Jim Henderson's funeral takes place in Truro after he was killed in an air strike in Gaza.

Growing rates of malnourishment are preventing healing for those in Gaza battered by Israel’s war.

Germany and the US are rendering a draft resolution on the Bosnian genocide meaningless with their position on Gaza.

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.

Video showed medical staff and patients, including a newborn, fleeing Kamal Adwan Hospital after Israeli missiles struck

The protest season at universities usually crescendos just before commencement: The weather is balmy and most term papers are done, but what student or professor would wish to stay around campus during summer break if they did not absolutely have to? This year, the protests have taken an uglier turn, as encampments have sprouted up. The demonstrators—most of them students, many not, often masked—are calling for divestment by their universities from companies based in or doing business with Israel. Some of the protesters see this goal as an interim step toward the destruction of the state of Israel.

In each case, students, faculty, and administrators participating in or supporting the protests assert that universities have a special obligation to take an institutional stand, separate and apart from what any of their members believe, say, or do as individuals.

Universities have reacted in various ways. University of Florida President Ben Sasse was firm and unambiguous; the administrations at Tufts and Cornell similarly refused to fold, and the students threw in the towel when they realized that their protests were going nowhere. Union Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with Columbia, accepted the demands, while the larger university vacillated between tolerance and crackdowns, ultimately having the police storm an occupied building. But some elite institutions—Brown, Northwestern, and Harvard among them—have chosen to end the encampments by offering disciplinary amnesty for nonviolent protesters, and promising to review investments in Israel, often through expedited processes.

The reality behind this last approach is a desperate squirm.

On the one hand, university presidents do not want riots in the quad, and they know that calling in the cops can trigger more extreme demonstrations by faculty and students. On the other hand, they are feeling the fury of pro-Israel alumni and donors and, after watching congressional hearings on television, have a healthy fear of being, as one might say, Stefaniked.

Their solution, however, is no solution, resting as it does on flawed practical politics, wishful thinking about the real animus on their campuses, and, most seriously, a misunderstanding of the moral concerns and values that universities can legitimately represent.

[Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]

The amnesty and investment reviews are attempts to buy off protesters, in the hope that by the time the university committees do their work, the war in Gaza will be over, and in any case the divestment decisions (almost assuredly negative, because the alternative would open up an equally ugly can of worms) can be made this summer or next, while the kids are backpacking in Mongolia.

The problem is that the appearance of caving is caving. If you tacitly tell students that violating university rules will bring no sanctions, they will do it again. The chances are pretty good that the students and others will see through the “we will look carefully at our investment decisions” dodge and come back, with more insistent demands and an awareness that the university lacks the gumption to suspend or expel them for setting up tent cities, blocking access to buildings, and disrupting study in libraries and dormitories.

The wishful thinking about what is actually going on is much worse. The brute fact is that many American universities and colleges, including some of the best, have seen a surge in anti-Semitism, including protesters mobbing students wearing kippahs and shouting that Zionists—that is, people who believe that the Jews deserve a state of their own—deserve death. Many Jewish students, as a result, feel unsafe and unwelcome, and university leaders have only rarely denounced anti-Semitic outbursts without reference to other forms of bias, thereby skirting the core problem.

The deeper misunderstanding of universities’ roles and moral standing, however, is the most troubling aspect of the Great Academic Squirm of 2024. Universities cannot claim and do not deserve some special status as arbiters of a moral foreign policy. After all, they are not, and have never been, paragons of moral virtue. Both Harvard and Johns Hopkins, universities with which I have been proudly affiliated over many years, in the past century had rabidly anti-Semitic presidents: A. Lawrence Lowell and Isaiah Bowman, respectively. They were accomplished academic leaders and architects of much of the modern university. They had academic vision, and they did good things for their institutions. They just also happened to be bigots.

Modern university leaders have recognized the sins of their predecessors and apologized copiously for them, but that is not the point. The lesson, rather, is that as individuals, they are probably every bit as fallible, albeit in different directions. They should aim for humility, not self-flagellation.

The students and faculty are even worse from this point of view. Nineteen-year-olds make good soldiers, but not good generals, judges, corporate executives, or bishops, for the excellent reason that their emotions and passions, noble or ignoble, have yet to be tamed by wisdom and good judgment. It was the best and brightest on our campuses who signed up for the original America First movement, after all, pushing for isolationism as the Nazis seized power in Germany. (Many, of course, more than compensated for the puerility of their collegiate political views by honorable service in World War II.)

Today’s students are no better or worse than their predecessors. They are, as befits their age, morally selective to a fault: Can anyone recall a demonstration against Pernod Ricard for failing to fully halt exports of Absolut Vodka to Russia until about a year ago? Where are the mass demonstrations about the Rohingya, Sudan, the Uyghurs, the Syrian massacres, or for that matter the Chinese laogai penal-labor system or the prisons of North Korea? Or, in an earlier era, against Robert Mugabe’s murderous tyranny in Zimbabwe or the Vietnamese gulag after the fall of Saigon?

Presumably, students come to a university for an education, which implies that they need to be educated, which means that they are not, in fact, ready to make the deeper judgments on which society depends. They are high on passion, and, as interviewers have found, many of them are extraordinarily ignorant about the causes for which they are demonstrating.

As for faculty, reading the novels of David Lodge and Julie Schumacher—not to mention viewing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—would confirm the view that I have come to after 40 years in departmental meetings, that one should not expect too much by way of prudence and profound moral and political judgment from them, either.

There are sterling characters among the professoriate—heroic, self-sacrificing, and wise. There are a great many more who are simply passionately dedicated to a subject, be it broad or arcane, and just want to teach and research it and otherwise be left in peace. But in addition, there are the garden-variety intriguers, backstabbers, prima donnas, and bullies. There are also quite a few adulterers, predators, egomaniacs, and borderline swindlers, and even a sociopath or two. Some professors are experienced in the ways of the world; most of them are not, having viewed it with all the blessed autonomy and freedom from the constraints of politics or war that universities appropriately provide. They have no special qualification for the role of society’s conscience.

The university’s real missions are noble: education, particularly of the young, and the pursuit of the truth. The people engaged in that mission may or may not be the finest characters in the world, or have the best moral or political judgment, but the missions are of the highest importance.

It is the business of academic leaders to sustain their institution’s commitment to those missions, and nothing more. They have neither the moral standing nor the credibility in wider society for exceeding that mandate, or doing anything other than creating an optimal environment for learning and research, upholding the rules, and stewarding the institution’s finances.

The leaders of universities do not exist to pass judgment on politics, or twist their endowments into moralistic knots, or attempt to shape the course of American foreign policy. As individuals, they (and students, faculty, and administrators) may have something useful to say about politics and every right to do so. In their official roles, they should have none.

When educational leaders exceed their mission or, conversely, lack the courage to defend it resolutely, they will bring more discredit, more unwelcome political attention, and more turmoil upon themselves and their institutions than they already have. And however much they squirm today, the protesters will come back to make them squirm more tomorrow.

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