Ron E. Hassneris a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He writes: “When college students who sympathize with Palestinians chant “From the river to the sea,” do they know what they’re talking about? I hired a survey firm to poll 250 students from a variety of backgrounds across the U.S. Most said they supported the chant, some enthusiastically so (32.8%) and others to a lesser extent (53.2%).

But only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea. Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic. Less than a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafat was (12 of them, or more than 10%, thought he was the first prime minister of Israel).

Asked in what decade Israelis and Palestinians had signed the Oslo Accords, more than a quarter of the chant’s supporters claimed that no such peace agreements had ever been signed. There’s no shame in being ignorant, unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions.

Would learning basic political facts about the conflict moderate students’ opinions? A Latino engineering student from a southern university reported “definitely” supporting “from the river to the sea” because “Palestinians and Israelis should live in two separate countries, side by side.” Shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel, he downgraded his enthusiasm for the mantra to “probably not.” Of the 80 students who saw the map, 75% similarly changed their view.

An art student from a liberal arts college in New England “probably” supported the slogan because “Palestinians and Israelis should live together in one state.” But when informed of recent polls in which most Palestinians and Israelis rejected the one-state solution, this student lost his enthusiasm. So did 41% of students in that group.

A third group of students claimed the chant called for a Palestine to replace Israel. Sixty percent of those students reduced their support for the slogan when they learned it would entail the subjugation, expulsion or annihilation of seven million Jewish and two million Arab Israelis. Yet another 14% of students reconsidered their stance when they read that many American Jews considered the chant to be threatening, even racist. (This argument had a weaker effect on students who self-identified as progressive, despite their alleged sensitivity to offensive speech.)

In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region’s geography, history or demography. Those who hope to encourage extremism depend on the political ignorance of their audiences. It is time for good teachers to join the fray and combat bias with education.

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Peggy Noonan is an award winning columnist, author and former speech writer for Ronald Reagan. She writes: “At first I didn’t understand. Among Hamas’s crimes of 10/7: little children and babies murdered, some burned to death; children forced to watch parents chased, beaten and shot. Old couples murdered in their homes; families who’d taken refuge in safe rooms burned out and killed. Hamas attempted to behead a kibbutz worker, and killed old women standing at a bus stop. Women were abused—raped, it seemed certain.

But I didn’t understand why, from day one, the last received such emphasis. Defenders of Hamas kept demanding proof and claiming there was no evidence. It was as if they were saying: Sure we behead people and kill infants but raping someone, that’s crossing a line!

But now I understand what was done. It was grim and dreadful, but it was also systematic and deliberate. And since there’s going to be a lot of 10/7 “trutherism”—there already is—we have to be clear about what happened.

In the days after the attack, chaos reigned in the attack areas. At least 1,200 people had been murdered, their bodies scattered through kibbutzim and on the site of the Nova music festival. The crime scene was huge; the priority was identifying the dead and informing their families. Documentation of crimes was incomplete, forensic evidence not always recorded, evidence perishable. The testimony of witnesses, body collectors and morgue workers came in unevenly. It has built and is becoming comprehensive.

A stunning report appeared last weekend in London’s Sunday Times, by reporter Christina Lamb. Bar Yuval- Shani, a 58-year-old psychotherapist treating the families of victims, told Ms. Lamb she has been told by several witnesses of rape at the music festival. A police commander told Ms. Lamb, “It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning, and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people.”

Ms. Lamb quotes Yoni Saadon, 39, a father of four and shift manager in a foundry who was at the music festival. He said he hid as a young woman was raped, and saw Hamas fighters capture another young woman near a car. “She was fighting back, not allowing them to strip her. They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her.”

“We didn’t understand at first,” Ms. Lamb quoted Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a Hebrew University expert on international law, who heads a commission into the Hamas crimes. She said survivors arriving at hospitals weren’t asked about sexual abuse or given rape kits, but those who volunteered to collect bodies started reporting that many of the women were naked and bleeding from the genitals.

The commander of a unit of a volunteer religious organization that collected the remains of the dead told Ms. Lamb they collected 1,000 bodies in 10 days from the festival site and the kibbutzim. “No one saw more than us. . . . It seemed their mission was to rape as many as possible.”

Israel Defense Forces sources told the paper that Hamas fighters caught in Gaza reported in police interrogations that they had been instructed by superiors to “dirty” and “whore” the women.

A few days after the Sunday Times report came one on the mounting evidence of violent sexual abuse from BBC correspondent Lucy Williamson. Several of those involved in collecting and identifying the bodies of the dead told the BBC that they had seen “multiple signs of sexual assault, including broken pelvises, bruises, cuts and tears, and that the victims ranged from children and teenagers to pensioners.” Video testimony of an eyewitness to the music festival, shown to journalists by Israeli police, “detailed the gang rape, mutilation and execution of one victim.” The BBC saw “videos of naked and bloodied women filmed by Hamas on the day of the attack.”

The gallant gents of Hamas were filming their own war crimes.

Israeli police have privately shown journalists filmed testimony of a woman at the music festival. She describes Hamas fighters gang-raping a woman and then mutilating her. The last of her attackers shot her in the head. She said the men cut off parts of the woman’s body during the rape. In other videos, Ms. Williamson writes, women carried away by the terrorists “appear to be naked or semi-clothed.”

Reuters on Dec. 5 quoted an Israeli reservist who worked at a makeshift morgue. “Often women came in in just their underwear,” she said. “I saw very bloody genitals on women.” Reuters spoke to seven people, first responders and those dealing with the dead, who attested to the sexual violence. Reuters quotes written testimony from one volunteer, who said he saw dozens of dead women in shelters: “Their clothing was torn on the upper part, but their bottoms were completely naked.”

This Monday a meeting at the United Nations laid out proof of the violent abuse. In the New York Times, reporters Katherine Rosman and Lisa Lerer quoted the testimony of Simcha Greinman, a volunteer collector of remains at the kibbutzim. He said the body of one woman had “nails and different objects in her female organs.” A person’s genitals were so mutilated “we couldn’t identify if it was a man or a woman.” Other women had mutilated faces. The head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police was asked how many women were abused. He said, “I am talking about dozens.”

If half of this testimony is true, then what was done to the women at the music festival and in the kibbutzim wasn’t a series of isolated crimes. It happened at scale, as part of a pattern, and with a deliberateness that strongly suggests it was systematic. The rape, torture and mutilation of women looks as if it was part of the battle plan. Hamas used sexual violence as a weapon.

Why has the progressive left in the West, for two months now, been disbelieving, silent or equivocal about what Hamas did to women? One answer is that the progressive left hates Israel and feels whatever is done to Israelis is justified. Another is that the sick brutality of Hamas’s actions undercuts its position in the world, undercutting too the cause they falsely claim to represent, that of the Palestinian people. Why have women’s groups of the progressive left been silent? Because at bottom they aren’t for women; they are for the team.

All of this makes more remarkable the exchange between Dana Bash of CNN and Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Seattle. Ms. Bash pressed Ms. Jayapal on why she wasn’t condemning what had been done to women on 10/7. Ms. Jayapal was evasive, tried to redirect, said rape is “ horrific” but “ happens in war situations.”

“However,” she said, “I think we have to be balanced about bringing in the outrages against Palestinians.”

Balanced? How do you balance a story like the horrors of Oct. 7? You don’t, you just find and tell the truth. Some stories don’t have two sides. This is one of them.

Why is it important? Because it happened. Because it reveals something about the essential nature of Hamas and reflects its ultimate political goals. Progressives admiringly quote Maya Angelou’s advice that when people show you who they are, believe them. Oct. 7 was Hamas showing you who they are. Believe them.”

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Jared Malsin is a Middle East correspondent for The Wall Street Journal based in Istanbul, covering Turkey, Syria and the wider region, and Fatima AbdulKarim is a journalist based in Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the central West Bank, that serves as the de facto administrative capital of the Palestinians. They write:

“Hamas has called for Palestinians to confront Israel at the Al Aqsa Mosque on Friday, when the arrival of large numbers of worshipers presents a test for Israeli authorities aiming to sustain a fragile peace at the site over Ramadan as war rages in Gaza.

In recent years, the Islamic holy month has been an occasion for violent confrontations among Palestinians, Israeli authorities and Jewish worshipers at the compound in East Jerusalem, considered the holiest site in Judaism, and one of Islam’s holiest. Jerusalem is holding its breath.

“The situation is dire in Jerusalem and this Ramadan we are not feeling any of its spirit, neither in celebrations nor in worship, because the occupation has turned the city into a military zone,” said Maha Yaish, a tourism operator who lives in East Jerusalem, referring to the Israeli security presence. Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in February called for Palestinians to march on Al Aqsa at the start of Ramadan, which began on Sunday. The march didn’t materialize.

On Thursday, Hamas issued another demand for action. “We call upon our people in Jerusalem, the West Bank, the interior, and the occupied lands to mobilize and confront the occupation’s schemes against the blessed Al Aqsa Mosque,” Hamas said. “Protecting Jerusalem is among the utmost duties, especially as we are in the month of Jihad and victories.”

Al Aqsa has been largely calm, following brief scuffles between Israeli police and Palestinians on Sunday. Palestinian leaders said Israeli police have in recent days managed to facilitate entry by Palestinians, after restricting access since the beginning of the war in Gaza.

“Last night, there were no restrictions for East Jerusalemites and Palestinian citizens of Israel,” said Mustafa Abu Sway, an Islamic scholar at Al Aqsa Mosque, on Thursday. In the past, as many as 250,000 worshipers have converged on the site on Fridays during Ramadan, he said.

As for the risk of violence, he said, “The worshipers are not interested in anything like that. So far, so good.”

Israeli police said Palestinians were entering the complex after enhanced security checks. Israel says it often faces attacks by Palestinians during Ramadan, including the pelting of Jewish worshipers with stones or shooting fireworks.

The religious importance of the compound, which is known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, means even small disputes over access have the potential to erupt into conflict.

“Add to that, the backdrop of carnage in Gaza. That creates a very, very volatile mix. If there’s any single event alone, that could possibly trigger a regional war,” said Daniel Seidemann, a Jerusalem based Israeli civil rights lawyer and onetime adviser to Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

A visit to the site in 2000 by former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, then a right-wing opposition leader, was one of the triggers of the second Palestinian intifada, which resulted in years of fighting with Israeli forces. In 2021, Hamas fired rockets into Israel following confrontations at the site between Palestinian worshipers and police, sparking an 11-day war in Gaza.

Some Palestinians described Ramadan this year as a time for resistance to Israeli occupation. Israel has expanded its security operations across the West Bank, following the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that led to the Israeli offensive in Gaza.

“What does the world expect from people who are having to live with such brutality?” said Adham Manasra, a 39year-old accountant and father of three in Ramallah. “Of course the natural reaction is to revolt, but not because anyone is calling them to. It’s a reaction to the daily humiliation.” 

Since Israel seized East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan in the Six-Day War, fought between Israel and a coalition of Arab states (primarily Egypt, Syria, and Jordan) from 5 to 10 June 1967, Israeli authorities have allowed a delicate status quo to remain in place in which a Muslim religious authority under the Jordanian government administers the Al Aqsa site, but Israeli police control its entrances. Jews are forbidden to pray on the site, although in recent years more have done so without repercussions.

In the months prior to the outbreak of the Six-Day War in June 1967, tensions again became dangerously heightened: Israel reiterated its post-1956 Suez Canal Crisis position that another Egyptian closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping would be a definite casus belli. In May 1967, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser announced that the Straits of Tiran would again be closed to Israeli vessels. He subsequently mobilized the Egyptian military into defensive lines along the border with Israel^[35] and ordered the immediate withdrawal of all UNEF personnel.

On 5 June 1967, as the UNEF was in the process of leaving the zone, Israel launched a series of preemptive airstrikes against Egyptian airfields and other facilities, launching its war effort Egyptian forces were caught by surprise, and nearly all of Egypt’s military aerial assets were destroyed, giving Israel air supremacy.

Simultaneously, the Israeli military launched a ground offensive into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula as well as the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip. After some initial resistance, Nasser ordered an evacuation of the Sinai Peninsula; by the sixth day of the conflict, Israel had occupied the entire Sinai Peninsula. 

Jordan, which had entered into a defense pact with Egypt just a week before the war began, did not take on an all-out offensive role against Israel. However, the Jordanians did launch attacks against Israeli forces to slow Israel’s advance. On the fifth day, Syria joined the war by shelling Israeli positions in the north.

Egypt and Jordan agreed to a ceasefire on 8 June, and Syria on 9 June, and it was signed with Israel on 11 June.

This year, Israeli military authorities imposed restrictions on Palestinians from the West Bank from entering Jerusalem for prayers, allowing only men over 55, women over 50 and children under 10 to enter. The restrictions are similar to those imposed in the past.

“Ramadan is sacred to Muslims; its sanctity will be upheld this year, as it is every year,” the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office said.

Palestinians streamed to Al Aqsa this week to enjoy moments of prayer and quiet conversation. At night, the sound of tarawih, Ramadan prayers in which worshipers read long sections of the Quran, could be heard drifting over the walls of the old city.

“We’re standing watch over Al Aqsa,” said Samira Eghbariya, 59, who traveled to Jerusalem from Umm al-Fahm, a town in northern Israel. She said Israeli police questioned her on her way into the compound.

Nearby, Umm Mahmoud, 51, stood in the shadow of the Dome of the Rock, collecting donations for her family in Gaza. On her phone, she swiped through photos of killed and injured relatives, a flipbook of bloody and bandaged faces. As she stood there, her daughter called from Gaza. “We just want to sleep in peace,” the daughter said.”

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The Wall Street Journal editorial board writes: ““I just want to remind the world, Palestinian mothers love their children just as much as any other mother in the world,” Jordan’s Queen Rania said on CNN last week. “For them to have to go through this is just unbelievable.

And equally, I think that people all around the Middle East, including in Jordan, we are just shocked and disappointed by the world’s reaction to this catastrophe that is unfolding. In the last couple of weeks we have seen, you know, a glaring double standard. . . . Are we being told that it is wrong to kill a family, an entire family, at gunpoint, but it’s OK to shell them to death?”

Suddenly the talk of Israeli grandmothers and babies being butchered by Hamas has given way to reports of Palestinian children killed by the Israel Defense Forces. And so Queen Rania asks: Aren’t Palestinian lives as precious as Israeli ones?

Of course they are. But to focus on death counts alone— without looking to how and why people were killed—is to reduce this war to a grim PR battle of photos and numbers.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday said this war has entered its second stage. He was talking about Israel, but it applies equally to Hamas. The barbarism of Oct. 7 was only the first stage of the Hamas war plan. The second stage was to force an Israeli response in Gaza that Hamas knew would mean the killing of innocent Palestinians—which boosts the terrorist group’s propaganda.

Whether the IDF is taking the right steps to minimize the loss of Palestinian civilian lives can be argued. But nothing Hamas does is to protect the Palestinian people. Look at how Hamas prevented Palestinians from leaving northern Gaza in accord with Israeli warnings.

Hamas has built a sophisticated tunnel network to protect its members from Israeli bombs and missiles. Has anyone seen a comparable network of shelters to safeguard the Palestinians Hamas claims to be fighting for? Hamas locates its ammunition caches and command centers in these tunnels beneath schools, hospitals and mosques, so that any Israeli fire necessarily will mean more civilian casualties.

The disturbing truth about Hamas’s second stage is this: Palestinian deaths are more useful to Hamas even than Israeli deaths.

Michael Walzer is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the author of “Just and Unjust Wars.” He is a self-described social democrat. He is no fan of Mr. Netanyahu.

In an article for the New Republic, Mr. Walzer makes clear that like Queen Rania, he holds Palestinian life precious—and he believes that the IDF has an obligation to act to protect Palestinians, even if it means greater risk for Israeli soldiers. But Mr. Walzer recognizes something Queen Rania doesn’t: “A just victory requires the defeat of Hamas.”

Mr. Walzer considers the creation of a viable Palestinian state part of a just victory. Agree with him or not—I believe Palestinians need the possibility of a decent life more than a state—he is saying that any just resolution requires the destruction of Hamas first.

This becomes easier to understand once the essence of a terrorist is recognized: a war criminal who rejects any limit, including deliberately targeting civilians. This differs from the IDF, which kills civilians as a consequence of its effort to get at Hamas. In just-war teaching this is known as double effect.

It’s a fine distinction that represents a fundamental moral divide. Tel Aviv University historian Martin Kramer, a fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, notes that the argument that there’s no difference between the killing of civilians by Hamas and those by the IDF has a precedent in the so-called Dresden defense.

This was the argument advanced by commanders of paramilitary Nazi death squads, who claimed that what they did up close and on the ground was no different morally from what Allied bombers did from thousands of feet in the air. The Nuremberg judges vehemently disagreed, pointing out that the actions differ “ both in fact and in law.” The innocent people killed by Allied bombs were incidental to the military objective. To the Nazis, killing innocent people was the objective.

That’s what makes Hamas members war criminals. On Oct. 7, they executed a plan to target, attack and murder innocent Israelis. Now that they have the Israeli counterattack they counted on, they are trying to use the Palestinian dead to claim victimhood. It isn’t just Queen Rania, either: We hear the same argument at the United Nations, in Congress and on elite American college campuses.

Yes, Palestinian mothers love their children no less than anyone else. But with horrible images from Israel and Gaza now filling our TV screens, moral judgment begins with making the obvious distinctions, not erasing them.”

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Daniel Henninger is an American commentator. He serves as the deputy editorial page director of The Wall Street Journal, and is a Fox News contributor. He writes: “The election that a strong majority of Americans say they don’t want looks likely to happen. As this avalanche of unreality hurtles down the mountain, let me ask: What about the Houthi vote?

With the American presidency being contested primarily over the moral fitness of one man and the mental fitness of another, can anyone be surprised that the Houthis, a Yemeni Shiite tribe, concluded this was the moment to attack global shipping in the Red Sea?

A substantial percentage of seaborne shipping, notably oil, travels up the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal. In response to the Houthi attacks, the U.S. has carried out counterattacks against Houthi sites in Yemen, the latest on Tuesday. Oil giant Shell has halted shipments through the Red Sea, and the world’s major shippers are rerouting around Southern Africa at great cost, which consumers will bear.

Given the sequence of events from Hamas’s act of war on Israel Oct. 7 to the Houthis’ offensive against the Red Sea shipping lanes, it is now clear that Iran decided the moment was right to stretch the U.S.’s strained military capacity to the limit, or even breaking point.

Prior to the Israeli-Hamas war, the national-security debate in the U.S. and among its Republican presidential candidates was whether we could simultaneously confront China and support Ukraine against Russia. If you were an adversary looking at a U.S. uncertain about its global leadership, what would you do? Answer: Up the ante. Pile more pressure onto the world’s self-doubting superpower. That is what Iran has done.

In recent years, there has been a lot of discussion about the stated intention of China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin to displace the dominant political value system of the U.S. and its democratic allies in Europe and Asia. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, appears to have concluded it was time to make the threat explicit. The Houthi assaults on a choke point of global shipping and the principle of freedom of navigation is a direct attack on the U.S.-led world order. So what is the U.S. going to do about it? Or about the threats that preceded Oct. 7?

The Israel-Hamas war pushed Ukraine’s war with Russia off the front pages, but not in Europe. The German newspaper Bild reported this week that according to classified documents from the German Defense Ministry, that country is preparing for a Russian mobilization beyond Ukraine toward the eastern flank of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Also in recent days, Sweden’s defense minister and top military commander both said Swedes should prepare for such a possibility.

Recently, Taiwan’s brave people, living in the shadow of communist China, voted to elect a president committed to the island’s independence. The question now becomes whether current shortfalls in U.S. defense manufacturing will make it difficult to fill Taiwan’s $19 billion order for military weaponry to defend itself against China. And of course shipping lanes in the South China Sea—the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia—are already under pressure from China.

Meanwhile, the southern U.S. border sits as an open wound, bleeding migrants and fentanyl into the mainland from all over the world.

It isn’t an overstatement to say that the U.S. today needs leadership and vision on the order of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan. We are past the point of pretending that the current scope and pace of global disorder doesn’t require a financial commitment to rebuilding the U.S. defense-industrial base. We need a president who will make that case to the American people. The prospects aren’t promising.

The political pressure on Mr. Biden from his party’s left goes far to explain why his national- security team has been behind the curve on every important strategic decision. That won’t improve, especially with John Kerry, architect of the Obama-Iran nuclear deal, joining the Biden campaign. Anti-Israel demonstrations in New York and Washington have taken on an Antifa-like atmosphere of impending violence.

Republicans, meanwhile, are again flirting with an isolationist temptation that has become untenable since October. The Iowa caucuses signaled Republicans’ belief in Donald Trump as their national leader. But listen closely to him and other than extending the border wall and tariffs, it isn’t clear what Mr. Trump would do beyond saying, as he did Monday evening, that “I get along great” with China’s Mr. Xi and Russia’s Mr. Putin. Hopefully that doesn’t mean resolving Ukraine in 24 hours with another Yalta agreement.

America’s politics is rife with sentiment, and perhaps today sentiment is all one needs to win a nomination for the U.S. presidency. The Houthis have voted early on calling America’s bluff “

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What an Asymmetric Victory Would Look Like.