For Jewish graduate students taking a clinical psychology course at
George Washington University—the first of three in a required “diversity sequence”—it didn’t take long to realize that the instructor, Lara Sheehi, had no intention of keeping her obsessive hatred of Israel out of the classroom, even though Middle East politics had no bearing on the class’s ostensible subject matter. The students raised their concerns with the university and, when administrators proved unsympathetic, filed a formal Title VI complaint. Cary Nelson provides a detailed analysis:

By mid-November, the Jewish students learned that Sheehi had been disparaging them in faculty groups. . . . This escalated to an allegation that the students were racist. The result was that the students were subjected to disciplinary proceedings. Then matters became Orwellian. As the complaint specifies, “rather than provide the students with a statement of their offense, faculty have instead asked the students to describe to the faculty what they did wrong and what harm they caused.” This amounted to a forced confession, one with a built-in threat that they could be judged unsuitable to become therapists if they did not cooperate.

Sheehi’s antipathy toward the Jewish state permeates not only her teaching but also her academic work and social-media accounts. Turning to the former, and in particular the book Sheehi coauthored with her husband, Nelson demonstrates “the therapeutic perils of combining anti-Zionism with a social-justice agenda.”

There is a fundamental—and likely unresolvable—contradiction built into this agenda. The Sheehis’ political convictions lead them to see all Israelis, whatever their job titles, as undifferentiated, interchangeable agents of the occupation. In [one paper], she properly condemns the belief system that “collapses Islam into a monolithic entity with an essential potentiality for violence,” but she embraces that very prejudice regarding Israelis. The pressures psychoanalysis might exert toward individuation have no impact there. Similarly, both as victims of Israeli oppression and as avatars of “resistance,” Palestinians become interchangeable in [the Sheehis’] eyes.

[As a solution, the Sheehis] offer violence, not so much as a means to an end, even as a way to compel negotiation, but rather as the only valid form of Palestinian self-expression, one that traditional psychoanalysis aims to suppress. It begins with their effort to valorize suicide, a form of Palestinian violence against the self that they endorse. It is an extraordinary stand for clinicians to take.

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.