Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

People all over the world are divided about the best way forward in the Middle East. As conflict devastates that region, how should citizens outside the Middle East handle their differences of opinion about the best way forward without tearing their societies apart?

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Conversations of Note

In Spiegel International, under the headline “Middle East Conflict Tests the Postwar World Order,” a piece with six bylines advances a theory of geopolitics and poses a series of questions:

In Germany, which bears “historic responsibility for the worst imaginable crime,” as Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said in her UN speech in reference to the Holocaust, one misguided sentence can divide families and end friendships. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the same is true in many countries of the Muslim world. In societies and countries that are farther away from this conflict, the debates may proceed differently. But there, too, they are increasingly toxic—from Southeast Asia to Latin America, from the U.S. to Europe.

What are the consequences of this extreme polarization? What are the consequences for a possible cease-fire, armistice or—as anachronistic as it might sound—for a political solution of the Middle East conflict? What about the broader consequences for a world order which, following the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the U.S., the financial crisis in 2008, the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is clearly decaying?

Noah Millman argues that a lot of commentary about the West’s response to events in the Middle East is premature, because Western reactions depend in part on how the war in Gaza plays out. Israel’s ability to destroy Hamas, and what doing so would require, is just the first of the uncertainties he notes:

Will Israel move in with large forces, or mostly conduct periodic raids from safer positions inside Israel? Will the campaign last weeks? Months? Years? How sustained will the bombardment continue to be, and for how long? Then: how will the United Nations and various NGOs be brought in to relieve the suffering of the Gazan people? Or will they be firmly kept out—or will they refuse to come because the situation isn’t safe enough for them to operate? Will more and more vulnerable Gazans be evacuated … or will Egypt and Israel’s other neighbors and the Gazans themselves refuse to facilitate what they see as a plot to depopulate the Strip and give Israel a freer hand?

Finally, how, more generally, will the other players in the region, hostile and non-hostile, react over time to Israel’s campaign? Will Hezbollah join the war? Will Iran? Will the American military wind up getting drawn in? What about Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia—will they make dramatic efforts to mediate and moderate the conflict … Or will they make no such overtures, and just try to insulate themselves as much as possible from the conflict? Or will they even be drawn in on Israel’s side?

Any of these scenarios—a longer war, a wider war, a war with an unclear outcome—opens up wildly different possibilities for how politics will be shaped in Europe and America in response.

Shadi Hamid cautions against treating terrorism as an irrational phenomenon and support for it as unchangeable:

Terrorism doesn’t fall from the sky. Terror is a tactic. It is a choice. Hamas’s grisly assault on Israel must be analyzed with this in mind. If we ignore this, we make it more likely that other violent organizations will take Hamas’s place even if the group is neutralized or somehow eliminated … According to one July poll, 60 to 75 percent of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank had positive views of Islamic Jihad and the Lions’ Den—groups just as or even more radical than Hamas … There are two ways to look at this. One is to say that something is inherently wrong with Palestinians—a view often expressed by both the Israeli and American right—or even that Palestinians, by supporting groups that are evil, are complicit in that evil. This perspective has dangerous implications: It means downplaying distinctions between combatants and civilians (as many Israeli officials have repeatedly done) and seeing all Palestinians as enemies to be destroyed.

The other way to interpret the survey results is to acknowledge a truth about all people: They’re complicated. In the July poll, half of Gazans agreed that “Hamas should stop calling for Israel’s destruction and instead accept a permanent two-state solution based on the 1967 borders.” But it is possible for Palestinians to support a two-state solution that would allow Israel to exist as a Jewish state while also supporting armed attacks against and inside Israel. It’s more useful to ask how Palestinian attitudes toward violence have evolved. As the journalist Peter Beinart recently noted, at the height of the Oslo accords in 1996—when a settlement seemed possible—Palestinian support for the peace process reached 80 percent while support for violence dropped to around 20 percent. Clearly, Palestinians, like any group, are capable of supporting both violence and nonviolence, depending on the circumstances.

Physical Therapy for New Mothers

Christine Henneberg lays out the case for making PT a more frequent part of post-delivery medical care:

Pregnant women and new mothers are, in a sense, different from other hospitalized patients. Doctors tend to think of them as healthy young people undergoing a normal, natural process, one that should require serious medical intervention only occasionally. This is how my patients tend to see themselves too—and most of them do go on to live normal, if changed, lives. By this philosophy, what new mothers need isn’t intensive rehab, but a brief period (one or two days) of observation, some education about how to feed and care for their baby, and then a timely discharge home, with a single postpartum visit a few weeks later. Indeed, this laissez-faire approach is the standard of care in many U.S. hospitals.

But as the U.S. faces a surging maternal-mortality rate, with more than half of maternal deaths occurring after delivery, physicians are now in wide agreement that the standard of care needs to change. Pregnant women in the U.S. are not as young as they once were. Pregnancy and childbirth can present grave dangers—particularly when a woman already has underlying health conditions. A vaginal delivery is an intense physiological event that involves the rapid expansion and then contraction of the musculoskeletal system, along with dramatic shifts in hormones, blood volume, and heart rate. A Cesarean section is a major surgery that involves cutting through layers of skin, fascia, and muscle—and that’s if everything goes perfectly.

Rebeca Segraves, a Washington State–based doctor of physical therapy specializing in women’s health, told me she was struck early in her career by the realization that women undergoing a C-section did not receive routine postoperative PT. She was used to performing inpatient evaluations for patients recovering from relatively minor illnesses and surgeries, such as pneumonia, gallbladder removal, and prostatectomy. But after a C-section, she says, a PT evaluation “just wasn’t the culture.”

Yes, There Are Principled Supporters of Free Speech

At New York, Jonathan Chait argues that there is a reason for the "the frequency of the claim that free-speech defenders are not consistent in their values":

Insisting that nobody really upholds a value is a way of giving yourself permission to ignore it. Brutal dictators like to say that every government violates human rights; gangsters are fond of insisting they’re no more crooked than any other powerful person.

There is a crucial difference between a specific, factually grounded charge of hypocrisy and a sweeping generalized charge of hypocrisy. The former is designed to uphold standards by shaming those who violate them. The latter is designed to undermine a standard by asserting implicitly that nobody actually cares about it.

The ubiquitous rhetorical move of insisting the “cancel-culture brigades” never criticize right-wing censorship serves that purpose. Its adherents repeat it so frequently because it plays a crucial role in their worldview in discrediting a belief system, free-speech liberalism, that poses a threat by dint of its ideological proximity. (The near enemy is always more dangerous than the far enemy.)

Provocation of the Week: You Have Two Noses

In The Atlantic, Sarah Zhang delivers a passage that forever changed how I think about my body:

The argument that humans have two noses was first put to me by Ronald Eccles, a nose expert who ran the Common Cold Centre at Cardiff University, in Wales, until his retirement a few years ago. This sounds absurd, I know, but consider what your nose—or noses—looks like on the inside: Each nostril opens into its own nasal cavity, which does not connect with the other directly. They are two separate organs, as separate as your two eyes or your two ears.

And far from being a passive tube, the nose’s hidden inner anatomy is constantly changing. It’s lined with venous erectile tissue that has a “similar structure to the erectile tissue in the penis,” Eccles said, and can become engorged with blood. Infection or allergies amplify the swelling, so much so that the nasal passages become completely blocked. This swelling, not mucus, is the primary cause of a stuffy nose, which is why expelling snot never quite fixes congestion entirely …

In healthy noses, the swelling and unswelling of nasal tissue usually follows a predictable pattern called the nasal cycle. Every few hours, one side of the nose becomes partially congested while the other opens. Then they switch, going back and forth, back and forth … The idea made sense as soon as I consciously thought about it: When I’m sick, and extra swelling has turned partial congestion into complete congestion, I do tend to feel more blocked on one side than the other. Once you’re aware of the nasal cycle, you can control it—to some extent.

If you’re suffering from a cold, get the relevant details here. See you next week!

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A new pattern is emerging in Chinese foreign policy that bodes poorly for global stability: Chinese leader Xi Jinping pretends to favor peaceful resolutions to international conflicts while actually encouraging the world’s most destabilizing forces.

In the Middle East, Beijing has vociferously called for an end to the fighting between Israel and Hamas and claims to take an evenhanded approach to the belligerents. But the Chinese government is, in effect, backing Hamas—and therefore terrorism. Xi’s position on Gaza is identical to his stance on the world’s other major conflict, the war in Ukraine. There, too, Beijing has asserted principled neutrality and even launched a peace mission, while at the same time deepening ties to Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin.

[Read: China plays peacemaker]

Beijing seeks to exploit both of these crises in order to undermine the United States and promote its own global leadership. To this end, Xi backs the aggressor, blames the United States for the resulting disorder, and then portrays himself as the more responsible peacemaker with better solutions to the world’s problems. China and Russia are in this game together: Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi had the chutzpah to call for a cease-fire in Gaza in discussions with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, while the Russian army was grinding up civilians in Ukraine.

Officially, China’s leaders have tried to appear impartial on the Gaza conflict. They have repeatedly made generic statements—for instance, that they “oppose and condemn all violence and attacks against civilians.” But Beijing has pointedly avoided condemning Hamas for the atrocities it committed against Israeli citizens on October 7, which touched off the current crisis. Denouncing that attack would be “illogical,” according to the Global Times, a news outlet run by the Chinese Communist Party, because the broader conflict was “partly caused by Western colonization and exacerbated by US biased Middle East policies.” Beijing won’t even mention Hamas in its official comments, asserting instead that the conflict is between Israel and Palestine.

China’s position has hardened against Israel as the fighting has intensified. On October 14, just a week after Hamas’s attack, Wang Yi stated that Israel’s response had already “gone beyond self-defense.” China’s ambassador to the United Nations justified vetoing a Security Council resolution, sponsored by the United States and calling for pauses in the fighting for humanitarian efforts, on the grounds that the draft was “seriously out of balance” because it didn’t address the issue of Palestinian statehood, among other reasons. The Chinese ambassador then called for Israel to lift its Gaza siege—without mentioning Hamas or demanding that the group release Israeli hostages.

Beijing seems to have little compunction about calling out Western hypocrisy while indulging in doublespeak of its own. Commentary in the state-owned China Daily blasted the “double standard exhibited by many Western leaders” who, for example, deplore Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine but supposedly fail to hold Israel similarly accountable for the suffering caused by its siege of Gaza. And yet China, the erstwhile defender of the rights of Palestinians, is engaged in widespread human-rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, where Chinese leaders claim to be prosecuting an anti-terror campaign, and Beijing has flatly denied the national aspirations of people, such as the Tibetans, who live in territories that the Communist Party considers integral to China.

The United States is, as usual, China’s real target: Beijing wants to pin responsibility for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Washington, to point to as evidence that the United States has lost its purchase as a world leader. The Global Times opined that the major driver behind the conflict was “the marginalization of the Palestinian issue by the United States and European powers,” a deficit that shows that “the United States and Europe have significantly weakened their capacity to uphold the existing world order.”

China’s leaders evidently hope that showing sympathy for Palestinians will endear them to the Arab world and bolster their effort to build support in the global South. But the complexities of the Middle East, which have bedeviled Washington for decades, are likely to also plague Chinese diplomats, who are relative newcomers to the region. Although support for the Palestinian cause is widespread, many Arab leaders also consider Hamas to be a terror organization. For example, the United Arab Emirates has criticized Hamas for the October 7 attack far more sharply than China has. Jonathan Fulton, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who specializes in China’s relations with the Middle East, told me that China’s effort to capitalize on the current crisis to sell itself in the region as the champion of all who have been oppressed by the United States has run up against the problem that “not every Arab country sees this the same way.” As a result, he said, “China’s response here has been a little ineffectual.”

China’s will and capacity to serve as a global peacemaker has been even more underwhelming. Beijing has previously offered to mediate between Israel and the Palestinians, and it dispatched an envoy to the region after the current crisis erupted. Wang Yi told Israel’s foreign minister that Beijing “will exert its utmost to do anything conducive to the reconciliation” between the Palestinians and Israelis. But Chinese diplomats probably don’t have the pull to lure the two sides to the negotiating table. Even before the current crisis, the Israelis, close American allies, greeted Chinese overtures with skepticism. Now Beijing has struck an overtly pro-Palestinian position that one Israeli envoy has called “disturbing,” and which only deepens Israeli distrust in China’s ability to serve as an impartial mediator.

Xi does have relationships in the Middle East, however, and he could be doing more—if he wanted to. China was able to capitalize on its economic clout to broker a detente between Saudi Arabia and Iran earlier this year. Iran, much like Russia, relies on China for economic and political support due to its isolation from the West. Xi has raised Iran’s diplomatic profile, most recently by spearheading an expansion of the BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—group of emerging nations, which invited Tehran to join in August. China also purchases nearly all of Iran’s oil exports, according to estimates from the data provider Kpler—a fact that Beijing tries to obfuscate because the Islamic Republic is under international sanctions.

[Read: The axis of resistance has been gathering strength]

Tehran is a significant player in the current conflict, as the major benefactor behind Hamas, Hezbollah, and several other regional militias that have threatened to widen the war. But Xi does not appear to have leveraged his influence to prod Iran into easing the crisis or at least preventing its escalation. Beijing could also work with Egypt, another close political and economic partner, to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, about which China claims to be so concerned. But it does not appear to have done so. In a recent note, Trivium, a China-focused research firm, opined that Beijing’s “hands-off” approach to international affairs “is appealing during peacetime, but can’t yet deliver security when it counts.”

China wants credit for stating the obvious—that peace is better than war—without the responsibility or entanglements involved in bringing that peace about. Worse, Xi appears willing to risk global instability in the pursuit of his geopolitical ambitions. The game he’s playing is a dangerous one—even for China itself, because the country depends heavily on energy imported from the Middle East. An escalation of the Gaza conflict into a wider regional war could be a disaster for China from an economic standpoint alone.

The same argument could be made of the broader dynamics Xi seeks to upset. More turmoil in the U.S.-led global order, which has historically underpinned China’s development into a great power, would undercut the country’s economic progress. But Xi’s policies toward Gaza and Ukraine show his readiness to torch the current order in pursuit of a China-centric world, whatever the long-term consequences are likely to be.

Their exit has been halted in a dispute over evacuating injured patients, Palestinian sources say.