On August 11, tens of thousands of Israelis gathered in Tel Aviv to protest the recently passed nation-state law. Some of the demonstrators—against the wishes of the organizers—waved Palestinian flags and recited such chants as “with blood and fire, we will redeem Palestine.” But Evelyn Gordon notes something far more disturbing about the demonstration:

In 2016, Xiyue Wang, an American citizen and a PhD candidate at Princeton University, traveled to Tehran to improve his Persian, and to conduct archival research on the governance of border provinces in the 19th and early 20th centuries. A few months later he was arrested and sent to the Evin prison, where he was held for 40 months, most of which he spent in solitary confinement. He emerged thoroughly disabused of his former faith in the possibility of U.S conciliation with the Islam Republic. He had a similar change in attitude toward his university. Peter Theroux writes: