Earlier this month, the University of Austin announced itself to the world as a new experiment in higher education, meant to provide an alternative to the ideological conformity, political correctness, inflated tuition, and low graduation rates that plague American colleges and universities. Among those involved in the project are the former Treasury secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers, the playwright David Mamet, and the Mosaic contributors Bari Weiss, Leon Kass, and Wilfred McClay.

Daniel Gordis, learning of this university-in-the-making, was put in mind of Shalem College—where he has taught and which he has administrated since its founding in 2013. Shalem, of course, is Israel’s sole liberal-arts college, and was likewise established in part as an alternative to an academic landscape where certain left-wing orthodoxies predominated. But he sees Israel’s higher-education woes as very different from America’s:

It was the fall of 2014, shortly after a horrific summer of war with Hamas. . . . I sat in on a class that all first-year students take, in which they read Homer’s epic war story, the Iliad. . . . Seated in a large square around the seminar table, the texts open in front of them, one of the students suddenly spoke, saying to no one in particular: “You know, the average Greek reader had to know that this was a totally stylized account of war,” and then he paused. “Because war is nothing like this.”

That summer, some of the students had had classes. Hardly any men showed up—many had been called up. And the women who did come to class arrived bleary-eyed, spent. They’d waited up all night to hear from a husband, a fiancé, a boyfriend, a brother.

Students in Israel do not report professors for saying things that make them uncomfortable or that “trigger” them (a word no one uses in Israel). That is not to say that no professor at any Israeli university and college ever crosses the line of what I might personally find in good taste, but it is to say that students who go to war don’t go looking for micro-aggressions. They have real aggressions to deal with. Nor do students in Israel protest the appearance of lecturers who have views of which they do not approve.

Why has the campus anti-intellectual anger and intolerance that [the University of Austin’s founding president] describes not come to Israel? I’m not entirely certain. When our students read about what’s happening in the U.S., they’re more dismissive than anything else. I can no longer count how many students have said, in almost identical words, once they read about the culture of American campuses, “They don’t have anything that they’ve committed their lives to that they think is worth fighting for, so they have to create something.”

Critics of the American bombing raid on Iran have warned that it could lead to dangerous retaliation, and risk dragging the U.S. into a broader conflict. (How this could be a greater risk than allowing the murderous fanatics who govern Iran to have nuclear weapons is a separate question.) Yesterday, Iran indeed retaliated. Noah Rothman writes:

On Monday, Iranian state media released a high-production-value video revealing [the government’s] intention to strike U.S. forces inside neighboring Qatar. A bombastic statement from Iran’s Supreme National Security Council accompanying the video claimed that Iran had launched a salvo of ten missiles at the U.S.-manned Al Udeid Air Base, which “pulverized” American forces. In reality, the missiles seem to have all been intercepted before they reached their targets. No casualties have been reported.

In fact, the Iranians quietly gave Qatar—the Gulf state with which they have the best relations—advance warning of the attack, knowing that the Qataris would then pass it on to the U.S. Thus prepared, American forces were able to minimize the damage. Rothman continues:

So far, Iran’s retaliatory response to U.S. strikes on its nuclear program looks a lot like its reaction to the 2020 attack that killed the Revolutionary Guard commander Qassem Suleimani—which is to say that it seems like Tehran is seeking an offramp to avoid a potentially existential conflict with the United States.

Now, it’s important to note that this is only a face-saving climb-down if that’s how we want to interpret it. The only reason why we remember the Iranian operation aimed at avenging Soleimani’s death as a cease-fire overture is because we decided to take it that way. We didn’t have to do that. One-hundred-and-ten U.S. service personnel were treated for injuries as a result of that direct and unprecedented ballistic-missile attack on U.S. forces in Iraq. . . . The U.S. could have regarded that strike as an unacceptable precedent, but the Trump administration had made its point. By simply deeming deterrence to have been restored, the U.S. helped bring that condition about.

It appears that is precisely what the U.S. has done this time. Last night both Washington and Tehran announced a cease-fire, one that includes Israel. Whether it will hold remains to be seen; Iran already managed to get in a deadly, eleventh-hour attack on civilians in Beersheba. If Jerusalem knew such an arrangement was in the cards—and there is every reason to think it did—then its military activities over the past few days start to make a great deal of sense.

Since June 13, there has been some lack of clarity about whether Israel’s goal is to destroy Iran’s nuclear and ballistic-missile capabilities, or to destabilize the regime. Now it seems that the IDF has been doing precisely what it has done in the final phase of almost every prior war: try to inflict as much damage as possible upon the enemy’s military infrastructure before the U.S. blows the whistle and declares the war over—thus reestablishing deterrence and leaving its enemy’s offensive capabilities severely weakened.

In the next item, I’ll turn to some of the nonmilitary targets Israel chose.