An Israeli man has been arrested for desecrating a Muslim cemetery by hanging the head of a donkey.

Jerusalem’s Christians describe a bleak Christmas season as they pray for the people of Gaza instead of celebrating.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.

My fondness for the acknowledgments section of books runs very deep. Sometimes I flip to them first, though I try to hold off on this guilty pleasure. I love the way they can reveal a writer’s true, gushy self beneath the veneer of authorial control and style, reminding us of the human being who struggled to bring these pages into existence. But acknowledgments also do something else: They show us what a collaborative act it is to produce a book, if only because we get to hear about the writer’s mom, long-suffering spouse, and loyal dog. And, occasionally, an author reveals the identity of some other important but unseen people: agents, editors, publicists, book-cover designers, fact-checkers.

In an essay this week on Dan Sinykin’s book about publishing, Big Fiction, Josh Lambert evokes this wider workforce. Sinykin’s book sets out to show how conglomeration among publishing houses has affected the kinds of novels we read. Though Lambert isn’t convinced that Sinykin has achieved that objective, he does applaud the effort at further transparency around how books are actually made, and offers this intriguing suggestion: If movies and TV shows include extensive credits, why shouldn’t books? “Would it really be so difficult to have a credits page that acknowledges the contributions of the folks responsible for layout, marketing, and proofreading?” he asks.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

The perfect antidote to an age of angsty literature Our forests need more fire, not less. Seven books that actually capture what sickness is like Zombie history stalks Ukraine.

The proposal is a modest one. And Lambert isn’t the first to consider it; the idea has been bubbling for years. In 2022, Lisa Lucas, who oversees the Pantheon and Schocken imprints, tweeted out her support for a credits page along the lines of what Lambert suggests: “It’s a damn shame that most people don’t know how many people it takes to make a book!” One author who took up the challenge was Malcolm Harris, whose book Palo Alto we wrote about earlier this year. He asked for a page that would list everyone who’d been involved in the creation of his book, from the legal counsel to the publicity intern. “I think everyone who works on a book should be able to point to their name in it forever, and I’m proud that’ll be the case with this one,” Harris tweeted. Molly McGhee recently did the same for her first book, crediting her agent, marketing team, contracts manager, and writing teachers.

The idea hasn’t exactly taken off, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Authorship is commonly imagined as an act of lone genius, as if a book emerges from the brain of a writer like Athena springing fully formed from the head of Zeus. Don’t get me wrong: The process of writing a book is, for the most part, a very solitary one—I’ve written two books, and each one required whole years of sitting in rooms by myself, knowing that it was entirely up to me and my will as to whether a book would come into being. But this is only part of the struggle, and many, many people are involved in getting a book into a reader’s hands.

An editor—especially a brilliant one, as I’ve been lucky to have—pushes against your ideas, hones your writing, demands that you express yourself with the utmost clarity. The publicity-and-marketing team helps frame how the book will be received. The art director designs a cover that will determine what a reader will feel before they even flip to the first page. The best copy editors can give the book the smoothness of a taut bedsheet. Foreign-rights agents make sure that people in other countries can read your words. It would take nothing away from an author to give them all their due—in fact, in an industry with sadly little remuneration, it would only add to these publishing professionals’ feeling of investment in the creative work they’ve helped bring into the world.

The holiday season is a good time to stop and consider all of the unnoticed labor that makes a book possible. These people, along with my favorite writers, have my gratitude for the pleasure they’ve brought me this past year, even if their work doesn’t always get the appreciation it deserves.

Illustration by The Atlantic

The Invisible Forces Behind the Books We Read

What to Read

Middlemarch, by George Eliot

In 1871, when Eliot was writing Middlemarch, Britain had recently undergone some 40 years of social upheaval. The First and Second Reform Acts enfranchised men of lower means and pedigree, broadening the voting public to include more than just the wealthy and noble few. But her mammoth novel takes place in the lead-up to that change, exploring the tensions between rich and poor, rural and urban, old and new. The story follows Dorothea Brooke, a wealthy and pious 19-year-old orphan living with her sister and her uncle, and Tertius Lydgate, a sweetly naive and eager doctor, as each falls in love, marries, and discovers that a lot follows the expected happily-ever-after. Subplots abound, of course, as this is a lengthy and intricate “Study of Provincial Life” (the novel’s subtitle), but the love triangles, political maneuvering, and intricate gossip in the titular English town make for a thrilling read. This is a book about wonderfully and frustratingly messy people. — Ilana Masad

From our list: Six classic books that live up to their reputation

Your Weekend Read Photo illustration by Chantal Jahchan. Sources: Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty; Os Tartarouchos / Getty; fotograzia / Getty.

Everyone Should Be Reading Palestinian Poetry

Recently, while reading the cookbook Jerusalem, I was struck by an observation made by its co-authors, an Israeli chef and a Palestinian chef, in the introduction. Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi write that food “seems to be the only unifying force” in Jerusalem, a city claimed as the capital of both Israel and Palestine. Despite their cuisine’s fraught history, the chefs consider the preparation of meals to be a uniquely human act—an unspoken language shared between two people who might otherwise be enemies.

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Recently reading through the cookbook Jerusalem, I was struck by an observation made by its co-authors, an Israeli chef and a Palestinian chef, in their introduction. Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi write that food “seems to be the only unifying force” in Jerusalem, a city claimed as the capital of both Israel and Palestine. Despite their cuisine’s fraught history, the chefs consider preparing meals to be a uniquely human act—an unspoken language shared between two people who might otherwise be enemies.

I was flipping through Jerusalem rather than scrolling through news updates about the Middle East. I found comfort in the co-authors’ attitude of community, especially when many conversations on social media, in mainstream U.S. coverage, and in real life threaten to turn the lost lives of the Israel-Hamas war into abstractions. I quietly leave the room whenever the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is casually discussed at work or among friends, because I do not want to treat death as a watercooler topic of conversation. I am the son of Palestinian immigrants, and I have family in Gaza. I do not want to be a spokesperson for Palestinian suffering.

Although reading about violence in Palestine does little more than cause me pain and frustration, poetry allows me to access the place’s wonder and complexity. And, judging from the surge in people who are sharing Palestinian poetry, the same is true for readers across the globe. The poems of Mahmoud Darwish, Mosab Abu Toha, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, and other Palestinian writers have gone viral on TikTok, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). The hashtag #palestinianpoetry has more than 206,500 views on TikTok, and the hashtag #mahmouddarwishpoetry has 17.8 million views. Both the Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets have been sharing works by Palestinian writers, not to mention the countless posts I see among my own family and within my various literary circles.

[Poem: ‘Younger Than War,’ by Mosab Abu Toha]

As a poet myself, I suspect that there are many reasons for the form’s increased popularity. Poetry can communicate confusion and suffering because it isn’t a medium for resolving problems. It is better suited for affirming humanness, piercing through politicized news narratives, and—during tense historical moments—producing memorable, shareable lines. Of course, a line offers only a glimpse of a poem’s whole. It cannot, and does not, aim to make the argument of the entire poem—if a poem makes an argument at all. But in a few carefully considered words, poems can create enough electricity to spark surprising feelings in a reader: curiosity, pain, empathy. How important, especially now, to connect audiences to poems that generate such emotions.

Consider just the title of the widely shared poem by Noor Hindi, “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying.” Hindi’s title, which acts as its first line, bluntly concretizes the Palestinian cause and turns it into an issue of human rights—her people’s rights. The poem’s urgency is apparent in its language, starting with a verb, that verb, and ending with an image of death. The title is a desperate, angry cry for help.

The speaker positions herself against the “colonizers” who have the freedom to “write about flowers.” She, however, aims to “tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks / seconds before becoming daisies.” The broken line and its comparison of sturdy, unliving tanks with fragile daisies point to the same conclusion: The speaker’s people are precious nothings compared with the forces around them. The speaker can’t talk about children without talking about flowers, a strangely beautiful dehumanization. She is, in ways she can’t quite articulate, like the colonizers her poem stands against.

Many of Hindi’s lines carry their emotional weight in language and images immediately accessible to the reader. When Hindi writes, “Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons,” it stings with the same venom as “I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.” I’ve seen each of these lines shared individually, retweeted, and highlighted as a synecdoche for the poem.

No wonder some fear poetry’s viral power. Fadwa Tuqan, a Palestinian feminist and poet, famously used her poetry as an act of political resistance from the 1940s until just before she died, in 2003. The Guardian published an obituary featuring an exaggerated claim that the former Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan once likened reading a single Tuqan poem to facing 20 enemy fighters. A more accurate telling of the event comes from Samar Attar’s Debunking the Myths of Colonization: The Arabs and Europe, which notes that Dayan wanted a group in Israel to rescind its offer inviting Tuqan to recite poetry in the West Bank. The defense minister’s justification, according to Attar: “One of her poems is capable of creating ten resistance fighters.” Regardless of the number of combatants poetry can allegedly spur into battle, the point stands: Words have influence, and poetry’s words, dense with meaning and softened by emotion, can generate real change.

The October 7 attacks and the current war in Gaza are harrowing examples of the consequences of undervaluing human life. “Imagine extending … equal humanity to everyone, every time,” Fady Joudah, a prolific Palestinian poet and essayist, wrote in a recent LitHub article. The politician-poet and activist Hanan Ashrawi shows what it means to extend humanity to some of war’s most vulnerable victims in her poem “From the Diary of an Almost-Four-Year-Old.” Though her poem borders on sentimentality, Ashrawi achingly describes how the world looks to a toddler whom a soldier unremorsefully shoots in the eye. The poem’s power comes from its final lines, in which the child dispassionately recounts hearing about a nine-month-old who has also lost an eye and wonders if the same soldier was responsible. The speaker empathizes with the younger victim, expressing herself with a precociousness that might be sweet if it weren’t devastating:

I’m old enough, almost four,
I’ve seen enough of life,
but she’s just a baby
who didn’t know any better.

The 3-year-old’s matter-of-factness and innocence produce a painful irony. Palestinian toddlers, Ashrawi suggests, are so accustomed to violence that they’ve become experts in it. Having “seen enough of life,” they are emotionally prepared for their own death—in some ways, more so than adults.

[Read: The nameless children of Gaza]

Indeed, much of Palestinian poetry emphasizes the voices of the injured and silenced. Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s “Running Orders,” an enormously popular poem, describes an unconcerned assault on life, and in doing so, insists that all life is valuable—the message of many Palestinian anti-war poems. Tuffaha’s poem is told from the perspective of a parent preparing to flee her house after receiving a warning call. I find the poem especially heartbreaking amid the current conflict, during which the Israel Defense Forces have seemingly chosen to forgo the knock-on-the-roof policy, a warning to allow noncombatants to escape (to where? some poets and human-rights groups ask) before soldiers drop a bomb in a civilian-dense area.

For Tuffaha’s narrator, though, the experience of receiving a warning is new: “They call us now, / before they drop the bombs.” The break at the end of the opening line separates the politeness of a phone call from the community-shattering violence that follows. The attacks isolate the speaker from her neighbors even as she is surrounded by them, and her city becomes a “prison by the sea / and the alleyways are narrow / and there are more human lives / packed one against the other / more than any other place on earth.” These short, claustrophobic lines pile injustices on top of one another, offering no way out of this war-imposed jail cell.

The speaker, swept up in her family’s mistreatment, starts minimizing her own suffering. She begins speaking in the voice of the caller and the other combatants: “It doesn’t matter that / you can’t call us back to tell us / the people we claim to want aren’t in your house / that there’s no one here / except you and your children / who were cheering for Argentina / sharing the last loaf of bread for this week / counting candles left in case the power goes out.” Tuffaha affirms the family’s dignity by emphasizing the ordinariness of their lives. And in showing the casual destruction of their home, Tuffaha’s closing lines strike with the force of a missile. They empty the sensitive reader in the same way the speaker’s house has been gutted:

It doesn’t matter
that 58 seconds isn’t long enough
to find your wedding album
or your son’s favorite blanket
or your daughter’s almost completed college application
or your shoes
or to gather everyone in the house.
It doesn’t matter what you had planned.
It doesn’t matter who you are.
Prove you’re human.
Prove you stand on two legs.
Run.

The only solution her family has is to run, but 58 seconds isn’t enough time to grab the myriad objects that, together, make up their life. Ironically, to prove they are human, they have to run, shoeless, like animals. And because “the borders are closed / and your papers are worthless,” the best the family can hope for is some sort of foreign pity as refugees, lost and permanently away from home. Najwan Darwish, one of Palestine’s most prominent poets, ends his poem “I Write the Land” with the notion that he, and many other Palestinians, eventually will be erased: “My words are everywhere / and silence is my story.” To him, erasure is the inevitable outcome of Palestinian struggles for sovereignty, and his story alone is insufficient to bring effective change.

Poetry at its best can stun readers into silence, but also give the silenced a voice and a way to share that voice. Reading Gazan poets, many of whom have recently been killed, I’m struck by the words they leave behind, and their unignorable humanness. News reports and interviews of course have the potential to share the perspective of the disenfranchised. But poetry conveys the humanity and personality of an interview without its opportunism; it offers the heart of a news article without burdening itself with data. Better still, it doesn’t have anything to prove. It sits like a monument to injustice—unflinching, chipped, told in broken pieces that together are something like art.

One must feel for the fishermen of Cape May, New Jersey. They had a fair grievance and took it to court—all the way to the Supreme Court. But along that journey their lawsuit became something else: a way to possibly remake administrative law. They just want to make a living catching herring, but the justices are more interested in using their case to weigh in on a different legal question entirely.

This is the story of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, one of the blockbuster cases on the Court’s docket this year. The case involves a federal law requiring fishermen to “carry” government inspectors as observers on their fishing boats in order to monitor compliance with a federal agency’s rules. That regulator—the National Marine Fisheries Service—recently interpreted carry to mean “pay for” and began charging fishermen roughly 20 percent of their revenue to pay the monitors’ wages. A group of fisheries sued but lost in the D.C. Circuit, which said that because of what’s known as the Chevron doctrine, the court was obligated to defer to agencies’ “reasonable” interpretations of “ambiguous” statutes.

So, the fishing companies took their case to the Supreme Court, and their lawyers (from the conservative Cause of Action Institute) put two questions in front of the justices. First, they asked if the D.C. Circuit applied Chevron correctly. The fishermen think that the statute is not ambiguous and that the agency’s interpretation is not reasonable. If the Supreme Court were to agree, the fishermen would not have to keep paying the monitors. The second question the fishermen’s lawyers asked was much more provocative: Is it time for the Court to overturn Chevron—or, at least, rewrite it to avoid outcomes like this?

[From the January/February 2024 issue: A MAGA judiciary]

The justices took the case, but only in part: The Court will hear only the second question. The fishermen will have their day, but they can’t bring one of their best arguments with them. Now the only way the fishermen can win is if the Supreme Court overturns a 40-year-old precedent; whether the fishermen are right about the ambiguity of the statute or the reasonableness of the agency’s interpretation is no longer part of the case.

That the Court will decide Loper Bright without considering the first question may seem odd, but it’s unfortunately all too common. The Supreme Court almost never decides entire cases. Justices pick the questions they want to decide, and this time, they decided they wanted to reconsider a pillar of administrative law that has stood since the Reagan administration. But picking the law you want to change and then changing it sounds a lot like a job for Congress, not a court.

No wonder many Americans today worry that the Supreme Court plays too large a role in setting national policy. In the past decade, the Court has decided cases dealing with abortion, President Barack Obama’s DAPA program, and same-sex marriage without actually considering the full cases. Instead, the Court picked the questions from those cases that it wanted to answer—the policy it wanted to make—and focused on those. This self-assigned power to choose its questions rather than judging entire cases is perhaps the most important part of the story of how the Court became such a powerful policy maker. It is certainly the most overlooked.

At its inception, the Supreme Court had almost no control over its docket. Like virtually all common-law appellate courts before it, the Court heard all cases because it was required to do so and decided them in their entirety. It was explicit that its duty was “to give judgment on the whole record”—no cherry-picking of questions.

By 1891, the Court was hopelessly behind on its work, so Congress stepped in. It created the Circuit Courts of Appeals—lower federal courts that handle initial appeals from federal trial courts—and limited the Supreme Court’s mandatory docket. But this limitation created a new problem. What if the new circuit courts disagreed? Or what if they misinterpreted the law in cases that the Court was no longer obligated to hear?

Congress provided a solution. Ordinarily, the new circuit courts get the final word, but there are two exceptions where the Supreme Court gets to speak: First, circuit courts can “certify”—that is, send—specific questions to the Supreme Court. The justices may either answer the question or bring the whole case up for the justices to decide in full. Second, if the circuit court does not certify a question, the Supreme Court could grant certiorari and decide the entire case itself. This distinction between discrete questions emerging through certification and full cases coming before the Court through certiorari has been explicit since 1891 and remains enshrined in statutes today.

By 1925, the Court was once again falling behind. The justices went to Congress and asked for even more control over their docket. Congress obliged and made more of the Court’s docket discretionary. Still, as before, both Congress and the Court tied certification to individual questions and certiorari to entire cases. Chief Justice William Howard Taft said certiorari extended “to the whole case and every question presented in it.” Justice Willis Van Devanter assured Congress that he and his peers understood that granting writ meant “full consideration of the case.”

But two years later, the justices went back on their word. In a case called Olmstead v. United States, the Court granted certiorari and expressly limited its review to constitutional questions, ignoring other issues involved in the case. Over time, this practice became more and more common, and in 1939, the Court wrote its own rule giving itself power to limit its review to specific questions in all cases.

[Adam Serwer: The constitution is whatever the right wing says it is]

Today, this little-known rule has major consequences. In cases dealing with abortion (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health), marriage equality (Hollingsworth v. Perry, United States v. Windsor, and Obergefell), President Obama’s DAPA program (United States v. Texas), class actions (Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes), the appointments clause (National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning), campaign finance (Citizens United), and the recognition of Jerusalem (M.B.Z. ex rel. Zivotofsky v. Clinton), the Court preselected its questions. The justices eliminated questions they didn’t want to answer and added some they did. But they never actually did what courts are supposed to do: sit down and decide a full case.

Even when the justices don’t add or subtract questions, the Court’s choose-your-own-adventure approach to its docket invites activist lawyers to bring up questions that allow the justices to make new laws. In many cases, when the Court isn’t actively manipulating the docket, all that means is that the lawyers guessed right about what the justices wanted to talk about. But if they guess wrong, the justices can and often do fix things. As in Loper Bright, the Court is typically primarily interested in legislating, and the case itself is barely an afterthought.

According to both text and history, the Supreme Court should be deciding full cases, but that’s not what the Court does today. Despite the Roberts Court’s stated emphasis on the original public meaning of law, the justices seem comfortable abandoning text and history when it comes to the statutes that govern the Court’s own behaviors.

Holding others to a standard the justices don’t apply to themselves is galling, but targeting questions creates another big problem. It transforms the Court from a tribunal deciding cases into a super-legislator with little accountability. Unsurprisingly, this legislative power divides and politicizes the Court. It also devalues the flesh-and-blood people whose very livelihoods depend on the Court’s decisions.

Many litigants swear to take their case all the way to the Supreme Court. Cape May’s fishermen got one question there, but not their whole case. If the Court decides to leave Chevron as is, they can make no further appeal, even though perhaps their strongest argument—the argument that carry cannot be reasonably interpreted as “pay for”—was never considered by the Court. I wouldn’t blame these fishermen for asking whether the Supreme Court is even a court at all. Courts are supposed to decide full cases after hearing all the arguments. That’s what the law says the Supreme Court is supposed to do, but that’s not what the Supreme Court does. It hasn’t for a long time.

On the day after Israel’s stunning victory in the June 1967 war, Yitzhak Rabin reportedly wrote about the need to “turn the fruits of this war into peace.” Rabin, who as chief of staff had masterminded the strategy and tactics that made the Israel Defense Forces so remarkably successful, understood that a conflict that ends without peace is merely an interregnum until the next war breaks out. Israeli and American policy makers should heed this lesson as they think about the day after the war against Hamas in Gaza.

Significant differences already exist among the key parties. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talks of taking on a long-term security responsibility in Gaza, and has seemingly ruled out the return of the Palestinian Authority to govern the territory. American President Joe Biden rejects any extended Israeli presence and argues for resuming efforts to create a two-state peace settlement. The U.S. secretary of state, Antony Blinken, wants a revitalized Palestinian Authority to resume control over Gaza. The PA’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, agrees with Blinken but argues that this can happen only in the context of a broader deal. These leaders might find a way to paper over their disagreements in the immediate aftermath of the war, but missing is a common vision for how to transform the fighting’s outcome, which will probably see Hamas’s military capabilities and political ambitions sharply curtailed, into some more durable arrangement between Israel and the Palestinians.

[Graeme Wood: Why the most hated man in Israel might stay in power]

When thinking about the day after, we need to be mindful that actions now will affect options later. Israel’s stated intention to destroy Hamas—an unlikely prospect—suggests continued fighting, a worsening situation on the ground, and even more civilian casualties. Hamas’s survival strategy is to hang on and emerge as intact as possible when the fighting stops. These war aims, as mutually exclusive as they are, could amount to the same result: a very prolonged conflict. That makes the task of bringing the fighting to an end all the more urgent, once Israel has severely degraded Hamas’s capabilities.

Part of that task is to decide what arrangements cannot work and should be discarded—namely, the 2020 Trump plan. That proposal included permission for Israel to annex up to 30 percent of the West Bank; a Palestinian state in a number of noncontiguous cantons in the West Bank; and a de facto right for Israel to decide when the Palestinian state could come into being. Not only is that plan a nonstarter, but its reappearance as the basis for talks, as some have suggested, would kill a peacemaking process before it even began. Instead, the parties need to embrace complexity and hard choices.

A phased diplomatic strategy is required, one that operates on two tiers. The first tier involves providing security inside Gaza after the fighting stops and setting up a transitional government until the Palestinian Authority can take over; the second tier includes a serious, sustained effort to bring an end to the occupation and the beginning of a two-state solution. Both elements in this diplomacy will require American leadership to convene and organize representation from Israel, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Arab Quartet (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates), as well as major European allies. Support from and consultation with the African Union and other regional bodies could lend credibility and broader consent to the effort.

The first focus must be on rebuilding Gaza to ensure security and stability, and to pave the way for restoring governance by the Palestinian Authority. This process will be laborious and delicate, and will take time to achieve. First comes deescalation, providing monitoring and accountability for an armistice, when that takes effect. In turn, the security arrangements must enable the restoration of basic law and order. Alongside this, humanitarian assistance must resume, with as much aid as possible delivered as quickly as possible. This delivery of aid must also assure all parties of its integrity—that it is supplying civilians, not resupplying terrorists. An international conference may be required to facilitate donor countries’ pledges of funds for the reconstruction of Gaza.

[Graeme Wood: The theory of Hamas’s catastrophic success]

This initial phase can draw on the thousands of Palestinian civil servants and police officers employed by the Palestinian Authority. Because they will not agree to operate under Israeli supervision, a United Nations body or other international group will need to oversee the provision of basic civic services. Israel will likely retain a military presence in Gaza during this phase, but will need to start planning a complete withdrawal of its forces.

The second phase will involve stabilization measures—for example, providing security mechanisms to reassure Israel that it can begin that withdrawal, and reconstruction projects that enable civilians to return to rebuilt homes. In this phase, a contact group representing the PLO, the Arab Quartet, and the UN should meet to discuss the principles and timeline of a transition to Palestinian Authority rule in Gaza. This group could also spin off council bodies: one to oversee public safety and order, and another to oversee the allocation of goods and services.

A third phase would see the Palestinian Authority begin to take over the governance of Gaza. The contact group’s members would need to establish an interim ruling body, agree on a schedule and process for handing over full authority to the PA, accelerate reconstruction, and explore a constitutional convention. The group would also begin a process of disarming Hamas fighters and reintegrating them into civilian life.

The transition from one phase to another will need to progress on an agreed timeline, so that Palestinians see their lives being rebuilt and Israelis see credible governance and security emerging.

[Read: Netanyahu should quit. The U.S. can help with that.]

Even if this ambitious agenda for Gaza meets this series of goals, that will not be enough to gain wide support among Palestinians and Arabs of other countries. If these transitional measures are the only thing happening, Palestinians will see this as a return to an unacceptable status quo: Israeli occupation and blockade, and the denial of their freedoms. A narrow approach limited to Gaza’s reconstruction will end up building an elaborate sand castle that will wash away as soon as the terrorists regroup, rearm, and renew attacks—this time against both the Palestinian Authority and Israel.

The only approach to “the day after” that could prove enduring is to turn the postwar situation into an opportunity for a political settlement that would end the occupation and give Palestinians an opportunity to achieve self-determination. In parallel to the stabilization and reconstruction efforts in Gaza, a peacemaking process must get under way.

President Biden should begin it by delivering a major speech laying out America’s approach to this process. He should declare his determination to move toward a two-state outcome and outline the significant actions the U.S. will undertake. These would include reversing the malign actions of the previous administration: reestablishing the American consulate general in East Jerusalem, to operate independently of the U.S. embassy, and reopening the PLO’s office in Washington, D.C. He should also announce an increase in assistance to the Palestinian Authority to help it redevelop its capacities. He should demand that Israel crack down on settler violence in the West Bank, desist from enabling evictions of Palestinians from residences in Jerusalem, and stop new settlement activity (beyond the blocs that have been identified in previous negotiations to remain Israeli territory in return for “swaps” of land in Israel of equal size and value).

The president should also use this address to insist that the Palestinian Authority end welfare payments to families of terrorists. He must also emphasize the PA’s responsibility to eradicate organized violence and prevent the emergence of violent groups in areas it controls. And he should push for the PA to hold fresh elections throughout the occupied territories as early as the reconstruction of Gaza practically permits. The president should close by stressing his administration’s renewed commitment to the principles established by previous rounds of diplomacy in the Israel-Palestine dispute since the Clinton parameters in 2000.

Biden’s plan, if he adopts this approach, will be unlikely to gain immediate support from the Israeli government, and may not from the Palestinian Authority either. But it will create a firm basis for American policy and diplomacy, laying down the terms for negotiations when they can be resumed.

As the Palestinian Authority’s governance in Gaza is being restored, the U.S. needs to turn back to the effort to help Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations normalize their relations with Israel. The U.S. could also signal a willingness to recognize Palestinian statehood provided that the PA shows it can reform itself and prove capable of running an independent nation.

All of this will be very hard to achieve. The Palestinian Authority barely governs in the West Bank, and assuming the responsibility of governing Gaza and controlling security there will be extremely challenging. The elderly President Abbas has shown no inclination to reform the PA, hold elections, or plan for who might succeed him. As for Israel, the postwar period will be preoccupied with a political reckoning over the intelligence and security failures that preceded October 7. Netanyahu will try to hang on to power, and he and his extremist coalition will return to their agenda of overhauling Israel’s judicial system and paving the way for annexation of the occupied territories. Israelis in general are unlikely to favor freezing settlements or engaging in a peace process with the Palestinians.

[Read: Why these progressives stopped helping Biden]

Soon also, Biden will be drawn into a hard-fought battle for reelection. The policy on Gaza and peace that I’m proposing will be controversial among American supporters of Israel; Republicans would probably seize on parts of it to attack the president. Some in Biden’s camp will see little near-term upside in adopting this approach during an election year. But Biden has exercised bold diplomacy in other parts of the world, and it can work here too—advancing the prospects of peace, ensuring Israeli security, and addressing Palestinian grievances. This will help rebuild support for his presidency among disaffected domestic constituencies as well as among foreign allies.

Only such a transformational approach holds the possibility, slim as it is, of changing the disastrous trajectory of Israeli-Palestinian relations. We all know what that looks like: continued occupation, repression, radicalization, and conflict, ensuring an endless cycle of the trauma and tragedy that these two peoples have experienced these past months. We have the choice to try something different.

Recently the Hamas politician Fathi Hammad went on TV to proclaim that the organization’s next step would be to declare a caliphate—a concept that the Islamic State had all but trademarked for its use in jihadist circles. The caliphate would be based in Jerusalem. Hammad also took aim at Muslim rivals (another ISIS obsession) and called for the ouster of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a secular figure. By invoking caliphates and gunning for Abbas, Hammad turned toward a different kind of warfare, religious not only in rhetoric but also in its specific goals. The shift was so noteworthy that it was featured by MEMRI, the monitoring service that specializes in publicizing the most cringey and embarrassing rhetoric from Arab media.

Not much has been said since October 7 about the religious nature of the current war. Anshel Pfeffer, a columnist at Israel’s Haaretz, broached this touchy subject in a recent article. “None of the international coverage and commentary on Hamas’s massacre in Gaza border communities, and the war it triggered, has addressed its religious aspects,” he wrote. Hamas’s fighters incessantly invoke God and use religious language, and at some point one must “take them at face value” and “listen to what they actually say.” Like Zionism, he wrote, Hamas is “rooted in religion,” and that makes the present conflict “fundamentally religious.”

Religion is a sticky and intractable kind of dogma, and if the war is religious, the prospects for negotiated resolution are poor. Luckily, Pfeffer’s contention—that Hamas is religious and therefore the conflict should be understood religiously—is incomplete. I have seen the same videos as Pfeffer and have listened to all the “allahu akbar”s from the Hamas raiders, and their gleeful references to killing “Jews” (not “Israelis”). But listening to what someone says and taking them at face value are often contradictory pursuits. And a close listen to Hamas suggests that although the organization is religious, its religiosity is flexible.

[Read: Understanding Hamas’s genocidal ideology]

Hardly a minute passes without Hamas supporters draping themselves literally or figuratively in Islamic idioms. Arabic conversation is filled with little stock phrases that mention God, and that through constant use can lose their religious sense. (English does the same: Few Americans have God on the mind when we say goodbye, literally “God be with ye.”) Even by this standard, though, the group’s religious references are frequent, and far from perfunctory. The GoPro videos from the massacre include footage Hamas could not have planned to leak, and it shows killers using religious language with one another, while alone, and with their dying breath. In one case the bearer of a GoPro is shot in the chest, and as his lungs fill with blood, he issues a last, wet, gurgled prayer.

I don’t doubt the sincerity or fanaticism of the death-rattle prayer, or of Hamas’s official statements. I don’t suggest that its leaders are or were insincere; Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’s founder, was not sneaking BLTs and Coors Lights after Friday prayers. But for an organization, or a movement, to have “religious roots” means something more than sincere rhetoric. And relative to some other jihadist groups, Hamas has shallow religious roots.

A religious group can bend its political goals to accommodate the demands of religion, or it can bend its religion to accommodate the demands of messy, modern politics. An example of the first is ISIS, which Israeli and American officials have understandably but inaptly compared to Hamas. I wrote previously that ISIS hates Hamas and has marked the group’s leaders for death. One source of ISIS’s enmity was Hamas’s willingness to adopt policies that ISIS considered without support in Islamic scripture or history. ISIS really did try to break free of the bonds of modernity and replace the law and politics of today with forms recognizable to Muslims 1,000 years ago: a caliphate, a criminal code straight from the Quran and the example of the Prophet Muhammad, even modes of dress and grooming. Adherence to these policies cost ISIS dearly. When the group seized new towns, the locals often found its ways weird and unpleasant. When ISIS took sex slaves, in what it described as emulation of the practices of the Prophet and his companions, even many of its supporters objected, and pretty much the entire world, including most Muslims, united against ISIS.

By contrast, Hamas’s political program tends toward modernization. The organization mentioned a caliphate as an afterthought. In its infamous charter, Hamas brings up Islam constantly, but only in broad terms. It lists as its first objective “discarding evil, crushing it and defeating it,” and goes on to say that Islam should reign and its land revert to its rightful owners. (It invokes, somewhat tendentiously, the Islamic legal concept of the waqf, an irrevocable religious endowment. Palestine as a whole was a waqf, it says, and thus it can never be ceded to non-Muslims, “until the Day of Resurrection.”) Islam, the charter says, is a “way of life”—a widely shared view among Muslims, but one that says little about whether Ismail Haniyeh or Mahmoud Abbas should be in charge, and what the punishment should be for drinking wine. The charter states that Hamas “draws its guidelines from Islam”—a contrast with ISIS’s deriving its actual laws from Islam.

[Graeme Wood: Hamas is not ISIS]

Hamas tries to take old concepts and mold them to fit new ones, including democracy, a form of government alien to Islam—and every other ancient religion—in its original form. Early Muslims counted as a key political concept bay’a, or loyalty oaths, and ISIS adopted these, whereas one Hamas ideologue likened multiparty democracy to a “modern bay’a,” as a way to legitimate the newfangled political concept. The group’s politics are replete with these concessions to life in a modern state. Even the supposed irrevocability of the waqf turns out to be flexible: The group has suggested that it would accept the existence of some version of Israel, and well before the Day of Resurrection.

What distinguishes a movement with deep, as opposed to shallow, religious roots is whether its actions make any sense, except in light of religious motivation—or whether, when you subtract the religious element, the movement stays pretty much the same. On the one hand, political violence by Palestinians is not an exclusively Muslim activity (Christians and atheists have partaken), and Hamas’s terrorism fits within that ecumenical tradition. Even Hammad, in his teaser about a caliphate, tried to keep his tent extra-large. He appealed to Islamic concepts, but he also appealed to a universal sense of self-respect, saying that he was “not even talking in terms of being Muslim, but in terms of being noble.” On the other hand, if Hamas were drained of its Muslim character, one would have a hard time imagining those youngsters running around the Gaza envelope, hoping to end the day with a bloody prayer on their lips. Non-Muslims have courted glorious and (in their minds, at least) heroic deaths just as Muslims have. But the particular headlong rush toward martyrdom does seem characteristic of jihadism.

The religious rhetoric is there; it is sincere; it is foundational. And yet the action on the basis of that rhetoric remains not completely religious in character. I see ample room for motivation by chauvinism, anti-Semitism, and, yes, legitimate political grievance. Fathi Hammad’s comments suggest that the religious roots are sinking deeper. But they haven’t hit bedrock yet.

The march had initially been approved despite concerns over potential violence during the war on Gaza.

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Donald Trump has hastened America’s decline into a “post-truth” society that privileges feelings over reality, my colleague Megan Garber has argued. I spoke with Megan about her  contribution to “If Trump Wins,” our new project considering the threat that a second Trump term poses to American democracy. We discussed Trump’s manipulations and the double-edged power of emotion in American life.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump says he’ll be a dictator on “day one.” Selling art to the rich, famous, and inebriated Why these progressives stopped helping Biden If Trump Wins: A plan to outlaw abortion everywhere

‘Our Truest Ideology’

Lora Kelley: You write that every story Donald Trump invents—“every wild claim, freed from the dull weight of accuracy—doubles as permission: You, too, can feel your way to your facts.” Why, for Trump’s followers, is that permission to let feelings overpower the truth so compelling?

Megan Garber: Facts require a certain amount of effort. They require learning and patience and work. Above all, facts require humility: a recognition that your personal reality is not necessarily everyone else’s reality, and that there are truths that exist beyond you and your preferences.

There’s something very compelling about someone who says, You know what, you don’t need to do that. If you feel that the world is a certain way, Trump’s pitch goes, then the world can be a certain way. Trump himself models that, and gives his followers permission to share that idea. Take the Big Lie, for example. Trump did not want to have lost the election. And so he said, I did not lose the election. There is, perversely, this almost elegant simplicity to it. Feelings are so much easier than facts.

Trump is also a brand, and he’s so good at tapping into the idea that emotion is all there is. He lives out the notion, in politics, that the customer is always right. Whatever the voter wants to be true in a certain way can be true.

Lora: What does Trump’s continued ability to grip the country tell us about Americans’ urge to be entertained?

Megan: Americans defer to entertainment so much, not just in the world of culture but in the world of our politics. Much of the way Americans are taught to think about politics is incredibly superficial—an approach that equates politics with an ongoing show where the biggest responsibility is not to democracy but to entertainment and distraction.

Trump does that even for the people who are not his supporters. So in this very tragic way, he captures something that is broadly true, I think, about American culture: that entertainment is our truest ideology and the truest value that we share. The media, especially early on, treated Trump as a performance. And that treatment generally underplayed all of the terrible things he represents.

Lora: At the same time that Trump is approaching feelings in this bad-faith way, other people in America—including activists who are fighting against Trump and his policies—are centering feelings in their politics too. What place do emotions occupy in American life when people of all political leanings are using them for their own ends?

Megan: Emotions have always been part of politics. And emotions can be tools of justice or weapons of cruelty. Part of what is so tragic about Trump, and so insulting, is that the possibility of emotions in politics can be so strong. Trump simply proves the worst of it.

But the other side of that is: We are also seeing more and more empathy. With the affordances of social media, people have voices and can turn their feelings and their experiences of the world into shareable pieces of media. Movements can spread so much more quickly now; people can speak up and say, This is what it feels like to be me. This is what it feels like to be told that you have fewer rights than other people do.

Related:

The truth won’t matter. We’ve lost the plot.

Today’s News

Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, who was ousted from his position as speaker of the House in October, will retire at the end of the year. Police responded to reports of a shooting on the University of Nevada at Las Vegas campus. The suspected shooter has been located and is dead, authorities said. Senate Republican leaders blocked a legislative package that would have provided aid to Ukraine. Evening Read Zak Tebbal

Against Algebra

By Temple Grandin

(From 2022)

One of the most useless questions you can ask a kid is, What do you want to be when you grow up? The more useful question is: What are you good at? But schools aren’t giving kids enough of a chance to find out.

As a professor of animal science, I have ample opportunity to observe how young people emerge from our education system into further study and the work world. As a visual thinker who has autism, I often think about how education fails to meet the needs of our very diverse minds. We are shunting students into a one-size-fits-all curriculum instead of nurturing the budding builders, engineers, and inventors that our country needs.

Read the full article.

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For most of my career, working as a psychiatrist in Jerusalem, I have run locked wards, serving people in distressed states who cannot remain in the community because of their need for round-the-clock care.

This life, indeed much life in Israel, feels precarious right now. The first air-raid sirens in more than a week have begun sounding in Jerusalem as I write. The comparisons between the Hamas attack of October 7 and the Holocaust reveal the extent to which our complacency has been shattered.

[Read: Younger than war]

That the residents of Gaza have it far worse is undeniably true. My 6-year-old son drew a self-portrait depicting himself supine, a bomb descending upon him, and I got upset. I would not trade places with the families carrying their bloodied children into the emergency rooms of Gaza, with no place but the floor to rest them between the wounded and dead. Just writing these words, I cry. And I’m outraged that Hamas could knowingly, willingly, invite this retribution for the atrocities it inflicted.

The foreign reader, then, will be excused for assuming that the life of Arabs and Jews within Israel is marked by unremitting mutual enmity and lust for vengeance. Such hostile feelings are present in generous doses, but much more is happening on the ground. And the locus of positive change is often the workplace.

The Israeli public health-care system, in which I work, is perhaps the most integrated sector in the country. About half of the recipients of medical licenses are Arabs (including Druze), far beyond their percentage in the population. Graduating nurses, pharmacists, and even dentists are more likely to be Arab than Jewish. Hospital patients can expect to be treated by multiethnic professionals. And at times like these, when many Jews have been called to the war for reserve duty, the role of Arabs, who generally do not serve in the military, becomes even more prominent.

A couple of generations ago, medicine was the ticket into respectable American society for a generation of Jews, eventually opening up other possibilities to them as well. Something similar may be happening for Arab Israelis, who remain underrepresented in other professional fields, such as tech, but among whom health care is a popular career choice for ambitious and capable students. The Israeli education system for Arabs has long been separate and unequal, in terms of both funding and results. The government has made an investment in changing this. Doing so will bring us closer not only to becoming a just society but to being a peaceful one as well.

I spend my work days (and occasional nights) within this cultural tapestry. I have worked in psychiatry since 1986, when I left New York in order to make my home in Jerusalem. Two years ago, I was given responsibility for directing the most active inpatient unit in Jerusalem, at Kfar Shaul Hospital, which is located on a scenic campus on the grounds of what was once the Arab village of Deir Yassin, the site of a reported 1948 massacre of Arab villagers by Jewish (not yet Israeli) troops. The place is steeped in history, which most manage to ignore in their daily activities. Yet the staff in my ward is highly integrated. Three of the five psychiatrists are Arabs. The head nurse and close to half of his staff are Arab. About a quarter of our patients are Arab, mostly from East Jerusalem. The staff coheres. We are a workforce operating in partnership to accomplish shared goals.

The warmth among workers belonging to these two tribes, Arab (overwhelmingly Muslim) and Jewish, is real and heartening. We attend one another’s family weddings, and some of us share vacations. We allow ourselves to poke good-natured fun at one another’s religious practices. Just recently, when a Christian patient smuggled a quantity of forbidden ham into the ward, we thanked him for uniting Jew and Muslim against a common enemy.  

My unscientific impression is that among acquaintances who work alone or only with their co-religionists, the level of fear and suspicion is higher. For example, an acquaintance in synagogue, a young man home for Shabbat from his reserve duty, spoke with me excitedly about the current situation. (I think that Judaism is more tolerant than the other monotheistic religions of schmoozing during services, but I hope not to get fact-checked on this point.) We were talking about the Hamas attack in the south and the Hezbollah threat in the north when he told me solemnly, “There is a much bigger threat looming, which we are going to have to overcome.”

“Iran?” I asked.

He shook his head dismissively. I was stumped.

“Bet Tsefafa,” he explained, referring to a nearby Arab neighborhood, which is well integrated into Jerusalem. He doesn’t work with Arabs in his civilian life. If he did, I don’t think that he would have believed this.

A war waged between our co-religionists so nearby—traversing the distance between Gaza and Jerusalem takes a car barely an hour and a half, or a missile a minute and a half—threatens to rip apart this fragile social fabric.

I was concerned that, since the outbreak of war, my hospital staff was not speaking openly about their feelings. Morning greetings had become mere formalities and were often rapidly concluded with formulaic wishes that we hear good tidings. Could we do better?

With this in mind, I convened a staff meeting one afternoon where 20 people, split almost evenly along ethnic lines, sat around a table and gingerly began to talk about coming to work at a time of destruction. Participating seemed easier for Jews: They felt more confident about their place. Many remarked that coming to work was like coming to family, all of us united in the service we provide. The Arabs were more hesitant at first. They knew that outside the workplace, they bore a burden of suspicion. One managed to tell us, haltingly, about friends in Gaza who opposed Hamas but now were fleeing with their young children from the bombarded north to the uncertain safety zones in the south. Another described his doubts about returning to the gym where he regularly works out, lest he be asked to leave. Fear of reprisals by would-be vigilantes roaming the streets was a common theme.

The meeting ended, but people lingered to continue the conversation (a welcome change, for me, from other staff meetings where people are impatient to disperse and get on with their work), in little animated, mixed groups of two or three. I felt that we had crossed a barrier. I learned more about the tragic hopelessness of Gazan citizens, enemies of Hamas, who had nowhere to flee. It had been so much easier not to see them. And I felt such closeness to all my staff, regardless of ethnicity.

[Rund Abdelfatah: The nameless children of Gaza]

Work is where these connections, this dialogue, can develop most naturally. If we cultivate these encounters, which are already blooming in many places, while minimizing the effect of the powerful ethnic isolationists and supremacists on both sides, there may yet be hope for a better, more peaceful future.

I don’t purport to speak for my Arab colleagues. As close as I feel to them, I know that their perspective in this miserable situation is necessarily different from mine. I occasionally discern that some are holding back, uncertain how far I can be trusted. And don’t I weigh my words more carefully when I’m with them? The ethnic divide deepens that essential chasm separating any two people; the bombs exploding around us leave craters there. I know that far more than the occasional staff meeting will be needed for us to defuse the tensions of the Middle East, which ineluctably seep into the department.

Yet I grasp onto the connections I’ve made and find strength in these encounters. I will not forget how, the morning after the savage October 7 assault, stunned by the extent of the atrocities, I arrived early at work and found a senior nurse, a devout Muslim, sitting alone, puffing anxiously on a cigarette, and seeming more withdrawn than is usual for this energetic, charismatic man. He had worked for many years in the department; of all the staff, only I speak a better Yiddish than he.

I sat myself down next to him, and we mournfully, fearfully, tried to understand how this could have happened. We spoke about the evils of fanaticism, and he tried to explain to me the sacrilege against the Quran entailed by these violent acts.

Hesitantly, I shared with him my fantasy: “I imagine myself abducted by these murderous bastards. And just as they are about to slit my throat, I somehow manage to convince them to allow me one call. And I dial, and you answer. And, on loudspeaker, you explain to them that they must not commit this horrific sin.”

He gave me one of his heartwarming smiles and said confidently, “Just call me, I will speak with them and tell them!”

For the first time since the catastrophe, I felt a vague twinge of hope.