Hours before the U.S. House of Representatives is set to vote on a crypto bill, president Biden released a statement saying that he is against the legislation, but he isn’t threatening to veto it.

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The move brings the total number of US students benefitting from the president's debt relief push to 4.75 million.

Even if a highly anticipated agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia never comes to fruition, its rumored announcement seems sure to do at least one thing: further isolate Israel within the international community.

Over the past few years, the Biden administration has been working with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, on a wide-ranging deal to strengthen ties between the United States and Saudi Arabia as part of a broader agreement in which Saudi Arabia will normalize relations with Israel.

Saudi Arabia is asking for a closer defense relationship with the United States and access to Washington’s most advanced weapons systems, but it wants more than that. It wants the U.S. to help it develop a civilian nuclear-power program, relax scrutiny of the transfer of sensitive technologies, and expedite the review of Saudi investments in U.S. technology firms and crucial infrastructure.

Based on conversations with senior Saudi and U.S. officials over the past several weeks, and bearing in mind that none of us has yet seen the details of the prospective deal, I am not yet convinced that a deal would be in America’s interest—or even necessary, given the already deepening commercial links between the two countries.

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

But I am also not convinced that any senior Saudi decision maker—not least the one who really counts, the crown prince—believes a deal is possible. The Saudis I have spoken with have made clear they will recognize Israel only if Israel consents to creating irreversible momentum toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Those same Saudis, meanwhile, are impressively clear-eyed about Israeli politics at the moment. They understand that few, if any, Israelis are in a mood to consider the creation of a Palestinian state, and they understand that Israeli-government policies over the past three decades might have made such a state impossible in the West Bank, anyway.

So on the one hand, the Saudis deserve some credit for doing what would have been unthinkable a decade ago: making a desire to eventually normalize ties with Israel the de facto policy of the kingdom. But on the other hand, there is no real, immediate cost to the Saudis for doing so—not when they know that Israel will not accept their one condition.

This deal is setting Israel up to be the fall guy. The United States and Saudi Arabia are likely going to herald a potentially transformative agreement that Israel appears almost certain to reject—in front of a global audience that has lost patience with that country’s policies toward and treatment of the Palestinians.  

The Saudis will likely not be overly disappointed, or surprised, by Israel’s rejection of their terms. They might even enjoy it. Indeed, 50 years after Israel’s then–Foreign Minister Abba Eban lamented that the Palestinians “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” the Saudis and other Arabs will delight in throwing that famous quote back at Israel.  

Even in the best of times, Israeli political debates can be maddeningly solipsistic. Henry Kissinger quipped that Israel “doesn’t do foreign policy—only domestic politics.” But these are not the best of times. In the seven months since the horrific attacks of October 7, the gulf between how Israel defines its security needs and how the world defines those same needs has grown like never before. My conversations with Israeli friends—almost all of whom believe that their country has basically done the right thing in Gaza, even as they now demand a strategy for concluding the campaign—are invariably tense. Israel is waging a war of punishment against the people of Gaza, and Israelis have been largely shielded from the images of the suffering and destruction that the rest of us see.

When the Biden administration made the relatively modest decision to condition some military aid to Israel in advance of an assault on Rafah, Israeli leaders responded with defiance, hurling abuse at the American president—“Hamas ❤️ Biden,” one right-wing minister tweeted—and boasting that Israel would “stand alone” if necessary.

But Israel has not stood alone for a very long time. For years, Israelis might have told themselves, and Americans, that they can provide for their own security—if only the United States would help arm them. But the Jordanian and Egyptian armies have long defended Israel’s southern and eastern flanks, while the United States provides roughly a quarter of Israel’s defense budget and has elaborate and well-rehearsed contingency plans to defend Israel in an emergency.  

That U.S. troops would someday be called upon to defend Israel in a regional war has seemed inevitable. That moment arrived in April, when the United States led a coalition of nations—including Jordan, France, and the United Kingdom—in repelling an Iranian aerial assault on Israel. A precedent had been shattered: American men and women were in the line of fire, protecting Israel from its enemies.

They did so, of course, because Israel does not, in fact, stand alone, nor is Israel an island unto itself: It is part of the international community and a broader regional security system. Its decisions affect not only its own citizens but millions of people across the region, and billions of dollars in international trade. And the United States and its allies have no interest in either Israel or Iran dragging them into a wider conflagration that will affect those lives, or that commerce.

The Saudis and the Biden administration both seem determined to teach Israel this lesson. If Israel, as expected, rejects a deal, the Saudis will quickly pivot, telling Biden’s negotiators that the same long-term bilateral agreement that made sense within the context of a deal with Israel would surely make sense on its own. Riyadh’s point about Israel and its place in the region will have been made, and the Biden administration will have helped make it.

US slaps tariffs on Chinese goods, and Beijing launches an anti-dumping inquiry in response.

Issue polling can make you think that voters are oblivious. A recent poll by the Los Angeles Business Council finds that although 61 percent of respondents in the nation’s second-largest city think L.A. should substantially increase the number of new housing units, just 40 percent believe that doing so will make housing more affordable. Nearly half think that doing so will drive up the cost of housing and push residents out.

But here’s a more generous interpretation of that poll: Angelenos want the housing crisis to be solved. And when they hear a pollster offer them potential solutions to the problem, they express their agreement. They’re not policy experts; they’re transmitting their values and priorities. They want cheaper housing, they want more options for where to live, and they don’t want people to be forced from their current neighborhood. They just expect—quite reasonably—that working out the details is up to somebody else. That is, after all, the point of representative democracy.

Polls are incredibly useful in trying to demystify public opinion. They’re much better than heuristics such as “I ran into a guy at the grocery store” and “I saw a lot of lawn signs on my morning commute.” But issue polls are still merely tools that help uncover public opinion. They’re not public opinion itself.

Voters do have intuitions about what kinds of policies sound better to them. On housing policy, for instance, poll respondents are typically most excited about demand-side policies that have a clearly identifiable beneficiary. In this spirit, President Joe Biden’s new plan to lower housing costs calls upon Congress to expand rent vouchers and give first-generation homeowners up to $25,000 in down-payment assistance, among other measures.

Many people are cooler on supply-side policies that ease the construction of more housing, even though this is the only systematic answer to the housing crisis. Promises to streamline regulations sound amorphous and vague, and they directly benefit developers, who are routinely cast as villains. Sometimes, giving voters what they most want—in this case, an answer to an affordability crisis—can come only through seemingly unpopular means: building a lot of dense new housing.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Housing breaks people’s brains]

By pushing initiatives more directly tailored to poll results, policy makers can appear to be addressing a crisis. But a popular course of action may not be a solution to the core problem. In March, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, vetoed an ambitious supply-side housing reform designed to produce more starter homes; the following month, she pledged $13 million in financial assistance for “up to 500” first-time homebuyers. How can helping a few hundred people buy a house seriously address a cost-of-living crisis that affects millions?

When pundits and political operatives take issue polling too literally, they may come to see the public’s views as hopelessly contradictory. You want fewer taxes and more social services? How could some of the same voters who said, in May 2020, that the government hadn’t gone far enough in shutting down businesses during the early pandemic also believe that all businesses that establish social-distancing protocols should be allowed to reopen?

[Jerusalem Demsas: Why did the U.S. Navy kill Arizona’s housing bill?]

A lot of polling is intentionally misleading, though. As ABC News’s G. Elliott Morris explains on his Substack, “The landscape of issue polling is particularly fraught with partisan advocacy organizations and biased surveys.” We should also be wary of polls that ask respondents to render instant judgment on oddly specific questions. What does it even mean to say that 54.6 percent of Americans think that the funding structure for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is unconstitutional? Or that 81 percent of Arizonans support conserving 30 percent of America’s land and waters by the year 2030?

How a pollster frames any question affects the response. More respondents might consider the 30 percent goal excessive if you told them that it would require setting aside more than 600,000 square miles of additional land—an area more than twice the size of Texas. Political context matters too. If you told people in Arizona, a polarized purple state, that the conservation goal is a Biden-administration priority, would 81 percent of voters still support it?

It’s reasonable to view a complicated policy proposal more or less favorably based on who is promoting it. If Biden doesn’t represent respondents’ values in policy areas that they understand well, they might rationally view an unfamiliar conservation proposal with more suspicion.

Political professionals tend to look down on the mental yardsticks that real people use when answering poll questions. In 2012, one Democratic pollster, frustrated with voters who embraced individual elements of Obamacare while rejecting the overall law, declared, “The first lesson you learn as a pollster is that people are stupid.” But policy makers miss something important when they decide that polls—about health care, housing, or anything else—reveal the shortcomings of the respondents rather than the complexity of the issues.