On October 16, 2020, Samuel Paty, a teacher at a French high school, was beheaded by a young Muslim man after showing a picture of Mohammad to his class. Liam Duffy observes that, on the two-year anniversary of the murder, prominent French newspapers of the left, right, and center lamented the fact that little seems to have changed. As Duffy explains, they had a specific reason for their pessimism:

[J]ust days before the anniversary, a schoolteacher was forced into police protection after receiving death threats and anti-Semitic abuse in a letter promising the same fate as Paty. Another teacher was threatened by the relative of a pupil for merely discussing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in class.

Far from being deterred by the knowledge of Paty’s fate, campaigns and threats against educators have continued unabated in the two years since, and in some cases have crossed the Channel.

There’s a sense that schoolteachers are on the frontlines in the defense of republican principles, [what in the U.S. would be called democratic values], which is under assault from the religious right (Catholic or Islamist) and the identity-obsessed left. But it is France’s Islamist scene that clearly sees the classroom as a frontline. A confidential government report recently sounded the alarm that Islamist “influencers” have been waging an online offensive to destabilize institutions and undermine laïcité (official secularism) in the school. Large accounts on mainstream social-media platforms encourage young people to confront staff on matters of religious contention, to pressure other students, and deliberately to violate school rules on dress code and religious attire.

If there is to be peace, Palestinians will have to unlearn the hatred of Israel they have imbibed during nearly two decades of Hamas rule. This will be a difficult task, but Cole Aronson argues, drawing on the experiences of World War II, that Israel has already gotten off to a strong start:

The population’s compliance can . . . be won by a new regime that satisfies its immediate material needs, even if that new regime is sponsored by a government until recently at war with the population’s former regime. Axis civilians were made needy through bombing. Peaceful compliance with the Allies became a good alternative to supporting violent resistance to the Allies.

Israel’s current campaign makes a moderate Gaza more likely, not less. Destroying Hamas not only deprives Islamists of the ability to rule—it proves the futility of armed resistance to Israel, a condition for peace. The destruction of buildings not only deprives Hamas of its hideouts. It also gives ordinary Palestinians strong reasons to shun groups planning to replicate Hamas’s behavior.