State government says about 200 children were in the school when gunmen on motorbikes attacked.

France has about 5,100 deployed in the Sahel — more specifically in Chad, Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger — as part of its Operation Barkhane against Islamic terrorist groups.

Austrian Muslim groups slam government over map identifying mosques and Islamic associations around the country.

Rereading Exodus, the schmaltzy 1958 best seller about Israel that became a Hollywood movie starring Paul Newman, I was surprised by something I hadn’t noticed as a teenager. The author, Leon Uris, describes a utopia of brave young pioneers in khaki shorts, farming when possible and fighting when necessary, quoting Bible verses as they hook up in ancient ruins, and so forth. But the novel isn’t just a fantasy about Israel, as I’d remembered, or even primarily that: It’s about America. Exodus says less about the country where it’s set than about an American tendency, one very much in evidence this month, to imagine people here in Israel as a reflection of themselves.

“She was one of those great American traditions like Mom’s apple pie, hot dogs, and the Brooklyn Dodgers” is how Uris describes his main female character, Kitty Fremont, a nurse who isn’t Jewish but finds herself embroiled in Israel’s War of Independence. The male lead, Ari Ben Canaan, is a blond frontiersman, tough yet sensitive, who knows his way around good cognac, the foxtrot, and an automatic rifle. He’s a Jew worthy of the great American tradition embodied by Kitty, and Exodus ends with them together. That seems, in fact, like the point of the book.

When Uris was writing in the 1950s, most Israeli Jews were natives of the Islamic world who’d either been drawn to the new state or forced from their home by their former neighbors. Many of the rest were survivors of the Holocaust trying to hack out a living without losing what was left of their mind. They lived alongside a sizable Muslim Arab minority, a remnant of those displaced by the war, feared as a fifth column and kept under military rule. Kibbutznik pioneers like Ari Ben Canaan were never more than a tiny share of the population—and as committed socialists, would never have gone anywhere near the foxtrot. Few people here were blond. A more representative hero for Exodus would have been the Arabic-speaking seamstress from the Jewish ghetto in Marrakech.

[Read: A new word is defining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Washington]

But Exodus wasn’t about representation, or about a strange country in the Middle East. It was an attempt to get American readers to look at Israel and see themselves. Ari Ben Canaan was a hero from the America of Ernest Hemingway and John Wayne. He was a blue-eyed, chiseled, gorgeous Paul Newman.

Although a close relationship between America and Israel has been taken for granted over the past half century, it solidified only once Americans decided that Israelis were like them. In novels and countless press reports about pioneers and fighters in the ’50s, “Israel and Jews came to be perceived as masculine, ready to fight the Cold War alongside America,” the scholar Michelle Mart wrote in her study of the topic, Eye on Israel. “By contrast, Arabs were increasingly stigmatized as non-Western, undemocratic, racially darker, unmasculine outsiders.”

“In the images of Israelis, then,” she wrote, “Americans constructed their own self-image at mid-century.”

That construction has been on my mind this month as disturbing events unfolding here have been picked up and interpreted abroad. Many Americans are now using their image of home to construct their image of Israel. Indeed, for some on the progressive left, the conflict between Jews and Muslims 6,000 miles east of Washington, D.C., has become jumbled up with American ideas about race.

“What they are doing to the Palestinian people is what they continue to do to our Black brothers and sisters here,” Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan shouted to applause at a rally earlier this month, leaving listeners to ponder the word they. Celebrities tweeted the phrase “Palestinian Lives Matter,” echoing the American protests for racial justice. “Until all our children are safe,” Representative Cori Bush of Missouri told the House, “we will continue to fight for our rights in Palestine and in Ferguson.”

I first encountered this sort of American projection about 15 years ago, as a local reporter working for a U.S. news service. A few Israeli motorists had been murdered by Palestinian gunmen on a road between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that cuts through the West Bank. The army had closed the road to Palestinian traffic, allowing access only to drivers, Jews and Arabs, with Israeli license plates. This decision was effective; the shootings stopped. One of my colleagues in the bureau, a recent arrival from America, asked if we could now say that the road was “segregated.”

[Read: No one is coming to help the Palestinians]

Since arriving from Canada as a teenager in the mid-’90s, I’d always tried to understand this place, with its singular complications and steep inequalities, on its own terms. But I realized that when many Westerners peer out at the world, what they’re really looking for is a mirror.

The story of the Jewish minority in Europe and in the Islamic world, which is the story of Israel, has nothing to do with race in America. My grandmother’s parents and siblings were shot outside their village in Poland by people the same color as them. If you stand on a street in the modern state of Israel and look at passersby, you often can’t tell who’s Jewish and who’s Arab. Many Israelis are from Arab countries, and for the 6 million Jews living in the heart of the Arab world (300 million people) and in the broader Islamic world (1.5 billion people), the question of who’s the minority is obviously a tricky one. Most Black people here are Jews with roots in Ethiopia. The occupation of the West Bank is supported by many Israelis mainly because they have rational fears of rockets and suicide bombings, tactics that weren’t quite the ones endorsed by the American civil-rights movement. All of this is to say that although Israel, like America, is deeply messed up, it’s messed up in completely different ways.

Nonetheless, the belief in a fundamental similarity has caught on. While following the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, which to me seemed just and necessary, I saw a sign that read From Ferguson to Palestine. This was puzzling: American soldiers still occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, and American aid money was flowing to repressive regimes throughout the Middle East and beyond. If activists were seeking foreign inspiration for a domestic movement, they had hundreds of ongoing ethnic conflicts to choose from. But something about Palestine struck Americans as relevant to their own experience.

That sentiment has moved into elite opinion. In 2019, The New York Times published an op-ed by the respected scholar Michelle Alexander, the author of an important book on incarceration, that described Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians as “one of the great moral challenges of our time,” the scene of “practices reminiscent of apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow segregation in the United States.” The essay didn’t explain why this conflict constitutes one of the great moral challenges or offer any indication that the author had ever visited Israel. Last year the Times ran an essay by the author Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Pulitzer Prize winner and a college professor in Los Angeles, that ridiculed “white writers” for their “white privilege,” identified the American dream as “settler colonialism,” and then segued into an attack on Israelis as settler colonialists.

For these Americans, distant Jews have become an embodiment of the American evil, racial oppression. People have always projected fantasies onto other places and groups, but this particular type of projection, in which Jews are displayed as the prime symbol of whatever’s wrong, has a long history. When it surfaces, it usually heralds an impatience with logical analysis and normal politics, and a move toward magical thinking.

[Micah Goodman: How to shrink the Israeli-Palestinian conflict]

In some ways, Americans haven’t progressed from the “Israeli” pioneer of Exodus, who’s white and blond and seems so awfully familiar. We’re still stuck with Ari Ben Canaan— except now he’s a racist. And if Palestinians were disdained in the old novels and reportage as non-Western, dark, and unmasculine, they’re still more or less kept in the same world of stereotypes—except those attributes are no longer considered negative. This helps explain, for example, the passivity of Palestinians in many Western accounts of what’s going on here, and why Western reporters are drawn to the tragedy of Palestinian civilians while remaining relatively uninterested in the ruthless strategy and significant accomplishments of the Palestinians’ Iran-backed military force, Hamas. In both the old and new versions of the fantasy, Israelis are actors and Palestinians are props.

Western observers are often tempted to see foreign countries as mirrors of their own, because it makes a story more compelling for members of their audience, who are interested—who isn’t?—mainly in themselves. And it means they can analyze other societies without going to the considerable trouble of studying them, learning their language, or even visiting. So Narendra Modi of India is Donald Trump, and France’s problem is racial inequality, and Dutch conservatives are Republicans. It’s seductive to think that everything you need to know you learned back in Berkeley.

But believing that foreign countries operate according to American logic is a recipe for confusion, even disaster. Many Americans looking at Iraq in the early years of this century, for example, saw a democracy-in-waiting stymied only by a cruel dictator. America then took steps that resulted, directly and indirectly, in hundreds of thousands of deaths, including those of more than 4,500 American soldiers, with little to show for it. The world is not a mirror. The world is a kaleidoscope that can be understood only by people who are experts in each individual shard, and even then only partially.

The truth is that Israel is a small country in the Middle East that has nothing to do with the demons stalking America. We have our own demons. Conflating them won’t make either country’s problems easier to understand or solve.

A Syrian has been sentenced to life in prison for stabbing two gay men in Dresden last year, killing one and seriously injuring his partner in an attack that prosecutors said was motivated by anti-LGBT Islamic extremist beliefs.

Iran says court verdict a part of 'politicised' moves by the Canadian government against the Islamic republic.

Sky News host Andrew Bolt says "you cannot trust" the mainstream media to report fairly on "this war against Israel". "Not when you have the ABC, the national broadcaster, claiming that the Islamic terrorists who have fired more than 3000 missiles now at Israel from Gaza, were just retaliating against Israel's bombing of Gaza, when the truth is exactly the other way around," Mr Bolt said. "Israel starting bombing Gaza to stop the rocket attacks which had already started," he said. "It was retaliating". Mr Bolt spoke to the Co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry Alex Ryvchin about various aspects of the conflict and its reporting in the media.

Very few Americans are allowing themselves to feel anything about Afghanistan anymore. A triple bombing in Kabul left 80 people, many of them schoolgirls, dead last week. In photographs, you see the physical devastation of the bombing—a crater, twisted metal, gouged walls—but the more visceral devastation is in the faces of family members, the contorted, grief-stricken expressions of mothers and fathers at the gates of the school as they search for their daughters. In one image, a little boy holds his missing sister’s backpack. What you see is pure loss. The media covered the bombing, but I didn’t discern any outrage among people in the U.S.

I understand America’s indifference. It is born out of a collective cynicism, a belief that the war will never turn the corner. I was deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan five times from the ages of 24 to 31, and by the end, I thought the situation was hopeless too. But my cynicism eventually melted away, as I suppose America’s will. That cynicism, I hope, will evolve into retrospective indictment, and we will see that what we did there had value. We will also come to realize that the decision to completely pull out is negligent.

[Read: What was America doing in Afghanistan?]

Toward the end of my last deployment, in Afghanistan, I was nearly killed. I had been nearly killed before. But this time felt different. I was now a father, my daughter having arrived a few months earlier. I was on patrol with the Afghan special-operations unit I advised, and we were driving out of a dry riverbed when the vehicle in front of mine rolled over an IED, vanishing in a concussive pillar of smoke. The IED was part of a larger ambush, and after the blast a firefight ensued. When we returned to base hours later with our dead—or the pieces of our dead—zipped up in body bags, I was angry, exhausted, and completely finished with the senselessness that was Afghanistan.

Now that I was a father, the idea of deploying had come to feel selfish, like I’d developed a weekend base-jumping habit. Those unfortunate enough to love me lived under the tyranny of low-grade terror every time I had to leave. With a family to support, I was too grown up for this. My life now had more pressing concerns than trying to create a free and stable Afghanistan (if that even was our mission). Although I had already decided to leave the wars before that last firefight, for years I looked back on the incident as having brought total clarity to my decision.

War had taught me cynicism, a general distrust of human nature. If you’re going to spend seven years deploying in and out of war zones, a healthy bit of cynicism is a requirement, a way to defend against emotional investment. Those walls protect you. Then, when you come home, hopefully you figure out how to bring those walls down, so you can become a recognizable version of the person you were before. Parenting forced me to let go of my anger about the war and the resultant pessimism that had seeped into different parts of my life. As my children grew older, I knew I couldn’t be a good parent if I carried that burden, I needed to exude the antithesis of cynicism: belief in my children and their future.

Putting my cynicism behind me allowed me to see Afghanistan and all we tried to accomplish there differently. Occasionally, the war has come up as a topic in school for my daughter. Teachers and friends have told her that the war was about many things—September 11, helping the Afghan government and the Afghan people—but the cause that has resonated the most with my daughter is that the war was fought so that little girls like her could go to school.

Ten years ago, if my then-infant daughter had asked me why I was fighting in Afghanistan, that more cynical version of me—the one who arrived exhausted and bloody back at base after that ambush—likely wouldn’t have spoken much about girls going to school. Mentioning that mission would have felt dangerously sentimental. I likely would have said something fatalistic about war’s enduring nature and left it at that. But that’s not who I am today. The parent I’ve become—the one who believes in his children and hopes to raise them to become upstanding adults—is able to tell my daughter that yes, helping girls like her was one of the reasons we were over there, or at least it was an outgrowth of our effort to democratize the country. Saying that does not excuse the dysfunction that has attended the war in Afghanistan. Both can be true.

Withdrawing completely from Afghanistan is a decision I don’t agree with, even if it’s one that fits the mood of our country (or the slick optics of a war’s ending on the anniversary of the attacks that prompted it). To simply wash our hands of an entire country and its people is deeply cynical. Currently, approximately 2,500 U.S. troops are serving in Afghanistan, a fraction of the 100,000 troops serving there when I left a decade ago. In 2020, more U.S. troops died in training accidents at Camp Pendleton in California than died in combat in Afghanistan. Signaling our commitment by keeping a small U.S. force there wouldn’t prevent every attack, but it would go a long way toward stabilizing the region, and allowing the Afghans to finish the fight against the Taliban for themselves. But the Biden administration has made its choice and doesn’t appear likely to reverse course, no matter how many schoolgirls the Taliban or the Islamic State massacre.

[Read: The original sin of the war in Afghanistan]

The events in Kabul last weekend teach us that our cynicism comes at a cost, to Afghanistan and to the U.S. In the months ahead, we will see more images like those out of Kabul. Our current hard-edged national mood will only endure for so long. Eventually, we will have to reckon with why we chose this path, one that allows girls to die in the very schools we encouraged them to attend. If we as a country are going to actually “come home” from Afghanistan, we’re going to need to find a better answer than Our effort there at the end was hopeless. Because cynicism won’t allow us to move on. It never does.

“Today Iran, tomorrow Palestine.” Thus cheered the crowd in Tehran in February 1979, during the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s visit to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini just days after the success of the Iranian revolution. Arafat was the first foreign dignitary to visit Iran after the fall of the shah. For him, Khomeini’s success was a win for the Palestinian cause: His guerilla fighters had helped train Iranian revolutionaries in Lebanon, and he was hopeful that, with Khomeini’s help, he would soon be on his way to establishing a Palestinian state.

This fascinating and relatively little known episode in the Middle East’s history altered the region’s political landscape, and still informs the context in which today’s events in the Palestinian territories and Israel are unfolding. Although the personal relationship between Arafat and Khomeini soured within a year, their encounter marks the moment when revolutionary Iran’s involvement with the Palestinians began, and when the Palestinian issue inserted itself into a then-still-nascent regional rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Forty years later, Iran continues to brandish the Palestinian cause to shore up its anti-imperial credentials and project power in the region, posing as the only true defender of the Palestinians. In Tehran’s view, that offers it a contrast to Arab countries that either signed peace deals with Israel, such as Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, or cozied up to it, such as Saudi Arabia. This is why the Biden administration must view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a piece of the wider puzzle as it seeks to revive the nuclear deal with Iran: because that’s how Tehran sees it.

That’s not to dismiss the seven-decade long plight of the Palestinians, dispossessed and expelled repeatedly from their homes. Nor does it take away from the horror of the violence between Israeli Jews and Arabs, from Haifa to Lod, and the alarming rise of Jewish extremism.

But that meeting decades ago remains essential to understanding how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is used by those who aren’t directly impacted to advance their own agendas, and how differently it features in the Middle East today compared with even two decades ago.

[Read: ‘We want a nation’]

When I began researching my book on the Saudi-Iranian rivalry, I did not expect to find that the Palestinian cause had played a role in the Iranian revolution, nor that it was a thread in the long-running proxy battle between Riyadh and Tehran, which also began in 1979. The two countries’ competition for influence is the key undercurrent that has driven, and continues to drive, many of the political, religious, and cultural dynamics in the region, as well as conflicts in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq.

The Arab-Israeli conflict began well before the Saudi-Iranian rivalry and continued to evolve mostly in parallel, with its own dynamics of occupation, wars, intifadas, invasions, and withdrawals. Saudi Arabia and Iran used different approaches to appropriate the issue of Palestine: Riyadh by using fiery rhetoric and promoting peace plans and Tehran by funding groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Then the Clinton administration’s efforts to secure peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians failed, the second intifada started in 2001, and Iran pushed itself further onto the Palestinian scene, building on what had begun in the guerilla training camps in Lebanon in the 1970s. Since then, the Saudi-Iran rivalry and the Arab-Israeli conflict have become even more intertwined.

Now Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argues that the real threat to his country comes from Iran, not what seemed to be a dormant conflict with the Palestinians—that Israel could exist with a no-cost occupation while progressively establishing relations with Arab countries such as Bahrain and the UAE. Though these countries had their strategic and economic reasons for signing the Abraham Accords, there was always an anti-Iran slant to their unspoken cooperation with Israel.

For a long time, Arab regimes used the Arab-Israeli conflict to defend their bloated military budgets and explain away human-rights abuses and oppression—claiming that it was all in service of a greater cause. The Obama administration tried, sporadically, to resume negotiations and find a way forward, but senior United States officials recognized that Arab regimes had been using the conflict with Israel to distract their citizens from their own poverty and hopelessness. U.S. officials still mistakenly thought, however, that this meant that Washington could put the Palestinian issue on the back burner and focus on development and human rights—especially when the 2011 Arab uprisings erupted. When President Donald Trump declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel, the lack of upheaval across the region was also taken as confirmation that the fire of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict had died.

[Read: The Muslim world’s question: ‘What happened to us?’]

But decisions such as these fuel the deep sense of abandonment that Palestinians have felt over the decades. A similar feeling of isolation is what initially drove Arafat to seek out Khomeini in the late 1970s, after successive Arab defeats in wars against Israel. Even worse was Egypt’s perceived betrayal, when Anwar Sadat broke ranks and became the first Arab leader to visit Israel, in 1977. It was around then that Arafat decided he needed new friends. The region’s most powerful military, aside from Egypt, belonged to Iran, but the Shah—who was still ruling the country—was a friend of Israel. Hundreds of Iranian revolutionaries, Marxists and Islamists alike, were already training in various Palestinian camps in Lebanon when Arafat made contact with Khomeini in 1977, just as the revolution in Iran started to simmer.

The ayatollah had identified the Palestinian cause early on as one that could give him appeal beyond Iran’s borders and beyond the Shia Muslim community, one that he could latch on to and make his own, undermining Saudi Arabia’s leadership of the broader Muslim world.

Arafat’s visit to Tehran in 1979 was triumphant, but even then there was tension. Khomeini wanted Arafat to embrace the Islamic precepts of revolution and abandon his nationalist rhetoric. Arafat was not interested. Within a year, the mood had turned. Palestinian guerillas believed the people around Khomeini were religious “nut cases,” while Khomeini’s acolytes looked at the Palestinian fighters with disdain: They drank, didn’t pray or fast, and wore ties. But Khomeini had what he needed—an in with the Palestinians, some of whom thought Arafat was too moderate. They would go on to establish Islamist factions, eventually leading to the birth of Hamas.

Revolutionary Iran proclaimed the last Friday of Ramadan to be al-Quds Day, or Jerusalem Day, marked by military parades and anti-Israel and anti-American chest thumping. Later, Tehran would set up the Quds Force, led for years by General Qassem Soleimani and ostensibly meant to liberate Jerusalem, though it made destructive detours in Beirut, Aleppo, and Baghdad.

The events this week have been a reminder of the secular, nationalist currents that have long undergirded the Palestinian cause: In the late 1970s, a poster hung on the wall in the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Beirut offices bearing the title A List the People Will Complete, below which were the names of several countries. Three of them, Ethiopia, Vietnam, and Spain, had red check marks next to them—countries liberated by anti-imperialists. In February 1979, a red check mark was added next to Iran, while Palestine and Egypt still waited farther down the list. Before the latest violence erupted between Arabs and Jews within Israel, and before Hamas again started lobbing rockets at Israel, peaceful protests were being conducted by young Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah, speaking out in international media, talking about international law and smiling bravely while they were being arrested by Israeli forces. They believe they are hearing more and more voices in support of their cause around the world, and in the halls of power, including, crucially this week, numerous voices in the U.S. Congress. They are mobilizing in ways we haven’t seen before, in the occupied territories, in Gaza, in refugee camps around the region, and in the diaspora.

There is limited hope among Palestinians: Egypt is trying to broker a cease-fire. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have condemned Israel’s actions, beginning with the eviction of Palestinians from land claimed by Israeli settlers and have called on all sides to “show restraint.” President Joe Biden has dispatched Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hady Amr to Tel Aviv. (With more than $3.3 billion in aid given, Washington has the most influence on Israel.) But the signs are not good. Any cease-fire will be a temporary fix. Arab capitals have limited leverage. And the U.S. has twice blocked efforts at the United Nations to address the violence, with Biden rebuffing calls by some in his party to condition aid to Israel on how it treats Palestinians. Biden seems eager to avoid being dragged into the conflict. But his administration should know that no matter how much it wants to deprioritize the Middle East, even the singular goal of reaching a nuclear deal with Iran can be undermined by violence in East Jerusalem, and Hamas rockets flying into Israel.

[Read: America’s future might be Lebanon]

Ultimately, the Palestinians are still mostly on their own. Their anger is directed against Israel first and foremost, but there is also rage for all those who they argue should be helping them but are not: the Palestinian Authority and President Mahmoud Abbas, who has been in power since 2005; Arab countries that profess brotherhood and common cause but only pay lip service to the Palestinian cause; Washington, which rhetorically voices commitment to human rights and justice but does little to hold its allies, including Israel, accountable on these fronts. The Syrian-Palestinian writer Nidal Betare, who grew up in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus, also raged in a Twitter thread against Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In it, he accused them of having lost their role as liberation movements and having turned into guns for hire, their leaders sitting comfortably in Damascus or Qatar while Palestinians are being bombarded in Gaza.

Some Palestinians may look to Iran as their last ally, and may well cheer the Hamas rockets as the sole way to push back against Israel. But for more than 40 years, the Islamic Republic has used the Palestinian cause for its own advancement. These days, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, tweets his outrage at Israel and the “racist criminal behavior of the usurpers” before flying to Damascus to meet Syrian President Bashar al-Assad—the same man who unleashed hell on his own country and besieged and starved thousands in Yarmouk.

As always in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, two narratives are vying for primacy. In one, Israel is simply defending itself against a fresh attack. In the other, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is the latest example of a desire to punish and humiliate Palestinians. These two narratives are not reconcilable, which makes reasoned discussion an exercise in futility. But any sophisticated argument must contend with the long, winding lead-up to the current events. Why is war in Gaza returning now, and why does it always seem to return, with stubborn, periodic insistence?

Despite inching toward the Democratic Party’s left flank on various domestic- and foreign-policy issues, the Biden administration has fallen back on the usual formulas, offering robotic recitations about “Israel’s right to defend itself.” On Thursday, President Joe Biden said that he hadn’t seen a “significant overreaction” from Israel, while failing to mention a word about Palestinian deaths. In so doing, he gave Israel what amounts to a green light to intensify its bombing campaign.

The White House has been eager to highlight Biden’s “unwavering support” for Israel, which raises the question of what, if anything, might cause America’s support for the Israeli government to waver even slightly. This question is worth asking sooner rather than later, now that more than 120 Palestinians have died, a quarter of them children—all in a few days—according to Palestinian officials.

Supporters of the status quo tend to focus on the fact that Hamas started lobbing rockets into Israel, and they argue that Israel has no choice but to retaliate, as any other country would. Some even suggest that the Israeli army is historically unparalleled in its efforts to spare civilian casualties. This line of argument, however, does not tend to offer many details on how this latest conflagration came to be. Why is all of this happening now? Wars and skirmishes don’t occur in a vacuum; they are the result of an accumulation of actions and reactions over years, if not decades.  

[Photos: Violence explodes across Israel and Gaza]

A potential reputational cost attends even asking these questions. Those who do are often accused of justifying or supporting Hamas’s actions. But it should be possible to do two things at once—first, to note that Hamas is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. This is not in doubt, and to my knowledge there isn’t a particularly large grassroots movement to remove the designation. Hamas’s rockets are indiscriminate and are designed to terrorize Israeli civilians. They might hit schools or hospitals, or they might not. It is this lack of knowing that makes them “effective,” despite their imprecision. These are war crimes, as Human Rights Watch has documented. Second, it should also be possible to recognize that the current conflict in Gaza didn’t appear from the sky unannounced, a product of random chance.

If we want to prevent violence or terrorist activity from happening in the future, then we have to understand what motivates violence or terrorist activity. This is a straightforward observation, albeit a fraught one. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, attempts to understand why were viewed by many as terrorism apologetics. Among scholars and analysts of violent extremism, however, it is close to an article of faith that contextual factors make resorting to violence either more or less likely. The goal is to understand what they are and, ideally, to try to address them.

Even the George W. Bush administration made a rather sophisticated and somewhat original argument about the “root causes” of the September 11 attacks. President Bush and his top aides argued that citizens are more likely to resort to violence when they lack peaceful, constructive means to express their grievances. Accordingly, September 11 did not happen because Arabs despised our freedom, but rather because the Middle East’s stifling political environment bred anger, frustration, and ultimately hate. Part of the long-term solution, then, was to promote democratic reform and basic political rights. Later, when the Islamic State rose to prominence, in 2013, a whole literature emerged on the causes and grievances that led to the organization’s rise. When a white supremacist murdered 50 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019, I argued in favor of assessing the arguments and motivations in his 74-page manifesto—not to give those views legitimacy, as some feared, but to understand the drivers of radicalization.

In the case of the current situation in Gaza, the objective is not to carefully assess Hamas’s “grievances.” The group’s behavior is not particularly mysterious. Hamas leaders see anger against Israel building among ordinary Palestinians, and they see an opportunity to weaponize it. They send rockets across the border and invite destruction because they wish to project relevance and rally domestic support after years of diminished popularity. Hamas is not a bunch of crazed lunatics. Selfish, self-serving, and cavalier toward Palestinian life, its leaders are acting according to a traditional rational-actor model. Whether or not we like it, they believe they will benefit from the crisis—and they may, in reality, find themselves in a stronger position when this is over.

This is one step in the analysis, but it still doesn’t tell us much about why Palestinian anger had been rising in the first place. Progressive Democrats tend to emphasize the original “source” of the current violence. This source isn’t exactly a secret either. As The New York Times reported: “The trouble started on Monday, when a heavy-handed police raid at Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque—the third-holiest site in Islam, located atop a site also revered by Jews—set off an instant backlash.” Yet while the police raid was actually unfolding—during the final days of Ramadan and at such a sensitive site—I found only minimal coverage in mainstream outlets. I relied instead on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts that were covering the raid and its aftermath in real time, although many were censored for “sensitive content.” The tragedy, upon other tragedies, is that the world seems to pay attention to Palestinians only when they use violence. Nonviolent activism goes largely ignored.  

Tensions had, in fact, been building for months, with the threatened eviction of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Smaller protests in the area, taking place at a steady clip for some time, grew larger. But even these details don’t capture the broader context. What is so important about Sheikh Jarrah, and why are Palestinian families being faced with eviction in the first place? As NBC News reported: “The expansion of Jewish settlements in Sheikh Jarrah, which is on land that helps form the final link in a settlement circle surrounding east Jerusalem—an area that Palestinians hope will be the capital of a future state.”

[Micah Goodman: Eight steps to shrink the Israeli-Palestinian conflict]

That aspiration matters, but seemingly not much to those who see Israel’s right to self-defense as the only truly salient issue. They don’t see the occupation itself—and what has flowed from it—as the original sin. And because they don’t recognize the centrality of the occupation, they don’t acknowledge what is so obvious to the other side: the basic fact of a lopsided power dynamic, in which Israel is the aggressor and Palestinians are the aggressed. This imbalance ought to matter—and not just for moral reasons. American policy makers, regardless of whether they see Palestinians as fully deserving of rights and dignity, should understand that wildly unequal power and capabilities make peace all but impossible. Absent international pressure, the more powerful actor has few incentives to offer substantive compromises and concessions to the weaker party.

The Biden administration is acting as if the past several years (or decades) have not happened. It is repeating the same mistakes as its predecessors, while hoping that a cease-fire can bring an end to hostilities and a return to calm. But until fundamental injustices—and Palestinian national aspirations—are addressed by ending an occupation that has lasted longer than my own existence, the calm will prove uneasy. Maybe that’s good enough for Biden. But it shouldn’t be.