In 1989, Donna Robinson Divine found herself being interrogated by a diversity officer at Smith College—then a brand-new position—for asking a final-exam question about the role of Islam in Middle Eastern politics and, as Robinson puts it, “mentioning slavery in the Muslim world without comparing it (favorably) to the system in America.” At the time, Divine, as a tenured professor, was able to avoid punishment, but since then she has witnessed academic freedom narrowed, while the scope of what ideas are deemed offensive grows ever wider. She observes the key place discussions of the Israel-Palestinians conflict have played in this trend:

Social justice came to the campus wrapped around a proclaimed sensitivity to the downtrodden and oppressed, sufferings supposedly wrought by the twin evils of colonialism and racism. Masquerading as a moral imperative, social-justice activism aimed to convert the curriculum into an instrument to erase evil and pain wherever they were located. And when found nearby—for example, if speech in the classroom “triggered” trauma or discomfort—it had to be regulated. No longer were nuanced conversations or the exchange of diverse views and engagement with different ideas the point of education. Rather it was the mobilization of feelings—and that necessarily placed limits on reasoning and thinking.

On many campuses, the fault line dividing the old oppressive order from the new progressive world quickly began to run decisively and deeply through Palestine. Coiled around a narrative of catastrophic defeat (nakba) Palestinians became the enduring image of the victim, and in the social-justice lexicon, an open wound and unfinished history. [The war of] 1948 came to be understood less in terms of its military outcome than as a first cause of suffering, a dislocation stalking politics in Arab lands while stamping Palestinian identity indelibly by its national trauma as a symbol of displacement, alienation, and indignity.

Palestinians became caught in the crossfire of conflicting imperatives, and none more discordant from the need to build state institutions than the need for the passion to remain a cause. For the idea of Palestine as a territory for two states for two peoples threatened to dissolve the very notion of Palestinian identity.

Echoes of pain and loss carried the Palestinian narrative across oceans and continents drawing false analogies between disparate groups or movements or histories that expanded alliances but did nothing to deepen understanding of what caused their suffering and dislocation. An acrobatic logic interweaving fact and fiction and spinning elaborate metaphors falsely fashioned linkages between people, politics, and history with nothing in common except their calls for a reckoning with the powers presumably denying them justice.

In a momentous meeting with the Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa in Riyadh, President Trump announced that he is lifting sanctions on the beleaguered and war-torn country. On the one hand, Sharaa is an alumnus of Islamic State and al-Qaeda, who came to power as commander of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which itself began life as al-Qaeda’s Syrian offshoot; he also seems to enjoy the support of Qatar. On the other hand, he overthrew the Assad regime—a feat made possible by the battering Israel delivered to Hizballah—greatly improving Jerusalem’s strategic position, and ending one of the world’s most atrocious and brutal tyrannies. President Trump also announced that he hopes Syria will join the Abraham Accords.

This analysis by Eran Lerman was published a few days ago, and in some respects is already out of date, but more than anything else I’ve read it helps to make sense of Israel’s strategic position vis-à-vis Syria.

Israel’s primary security interest lies in defending against worst-case scenarios, particularly the potential collapse of the Syrian state or its transformation into an actively hostile force backed by a significant Turkish presence (considering that the Turkish military is the second largest in NATO) with all that this would imply. Hence the need to bolster the new buffer zone—not for territorial gain, but as a vital shield and guarantee against dangerous developments. Continued airstrikes aimed at diminishing the residual components of strategic military capabilities inherited from the Assad regime are essential.

At the same time, there is a need to create conditions that would enable those in Damascus who wish to reject the reduction of their once-proud country into a Turkish satrapy. Sharaa’s efforts to establish his legitimacy, including his visit to Paris and outreach to the U.S., other European nations, and key Gulf countries, may generate positive leverage in this regard. Israel’s role is to demonstrate through daily actions the severe costs of acceding to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ambitions and accepting Turkish hegemony.

Israel should also assist those in Syria (and beyond: this may have an effect in Lebanon as well) who look to it as a strategic anchor in the region. The Druze in Syria—backed by their brethren in Israel—have openly expressed this expectation, breaking decades of loyalty to the central power in Damascus over their obligation to their kith and kin.