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just as we saw in the summer with immigration writ large, the progression doesn't end with Trump. We've had three presidential elections since the 9/11 terror attacks and no presidential candidate has ever proposed shutting down mosques in the United States or creating a special registry and identification cards for Muslims living in the United States.

So yesterday Megyn Kelly asked Marco Rubio whether he'd shut down radical mosques like Trump. He tried to deflect the question by saying that it wasn't about mosques but closing down any facility that was promoting radicalism. In other words, Rubio, while clearly not eager to answer the question, pointedly refused to rule out following Trump's lead.

It is a very good example of how Trump is not only shaping the debate on the right but rapidly mainstreaming ideas that were as recently as a week ago considered entirely outside the realm of mainstream political discourse.

It's particularly effective with the less sophisticated and principled candidates like Rubio. Jeb Bush said flatly this morning that Trump's database proposal is "just wrong." But Ben Carson quickly took Trump's lead comparing Syrian refugees to "mad dogs." The difference is that Marco Rubio could very well be president in 18 months. Jeb Bush won't be.

this is no longer a matter of Trump yakking on about building a gilded 100-foot wall along the southern border and having Mexico agree to pay for it. Trump is now proposing things that sound like they put millions of American citizens and resident aliens on a road to something like the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Carson provide evidence that, for now at least, a large percentage of Republican voters are in a fiercely anti-political mood. As a result, the usual ways voters judge a candidate — experience, governing achievements, mastery of issues — have been devalued.

People are looking for candidates not only to give voice to their anger but to amplify it. Reason has given way to demagogy. In a political context, Mr. Trump and Mr. Carson represent the id rather than the superego, not just in what they say but in how they perceive the world around them.

it will also require Republican voters to lift their sights and raise their expectations about the goals of politics, which are to improve the lives of our fellow citizens in concrete ways; to advance, even imperfectly, liberty, opportunity and a more decent and just society.

I get that it may be emotionally satisfying to cheer on careless rhetoric, to portray every political difference as a “give me liberty or give me death” moment, and to imply that America under Barack Obama is like Germany under Adolf Hitler. But it is also intellectually discrediting, politically self-defeating and unworthy of those who are citizens of a great republic.

"The Religious Right did not start because of a concern about abortion," says Ed Dobson, who as an associate pastor at Falwell's church, was present at the founding of the Moral Majority. "I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.

"In one fell swoop," writes political scientist Corey Robin, "the heirs of slaveholders became the descendants of persecuted Baptists, and Jim Crow a heresy the First Amendment was meant to protect."

Falwell would repudiate his segregationist past and his movement would pivot from race to "family values." Yes, abortion was murder and homosexuality was unnatural. But each also undermined family life.

Trump, who has been married three times and derives his language more from the vulgarities of bathrooms than from the niceties of the pulpit, has also taken stances on key cultural issues, including abortion and gay rights, that are at odds with the Republican Party's white evangelical base.

Other presidenti

al candidates, including Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush and Bernie Sanders, have addressed Liberty stud

With this promise in sight, it seems like a good time to revisit what Falwell Sr. said about King before and after he co-founded the Moral Majority in 1979 as a "pro-life, pro-family, pro-moral, and pro-American" organization.

This ruling stripped tax-exempt status from all-white private schools formed in the South in reaction to the Brown v. Board of Education mandate to desegregate public schools.

Their intent was safeguard children from secularization, not racial integration, but their schools had been unfairly and illegally targeted by a federal government hell-bent on making secular humanism the nation's false faith.

"There was an overnight conversion," recalled Paul Weyrich -- the conservative strategist who coined the term "moral majority" -- as conservative Christians realized that "big government was coming after them as well."

Similarly, feminism was dangerous because it confused the distinct roles men and women and boys and girls were to play in the "traditional family," which Falwell and his fellow travelers understood to be of a singular sort: one male breadwinner and one female homemaker, married, with children, living under one roof and the patriarchal authority of the man of the house.

Nonetheless, he does have a story to tell that resonates not only with white evangelicals' complaints about the decline of a Christian America, but also with the broad contours of the Christian story, which runs from The Fall in Eden to redemption at the hands of the crucified and resurrected Christ. Both of these narratives get going with a fall from grace and point toward an upcoming revival.I know many evangelicals, and Trump is not one of them.

One risk of this apparently widespread suspicion is that it could become self-fulfilling. If enough people and businesses believe the economy is secretly terrible, they will behave in ways that make it terrible — by curbing their own spending and hiring, for example. 

This distrust of public data is partly, though not entirely, Trump’s fault.

At times Trump has mused that “real” unemployment is as high as 42 percent , a comically hyperbolic figure

Such comments are part of his broader narrative of numerical nihilism, a political strategy of discrediting any statistic or fact that could obstruct his path to the presidency.

as World’s Worst Surrogate Ben Carson said Friday on MSNBC, “Let’s throw the economists out, and let’s use common sense.” Presumably Carson believes that all forms of expertise, including neurosurgical, should be similarly disposed of in favor of “common sense.”

this anti-intellectual, ignore-the-data attitude mostly owes its growth to a careless, conspiracy-theorizing league of (mostly) conservative politicians and pundits.

They elevated themselves by sowing distrust in traditional institutions and sources of authority, from the media to civil servants to scientists. They presented themselves as the sole truth-tellers, system de-riggers and messianic statistics unskewers, while maintaining that everyone else was feeding the public lies.

The problem with elevating yourself by tearing down the existing authoritative institutions is that once you succeed, you’ve established a road map for others to tear you down, too

This is how a democracy crumbles: not with a bang, but with data trutherism.

Nikki Haley and Ben Sasse are likely to ring bells; Josh Hawley and Charlie Baker, not so much. Bonus points for anyone outside Tulsa who has heard of G.T. Bynum.) All should be on the radar of anyone concerned about where the GOP is headed.

This is not to suggest Congress is devoid of leadership material. House member Will Hurd is making many, many Republican mouths water. The 40-year-old ex-CIA operative represents the Texas 23rd; it is the state’s largest and most competitive district, sprawling from San Antonio to El Paso, and its electorate is over 70 percent Latino. Hurd is young, sharp, media-savvy, tech-savvy, and ambitious. And he’s black—no small matter for Republicans looking to prove they aren’t the party of white nationalism.

many Republicans are especially enthusiastic about talented women rising through the ranks. House members Mia Love and Elise Stefanik are among those most often mentioned.

Multiple Republicans voiced optimism that Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn, now running for Senate, will turn out to be a force in the upper chamber.

Similarly, many GOP women are rooting for Arizona Representative Martha McSally

Over in the Senate, Nebraskan Ben Sasse has made a name for himself by being an early and consistent conservative critic of Trump.

Another name being talked about: Adam Putnam, the Florida congressman-turned-state agriculture commissioner now running for governor.

Then there’s Josh Hawley, the freshly scrubbed attorney general of Missouri, who is gunning for Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill’s seat

Oklahoma’s G.T. Bynum. A former Senate staffer and lobbyist, Bynum won a seat on the Tulsa city council in 2008. Fresh-faced and funny

GOP members of Congress who consider Trump an ignorant, narcissistic, lying, authoritarian bully (and according to Bob Corker, many do) face a choice between their principles and their jobs.

In May 2016, Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake of The Washington Post enumerated “The 10 Republicans who hate Donald Trump the most.” Graham came in number one.

Graham has become, as Michael Shear and Sheryl Gay Stolberg put it in The New York Times, the “Senate’s Trump whisperer.

Graham admitted in another interview, “I do better in South Carolina when I’m seen as helping him, ‘cause he’s popular.”

“if I don’t stand up for” the religious freedoms of Muslims, “you won’t stand up for mine.”

In September 2015, when Ben Carson said he could never support a Muslim for president, Graham told him “to apologize to American Muslims” for failing to recognize that “America is an idea, not owned by a particular religion.”

That December, when Trump responded to the attacks in San Bernardino by proposing a moratorium on Muslim immigration, Graham responded ferociously. “He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” Graham told CNN. “He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for. ... He’s the ISIL man of the year.”

as he and Trump have grown chummier, Graham’s tone has changed. In his Fox interview, Graham twice applauded Trump for recognizing “that we’re in a religious war.” In other words, he applauded Trump for doing exactly the thing Graham has in the past denounced him for doing: defining the war against ISIS as a war against Islam

Graham later explained that, in his mind, this “religious war” is against not Islam per se but merely “a sect in Islam.” But there’s plenty of evidence that Trump doesn’t make such subtle distinctions. Trump said during the campaign, after all, that, “Islam hates us.” He called for a moratorium on all Muslim immigration

Graham is less public about a lot of the issues on which he once opposed Trump. And, as a result, American Muslims seem to have lost one of the few Republicans willing to defend their rights just when they need him most.

According to some, that’s my job: to skewer — brilliantly! — the Left while ignoring everything else. Well, nuts to that. Let other people be good little tribesmen. (“Good Germans,” we used to say, when I was growing up.) You and I are individuals

It is impossible to agree on what conservatism is. That is one of the beauties of conservatism, I think: It is beyond ideology, almost an anti-ideology.

Are we, in fact, united by love? Or can the Right give the Left a run for its money in the hate department?

I cherish a memory from The Simpsons. The wife of Apu, the Kwik-E-Mart owner, is pregnant, and he is sweatin’ it. Homer reassures him: “Kids are the best, Apu. You can teach them to hate the things you hate. And they practically raise themselves, what with the Internet and all.”

Shared hatreds can be very, very satisfying.

He’s trying to articulate a language of shared culture and values in a country that has been rocked by technological, cultural, and demographic change. It may be an imperfect attempt. But at least Sasse has identified the right project.

The Vanishing American Adult is written as a reflection on the purpose and nature of education, which, Sasses argues, should extend beyond schooling and classrooms.

Instead of relying on “institutionalized school-centric childhood[s],” Sasse says, families should develop practices that will prepare their kids to become “fully formed, vivacious, appealing, resilient, self-reliant, problem-solving souls who see themselves … called to love and serve their neighbors.”

In a chapter called “Embrace Work Pain,” Sasse encourages families to set their alarms early, maintain a rigorous chore system, and send their kids out to do hard labor; in his case, it was detasseling corn

Sasse holds up multi-generational relationships, world travel, and voracious reading as ways of building greater empathy and self-knowledge.

A large portion of the book is dedicated to forms of stoicism, discipline, and self-denial: “There is almost nothing more important we can do for our young than convince them that production is more satisfying than consumption,” he writes. “Anyone who swims so completely in a sea of material surplus as to be unaware of the virtues of the simple life is flirting with great moral risk.

Citizens who take little interest in books threaten the idea of democracy, which “assume[s] the ability to read—and a desire to read.

Americans have long held the “ideal that work is a necessary component of becoming a fully formed adult, that a life well-lived entails a forward-leaning embrace of responsibility.” The country’s great challenge is “to create lifelong learners and lifelong producers,” he writes.

he believes culture—and the acculturation of the young—is more important than policy.

Americans “are a drifting and aimless people—awash in material goods and yet spiritually aching for meaning.

His proposals are about recovering this sense of meaning and establishing a shared language for talking about it, thickening the civic culture that serves as the foundation of political deliberat

This is an increasingly radical idea. America has largely responded to the challenges of diversity and pluralism by pushing moral language out of public life.

Platforms like Twitter, beloved by Sasse and Trump alike, thrive on outrage, reduction, and snark.

n. Like Rousseau, Sasse sees healthy society as a function of virtuous individuals. The senator is making “a plea for self-discipline and self-control” as “the one and only dignified alternative to discipline and control” by the government.

I actually stood up for the Pledge of Allegiance and sang along with the national anthem. Nonetheless, the scars of the Trump years are likely to endure. A new era, alas, doesn’t mean that the last one didn’t happen.

As an L.G.B.T.Q. American, I’ve spent the past four years fearing that every new day will bring some new indignation — like Ben Carson calling women like me “big hairy men,” or the time the administration considered erasing transgender individuals as a legal entity altogether. Or simply the policy enacted as Mr. Trump was on his way out the door, wiping out nondiscrimination protections for queer Americans.

As Mary Tyler Moore imitating Abe Lincoln might have said: “Oh, Mr. Grant. Let us strive on to finish the work we are in and to bind up the nation’s wounds.”

The group is led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and includes Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Steve Daines of Montana, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Mike Braun of Indiana, and Senators-elect Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

But as Mr. Trump continues to perpetuate the myth of widespread voter fraud, a growing number of Republicans in Congress have been eager to challenge the results, either out of devotion to the president or out of fear of enraging the base of their party that still reveres him even in defeat.

Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, on Thursday condemned the attempt, calling it a “dangerous ploy” intended to “disenfranchise millions of Americans.” He accused fellow Republicans of making a political calculation to try to further their careers at the expense of the truth by tapping into Mr. Trump’s “populist base.”

As Mr. Biden racked up victories in November, Mr. Trump indulged in increasingly outlandish fictions, spreading disinformation about the election’s results and encouraging his followers to challenge the vote at every step. In recent weeks, as his legal defeats have stacked up, the president has become more vitriolic in his condemnations of Republicans who fail to support his false claims of having been the true victor in the election, and has lavished praise on those who parrot his accusations.

Nevertheless, more than a month after Mr. Biden’s victory, with increasing numbers in their party marching in lock step with Mr. Trump, some Republicans felt the need on Saturday to explain why they planned to vote to uphold the results of a democratic election.

Senator Mitt Romney of Utah warned of the consequences of backing a bid to subvert the election’s outcome.“I could never have imagined seeing these things in the greatest democracy in the world,” he said in a statement. “Has ambition so eclipsed principle?”

The vice president, the statement continued, “welcomes the efforts of members of the House and Senate to use the authority they have under the law to raise objections and bring forward evidence before the Congress and the American people on Jan. 6th.”

Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, has said he will object to certifying the results, and with Mr. Hawley’s support, that challenge would hold weight, prompting senators and representatives to retreat to their chambers on opposite sides of the Capitol for a two-hour debate and then a vote on whether to disqualify a state’s votes. Both the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate would have to agree to toss out a state’s electoral votes — something that has not happened since the 19th century and is not expected to this time.

“A fair and credible audit — conducted expeditiously and completed well before Jan. 20 — would dramatically improve Americans’ faith in our electoral process and would significantly enhance the legitimacy of whoever becomes our next president,” they wrote. “We are acting not to thwart the democratic process, but rather to protect it.”

Vice President Mike Pence signaled his support as 11 Republican senators and senators-elect said that they would vote to reject President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.

The senators’ opposition to certifying Mr. Biden’s election will not change the outcome. But it guarantees that what would normally be a perfunctory session on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to ratify the results of the presidential election will instead become a partisan brawl, in which Republicans amplify specious claims of widespread election rigging that have been debunked and dismissed for weeks even as Mr. Trump has stoked them.

“We fully expect most if not all Democrats, and perhaps more than a few Republicans, to vote otherwise,” the senators wrote.

The backlash to globalization, consumerism, and cultural homogeneity sent strongmen in search of an updated brand of identity politics.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Maria told me, “Russia had become a country that has forgotten what it means to have a history, a country that has fallen out of history.” It had become a country with a history filled with ghosts—the enormous suffering of the Soviet years, along with the sense of loss that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union.

New technologies facilitated the dissemination of propaganda and disinformation on a mass scale, so that it’s hard to tell where Putin’s invented pretexts end and his own motivations begin.

We have reached a hinge of history. At issue is not just the future of Ukraine but that of the world that will emerge on the other side of this war. If we heed the lessons of this moment, we can rebuild from the rubble a renewed international order that once again places democratic values over the more transitory impulses of profit and immediate gratification.

If we don’t, things could get much worse.

The creation of national-security states veiled the machinations of governments while providing endless justifications for defensive aggression.

With his attacks on Ukraine in 2014, Putin rejoined history—the history that has dominated most of humanity’s time on the planet, when nations fought wars over territory and reconquered places that had been taken away. Blood and soil

while his single-minded focus on corruption represented a needed change, she did not think it was sufficient

Instead, she said, a more radical shift had to take place. To her, this was the other side of the coin from Navalny’s interest in upending a corrupt cabal: the simple notion that politics and government had to be rooted in truth. “People are yearning for a sense of truth, for a certain sense of reality that is always being distorted. People are asking for something that is based on an ethical frame.”

The history that Putin had reentered was the older kind, which inevitably leads nations down rivers to the heart of darkness, borne on the currents that gave rise to fascism and communism

When history appeared to come to an end at the conclusion of the Cold War, the specter of another world war was lifted, and with it some of the sense of drama that Putin had tapped into.

As a Russian, Maria knew how this kind of history could hurt people, in ways that Americans, too often, do not. Every Russian had been touched by World War II. Every Russian family had suffered in some way through the Soviet times.

This was the main thing she had to tell us Americans, I realized—this warning. She felt the return of history. “I am afraid of some catastrophe that is going to happen,” she said to me in 2020, referring to her state of mind the past few years. “I feel it in my bones. I am sharing this with my compatriots: There is going to be a new war, World War III, or the gulags, or the trials.”

“The attacks by Hamas didn’t happen in a vacuum,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, citing the 56-year Israeli occupation. Both sides are responsible, added former president Barack Obama, urging us to “take in the whole truth” of the conflict.

This is not a political conflict, we remind the world, but an outbreak of evil. Just like ISIS, we note, recalling the terrible devastation caused by the necessary American assault in Mosul and Raqqa. 

No, we patiently explain, the massacre was not in response to anything Israel does but to what Israel is

yes, the suffering of innocent Gazans deserves the world’s urgent humanitarian attention, but not at the expense of moral clarity about the justness of this war.

Yes, many Jews readily acknowledge, Israel bears its share of the blame for this hundred-year conflict. So do Palestinian leaders, who rejected every peace offer ever put on the table. 

What may well be the most horrific massacre of our time, outdoing even the atrocities of ISIS, has resulted in the unprecedented popularity of the Palestinian cause.

increasingly, we sense that we are talking to ourselves. The post-religious West, which substitutes the ideological rhetoric of academia for a genuine language for evil, doesn’t understand the old Jewish language we are speaking.

No, Israel is not a paragon of virtue. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have spent this last year protesting every week against the anti-democratic Netanyahu government

To leave a genocidal regime on our border would be a betrayal of the founding ethos of Israel as a safe refuge for the Jewish people. It would be the beginning of our unraveling.

Over and over we repeat what we’d assumed was self-evident: One side seeks to maximize civilian casualties, the other side to minimize them.

Harnevo mocked Cosgrave for tweeting, on the day of the massacre, a chart comparing the number of Palestinians and Israelis killed over the last 15 years. “You see Paddy, what happened on October 7 was not another data point on your f*king charts. It was something else, unbearable.” 

there are moments when we must risk going alone. We know that the longer the fighting in Gaza lasts, even our friends will begin to pressure us to relent. We must resist that pressure and not fear the consequences. 

During the Second Intifada, when the IDF fought suicide bombers in Palestinian towns and villages, an exasperated Kofi Anan, then secretary-general of the UN, demanded: “Can the whole world be wrong and only Israel is right?” Israelis unhesitatingly replied: Absolutely.

Speaking at the gravesite, Yonadav’s brother called on the government to resist world pressure and persevere. He invoked Israel’s first prime minister: “David Ben-Gurion said that it doesn’t matter what the gentiles say, only what the Jews do.”

Israelis across the political spectrum agree that the regime of Oct. 7 must be destroyed. Like Ben-Gurion, we are willing to pay the bitter price of being alone.

Inflammatory language has also been used by journalists, retired generals, celebrities, and social media influencers, according to experts who track the statements. Calls for Gaza to be “flattened,” “erased” or “destroyed” had been mentioned about 18,000 times since Oct. 7 in Hebrew posts on X,

The cumulative effect, experts say, has been to normalize public discussion of ideas that would have been considered off limits before Oct. 7: talk of “erasing” the people of Gaza, ethnic cleansing, and the nuclear annihilation of the territory.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, a right-wing settler who went from fringe figure to minister of national security in Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet, has a long history of making incendiary remarks about Palestinians. He said in a recent TV interview that anyone who supports Hamas should be “eliminated.”

The idea of a nuclear strike on Gaza was raised last week by another right-wing minister, Amichay Eliyahu, who told a Hebrew radio station that there was no such thing as noncombatants in Gaza. Mr. Netanyahu suspended Mr. Eliyahu, saying that his comments were “disconnected from reality.”

Mr. Netanyahu says that the Israeli military is trying to prevent harm to civilians. But with the death toll rising to more than 11,000, according to the Gaza health ministry, those claims are being met with skepticism, even in the United States,

Such reassurances are also belied by the language Mr. Netanyahu uses with audiences in Israel. His reference to Amalek came in a speech delivered in Hebrew on Oct. 28 as Israel was launching the ground invasion. While some Jewish scholars argue that the scripture’s message is metaphoric not literal, his words resonated widely, as video of his speech was shared on social media, often by critics

“These are not just one-off statements, made in the heat of the moment,”

“When ministers make statements like that,” Mr. Sfard added, “it opens the door for everyone else.”

“Erase Gaza. Don’t leave a single person there,” Mr. Golan said in an interview with Channel 14 on Oct. 15.

“I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals,” Ms. Netanyahu said during a radio interview on Oct. 10, referring to Hamas

In the West Bank last week, several academics and officials cited Mr. Eliyahu’s remark about dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza as evidence of Israel’s intention to clear the enclave of all Palestinians — a campaign they call a latter-day nakba.

On Saturday, the Israeli agriculture minister, Avi Dichter, said that the military campaign in Gaza was explicitly designed to force the mass displacement of Palestinians. “We are now rolling out the Gaza nakba,” he said in a television interview. “Gaza nakba 2023.”

The rise in incendiary statements comes against a backdrop of rising violence in the West Bank. Since Oct. 7, according to the United Nations, Israeli soldiers have killed 150 Palestinians, including 44 children, in clashes.

the use of inflammatory language by Israeli leaders is not surprising, and even understandable, given the brutality of the Hamas attacks, which inflicted collective and individual trauma on Israelis.

“People in this situation look for very, very clear answers,” Professor Halperin said. “You don’t have the mental luxury of complexity. You want to see a world of good guys and bad guys.”

“Leaders understand that,” he added, “and it leads them to use this kind of language, because this kind of language has an audience.”

Casting the threat posed by Hamas in stark terms, Professor Halperin said, also helps the government ask people to make sacrifices for the war effort: the compulsory mobilization of 360,000 reservists, the evacuation of 126,000 people from border areas in the north and south, and the shock to the economy.

It will also make Israelis more inured to the civilian death toll in Gaza, which has isolated Israel around the world, he added. A civilian death toll of 10,000 or 20,000, he said, could seem to “the average Israeli that it’s not such a big deal.”

In the long run, Mr. Sfard said, such language dooms the chance of ending the conflict with the Palestinians, erodes Israel’s democracy and breeds a younger generation that is “easily using the language in their discussion with their friends.”

“Once a certain rhetoric becomes legitimized, turning the wheel back requires a lot of education,” he said. “There is an old Jewish proverb: ‘A hundred wise men will struggle a long time to take out a stone that one stupid person dropped into the well.’”

such an alliance will not come together if Netanyahu sticks with his policy of undermining the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — essentially driving Israel and its seven million Jews into indefinite control of five million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The pro-American forces in the region and Joe Biden himself cannot and will not be party to that.

three things are totally clear.1. The keystone for winning all three wars is a moderate, effective and legitimate Palestinian Authority that can replace Hamas in Gaza, be an active, credible partner for a two-state solution with Israel and thereby enable Saudi Arabia and other Arab Muslim states to justify normalizing relations with the Jewish state and isolating Iran and its proxies.2. The anti-keystones are Hamas and Netanyahu’s far-right coalition that refuses to do anything to rebuild, let alone expand, the Palestinian Authority’s role.3. Israel and its U.S. backer cannot create a sustainable post-Hamas regional alliance or permanently stabilize Gaza while Benjamin Netanyahu reigns as the prime minister of Israel.