Some ideas exist so far beyond one’s own moral boundaries that to hear them articulated out loud, unabashedly, is to experience something akin to awe. That’s how I felt, anyway, when I watched the video of a Cornell professor speaking at a rally a week after Hamas’s October 7 attack. “It was exhilarating!” he shouted. “It was energizing!” The mass murder and rape and kidnapping of Israelis on that day had already been well documented. I saw an atrocity; he saw renewal and life. Gazans, he exclaimed, “were able to breathe for the first time in years.”

The professor spat out these words, but I heard another voice too. It belonged to Frantz Fanon.

The mid-century theorist of decolonization has long been the patron saint of political violence. Since his death in 1961, at the age of 36, Fanon’s concepts have provided intellectual ballast and moral justification for actions that most people would simply describe as terror. For him, the world divided neatly into two groups, the colonized and the colonizer. Innocent civilians didn’t figure much into this dichotomy. When posters bearing photos of Israeli toddlers abducted to Gaza were vandalized and the word kidnapped replaced with occupier, that was pure Fanon. His argument, articulated in “On Violence,” the provocative first chapter of his book The Wretched of the Earth, has the efficiency of a syllogism, as seemingly self-evident as an eye for an eye: The violence of colonialism has robbed the colonized of their humanity; to regain a sense of self, they must commit the same violence against the colonizer. “For the native,” Fanon wrote at his bluntest, “life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler.”

Was there more to Fanon? Even a child understands that violence begets only more violence, that a slap to the face creates the conditions for a return slap, or a fist, or a bullet. And what had Hamas’s “exhilarating” invasion into Israel produced for Palestinians, besides ruin, unbearable suffering, and mass death? In a new biography, The Rebel’s Clinic, Adam Shatz, an editor at the London Review of Books, aims to rescue Fanon from reduction. Shatz openly admires the Martinican psychiatrist turned Algerian revolutionary. He respects his élan and his spirit of resistance. And he sees lasting value in Fanon’s theories about the toll racism and colonialism take on the body and brain—insights that have proved extraordinarily generative, sprouting thousands of academic monographs over the decades. As for the advocacy of violence, Shatz does not excuse it; he even calls it “alarming” at one point, though that’s about as far as he goes. But like Fanon’s longtime secretary, Marie-Jeanne Manuellan, who laments to Shatz that her boss has been “chopped into little pieces,” the biographer wants to put this most provocative piece of Fanon into its proper context—to borrow a newly loaded word.

Shatz is not the first to take the full measure of Fanon, and he draws much from a definitive 2000 biography by David Macey and a handful of memoirs from those who knew the man. The uniqueness of this new book is rather in the ways it connects the intellectual dots of Fanon’s life—Aimé Césaire to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to Richard Wright to the many theorists, such as Edward Said, who found in Fanon an inspiration. Understanding Fanon as a “prophet,” Shatz writes, “treats him as a man of answers, rather than questions, locked in a project of being, rather than becoming.” The becoming is what matters to Shatz, the associations and influences, the alienations Fanon felt, and the epiphanies that emerged from them.

Fanon did call violence a “cleansing force,” but Shatz believes that the idea was rendered cartoonish almost from its first utterance—and by no less than Sartre in an infamous preface he wrote for the The Wretched of the Earth. By trying to out-Fanon Fanon, Sartre hyped the notion of decolonization as a zero-sum game, one in which Europeans would have to die for the colonized world to be born; this was, Shatz writes, a “parody” of Fanon.

So how did Fanon see violence? Armed resistance was a necessity for oppressed people—a perspective easy to agree with, especially when the oppression seems to foreclose any other option. But for Fanon, violence was not just about necessity; it was also positive in and of itself, serving a psychological end. Much like the electroshocks Fanon prescribed his patients, violence rebooted the consciousness of a colonized person by releasing him from his “inferiority complex and his passive or despairing attitude.” This was not military strategy. This was therapy. And in its name, Fanon tacitly condoned a lot of killing, and not just of people in uniform. When the revolutionaries he had joined placed bombs in cafés where they murdered women and maimed children, he didn’t walk away. The oppressed needed violence in order to be made whole. Colonialism and its underlying racism had physical effects on its subjects. (A new book, Matthew Beaumont’s How We Walk, uses Fanon to look at how this oppression affects a person’s actual gait.) Achieving full humanity was possible only through an equivalently embodied act of overwhelming one’s oppressor.

The point of violence, then, was not to “cleanse” in any kind of outward sense. In fact, Shatz thinks this word—which does have a whiff of ethnic cleansing—is a mistranslation. The original French is “la violence désintoxique,” and Shatz prefers the clumsy but possibly more accurate “dis-intoxicating,” an inwardly focused act—to sober oneself up, to wake the colonized from, Shatz writes, “the stupor induced by colonial subjugation.” It’s a subtle shift, one example of Shatz trying to usher in a more complex and possibly palatable version of Fanon. And I guess “dis-intoxicating” does seem less gratuitous a reason for killing than “cleansing,” though I’m not sure the distinction would matter much to a child blown up in a café.

I should add that Fanon didn’t always write about this psychological dimension of killing with praise or gusto. In Shatz’s more expansive view, we see Fanon slip back and forth from militant advocacy to a kind of scientific-observer status, making it hard to know sometimes where he stood in relation to the violence he was theorizing about. Often Fanon appears simply to have been sketching out the mechanics of decolonization, and arriving at conclusions that make for very poor slogans: “The colonized subject is a persecuted person who constantly dreams of becoming the persecutor.”

Not just the depth of his thinking but also Fanon’s ultimate idealism has been lost, Shatz insists. Despite the lurid visions of death, Fanon was an optimist who hoped that the necessary physical confrontation between colonized and colonizer would produce a “new man” and a fresh world of egalitarianism and individual freedom. Though he has been championed by movements of Black identity in his afterlife, Fanon himself did not draw his sense of self from a connection to his ancestors or the reclamation of an African past (he rejected, in fact, the Negritude movement, which sought to do just this). He didn’t believe that race could be ignored, but he emphatically did not want to be defined by it. He wanted race to be overcome. He looked instead to the future, to a postcolonial utopia that would level all the old power structures. “Superiority? Inferiority? Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?” he wrote. And in this future of inclusivity and justice, the lion would finally lie down with the lamb.

How exactly this transformation would—or could—take place, given the many corpses Fanon imagined would litter the path there, Shatz has to admit, “Fanon did not explain.”

This disconnect is jarring. And Shatz doesn’t try to resolve it; he knows he can’t. He calls his reading of Fanon “symptomatic,” attuned to “gaps, silences, tensions, and contradictions”—of which there are many. Fanon died young and didn’t have time for memoir; little remains that might offer insight into his inner life. He comes across here as intellectually and physically restless. Even his books were acts of “spoken-word,” as Shatz describes them, dictated while pacing and letting his thoughts fly. But we do have the facts of Fanon’s life—the actual revolution to which he wedded himself—and the evolution of his thinking, which Shatz engagingly and efficiently lays out. And these provide the most convincing counterargument to the sort of killing that Fanon validated. The pieced-together Fanon who emerges from Shatz’s study is a man who should have known better. His own actions, his own writing, provide enough evidence of just how self-defeating and self-immolating violence can be.

The first words that the future mortal adversary of colonialism learned to write were “Je suis francais”—“I am French.” Fanon would eventually throw in his lot with the powerless, but he was born in 1925 into a middle-class family on the Caribbean island of Martinique, a French colony since the early 17th century. His parents were part of an aspiring class: devoted subjects of the metropole who had worked hard to assimilate and leave behind the island’s history of slavery, certainly not eager to rebel. Shatz suggests that while growing up, Fanon didn’t ever identify as Black. He saw himself instead as a French West Indian.

This relationship to France and his own racial identity underwent a radical change during and after World War II. Fanon eagerly enlisted and found himself fighting in Europe, even sustaining a shrapnel injury in the fall of 1944 during a battle near France’s eastern border. It was in this experience of war, alongside both white soldiers and those from the African colonies, that he first understood how he was seen by his fellow Frenchmen, that his skin made him a second-class citizen to them. This shocked him—he was “wounded to the core of his being,” his brother Joby would later write. The slights added up. He never forgot, for example, the white Frenchwomen who refused to dance with him after the news of liberation, choosing American soldiers instead (and Fanon, Shatz reveals in one of the book’s rare personal details, secretly loved to dance).

One particular incident became an origin story of sorts, recounted in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon’s first book, published in 1952. Once the war was over, he remained in France and attended medical school in Lyon, a city with few Black people where he was continuously reminded of his difference. One day while riding the train, a little boy fearfully pointed at him and said to his mother, “Look, maman, a nègre!” Fanon tried to smile, to diffuse the awkwardness, but he felt rage well up inside him. When the mother tried to calm the scared boy by saying, “Look how handsome the nègre is,” Fanon couldn’t hold back any longer. “The handsome nègre says, fuck you, madame,” he burst out. The rupture with social norms felt freeing. “I was identifying my enemies and I was creating a scandal,” Fanon wrote about the moment. “Overjoyed. We could now have some fun.”

Fanon understood himself to be the other, and knew that he would never escape the limitations this imposed on him. “Whatever he did—take a stroll, dissect a corpse, make love, speak French—he did while being Black,” Shatz writes. “It felt like a curse, or a time bomb in his head.” The only way to overcome the feeling of being pinned down was to squirm, as he had done on the train—to refuse it. Existentialism, for this reason, served as a helpful philosophy for Fanon when he discovered and embraced it in the late 1940s. Sartre was concerned with the problem of human freedom and the ways we are being constantly hindered by the “gaze” of another, defining and thereby constraining us. His 1946 book Réflexions sur la Question Juive became a source text for Fanon: It explained how anti-Semites’ fears had effectively “created” the Jew, much as the psychological projections of the white world around him made Fanon Black in ways he detested and wanted to push back against.

Biographers, including Shatz, have not been able to pinpoint exactly when during his medical studies, or why, Fanon drifted toward psychiatry. But the field would give him a chance to explore how these societal oppressions—which he began to think of as a kind of atmospheric violence—shaped the individual. Black Skin, White Masks, his first book, grew out of his original, but rejected, idea for a doctoral thesis. By the late 1940s, when he started composing it, he had concluded that to become fully human—that is, free from being seen in the way that he believed Black men were, as simply an “oppositional brute force” to Western civilization—one had only a single option: to try to become white. But this, of course, was impossible, a Sisyphean task. A mask of whiteness can be attempted, but it will always be just a mask, and the effort to keep it on is its own kind of torture. “Another situation is possible,” Fanon declared, but “it implies a restructuring of the world.”

Only revolution could bring about this restructuring. But Fanon could not have known, when he arrived in the agitated French colony of Algeria in 1953, that he was about to find himself, almost by chance, in the middle of one. At the age of 28, he was sent by the French government to be the director of a psychiatric hospital in a small garrison town called Blida, and he eventually began noticing all the ways colonialism itself was the main cause of his many patients’ mental illnesses. But he also saw in the Algerians’ refusal to assimilate, to wear the mask, a powerful force to which he wanted to attach himself. “They persisted in saying no to the French,” Shatz writes. “To their medicine, to their lifestyle, to their food, to their judicial system—to the amputation of their identity that colonialism sought to inflict.”

When an uprising against France began at the end of 1954, Fanon quietly but subversively used his hospital to help treat fighters with the National Liberation Front, known as the FLN. A rebel assault launched in the harbor city of Philippeville in August of 1955 was a pivotal moment for him and the country—“the point of no return,” as Fanon would later put it. Coordinated by the FLN, groups of peasant militias attacked civilians, mostly European, with pitchforks, knives, and axes, massacring dozens in the streets and in their homes. The French were horrified and retaliated ruthlessly, shooting hundreds of Algerian men without trial. The episode brought out into the open and made explicit for Fanon both the violence of colonialism and the necessary counterviolence of decolonization. Fanon tied his fate to the FLN and was expelled from Algeria in early 1957, becoming part of the resistance in exile in neighboring Tunisia. Until his death only four years later, he devoted himself entirely to the cause.

In joining the FLN, Fanon had to toss into the fires of the revolution many of his own intellectual and moral commitments. He had believed in individuality, in the pursuit of a restructured world liberated from the violence that had so psychically corroded the minds of his patients. But now he was a soldier, subordinate to a militant movement whose methods and aims would seem to diverge wildly from Fanon’s ideals. Shatz doesn’t ignore this tension, but he also stops short of reckoning with the jumbled and irreconcilable set of principles Fanon would try to maintain. He falls back instead on his basic appreciation for Fanon’s energy and full-bodied dedication. Shatz thinks that “for all that he tried to be a hard man, Fanon remained a dreamer.” But his biography shows the opposite: The dreamer may have dreamed of a common humanity, but to get there, he jumped in a car with hard men and became one himself.

The Algerian Revolution, like most revolutions, ate its own. Among the victims was Abane Ramdane, a prominent FLN leader who had respected and vouched for Fanon, sharing his vision of a modern, inclusive, secular Algeria. In 1957, leaders more interested in, as Shatz puts it, “the restoration of Muslim Algeria, not social revolution” gained the upper hand in an internal FLN power struggle. On their orders, Ramdane was strangled to death by the side of a road. Fanon knew of the murder. But whether out of allegiance to the movement or fear for his own life—according to another FLN leader, Fanon was on a list of men to be executed in case of internal revolt—he said nothing.

Fanon had to lie, regularly. One of his roles while based in Tunis was to edit a newspaper, the FLN’s mouthpiece, El Moudjahid. As an editor, his attitude toward the truth followed the same binary logic as his ideas about violence: What they do to us, we can do to them. “In answer to the lie of the colonial situation, the colonized subject responds with a lie,” he wrote in The Wretched of the Earth. “In the colonial context there is no truthful behavior. And good is quite simply what hurts them most.” When the FLN rounded up and killed more than 300 men outside the village of Melouza for supporting a rival rebel group, Fanon denied publicly that it had happened, though he knew otherwise. Writing about it later, he offered the weak defense that the French had done worse.

This pattern, of looking to the colonizer to justify the actions of the colonized, shows up consistently in these revolutionary years, as if Fanon, despite being once convinced by existentialism of his own boundless freedom, is trapped in a mirror. “The very same people who had it constantly drummed into them that the only language they understood was that of force, now decide to express themselves with force,” Fanon wrote. “To the expression: ‘All natives are the same,’ the colonized reply: ‘All colonists are the same.’” When Fanon began making connections among the independence movements of sub-Saharan Africa, he imagined a united force to help the Algerians, one that could “hurl a continent against the last ramparts of colonial power.” As Shatz notes, this was “anti-imperialist rhetoric” that “had the ring of colonial conquest.”

The more he threw himself into the Algerian fight, the more blind Fanon seems to have become to what that cause actually represented. The desire to bring back a traditional Muslim way of life from before the French arrived—with the implications this held for the role of women or nonbelievers—became the animating force of the uprising and the essential purpose of throwing off colonialism. Whereas for Fanon, as Shatz puts it, the struggle was always about battling “class oppression, religious traditionalism, even patriarchy,” such values were nowhere near the top of the FLN leadership’s own goals by the early 1960s. Indeed, if he had lived to see a free Algeria, it’s doubtful that Fanon—who didn’t even speak Arabic—would have found a place for himself in the brutally autocratic country that emerged.

Did Fanon know what he was giving up when he joined the Algerian Revolution? Shatz sees the moral compromises as “a tactical surrender of freedom that did not escape his notice or leave him without regrets.” Yet this seems to be a projection on Shatz’s part; at any rate, he unearths little evidence of those regrets in Fanon’s own writing.

By the time he finished dictating The Wretched of the Earth, in 1961, Fanon was sick with the cancer that would kill him. That final book was a desperate last will and testament, and one that appears in retrospect to capture the “striking ambivalence,” as Shatz puts it, of Fanon’s worldview. It opens with the “militant self-certainty” of “On Violence.” And it ends with a series of case studies from Fanon’s psychiatric practice in Algeria, which depict just how debilitating and long-lasting the effects of living in a society marked by violence can be. He offers the story of a man who witnessed a massacre in his village and developed a desire to kill as a result, and describes a European police officer who brings home the brutality he has to inflict every day, torturing his wife and children.

For the oppressed, violence can feel like the only way out of a life that is otherwise encased by walls, like the only means of survival. And Fanon does understand, better than any other thinker, the vertiginous high of standing over your tormentor, of regaining a sense of agency. His solution feels like an unambiguous, cosmically just response to the day-to-day violence of colonialism, and it’s not hard to understand why it might feel like the only way toward freedom. After enough death, France did, in the end, leave Algeria. But if violence is also meant to be ennobling, this aspect of it is, as Shatz describes, “ephemeral at best.” What lasts longer—and Fanon the psychiatrist is keenly alert to this—is how permanently damaging violence is to whoever perpetrates it. Fanon's surreal denial of this knowledge, his belief that somehow slicing the throat of the colonizer will lead to a new, more equitable reality and not just more violence, is hard to comprehend.

The best case Shatz makes for not being repelled outright by Fanon’s bloody vision is his suggestion that The Wretched of the Earth be read “as literature”—in fact, this might be the key to understanding his continued appeal for readers, a narratively satisfying way of resolving the world’s wrongs with the slash of a sword. Fanon had a literary sensibility, and possibly, Shatz writes, it may have carried him into starker territory than he fully intended, producing an allegorical text that resembled something out of Samuel Beckett’s mind—with the colonized and colonizer as “archetypes locked together in fatal contradiction.” “On Violence” does contain some strikingly poetic passages. Fanon wrote, for example, about how the physical oppression of colonialism expresses itself in dreams:

The dreams of the native are muscular dreams, dreams of action, aggressive dreams. I dream that I am jumping, that I am swimming, that I am running, that I am climbing. I dream that I’m bursting out laughing, that I’m crossing the river in a single stride, that I’m being pursued by a pack of cars that will never catch me. During colonization, the colonized never ceases to liberate himself between the hours of nine in the evening and six in the morning.

Fanon evokes powerlessness and the anguish of trying to regain control of one’s own life. This makes The Wretched of the Earth “rich in dramatic potential,” as Shatz writes. If only Fanon’s book was meant to be read as a novel or as poetry—but it wasn’t. It was intended and understood as a prescription.

Violence felt inevitable to Fanon, but he lived in a moment when other possibilities existed. Gandhi’s Salt March took place within his lifetime, as did the Montgomery bus boycott. These movements, with stakes just as high as those of Algerian independence, self-consciously countered the brutality of the oppressor with humanistic tactics. Change came not from mimicking violent behavior but from deliberately, and with great discipline, avoiding it, breaking what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the chain reaction of evil.” Nonviolence had, of course, its own dangers and detractors—Fanon would probably agree with Malcolm X, who looked at children being attacked with fire hoses and police dogs in Birmingham in 1963 and said, “Real men don’t put their children on the firing line.” But the approach of the civil-rights movement in these years achieved concrete victories against discrimination before it devolved into its own forms of militancy. In Africa, the majority of countries that became independent while hundreds of thousands were dying in Algeria did so through peaceful if tense negotiations with the colonial powers. Moreover, during Fanon’s life, the world had already seen what happens when violence is thought of as a “cleansing force.” Even the language Fanon used was somewhat familiar. “Only war knows how to rejuvenate, accelerate and sharpen human intelligence for the better,” wrote Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the leader of the Italian futurists (and an eventual fascist) in the first months of the bloodbath that was World War I.

And if armed conflict seemed the only way for Algerians to shake off France’s long domination, Fanon could have remained more intellectually honest, and less tangled in contradiction, by taking a critical stance. Others did just this. Albert Memmi was a Tunisian Jewish intellectual who, like Fanon, saw the harm caused by colonialism and racism to be “as unbearable as hunger.” But he understood that the militants fighting French rule were using means that represented a choice “not between good and evil, but between evil and uneasiness.” He supported armed resistance with open eyes about the consequences of all this killing and an awareness that the type of society the revolutionaries were fighting for would ultimately be inhospitable to him and his own marginalized identity as a Jew.

The Fanon of “On Violence” hardly blinks; no room for “uneasiness.” And this makes it nearly impossible for Shatz to grant the nuance he so desperately wants to accord Fanon. Alongside the intellectual drama, there is also a Freudian psychodrama that weaves its way through the biography, and it comes closest to explaining Fanon’s motives: a disgruntled son who came to detest what he saw as the passivity of his native Martinique, a land of formerly enslaved people whose freedom was granted to them by their colonizer; a man who chose France as his adopted father, but then decided to kill his connection to this father country when it betrayed him by making him feel he wasn’t a true son. When Fanon took up the Algerian cause, it was with the “zeal of a convert,” writes Shatz. An Algerian activist and historian, Mohammed Harbi, who knew Fanon, said he had “a very strong need to belong”; this is a quality that could easily drive someone to excesses of unquestioning loyalty. He wanted a home.  

This more psychological portrait does help us better understand why Fanon didn’t seem to see his own deep contradictions, or why he couldn’t extricate himself if he did. But it also undermines Shatz’s project to bring together all the pieces of Fanon, to rescue him from “vulgar Fanonism,” to present him as a more complex, textured thinker. His pervasive rage is particularly damaging, so Shatz largely ignores it—for example, he does note Fanon saying he had to be a “god” to his wife, Josie, but doesn’t engage with recent research that alleges he hit her in front of others, or the many moments in Fanon’s writing where darkness bubbles up (“Just as there are faces that ask to be slapped, can one not speak of women who ask to be raped?”). Perhaps to really understand Fanon is to return to that moment on the train in Lyon when the little white boy looked at him in terror and he responded with the anger of a man who just couldn’t bear any longer to live in society as it was. “I exploded,” Fanon wrote about that moment and its aftermath. “Here are the broken fragments put together by another me.”

The fragments are razor-sharp, even as they glisten. They are worth picking up carefully and scrutinizing. But at a moment when we are badly in need of new ways of seeing one another, of recognizing humanity in one another, I’m not sure how helpful those fragments are, because they will cut you. And you will bleed and bleed.

Hamas understands that it can not win on the battlefield, so it tries to win in the court of global public opinion. Gutteres, unfortunately, appears to be the poster boy for these efforts, Middle East Forum Israel’s Nave Dromi writes.

“This is our 9/11,” an Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson said a few days after the rape, torture, kidnapping, and mass murder of Israelis on October 7. Or it was worse than 9/11. “Twenty 9/11s,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said a few weeks later, once the scale of the devastation was evident. As for the current military campaign in Gaza? Earlier this month, Netanyahu told new IDF cadets, “We are preventing the next 9/11.”

I’m a New Yorker. For me, 9/11 was the unbearable loss of thousands of lives. But I’m also a veteran of America’s War on Terror, so for me, 9/11 was also the pretext for disastrous, poorly conceived wars that spread death and destruction, destabilized the Middle East, created new enemies, and empowered Iran.

[George Packer: Israel must not react stupidly]

Finally, I’m an American. My country is supporting Israel militarily and diplomatically, and so I have a stake in answering this question: Is the United States enabling Israel to make the same terrible mistakes we did after 9/11?

In principle, Israel has a case for military action in Gaza, and it goes something like this. Across its border sat an army of tens of thousands of men intent on massacring civilians. Ghazi Hamad, from Hamas’s political bureau, declared that the atrocities of October 7 were “just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.” Yes, rooting out Hamas would be brutal—the group welcomes civilian collateral damage and has entrenched itself in hundreds of miles of tunnels honeycombed through civilian infrastructure. But peace is illusory as long as Hamas remains in power.

Perhaps, in an alternate world, Israel could have fought such a war with restraint, in order to degrade Hamas’s military power without playing into its hands by causing unnecessary civilian suffering. Israel would have helped, rather than hindered, the efforts of outside states to funnel humanitarian aid into Gaza—showing that it distinguished the Palestinian people from Hamas battalions and valued their lives. If Israel had very different internal politics, it might even have signaled a positive vision for the war’s end—one premised on rebuilding a Gazan government led by Palestinians not committed to Israel’s destruction but to a fair-minded two-state solution that would ensure full political rights for Gazans. But this is not the war that Israel has fought.

“Sometimes it sounds like certain officials, it’s almost as if they support a hypothetical war, instead of the actual war that Israel is fighting,” Adil Haque, an executive editor at Just Security and an international-law professor at Rutgers University, told me.

Friends of mine who support Israel have compared the Gaza campaign to the American and Iraqi fight against the Islamic State in Mosul, another large urban area of about 2 million people defended by an entrenched enemy hiding among civilians. At least 9,000 innocents died, many from American air strikes.

I walked through the devastation in Mosul two years after the battle, and it was like nothing I’d ever seen. Blocks of rubble, the skeletal remains of homes and shops, survivors living in the shatters who spoke of starvation and horror, collecting rainwater or risking their lives to go to the river, where soldiers shot at them. “It’s like Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” one man told me in the ruins of his home. But he also said that ISIS was gone from Mosul forever. “Even if all I have is a piece of wood,” he said, “I would fight them rather than let them return.”

The war Israel is actually fighting in Gaza bears little resemblance to that brutal and far from perfect, but necessary, campaign. Rather, in Gaza, Israel has shown itself willing to cause heavy civilian casualties and unwilling to care for a population left without basic necessities for survival. It has offered no realistic plan for an eventual political settlement. Far from the hypothetical war for Israeli security, this looks like a war of revenge.  

Palestinians gather to collect aid food in Beit Lahia, in the northern Gaza Strip, on February 26, 2024, amid continuing battles between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas. ( AFP / Getty)

Israel’s approach to civilian lives and infrastructure is the first and most obvious problem. John Spencer, the chair of urban-warfare studies at West Point, told The Wall Street Journal this month that Israel sets the “gold standard” for avoiding civilian casualties. Defenders of Israel cite its use of precision munitions and its distribution of leaflets and phone calls warning civilians to evacuate combat areas.

But evacuation orders can only do so much for a trapped population facing destroyed infrastructure, dangerous exit routes, and unrealistic time frames. Israel’s original evacuation order for northern Gaza gave 1.1 million people just 24 hours to leave. As Paula Gaviria Betancur, the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons, noted at the time, “It is inconceivable that more than half of Gaza’s population could traverse an active war zone, without devastating humanitarian consequences, particularly while deprived of essential supplies and basic services.”

And precision munitions are good only when used precisely. Senior Israeli officials complained even before the war that the list of possible military targets in Gaza was “very problematic.” Then Israel dropped a massive amount of ordnance on Gazan neighborhoods—6,000 bombs in the first six days of the war alone. For comparison, the international coalition fighting ISIS dropped an average of 2,500 bombs a month across all of Syria and Iraq. To think that Israel was precisely targeting 1,000 strikes a day strains credulity. Satellite images do not show pinpoint strikes but whole flattened neighborhoods. From October 7 to November 26, Israel damaged or destroyed more than 37,000 structures, and as CNN reported in December, about 40 to 45 percent of the air-to-ground munitions used at that point were unguided missiles. Certainly Hamas’s practice of building its tunnels beneath civilian infrastructure means that destroying the tunnels will cause widespread damage, but the scale of this bombing campaign goes well beyond that.

What does this mean for death tolls? Larry Lewis, the director of the Center for Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence at the Center for Naval Analyses, found that even if we accept the IDF’s claim that 12,000 of the roughly 29,000 Gazans reported dead by February 20 were enemy fighters, that would still mean that for every 100 Israeli air strikes, the IDF killed an average of 54 civilians. In the U.S. campaign in Raqqa, the American military caused an estimated 1.7 civilian deaths per 100 strikes.

Israel’s lack of concern for civilian casualties is clear from well-documented individual strikes. On October 31, Israel struck the Jabaliya refugee camp with what appears to have been at least two 2,000-pound bombs, destroying entire housing blocks. News footage soon after showed at least 47 bodies, including children, pulled from the rubble in the refugee camp. Eventually the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry would claim 195 dead and hundreds more injured. The target of the strike was Ibrahim Biari, a Hamas commander who helped plan October 7, as well as a tunnel network and other Hamas fighters.

[Read: Is the destruction of Gaza making Israel any safer?]

During the Battle of Mosul, strikes that could be anticipated to kill 10 civilians or more required sign-off from the commanding general of Central Command, which oversees all American military activity across the greater Middle East. Deliberate strikes might have been analyzed by multiple working groups, and precautions taken to limit civilian casualties by using a more precise weapon with a smaller blast radius. A strike might have been canceled if the harm to civilians outweighed the possible battlefield advantage. In the Jabaliya strike, Israel caused foreseeable civilian casualties an order of magnitude greater than anything America would have signed off on during the past decades of war. And yes, 2,000-pound bombs are among the munitions that the United States has been sending to Israel, and which Israel has been using for strikes that American commanders would never permit from their own armed forces.

Even more troubling has been Israel’s failure to allow humanitarian relief to reach the civilian population it has put at risk. On October 9, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, declared a “complete siege” of Gaza, stating, “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” Since then, the Israeli bombing campaign has destroyed Gaza’s agriculture and infrastructure, and Israel has restricted aid coming from outside the Strip.

The United States has played a game of push and pull, providing weapons but telling Israeli authorities that they must allow humanitarian aid into Gaza; Israel fails to sufficiently comply, and Gazans starve. In February, the deputy executive director of the World Food Programme, Carl Skau, announced that one out of every six Gazan children under the age of 2 was acutely malnourished. “Hundreds of trucks are waiting to enter, and it is absolutely imperative to make crossing points work effectively and open additional crossing points,” the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, Josep Borrell, said on March 18. “It is just a matter of political will. Israel has to do it.”

A UN Security Council resolution noted on December 22 that under international law, all parties must “allow, facilitate, and enable the immediate, safe, and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance at scale directly to the Palestinian civilian population.” That Israel lets some aid through is not a defense. As Tom Dannenbaum, an associate professor of international law at Tufts University, pointed out at the beginning of the conflict, even when starvation is being used as a weapon of war, “often there can be a trickle of humanitarian relief or a stop-start permission of essentials into a territory that is besieged.” In Gaza, starving children fill desperately strained hospital wards. Israel can make no plausible argument that it’s meeting its obligations here.

Perhaps the most damning indictment of Israel’s conduct is that it is fighting this war without any realistic vision of its outcome, other than the military defeat of Hamas. The “day after” plan that Netanyahu released in February suggests an indefinite Israeli military occupation of Gaza, rejects international negotiations toward a permanent settlement with the Palestinian people, and gives only a vague nod toward a reconstruction plan “financed and led by countries acceptable to Israel.” On March 14, Ophir Falk, one of Netanyahu’s advisers, declared in The Wall Street Journal that the military campaign was “guaranteeing that Gaza will never pose a threat to Israel again.” This is delusional.

Violent repression can backfire or produce Pyrrhic victories. Look at my war. Toppling Saddam Hussein created a fertile chaos for insurgent groups of all types. When I deployed to Iraq as part of the American surge of troops in 2007, we successfully worked with Sunni leaders to bring down the level of violence, only for ISIS to rise from the country’s unstable politics over the decade that followed.

Repression rarely completely eradicates terrorist groups. Even Israeli intelligence admits that Hamas will survive this war. And as the terrorism expert Audrey Kurth Cronin has noted, repression is difficult for democracies to sustain, because it “exacts an enormous cost in money, casualties, and individual rights, and works best in places where the members of terrorist groups can be separated from the broader population.” The latter is manifestly not the case in Gaza.

Sheer force cannot make Palestinians accept the violence done to them, the destruction wrought on their homes, and their fate as a subject population, deprived of self-determination. Recent polls show two-thirds of Gazans blaming Israel for their suffering, and most of the rest blaming the United States, while in the West Bank support for armed struggle has risen. Defenders of Israel will often reference a quote attributed to Golda Meir: “If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.” But that’s not how Palestinians experience it. Even before October 7, the rate of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank was on track to reach an all-time high in 2023. More attacks followed.

Making this combustible situation still worse are international actors who benefit from stoking conflict. Iran has long helped train, supply, and fund armed Palestinian groups, offering a reported $350 million in 2023 alone. More arms, training, and funding will flow in the future, not only to Gaza but around the region. Netanyahu has suggested that Israel will maintain military control of Gaza, operating a security buffer zone inside Gaza and closing the border with Egypt. From a military perspective alone, such an expensive commitment to endless repression within Gaza would be shortsighted. As Cronin points out, historically, “using overwhelming force tends to disperse the threat to neighboring regions.”

A good pretext for a war does not make a war just. War needs to be carried out without brutality and drive at a just political end. Israel is failing on both counts. Hamas may be horrific, but just because you’ve diagnosed a malignant tumor doesn’t mean you hand a rusty scalpel to a drunk and tell him to cut away while the patient screams in terror.

[Graeme Wood: Pressuring Israel works]

All of which calls into question America’s support for this war. Washington never even tried to make its aid conditional on Israel’s abiding by the standards of wartime conduct that Americans have come to expect. The Biden administration has twice bypassed congressional review in order to provide weapons to Israel. Senator Bernie Sanders proposed having the State Department investigate possible Israeli human-rights violations, but the Senate rejected the bid. Any policy relying on less debate and greater ignorance should raise alarms in a democracy. The administration’s policy has already hurt America’s standing globally.

“All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost,” a senior G7 diplomat told the Financial Times in October. “Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”

Defenders of the war often ask: If not this, what should Israel be doing? Some of the answers to that question are fairly easy. Israel should not approve strikes that will predictably kill more than 100 civilians for limited military gain. It should not bomb entire neighborhoods to rubble. And it must make an aggressive commitment to providing humanitarian relief, rather than being a stumbling block to groups trying to save lives in the midst of starvation.

Other answers are more difficult, because to imagine a postwar Gaza that might lead to peace, or at least to the weakening of violent forces around the region, would be to imagine a very different Israeli government—one that could credibly commit to helping facilitate the rebuilding of a Palestinian government in Gaza and the provision of full political rights to the people there. Instead, Israel has a government that just announced the largest West Bank land seizure in decades, and whose prime minister offers nothing to Palestinians but “full Israeli security control of all the territory west of the Jordan.”

The Biden administration has assured its critics that it is pressuring Israel to do better. It recently allowed a UN Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire to pass, even as it abstained and criticized the resolution for failing to condemn Hamas. But this will hardly repair the damage to America’s international reputation. Washington needs to address the war that is, not the hypothetical war U.S. officials would like to see. As Adil Haque told me, “It’s been five and a half months now, and there’s no indication that Israel will ever change its tactics in a significant way, so you either support the way it fights, or you can’t support it at all.” Washington needs to stop making excuses for Israel and stop supporting this war.

So perhaps October 7 will be Israel’s 9/11, or 20 9/11s—not just because of the scale of the losses, but because of the foolishness and cruelty of the response. And a few years from now, if I talk with a survivor of this devastating war, will he blame Hamas for provoking it? I would guess that he’ll blame the country that bombed him without mercy and restricted the delivery of food while his family starved to death. And he’ll blame America for enabling it. And so will the rest of the world. And they’ll be right.

If Benjamin Netanyahu had accepted defeat in June 2021, finally yielding the stage to a coalition of his opponents, he could have retired at the age of 71 with a decent claim to having been one of Israel’s more successful prime ministers.

He had already surpassed the time in office of Israel’s founder, David Ben-Gurion, becoming the country’s longest-serving prime minister in 2019. His second stretch in office, from 2009 to 2021, coincided with perhaps the best 12 years Israel had known since its founding in 1948. The country enjoyed relative security, with no major wars or prolonged Intifadas. The period was one of uninterrupted economic growth and prosperity. Thanks to its early adoption of widespread vaccination, Israel was one of the first countries in the world to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic. And toward the end of that span came three agreements establishing diplomatic relations with Arab countries; more were likely on the way.

Twelve years of Netanyahu’s leadership had seemingly made Israel more secure and prosperous, with deep trade and defense ties across the world. But this wasn’t enough to win him another term. A majority of Israelis had tired of him, and he had been tainted by charges of bribery and fraud in his dealings with billionaires and press barons. In the space of 24 months, Israel held four elections ending in stalemate, with neither Netanyahu nor his rivals winning a majority. Finally, an unlikely alliance of right-wing, centrist, left-wing, and Islamist parties managed to band together and replace him with his former aide Naftali Bennett in June 2021.

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

At that point, Netanyahu could have sealed his legacy. A plea bargain on offer from the attorney general would have ended his corruption trial with a conviction on reduced charges and no jail time. He would have had to leave politics, probably for good. Over the course of four decades in public life, including 15 years as prime minister and 22 as the Likud party’s leader, he had already left an indelible mark on Israel, dominating the second half of its history. But he couldn’t bear the thought of giving up power.

Within 18 months, he was back as prime minister for the third time. The unwieldy coalition that replaced him had imploded, and this time around, Netanyahu’s camp of far-right and religious parties ran a disciplined campaign, exploiting the weaknesses of their divided rivals to emerge with a small parliamentary majority, despite still being virtually tied in the vote count.

Nine months later, Netanyahu, the man who promised, above everything else, to deliver security for Israel’s citizens, presided over the darkest day in his country’s existence. A total breakdown of the Israeli military and intelligence structure allowed Hamas to breach Israel’s border and embark on a rampage of murder, kidnapping, and rape, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and taking more than 250 hostage. The calamities of that day, the failures of leadership leading up to it, and the traumas it caused will haunt Israel for generations. Even leaving completely aside the war he has prosecuted since that day and its yet-unknown end, October 7 means that Netanyahu will always be remembered as Israel’s worst-ever leader.

How does one measure a prime minister?

There is no broadly accepted ranking of the 13 men and one woman who have led Israel, but most lists would feature David Ben-Gurion at the top. Not only was he the George Washington of the Jewish state, proclaiming its independence just three years after a third of the Jewish people had been exterminated in the Holocaust, but his administration established many of the institutions and policies that define Israel to this day. Other favorites include Levi Eshkol, for his shrewd and prudent leadership in the tense weeks before the Six Day War, and Menachem Begin, for achieving the country’s first peace agreement with an Arab nation, Egypt.

All three of these men had mixed records and detractors, of course. Ben-Gurion had autocratic tendencies and was consumed by party infighting during his later years in office. After the Six Day War, Eshkol failed to deliver a coherent plan for what Israel should do with the new territories it occupied and the Palestinians who have remained under its rule ever since. In Begin’s second term, Israel entered a disastrous war in Lebanon, and his government nearly tanked the economy. But in most Israelis’ minds, these leaders’ positive legacies outweigh the negatives.

Who are the “worst prime ministers”? Until now, most Israelis regarded Golda Meir as the top candidate for that dismal title. The intelligence failure leading to the Yom Kippur War was on her watch. Before the war, she rejected Egyptian overtures toward peace (though some Israeli historians have recently argued that these were less than sincere). And when war was clearly imminent, her administration refrained from launching preemptive attacks that could have saved the lives of hundreds of soldiers.

[Read: The end of Netanyahu]

Other “worst” candidates have included Ehud Olmert, for launching the second Lebanon war and becoming Israel’s first former prime minister to go to prison for corruption; Yitzhak Shamir, for kiboshing an agreement with Jordan’s King Hussein that many believe could have been a significant step toward resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict; and Ehud Barak, for spectacularly failing to fulfill his extravagant promises to bring peace with both the Palestinians and Syria.

But Benjamin Netanyahu now surpasses these contenders by orders of magnitude. He has brought far-right extremists into the mainstream of government and made himself, and the country, beholden to them. His corruption is flamboyant. And he has made terrible security decisions that brought existential danger to the country he pledged to lead and protect. Above all, his selfishness is without parallel: He has put his own interests ahead of Israel’s at every turn.

Netanyahu has the distinction of being the only Israeli prime minister to make a once reviled movement on the right fringe of the country’s politics into a government stakeholder.

Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of a Jewish-supremacist group called Kach, won a lone seat in the Knesset in 1984. He openly called for replacing Israeli democracy with a constitution based on the laws of the Torah and for denying Israel’s Arab citizens equal rights. During Kahane’s single legislative term, the entire Israeli political establishment shunned him. When he got up to speak in the Knesset, all of its members would leave the plenum.

In 1985, Likud joined other parties in changing election law so that those who denied Israel’s democratic identity, denied its Jewish identity, or incited racism could be barred from running for office. Under this provision, Kach was never allowed to compete in another election. Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990. Four years later, a member of his movement killed 29 Muslims at prayer in Hebron, and the Israeli government proscribed Kach as a terror organization and forced it to disband.

But the Kahanists didn’t go away. With each Israeli election, they tried to rename their movement and adjust its platform to conform with electoral law. They remained ostracized. Then, in 2019, Netanyahu saw a roadblock on his path to reelection that they could help him get around.

Several Israeli parties had pledged not to serve in a government led by an indicted prime minister—quite possibly, enough of them to shut Netanyahu out of power. To prevent that from happening, Netanyahu needed to eke out every possible right-wing and religious vote for his potential coalition. The polls were predicting that the latest Kahanist iteration, the Jewish Power party, which is led by the thuggish but media-savvy Itamar Ben-Gvir, would receive only about 10,000 votes, well below the threshold needed to make the party a player on its own; but Netanyahu believed that if he could persuade the Kahanists and other small right-wing parties to merge their candidates’ lists into a joint slate, together they could win a seat or two for his potential coalition—just what he needed for a majority.

Netanyahu began pressuring the leaders of the small right-wing parties to merge their lists. At first the larger of these were outraged. Netanyahu was meddling in their affairs and, worse, trying to coerce them to accept the Kahanist outcasts. Gradually, he wore down their resistance—employing rabbis to persuade politicians, orchestrating media campaigns in the nationalist press, and promising central roles in future administrations. Media figures close to Netanyahu accused Bezalel Smotrich, a fundamentalist settler and the new leader of the religious Zionist party, of “endangering” the nation by making it easier for the hated left to win the election. Soon enough, Smotrich’s old-school national-religious party merged not only with Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power but with an even more obscure, proudly homophobic party led by Avi Maoz.

Netanyahu did worry a bit about the optics. Throughout five stalemated election campaigns from 2019 to 2022, Likud coordinated closely with Jewish Power, but Netanyahu refused to be seen in public with Ben-Gvir. During the 2022 campaign, at a religious festival, he even waited backstage for Ben-Gvir to leave the premises before going up to make his speech.

Two weeks later, there was no longer any need to keep up the act. Netanyahu’s strategy succeeded: His coalition, merged into four lists, edged out its squabbling opponents with 64 of the Knesset’s 120 seats.

Netanyahu finally had the “right-wing in full” government he had often promised. But before he could return to the prime minister’s office, his allies demanded a division of the spoils. The ministries with the most influence on Israelis’ daily lives—health, housing, social services, and the interior—went to the ultra-Orthodox parties. Smotrich became finance minister; Maoz was appointed deputy minister in charge of a new “Agency for Jewish Identity,” with power to intervene in educational programs. And Ben-Gvir, the subject of numerous police investigations for violence and incitement over a period of three decades, was put in charge of a newly titled “Ministry of National Security,” with authority over Israel’s police and prison services.

As Netanyahu signed away power to the Kahanists, he told the international news media that he wasn’t forming a far-right government. The Kahanists were joining his government. He would be in control. But Netanyahu hadn’t just given Israel’s most extreme racists unprecedented power and legitimacy. He’d also insinuated them into his own formerly mainstream party: By March 2024, Likud’s candidates for local elections in a handful of towns had merged their slates with those of Jewish Power.

Likud long prided itself on combining staunch Jewish nationalism, even militarism, with a commitment to liberal democracy. But a more radical stream within the party eschewed those liberal values and championed chauvinistic and autocratic positions. For much of the past century, the liberal wing was dominant and provided most of the party’s leadership. Netanyahu himself espoused the values of the liberal wing—until he fell out with all the main liberal figures. By 2019, none was left to oppose the alliance with Ben-Gvir’s Kahanists.

Now more than a third of Likud’s representatives were religious, and those who weren’t preferred to call themselves “traditional” rather than secular. They didn’t object to cooperating with the Kahanists; indeed, many had already worked with them in the past. In fact, many Likud Knesset members by that point were indistinguishable from the Jewish Power ones. Israel’s worst prime minister didn’t just form an alliance of convenience with the country’s most irresponsible extremists; he made them integral to his party and the running of the state.

That Netanyahu is personally corrupt is not altogether novel in the history of the Israeli prime ministership. What makes him worse than others is his open contempt for the rule of law.

By 2018, Netanyahu was the subject of four simultaneous corruption investigations that had been in motion for more than a year. In one, known as Case 4000, Netanyahu stood accused of promising regulatory favors to the owner of Israel’s largest telecom corporation in return for favorable coverage on a popular news site. Three of the prime minister’s closest advisers had agreed to testify against him.

Investigations of prime ministers are not rare in Israel. Netanyahu was the subject of one during his first term. The three prime ministers who served in the decade between his first and second terms—Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert—had all been investigated as well. Only in Olmert’s case did police deem the evidence sufficient to mount a prosecution. At the time, in 2008, Netanyahu was the leader of the opposition.

“We’re talking about a prime minister who is up to his neck in investigations and has no public or moral mandate to make fateful decisions for Israel,” Netanyahu said of Olmert. “There is a concern, I have to say real, not without basis, that he will make decisions based on his personal interest of political survival and not on the national interest.”

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

Ten years later, Netanyahu would be the one snared in multiple investigations. Then he no longer spoke of corruption in high office but of a “witch hunt,” orchestrated by rogue police commanders and left-wing state prosecutors, and egged on by a hostile news media, all with the aim of toppling a right-wing leader.

Netanyahu was determined to politicize the legal procedure and pit his supporters against Israel’s law-enforcement agencies and judiciary. Never mind that the two previous prime ministers who had resigned because of corruption charges were from the center left. Nor did it matter that he had appointed the police commissioner and attorney general himself; both were deeply religious men with impeccable nationalist backgrounds, but he tarred them as perfidious tools of leftist conspiracy.

Rather than contemplate resignation, on May 24, 2020, Netanyahu became the first sitting Israeli prime minister to go on trial. He has denied all wrongdoing (the trial is still under way). In a courthouse corridor before one session, he gave a 15-minute televised speech accusing the legal establishment of “trying to topple me and the right-wing government. For over a decade, the left wing have failed to do this at the ballot box, and in recent years have come up with a new idea. Elements in the police and prosecutor’s office have joined left-wing journalists to concoct delusional charges.”

The law didn’t require Netanyahu to resign while fighting the charges against him in court. But doing so had seemed logical to his predecessors under similar circumstances—and to Israel’s lawmakers, who had never envisaged that a prime minister would so brazenly challenge the justice system, which he had a duty to uphold. For Netanyahu, however, remaining in power was an end in itself, one more important than preserving Israel’s most crucial institutions, to say nothing of Israelis’ trust in them.

Netanyahu placed extremists in positions of power, undermined confidence in the rule of law, and sacrificed principle to power. Little wonder, then, that last summer, tensions over the role of Israel’s judiciary became unmanageable. The crisis underlined all of these reasons that Netanyahu should go down as Israel’s worst prime minister.

For 34 of the past 47 years, Israel’s prime ministers have come from the Likud party. And yet many on the right still grumble that “Likud doesn’t know how to rule” and “you vote right and get left.” Likudniks complain about the lingering power of “the elites,” a left-wing minority that loses at the ballot box but still controls the civil service, the upper echelons of the security establishment, the universities, and the media. A growing anti-judicial wing within Likud demands constitutional change and a clamping-down on the supreme court’s “judicial activism.”

Netanyahu had once minimized these complaints, but his stance on the judiciary changed after he was indicted in 2019. Indeed, at the start of his current term, Likud’s partners demanded commitments to constitutional change, which they received. The ultra-Orthodox parties were anxious to pass a law exempting religious seminary students from military service. Such exemptions had already fallen afoul of the supreme court’s equality standards, so the religious parties wanted the law to include a “court bypass.” Netanyahu acceded to this. To pass the legislation in the Knesset, he appointed Simcha Rothman, a staunch critic of the court, as the chair of the Knesset’s Constitution Committee.

He also appointed Yariv Levin, another fierce critic of the court, as justice minister. Just six days after the new government was sworn in, Levin rolled out a “judicial reform” plan, prepared by a conservative think tank, that called for drastically limiting the court’s powers to review legislation and gave politicians control over the appointment of new justices.

Within days, an extremely efficient counter-campaign pointed out the dangers the plan posed, not just to Israel’s fragile and limited democracy, but to its economy and security. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested in the streets. Likud began to drop in the polls, and Netanyahu privately urged the leaders of the coalition parties to delay the vote. They refused to back down, and Levin threatened to resign over any delay.

Netanyahu’s motives, unlike those of his partners, were not ideological. His objective was political survival. He needed to keep his hard-won majority intact and the judges off-balance. But the protests were unrelenting. Netanyahu’s independent-minded defense minister, Yoav Gallant, pointed to the controversy’s dire implications for the Israel Defense Forces as hundreds of volunteer reserve officers threatened to suspend their service rather than “serve a dictatorship.”

Netanyahu wasn’t sure he wanted to go through with the judicial coup, but the idea of one of Likud’s senior ministers breaking ranks in public was unthinkable. On March 25 of last year, Gallant made a public statement that the constitutional legislation was a “clear and major threat to the security of Israel” and he would not be voting for it. The next evening, Netanyahu announced that he was firing Gallant.

[Anne Applebaum: Netanyahu’s attack on democracy left Israel unprepared]

In Jerusalem, protesters besieged Netanyahu’s home. In Tel Aviv, they blocked main highways. The next morning, the trade unions announced a general strike, and by that evening, Netanyahu backed down, announcing that he was suspending the legislation and would hold talks with the opposition on finding compromises. Gallant kept his post. The talks collapsed, protests started up again, and Netanyahu once again refused to listen to the warnings coming from the security establishment—not only of anger within the IDF, but that Israel’s enemies were planning to take advantage of the country’s disunity to launch an attack.

The debate over judicial reform pitted two visions of Israel against each other. On one side was a liberal and secular Israel that relied on the supreme court to defend its democratic values; on the other, a religious and conservative Israel that feared that unelected judges would impose incompatible ideas on their Jewish values.

Netanyahu’s government made no attempt to reconcile these two visions. The prime minister had spent too many years, and all those toxic electoral campaigns, exploiting and deepening the rift between them. Even when he belatedly and halfheartedly tried to rein in the radical and fundamentalist demons he had ridden back into office, he found that he could no longer control them.

Whether Netanyahu really meant to eviscerate Israel’s supreme court as part of a plot to weaken the judiciary and intimidate the judges in his own case, or whether he had no choice in the matter and was simply a hostage of his own coalition, is immaterial. What matters is that he appointed Levin as justice minister and permitted the crisis to happen. Ultimately, and despite his professed belief in liberal democracy, Netanyahu allowed Levin and his coalition partners to convince him that they were doing the right thing—because whatever kept him in office was right for Israel. Democracy would remain strong because he would remain in charge.

Trying to diminish the powers of the supreme court isn’t what makes Netanyahu Israel’s worst prime minister. The judicial reform failed anyway. Only one of its elements got through the Knesset before the war with Hamas began, and the court struck it down as unconstitutional six months later. The justices’ ruling to preserve their powers, despite the Knesset’s voting to limit them, could have caused a constitutional crisis if it had happened in peacetime. But by then Israel was facing a much bigger crisis.

Given Israel’s history, the ultimate yardstick of its leaders’ success is the security they deliver for their fellow citizens. In 2017, as I was finishing my unauthorized biography of Netanyahu, I commissioned a data analyst to calculate the average annual casualty rate (Israeli civilians and soldiers) of each prime minister since 1948. The results confirmed what I had already assumed. In the 11 years that Netanyahu had by then been prime minister, the average annual number of Israelis killed in war and terror attacks was lower, by a considerable margin, than under any previous prime minister.

My book on Netanyahu was not admiring. But I felt that it was only fair to include that data point in his favor in the epilogue and the very last footnote. Likud went on to use it in its 2019 campaigns without attributing the source.

The numbers were hard to argue with. Netanyahu was a hard-line prime minister who had done everything in his power to derail the Oslo peace process and prevent any move toward compromise with the Palestinians. Throughout much of his career, he encouraged military action by the West, first against Iraq after 9/11, and then against Iran. But in his years as prime minister, he balked at initiating or being dragged into wars of his own. His risk aversion and preference for covert operations or air strikes rather than ground operations had, in his first two stretches in power, from 1996 to 1999 and 2009 to 2021, kept Israelis relatively safe.

Netanyahu supporters on the right could also argue, on basis of the numbers, that those who brought bloodshed upon Israel, in the form of Palestinian suicide bombings and rocket attacks, were actually Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, the architects of the Oslo Accords; Ehud Barak, with his rash attempts to bring peace; and Ariel Sharon, who withdrew Israeli soldiers and settlers unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, creating the conditions for Hamas’s electoral victory there the following year. That argument no longer holds.

If future biographers of Israeli prime ministers undertake a similar analysis, Netanyahu will no longer be able to claim the lowest casualty rate. His 16th year in office, 2023, was the third-bloodiest in Israel’s history, surpassed only by 1948 and 1973, Israel’s first year of independence and the year of the Yom Kippur War, respectively.

[Read: This war isn’t like Israel’s earlier wars]

The first nine months of 2023 had already seen a rise in deadly violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as terrorist attacks within Israel’s borders. Then came the Hamas attack on October 7, in which at least 1,145 Israelis were massacred and 253 kidnapped and taken to Gaza. More than 30 hostages are now confirmed dead.

No matter how the war in Gaza ends, what happens in its aftermath, or when Netanyahu’s term finally ends, the prime minister will forever be associated above all with that day and the disastrous war that followed. He will go down as the worst prime minister because he has been catastrophic for Israeli security.

To understand how Netanyahu so drastically failed Israel’s security requires going back at least to 2015, the year his long-term strategic bungling of the Iranian threat came into view. His mishandling didn’t happen in isolation; it is also related to the deprioritization of other threats, including the catastrophe that materialized on October 7.

Netanyahu flew to Washington, D.C., in 2015 to implore U.S. lawmakers to obstruct President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Many view this gambit as extraordinarily damaging to Israel’s most crucial alliance—the relationship with the United States is the very bulwark of its security. Perhaps so; but the stunt didn’t make subsequent U.S. administrations less supportive of Israel. Even Obama would still go on to sign the largest 10-year package of military aid to Israel the year after Netanyahu’s speech. Rather, the damage Netanyahu caused by presuming too much of the United States wasn’t to the relationship, but to Israel itself.

Netanyahu’s strategy regarding Iran was based on his assumption that America would one day launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear program. We know this from his 2022 book, Bibi: My Story, in which he admits to arguing repeatedly with Obama “for an American strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.” Senior Israeli officials have confirmed that he expected Donald Trump to launch such a strike as well. In fact, Netanyahu was so sure that Trump, unlike Obama, would give the order that he had no strategy in place for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program when Trump decided, at Netanyahu’s own urging, to withdraw from the Iran deal in May 2018.

Israel’s military and intelligence chiefs had been far from enamored with the Iran deal, but they’d seized the opportunity it presented to divert some of the intelligence resources that had been focused on Iran’s nuclear program to other threats, particularly Tehran’s network of proxies across the region. They were caught by surprise when the Trump administration ditched the Iran deal (Netanyahu knew it was coming but didn’t inform them). This unilateral withdrawal effectively removed the limitations on Iran’s nuclear development and required an abrupt reversal of Israeli priorities.

Senior Israeli officials I spoke with had to tread a wary path here. Those who were still in active service couldn’t challenge the prime minister’s strategy directly. But in private some were scathing about the lack of a coherent strategy on Iran. “It takes years to build intelligence capabilities. You can’t just change target priorities overnight,” one told me.

[Read: A shocked and frazzled collective mind]

The result was a dissipation of Israeli efforts to stop Iran—which is committed to the destruction of Israel. Iran sped further than ever down the path of uranium enrichment, and its proxies, including the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border, grew ever more powerful.

In the months leading up to October 7, Israel’s intelligence community repeatedly warned Netanyahu that Iran and its proxies were plotting a major attack within Israel, though few envisaged something on the scale of October 7. By the fall of 2023, motives were legion: fear that an imminent Israeli diplomatic breakthrough with Saudi Arabia could change the geopolitics of the region; threats that Ben-Gvir would allow Jews greater access to the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and worsen conditions for Palestinian prisoners; rumors that the deepening tensions within Israeli society would render any response to an attack slow and disjointed.

Netanyahu chose to ignore the warnings. The senior officers and intelligence chiefs who issued them were, to his mind, conspiring with the law-enforcement agencies and legal establishment that had put him on trial and were trying to obstruct his government’s legislation. None of them had his experience and knowledge of the real threats facing Israel. Hadn’t he been right in the past when he’d refused to listen to leftist officials and so-called experts?

Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7 was the result of a colossal failure at all levels of Israel’s security and intelligence community. They had all seen the warning signals but continued to believe that the main threat came from Hezbollah, the larger and far better-equipped and trained enemy to the north. Israel’s security establishment believed that Hamas was isolated in Gaza, and that it and the other Palestinian organizations had been effectively deterred from attacking Israel.

Netanyahu was the originator of this assumption, and its biggest proponent. He believed that keeping Hamas in power in Gaza, as it had been for nearly two years when he returned to office in 2009, was in Israel’s interest. Periodic rocket attacks on Israeli communities in the south were a price worth paying to keep the Palestinian movement split between the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority in the West Bank enclaves and Hamas in Gaza. Such division would push the troublesome two-state solution off the global agenda and allow Israel to focus on regional alliances with like-minded Arab autocracies that also feared Iran. The Palestinian issue would sink into irrelevance.

Netanyahu’s disastrous strategy regarding Gaza and Hamas is part of what makes him Israel’s worst prime minister, but it’s not the only factor. Previous Israeli prime ministers, too, blundered into bloody wars on the basis of misguided strategies and faulty advice from their military and intelligence advisers.

Netanyahu stands out from them for his refusal to accept responsibility, and for his political machinations and smear campaigns since October 7. He blames IDF generals and nourishes the conspiracy theory that they, in alliance with the protest movement, somehow allowed October 7 to happen.

[Hillary Rodham Clinton: Hamas must go]

Netanyahu believes that he is the ultimate victim of that tragic day. Convinced by his own campaign slogans, he argues that he is the only one who can deliver Israel from this valley of shadows to the sunlit uplands of “total victory.” He refuses to consider any advice about ending the war and continues to prioritize preserving his coalition, because he appears incapable of distinguishing between his own fate, now tainted by tragic failure, and that of Israel.

Many around the world assume that Israel’s war with Hamas has proceeded according to some plan of Netanyahu’s. This is a mistake. Netanyahu has the last word as prime minister and head of the emergency war cabinet, but he has used his power mainly to prevaricate, procrastinate, and obstruct. He delayed the initial ground offensive into Gaza, hesitated for weeks over the first truce and hostage-release agreement in November, and is now doing the same over another such deal with Hamas. For the past six months, he has prevented any meaningful cabinet discussion of Israel’s strategic goals. He has rejected the proposals of his own security establishment and the Biden administration. He presented vague principles for “the day after Hamas” to the cabinet only in late February, and they have yet to be debated.

However one views the war in Gaza—as a justified war of defense in which Hamas is responsible for the civilian casualties it has cynically hidden behind, or as an intentional genocide of the Palestinian people, or as anything in between—none of it is Netanyahu’s plan. That’s because Netanyahu has no plan for Gaza, only one for remaining in power. His obstructionism, his showdowns with generals, his confrontations with the Biden administration—all are focused on that end, which means preserving his far-right coalition and playing to his hard-core nationalist base.

Meanwhile, he’s doing what he has always done: wearing down and discrediting his political opponents in the hope of proving to an exhausted and traumatized public that he’s the only alternative. So far, he’s failing. Polls show that an overwhelming majority of Israelis want him gone. But Netanyahu is fending off calls to hold an early election until he believes he is within striking distance of winning.

Netanyahu’s ambition has consumed both him and Israel. To regain and remain in office, he has sacrificed his own authority and parceled out power to the most extreme politicians. Since his reelection in 2022, Netanyahu is no longer the center of power but a vacuum, a black hole that has engulfed all of Israel’s political energy. His weakness has given the far right and religious fundamentalists extraordinary control over Israel’s affairs, while other segments of the population are left to pursue the never-ending quest to end his reign.

One man’s pursuit of power has diverted Israel from confronting its most urgent priorities: the threat from Iran, the conflict with the Palestinians, the desire to nurture a Westernized society and economy in the most contested corner of the Middle East, the internal contradictions between democracy and religion, the clash between tribal phobias and high-tech hopes. Netanyahu’s obsession with his own destiny as Israel’s protector has caused his country grievous damage.

Most Israelis already realize that Netanyahu is the worst of the 14 prime ministers their country has had in its 76 years of independence. But in the future, Jews might even remember him as the leader who inflicted the most harm on his people since the squabbling Hasmonean kings brought civil war and Roman occupation to Judea nearly 21 centuries ago. As long as he remains in power, he could yet surpass them.

All the latest developments on the Israel-Hamas war.

PM Benjamin Netanyahu says Hamas has been emboldened by the demand for an immediate ceasefire.

This is a breaking news story, more details to follow.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, on a visit to Iran, says Israel is experiencing "unprecedented political isolation".

The Home Office is examining claims UK Border Force officers "aggressively questioned" two Israeli men.

O

ne of the section leaders for my computer-science class, Hamza El Boudali, believes that President Joe Biden should be killed. “I’m not calling for a civilian to do it, but I think a military should,” the 23-year-old Stanford University student told a small group of protesters last month. “I’d be happy if Biden was dead.” He thinks that Stanford is complicit in what he calls the genocide of Palestinians, and that Biden is not only complicit but responsible for it. “I’m not calling for a vigilante to do it,” he later clarified, “but I’m saying he is guilty of mass murder and should be treated in the same way that a terrorist with darker skin would be (and we all know terrorists with dark skin are typically bombed and drone striked by American planes).” El Boudali has also said that he believes that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a justifiable act of resistance, and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in place of its current government (though he clarified later that he “doesn’t mean Hamas is perfect”). When you ask him what his cause is, he answers: “Peace.”

I switched to a different computer-science section.

Israel is 7,500 miles away from Stanford’s campus, where I am a sophomore. But the Hamas invasion and the Israeli counterinvasion have fractured my university, a place typically less focused on geopolitics than on venture-capital funding for the latest dorm-based tech start-up. Few students would call for Biden’s head—I think—but many of the same young people who say they want peace in Gaza don’t seem to realize that they are in fact advocating for violence. Extremism has swept through classrooms and dorms, and it is becoming normal for students to be harassed and intimidated for their faith, heritage, or appearance—they have been called perpetrators of genocide for wearing kippahs, and accused of supporting terrorism for wearing keffiyehs. The extremism and anti-Semitism at Ivy League universities on the East Coast have attracted so much media and congressional attention that two Ivy presidents have lost their jobs. But few people seem to have noticed the culture war that has taken over our California campus.

For four months, two rival groups of protesters, separated by a narrow bike path, faced off on Stanford’s palm-covered grounds. The “Sit-In to Stop Genocide” encampment was erected by students in mid-October, even before Israeli troops had crossed into Gaza, to demand that the university divest from Israel and condemn its behavior. Posters were hung equating Hamas with Ukraine and Nelson Mandela. Across from the sit-in, a rival group of pro-Israel students eventually set up the “Blue and White Tent” to provide, as one activist put it, a “safe space” to “be a proud Jew on campus.” Soon it became the center of its own cluster of tents, with photos of Hamas’s victims sitting opposite the rubble-ridden images of Gaza and a long (and incomplete) list of the names of slain Palestinians displayed by the students at the sit-in.

Some days the dueling encampments would host only a few people each, but on a sunny weekday afternoon, there could be dozens. Most of the time, the groups tolerated each other. But not always. Students on both sides were reportedly spit on and yelled at, and had their belongings destroyed. (The perpetrators in many cases seemed to be adults who weren’t affiliated with Stanford, a security guard told me.) The university put in place round-the-clock security, but when something actually happened, no one quite knew what to do.

[Conor Friedersdorf: How October 7 changed America’s free speech culture ]

Stanford has a policy barring overnight camping, but for months didn’t enforce it, “out of a desire to support the peaceful expression of free speech in the ways that students choose to exercise that expression”—and, the administration told alumni, because the university feared that confronting the students would only make the conflict worse. When the school finally said the tents had to go last month, enormous protests against the university administration, and against Israel, followed.

“We don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!” students chanted, a slogan advocating that Israel be dismantled and replaced by a single Arab nation. Palestinian flags flew alongside bright “Welcome!” banners left over from new-student orientation. A young woman gave a speech that seemed to capture the sense of urgency and power that so many students here feel. “We are Stanford University!” she shouted. “We control things!”

“We’ve had protests in the past,” Richard Saller, the university’s interim president, told me in November—about the environment, and apartheid, and Vietnam. But they didn’t pit “students against each other” the way that this conflict has.

I’ve spoken with Saller, a scholar of Roman history, a few times over the past six months in my capacity as a student journalist. We first met in September, a few weeks into his tenure. His predecessor, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, had resigned as president after my reporting for The Stanford Daily exposed misconduct in his academic research. (Tessier-Lavigne had failed to retract papers with faked data over the course of 20 years. In his resignation statement, he denied allegations of fraud and misconduct; a Stanford investigation determined that he had not personally manipulated data or ordered any manipulation but that he had repeatedly “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes” from his lab.)

In that first conversation, Saller told me that everyone was “eager to move on” from the Tessier-Lavigne scandal. He was cheerful and upbeat. He knew he wasn’t staying in the job long; he hadn’t even bothered to move into the recently vacated presidential manor. In any case, campus, at that time, was serene. Then, a week later, came October 7.

The attack was as clear a litmus test as one could imagine for the Middle East conflict. Hamas insurgents raided homes and a music festival with the goal of slaughtering as many civilians as possible. Some victims were raped and mutilated, several independent investigations found. Hundreds of hostages were taken into Gaza and many have been tortured.

This, of course, was bad. Saying this was bad does not negate or marginalize the abuses and suffering Palestinians have experienced in Gaza and elsewhere. Everyone, of every ideology, should be able to say that this was bad. But much of this campus failed that simple test.

Two days after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Stanford released milquetoast statements marking the “moment of intense emotion” and declaring “deep concern” over “the crisis in Israel and Palestine.” The official statements did not use the words Hamas or violence.

The absence of a clear institutional response led some teachers to take matters into their own hands. During a mandatory freshman seminar on October 10, a lecturer named Ameer Loggins tossed out his lesson plan to tell students that the actions of the Palestinian “military force” had been justified, that Israelis were colonizers, and that the Holocaust had been overemphasized, according to interviews I conducted with students in the class. Loggins then asked the Jewish students to identify themselves. He instructed one of them to “stand up, face the window, and he kind of kicked away his chair,” a witness told me. Loggins described this as an effort to demonstrate Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. (Loggins did not reply to a request for comment; a spokesperson for Stanford said that there were “different recollections of the details regarding what happened” in the class.)

“We’re only in our third week of college, and we’re afraid to be here,” three students in the class wrote in an email that night to administrators. “This isn’t what Stanford was supposed to be.” The class Loggins taught is called COLLEGE, short for “Civic, Liberal, and Global Education,” and it is billed as an effort to develop “the skills that empower and enable us to live together.”

Loggins was suspended from teaching duties and an investigation was opened; this angered pro-Palestine activists, who organized a petition that garnered more than 1,700 signatures contesting the suspension. A pamphlet from the petitioners argued that Loggins’s behavior had not been out of bounds.

The day after the class, Stanford put out a statement written by Saller and Jenny Martinez, the university provost, more forcefully condemning the Hamas attack. Immediately, this new statement generated backlash.

Pro-Palestine activists complained about it during an event held the same day, the first of several “teach-ins” about the conflict. Students gathered in one of Stanford’s dorms to “bear witness to the struggles of decolonization.” The grievances and pain shared by Palestinian students were real. They told of discrimination and violence, of frightened family members subjected to harsh conditions. But the most raucous reaction from the crowd was in response to a young woman who said, “You ask us, do we condemn Hamas? Fuck you!” She added that she was “so proud of my resistance.”

David Palumbo-Liu, a professor of comparative literature with a focus on postcolonial studies, also spoke at the teach-in, explaining to the crowd that “European settlers” had come to “replace” Palestine’s “native population.”

Palumbo-Liu is known as an intelligent and supportive professor, and is popular among students, who call him by his initials, DPL. I wanted to ask him about his involvement in the teach-in, so we met one day in a café a few hundred feet away from the tents. I asked if he could elaborate on what he’d said at the event about Palestine’s native population. He was happy to expand: This was “one of those discussions that could go on forever. Like, who is actually native? At what point does nativism lapse, right? Well, you haven’t been native for X number of years, so …” In the end, he said, “you have two people who both feel they have a claim to the land,” and “they have to live together. Both sides have to cede something.”

The struggle at Stanford, he told me, “is to find a way in which open discussions can be had that allow people to disagree.” It’s true that Stanford has utterly failed in its efforts to encourage productive dialogue. But I still found it hard to reconcile DPL’s words with his public statements on Israel, which he’d recently said on Facebook should be “the most hated nation in the world.” He also wrote: “When Zionists say they don’t feel ‘safe’ on campus, I’ve come to see that as they no longer feel immune to criticism of Israel.” He continued: “Well as the saying goes, get used to it.”

Zionists, and indeed Jewish students of all political beliefs, have been given good reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed, and called derogatory racial epithets. At least one was told he was a “dirty Jew.” At least twice, mezuzahs have been ripped from students’ doors, and swastikas have been drawn in dorms. Arab and Muslim students also face alarming threats. The computer-science section leader, El Boudali, a pro-Palestine activist, told me he felt “safe personally,” but knew others who did not: “Some people have reported feeling like they’re followed, especially women who wear the hijab.”

In a remarkably short period of time, aggression and abuse have become commonplace, an accepted part of campus activism. In January, Jewish students organized an event dedicated to ameliorating anti-Semitism. It marked one of Saller’s first public appearances in the new year. Its topic seemed uncontroversial, and I thought it would generate little backlash.

Protests began before the panel discussion even started, with activists lining the stairs leading to the auditorium. During the event they drowned out the panelists, one of whom was Israel’s special envoy for combating anti-Semitism, by demanding a cease-fire. After participants began cycling out into the dark, things got ugly.

Activists, their faces covered by keffiyehs or medical masks, confronted attendees. “Go back to Brooklyn!” a young woman shouted at Jewish students. One protester, who emerged as the leader of the group, said that she and her compatriots would “take all of your places and ensure Israel falls.” She told attendees to get “off our fucking campus” and launched into conspiracy theories about Jews being involved in “child trafficking.” As a rabbi tried to leave the event, protesters pursued him, chanting, “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”

At one point, some members of the group turned on a few Stanford employees, including another rabbi, an imam, and a chaplain, telling them, “We know your names and we know where you work.” The ringleader added: “And we’ll soon find out where you live.” The religious leaders formed a protective barrier in front of the Jewish students. The rabbi and the imam appeared to be crying.

Protests at Stanford. Sources: Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu / Getty

Saller avoided the protest by leaving through another door. Early that morning, his private residence had been vandalized. Protesters frequently tell him he “can’t hide” and shout him down. “We charge you with genocide!” they chant, demanding that Stanford divest from Israel. (When asked whether Stanford actually invested in Israel, a spokesperson replied that, beyond small exposures from passive funds that track indexes such as the S&P 500, the university’s endowment “has no direct holdings in Israeli companies, or direct holdings in defense contractors.”)

When the university finally said the protest tents had to be removed, students responded by accusing Saller of suppressing their right to free speech. This is probably the last charge he expected to face. Saller once served as provost at the University of Chicago, which is known for holding itself to a position of strict institutional neutrality so that its students can freely explore ideas for themselves. Saller has a lifelong belief in First Amendment rights. But that conviction in impartial college governance does not align with Stanford’s behavior in recent years. Despite the fact that many students seemed largely uninterested in the headlines before this year, Stanford’s administrative leadership has often taken positions on political issues and events, such as the Paris climate conference and the murder of George Floyd. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Stanford’s Hoover Tower was lit up in blue and yellow, and the school released a statement in solidarity.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: Let the activists have their loathsome rallies]

When we first met, a week before October 7, I asked Saller about this. Did Stanford have a moral duty to denounce the war in Ukraine, for example, or the ethnic cleansing of Uyghur Muslims in China? “On international political issues, no,” he said. “That’s not a responsibility for the university as a whole, as an institution.”

But when Saller tried to apply his convictions on neutrality for the first time as president, dozens of faculty members condemned the response, many pro-Israel alumni were outraged, donors had private discussions about pulling funding, and an Israeli university sent an open letter to Saller and Martinez saying, “Stanford’s administration has failed us.” The initial statement had tried to make clear that the school’s policy was not Israel-specific: It noted that the university would not take a position on the turmoil in Nagorno-Karabakh (where Armenians are undergoing ethnic cleansing) either. But the message didn’t get through.

Saller had to beat an awkward retreat or risk the exact sort of public humiliation that he, as caretaker president, had presumably been hired to avoid. He came up with a compromise that landed somewhere in the middle: an unequivocal condemnation of Hamas’s “intolerable atrocities” paired with a statement making clear that Stanford would commit to institutional neutrality going forward.

“The events in Israel and Gaza this week have affected and engaged large numbers of students on our campus in ways that many other events have not,” the statement read. “This is why we feel compelled to both address the impact of these events on our campus and to explain why our general policy of not issuing statements about news events not directly connected to campus has limited the breadth of our comments thus far, and why you should not expect frequent commentary from us in the future.”

I asked Saller why he had changed tack on Israel and not on Nagorno-Karabakh. “We don’t feel as if we should be making statements on every war crime and atrocity,” he told me. This felt like a statement in and of itself.

In making such decisions, Saller works closely with Martinez, Stanford’s provost. I happened to interview her, too, a few days before October 7, not long after she’d been appointed. When I asked about her hopes for the job, she said that a “priority is ensuring an environment in which free speech and academic freedom are preserved.”

We talked about the so-called Leonard Law—a provision unique to California that requires private universities to be governed by the same First Amendment protections as public ones. This restricts what Stanford can do in terms of penalizing speech, putting it in a stricter bind than Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, or any of the other elite private institutions that have more latitude to set the standards for their campus (whether or not they have done so).

So I was surprised when, in December, the university announced that abstract calls for genocide “clearly violate Stanford’s Fundamental Standard, the code of conduct for all students at the university.” The statement was a response to the outrage following the congressional testimony of three university presidents—outrage that eventually led to the resignation of two of them, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill. Gay and Magill, who had both previously held positions at Stanford, did not commit to punishing calls for the genocide of Jews.

Experts told me that Stanford’s policy is impossible to enforce—and Saller himself acknowledged as much in our March interview.

“Liz Magill is a good friend,” Saller told me, adding, “Having watched what happened at Harvard and Penn, it seemed prudent” to publicly state that Stanford rejected calls for genocide. But saying that those calls violate the code of conduct “is not the same thing as to say that we could actually punish it.”

Stanford’s leaders seem to be trying their best while adapting to the situation in real time. But the muddled messaging has created a policy of neutrality that does not feel neutral at all.

When we met back in November, I tried to get Saller to open up about his experience running an institution in turmoil. What’s it like to know that so many students seem to believe that he—a mild-mannered 71-year-old classicist who swing-dances with his anthropologist wife—is a warmonger? Saller was more candid than I expected—perhaps more candid than any prominent university president has been yet. We sat in the same conference room as we had in September. The weather hadn’t really changed. Yet I felt like I was sitting in front of a different person. He was hunched over and looked exhausted, and his voice broke when he talked about the loss of life in Gaza and Israel and “the fact that we’re caught up in it.” A capable administrator with decades of experience, Saller seemed almost at a loss. “It’s been a kind of roller coaster, to be honest.”

He said he hadn’t anticipated the deluge of the emails “blaming me for lack of moral courage.” Anything the university says seems bound to be wrong: “If I say that our position is that we grieve over the loss of innocent lives, that in itself will draw some hostile reactions.”

“I find that really difficult to navigate,” he said with a sigh.

By March, it seemed that his views had solidified. He said he knew he was “a target,” but he was not going to be pushed into issuing any more statements. The continuing crisis seems to have granted him new insight. “I am certain that whatever I say will not have any material effect on the war in Gaza.” It’s hard to argue with that.

People tend to blame the campus wars on two villains: dithering administrators and radical student activists. But colleges have always had dithering administrators and radical student activists. To my mind, it’s the average students who have changed.

Elite universities attract a certain kind of student: the overachieving striver who has won all the right accolades for all the right activities. Is it such a surprise that the kids who are trained in the constant pursuit of perfect scores think they have to look at the world like a series of multiple-choice questions, with clearly right or wrong answers? Or that they think they can gamify a political cause in the same way they ace a standardized test?

Everyone knows that the only reliable way to get into a school like Stanford is to be really good at looking really good. Now that they’re here, students know that one easy way to keep looking good is to side with the majority of protesters, and condemn Israel.

It’s not that there isn’t real anger and anxiety over what is happening in Gaza—there is, and justifiably so. I know that among the protesters are many people who are deeply connected to this issue. But they are not the majority. What really activates the crowds now seems less a principled devotion to Palestine or to pacifism than a desire for collective action, to fit in by embracing the fashionable cause of the moment—as if a centuries-old conflict in which both sides have stolen and killed could ever be a simple matter of right and wrong. In their haste to exhibit moral righteousness, many of the least informed protesters end up being the loudest and most uncompromising.

Today’s students grew up in the Trump era, in which violent rhetoric has become a normal part of political discourse and activism is as easy as reposting an infographic. Many young people have come to feel that being angry is enough to foment change. Furious at the world’s injustices and desperate for a simple way to express that fury, they don’t seem interested in any form of engagement more nuanced than backing a pure protagonist and denouncing an evil enemy. They don’t, always, seem that concerned with the truth.

At the protest last month to prevent the removal of the sit-in, an activist in a pink Women’s March “pussy hat” shouted that no rape was committed by Hamas on October 7. “There hasn’t been proof of these rape accusations,” a student told me in a separate conversation, criticizing the Blue and White Tent for spreading what he considered to be misinformation about sexual violence. (In March, a United Nations report found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence,” including “rape and gang rape,” occurred in multiple locations on October 7, as well as “clear and convincing information” on the “rape and sexualized torture” of hostages.) “The level of propaganda” surrounding Hamas, he told me, “is just unbelievable.”

The real story at Stanford is not about the malicious actors who endorse sexual assault and murder as forms of resistance, but about those who passively enable them because they believe their side can do no wrong. You don’t have to understand what you’re arguing for in order to argue for it. You don’t have to be able to name the river or the sea under discussion to chant “From the river to the sea.” This kind of obliviousness explains how one of my friends, a gay activist, can justify Hamas’s actions, even though it would have the two of us—an outspoken queer person and a Jewish reporter—killed in a heartbeat. A similar mentality can exist on the other side: I have heard students insist on the absolute righteousness of Israel yet seem uninterested in learning anything about what life is like in Gaza.

I’m familiar with the pull of achievement culture—after all, I’m a product of the same system. I fell in love with Stanford as a 7-year-old, lying on the floor of an East Coast library and picturing all the cool technology those West Coast geniuses were dreaming up. I cried when I was accepted; I spent the next few months scrolling through the course catalog, giddy with anticipation. I wanted to learn everything.

I learned more than I expected. Within my first week here, someone asked me: “Why are all Jews so rich?” In 2016, when Stanford’s undergraduate senate had debated a resolution against anti-Semitism, one of its members argued that the idea of “Jews controlling the media, economy, government, and other societal institutions” represented “a very valid discussion.” (He apologized, and the resolution passed.) In my dorm last year, a student discussed being Jewish and awoke the next day to swastikas and a portrait of Hitler affixed to his door.

[David Frum: There is no right to bully and harass]

I grew up secularly, with no strong affiliation to Jewish culture. When I found out as a teenager that some of my ancestors had hidden their identity from their children and that dozens of my relatives had died in the Holocaust (something no living member of my family had known), I felt the barest tremor of identity. After I saw so many people I know cheering after October 7, I felt something stronger stir. I know others have experienced something similar. Even a professor texted me to say that she felt Jewish in a way she never had before.

But my frustration with the conflict on campus has little to do with my own identity. Across the many conversations and hours of formal interviews I conducted for this article, I’ve encountered a persistent anti-intellectual streak. I’ve watched many of my classmates treat death so cavalierly that they can protest as a pregame to a party. Indeed, two parties at Stanford were reported to the university this fall for allegedly making people say “Fuck Israel” or “Free Palestine” to get in the door. A spokesperson for the university said it was “unable to confirm the facts of what occurred,” but that it had “met with students involved in both parties to make clear that Stanford’s nondiscrimination policy applies to parties.” As a friend emailed me not long ago: “A place that was supposed to be a sanctuary from such unreason has become a factory for it.”

Readers may be tempted to discount the conduct displayed at Stanford. After all, the thinking goes, these are privileged kids doing what they always do: embracing faux-radicalism in college before taking jobs in fintech or consulting. These students, some might say, aren’t representative of America.

And yet they are representative of something: of the conduct many of the most accomplished students in my generation have accepted as tolerable, and what that means for the future of our country. I admire activism. We need people willing to protest what they see as wrong and take on entrenched systems of repression. But we also need to read, learn, discuss, accept the existence of nuance, embrace diversity of thought, and hold our own allies to high standards. More than ever, we need universities to teach young people how to do all of this.

For so long, Stanford’s physical standoff seemed intractable. Then, in early February, a storm swept in, and the natural world dictated its own conclusion.

Heavy rains flooded campus. For hours, the students battled to save their tents. The sit-in activists used sandbags and anything else they could find to hold back the water—at one point, David Palumbo-Liu, the professor, told me he stood in the lashing downpour to anchor one of the sit-in’s tents with his own body. When the storm hit, many of the Jewish activists had been attending a discussion on anti-Semitism. They raced back and struggled to salvage the Blue and White Tent, but it was too late—the wind had ripped it out of the ground.

The next day, the weary Jewish protesters returned to discover that their space had been taken.

A new collection of tents had been set up by El Boudali, the pro-Palestine activist, and a dozen friends. He said they were there to protest Islamophobia and to teach about Islam and jihad, and that they were a separate entity from the Sit-In to Stop Genocide, though I observed students cycling between the tents. Palestinian flags now flew from the bookstore to the quad.

Administrators told me they’d quickly informed El Boudali and his allies that the space had been reserved by the Jewish advocates, and offered to help move them to a different location. But the protesters told me they had no intention of going. (El Boudali later said that they did not take over the entire space, and would have been “happy to exist side by side, but they wanted to kick us off entirely from that lawn.”)

When it was clear that the area where they’d set up their tents would not be ceded back to the pro-Israel group willingly, Stanford changed course and decided to clear everyone out in one fell swoop. On February 8, school officials ordered all students to vacate the plaza overnight. The university was finally going to enforce its rule prohibiting people from sleeping outside on campus and requiring the removal of belongings from the plaza between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. The order cited the danger posed by the storm as a justification for changing course and, probably hoping to avoid allegations of bias, described the decision as “viewpoint-neutral.”

That didn’t work.

About a week of protests, led by the sit-in organizers, followed. Chants were chanted. More demands for a “river to the sea” solution to the Israel problem were made. A friend boasted to me about her willingness to be arrested. Stanford sent a handful of staff members, who stood near balloons left over from an event earlier in the day. They were there, one of them told me, to “make students feel supported and safe.”

In the end, Saller and Martinez agreed to talk with the leaders of the sit-in about their demands to divest the university and condemn Israel, under the proviso that the activists comply with Stanford’s anti-camping guidelines “regardless of the outcome of discussions.” Eight days after they were first instructed to leave, 120 days after setting up camp, the sit-in protesters slept in their own beds. In defiance of the university’s instructions, they left behind their tents. But sometime in the very early hours of the morning, law-enforcement officers confiscated the structures. The area was cordoned off without any violence and the plaza filled once more with electric skateboards and farmers’ markets.

The conflict continues in its own way. Saller was just shouted down by protesters chanting “No peace on stolen land” at a Family Weekend event, and protesters later displayed an effigy of him covered in blood. Students still feel tense; Saller still seems worried. He told me that the university is planning to change all manner of things—residential-assistant training, new-student orientation, even the acceptance letters that students receive—in hopes of fostering a culture of greater tolerance. But no campus edict or panel discussion can address a problem that is so much bigger than our university.

At one rally last fall, a speaker expressed disillusionment about the power of “peaceful resistance” on college campuses. “What is there left to do but to take up arms?” The crowd cheered as he said Israel must be destroyed. But what would happen to its citizens? I’d prefer to believe that most protesters chanting “Palestine is Arab” and shouting that we must “smash the Zionist settler state” don’t actually think Jews should be killed en masse. But can one truly be so ignorant as to advocate widespread violence in the name of peace?

When the world is rendered in black-and-white—portrayed as a simple fight between colonizer and colonized—the answer is yes. Solutions, by this logic, are absolute: Israel or Palestine, nothing in between. Either you support liberation of the oppressed or you support genocide. Either Stanford is all good or all bad; all in favor of free speech or all authoritarian; all anti-Semitic or all Islamophobic.

At January’s anti-anti-Semitism event, I watched an exchange between a Jewish attendee and a protester from a few feet away. “Are you pro-Palestine?” the protester asked.

“Yes,” the attendee responded, and he went on to describe his disgust with the human-rights abuses Palestinians have faced for years.

“But are you a Zionist?”

“Yes.”

“Then we are enemies.”