Cataclysmic world events — the fall of the Soviet Union, the Iranian Revolution, September 11, Donald Trump’s ascendancy — should cause cataclysmic, or at least fundamental, changes in thought. To be an intellectual, or a citizen, means to respond to history, to think anew, rather than be beholden to one’s oldest, fondest, but no longer useful ideas. The Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 was surely one of those history-altering events; so is the war in Gaza. But rather than inspire honest reassessments and new modes of thought, they have birthed, instead, dangerously Manichean analyses among a coterie of leftist intellectuals. For too many writers, it has evidently become impossible to keep two — much less several — thoughts in one’s head simultaneously. Though some try to simplify, which is to say, falsify, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is one of the most convoluted problems of the past one hundred years. That is a very long time, and rather than abating it has become increasingly, terrifyingly inflamed. Here are two peoples, each with a deeply ingrained sense of persecution and loss, fighting over a tiny land. Here are two national liberation movements — and, increasingly, religious messianic movements — whose members have killed each others’ children. After such sorrow, what forgiveness? Any account of the conflict, and any proposals for its resolution (however dim that now seems) must reckon with all this — not occasionally, but consistently and steadily. This is a difficult task, at which we all fail at times; the cruelty of the Hamas attacks, and of Israel’s war in Gaza, have made it immeasurably harder. I sometimes think that too much death and too much hatred have driven us all slightly insane; it sometimes seems that one must choose which one — but only one — of these cruelties to abhor. As if surrendering, in defeat, to the complexity this conflict demands, too many intellectuals have retreated into almost ludicrously reductive modes of thought — what Zadie Smith described, in an essay on the campus protests, as “the atavistic pleasure of violent simplicity”— along with nostalgic reveries, inapt historic analogies, nonsensical proposals, and patently dishonest historic accounts that occlude any possible understanding of the volatile times we are living through. And crucially, they seem to lack the tragic sense of history that this conflict demands. But if intellectuals fail to reveal knowledge and enable critical thinking, it is not clear what value they have. The tumult and the savagery of the last two years — the October 7 attacks, the Gaza war with its horrific death toll, the abandonment of the hostages, the demonstrations on college campuses and elsewhere against Israel, as well as those in Israel against the government, the vilification of “Zionists,” the charges of genocide, the weakening of the “Axis of Resistance,” the Twelve Day War between Iran and Israel and America — require a wide-angle lens that can take in many contradictory factors at once. Instead, too many writers have grown more rigid and fastened their blinkers ever more tightly. I will be writing here about the failures of the left — like Albert Memmi, I feel, despite everything, that they are my people — but the right, too, has responded to the atrocities with derangements of its own. The Lilliputian revolutionaries at Columbia and elsewhere who distribute Hamas leaflets and revere Hassan Nasrallah have inspired a kind of moral panic about higher education and the place of Jews within it. For some conservatives, the people of the book have, for perhaps the first time in our history, become enemies of the book. “Hit Harvard with everything you’ve got,” Abe Greenwald, the executive editor of Commentary, wrote in May. “The current enemies of the Jews must be taken down. . . . In the present, my thinking is binary. There are the Jews, and there are those who are trying to wipe us out. . . . As far as I’m concerned, Donald Trump can’t lean too heavily on Harvard.” In a subsequent column, Greenwald decried the “illegal immigrants [who] have spurred on or joined in the Jew-hunt.” When it comes to Israel and Palestine, historical complexity, political complexity, and moral complexity are all of a piece. Lose one and you lose them all. It is possible to find glimmers of alternative ways of thinking on the left — to find, that is, intellectuals who have not betrayed their calling. “I support its genesis unequivocally and loathe its prosecution vehemently,” Jack Omer-Jackaman wrote in the left-Zionist magazine Fathom, referring to the war against Hamas. But writers who resist the lure of absolutism and who insist on nuanced analyses find themselves accused of spinelessness, cowardice, and moral evasion. To think precisely yet capaciously, and to extend empathy beyond the constricted confines of “our side,” is now regarded as a moral and intellectual failure. 
Several recent books addressing the war in Gaza, written not by ignorant students shouting “globalize the intifada!” but by public intellectuals and seasoned academics, exemplify the trend toward Manichean thinking: Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza: A History, Enzo Traverso’s Gaza Faces History, and Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. Mishra is the author of books on Buddhism and Kashmir, and a contributor to publications such as the Guardian, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. Enzo Traverso, an award-winning Italian historian who currently teaches at Cornell , works in the tradition of critical theory and has been influenced by neo-Marxists. (Though he is not Jewish, so far as I know, he is very interested in Jews; he once wrote a good book called The Marxists and the Jewish Question, which analyzed why the former had misunderstood the latter.) Peter Beinart is an editor at large of the anti-Zionist magazine Jewish Currents, a contributing Opinion writer to the New York Times, and a professor of journalism at the City University of New York. These books illustrate how anti-Zionism has become not only the
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