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.

Yesterday I saw an unconfirmed report that the Biden administration has offered Israel a massive arms deal in exchange for a promise not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Even if the report is incorrect, there is plenty of other evidence that the White House has been trying to dissuade Jerusalem from mounting such an attack. The thinking behind this pressure is hard to fathom, as there is little Israel could do that would better serve American interests in the Middle East than putting some distance between the ayatollahs and nuclear weapons. Aaron MacLean explains why this is so, in the context of a broader discussion of strategic priorities in the Middle East and elsewhere:

If the Iran issue were satisfactorily adjusted in the direction of the American interest, the question of Israel’s security would become more manageable overnight. If a network of American partners enjoyed security against state predation, the proactive suppression of militarily less serious threats like Islamic State would be more easily organized—and indeed, such partners would be less vulnerable to the manipulation of powers external to the region.

[The Biden administration’s] commitment to escalation avoidance has had the odd effect of making the security situation in the region look a great deal as it would if America had actually withdrawn [from the Middle East].

Alternatively, we could project competence by effectively backing our Middle East partners in their competitions against their enemies, who are also our enemies, by ensuring a favorable overall balance of power in the region by means of our partnership network, and by preventing Iran from achieving nuclear status—even if it courts escalation with Iran in the shorter run.