas, have proved to be reckless allies willing to embrace political violence. Other regional powers—notably Turkey and Iran—have made highly effective use of foreign proxies, but they have done so by exerting far more direct control than Qatar has attempted or could exercise over the Brotherhood-aligned movements. For too long, Doha has danced between its Islamist allies and its Western and Arab partners. The music just stopped.