Israeli control over the corridor between Gaza and Egypt would mean a de facto full reoccupation of the Gaza Strip.

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Nearly three months into the Israel-Hamas war, our writers think through the possible futures that await the region.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

81 things that blew our minds in 2023 Political accountability isn’t dead yet. The woman who didn’t see stuttering as a flaw

How This Ends

Weeks after Hamas’s attacks on Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza, my colleague Franklin Foer published an article titled “Tell Me How This Ends.” “The Israeli operation faces the same question that ultimately vexed the American project in Iraq,” he wrote: “What comes next?”

Two months later, the questions that Frank raised about the future of the region are no easier to answer, and the civilian death toll in Gaza continues to rise. I’ve come back to the guiding inquiry of Frank’s article many times in recent months: How does this end? The reading list below offers a range of perspectives from our writers about what could, or ought to, come next.

Israel’s impossible dilemma: “Israel’s larger stated aim—of utterly eradicating Hamas—is impossible,” the scholar Hussein Ibish argued earlier this month. “If the Israelis stay in Gaza out of determination to deny Hamas a hollow win, they will instead ensure that Hamas gets a political victory that is actually worth something—one that will play out over months and years of further warfare.” The one-state delusion: “Neither Israelis nor Palestinians are going anywhere, and neither will give up their national identity,” the political scientist Arash Azizi argued last month. “Those who truly want peace and justice in the Holy Land should start by recognizing this reality.” A phased diplomatic strategy: Joe Biden “has exercised bold diplomacy in other parts of the world, and it can work here too—advancing the prospects of peace, ensuring Israeli security, and addressing Palestinian grievances,” Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt, wrote this month. The day after Netanyahu: “Israel has long succeeded in spite of its leaders, not because of them,” Atlantic staff writer Yair Rosenberg wrote last month. “As Israel’s population steps up where its prime minister and his hard-right allies have failed, the real source of the state’s strength has never been more obvious.” “All my life, I’ve watched violence fail the Palestinian cause”: “In spite of the horrors of recent weeks—or perhaps because of them—many Jews and Palestinians want peace more than ever,” the British Palestinian writer John Aziz wrote last month. “But Palestinians need more than peace. They need leaders who will serve their interests instead of persecuting those—including the LGBTQ and non-Muslim communities—who exist on the margins of society.” A message of peace: “There never has been, nor will there be, a military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian situation,” Ziad Asali, founder of the American Task Force on Palestine, wrote last month. “Israel obviously can, in its campaign against Hamas, flatten Gaza. It has the machines and bombs to do so. But it can’t destroy the Palestinian desire to be free.”

Evening Read

The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty / The Atlantic

How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class (From 2020)

By Daniel Markovits

When Pete Buttigieg accepted a position at the management consultancy McKinsey & Company, he already had sterling credentials: high-school valedictorian, a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, a Rhodes Scholarship. He could have taken any number of jobs and, moreover, had no obvious interest in business. Nevertheless, he joined the firm.

This move was predictable, not eccentric: The top graduates of elite colleges typically pass through McKinsey or a similar firm before settling into their adult career. But the conventional nature of the career path makes it more, not less, worthy of examination. How did this come to pass? And what consequences has the rise of management consulting had for the organization of American business and the lives of American workers?

Read the full article.

Culture Break

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Listen. The 25 best podcasts of 2023 kept listeners hooked on stories about female adultery, espionage, scamming, and wanderlust.

Read. “Midwinter,” a new poem by Grady Chambers:

“After, with their underwear still tangled / in the top sheet, or just waking / in winter, the stunned trees / thrusting up their arms, / he was always the first to leave the bed.”

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All the latest developments on the Israel-Hamas war.

Washington Wizards fans didn’t need a new reason to be miserable. As a Wizards diehard, I’m used to following their annual descent in the NBA standings. But I experienced a fresh sort of pain at the recent announcement that the team would be moving from its convenient downtown-D.C. home to a new, $2.2 billion “world-class Entertainment District” in the Virginia suburb of Alexandria. What’s so sad about my terrible team leaving the emptiest arena in the NBA for a gleaming palace across the Potomac? Sit down and let me explain—right here, in row G, seat 11, because I couldn’t find anyone else to go to the game with me.

In many cities, having NBA season tickets is a status symbol. Not in D.C. lately. I’ve had Wizards season tickets for the past 10 years, a fact that tends to be met with the sort of pitying curiosity that I assume is familiar to Civil War reenactors and ferret owners. I love this team. I really do. I follow the Wizards religiously, by which I mean: regular attendance, tithing, and a vague promise of salvation through suffering. That suffering stretches back 45 years. The then–Washington Bullets won the franchise’s only NBA title in 1978. The following year they went back to the finals but lost. Since that season, the team has never made it past the second round of the playoffs and hasn’t even made it to 50 regular-season wins, the longest such streak in the league by two decades. (Last season alone, six teams won more than 50 games.) The median age in the United States is about 39 years old, meaning most Americans have never existed at the same time as a relevant Washington basketball team.

For my first five years as a season-ticket owner, the Wizards weren’t great, but they were at least competitive, with some exciting young talent. They even made it to 49 wins once! Back then, the arena was loud and the city was paying attention. Now they’re one of the very worst teams in the league, and the seats are empty. The beautiful thing about sports, though, is that winning cures everything. Improving the vibes would seem straightforward: Build a better team. Instead, the owner, Ted Leonsis—who, through his company, Monumental Sports and Entertainment, also owns the NHL’s Washington Capitals and the WNBA’s Washington Mystics—would rather put a $2.2 billion cart before the horse. Maybe building a flashy new arena with the help of Virginia taxpayers is a way to sidestep the “winning basketball games” thing. (Laurene Powell Jobs, a minority owner of Monumental Sports, is the founder of Emerson Collective, which is the majority owner of The Atlantic.)

[Prashant Rao: Why it’s good that Americans don’t dominate in basketball]

The new complex will be only about six miles from the Wizards’ current Chinatown digs, but emotionally the team might as well be moving to Alexandria, Egypt. Capital One Arena is easily accessible from nearly anywhere in the region, walking distance from every subway line, and close to bars, restaurants, and museums. The new location is slotted between the Potomac River, a big Target, and acres of current and upcoming construction just south of the still-in-progress Amazon HQ2. In addition to the arena for basketball and hockey, the site plans envision a performing-arts venue, a TV studio, corporate offices, and a “fan plaza,” which is developer-speak for “a big sidewalk.”

The complex that Leonsis wants to build is the dream of sports owners and developers everywhere: a city without the city. It’s a big, walkable, transit-accessible area full of tall buildings and bright lights without any of the annoyances that arise from crowded civilization. There’s no loud music blasting, except what the company pumps through the speakers. There’s no vice, except for the company-owned bars and gambling parlors. There’s no theft, except for the likely extortionate price of everything inside.

Having the Washington Wizards play in the heart of Washington, D.C., isn’t just convenient; it weaves the team into the city’s culture, making every win and loss a matter of civic pride or civic shame. When I reached out for comment, Monumental Sports officials stressed to me that they weren’t abandoning D.C. Under the proposed plan, the WNBA’s Mystics would move to the Wizards’ old arena in Chinatown, and Monumental would put money into improvements that would allow it to host more college sports, concerts, conferences, and other events. But the company just built a partially publicly funded arena for the Mystics and the Wizards’ minor-league team that only opened in 2018 and was supposed to spur redevelopment in the economically depressed, predominantly Black neighborhood of Congress Heights. Now, only five years later, it’s supposedly overcrowded and outdated.

At the new arena’s rollout event, Leonsis gestured to the airport that sits about a mile from the proposed site. “It’s no secret that this great airport here was considered Washington National, and yet it’s in Virginia,” he said. It was an inadvertently apt comparison. An annoying trip out to a sterile complex where everything costs more than it should? Future Wizards games already sound like trips to the airport.

The surprise Alexandria announcement came after Leonsis unsuccessfully asked the city of Washington for $600 million to renovate Capital One Arena, which was built with minimal public investment and opened in 1997. The new arena still isn’t a done deal. It needs approval from local and state representatives, and many who live in Alexandria and nearby aren’t happy with the idea of an “entertainment district” bringing even more traffic through their city. Leonsis’s agreement with Virginia is nonbinding, and he’s still allowed to negotiate with D.C. going forward. Meanwhile, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser prepared a last-ditch plan that would keep the Wizards and Capitals in Chinatown in exchange for $500 million in public funding.

As a longtime fan and D.C. resident, I should be rooting for the Virginia deal to fall through. But what if that option feels just as bad? A “win” for D.C. would cost half a billion dollars that could be spent on, well, anything other than fixing up a billionaire’s property. It’s nearly as much as the city plans to “invest in affordable housing, support community redevelopment, and provide shelter” over the next five years, according to its fiscal-year-2024 budget. Worried about the state of Chinatown after the Wizards and Capitals leave? Maybe the city could put some of that money toward supplementing the $70 million earmarked to “support the District’s economic recovery and growth.” If Monumental takes Bowser’s deal, stays put, and has me back in my usual seat at a renovated Capital One Arena, I can’t imagine looking around the stadium and seeing anything but better uses for my city’s tax dollars. Sure, the schools need new computers, but have you seen the size of the new Jumbotron?

The argument for spending the money is that an arena brings people downtown, and those people in turn spend money, providing tax revenue. But crediting arenas with all that revenue means assuming that those people wouldn’t go out and spend their money anywhere in the city unless they visited the arena—and that the city couldn’t get better results by investing the money directly into neighborhoods. Monumental Sports officials say that all public spending on the new arena complex will be offset by future tax revenue from it—$1.35 billion in funding from Virginia, potentially the largest arena subsidy in American history, would actually be free. But among economists, who disagree on nearly everything, there is broad consensus that sports stadiums don’t contribute much to the local economy. These projects tend to do a better job of obfuscating cost than preventing it, says Nate Jensen, a University of Texas professor who researches government economic-development strategies. He has found that public-school budgets tend to be hit hard, due to their reliance on the sort of property taxes that are often waived to fund new arenas. “It’s probably one of the worst bets you can make in terms of economic development,” he told me. “The economic impact of most stadiums is about the same as a Target store.” (That’s bad news for Alexandria, where developers are considering knocking down the Target next door to make room for more stadium-adjacent development.)

[Read: Sports stadiums are a bad deal for cities]

In economic terms, moving the Wizards to Virginia would actually be a big win for me as a D.C. resident. My subway ride to games would be longer, but the billion dollars in funding, the traffic issues, and the potential legal battles would be Virginia’s problem—with apologies to my friends who teach at Alexandria City High School. I would be a free rider, which, economically speaking, is the best thing to be. But that doesn’t feel like a win either. If I operated from a place of pure, cold logic, I wouldn’t be a Wizards fan.

I can think of one more option, though—one that no one has discussed, because, I presume, it is utterly unprecedented in its civic genius. The city of Washington, D.C., should seize the Washington Wizards through eminent domain. The city code outlines the right to acquire private property for condemnation or other reasons in the public interest after paying a satisfactory price to the current owner. If you’re willing to pay half a billion dollars to fix up the arena, why not kick in another couple billion and just take the franchise? The case could certainly be made that the current Wizards team is a form of urban decay.

Government ownership of a sports franchise might sound bizarre and un-American. But consider that, earlier this year, the Qatari sovereign-wealth fund bought a 5 percent stake in Monumental Sports. Why should a foreign nation get to own part of the Wizards while the city they play in gets nothing? Mayor Bowser and the D.C. city council should declare the team a public utility, pump the NBA’s massive TV revenue back into the city, and make the front office run for reelection every four years. I’ll leave it to the lawyers to figure out whether any of this is actually legal. I’m more interested in the principle. D.C. residents infamously don’t get to vote for representation in Congress. At least let us vote for our basketball team.

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Over the past few years, I’ve reminded you of the best Christmas specials and talked about some classic Christmas music. This year, it’s time to clear the field for the greatest adaptation of the greatest Christmas story.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The Colorado Supreme Court just gave Republicans a chance to save themselves. The Colorado ruling calls the originalists’ bluff. Trump insists he hasn’t read Mein Kampf.

The holidays are a time to look back on a long year, but also to look forward to the new one. Give an Atlantic subscription to someone close to you and they’ll get a year of the best coverage on the most important stories—to stay informed and inspired as we enter the new year.

An Actual Ghost Story

Christmas, no matter what your religious beliefs, is a wonderful time to cherish our friends and family but also, in the season’s spirit of reconciliation, to recognize and embrace our common humanity with people everywhere. In the approaching depths of winter, we can recommit to kindness, peace, and joy. That’s why I would like to take this opportunity, right before the holiday, to make you all mad one more time with one of my cultural takes.

There are some good adaptations of the Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol, and many bad ones, but only one truly great version, and it is the 1984 made-for-television movie starring George C. Scott.

Wait. Hear me out.

I know that many people are intensely loyal to the 1951 version (titled A Christmas Carol in the United States, and released in the U.K. as Scrooge), starring Alastair Sim. I understand why. It’s charming, in its way, but it is also enduring because so many of us grew up with it. For a time, it was like It’s a Wonderful Life, the black-and-white wallpaper always there in the background after Thanksgiving. And Sim is wonderful: He was only 50 when he filmed Scrooge but he looks much older; his Scrooge is so deformed by sin that his transformation later in the story is almost a physical change, wondrous and giddy.

But for me, too much of Scrooge is formal and stagey. And let’s not even talk about the other versions from the 1930s, or the Muppets, or Bill Murray, or the cartoons, or the more arty takes. Some of them are truly awful. (I’m looking at you, Guy Pearce.)

When I first saw the Scott version, however, I loved the tighter connection to the book, and especially the attention to detail and atmosphere. No, it doesn’t really snow that much in London, but the 1984 version is so evocative that you can almost smell Scrooge’s musty bedroom, the happy stink of the open-air butchers and fishmongers, and the scrawny goose roasting in Mrs. Cratchit’s tiny kitchen.

Most important, just as Sim carried Scrooge, this version is Scott’s movie, despite the outstanding actors around him. Scott was an American, and his British accent slips now and then—I always wince when he tries to get his tongue around “I wonder you don’t go into Parl-ya-ment”—but years of hard living gave him a face, a voice, and a stare that no other Scrooge could match.

And yes, he was fat. Scrooge, in most other iterations, is a scrawny geezer who doesn’t eat much or drink or “make merry” at Christmas. But Scott’s Scrooge is a barrel-chested bully, an imposing and nasty piece of work. He’s not particularly disciplined or monkish; he’s just a corpulent old bastard who can’t remember that he was once a human being.

Then there are the ghosts. They’re deeply unsettling apparitions, which makes Scott’s version a bit more PG-13 than most of the other adaptations.

Frank Finlay’s Marley, in particular, is not some old pal coming to issue a friendly warning. Marley is a damned soul, wailing and doomed. He’s a rotting corpse, for crying out loud. Angela Pleasence is a radiant and annoying Ghost of Christmas Past. At first, I found her off-putting, and then I realized: She’s supposed to be annoying. She’s not guiding Scrooge on a nostalgia tour of his youth; she’s taking acidic delight in showing Scrooge what a jerk he’s become. Every Scrooge loses his temper at these “pictures from the past,” but Scott’s anger seems especially justified as Pleasence smirks at him.

Edward Woodward, however, steals every scene he’s in as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Instead of some phantasmic simp gently reminding Scrooge of the need for Christian charity, Woodward is a striding giant, a knight of Christmas whose mirth barely conceals his moral rage. When observing Bob Cratchit’s family doting on Tiny Tim, he snarls to Scrooge: “It may well be that, in the sight of heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child!” Woodward delivers it not as a rebuke but as a threat, and that moment still sends a chill through me.

I also have a very personal reason for loving Scott’s version more than any other.

My father was, if not a Scrooge, something of a Grinch, as my mother called him every year. He growled about how Christmas was a giant, expensive pain in the ass. But my dad was a churchgoing Christian, and he harbored a secret love for the holiday. Despite his bah-humbug approach, he insisted on a real tree every year, leaving the decorating to me and my mother. He wrapped his own presents, if you can count “rolling them through paper and tape” as “wrapping.” He and I would go to Christmas Eve services (in Greek Orthodox churches, they’re usually in the late afternoon or early evening) every year while my mother prepared dinner.

But my father was also a very difficult man, and my parents had an extremely volatile marriage. Like many men, my father carried his share of sins and secrets. And like most men of his generation, he did not often speak of them. Some, I know, weighed on him to the very end of his life.

So I was surprised when, one night in the mid-1980s, he joined us to watch A Christmas Carol. We sat in our dark living room with a small fire and no light but the blinking tree. He was chatty and seemed to enjoy it, but he became very quiet toward the end, when Scrooge realizes that at a not-so-distant future Christmas, he is dead and no one cares. Alone in the darkness and the snow, Scott pleads for mercy not like some accomplished thespian in the scene of his life but like an old man at the edge of the abyss, one who now fully understands how his own actions brought him to a desolate end.

I looked over at my parents. My mom was holding my father’s hand. And my father, quiet in the dark, had tears on his cheeks.

Until that moment, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen my father cry, including at his mother’s funeral—and certainly never at a movie. Scott got to him, perhaps because Scott’s Scrooge was a man my father could understand: loud, tough, and full of anger and regret, rather than the effete, pinched-face slip of a fellow played by Sim and others.

In later life, I sometimes feel the same tears welling in my eyes when Scott pleads for one more chance. These tears are not only for my father, who struggled with his own burdens to the end of his life, but for myself as well. It’s easy to hate Scrooge when you’re young and think you have plenty of time to straighten yourself out. When you’re older, you start to wonder how much time you’ve let get by you, and whether you and the elderly miser have more in common than you might like to admit.

Scott’s A Christmas Carol isn’t perfect; it has some especially cringeworthy and twee moments with Tiny Tim. But this isn’t Tim’s story. It’s about looking into the grave and realizing that on Christmas—or any day, really—it is always within our power to change our heart and to become, like Scrooge, “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old city knew.”

To borrow another line from Dickens: May that be truly said of all of us.

Merry Christmas. See you next week.

Related:

We need a little Christmas (music). The most beloved Christmas specials are (almost) all terrible.

Today’s News

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh arrived in Egypt for talks with Egyptian officials about a possible new cease-fire in Gaza and hostage swaps. After three years of negotiations, the European Union reached a provisional agreement to overhaul its asylum and migration laws. Pending ratification, the pact aims to make it easier to limit the entry of migrants while still protecting the right to asylum, according to EU officials. The World Health Organization designated the new JN.1 coronavirus strain as a “variant of interest” yesterday because of its “rapidly increasing” spread.

Evening Read

Pablo Delcan

My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump

By Tim Alberta

It was July 29, 2019—the worst day of my life, though I didn’t know that quite yet.

The traffic in downtown Washington, D.C., was inching along. The mid-Atlantic humidity was sweating through the windows of my chauffeured car. I was running late and fighting to stay awake. For two weeks, I’d been sprinting between television and radio studios up and down the East Coast, promoting my new book on the collapse of the post–George W. Bush Republican Party and the ascent of Donald Trump. Now I had one final interview for the day …

All in a blur, the producers took my cellphone, mic’d me up, and shoved me onto the set with the news anchor John Jessup. Camera rolling, Jessup skipped past the small talk. He was keen to know, given his audience, what I had learned about the president’s alliance with America’s white evangelicals … Polling showed that born-again Christian conservatives, once the president’s softest backers, were now his most unflinching advocates. Jessup had the same question as millions of other Americans: Why?

Read the full article.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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The top leader of Hamas was in Egypt for talks Wednesday on halting the war in Gaza and securing the release of at least some of the estimated 129 Israeli captives held by Palestinian militants.

Hamas's leader is in Egypt to discuss a potential deal that could see more Israeli hostages released.

The reaction to the events of October 7 has made the growing radicalization of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party—and, in particular, its indulgence of anti-Semitism—more clear than ever. And it has highlighted President Joe Biden’s role in resisting the leftward pull of those progressives, a stand of increasing importance not just for his party, but for the country as a whole.

In the early-morning hours of a Jewish holiday, Simchat Torah, the terrorist group Hamas launched an unprovoked attack, committing the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Civilians were intentionally targeted, and constituted the overwhelming majority of casualties. Israeli families were burned alive while hiding in their homes. People were decapitated. The bodies of babies were riddled with bullets. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking at a Senate hearing, told of a boy, 6, and a girl, 8, and their parents around the breakfast table. The father’s eye was gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast was cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, and the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed. “And then their executioners sat down and had a meal,” Blinken said. “That is what this society is dealing with.”

One survivor of Hamas’s attack on a music festival told PBS’s Nick Schifrin that the terrorists raped girls and then murdered them with knives. And after they did that, “they laughed. They always laughed … I can’t forget how they laughed.”

[Read: Why these progressives stopped helping Biden]

A video posted online showed a young woman, 22-year-old Shani Louk, “facedown in the bed of the truck with four militants, apparently being paraded through Gaza,” The Washington Post reported, as “one holds her hair while another raises a gun in the air and shouts, ‘Allahu akbar!’ A crowd follows the truck cheering. A boy spits in her hair.”

Shani Louk was later declared dead after forensic examiners found a bone fragment from her skull.

All told, the estimated Israeli death toll is nearly 1,200 in a country of less than 10 million; about 240 hostages, including dozens of children and the elderly, were taken. (About 110 have been released in exchange for nearly 250 Palestinian prisoners.)

The actions by Hamas were so vicious and so cruel that they defy human imagination. “The depravity of it is haunting,” an Israeli military official told CBS News of the scene in the Kfar Aza kibbutz. And yet sympathy for Israel began to fade in just a matter of days in some quarters in the U.S. It gave way to anti-Semitic ugliness, most of it found on the American left and yet only a slice of the spreading anti-Semitism we’re seeing across the globe.

We saw anti-Semitism in Philadelphia, where a restaurant, Goldie, was targeted and mobbed because its owner is Jewish and Israeli (the crowd chanted “Goldie, Goldie, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide”); in Queens, where hundreds of high-school students protested against a teacher who is Jewish and whose social-media profile photo showed her holding up an I Stand With Israel sign, forcing her to be moved to another part of the school; in Brooklyn, where a trio of young men beat up three Jewish strangers in separate attacks during a 40-minute “spree of hate crimes”; and in Times Square, where protesters cheered Israeli fatalities, made throat-slitting gestures, and flashed victory signs with their hands, a show of solidarity with Hamas.

Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a speech, “The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege, the walls of the concentration camp, on October 7. And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their land that they were not allowed to walk in.”

“And yes,” he continued, “the people of Gaza have the right to self-defense, have the right to defend themselves; and, yes, Israel as an occupying power does not have that right to self-defense.” (He insists that these remarks have been taken out of context.)

CNN posted a story on anti-Semitic vandalism rattling Jewish communities: “An antisemitic phrase scrawled on a Holocaust survivor’s home in California. A display supporting Israeli hostages kicked over in Minnesota. Palestinian nationalist messaging spray-painted on a non-profit’s building in Rhode Island.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a Senate testimony that anti-Semitism in the U.S. is “a threat that is reaching, in some way, sort of historic levels.” He said that while Jews represent less than 3 percent of the population, they account for about 60 percent of all religious-based hate crimes.

On college campuses, a haven for progressives, anti-Semitic speech has skyrocketed. At Harvard, several student groups issued a statement after the attacks by Hamas saying that Israeli policies are “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” An Israeli Columbia student who confronted a woman ripping down posters of hostages was assaulted. A Cornell University student was charged with making threats against Jewish students on the campus.

A display outside the University of Minnesota’s Jewish student center showing the faces of several Israelis taken hostage by Hamas was reportedly kicked over and damaged. At Cooper Union in New York, pro-Palestinian protesters pounded on windows as Jewish students took shelter in a locked library. During a demonstration of solidarity for hostages held by Hamas, a University of Massachusetts at Amherst student was accused of punching a Jewish student holding an Israeli flag and then spitting on it. And at George Washington University, pro-Palestinian demonstrators projected slogans on to the side of a library, including Glory to our martyrs and Free Palestine from the river to the sea, a call for eliminating the Jewish state. Similar things have happened at other universities.

John Kirby, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said that rising anti-Semitism on college campuses is a “deep concern.”

Two weeks ago, in a moment that reverberated well beyond the academic world, the presidents of three of the most prestigious universities in America—Harvard, Penn, and MIT—were asked during a congressional hearing whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates these school’s rules on bullying and harassment. The answers by the presidents were lawyerly and evasive. One said it depended on “context.”

When University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill was pressed, she responded, “If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.”

“‘Conduct’ meaning committing the act of genocide?” Republican Representative Elise Stefanik asked. “The speech is not harassment? This is unacceptable.” The comments by these three college presidents caused a firestorm of criticism that subsequent clarifications and apologies failed to dispel.

Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand told Fox News that all three presidents should leave their posts. “You cannot call for the genocide of Jews, the genocide of any group of people, and not say that that’s harassment,” she said. Two days after the hearing, Magill resigned.

Jonathan Haidt, an NYU professor who has written strongly in favor of free speech on campus, says that he was most troubled by the double standard of the college presidents:

“What offends me is that since 2015, universities have been so quick to punish ‘microaggressions,’ including statements intended to be kind, if even one person from a favored group took offense,” Haidt wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “The presidents are now saying: ‘Jews are not a favored group, so offending or threatening Jews is not so bad. For Jews, it all depends on context.’ We might call this double standard ‘institutional anti-semitism.’” Yes, we might.

Many liberal Jews who considered themselves part of the progressive movement have felt betrayed by their left-wing allies—including Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Socialists of America—since the October 7 massacre.

In Los Angeles, Rabbi Sharon Brous, whom The New York Times describes as “a well-known progressive activist who regularly criticizes the Israeli government,” told her congregants about the “existential loneliness” she and other Jews have felt since the Hamas attacks.

“The clear message from many people in the world, especially from our world—those who claim to care the most about justice and human dignity—is that these Israeli victims somehow deserved this terrible fate,” she said.

Rabbi Brous’s sentiments are shared by others. Joanna Ware, the executive director of the Jewish Liberation Fund, a philanthropic group created in 2020, put it this way to the Times: “It has been painful to see some people I consider friends or comrades seeming to have a hard time empathizing with Israelis and, by extension, Jews in the United States.” And Daniel Sokatch, the CEO of the New Israel Fund, told the Times that it “felt like betrayal, not of us as allies, but of the values we all stand for.”

Last month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, America’s highest-ranking Jewish elected official, delivered a deeply personal, 40-minute speech from the floor of the Senate explaining and condemning the wave of anti-Semitism we have witnessed since the attacks by Hamas. Schumer’s anguished words were primarily aimed at progressives and young people. The rising anti-Semitism, he said, isn’t coming from the far right but from “people that most liberal Jewish Americans felt previously were their ideological fellow travelers.”

“Not long ago, many of us marched together for Black and brown lives, we stood against anti-Asian hatred, we protested bigotry against the LGBTQ community, we fought for reproductive justice out of the recognition that injustice against one oppressed group is injustice against all,” Schumer said. “But apparently, in the eyes of some, that principle does not extend to the Jewish people.”

So how did we get to the point where progressives—those who define themselves as committed to social justice—would find themselves either reluctant to criticize, or in many cases expressing support for, Hamas? Hamas, after all, is a designated terrorist organization with a militant ideology and a charter endorsing genocide against the Jews. It persecutes LGBTQ people, systematically denies rights to women, and denies other basic political and legal rights to Gazans. But that doesn’t seem to bother many progressives.

For them, everything is understood through power differentials and identity politics. Israel is powerful and therefore an oppressor, which by definition makes the Jewish state evil; Palestinians are powerless and oppressed, which by definition makes their cause good. Israel can never be in the right, and Hamas can never be in the wrong.

One example: Knowing that a military response from Israeli was inevitable in the wake of savage attacks, Hamas encouraged Palestinian civilian casualties by using civilians as human shields. Hamas intentionally positions its military assets in civilian areas such as schoolyards and hospitals; it uses civilian infrastructure for its military purposes.

Yet the narrative of the left is that Israel, not Hamas, is guilty of “genocide.” And in their Orwellian world, Israel is itself responsible for the attacks it suffered.

Jonathan Chait of New York magazine, in describing the thinking of what he calls the “illiberal left,” put it this way: “The legitimacy of a tactic can only be assessed with reference to whether it is being used by the oppressor or the oppressed.” In his construct, murdering children or raping women isn’t intrinsically bad; its morality depends on who is doing the murdering and the raping. And those who are “privileged” are in no position to criticize those who are not. In addition, criticizing Hamas can only help the Zionist project, which is indefensible.

What this all means in practice is that, in the name of social justice, progressives are betraying social justice. They are imposing an ideological prism on life and events that leads to dehumanization, a hardness of heart, cruelty, and a lack of conscience. It also distorts history, including distorting the history of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, which I wrote about last year.

One can of course criticize the policies of various Israeli governments and military tactics without being anti-Semitic. People who love Israel can be critical of policies of Israel. One can also have deep compassion for the suffering that the Palestinian people have endured for generations and sympathize with their longing for a homeland. But a fair reading of the historical record—or at least my own reading of the historical record—shows that the obstacle to a Palestinian homeland lies much more with a militant and corrupt Palestinian leadership, which has created a malignant political culture, than with Israel, which has frequently shown a willingness to surrender land for genuine peace.

Israel did so with Egypt in 1978 and Jordan in 1994, and has tried to do so with Palestine, including in 1967 when Israel offered to return the land it had captured during the war that year in exchange for peace and normal relations, an offer that was summarily rejected by Arab leaders meeting in Khartoum; and 2000, when Yasir Arafat rejected Israel’s offer of Palestinian statehood with east Jerusalem as its capital, the return of all of Gaza and virtually all the land in the West Bank, and the readmission of refugees to the new Palestinian state.

What is happening on the American left is a cautionary tale. Like MAGA world, it has been deformed by a toxic ideology that not only rejects inconvenient truths; it inverts morality in order to confirm its presuppositions. In the case of the left, its ideology—a mix of postmodernism, post-colonialism, and critical race theory, what my Atlantic colleague Yascha Mounk calls the “identity synthesis”—has played a role in aligning itself with one of the most malevolent groups on the planet, whose savagery was on full display on October 7.

Unlike those progressives who sided with Hamas after October 7, President Biden has offered extraordinary support for Israel. Just hours after the attack, Biden said what Hamas did was an “appalling assault.” He went on to say that his “support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering.” Biden was true to his word.

The president traveled to Tel Aviv—and within range of Hamas rockets—just weeks after the attack. It was a remarkable gesture of solidarity; so was his request for more than $14 billion in additional assistance for Israel. Virtually every public comment about Israel by Biden and his advisers has been supportive of the Jewish state, even as he has taken steps to provide $100 million in humanitarian assistance for the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. (Differences have surfaced, though, between Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over what happens in Gaza after the war ends, and the intensity with which the conflict is being waged.) Biden has spoken out forcefully against rising anti-Semitism in America. He said at a White House Hanukkah reception, “I am a Zionist.” No one who is familiar with Biden’s 50-year public career is surprised by his stance.

Shalom Lipner, who was an adviser to more than a half dozen Israeli prime ministers, said Biden was now more popular in Israel than the country’s own leaders. “This isn’t just from today; we’re looking at a history here,” Lipner told Peter Baker of The New York Times. “He’s always been there.” (One senator referred to Biden as “the only Catholic Jew.”)

Not surprisingly, Biden has been criticized within his own party for being too pro-Israel. Nearly half of Democrats disapprove of how Biden is handling the Israel-Hamas conflict, according to one recent poll, while another poll found that the percent of Democrats under 35 who believe that the Biden administration is too pro-Israel has doubled to 41 percent. These findings highlight the deep, intense divisions within his party over the war. (At anti-war protests young progressives chanted, “Biden, Biden, you can’t hide; you signed off on genocide.”) Yet Biden shows no signs of wavering.

During the 2020 campaign, Donald Trump said Joe Biden was “a helpless puppet of the radical left.” In fact he has mostly proved to be a bulwark against it. Many of the radical ideas being championed by the left prior to the 2020 election—the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, increasing the marginal tax rate to 70 percent, abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, packing the Supreme Court, putting an end to the Electoral College, reparations for Black Americans—have not been embraced by Biden. Neither has defunding the police. Biden has asked for and received increases in defense spending, which is at a record level. Under Biden, domestic oil production is at an all-time high. He’s been a fierce advocate for Ukraine in its war against Russia. He strengthened NATO and played an essential role in adding Finland and Sweden to it.

[Read: Is Biden toast?]

For many years Joe Biden was seen as an “amiable lightweight.” His political career seemed over when, as vice president, he was passed over by his party, which nominated Hillary Clinton for president in 2016. But history had other things in mind. Biden looks to be the only person standing between Donald Trump and a second term that would pose a catastrophic threat to the republic. At the same time, he is also the key person resisting the pull of the progressive left on the Democratic Party. A person who was thought to be a transitional president is turning out to be a consequential one. An awful lot hinges on the man from Scranton.

His victory was widely deemed a foregone conclusion and he secured 89.6 per cent of the vote, the National Election Authority claimed.

Under a new leader, Egypt's journalists' body is reviving its role as a platform to defend the rights of media workers.