Soon enough, students will return to college campuses and in all likelihood, student activists will renew their efforts to vilify Israel and ostracize Jews. Searching for the roots of the protests, Paul Berman embarks on an intellectual journey that includes the political evolution of the Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael, the works of the anticolonial theorist Frantz Fanon, and much else. He concludes by detecting a certain “climate of opinion that hovers over the university humanities departments and maybe a few other places, and over the art world and the literary world, and seeps at times into the mainstream press.”

Behind that climate of opinion, Berman writes, is a “single notion”

that deep truths lurk invisibly beneath the falsities of modern life, and, if only the truths were revealed, a new era would dawn. . . . This sort of thing may strike some people as very exciting for political reasons, or for moral reasons.

But the primary victim right now of this sort of thinking has turned out, somehow or another, to be the Jews. I suppose the somehow-or-another has been inevitable, given the allure of the either/or habit of mind.

So there are a great many people who gaze at Israel and prefer to see South Africa and its past. They do not see one more bloodbath in a history of even larger Middle Eastern bloodbaths. They prefer to see what the Islamists have always claimed to see, which is the crime against God, or the maximum crime of crimes, namely, an outright extermination of an entire people, such that “genocide,” the word, has become a catch phrase.

They see the Jews as Nazis, which has been a theme of the Islamist hysteria against Zionism for many decades. They decline to see anything at all about Hamas’s nature, doctrines, and practices, even if they do see those things. They see that resistance to what they imagine to be white settler-colonialism is righteous, and self-defense is monstrous. And the October 7 massacre seems to them—such is the logic, it is inescapable—a good thing, not just on balance. The October 7 massacre is a good thing absolutely.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].