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Nearly 30 percent of the ultra-Orthodox public now supports the idea of military service, twenty points higher than before the war,

“Something fundamental has changed here, and we don’t know what it is yet,” said Yossi Klein Halevi, an author and fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a research group in Jerusalem. “What we do know is that this is kind of a last chance for this country.”

Roughly a third of voters for Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing party, Likud, have abandoned the party since Oct. 7, according to every national poll since the attack.

Perhaps surprisingly, 70 percent of Arab Israelis now say they feel part of the state of Israel, according to a November poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based research group. That is 22 points higher than in June and the highest proportion since the group began polling on the question two decades ago.

But for others, the scale of the Oct. 7 atrocities has left them struggling to even empathize with Gazans, let alone retain hope in a peaceful solution to the conflict.In 2018, Mr. Klein Halevi, the author, wrote a book addressed to an imagined Palestinian, “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor,” in which he attempted to set out a vision for a shared future between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.Since Oct. 7, Mr. Halevi said, he has found it hard to even consider what such a future looks like. An observant Jew, he still prays for Palestinians, but more from duty than empathy, he said.“I spent years explaining the Israeli narrative and absorbing the Palestinian narrative — and I tried to find a space where both could live together,” Mr. Klein Halevi said.“I don’t have that language right now,” he said. “It’s emotionally unavailable to me.”

“The main purpose is to send a clear message to the West that future seizures of oil tankers will be met with a response in kind,” said Sina Azodi, an Iran analyst at the Atlantic Council in Washington.

Iranian news media said the two vessels had an estimated combined capacity to carry 1.8 million barrels of oil and that their cargo was now in Iran’s possession.

Iran has a history of the retaliatory seizing of oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz in response to ships carrying its oil being stopped or confiscated. But the incident on Friday marked the first time in months that a foreign-flagged vessel was targeted by Iran.

The shadow war between Iran and Israel has also played out in the waters of the Persian Gulf, with the West accusing Iran of a drone attack on an Israeli-affiliated tanker that killed two European crew members in 2021. Iran denied it had a role in the attack

The flag march is an annual parade where mostly nationalist Jewish groups celebrate Israel gaining control of the Western Wall during the 1967 Six-Day War and capturing East Jerusalem, placing the entire city under Israeli control.

Russia’s major successful military operations under Mr. Putin — the defeat of Georgia in 2008 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014 — happened when the West was looking the other way. In both cases, the world was caught unawares and Russia could complete its designs without the threat of armed international opposition.

there’s no major domestic unrest and elections are two years away. Mr. Putin doesn’t require an expansionist escapade to either shore up his rule or distract the population from its troubles. War is a big red button that can be pushed only once. Right now, there’s no need.

instead of submitting, the United States went the other way and began arming Ukraine

why did Mr. Putin raise the stakes so high? The answer is simple: Afghanistan. The West’s disastrous withdrawal from the country in August signaled the United States’ waning appetite for entanglement abroad. Emboldened, Mr. Putin clearly decided it was a good time to press his case for a revision of the post-Cold War order.

he fell back on unpredictability. The more irrational his behavior, went the thinking, the more likely the United States would accept his demands.

The core request — that NATO deny membership to Ukraine — was silly in a different way. There was no chance of Ukraine becoming a member any time soon, ultimatum or not. But that was Mr. Putin’s point: By demanding something that was already happening, Mr. Putin aimed to claim a victory over the West.

The Ukrainian Army is much improved, having upscaled its equipment and preparations for a ground invasion, and the Russian troops deployed near the border are most likely insufficient to conquer the country. Because of its sheer bulk, the Russian Army might be able to advance: Quantity has a quality of its own, as Stalin reportedly said. But it would surely come at the cost of catastrophic losses in human life.

There is, perhaps, one certainty to hold on to: Mr. Putin will never start a war he’s likely to lose. So the only way to ensure peace is to guarantee that in a military confrontation, Mr. Putin would never win.

The attack on Friday broke a relative lull in violence in Peshawar, which has borne the brunt of Taliban militancy in recent years. Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, the interior minister, called the attack an attempt to “disrupt peace and tranquillity of the provincial capital,” according to state-run news media.

In May 2019, ISIS-K created a separate Pakistani chapter, which has carried out attacks in Baluchistan Province, targeting ethnic Hazara Shiites.

Last fall, ISIS-K carried out high-profile bombings at two Shiite mosques in Afghanistan, killing and wounding dozens.

A second mosque attack on Friday, in Paktia Province in Afghanistan, southwest of Peshawar, killed at least three people and wounded more than two dozen after an explosive device was detonated, according to a Taliban spokesman.

Linker’s description of Bushnell’s options and actions is measured and not without some respect:

Damon hops off the bus at the same point I do: Bushnell displayed a tremendous amount of courage, yes. But this was mated to an absolute moral certainty.

Every society needs both, because that is how we conserve our achievements while still working toward a more perfect order.

[Bushnell’s] choice of that word to describe Israel means he followed the “anti-colonial left” in viewing the interminable conflict in and around the Jewish state through the lens of Western imperialism across the “global south.” Viewed in this way, Israelis are rapacious oppressors, exploiters, unjustly stealing from the Palestinians, occupying their land, not just in the territories of the West Bank that are occupied under international law but likely in its entirety. That’s certainly how Hamas views the situation, with an added overlay of Islamist theofascism.

What would it be like, I wonder, to live in a world so morally simple, so neat and tidy, so devoid of tragic clashes, so orderly, with its heroes and villains, its Children of Light and its Children of Darkness? I really wouldn’t know. Because the world I inhabit is one permeated by ambiguity and people with mixed motives who are often (usually?) torn between competing moral considerations and imperatives, not a world divided between the absolutely good and the absolutely evil. The line between good and evil doesn’t run between East and West, or North and South, or white and black, or Israel and Palestine. It runs right through every human heart. Or at least most hearts.

This is where liberalism and conservatism meet, in the most elemental sense. The conservative impulse is to be suspicious of change because you are aware that things can always get worse, that systems are often too complex to be understood, that tail risk rules the world. The liberal impulse is to believe that agency is precious, that the world can be improved, that progress is both possible and desirable.

Linker notes that Bushnell referred to Israelis as “colonizers”:

Every governing system needs both, because that is how we channel passions out of the street and into political institutions.

And every person needs both, because that is how we avoid the epistemic certainty that can drive us to extremes of exuberance or despair.

The war in Gaza is a textbook example of the dangers of epistemic certainty, because it is too complicated, freighted with too much history, and too full of horrors to fit neatly on one side of the ledger or the other.

The 10/7 attack was an act of unconstrained barbarism that made it impossible for Israel to coexist with Hamas. Or at least: I am not aware of any proposed remedy that would have made coexistence possible without Israel becoming a fully militarized, illiberal state.

The Israeli response has at times violated the rules of war—sometimes of its own volition and sometimes because Hamas’s strategy has been to position assets in such a manner as to result in the deaths of as many Palestinian civilians as possible.

The suffering of the Palestinian people is real and of a magnitude that is almost impossible to comprehend.

And yet, the war continues because Hamas has no interest in a ceasefire. “We are not interested in engaging with what’s been floated, because it does not fulfill our demands,” one Hamas official told the media yesterday.

The world is messy. Life is messy. Often in ways which break the human heart. The project of liberal society, which requires equal measures of liberalism and conservatism, is to manage this messiness as well as possible.