In an essay published last fall, Hussein Aboubakr explained how the story of the Nakba has been adopted by one generation after another of Arab revolutionaries as a tool to advance their respective visions of the Middle East. Now, he argues, the meaning of the Palestinian cause has mutated again, leaving the bounds of the Middle East completely. The evidence can be seen on American college campuses:

Instead of being a marginal cause supported and funded by foreign elements, anti-Zionism is in fact the flagship foreign-policy cause of the international left and the academic vanguard of progressive activism. A cause that was once regarded as fundamentally foreign is now mainstream across blue American cities and liberal elite institutions.

Whether wearing a hijab or a Star of David, Students for Justice in Palestine anti-Israel activists are not simply freaks who demonstrate in favor of Hamas. They are mainstream products of the monoculture of the academic left. . . . For contemporary college students, the Israel-Palestine issue is not a separate foreign-policy issue referring to the struggles of people in a small spit of sand in the Middle East. It is a domestic issue of social justice that fits within a unitary and indivisible framework of global justice concerns and decolonization.

Young American Jews have often shied away from facing the prospect that other liberal Americans of their generation—increasingly indoctrinated into left-wing ideologies and seeking a “leftist organizing space” for the struggle against racism, colonialism, and imperialism—are much more likely to align with pro-Palestinian activism than with Jews. One of the reasons is that many young Jews go to the same schools, where they are indoctrinated into the same ideologies, and are often unlikely to question critically whether there is something inherently distorted and dangerous in them.

As Israel moves closer to dismantling Hamas’s rule in Gaza, it will soon have to start implementing an alternative form of local governance. To do so it will likely draw on a confidential report produced by a team of Israeli scholars that has been circulating in the highest ranks of the government and military for the past few weeks.

One of the report’s authors, Netta Barak-Corren, discussed some of its suggestions recently with Dan Senor, addressing what can be learned from what the U.S. got right in Japan and Germany after World War II, and got wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan: