In a recent column, Shadi Hamid, a member of the Washington Post editorial board and a former fellow at the Brookings Institution, appears to have devised a new charge to level at Israel: it is responsible for the authoritarianism that dominates in the Arab world. How so? The U.S., says Hamid, fears that democratically elected governments in Egypt, the UAE, or other countries that have signed treaties with Israel would turn against the Jewish state. Of course, this doesn’t explain why Washington propped up autocracies like Saudi Arabia even when it made war on Israel, funded Hamas and other terrorist groups, and exported anti-Semitic teachings to the Muslim world; or why countries that aren’t aligned with the U.S. or Israel are also authoritarian.

Hussein Aboubakr takes a closer look at Hamid’s argument:

Hamid would like us to believe that Arab countries that are stable, like the Gulf monarchies, are only so because of the United States and Israel’s system of oppression, and those that are unstable and failing are also so because of the same system. No room for any distinctions or discernments is made that would acknowledge anything but American and Israeli plans and execution. This belief . . . absolves [Hamid] from accounting for the agency of Arab populations in any way, for his entire contention is that the system is made specifically to deprive Arabs of their agency. The ultimate conclusion from this thought process is that the struggle for region-wide Arab self-determination must necessarily and primarily be a struggle against Israel’s occupation and oppression.

Far from being Hamid’s own, this idea—the American-Israeli conspiracy against an imaginary Arab democracy—is commonplace in Middle East-studies and political-science departments in American universities. . . . It also has a long history that goes back to the beginning of the conflict itself. It is the logic through which the American liberal foreign-policy establishment came to be fixated on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the single issue that controls all the problems of the region.

More interesting than the logic itself is that its bizarre nature seems to have never compelled anyone to wonder how or why things should be so.

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:

The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:

An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.