The ceasefire announced Thursday between Israel and Hamas will hopefully end the worst of the violence that in the course of 11 days killed well over 200 people, the vast majority of them Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

In the narrowest sense, Hamas and Israel have both accomplished their immediate goals. Hamas got to portray itself as the defender of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, where much of the unrest began in recent weeks, and prove its capacity to hit most of Israel with its rockets. Israel, meanwhile, can say it has degraded Hamas’s military capabilities, in particular the underground network of tunnels from which it operates.

Yet the ceasefire does nothing to address the underlying conditions that have fueled the decade-and-a-half standoff between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, nor the issues that sparked this latest round of fighting.

Living conditions in Gaza, long grim, will continue to deteriorate absent a dramatic change to the blockade that restricts most freedom of movement and goods; it has been in place in its current form, imposed by Israel and Egypt, since 2006.

Beyond Gaza, Palestinians continue to face a deeply fragmented, restricted political situation. Those in the West Bank live under a patchwork of authorities — the Palestinian Authority in urban enclaves, a mixed regime in other populated areas, and direct Israeli military control in about 60 percent of the territory where Israeli settlers also live.

In East Jerusalem, Palestinians are legal residents of the city — which Israel considers united under its sovereignty — but generally lack full citizenship. Inside Israel, Palestinian citizens, who make up about 21 percent of the country’s population, face structural inequalities and political marginalization.

And Israel, whose civilians remain under the threat of Hamas rockets and fearful of the group’s advances in weaponry, is no less likely to respond harshly in the future to rocket fire than it was at the beginning of May. The vast majority of Israelis view Hamas as an unrepentant enemy with no intention of pursuing peace with Israel, and believe it would use any easing of the blockade to further arm itself and threaten Israeli civilians.

With these conditions still in place, the series of events that led to this latest flare-up, though extreme, could easily repeat itself in some variation in the future.

It’s therefore worth taking a closer look at those specific events, and the conditions that produced them, in order to understand where the conflict might go after the ceasefire, and what the prospects are for some kind of resolution to the seemingly endless cycle of violence.

Three Jerusalem flashpoints converge

The city of Jerusalem has for decades been a major focal point of the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and both Israelis and Palestinians claim it as their capital.

But three specific sites in and around the old city of Jerusalem emerged as flashpoints in the weeks leading up to the recent outbreak of hostilities: Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem; the Damascus Gate, a northern entrance in the wall of the old city; and al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third-holiest site, located on what is known as Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary) to Muslims and to Jews as the Temple Mount (Har HaBayit), the site of the biblical Jewish temples.

Sheikh Jarrah

Sheikh Jarrah is an East Jerusalem neighborhood located just outside the old city that for weeks has been the site of mass demonstrations by Palestinians protesting the imminent evictions of six Arab families from their homes by Israeli courts, to make way for Jewish activists who claim ownership of the land.

The homes in question were built by the Jordanian government in the 1950s for Palestinian refugees from Israel, after Jewish residents fled the neighborhood during the 1948 war and found refuge in Israel.

Israeli law provides Jewish Israelis the chance to reclaim property lost during that conflict — including in Sheikh Jarrah. But it offers no reciprocal right to Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, who lost their homes. In general, Israeli authorities and right-wing NGOs have been working for years to change the demographic balance of the city in favor of Jewish Israelis.

Aryeh King, a far-right activist who is currently deputy mayor of Jerusalem, told the New York Times last week that installing “layers of Jews” throughout East Jerusalem is specifically aimed at making its division impossible. “If we will not be in big numbers and if we will not be at the right places in strategic areas in East Jerusalem,” he said, then future peace negotiators “will try to divide Jerusalem and to give part of Jerusalem to our enemy.”

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Naturally, the Palestinians who have lived there since the 1950s strongly oppose these attempts to evict them. The Sheikh Jarrah case has gone all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court, which was originally scheduled to announce its ruling on May 10.

That these looming evictions could spark wider unrest was entirely foreseeable. On May 4, Daniel Seidemann observed on Twitter that the two “radioactive” issues of Jerusalem and displacement, which are combined in Sheikh Jarrah, “go to the core of Palestinians and Israelis identity,” and warned they could prove explosive.

And sure enough, they did.

To avoid further inflaming the situation, the Supreme Court delayed its ruling the day before it was scheduled, but by that point it was too late. Demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah already included violent clashes with police and extreme right-wing Israeli activists had come to provoke the clashes further.

Damascus Gate

Meanwhile, Damascus Gate, at the northern end of the old city, also became the site of recurrent protests and police crackdowns in recent weeks. During the month of Ramadan, Muslims in Jerusalem often gather on the steps surrounding the Damascus Gate plaza in the evenings as they break their fast.

But Israeli police limited such gatherings this year for fear of unrest, erecting barriers on the steps to prevent large gatherings. Many came anyway, and on successive nights throughout Ramadan, Israeli police drove them away using stun grenades and other heavy-handed tactics. The police then made an about-face, removing the barriers, but the images of ongoing clashes had already fueled tensions.

Al-Aqsa Mosque

The tension reached its apex in and around al-Aqsa Mosque. Starting in particular during Laylat al-Qadr, one of the holiest nights of Ramadan, and increasing in the following two days, Palestinian demonstrations there had joined those in Sheikh Jarrah and Damascus Gate, and amassed rocks and other simple projectiles in the mosque, in part in preparation for expected confrontations with right-wing Jewish activists who were scheduled to visit Temple Mount.

Israeli police, in a remarkable move — seen by many Israelis as an astounding error and by many Palestinians as a deliberate provocation — entered the mosque itself, during Ramadan, throwing stun grenades and making arrests. More than 200 Palestinians were reportedly injured along with 17 Israeli police officers, in images that reverberated across the Muslim world.

On their own, the Sheikh Jarrah evictions touched on fundamental Palestinian fears, evoking the legacy of the Nakba, the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the 1948 war.

Combined with the simmering tensions fueled by the Damascus Gate crackdowns and then images of a violent police raid on al-Aqsa, a central religious and national symbol, Palestinians across the West Bank, Jerusalem, Israel, and Gaza shared a sense of national and religious outrage.

And then Hamas got involved.

Unrest in Jerusalem turns into a war in Gaza

On the evening of May 10, Hamas issued an ultimatum to Israel to withdraw, by 6 pm, all police from Haram al-Sharif. This was a brazen move, meant as a show of force toward its far stronger enemy. And just after 6 pm, Hamas followed through on its threat, launching six rockets toward Jerusalem.

Up to that point, the younger, grassroots demonstrators in Jerusalem had dominated events, with the main Palestinian political factions — Fatah, the secular party that, through the Palestinian Authority, governs enclaves in the West Bank (though Israel remains in control of most of the territory) and Hamas — noticeably absent.

By launching these rockets, Hamas placed itself back at the center of events, attempting to co-opt Palestinians’ anger and portray itself as the defender of al-Aqsa, a Muslim symbol that Hamas, an Islamist movement, is keen to highlight.

Hamas’s rivalry with Fatah may have also played a role here. In January, the Palestinian Authority announced it would hold elections this summer for the first time since 2006. These would have included both Fatah, led by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, and Hamas, as well as other smaller Palestinian factions.

But on April 26, Abbas, fearing he would lose, canceled the elections. That left Hamas no political process through which it could gain power in the West Bank, and may have pushed it to seek other means to capture attention on the Palestinian national stage, showing its relevance and the irrelevance of Fatah.

Israel then responded to those rockets with more than 100 airstrikes on Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (another Islamist militant group active in Gaza) targets. Twenty-four Palestinians were killed, including nine children, though Israel claims that six of the children were killed by rockets fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad that fell short of their target.

The following night, Hamas surprised Israel with its ability to launch large numbers of rockets to far greater effective range than in the past, putting most of the Israeli population under fire. A few rockets got through Israel’s Iron Dome defense system and hit Israeli cities.

The Israeli response was been massive and overwhelming, killing more than 200 Palestinians, including many civilians and more than two dozen children, in Gaza, where residents have little refuge; 13 Israelis were killed by rockets and missiles fired from Gaza.

This violence all takes place against the backdrop of a longer conflict that has seethed between Israel and Hamas.

In 2005, Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip, as part of its “Disengagement” from Gaza and the Northern West Bank. Hamas subsequently won the Palestinian elections in 2006 and took sole control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, expelling forces of the Fateh-led Palestinian Authority. Israel placed intense restrictions on the movement of people and goods in and out of the territory, and Egypt, which borders Gaza from the south, followed suit.

Since then, three devastating wars between Israel and Hamas and the crushing blockade have left Gaza in a state of deep humanitarian crisis (for more on the situation in Gaza, see this report we co-authored with Hady Amr and Ilan Goldenberg in 2018). The crisis was deepened further this year by the coronavirus pandemic.

The past year has seen efforts to improve the economic situation, especially in the energy sector, with support from the Palestinian Authority and Qatar, and with Israel’s and Hamas’s tacit cooperation, but the humanitarian situation and the prospects for about 2 million Gazans remained very grim even before the latest fighting began.

None of this will be solved by the ceasefire.

What happens now?

Recent weeks have blurred the lines used for decades to delineate this conflict.

Some aspects of the violence are horrifyingly familiar, of course: This is the fourth major conflict between Israel and Hamas since 2006, with Israeli strikes causing mass devastation in Gaza each time.

But in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Israel itself, Palestinians who have long been divided by their physical geography and by the specific circumstances experienced in those different places are mobilizing in ways not seen in decades, including in a general strike on Tuesday that took place across all these territories.

The international perception of Israel’s role in this violence has also shifted, as solidarity with Palestinians grows among Democratic leaders and constituencies in the United States.

These changes mark a departure from previous conflicts, but they do not, in and of themselves, alter the fundamental dynamics between the main players.

Hamas remains entrenched in the Gaza Strip, in full control of the area but with little prospect of extending its power to the West Bank. Israel remains adamant, and is even emboldened, in its desire to block Hamas’s ability to arm itself — meaning that its blockade of the Gaza Strip will likely continue. And Palestinians continue to face varied forms of political fragmentation and discrimination in Jerusalem, in the West Bank, and within Israel, though in very different ways.

So while the fire may cease, the underlying conditions that sparked it remain unsolved.

There are no easy fixes in the short term, but a lot can still be done. The Israel-Hamas stalemate is deeply entrenched, but as we argued with colleagues in 2018, there is a chance to change it, modestly but meaningfully, through tacit understandings among Israel, the PA, and Hamas, with support from the US, Israel, Egypt, and the UN Special Representative in Jerusalem.

The broader context, detailed above, would require much more: a real shift of Israeli policy on the Palestinian issue writ large, and a Palestinian leadership able and willing to put its own affairs in order and to deal with Israel productively.

Kevin Huggard is a senior research assistant at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Natan Sachs is the director of the center.

Marching in a recent Ithaca, New York, demonstration in solidarity with Palestine was one of the truly gratifying moments of my life as an internationalist.

Organized by Cornell University undergraduates, the protest against Israel’s latest, massive bombardment of the Gaza Strip and assault on Palestinians within and beyond Jerusalem proved that even in Ithaca — a sleepy college town in upstate New York — one finds some of the legions of civilians around the world who have mobilized against Israel’s brutal policies of occupation and collective punishment.

The Ithaca demonstration, which featured a rally on Cornell’s campus followed by a march to the downtown commons, was heartening for another reason: The crowd of roughly 300 included a generous smattering of Black and brown faces. Indeed, almost half of the participants were people of color, most of them students.

That a critical mass of young people was willing to openly support Palestinian freedom — a cause many progressive activists once viewed as a third rail — reflects the extent to which public discourse on this issue has shifted. Even in the US, the citadel of support for Israeli might, some mainstream news outlets now supplement conventional assertions of Israel’s “right to defend itself” with forthright themes of Palestinian liberation.

In some ways, the visible presence of African Americans in many pro-Palestine mobilizations of recent weeks, including rallies in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, constitutes an equally remarkable cultural transition. While no wholesale pivot to the anti-imperialist left is underway, there are signs of a revitalization of some of the most vibrant traditions of Black internationalism.

It may be an exaggeration to suggest that the upsurge of mass resistance to white supremacy that propelled the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has also reenergized ideals of global solidarity among African Americans. But there can be no doubt that BLM, which some have dubbed the “American Intifada,” has driven to the center of Black political awareness questions of human rights and state violence — and principles of popular revolt — that are germane to Palestinian struggle.

Still, transformations of consciousness are never absolute. If Palestinian suffering is increasingly legible to some African Americans, especially those younger progressives who have radicalized the practice of domestic anti-racism, many remaining barriers must be overcome before Black solidarity with Palestine becomes a genuinely grassroots phenomenon in the US.

The Black Lives Matter movement reenergized Black-Palestinian solidarity

African American militants have long been among the staunchest allies of Palestinians. During the heyday of the US civil rights era, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee all embraced the demand for Palestinian liberation.

After the 1960s and ’70s, the strands of African American-Palestinian solidarity waxed and waned. But those bonds were strengthened in recent years when new bouts of state violence led both populations to cultivate overseas support.

Some of the most powerful exchanges occurred after the advent of BLM as a mass movement in 2014. Palestinians played a crucial role in the Ferguson, Missouri, uprising that flared that year in the wake of the police killing of Black teenager Michael Brown.

Palestinian activists used social media to share with African American protesters tactics for dealing with tear gas attacks by militarized police forces — an experience with which many subjects of Israeli occupation are all too familiar.

In 2015, more than 1,000 Black organizers and intellectuals signed a solidarity statement condemning Israel’s lopsided war on Gaza and stranglehold on the West Bank. That year also saw the release of a stylish video titled “When I See Them I See Us” that featured African American figures, from activist Angela Davis to singer Lauryn Hill, highlighting the “similarities, but not sameness,” of Black and Palestinian subjugation and resilience.

BLM, which rejuvenated mass African American protest amid the bourgeois racial politics of the Obama years, also provided a new framework for fashioning Black and Palestinian affinities.

Progressive, youthful Black organizations, from the Dream Defenders to Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100) to the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, embraced Palestinian liberation as a core element of their global agenda.

Some members of these and other African American groups toured Palestinian territories as part of international delegations, then returned to the US to circulate accounts — overwhelmingly absent from Western reportage — of the barbaric conditions of life under Israeli occupation. Often, such travelers were struck by the warm hospitality of the Palestinians, who appeared eager to forge cultural and social links to Black America.

Meanwhile, African American thinkers such as journalist Marc Lamont Hill and author Michelle Alexander braved vilification to denounce Israeli practices of “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing.”

Similar acts of solidarity unfolded during the recent, bloody siege of Palestinian civilian populations by the Israeli military. Groups such as Black Lives Matter of Paterson, New Jersey, have decried the wildly uneven violence unleashed on Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and Israel, and have called on the US, which funnels $3.8 billion to Israel in military aid annually, to stop sponsoring the carnage.

Such expressions of kinship do not erupt spontaneously. Many of the latest manifestations of African American-Palestinian mutuality reflect the work of US organizations such as Existence Is Resistance that have designed political education campaigns to counter Western erasures and distortions of Palestinian socio-historical realities.

But to gain a fuller picture of African American outlooks, one must weigh such comradely efforts against deep dimensions of ambivalence. In truth, the Palestine issue generates no more consensus among Black Americans than it does among Americans more broadly.

Black people aren’t immune to the American ignorance of foreign conflicts

There will always be those African Americans who oppose, on ideological grounds, the right of Palestinians to self-determination and territorial restoration. Many such individuals belong to churches that propagate essentialist theories of “Judeo-Christian” values or otherwise promote Christian Zionist beliefs.

Some African Americans are simply accommodationists who refuse to challenge the foreign policy dictates of US elites. Others harbor real admiration for Israel, in some instances seeing the state as a model of uncompromising sovereignty and ethnocentrism that Black nationalists should attempt to emulate.

But the opposite of solidarity is not antagonism; it is indifference. Black people are hardly immune to the ignorance with which so many Americans view foreign, nonwhite populations. Victims of white supremacy, African Americans are nevertheless fully capable of internalizing and reproducing the racist, Orientalist tropes that have buttressed imperial ventures within and beyond the Arab world.

As members of a marginalized population, some Black Americans are loath to bear the social costs of open identification with Palestinians, a stigmatized group located thousands of miles away. In the end, many Black people may lack the desire or knowledge to contest framings of Israel-Palestine as a hopelessly intractable conflict rooted in ancient hostilities.

Nor has the compass of African American political conscience always pointed toward Palestine. Prior to the mid-1950s and ’60s, when events such as the 1956 Suez Crisis and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War underscored the imperialist nature of the Zionist project, many African Americans supported statehood for Jewish refugees. Like other Westerners, they tended to overlook the violent displacement of Palestinians that accompanied the creation of Israel in 1948.

Still, it is safe to say that African American perspectives on Palestine remain well to the left of those of the American majority.

Solidarity is never predetermined — it must be reconstructed by each generation

As demands for Palestinian liberation gain international momentum, buoyed by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, the relative independence of social media, and the painstaking labor of countless activists, expressions of Black kinship with Palestinians may continue to expand.

But if they do so, it will not be the result of mere similarities between African American and Palestinian oppression. Connections, of course, do exist; both populations face conditions of “internal colonialism,” including racialization, dispossession, underdevelopment, and state violence. However, no perfect analogy exists between Black and Palestinian suffering. Parallelism alone cannot foster a sense of shared fate.

For African American camaraderie with Palestine to become a truly popular ideal, broad segments of the Black rank and file must recognize the global scope of white supremacy. They must see the need to form insurgent, international alliances across lines of color and culture. These principles must transcend the ranks of seasoned organizers, galvanizing those who lack firsthand experience with anti-racist and anti-imperialist campaigns.

The complexity of African American political aspirations suggests that such an awakening is entirely possible. The Black working classes have never equated their own freedom with the demise of formal segregation, or with the prospect of greater social inclusion within the apparatus of American empire. They have rarely let parochialism constrain their visions of a more just and egalitarian world.

I suspect that in the final analysis, many Black people can fully appreciate the Palestinian cause, a protracted struggle for land, autonomy, and cultural redemption that posits the total dismantling of domination as the horizon of human dignity.

Solidarity is never predetermined. It must be reconstructed by each generation. I draw hope, therefore, from the scattered evidence that, practically everywhere, an insurgent spirit is spreading.

During the recent Ithaca march, I spotted on the sidelines a cluster of young African American men. They appeared to be non-students — members, perhaps, of the town’s tiny, working-class Black community. They watched intently but did not join the throngs of chanting protesters. “Black and Palestinian liberation,” I shouted in their direction, and raised a fist. They said nothing. Yet one of them signaled his approval by wrapping me in a spontaneous hug.

Russell Rickford is an associate professor of history at Cornell University.

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Last week, no one had heard of Emily Wilder. Then she became the focus of a national campaign to get her fired. Days later, she was.

Things move fast. So there’s a good chance that days from now, the story of a rookie journalist who lost her job because of the way she used social media to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, will have faded from the discourse. Her firing will become just another bullet point in future stories about “cancel culture” on the right and left.

On the other hand: I have a hunch that the particular circumstances of Wilder’s narrative will have more resonance than your standard Outrage of the Week. Because it merges two storylines — the long-running, intractable standoff between Israelis and Palestinians, and the newer, intractable fight over fairness and objectivity in journalism that is being hashed out on Twitter and in Slack rooms and in the real world. What do fairness and objectivity in journalism really mean? And do those two ideas have to be linked at the hip? That is: Can you be fair in your reporting but abandon “the unreasonable and hideously stupid expectation that reporters must harbor no strong opinions about the things they care about,” as journalist Laura Wagner put it in Defector?

Answers that might have made sense a few years ago don’t seem to work anymore, so journalists, their bosses, and their readers are coming up with answers on the fly — and, in this case, failing miserably.

First, the chronology, as relayed by Wilder in press interviews and via Twitter:

• Wilder, who graduated from Stanford in 2020 and had been working as an intern for the Arizona Republic, went to work for the Associated Press this month as a “news associate” in Phoenix, “helping edit and produce content for publication” — an entry-level job.
• On Monday, May 14, the Twitter account for the Stanford College Republicans circulated old tweets and quotes — commentary critical of Israeli policies and supporters, like calling Republican donor Sheldon Adelson a “naked mole rat” — from her days as a student activist at Stanford. Those were quickly recirculated by right-wing outlets like Fox News and the Federalist.
• Wilder says an Associated Press manager told her that the news organization would investigate her social media use, but that she shouldn’t worry. “The editor said I was not going to get in any trouble because everyone had opinions in college,” Wilder told SFGate. “Then came the rest of the week.”
• On Thursday, May 17, she was fired for violating the AP’s social media guidelines. Wilder said she asked the AP to tell her what specifically she’d done wrong but hasn’t received an answer. “I asked them, ‘Please tell me what violated the policy,’ and they said, ‘No.’”

The AP says it fired Wilder for violating the company’s social media policy while employed there — that is, not for tweets she made prior to getting hired — but wouldn’t spell out specific infractions. A rep passed along this statement:

While AP generally refrains from commenting on personnel matters, we can confirm Emily Wilder’s comments on Thursday that she was dismissed for violations of AP’s social media policy during her time at AP. We have this policy so the comments of one person cannot create dangerous conditions for our journalists covering the story. Every AP journalist is responsible for safeguarding our ability to report on this conflict, or any other, with fairness and credibility, and cannot take sides in public forums.

So we’re left to guess at Wilder’s supposed infractions. The most likely candidate is this May 16 tweet — posted the day before the Stanford College Republicans went after her — critiquing the way mainstream media covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

Which presumably conflicts with the AP’s policy that “employees must refrain from declaring their views on contentious public issues in any public forum.”

Wilder has also retweeted several other tweets about the conflict, and the AP says that “Retweets, like tweets, should not be written in a way that looks like you’re expressing a personal opinion on the issues of the day. A retweet with no comment of your own can easily be seen as a sign of approval of what you’re relaying … unadorned retweets must be avoided.”

But let’s be clear: Wilder was working out of the AP’s Phoenix newsroom, half a world away from its former offices in Gaza, which were destroyed this month by Israeli airstrikes. Firing her doesn’t “safeguard” the AP’s ability to report on the conflict in any way. All of this tweet-parsing is ridiculous and shameful. The most charitable explanation is that her managers really didn’t like a handful of tweets their new hire had made — which is something they could resolve without firing her. But firing her days after she became the target of a political campaign is an explicit capitulation, and a green light for other groups to target other journalists with similar efforts — which they most certainly will.

It’s worth noting that we still haven’t heard directly from anyone at the AP about its side of the story in any detail. In a memo distributed to AP employees this weekend, executives wrote that “much of the coverage and commentary does not accurately portray what took place,” but didn’t offer their own version of events.

But if the premise of the AP’s actions is that the appearance of wrongdoing is as important as the act itself, then the AP is the guilty party here: It’s signaled that it will throw its journalists under the bus at a moment’s notice if people on Twitter complain loudly enough. And while the AP has told employees it intends to have an internal “conversation” about its social media policy, my hunch is that it’s still going to be fundamentally uncomfortable with a point of view common among journalists in 2021 — which is that they have points of view, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.

Wilder’s firing is one inflection point in a complex and evolving debate about journalistic objectivity that’s usually addressed sideways, rather than head-on. It highlights the strain newsrooms in the US are experiencing as they try to figure out how to tell journalists what beliefs they can express publicly. And which ones they’re either not supposed to have or that they’re supposed to pretend not to have.

Consider: Last year, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, Americans on social media aligned, at least temporarily, behind the Black Lives Matter moment. There were few willing to defend the actions of the Minneapolis police officers who killed him or didn’t stop his murder. And social media services were bursting with people proclaiming their opposition to systemic racism and support for the Black Lives Matter movement — a movement that had been considered left-of-mainstream just a few years earlier.

That momentum swept up middle-of-the-road mega-companies, like Walmart and Amazon. And it definitely included newsrooms, including my own: Last June, Vox.com managers sent out a memo reminding us that Vox journalists aren’t supposed to participate in political rallies, and to “refrain from using hashtags associated with movements and organizations we are actively covering, or publicly endorsing them.” That said, the memo added: “Racism is not a ‘both sides’ issue, and employees are free to speak out against racism and inequality.” It was a major shift.

In the recent past, some mainstream journalists would announce, in public, that they didn’t vote because they didn’t want their work to be biased — or because they wanted to prevent anyone, ever, from accusing them of bias. And some of that thinking still, amazingly, exists. But it’s wildly out of step with the present moment, where debates about ideology and politics have been replaced with debates between facts and fiction.

Half of Republicans, for instance, believe that the Capitol Riot “was largely a non-violent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists ‘trying to make Trump look bad.’” And that’s a story that requires no work at all to understand — you have to work hard not to comprehend what happened on January 6.

But when it comes to Israel and Palestine, there’s nothing like that kind of clarity, even among people who generally see the world the same way you do: Declare your support for children killed by Israeli artillery in Gaza, and you may find your Slackmate or Instagram followers have a lot to say about Hamas rockets aimed at Israel, or about a spike in anti-Semitic attacks worldwide since the most recent conflict. Or, just as likely, you may hear an uncomfortable silence. And my hunch is that those responses may surprise a younger generation of journalists.

Israelis and Palestinians have been fighting for decades, but we haven’t seen much of the conflict unfold during the social media age that really started in the 2010s, years after the last full-scale intifada: People have certainly employed social media as a weapon in the conflict, but that was before social media was all-encompassing, and before algorithmic design brought stuff to you before you knew you wanted to see it. Which means there’s a generation of Twitterers, Instagrammers, and TikTokers fully accustomed to sharing their views and advocating for causes online, but who haven’t seen pushback from most of their peers or bosses before.

See, for example, a recent tweet from the New Yorker Union declaring support for Palestine by expressing “solidarity for Palestinians from the river to the sea.” After critics argued that the phrase was anti-Semitic — whether that’s true is also up for debate — the union deleted it.

Then again, things are changing. It used to be that mainstream American politics had room for just one response when it came to Israel and Palestine. Now some Democrats, at least, are willing to critique Israeli behavior instead of supporting the country’s actions without reservation.

So are some celebrities, though there are limits to how freely they can express that. Earlier this month, Mark Ruffalo, who has a starring role in Disney’s Marvel universe, compared Israel to South African apartheid. Now he seems to have either walked back that post or something else:

Which is a pretty good summary, maybe, of the mess we’re in right now: Americans have conflicting feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but they aren’t quite sure about how to express that — and how publicly to do it. So of course journalists are in the same boat, but they’re also the ones who are often called on to pretend that they don’t have any opinion at all.

That might have worked in the past. But it certainly doesn’t now. Which is why Emily Wilder’s story may stick with us for a while longer.

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Last week, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in a conflict that claimed nearly 250 lives. But the underlying status quo makes another round of fighting all but inevitable, and a fundamental solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems further away than ever.

Worse, the long-running American solution for the problem — a US-mediated peace process aimed at creating a “two-state solution,” with an independent Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank existing alongside Israel — has proven to be a dismal failure.

Israel has become more and more entrenched in the West Bank, building new Jewish settlements that make it increasingly difficult to imagine a viable Palestinian state on that land. Meanwhile, the Palestinian leadership remains deeply divided: The militant group Hamas controls Gaza, while Fatah, a secular nationalist political party, nominally administers the West Bank through the Palestinian Authority (with Israel still ultimately in control).

This has led to a growing sense among analysts and experts that the two-state solution is no longer possible. Writing in the New York Times last week, the Arab Center’s Yousef Munayyer proclaimed “a growing global consensus” that “the two-state solution is dead. Israel has killed it.” Last year, influential Jewish American writer Peter Beinart declared that “the project to which liberal Zionists like myself have devoted ourselves for decades — a state for Palestinians separated from a state for Jews — has failed.”

But while pointing out the failings of the current approach is vital, its critics go too far. As far away as it may seem, the two-state solution is still the best possible option available for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That’s in large part because the alternatives are even less plausible.

The most commonly proposed replacement is a “one-state solution,” which would merge Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip into a single democratic country with equal rights for Arabs and Jews. Under this scenario, Arab Muslims would outnumber Jews, thus ending Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. Nor would Palestinians have a state purely to call their own, instead having to accommodate a large Jewish minority.

One state is even less likely to happen than a two-state solution. It would involve the most powerful player in the conflict, Israel, choosing to abandon its raison d’être. It’s far more likely to abandon West Bank settlements than to give up on Zionism wholesale.

This speaks to the deeper reason the two-state solution remains better than the leading alternative: It is the only realistic way of dealing with the fact that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one between two distinct nations. Israelis and Palestinians have fundamentally different identities and different ideas about how they want to be governed; in one state, one of their political projects would necessarily be defeated. This would make future violence more likely, not less.

Reviving the goal of a two-state solution is vital. But to do that, it needs to be separated from the moribund peace process. Instead, the US should pursue a strategy that could be termed “deoccupation”: one that aims to weaken the Israeli occupation’s hold on Israeli minds and Palestinian lives while, ultimately, creating the conditions under which its dismantling may become possible.

As the Israel-Gaza war raged, President Joe Biden made clear to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that there was a problem.

Full-throated support for Israel among Democrats was waning, namely because of progressives. Among the clearest signs were moves in the House and Senate to block a $735 million weapons sale to Israel, a deal that only weeks earlier Democratic congressional aides said they hadn’t considered controversial or even noteworthy.

On May 19, about nine days into the conflict, Biden told Netanyahu that unless he wanted to risk losing bipartisan support for Israel in Congress, he “expected” the Israeli premier to wind down the fight. The next day, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire.

Progressives in and out of government say their actions both pressured Biden and gave him a convincing talking point in conversations with Netanyahu. “Progressives deserve a little credit for the ceasefire,” said Ben Rhodes, a former top national security aide to President Barack Obama and an outspoken advocate for a more progressive foreign policy. “Biden was looking over his left shoulder and told Netanyahu, ‘You have to move on this.’”

The true extent to which progressives directly played a role in ending this round of Israeli-Palestinian fighting is unclear. The administration insists no members of Congress changed Biden’s mind during the conflict, and the president openly stated last week that “my party still supports Israel.”

But what is clear is that progressives no longer play a fringe role in the American national security discussion. They’re a real force, and their time is now.

“Looking at where this debate was 10 or even five years ago and where it is now, I think we can’t help but be encouraged,” said Matt Duss, Sen. Bernie Sanders’s national security adviser and a leading figure of the progressive foreign policy movement.

Biden’s presidency gave progressives a clear opportunity

Progressives have made their voices heard on foreign policy throughout US history. From the Wilsonian era to the Vietnam and Iraq wars, they’ve long pressured American leaders to avoid conflicts abroad and focus on economic and social issues at home.

The current progressive movement upholds those ideas and also places primacy on tackling climate change and promoting human rights while curbing support for authoritarian regimes.

The problem is that it didn’t have much success swaying either the Obama or Trump administrations.

Obama didn’t end the war in Afghanistan, for example, and supported Israel’s bombing campaign during the previous Israel-Hamas fight in 2014. “I think that undercut us with respect to human rights, and it didn’t help us make any progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue,” Rhodes told me.

And though President Donald Trump shared some of the antiwar tendencies of progressives, namely not initiating long wars in the Middle East, he ignored all left-leaning advice while cozying up to dictators, minimizing human rights, calling climate change a “hoax,” and exacerbating racial tensions at home.

But progressives did achieve one moral victory with Trump in office. After years of trying and failing, in 2019 Congress passed a resolution, spearheaded by progressives such as Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), to end US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, though Trump vetoed it. Still, it proved progressives could have a serious impact on the broader national security debate.

“The Yemen success was important and it gave momentum to the whole movement,” said Tommy Vietor, a former Obama White House official and now co-host with Rhodes of the left-leaning foreign policy podcast Pod Save the World.

Biden’s rise, though, was a boon to the progressive foreign policy movement.

Since the campaign, Biden’s team has remained closely connected to progressive climate, veteran, and other groups to hear their views on myriad national security issues. They’ve helped influence some of the president’s decisions, such as ending most offensive support for the Yemen war, withdrawing all US troops and contractors from Afghanistan by September 11, treating climate change as the top global threat, and waiving intellectual property protections for US-made Covid-19 vaccines.

That’s not to say the president is pursuing a purely progressive foreign policy, or that progressives are entirely pleased with him. “The left thinks it’s getting a raw deal from Biden on foreign policy generally,” said Van Jackson, a former Obama-era Pentagon official now at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. That perception, he said, has to do with Biden tying domestic issues to competition with China and resisting making deep cuts to defense spending.

Still, Jackson acknowledges, “there is a greater opportunity to influence policy from the left than any time since I’ve been alive.”

But privately, progressives share their concern that their wins so far came in areas where Biden already agreed with them. On the campaign trail, Biden said he would end “forever wars” and focus his attention on motivating the world to confront climate change.

The real test would be when progressives and Biden differed on a major issue. Then came the Israel-Gaza war.

The progressive pushback on Israel proved their staying power

Following weeks of aggressive and at times violent Israeli actions toward Palestinians in Jerusalem, the militant group Hamas launched rockets at Israel on May 10. Israel responded with devastating airstrikes and artillery fire on the group’s positions in Gaza.

The disparity between the two sides — Hamas has thousands of imprecise rockets while Israel has one of the world’s strongest militaries and most effective missile defense systems — meant it wasn’t a fair fight. Before a ceasefire ended the nearly two weeks of fighting, Israel had killed nearly 250 Palestinians, including 66 children, while Hamas had killed 12 Israelis, including two children.

Biden, as he has throughout his career, backed Israel’s “right to defend itself” while initially saying very little about the plight of the Palestinians. Progressives countered the president, saying support for Israel could and should be coupled with defending Palestinian rights.

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Among the most vocal critics was Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress. On May 13, she gave an impassioned speech on the House floor about the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and why the US should reconsider its unconditional support of Israel.

“When I see the images and videos of destruction and death in Palestine, all I hear are the children screaming from pure fear and terror,” she said, holding back tears. A statement from a Palestinian mother she read about putting her kids to bed during the bombings “broke me a little more because … my country’s policies and funding will deny this mother’s right to see her own children live without fear and to grow old without painful trauma and violence.”

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken had a choice to make. It was mid-May, and in a few days he’d travel to Europe for talks with allies on the Arctic and climate change, and to meet with his Russian counterpart ahead of a presidential-level summit in June.

But a fight broke out between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, threatening to explode into a larger, bloodier conflict.

Looking at his agenda and the events in the Middle East, Blinken consulted with his staff and the White House on what he should do. There were discussions about having him drop everything to shuttle back and forth between Middle Eastern capitals and help broker a ceasefire. Instead, Blinken decided he should keep his long-planned commitments in Europe but, along with other administration officials, get on the phone with key players in the brewing war.

He made that choice, the opposite of what previous secretaries of state had done during recent Israel-Gaza conflicts, for two main reasons.

The first was that he could still engage in “telephonic diplomacy” while in Europe, in the words of a senior State Department official, without the risk of having to potentially fly home empty-handed and embarrassed.

The second reason, though, speaks to the Biden administration’s view of foreign policy writ large: Less is sometimes more.

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“I find that in the current moment in Washington, although it’s been true for a long time, the answer is to do more. Everyone wants more, more, we should be doing more,” said a senior State Department official who, like two others, spoke to me on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. “Of course, more of everything is not a strategy.”

Blinken and others in the administration simply don’t believe solving a regional crisis requires top officials like Blinken to drop everything and fly to the hot spot, especially if there are larger, more consequential, longer-term issues to focus on elsewhere.

“I think it’s very important, given the geostrategic situation, the challenges we face, we be very disciplined and focused on the strategic direction,” the official continued, adding that the US can still “walk and chew gum at the same time.”

It’s not that the US was disengaged from the Israel-Gaza conflict. Top administration figures made more than 80 calls to world leaders during the conflict — with Blinken on the phone for at least 15 of them while in or traveling between Denmark, Iceland, and Greenland — in service of the ceasefire reached after 11 days of fighting.

But Biden’s team felt keeping to the European itinerary was better for the administration’s agenda in the long run and for the conflict in the short run.

“If Blinken had gone [to the region], it actually would’ve slowed things down,” said Dennis Ross, a distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, because neither Hamas nor Israel would’ve wanted to look like it was caving to the US.

Critics say much of that is beside the point. When it mattered most, it looked as though the US washed its hands of the situation and let the bombs fall where they may.

“It seemed from the outside that the administration was less interested in intervening and more interested in running interference for Israel’s own operations in Gaza,” said Omar Rahman, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center. “They damaged their own claim to lead the world on human rights, even if they were working hard behind the scenes to bring a halt to the fighting.”

This episode underscores a challenge the Biden administration will likely continue to face. Many will clamor for the US to visibly involve itself in crises in lieu of keeping a laser focus on longer-term challenges. But strategy is one thing; public perception is another.

For now, that doesn’t bother Biden’s team. “We shouldn’t allow reflexive thinking and unevolved thinking to dictate what we do and how we do it,” said another senior State Department official.

“We’re a country that’s big enough and capable enough to do multiple things at once”

When I discussed Blinken’s European schedule with one of the State Department officials, it was clear the secretary and his staff agreed canceling his appearances there would be the wrong call.

The first part of Blinken’s trip was to Denmark, a nation that needed tending to after its bad relationship with the Trump administration. Then it was off to Iceland for a meeting with the Arctic Council, the eight-country organization that coordinates policy in the High North. It would’ve been “unfortunate” if Blinken’s was the only empty seat at the table, the official said, especially as Russia takes over as temporary chair of the council for two years.

Blinken and his staff also felt it was important to hold bilateral meetings with his counterparts to discuss matters ranging from climate change to pandemic response. The most important of these was a one-on-one with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Their discussion set the table for next month’s summit between President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

All this “gives you an idea of what would have been put at risk if he had pulled it down,” the State official said.

The key message from my conversations with US officials was that sending Blinken to Cairo or Jerusalem would’ve kept him from reassuring allies, defending US interests in the Arctic, pushing for actions on climate change, coordinating global coronavirus efforts, and preparing Biden for a tense meeting with Putin. Though no one minimized the importance of ending the violence between Israel and Hamas, most experts I spoke to said the European agenda was robust enough to keep it.

“I think they made the right call,” said Heather Conley, senior vice president for Europe, Eurasia, and the Arctic at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, DC. “Usually it’s the urgent overshadowing the important, but this was working on the important while also managing the urgent.”

What’s more, she said, it’s never a good idea to send your top diplomatic official by themselves to solve thorny problems. “The secretary of state doesn’t always have to be the desk officer of the crisis of the moment,” Conley told me.

Martin Indyk, who served as the US special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations from 2013 to 2014, recapped for me the last two times a secretary of state flew to the region during a flare-up.

Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to Egypt and other nations in 2012 when calls to counterparts weren’t working. Her efforts helped secure a ceasefire, making it seem like that should be the playbook: When there’s a crisis, send the secretary.

But the new secretary of state, John Kerry, wasn’t as successful two years later. Despite drafting a ceasefire document for Israel and Hamas to work from, he came back to Washington “really humiliated,” Indyk said.

Watching those events from within the Obama administration was Jake Sullivan, now Biden’s national security adviser. What he took away from both cases, per Indyk, was that the nation’s top diplomat should travel to the area only to finalize terms that could make the ceasefire a success. Otherwise, the chances of in-person engagement working remained low, leading to inevitable embarrassment for the secretary and the administration.

That seems to have informed some of the thinking for why Blinken is in the region now, and not earlier. Once both sides agreed to stop fighting, he went to Israel to demonstrate that America still has its back and to meet with Palestinian leadership to announce more financial support for Gaza.

That trip was more effective than, say, spending time to quash Israel and Hamas’s beef amid the fighting.

“A premature intervention would’ve prolonged the crisis, it wouldn’t have ended it,” said Indyk, now at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The way to move Israel forward is to put your arm around them, reassure them that you’re in their corner, and push them in the direction you want to go.”

Threatening to place conditions on arms sales or call for a ceasefire early, as some critics from the left wanted, likely wouldn’t have worked. “The Israelis would dig in their heels and say, ‘Screw you, we’ve got rockets falling on our people and we’re going to respond,’” Indyk continued. Plus, he and others said, Hamas surely would’ve defied the US by launching more than the 4,500 rockets they did.

That a ceasefire came together after 11 days, and that Blinken was welcomed by both warring parties shortly after the fighting, has led Biden administration officials to consider their efforts a clear success.

“It was an affirmation that we’re a country that’s big enough and capable enough to do multiple things at once,” said a State official.

The Israel-Gaza strategy may have worked. The messaging didn’t.

One of the senior State officials I spoke with hinted they may consider this play again.

Blinken “was able to keep an important agenda moving forward on long-term strategic interests while maintaining a focus on the near-term crisis. That’s probably how we need to look at things going forward, as well,” the official told me.

In other words, don’t expect top officials such as Blinken, Sullivan, or even Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to divert from their schedules during the next crisis if they have more strategic issues (in their minds) to attend to.

That’s not to say the administration’s handling of Israel-Gaza was perfect or should necessarily be a model.

Ross, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy fellow who spent more than a decade working on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in government, noted that deploying Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israel and Palestinian Affairs Hady Amr — an experienced and capable senior aide, but still ultimately an aide — to the region fed perceptions that the US cared little about the fighting. “There’s no doubt that sending someone at that level didn’t signal a level of engagement at a high enough level,” Ross said.

But Brookings’s Rahman said his problems with the administration’s play had less to do with Blinken’s absence and more to do with what the US did on the whole. “I think there are ulterior motives at work, and it had very little to do with the ceasefire itself,” he said. Namely, “they weren’t interested in pursuing a ceasefire until Israel had done what it wanted to do.”

Which brings it back to the messaging issue Biden’s team will struggle with. Again, it’s all well and good to focus on strategic priorities, but the US still has to show where it stands on certain crises. And when the administration had the chance early on, it appeared to many that the US was only worried about Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself from rocket attacks, not how the war might affect innocent Palestinians in Gaza.

The overall play to end the fighting may have worked, then, but the administration didn’t necessarily win the perception battle. Biden’s handling of Israel-Gaza may not be just a flashpoint of his early presidency; it may serve as an example of a recurring problem in the years to come.

As the world increasingly speaks out against China’s genocide of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, the quietest voices continue to belong to the leaders of Muslim-majority countries.

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Look no further than Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s interview this week with Axios’s Jonathan Swan. Swan asked why the premier, who often speaks out on Islamophobia in the West, has been noticeably silent on the human rights atrocities happening just across his country’s border.

Khan parroted China’s denial that it has placed roughly 2 million Uyghurs in internment camps and then evaded the issue over and over again. “This is not the case, according to them,” Khan said, adding that any disagreements between Pakistan and China are hashed out privately.

That’s a jarring statement. Instead of offering a pro forma “Yes, of course we’re concerned by this” before moving on, Khan chose instead to minimize the problem altogether.

Why would Khan do such a thing during a high-profile interview, with his self-enhanced image as a defender of Muslims on the line? The prime minister gave the game away later in the interview: “China has been one of the greatest friends to us in our most difficult times, when we were really struggling,” Khan told Swan. “When our economy was struggling, China came to our rescue.”

For decades, American Jewish institutions have made it a priority to teach kids about Israel. Learning about the Jewish state is a key part of the curricula and programming at schools, camps, and community organizations around the country, with Israel often depicted as a miraculous entity locked in righteous battle with irrational Arab foes.

Given that the vast majority of American Jews never end up living, or even spending much time, in Israel, early and incomplete lessons can have a lasting effect on the political positions of the students who soak in them.

Rabbi Jill Jacobs was one such kid, although many of the lessons her instructors tried to instill in her didn’t quite take. She is the executive director of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, a group of social justice-minded Jewish clergy who, among other goals, seek better treatment for Palestinians.

As a member of Generation X, she grew up at a time when many Jewish educational establishments treated Palestinians either as nonexistent or — especially during the Palestinian uprising of the late ’80s, known as the First Intifada — as vicious anti-Semites. During her college years, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization entered the so-called Oslo process, a series of agreements that seemed to bring peace and Palestinian self-determination tantalizingly close. The process was not to last, but Jacobs holds on to the dream of a Jewish state coexisting alongside a Palestinian neighbor-state.

This month’s bloodshed between Israelis and Palestinians has prompted many, Jew and gentile alike, to reconsider the situation and give more credence to the Palestinian cause. Social media has been filled with American Jews denouncing some of the institutions that claim to represent them, often for the imbalanced Israel education they received as children. Vox spoke with Rabbi Jacobs to discuss the past and present of such education, as well as how she’d like to see it change in the future.

What kind of Israel education did you get when you were growing up?

I’m 45, so I graduated from high school in 1993 and from college in ’97, just to situate what was happening when I was a kid. I remember certainly that Israel was a place that could do no wrong. My first trip to Israel was when I was 6, with my family, and I remember coming back with my photo album, and I brought it into Hebrew school to show off.

I remember being a kid during the First Intifada and really not knowing what was going on, but watching it on the news with my parents and being told, “They’re throwing rocks at us because they hate us because we’re Jewish.” I remember in Sunday school during my middle school years asking about Palestinians in our Israel history class, and being told, “There’s no such thing as Palestinians; they’re Jordanians.”

I remember also, I was maybe 12 or 13, and I was just thinking to myself, There’s something wrong with that answer, but I don’t know what it is. I had enough information to know that there was something odd going on, but not enough to actually know what it was.

Some of my real Israel education happened at rabbinical school. I did my rabbinical school year in Israel in 2000, 2001 which was the first year of the Second Intifada [another Palestinian uprising, which lasted until 2005]. During that year, I was balancing both being terrified for my life and the life of my friends — which was a real terror because buses and cafes and restaurants around us were blowing up, people were being killed — and also starting to learn a little bit about what the situation was for Palestinians, hearing about West Bank closures and learning about what occupation actually meant. I don’t remember one a-ha moment when I figured out about occupation, but I knew about it at that point; I was learning.

I came back the next year with the Jewish Theological Seminary, where I studied, and the intifada was continuing. A friend who was a year behind me and I decided that we wanted to offer a day where people who are coming on this mission could see what the situation was for Palestinians.

So we did a day with [Israeli human-rights watchdog] B’Tselem in East Jerusalem. Certainly, it was not the first time I had been in East Jerusalem, but it was the first time that I had spent time in a Palestinian neighborhood. Then, in the next year or so, there was this big rally on the [National] Mall in DC to support Israel and some rabbinical students — it ended up being over 100 — decided to go as Rabbinical Students for a Just Peace, to be able to stand there and say, “Yes, of course we support Israel, and we also support an end to occupation, human rights for Palestinians.” We wrote a letter to major American Jewish institutions and had negative reactions.

One program that we started at T’ruah a few years ago is for rabbinical students and cantorial students spending their year in Israel. We have a year-long program where, once a month, we’ll take them to see something and to talk to people either inside of Israel or in the West Bank or East Jerusalem.

They will go to Hebron with Breaking the Silence [an Israeli veterans group that seeks to educate the public on the occupation], they’ll go and plant trees in a Palestinian village in the South Hebron Hills and talk to leaders there, they’ll meet with Bedouin Israeli citizens and asylum seekers and Palestinian human rights leaders and Israeli human rights leaders and get a really on-the-ground sense of what’s happening there. Then we do a lot of work with them on, “How are you going to use your voice as a rabbinic or cantorial leader to tell these stories?”

It’s definitely been a big shift from when I was in rabbinical school, when, certainly, we never spoke to a Palestinian as part of our Israel education. They certainly never would have taken us to the West Bank or really given us anything besides the rah-rah-Israel voice.

What do you think the state of the union of Israel education is like in America now?

My experience mostly comes from my kids’ Jewish summer camps, that’s the most personal experience. And also, more broadly, talking to rabbis in our network and educators and seeing what people are putting out publicly in terms of the education they’re doing. There’s still a real fear about talking about occupation.

Some things have changed since I was a kid. Of course, there are some that are better than others, but I think, from what I’ve seen, there is acknowledgment of Palestinians. There’s talk about peace. There’s also a desire to bring in voices that show some kind of coexistence or partnership. Very often there’s an attempt to bring in things that are to show off: “Here’s Jewish and Palestinian doctors working together, or the children’s choir.” Those are real, but they don’t necessarily get into the deep issues. There’s particularly sometimes a fear of even just saying the word “occupation.”

Or, God forbid, mentioning the Nakba [Arabic for “catastrophe,” which refers to the 1948 war that uprooted 700,000 Palestinians from their homes].

There’s also a lot of, I would say, substance-less Israel education. One of my favorite examples is my kid coming back from camp, and they had made [the group of Israeli-controlled mountains called] Har Hermon out of marshmallow fluff. She was very excited because she likes marshmallow fluff. What kid wouldn’t be excited, really? But what’s the educational content in that? They were learning about different places in Israel, or learning Israeli music or slang words — some of which come out of Arabic, which could also be an opportunity to talk about that. Just anything but occupation.

I love my kids learning Israeli music, and I love that people are showcasing different people doing these different kinds of great work in Israel, but there is that fear to talk about the real experiences of Palestinians and to really dive into occupation. There’s a sense that I’ve heard from educators and rabbis of, “Well, we have to make sure that kids love Israel and then we can introduce the hard stuff.”

But the actual experience, I think, of kids, is that nobody tells them anything and then they’re not actually prepared when they get to college and hear the hard stuff. Or they’re prepared with, “Here’s the hasbara [Hebrew for “explanation,” but also used colloquially to describe pro-Israel talking points], here are your copies of [Mitchell Bard’s pro-Israel book] Myths and Facts, here’s your answers to questions people will ask.” But that’s not really deep education.

No, definitely not. I remember Myths and Facts being perpetually on display in the main foyer at my childhood synagogue. I flipped through it once when I was maybe 11 or 12 to see what it was about, and even at that young age, I felt like it seemed janky and propagandistic. I don’t remember a ton about the details of my Israel education, to be honest. But we were definitely only told Israel was beautiful and our ancestral homeland. It was pretty cartoonish.

I contrast that with the way that we do US education. When I was growing up, my US history education was terrible because it was, “America is always perfect, and here’s some great men.” Right? That was the story. Then I remember getting to junior year of high school and having this phenomenal AP US history teacher who was the first person to inform us that the US is not always right and every history book has a bias and we should read for it.

I see how my kids are learning US history and — from second grade, even — they know about the genocide of Native Americans and they know about racism. They talk about police violence in school. Thank God. And it doesn’t make them hate America.

I just think that we need to be more sophisticated and understand that kids can feel connected to a place and connected to people from that place and also understand that not everything about that place is perfect, that it is not always easy. My kids are 7 and 11, and, for sure, my 11-year-old could explain occupation to you and also cares a lot about Israel because she has relationships with Israelis and has been there and probably feels about Israel very much how she feels about America. There’s a lot of very bad stuff in both countries.

The other piece that’s really important to understand is that people look at the educators and the rabbis, but there’s serious pushback by the parents and by donors. That’s probably even more serious. A lot of our experiences are that rabbis and educators are maybe more progressive than their communities. This was a number of years ago, but I went to speak at a Jewish day school. I wasn’t actually speaking about Israel, I was speaking about something else, but when Israel came up, I talked really honestly.

One of the kids had just come back from their 11th- or 12th-grade trip to Israel. They gave me their talking points, and I was able to just explain what the situation was. Two things happened. One was, afterward, a girl came up to me and she said, “I’ve been at this school since kindergarten, and you’re the very first person who has ever talked to us who has said anything about Palestinians other than that they’re terrorists.”

I grew up in an ostensibly liberal Chicago suburb, so they just sort of avoided discussing the Palestinians in any way, but I know lots of other Jews who had the lessons she’s talking about.

I think she was really thinking about that. She wasn’t mad. She was definitely working it out in her conversation with me. The other thing that happened is that a couple more right-wing students organized some kind of petition — I didn’t see it until much after the fact — and some parents got mad about the fact that I had been invited in. So there’s definitely a ton, just really a ton of pushback there.

I’ve heard this from camp staff, from other kinds of educators: that they’re willing to push further, but their real fear is that they know the kids can manage, the kids can handle difficult information, but the parents and the donors cannot.

The generational divide in the community is wild.

Yeah.

How do you think this sort of circle-the-wagons mentality in Jewish education has shaped Jewish and non-Jewish American attitudes about Israel? Do you see those seeds flowering in later life?

Well, I think that the approach has been disastrous, to be honest. Essentially, what happened is, you teach kids hasbara talking points. Maybe they like falafel and the latest Eurovision song and have some Israeli counselors, but they also have the talking points. And then it’s like a house of cards.

As soon as somebody says almost anything, as soon as there’s a crack, one of two things happens: Either they also circle the wagons and they are not able to question it at all and they just kind of put up a wall, or it all comes crashing down and then they feel like they can’t have any relationship with Israel at all. There are also some people who are placing themselves in the T’ruah, J Street [a center-left American lobbying group that focuses on Israel] kind of camp of human rights for all people, for both Israelis, for both Jews and Palestinians both in Israel and in, God willing, a future state of Palestine.

If the goal is to actually create lasting and strong relationships such that people feel like they actually want to be committed to working for a better future for Israelis and also Palestinians, you end up with a situation where people feel like they have to choose one end of a dichotomy. There’s not a lot of space that’s opened up in between.

There are those who would argue that the time for in-between is over, that you have to pick a side.

There’s a lot of scorn for liberal Zionism out there, and there’s a sense that you have to choose between being an anti-Zionist or a Zionist and that being a Zionist has to mean that you 100 percent agree with Israeli government policy. First, that’s just not true, that you have to pick one or the other. But second, I actually am on the side of saying that we should not be talking about Zionism anymore, at all. Zionism was a movement that created the state of Israel, with all of the footnotes that you need. Yes, the creation of the state of Israel was also the Nakba, and Jews and Palestinians experienced that extremely differently.

But now we’re in a situation where the movement ended; now we have a country. There’s some language on the far left that says Israel isn’t a real place. But Israel is an actual country, it’s a member of the United Nations, whether you like it or not, whether you think it should have been created or not. It’s not an idea, it’s not a movement.

The US is a country that was also birthed in bloodshed, that has 400 years of the sin of slavery in its past, as well as the genocide of Native Americans. I don’t think anybody is seriously suggesting that everybody in the United States who is not Native American or descended from people who were enslaved get up and leave.

I think the question is: What kind of reparations are possible and what kind of reparations are necessary in order to achieve that path? I think that’s the same question we should be asking about Israel: How do we move forward in a way that will guarantee the human rights of everybody in the region, including Jews, including Palestinians? And human rights include citizenship in a country. How does that include reparations? How does Israel come to terms with the Nakba without telling 7 million people to get up and go back to Poland or Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever they came from?

How do we effect change here? What are the best ways to get to a world where, at least within the United States, we have better Israel education?

The major funders of Jewish education are on the center right to far right. That means that major educational institutions and organizations that are producing materials for Israel education are either producing material that is center right to far right or that is trying to avoid politics altogether just by doing culture and things like that. That’s a huge problem. Then you have groups which run these educational programs for high school and college students that inculcate a kind of laissez-faire, right-wing, conservative approach to the world — not only about Israel.

For people who actually care about more progressive politics in general, on Israel, and inside the Jewish community, we need the funders. We need to not have a situation where some major funder is going to threaten to withdraw their money from an educational institution because, God forbid, they bring in an Israeli human rights leader or a Palestinian human rights leader or somebody from T’ruah or J Street.

It’s not about blaming the educators. This is where there’s funding. It’s not like the whole Jewish community got together and voted on how the funding is going to be allocated. There are certain people who have both a laser focus on Israel and also the money to put into it. It’s not that the money isn’t on the left, but the people on the left are not as laser-focused as the people on the right.

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