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.

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].