This week, Israel released an appalling video featuring five female Israeli soldiers taken captive at Nahal Oz military base on October 7. Fearful and bloody, the women beg for their lives while Hamas fighters mill around and alternately threaten to kill them and compliment their appearance. The captors call the women “sabaya,” which Israel translated as “women who can get pregnant.” Almost immediately, others disputed the translation and said sabaya referred merely to “female captives” and included no reference to their fertility. “The Arabic word sabaya doesn’t have sexual connotations,” the Al Jazeera journalist Laila Al-Arian wrote in a post on X, taking exception to a Washington Post article that said that it did. She said the Israeli translation was “playing on racist and orientalist tropes about Arabs and Muslims.”

These are real women and victims of ongoing war crimes, so it does seem excessively lurid to suggest, without direct evidence, that they have been raped in captivity for the past several months. (“Eight months,” the Israelis noted, allowing readers to do the gestational math. “Think of what that means for these young women.”) But to assert that sabaya is devoid of sexual connotation reflects ignorance, at best. The word is well attested in classical sources and refers to female captives; the choice of a classical term over a modern one implies a fondness for classical modes of war, which codified sexual violence at scale. Just as concubine and comfort woman carry the befoulments of their historic use, sabaya is straightforwardly associated with what we moderns call rape. Anyone who uses sabaya in modern Gaza or Raqqah can be assumed to have specific and disgusting reasons to want to revive it.

The word sabaya recently reappeared in the modern Arabic lexicon through the efforts of the Islamic State. Unsurprisingly, then, the scholars best equipped for this analysis are the ones who observed and cataloged how ISIS revived sabaya (and many other dormant classical and medieval terms). I refer here to Aymenn J. Al-Tamimi, recently of Swansea University, and to Cole Bunzel of the Hoover Institution, who have both commented on this controversy without sensationalism, except insofar as the potential of sexual enslavement is inherently sensational.

Under classical Islamic jurisprudence on the law of war, the possible fates of enemy captives are four: They can be killed, ransomed, enslaved, or freed. Those enslaved are then subject to the rules that govern slavery in Islam—which are extensive, and are nearly as irrelevant to the daily lives of most living Muslims as the rules concerning slavery in Judaism are to the lives of most Jews. I say “nearly” because Jews have not had a state that sought to regulate slavery for many centuries, but the last majority-Muslim states abolished slavery only in the second half of the 20th century, and the Islamic State enthusiastically resumed the practice in 2014.

Read: What did top Israeli war officials really say about Gaza?

In doing so, the Islamic State reaffirmed the privileges, and duties, of the slave owner. (Bunzel observes that the Islamic State cited scholars who used the term sabaya as if captured women were considered slaves by default, and the other fates were implicitly improbable.) The slave owner is responsible for the welfare of the slave, including her food and shelter. He is allowed to have sex with female slaves, but certain rules apply. He may not sell her off until he can confirm that she isn’t pregnant, and he has obligations to her and to their children, if any are born from their union. I cannot stress enough that such relationships—that is, having sex with someone you own—constitute rape in all modern interpretations of the word, and they are frowned upon whether they occur in the Levant, the Hejaz, or Monticello.

But in the premodern context, before the rights revolution that consecrated every person with individual, unalienable worth, sex slavery was unremarkable, and the principal concern was not whether to do it but what to do with the children. The Prophet Muhammad freed a slave after she bore him a child. The Jewish paterfamilias Abraham released his slave Hagar into the desert 14 years after she bore him Ishmael. But these are cases from antiquity, and modern folk see things differently. Frederick Douglass, in the opening of his autobiography, emphasized the inhumanity of American slave owners by noting the abhorrent results of those relationships: fathers hating, owning, abusing, and selling their own kin.

Sabaya is a term in part born of the need to distinguish captives potentially subject to these procreative regulations from those who would be less complicated to own. To translate it as “women who can get pregnant” is regrettably misleading. It makes explicit what the word connotes, namely that these captives fall under a legal category with possibilities distinct from those of their male counterparts. As Al-Tamimi observes, Hamas could just as easily have used a standard Arabic word for female war captives, asirat. This neutral word is used on Arabic Wikipedia, say, for Jessica Lynch, the American prisoner of war from the 2003 Iraq invasion. Instead Hamas used a term with a different history.

One could read too much into the choice of words. No one, to my knowledge, has suggested that Hamas is following the Islamic State by reviving sex slavery as a legal category. I know of no evidence that it has done so, and if it did, I would expect many of the group’s supporters, even those comfortable with its killing of concertgoers and old people, to denounce the group. More likely, a single group of Hamas members used the word in an especially heady moment, during which they wanted to degrade and humiliate their captives as much as possible. Thankfully, the captives appear unaware of the language being used around them. The language suggests that the fighters were open to raping the women, but it could also just be reprehensible talk, after an already coarsening day of mass killing.

Graeme Wood: Charge Palestine with genocide too

Reading too much into the language seems, at this point, to be less of a danger than reading too little into it. As soon as the Israeli translation came out, it was assailed for its inaccuracy, when it was actually just gesturing clumsily at a real, though not easily summarized, historical background. What, if anything, should the translation have said? “Female captives” does not carry the appropriate resonance; “sex-slavery candidates” would err in the other direction and imply too much. Every translation loses something. Is there a word in English that conveys that one views the battered women in one’s control as potentially sexually available? I think probably not. I would be very careful before speaking up to defend the user of such a word.

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.

Between May 6 and May 8, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) revised its estimates of how many women and children had died in Gaza. The numbers appeared to drop drastically: first, it reported at least 24,000 dead women and children, and two days later, it reported exactly 12,756 “identified” dead women and children. One could be forgiven for wondering whether the UN had raised about 6,700 Gazan children and 4,500 Gazan women from the dead.

OCHA has provided a running body count since the beginning of the Gaza war, and it currently stands at 34,844. This figure was generated by Hamas and is apparently accepted, give or take a few thousand, by Israelis. On a podcast last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu estimated that Israel had killed roughly 14,000 combatants and said the country regretted the deaths of another 16,000 Palestinian civilians. The apparent downward revision was made without any accompanying statement to explain the change or sudden precision. Israel’s military did not make a big deal about it either, probably because there is no way to sound good when celebrating a reduction in the number of children you have killed.

Many noticed anyway. David Adesnik, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, gave the most detailed account of what had happened. For about two months, OCHA had been repeating numbers from Hamas’s Government Media Office, and on May 8 it switched back to Hamas’s Ministry of Health, its source at the beginning of the war. The Ministry of Health is acknowledged to be the more reliable of the two, and it is unclear why OCHA switched to the worse of the two sources, or switched back. A UN spokesperson, Farhan Haq, later explained that the Ministry of Health was “for whatever reason, given the conditions on the ground, unresponsive.” But the Ministry of Health kept publishing statistics in the interim. OCHA didn’t use them.

On Wednesday, Haq said that the UN had “difficulty” verifying Hamas’s numbers but was adamant that the number of total dead remained the same. There was, he said, a “reduction in the number of identified bodies.” To clarify, to the extent possible, Haq seems to be arguing that there are just as many dead Palestinians as before, but many have now lost their identity? Haq makes the discrepancy sound like a minor correction. But the UN so drastically reduced the count of identified women and children that it amounts to an admission that it had been spreading deficient numbers for months.

If you are finding this mystifying, you are not alone. As Adesnik explains, part of the confusion arises from the Ministry of Health’s shifting accounting labels. Its system has evolved, and it now tallies named and identified corpses that have passed through its morgues—as well as, in a separate category, “unidentified” dead, for whom it has neither a body nor a name, just a vaguely-defined “report” from outside the hospital system. If, for example, first responders bring in a body, and they say seven other bodies are probably still under the rubble, the body in the morgue would count as identified and the seven others as unidentified. The additional source of confusion is seriously aberrant numbers from the Government Media Office.

Neither Hamas source, Adesnik writes, has fully explained where it gets its estimate of the number of unaccounted-for dead: more than 10,000 people. During the war, hospitals have stopped functioning, and keeping people alive has taken higher priority than keeping defensible statistics. But these numbers matter—first, because of the dignity of those killed or still living, and second, because total deaths and the ratio of combatant to noncombatant deaths will have implications for judgments about alleged war crimes and genocide.

This is one of those moments when the fog of statistics could be dispersed with just a few sentences of straight talk, of the sort rarely uttered by spokespeople. The UN numbers changed because the UN has little idea how many children have been killed in Gaza, beyond “a lot.” It gets its statistics from Hamas. Where else would it get them? There are no independent epidemiologists in Gaza right now doing the survey work, house to bombed-out house, that would yield reliable numbers. So OCHA used unreliable ones. It never concealed its sources, but it distributed even the most questionable numbers under the UN name.

Operating a statistics laundromat for Hamas’s media wing is embarrassing. But the absence of alternatives is also concerning. Any indictment of OCHA’s numbers should propose better sources for numbers—and, in their absence, ask why there aren’t any. Some of the blame for this absence falls on Hamas, which (in addition to its other flaws) ran a totalitarian state where independent research and criticism were policed and punished. Collecting data that contradicted Hamas’s official figures would be hard or fatal, even in relative peacetime.

Yair Rosenberg: The Israeli defense establishment revolts against Netanyahu

But Israel deserves reproach, too. Unlike Hamas, Israel purports to abide by the principles of the laws of war, including proportionality and distinction between combatants (who can be lawfully targeted) and civilians (who cannot). Hamas has fought with transparent disregard for these principles. Israel has conducted its war opaquely, in such a way that one must take its word that every bomb and every round is dropped or fired lawfully. Its media operations in this war will be remembered as a historic failure that allowed Hamas’s propaganda to be accepted and spread almost without rebuttal.

Much is expected of modern armies that accept, in theory, the burdens of morality and law. One expectation is that they fight in a way that can be examined by outsiders. In Iraq and Afghanistan, reporters routinely accompanied U.S. and other NATO units into battle. At the time, some questioned these embeds and argued that any reporter who depended on a U.S. infantry platoon for his food and safety would inevitably write positively about these soldiers and negatively about whoever was trying to kill them. But a competent reporter would factor those sympathies into her reporting. The main benefit of embeds was that a reporter could observe soldiers and Marines during moments of stress, when they were too busy to groom themselves and pose for PR purposes, and see what they really did and how they really fought. During moments of unguarded intimacy between engagements, they might speak frankly to a reporter. No one can maintain a pose forever. After a week of foot patrols in Fallujah or Kandahar, and a week of meals and billeting with soldiers, a reporter could say with some confidence whether her host unit was killing civilians indiscriminately, or wanted to.

Israel currently embeds zero journalists in Gaza. It isn’t legally obligated to let journalists join its frontline units. But it doesn’t let journalists into Gaza independently, either. “To allow journalists to report safely,” an Israeli military spokesperson told me, the Israel Defense Forces “accompany them when on the battlefield.” He would not say how many journalists had in fact been allowed to accompany IDF units—let alone accompany them on regular operations, rather than short press tours of battle sites after the action. When Hamas alleges that Israeli soldiers are shooting everyone in sight, and murdering families by flattening buildings devoid of military purpose, it can point to the dead children. Israel can deny the charge and hope that the world trusts it over an avowed terrorist group. The world seldom obliges.

To rebut Hamas’s allegations by letting journalists see the war up close would be a calculated risk. Even when conducted legally, war is ugly. It is possible to kill children legally, if for example one is being attacked by an enemy who hides behind them. But the sight of a legally killed child is no less disturbing than the sight of a murdered one. And Israel has discovered that shutting out the press carries its own risks. An infanticide that no one can see is also going to attract suspicion. Unsympathetic observers will think Israel is conducting its war in the manner of other countries whose counterinsurgent forces have preferred to work out of view of independent media. Russia did this in the Second Chechen War; Sri Lanka, in its civil war. Both countries’ militaries had much to hide.

None of this excuses OCHA, which jeopardized its credibility by repeating dubious numbers, long after the reasons for doubting them had been explained. That credibility is a precious resource. The IDF claims to have killed “at least 13,000” combatants—lower than Netanyahu’s estimate—but refused to comment yesterday when I asked if it had any idea how many civilians it had killed. The correct answer is, well, a lot. It would be nice if, before the war is over, some trusted third party could verify this macabre estimate with greater precision.

Its national broadcaster says it faced hostility simply because "we are Israelis and we were there".

I am a member of a strange club that nobody wants to belong to, but whose numbers are steadily growing: innocent people convicted in Iran of espionage for what Iranian officials call the “tyrannical Zionist entity” (in other words, Israel). Many among us are foreigners—businesspeople, journalists, tourists, and academics like myself, who traveled to Iran for what they thought would be a brief visit, only to find themselves thrown in prison on dubious charges.

The European Union diplomat Johan Floderus, a Swedish citizen, is but the latest high-profile victim of Iranian hysteria over Israeli spies on its territory. Currently awaiting sentencing from a revolutionary court in Tehran, Floderus faces allegations of “very extensive intelligence cooperation with the Zionist occupation regime” and a charge of “corruption on earth,” which carries the death penalty. Sweden’s foreign minister has stated publicly that the accusations against Floderus are “completely baseless and false,” and the head of the EU foreign service has labeled him “illegally detained.”

I was convicted of espionage for Israel under similarly spurious pretenses in 2019. I had been invited to an academic conference in Iran as the guest of a local university, and was arrested by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport as I was about to fly home to Australia. I was handed a 10-year prison sentence, of which I served more than two years at the mercy of the IRGC before I was freed in a prisoner swap.

[Read: I was a hostage in Iran. The deals are part of the problem.]

During my time in the Iranian prison system, I learned Farsi and used every opportunity possible to study my captors. In addition to IRGC interrogators and prison guards, I encountered a number of influential regime figures, including the head of IRGC intelligence, the deputy foreign minister, and even Iran’s current chief nuclear negotiator. At various junctures, these men came to the prison to meet and speak with me, or agreed to do so while visiting for seemingly other purposes.

The fact that someone who had been convicted of espionage, however unjustly, was given access to such people is testament to the chaotic way in which intelligence work is conducted in the Islamic Republic. Indeed, although Iran’s authorities talk tough and cast an extremely wide net in their quest to capture the Mossad agents they believe are in their midst, a prevailing lack of competence has meant that very few actual spies ever seem to get caught.

Not only does the Islamic Republic arrest a large number of innocent people domestically, but the agents of its two intelligence bodies, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security and the IRGC’s intelligence unit, have a long history of bungling operations overseas. Many operatives get caught: Just last month, a suspected member of the IRGC Quds Force was arrested in Peru for plotting to kill Israelis living in the country. Indeed the three IRGC members who were released in exchange for me had been convicted in Thailand of targeting Israeli diplomats in a failed bomb plot. Rather than making final preparations in the days before their operation, these hapless agents had been photographed drinking alcohol and partying with local prostitutes. In the course of resisting arrest, one of them had even blown off his own leg with the bombs they’d assembled.

Of course, not every overseas Iranian-intelligence operation fails, and the consequences are devastating when they do not. In 1994, 85 people were killed at a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires, in a bombing that Argentine courts later ruled was carried out on the orders of the Islamic Republic. Just last week, Argentina issued an Interpol red notice for Iran’s interior minister, Ahmad Vahidi, accusing him of having been behind the attack. The Islamic Republic is also apparently implicated in a string of assassinations and kidnappings of dissidents across Europe and the Middle East, as well as plots targeting Iranian opposition journalists in London and New York.

[Read: Iran’s deadly message to journalists abroad]

The incompetence and lack of professionalism of much of the Iranian intelligence apparatus stands in stark contrast to the efficiency of Israel’s, which is alleged to have carried out sophisticated sabotage and assassination plots on Iranian territory. Beginning in 2007, Israel is thought to have targeted scientists working on Iran’s nuclear program for assassination. At least six have been killed inside the country. In 2022 alone, seven officials affiliated with Iran’s missile or drone programs died under suspicious circumstances. Israel is also thought to have been behind two mysterious blasts at the Natanz nuclear facility, as well the theft of an enormous archive of documents relating to the nuclear program from a warehouse in Tehran. In 2023, Mossad even announced that it had kidnapped an IRGC hit man inside Iran; the Israeli agency released footage from his interrogation outside the country.

Somewhat bizarrely, my exchange for three blundering IRGC operatives wasn’t the only connection between my wrongful imprisonment and the high-stakes war of espionage that has long been playing out between Tehran and Tel Aviv. Less than 48 hours after I was freed from prison—and likely not unrelated to the deal that freed me—Israel carried out one of its most audacious missions on Iranian soil.

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was an IRGC commander and the shadowy mastermind of Iran’s covert nuclear-weapons program. While the regime was busy welcoming the three convicted terrorists home with garlands of flowers and sleek propaganda reels, agents acting for Israel parked a blue Nissan pickup truck on a highway intersection near the hamlet of Absard, north of Tehran. Hidden on the truck bed beneath a tarpaulin was a remote-controlled, AI-programmed machine gun. As Fakhrizadeh’s motorcade crossed the intersection, the sniper, watching via satellite from thousands of kilometers away, opened fire. Fakhrizadeh was killed in a hail of bullets. The truck then blew itself up.

The Israelis had clearly been surveilling Fakhrizadeh for months, if not years, prior to the attack. Yet they held their fire until after I had departed Iranian airspace, a move that was much to my benefit, as such a brazen operation would undoubtedly have scuppered the deal for my release. That the attack so closely coincided with my prisoner swap, however, was unlikely to be an accident, and had less to do with me than with the three IRGC terrorists exchanged for my freedom. Australia probably  had to secure Israel’s consent for trading them, as they had been caught targeting Israeli diplomats. The IRGC, of course, would have known that. And so the Israelis opted to send Tehran a message by allowing the deal to go through but killing Fakhrizadeh at nearly the same time: They would go after a bigger target, and on Iranian soil besides. Unlike the IRGC’s three amateurish agents in Thailand, they didn’t fail.

The Iranian regime has shown itself to be supremely adept at surveilling, arresting, and interrogating political dissidents, social-media activists, members of armed separatist groups, and even underground terror cells from organizations such as the MEK. As the unprecedented crackdown on the Woman, Life, Freedom demonstrations shows, the regime retains a fierce grip on the country and runs it like a police state. All of which leaves one to wonder: Why does Iran do such a poor job of countering Israel’s operations inside its territory?

One clue lies in the fact that many, if not most, of the assassinations and other plots attributed to Israel, including the killing of Fakhrizadeh, are conducted with the participation of local Iranian recruits. Interestingly, the quadcopter drones thought to have been used in Israel’s April 19 attack on a military facility in Isfahan province were also most likely assembled and launched from inside Iran.

The Islamic Republic’s security apparatus has long assumed that Israel is sending foreign tourists and other visitors to Iran to spy on its behalf. But this supposition seems more and more like a costly distraction from the real issue at hand: A not-insignificant number of Iranian citizens inside Iran appear willing to risk torture, imprisonment, and execution in order to assist enemies of their own government.

Iranian security agencies have had little success in thwarting Israeli activities inside their country in part because authoritarian regimes prioritize loyalty over competence. IRGC intelligence officials tend to owe their positions to either ideological conformity or to strong family or personal ties within the organization. If you weren’t a true believer (or at least good at pretending to be one) and didn’t have other IRGC members to vouch for you, you didn’t have a hope of becoming even a lowly prison official in a Revolutionary Guard detention facility. As one guard boasted to me, “Our positions aren’t advertised.” In such a system, aptitude, skill, and even security training are much lower priorities. The least suitable people can attain high ranks, while better-qualified candidates who are deemed insufficiently ideologically committed miss out.

The result is a lack of professionalism, which I observed firsthand during the 804 days I spent in IRGC custody. For example, I was once able to text the Australian embassy in the middle of an interrogation, because my interrogator had made the rookie error of leaving my confiscated phone in the room after he stepped out. On another occasion, I was able to trick one of my captors into revealing details of the diplomatic negotiations surrounding my release. And although I’m unable to go into specifics, female prisoners are routinely able to take advantage of the IRGC guards’ squeamishness about women’s bodies to smuggle information outside the prison.

Selected for ideological orthodoxy, the Revolutionary Guards I interacted with bought into all manner of conspiracy theories, which undoubtedly distorted their understanding of geopolitics and hamstrung their ability to interrogate suspects. I was regularly forced to listen to lengthy tirades about secretive Zionists pulling the levers of the global economy, or Israeli plots to poison the sperm counts of Muslim men in a scheme to achieve demographic supremacy. My handlers admitted to watching spy shows involving the Middle East, such as Fauda, Tehran, and Homeland. These seemed to reinforce their tendency to see the hand of Mossad behind every calamity that befell Iran, man-made or otherwise. Such paranoia helps explain the shockingly high numbers of innocent people, most of them Iranian, imprisoned on charges of working for Israel. Sadly, many of these people make false confessions under duress, which in turn gives the authorities the impression that they are catching real spies.

Institutional incompetence is not the sole reason Iran’s agencies have been losing the shadow intelligence war with Israel. Like all brutal authoritarian regimes, the Islamic Republic knows no language other than intimidation and the threat of violence. It has proved unable to offer positive incentives or rewards to those who might be in a position to assist it. The population, including the Islamic Republic’s traditional religious constituency, broadly loathes the regime; even the most disinterested and self-serving opportunist is reluctant to gather information on its behalf. The IRGC in turn distrusts the people it rules over and believes that cooperation can only be forcibly coerced.

[Read: How fake spies ruin real intelligence]

I experienced this approach myself in Evin Prison. Before I was put on trial, Revolutionary Guard interrogators accosted me with an offer of recruitment. Would I agree to travel to London to collect information on the Iranian dissident community? Would I use my status as an academic to visit Israel, effectively as an Iranian agent? Then, after the trial, they used the absurd 10-year sentence I was dealt as a lever of blackmail. The IRGC would only enter into negotiations over my freedom, I was told, if I agreed to work for them; if I did agree, I would be beholden to them in every way once freed.

“How do you know I won’t just run away after I’m allowed to leave Iran?” I asked the recruiters.

The answer was sobering. The IRGC had operatives on Australian soil, they told me, just as they did in Europe and North America. If I reneged, they would kill me. For more than 18 months, I resisted this pressure. It relented only after I leaked to the international press that I was a recruitment target.

The IRGC are better placed to blackmail Iranian or dual-national prisoners than they were with me. Anyone who has family members living in Iran faces an impossible choice: Agree to spy for the regime, or see your loved ones jailed and tortured alongside you. And because unwilling recruits can’t be fully trusted, they are then subjected to near-constant surveillance and threats to prevent them from escaping. During the years I spent in IRGC custody, I encountered several such people, three of whom were ultimately sent abroad on behalf of the IRGC.

Iran’s heavy-handed approach contrasts sharply with the methods that Israel is rumored to employ inside Iran. In prison I met several Iranian Muslims convicted of activities that linked them to Israel, and I heard stories of numerous others. Some were shown to have been calling Israel over Skype, or chatting with Israelis in internet message forums. Of course, many such people are innocent of any crime, and were likely just curious about a neighboring country whose name they had been encouraged to curse since primary school. There appeared to be slightly more substance to the allegations against a small number of others.

From what I came to understand, Israel has been able to capitalize on the Islamic Republic’s record of poor governance, economic mismanagement, poverty, and political repression to offer would-be collaborators valuable ways out. These could take the form of bundles of cash or offers of permanent residency, not only for Iranians who assist their operations, but for their family members as well. In this respect as in many others, the Islamic Republic has become its own greatest adversary: Having shown itself over the decades to be impervious to ideological moderation or reform from within, it has become so hated that its own people—its biggest victims—are willing to embrace the possibility that the enemy of their enemy is their friend. I lost track of the number of Iranians in prison who advocated for heavier economic sanctions and openly welcomed American or Israeli air strikes on Iran.

These sentiments have translated into robust support for Israel on social media, including from inside Iran, much of it making no reference to the horrors currently unfolding in Gaza. Some Iranians condemned the IRGC’s April 13 missile and drone attacks on Israel and cheered on Israel’s retaliation. Somewhat embarrassingly, the regime was forced to issue an official notice threatening to arrest anyone expressing these sentiments online. It followed through by arresting Mobina Rostami, a member of the national volleyball team, after she posted on social media: “As an Iranian, I am truly ashamed of the authorities’ attack on Israel, but you need to know that the people in Iran love Israel and hate the Islamic Republic.”

Israel and Iran’s tit-for-tat military strikes on each other’s territory will likely lead to a further intensification of their long-standing clandestine activities. As a result, Iran will likely throw more innocent people in prison; it will bungle more overseas operations; and ultra-hard-liners in its security establishment will double down on repressing a population that despises them. Such authoritarian tactics have already benefited Iran’s enemies and will continue to do so, offering Israel the upper hand in the covert war of espionage within Iran’s borders and abroad.

On Tuesday, Daniel Hagari, the chief spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces, did something extraordinary: He criticized the Israeli government. In recent days, Israeli troops have battled Hamas in parts of northern Gaza that had previously been cleared of enemy combatants. A reporter asked Hagari if the terrorist group had been able to reassert itself because the Israeli government had not set up any non-Hamas Palestinian administration for those areas.

The spokesman could have dodged the question. He did not. “There is no doubt that a governmental alternative to Hamas will create pressure on Hamas,” he replied, “but that is a question for the political echelon.”

Hagari’s polite but pointed critique of Israel’s leadership was a pebble. The avalanche came the next day. In a televised address yesterday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant—a former general and current member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party—publicly rebuked the government for failing to establish a postwar plan for Gaza. He then demanded that Netanyahu personally commit to Palestinian governance for the enclave, as opposed to Israeli settlement or occupation.

“Since October, I have been raising this issue consistently in the cabinet, and have received no response,” Gallant said. “The end of the military campaign must come together with political action. The ‘day after Hamas’ will only be achieved with Palestinian entities taking control of Gaza, accompanied by international actors, establishing a governing alternative to Hamas’s rule.”

Without such a political strategy, Gallant argued, no military strategy can succeed, and Israel will be left occupying Gaza and fighting a never-ending counterinsurgency against Hamas that saps the country’s military, economic, and diplomatic resources. “Indecision is, in essence, a decision,” he said. “This leads to a dangerous course, which promotes the idea of Israeli military and civilian governance in Gaza. This is a negative and dangerous option for the state of Israel.”

The defense minister closed with an ultimatum: “I call on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make a decision and declare that Israel will not establish civilian control over the Gaza Strip, that Israel will not establish military governance in the Gaza Strip, and that a governing alternative to Hamas in the Gaza Strip will be raised immediately.” With these words, the Israeli defense establishment effectively launched a revolt against the Netanyahu government—and the dreams of its far-right flank to flood Gaza with Israeli settlers.

Gallant is far from the only person to press Netanyahu on this matter. For months, President Joe Biden and his administration have called for Israel to work with the Palestinian Authority—the Hamas rival that governs the West Bank—to establish a new administration in Gaza. Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, two former IDF chiefs turned opposition politicians, joined Netanyahu’s government after October 7 on the condition that a committee be created to formulate a Gaza exit strategy. But despite all of this external and internal pressure, no such plan has materialized—for a very straightforward reason: Netanyahu cannot publicly commit to a postwar plan for Gaza that includes Palestinians, because the day-after plan of his far-right partners is to get rid of those Palestinians.

Yesterday, standing at a lectern emblazoned with the words settlement in Gaza will bring security, the far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir told a rally of thousands that the only way to defeat Hamas is to “return home” to Gaza and encourage “voluntary emigration” of its Palestinian population—a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. “Tell them,” Ben-Gvir declared, “‘Go to your homes, go to your countries. This is ours now and forever.’” Shlomo Karhi, a hard-right member of Netanyahu’s faction, offered similar sentiments. “In order to preserve the security achievements for which so many of our troops gave up their lives,” he said, “we must settle Gaza, with security forces and with settlers.”

[Read: The right-wing Israeli plan to resettle Gaza]

Polls show that most Israelis do not want to resettle the Gaza Strip. But Netanyahu and his coalition are uniquely beholden to the radical minority that does. Back in January, 15 of the coalition’s 64 members of Parliament attended a Jerusalem conference in support of Gaza resettlement. The parties that make up Netanyahu’s government received just 48.4 percent of the vote in Israel’s most recent election in November 2022. Without the far right, not only would the Israeli leader’s coalition collapse, but he would lack sufficient allies to form one in the future after another election. Alienating the extremists wouldn’t just finish Netanyahu’s government; it could end his political career.

This has placed the prime minister in a political vise. If he commits to postwar Palestinian rule in Gaza and begins acting seriously to establish it, he loses the far right. But if he commits to resettling Gaza, he loses the Israeli majority and the international community. And so, as he has often done in the past, Netanyahu has chosen not to choose, kicking the moment of decision down the road. But as Gallant said yesterday, indecision is also a decision—and it has consequences.

This month, Israel’s soldiers have been fighting pitched battles with Hamas in places such as Zeitun and Jabaliya that had previously been cleared by the IDF. Without any plan to govern these areas, Israel’s army has achieved many tactical victories in Gaza but suffered a strategic defeat, as Hamas has returned to fill the vacuum the IDF left behind. Faced with rising Israeli casualties in Gaza, far-right resettlement rallies in Israel, sharp criticism of Israel’s open-ended campaign abroad, and Netanyahu’s refusal to act, Gallant clearly felt compelled to speak out. In doing so, he made public the arguments he had previously been making in private.

Contrary to misquotes and mistranslations attributed to the Israeli defense minister in some international media outlets, Gallant has not called for genocide in Gaza, but rather for the territory to be handed back to Gazans. He has also consistently worked to align the Israeli campaign with the preferences of the Biden administration rather than the Israeli far right. In January, he called for Gaza to be governed by Palestinians in conjunction with the United States and moderate Arab states, without any Jewish settlements. In March, Gallant reportedly told the Israeli security cabinet that Gazans affiliated with the Palestinian Authority were the least bad option to administer the enclave.

Read: What did top Israeli war officials really say about Gaza?

Gallant believes that he is working both to protect Israel’s long-term security by saving it from a ruinous quagmire, and to coordinate its policy with its strongest ally, the United States. It is no coincidence that the defense minister’s dramatic address yesterday came shortly after U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told the White House press pool that “if Israel’s military efforts are not accompanied by a political plan for the future of Gaza and the Palestinian people, the terrorists will keep coming back … So we [are] talking to Israel about how to connect their military operations to a clear strategic endgame … to ensure the lasting defeat of Hamas and a better alternative future for Gaza and for the Palestinian people.”

Gallant is only one man, and he serves at Netanyahu’s discretion. He alone cannot alter national policy—but he has galvanized such change before. The last time the defense minister delivered a broadside against Netanyahu’s governance, it was in March 2023 to oppose a far-right effort to hobble Israel’s judicial system. At the time, Gallant warned that internal Israeli division over the legislation “poses a clear, immediate, and tangible threat to the security of the state.” That speech led to Gallant’s firing, which was reversed after hundreds of thousands of Israelis poured into the streets in protest.

Today, once again, Gallant has been pushed to the point of public dissent by his perception that Netanyahu is privileging his own coalition and political interest over the national interest. In his address to the Israeli public, Gallant declared that “we must make tough decisions for the future of our country, favoring national priorities above all other possible considerations, even with the possibility of personal or political costs.”

The right’s response to this call has not been kind. Netanyahu issued a brief video rejecting Gallant’s arguments without naming him. Ben-Gvir, the far-right minister, demanded that Gallant be fired, while other hard-line lawmakers assailed him in personal terms. Getting rid of Gallant, however, will not be easy. According to recent polling, he is the most popular politician in Israel, far outpacing Netanyahu and his far-right partners. The defense minister’s speech was also quickly praised by Benny Gantz, the opposition leader in Israel’s war cabinet, who is leading Netanyahu in the polls and could leave the government if the prime minister acts rashly. And Netanyahu will have to contend with the United States—Sullivan is set to visit Israel this weekend, where he will undoubtedly press Gallant’s case. (By last night, a Biden official was already telling reporters that “we share the defense minister’s concern.”)

Back in 2023, Gallant’s speech against the judicial overhaul ultimately doomed the effort after months of political upheaval. The success or failure of his latest intervention may determine not just the endgame for this conflict, but the trajectory of Israel in the decades to come.

In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II, the Earl of Warwick warns the king of an impending revolt, which is one of those

main chance of things
As yet not come to life, who in their seeds
And weak beginning lie intreasured

The ailing but canny king rises to the occasion:

Are these things then necessities?
Then let us meet them like necessities.

A brutal war ensues, in which Henry saves his kingdom.

King Henry’s response is a piece of wisdom well suited to a moment when clamoring or nervous politicians, addled demonstrators, and would-be anarchists or revolutionaries have scarcely anything sensible at all to say about the wars of our time.

The case of Israel against Hamas, and specifically the question of a potential invasion of Rafah, Gaza, is particularly striking. Freezing the conflict before the destruction of Hamas as an effective military organization (as a political movement, it may last a very long time) has no prospect of delivering anything remotely like peace. Insisting that the Israelis find a humane way of destroying an enemy, without collateral damage, is absurd when that force is deeply and cunningly dug in and fortified, and indeed prefers for political reasons to see its own civilians suffer. If such an alternative existed, surely someone would have described it for the rest of us.

The fact—the necessity, as King Henry might have put it—is that although any force engaging in urban warfare has a responsibility to limit civilian casualties, city fighting is ruinous. The residents of Mosul, Fallujah, or for that matter of Aachen in 1944, would agree.

[Elliot Ackerman: A knife fight in a phone booth]

Halting the war now, leaving Hamas still standing, is a surefire way to breed more wars. Doing so would encourage Hamas to fulfill its promise of launching many more October 7–style attacks. It would also embolden Iran, which has already gotten away with firing massive volleys of long-range missiles at Israeli cities; Hezbollah, which has ignored a deal requiring it to withdraw behind the Litani River and is waging a low-level war across the Lebanon frontier; and the Houthis, who have been taking potshots at merchant shipping.

The effectiveness of antimissile defenses has shielded governments from treating necessities like necessities. Indeed, it has in some measure obscured the existential nature of the long-running Israel-Hamas war. Western leaders have preferred not to take seriously the eliminationist rhetoric of Hamas, Iran, and their various proxies, just as they preferred not to take Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric denying the existence of a legitimate Ukraine seriously.

The vacuous commitment of Western leaders to stand with Ukraine “for as long as it takes” allows them to avoid defining that awkward word, it. Creeping talk of cease-fires—in which the Ukrainians evince no interest—substitutes for providing Ukraine with the means to win. More hard thinking of a Henrician kind would make clear that a cease-fire would produce only a demoralized Ukraine, a triumphal Russia, a blow to Western prestige—and, in the end, a renewed Russian war of conquest. It would also force other states in the path of Russia’s ruthless imperial ambitions to choose between accommodation and nuclear proliferation.

[Read: The war is not going well for Ukraine]

In both cases, there is in Western circles a desire to avoid confronting the awfulness of real war—not war waged in far-off lands for obscure purposes, but war waged to save or destroy nations, wars launched with massacre and the promise of more massacre in the event of victory by the side that started them.

There is a deeper civilizational malady here, the kind that manifests in magical thinking about political choice. It was audible in the calls for defunding the police, which did not pause to consider that crime rates might rise when officers cease to keep the streets safe; in the claims that gargantuan deficits would not lead to inflation; and in the assertion that you can keep children completely safe from risks of COVID without paying a penalty in their mental health.

Part of the transition to adulthood lies in accepting that actions have consequences, that money spent on one thing is not available for another, that not all stories have happy endings, that not all good things are compatible. Maturity is, above all, the recognition that reality is reality, and that when it conflicts with your wishes and desires, it always wins.

If a substantial number of members of Congress, on both sides of the aisle, act like spoiled teenagers, it is because few penalties exist for adult legislators acting like brats. Indeed, many of their constituents prefer it so. Under such circumstances, it should come as no surprise that student protesters complain when their university fails to feed them even as they occupy its buildings and muscle the janitors, or insist on wearing masks so that, unlike Martin Luther King Jr. or Henry David Thoreau, they do not have to take responsibility for civil disobedience. While there have been some notably adult responses to student unrest—University of Florida President Ben Sasse stands out in his insistence that students are not children and should not be treated as such—for the most part university presidents have flattered and appeased students rather than reproved them, even as some of those students have called for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.

The world has a distinctly 1930s feel to it. Western leaders have offered stirring or at least forceful rhetoric in response to multiple crises. But when it comes to deeds rather than words, the record is less compelling. During the Cold War, countries spent 4 or 5 percent of their GDP on defense, and the United States got as high as 8 percent. Today, even the United States is below 3 percent. There is a broad political consensus that China is a growing threat, that Iran is a violent menace, and that Russia is an imperial revanchist state. Yet no one is seriously calling for the kind of sacrifices that are needed to meet the crisis, such as raising taxes to reverse the shrinkage of the United States Navy or create the kind of industrial base that could sustain the American military should worse come to worst.

With some notable exceptions, Europe is even more lost in its world of wishful thinking than the U.S. is. France’s Emmanuel Macron may talk of stationing Western forces in Ukraine, but unless his and other governments introduce large-scale conscription and create the industries required to sustain armies, they will not have much by way of land forces to do it. Great Britain, a traditional defense stalwart, will struggle to meet a target of 2.5 percent of GDP spent on defense by 2030—as its forces have shrunk to levels not seen, in some cases, since Victorian times.

Thucydides, of whom Shakespeare’s King Henry would have approved, famously said that war is a rough master, a violent teacher. In peace and prosperity, he said, states and individuals do not find themselves “suddenly confronted with imperious necessity.” At a time when war flickers on the borders of a generally peaceful and generally prosperous and generally immature West, we would do well to heed his wisdom, and that of the tired but resolute Shakespearean king.

The job of international spokesperson for Israel, in a state of war, is fit for a patriot, a masochist, or a diva, or better yet all three. For most of the past six months, it was occupied by Eylon Levy, a 32-year-old British Israeli with an affinity for television cameras and seemingly infinite ability to absorb the abuse that comes from publicly defending Israel, at its least defensible and at its most. When Israel was still picking through the corpses in the kibbutzim near Gaza, he reminded viewers of the carnage—both the dead concertgoers and elderly (who were real victims) and “beheaded babies” (who turned out not to be). When Israel began hunting Hamas in Gaza, he defended his country’s actions without reservation, even when the civilian toll became unbearable. His tenure ended on the last day of March, reportedly after British Foreign Minister David Cameron took exception to Levy’s rhetoric. The story goes that Cameron’s office sent a curt message to Levy’s bosses, who suspended him and encouraged his resignation.

Levy says that these reports are inaccurate, and that he was forced out because he is not, and never was, a Netanyahu loyalist. He told me he has “no reason to doubt” a conflicting report that Sara Netanyahu, the child psychologist and former El Al flight attendant married to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, orchestrated his overthrow. Cameron was a pretext, he says. Levy’s version of events is one of many data points suggesting that the Netanyahu government is obsessed with the slavish loyalty of its staff. And Levy is not alone in wondering whether such a government is fit to lead a country as divided as Israel, during this time of maximum stress. (Netanyahu’s office did not reply to a request for comment on Levy and the circumstances of his hiring and departure.)

When I met him last month in Tel Aviv, Levy still seemed dazed by the speed of his rise and fall. He said he’d never met Sara Netanyahu or her husband, but if they thought he was less than devoted to Bibi’s politics, they were onto something. Before the war, he said, he had been among the hundreds of thousands who had filled Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv to protest the government and heap disgust on Netanyahu. “The protests became a social happening—just what people did on a Saturday night,” he said. His presence was sincere, but also, in that sense, “entirely unremarkable and quite expected for someone in my demographic.”

And his distaste for Netanyahu did not evaporate after October 7. Levy’s feed on X (formerly Twitter) confirms much of what he told me about his personal distaste for the prime minister, before the Hamas attack and indeed even in the days after it. He tweeted witheringly about Netanyahu’s failure to stop the attack (“This will be [his] legacy”), and about his “useless” ministers’ failure to address the public. But he went into spokesperson mode in record time—even before he was officially tapped for the job. Levy, who says he was “taking a professional break,” when the attack happened, had previously worked as a media adviser to Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Now he saw an opportunity. “The prime minister’s office had been caught with its pants down,” Levy told me. “It was simply not prepared to deal with the deluge of media attention.” He stacked his laptop on a pile of books on his dining-room table and positioned his lamp and webcam just so. “I thought: I know how to do media. So I put out the message that I was available to give media interviews.”

[Yair Rosenberg: The day after Netanyahu ]

The media took him up on the offer, and he did nearly a dozen TV hits. Within days, he says, an envoy from the prime minister’s office asked him whether he’d like to “come on board in some official capacity.” The envoy, Rotem Sella, was the Hebrew publisher of Netanyahu’s 2022 memoir and had now joined the government to correct the pants problem. Sella, Levy says, knew that Levy had protested Bibi but didn’t care. “It was a completely insane proposition,” Levy said—a guy in his living room, openly contemptuous of the government, would now be paid to defend it. “But everyone was doing their bit, so I said, ‘Absolutely. Count me in.’”

“Within 24 hours, I found myself effectively being nationalized,” he told me. The contemporaneous record strikes a vainer tone. He tweeted a photograph of himself at a lectern, with the comment “Cometh the hour,” a Churchillian line (“... cometh the man”) that is, like most compliments, best bestowed by others rather than by oneself. But as long as Israel’s actual leaders were bunkered away from public scrutiny—when they did appear, ordinary Israelis screamed at them—this living-room Churchill could run unopposed as Israel’s man of the hour.

He said he felt a wave of disbelief, as if he were getting away with something. “I had to pinch myself,” he told me. He had been marching in the streets against Netanyahu. Now he was giving press conferences behind a lectern that said PRIME MINISTER on it. Would anyone notice the reversal? “I was wondering at what point people were going to clock that the person now speaking on TV for the Israeli government had until recently been protesting against it.”

“There was complete pandemonium,” he said, with foreign-media requests coming fast and just a tiny crew to field them. “We were operating on pure adrenaline.” In practice, that meant saying yes to all reasonable requests, and offering regular “White House–style” press conferences from the Kirya, Israel’s military headquarters. Levy’s time at the podium and on news shows made him famous, or notorious, depending on one’s view of the Gaza war. Israeli comedians lightly lampooned him in sketches. His eyebrows became world-famous when he raised them, theatrically, at a Sky News presenter who had asked a question so bizarre and pretzeled in its logic that it must be seen to be believed. (She suggested that Israel had traded 150 Palestinian prisoners for only 50 Israeli hostages because Israel undervalues Palestinian life.)

As the war proceeded, and Gaza suffered more death and destruction, Levy’s resolute refusal to accept blame for civilian misery earned him the hatred and distrust of many. He maintained that opinion polls revealed that Hamas “represents the Palestinians.” His own language tended to be civilized and diplomatic. But when Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter used language (Nakba) guaranteed to make Palestinians think they were about to be ethnically cleansed, rather than repudiate those words, Levy seemed to relish the challenge of rising in their defense. And he treated other concerns about ethnic cleansing, which did not come from nowhere, as simply “outrageous and false accusations.” (“As a government official,” Levy told me later, “there is a limit to the amount you can repudiate statements by members of the government, even when they’re supremely unhelpful.”)

Levy’s performance was “indicative of what is wrong with a lot of Israel’s PR efforts,” Aymenn Al-Tamimi, a British translator and analyst who knew Levy when they were Oxford undergraduates, told me. He expressed doubt that Israel’s ideal representative would be a recreational contrarian with an accent straight from the Oxford Union. Levy, Al-Tamimi said, “treated his spokesman position as though it were a debating competition.”

In late November, after a brief pause for a successful prisoner exchange, the Israel-Hamas war resumed, and the government started facing intense domestic criticism for failing to engineer another swap. Around that time, the team handling Israel’s shambolic public-diplomacy operation started to get hints of an effort to purge those with suspect politics. “Something changed,” Shirona Partem, another erstwhile protester who had joined the government’s press team after October 7, told me. In addition to Levy, whose job was to speak on the record to foreign outlets, the government had hired a small crew of press liaisons to take media requests and coordinate interviews. “We were building something professional, not political,” she said. Partem emphasized that they spoke only to foreign media, so nothing they did could have been construed as undermining the government against its domestic opposition.

By December, though, her unit was told to stand down. Partem and others had developed relationships with reporters, and also with various Israeli experts and government offices from which those reporters were seeking information. Many of them kept replying to media requests—showing up for work, in effect, after having been fired. But officially, their positions were left empty. The prime minister’s office is known to be jealous of power and credit, and it had begun ensuring that no professional operation would succeed the apolitical team it had shut down.

Levy was exempt from the December purge, and for the next months was even unleashed to speak to Israeli media. He had recently gone viral for the eyebrow incident, and the government liked having someone with a little brio in front of the cameras, in contrast to the ministers who were still either shy or gaffe-prone. But he says he soon began to sense a chill in his relationship with the prime minister’s office. On January 17, he was told to share the podium more—a request that went against his instincts, as he had been trying to build a personal relationship with viewers and media, and also because he is a diva. He suspects that his protester past had become an issue, even though he maintains that it did not affect his work. “I don’t think that anyone who watched any of the interviews or press conferences I gave could say I injected personal opinion,” Levy said. Soon, someone in the prime minister’s office was briefing the media against him. He stressed that he has no direct knowledge of who was responsible, though multiple sources told me Sara Netanyahu had become irate over perceived political disloyalty.

The British foreign minister’s alleged complaint about Levy came in March, according to the BBC and Israeli media. That began the terminal phase of Levy’s spokesmanship. In a tweet, Cameron had urged the passage of more aid into Gaza. Levy countered that the channels for aid were unimpeded, saying, “There are NO limits on the entry of food, water, medicine, or shelter equipment”—a claim at odds with the extreme scarcity of all of those items in Gaza. Cameron’s office allegedly sent an arch inquiry to the prime minister’s office, to see if Levy was freelancing. Levy was soon suspended, though he denies that Cameron ever intervened to have him sacked. Levy said the supposed complaint was in fact just a single WhatsApp, sent from a Foreign Office employee to the prime minister’s office. (Cameron’s own spokesperson said, “We wouldn’t comment on the domestic appointments of another government.”) But he soon found his position untenable, and by April, he had resigned completely and was back in front of a camera at home, representing Israel pro bono.

Levy is in some ways understanding about the return of politics. “Cracks emerged,” he told me. He rattled off a number of bitter divides among Israelis: whether to prioritize the destruction of Hamas or the return of hostages; whether Netanyahu should resign now or later; whether the military should invade Rafah. These are all hard questions, he admitted, and it is to be expected that they would be divisive. “But my job was to keep politics aside,” he says. “And it’s sad to see that politics can infect what should be a national mission.”

Partem, his colleague, is now back in private life too. She told me she worries about how poorly Israel has waged its PR war—especially compared with Iran and Russia, both anti-Israel maestros. “We’re on the right side of history, but it feels like we weren’t able to convey that message,” she said. Her time as a mouthpiece for the government gave her hope, she added, “because she found that Israelis of all political persuasions were willing to work together—even if the government itself was too focused on its survival to join the effort. “Anybody who is in power for too long gets a bit delusional,” she told me. “We know there are people up for the task. But this current government is really a unique set of people who shouldn’t be there.”

If you want to gauge whether a protest chant is genocidal or anti-Semitic or disagreeable in any other way, you have to pay attention to more than the words. A chant is a performance, not a text. A leader initiates a call-and-response or else yells into a bullhorn, eliciting roars from the crowd. Hands clap, feet stomp, drums are beaten. The chanting creates a rhythm that can induce a sort of hypnosis, fusing individuals into a movement. The beat should be no more sophisticated than Bum-bah bum-bah bum-bah bum-bah, as in, “There is only one solution! Intifada, revolution!” To claim that a chant means only what it says is like asserting that a theatrical production is the same as a script.

You can start with the words, though. Take the chant about intifada revolution. Etymologically, intifada denotes a shaking-off, but in contemporary Arabic, it means an uprising: For instance, a 1952 uprising in Iraq against the Hashemite monarchy is referred to in Arabic as an intifada. But in English, including in English-language dictionaries and encyclopedias, the word refers primarily to two periods of sustained Palestinian revolt, the First and Second Intifadas. The first, which ran from 1987 to 1993, involved protests and acts of civil disobedience and was relatively peaceful, at least compared with the second, from 2000 to 2005, which featured Palestinian suicide bombings and targeted reprisal killings by Israeli forces; more than a thousand Israelis died in 138 suicide attacks. These intifadas received so much international press coverage that surely everyone in the world to whom the word means anything at all thinks of them first. The more general idea of insurrection can only be a poor second.

If that’s the association, then intifada is not a phrase that would indicate genocidal intent. Total casualties on both sides during these earlier periods of conflict run to somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000. At its most innocuous, though, it still implies violence. In the context of this particular chant, it might imply much more than that. Revolution doubles and intensifies intifada—an uprising is the beginning of a fight; a revolution is the wholesale destruction of a social order. “There is only one solution”: This has been deemed offensive on the grounds that “solution” evokes the Final Solution, the term used to describe the German decision to kill all Jews during World War II. The more salient point, it seems to me, is that the declaration rejects the idea that there is a political path to peace. It says that diplomacy is not an option, and compromise is not a possibility.

Of course, that’s just the chant on the page. The chant on college campuses is one slogan among many, taking on meaning from those that come before and after it. And, at the same time, it may be uttered by people who don’t care what they’re saying. At any given march or rally, some number of participants will have shown up in order to show up, to signal membership in a movement that they identify with much more than they agree with. When the protesters aren’t directly affected by the matter they’re protesting, the politics of identity frequently supersede the politics of ideas, as Nate Silver pointed out in his Substack newsletter last week. Participating in a political action becomes a way of fitting in, and a chant is the price of admission. As the police enter campus after campus, I’m guessing that the chants also channel rage at the authorities. “Free Palestine!,” sure, but also, Free my friends!

And yet, the plain meaning of a chant has an impact, even if the chanters aren’t fully aware of it. A chant is particularly effective when its message echoes and explains the overall mise-en-scène. “Globalize the Intifada!” is an ironically apt chorus for students marching through an American campus under Palestinian flags, their heads shrouded in keffiyehs, their faces covered in KN95 masks. “We don’t want no Zionists here!” has the ring of truth when chanted at an encampment where students identified as Zionists have been forced out by a human chain.

The other day, I stood outside a locked gate at Columbia University, near a group of protesters who had presumably come to support the students but couldn’t get inside. From the other side of the gate, a bespectacled student in a keffiyeh worked them into a rage, yelling hoarsely into a microphone and, at moments of peak excitement, jumping up and down. She had her rotation: “Intifada revolution,” then “Palestine is our demand; no peace on stolen land!” Then “Free, free Palestine!” Then “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” Finally, “Intifada, Intifada!” No one stopping to watch could fail to get the message. The young woman wasn’t calling for a cease-fire or a binational confederation of Palestine and Israel. She was calling for war. Is that anti-Semitic? It depends on whether you think that the violent eradication of the state of Israel is anti-Semitic.

Chants may feel like spontaneous outbursts of political sentiment, but they almost never are. So where do they come from? Social media, of course—most chants are rhyming couplets; repeated a few times, they’re just the right length for an Instagram Story. Another source is the political-organizing manuals that are sometimes called toolkits. These function more or less as a movement’s hymnals.  

The “rally toolkit” of the group Within Our Lifetime, a radical pro-Palestinian organization with connections on American campuses, lists 40 chants. I’ve heard almost half of them at Columbia, including “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here,” which, I learned from the toolkit, is a translation of a chant in Arabic. A fall-2023 Palestine Solidarity Working Group toolkit contains chant sheets from the Palestine Youth Movement and the U.S. Palestinian Community Network. (This word salad of names is in no way nefarious; political organizing is the art of building coalitions.) The lists overlap, with minor differences: The Palestinian Youth Movement’s sheet, for instance, includes several “Cross Movement Chants” that connect the Palestinian cause to others, such as “Stop the U.S. War machine—From Palestine to the Philippines.”

Some observers believe that one toolkit in particular reflects outside influence. A lawsuit claiming that Hamas is working with the national leadership of two organizations, National Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine, has just been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern Division of Virginia on behalf of nine American and Israeli plaintiffs, including six victims of October 7; it specifically cites NSJP’s Day of Resistance Toolkit as evidence. The chairman of AMP, Hatem Bazian, who was also one of NSJP’s founders, denies the claim, and told The Washington Post that the lawsuit is a defamatory “Islamophobic text reeking in anti-Palestinian racism.” The question remains to be adjudicated, but it is safe to say that the toolkit makes NSJP’s ideological affinities clear. The toolkit, released immediately after October 7, advised chapters to celebrate Hamas’s attack as a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance” and to lay the groundwork for October 12, “a national day of resistance” on campuses. Student groups across the country did in fact hold rallies and walkouts on October 12, two weeks before Israel invaded Gaza.

The Day of Resistance Toolkit is an extraordinary artifact, written in stilted, triumphalist prose that could have been airlifted out of a badly translated Soviet parade speech. “Fearlessly, our people struggle for complete liberation and return,” the document states. “Glory to our resistance, to our martyrs, and to our steadfast people.” NSJP includes graphics for easy poster-making; one of these is a now-notorious drawing of a crowd cheering a paraglider, a clear allusion to the Hamas militants who paraglided into Israel. And under “Messaging & Framing” come several bullet points; one group of these is preceded by the heading “When people are occupied, resistance is justified.” Under it, one finds the entire state of Israel, a recognized member-state of the United Nations, defined as an occupation, rather than just the West Bank, and its citizens characterized as “settlers” rather than civilians “because they are military assets used to ensure continued control over stolen Palestinian land.” If Israelis are not civilians, of course, then murdering them could count as a legitimate act of war. That heading, inverted (“Resistance is justified when people are occupied”), was soon being chanted by thousands of people around the country. The phrases did not originate with the toolkit, but it surely gave them a boost.

Many protest chants come across as unoriginal, but lack of originality is actually desirable. The more familiar a chant’s wording and cadence, the easier it is to pick up. A chant modeled on a much older one may also subtly advance a geopolitical argument. “Hey hey, ho ho! Zionism has got to go!,” which is an echo of “Hey hey, ho ho! LBJ has got to go!,” suggests a link between Gaza and Vietnam, Israeli imperialism and American imperialism. I don’t think that’s a stretch. The 1968 analogy is everywhere. Last week, I watched a Columbia protest leader praise a crowd by saying that they’re continuing what the anti-war protesters started. That night, dozens of today’s protesters did exactly that by occupying Hamilton Hall, also occupied in 1968.

I’m guessing that the Houthis—another Iranian-backed terrorist group, which controls a part of Yemen—provided a template for at least one chant. Around February, Columbia’s protesters were recorded chanting “There is no safe place! Death to the Zionist state!,” which struck me, in this context, as a taunting reply to Jewish students’ complaints about safety, followed by what sounded like a version of the actual, official Houthi slogan “God Is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.” And indeed, a month earlier, the crowd had openly chanted in support of the Houthis, who had been firing missiles at ships traveling through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The U.S. and Britain had just begun bombing them to stop the attacks, and the students sang, “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around!”

Does support for the Houthis and alleged support for Hamas mean that the students also support the groups’ sponsor, Iran? I doubt that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the student groups exchange messages on Signal. But at the very least, the chants raise the possibility that some of the more extreme radicals on campus align themselves with the Iranian government’s geopolitical orientation more than with America’s, and have somehow persuaded their followers to mouth such views.

One slogan, however, has become emblematic of the debate over the possible anti-Semitic content of pro-Palestinian chants. Its stature can be attributed, in part, to Republican Representative Elise Stefanik, who infamously insisted, during hearings on campus anti-Semitism, that it amounted to a call for genocide. The slogan, of course, is “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Israel’s supporters hear it as eliminationist: From the Jordan to the Mediterranean, which is to say, across the land that had been under British control before it was partitioned by the United Nations in 1947, Palestine will be free of Jews. Where are they supposed to go? Many Jews find the possible answers to that question very disturbing. Palestinians and their allies, however, reject the Jewish interpretation as a form of catastrophizing. They say that the chant expresses the dream of a single, secular, democratic nation in which Palestinians and Jews would live peacefully side by side, in lieu of the existing Jewish ethno-nationalist state. (It is hard to dispute that in this scenario, Jewish Israelis would lose the power of collective self-determination.)

Before “From the river to the sea” caught on in English, it was chanted in Arabic. It is not clear when it first came into use, but Elliott Colla, a scholar of Arabic and Islamic studies at Georgetown University, believes that it emerged during the First Intifada—or rather, two versions of it did. One was nationalist: “Min al-maiyeh lel mayieh, Falasteen Arabiya”: “From water to water, Palestine is Arab.” The other was Islamist: “Falasteen Islamiyyeh, min al-nahr ila al-bahr”: “Palestine is Islamic from the river to the sea.” At some point during the Oslo peace process, Colla says, a third chant appeared: “Min al-nahr ila al-bahr, Falasteen satataharrar,” or “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” “It is this version—with its focus on freedom—that has circulated within English-language solidarity culture from at least the 1990s,” Colla writes in a recent article.

Therefore, Colla writes, “Palestine will be free” should be considered a new chant expressing the ideal of a more inclusive state, not merely a translation of the older, more aggressive chants. It gives voice to a “much more capacious vision of a shared political project.” The problem with Colla’s benign reading of the slogan, however, is that the more nationalist or Islamist Arab-language chants are still in circulation; they share airtime with the English-language variant at American protests. In January, I started seeing videos of American students chanting “Min al-maiyeh lel mayieh, Falasteen Arabiya.” The menace implicit in the Arabic chant bleeds into the English-language version.

If a chant’s meaning changes according to the other ones being chanted at the same event, the signs being waved, the leader’s general affect, and so on, then today’s chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are not beautiful messages of peace. A voice breaking the calm of a neoclassical quad with harsh cries of “Intifada, Intifada” is not a harbinger of harmonious coexistence. “We don’t want two states! We want all of it!” seems especially uncompromising when sung next to snow that’s been stained blood-red with paint. (I imagine that the red snow was meant to allude to the blood of Gazans, but sometimes a symbol means more than it is intended to mean.) Student protesters often say that all they want is for the killing to stop. That may well be true. But that is not what they’re chanting, or how they’re chanting it.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

As the Israel-Hamas war continues, breathless headlines sometimes conceal more than they reveal.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

David A. Graham: “The Stormy Daniels testimony spotlights Trump’s misogyny.” The politics of fear itself When conservative parents revolt

Waiting for Details

In March, CNN reported that “the Israelis have ‘basically accepted’ a six-week ceasefire proposal in Gaza,” per a U.S. official. Yesterday, the Associated Press reported that Hamas said it had “accepted an Egyptian-Qatari cease-fire proposal.” Each of these claims quickly spread across the internet, fueling arguments among partisans around the world and raising hopes among both Palestinians and Israelis. Of course, as anyone following the conflict in Gaza knows, the fighting has not ended. These pseudo-cease-fires are far from the only instance of such whiplash between the headlines and reality in recent months—just recall the breathless news coverage surrounding Iran’s strike on Israel and the Israeli response, both of which were cast as a prelude to regional and possibly world war before fizzling into nothing of the kind.

Confused? Trying to figure out how to tell what’s true and what’s not? You’re not alone. I struggle with the challenge too. Here are four points about the cease-fire talks that guide my own reporting, and help me untangle where things stand.

1. As they negotiate, both parties are attempting to shape international media coverage—and their statements should be read with this in mind. In professional sports leagues, before consequential trades or player signings, there are often a flurry of leaks to media outlets about potential contract terms or trade packages. Most of these turn out to be false. This is how Aaron Judge, the superstar captain of the New York Yankees, was momentarily reported to have signed with the San Francisco Giants in 2022. Why are so many of these reports wrong? Sometimes, they reflect genuine offers from the midst of a fluid negotiation; other times they are an attempt by one side to increase their leverage.

International reporting is not sports reporting, but it is subject to similar dynamics. In the case of Israel and Hamas, both sides are selectively sharing information in order to shape press coverage, attempting to present themselves as reasonable and their opponent as recalcitrant. In some cases, this can lead to certain media outlets getting ahead of the story or being spun by those advancing an agenda. That appears to be what happened yesterday, when Hamas unilaterally announced that it had “agreed to” a cease-fire, and several outlets repeated the claim without sufficient scrutiny as to what the group had actually agreed to. As The New York Times reported, it later turned out that “Hamas did not ‘accept’ a cease-fire deal so much as make a counteroffer to the proposal on the table previously blessed by the United States and Israel.” Moreover, Hamas refused to commit to releasing only living Israeli hostages, as opposed to dead ones, in the first stage of a proposed multiphase deal. Here, as elsewhere, when confronted with a sensational headline, it pays to wait for more details before assuming the initial report provides the full picture.

2. Israel and Hamas aren’t the only ones negotiating—and this makes things very complicated. Israel and Hamas did not have formal relations even before they went to war in October. As a result, they have long communicated through intermediaries. Right now, cease-fire negotiations are being conducted in Cairo with the assistance of multiple outside mediators, including the United States, Egypt (which borders both Israel and Gaza), and Qatar (which hosts the Hamas political leadership). Each of these actors is providing their own proposals and compromise suggestions, which can help the parties progress but also allow them to posture by accepting a friendlier proposal from one of the external mediators than they would get from the other side. Understanding this dynamic can help you decode the headlines: There will be a deal when the story is not “Israel accepts U.S. cease-fire proposal” or “Hamas accepts Egyptian-Qatari proposal” but rather “Israel and Hamas agree to mutual cease-fire proposal.”

3. Several core sticking points still need to be resolved. To know whether the parties are actually close to a deal, it helps to know why they haven’t gotten to one yet. In addition to Hamas’s caginess about releasing living hostages—it has yet to provide a list of those Israelis it currently holds, and appears to want to use the live ones as bargaining chips for later stages—both parties have a fundamental disagreement about whether a deal would officially end the war. Hamas insists that it must, while Israel wants to reserve the right to return to Gaza and continue pursuing Hamas’s leadership, even after a long lull in hostilities.

This split over a “permanent cease-fire” might seem largely symbolic: Israel and Hamas have been at war with each other on and off for more than a decade, and that won’t change based on what a piece of paper says. But symbolism matters. Both parties—and in particular, their political leadership—want to be able to declare victory when a deal is signed. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in thrall to far-right coalition partners and dead in the polls, doesn’t want to look like he conceded to Hamas. Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, desperately wants to appear to have achieved something after all the devastation that Hamas and its October 7 massacre brought upon the people of Gaza. Being able to emerge from hiding and declare that he’d outlasted the vaunted Israeli military would accomplish that.

More substantively, Israelis are divided over whether the overriding goal of the current war should be destroying Hamas (in which case Israel cannot disengage until the group’s final battalions are defeated) or returning the hostages (in which case Israel could end this war now and fight Hamas another day). Israel’s leadership has so far refused to choose between these two goals, but the moment of decision seems to be arriving.

4. There is no agreement, but there are negotiations and they are at a pivotal point. Yesterday, Hamas made a negotiating counteroffer, then accepted its own counteroffer. That is obviously not how a bilateral agreement works, but it is evidence that negotiations are advancing. In response, Israel announced yesterday that it would send a new delegation to Cairo to continue talks. CIA director William Burns is reportedly personally on site to help facilitate a deal. At the same time, Israel has begun an operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where it says Hamas’s leadership is hiding among more than 1 million sheltering Palestinians.

President Joe Biden has warned the Israelis against a full-scale operation in Rafah, which is partly why the current one is limited in scope—it began with an evacuation order for 100,000 civilians, leaving the rest in place while Israel maneuvers in a smaller geographic area. This move undoubtedly puts further pressure on Hamas, but it also hastens the moment when Israel will have to decide whether to press forward into the rest of Rafah, potentially breaking with the Biden administration. This prospect in turn increases the pressure on Israel itself to reach some sort of agreement. Although the outcome of these precipitous events is uncertain, an inflection point is fast approaching—and the time may come once again to practice patience as the incomplete headlines roll in.

Related:

The right-wing Israeli campaign to resettle Gaza (From 2023) What did top Israeli war officials really say about Gaza?

Today’s News

The judge in Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial denied his lawyers’ request for a mistrial during Stormy Daniels’s testimony about her alleged sexual encounter with the former president and a hush-money payment. TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, sued the U.S. federal government over recent legislation that mandates the sale of TikTok, claiming that the law violates the company’s First Amendment rights. Vladimir Putin was inaugurated for his fifth term as the president of Russia in a ceremony that the U.S. and many European nations boycotted.

Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.

Enough With Saving the Honeybees

By Ellen Cushing

In 2022, at least 18 states enacted bee-related legislation. Last year, a cryptocurrency launched with the intention of raising “awareness and support for bee conservation.” If you search Etsy right now for “save the bees,” you’ll be rewarded with thousands of things to buy. Bees and Thank You, a food truck in suburban Boston, funds bee sanctuaries and gives out a packet of wildflower seeds—good for the bees!—with every grilled cheese sandwich it sells. A company in the United Kingdom offers a key ring containing a little bottle of chemicals that can purportedly “revive” an “exhausted bee” should you encounter one, “so it can continue its mission pollinating planet Earth.”

All of the above is surprising for maybe a few different reasons, but here’s a good place to start: Though their numbers have fluctuated, honeybees are not in trouble. Other bees are. But the movement’s poster child, biggest star, and attention hound is not at risk of imminent extinction, and never has been.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The conjoined twins who refused to be “fixed” “Ukraine has changed too much to compromise with Russia,” Illia Ponomarenko argues. Being an ambassador in Washington keeps getting harder. James Parker: “Some late-breaking adjustments to my new autobiography”

Culture Break

Max

Watch (or skip). Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show (out now on Max) is a new unscripted show about the comedian’s life that may lean too much into voyeurism, Hannah Giorgis writes.

Read. A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria, by Caroline Crampton, explores the pervasiveness of health anxiety.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

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