A First Amendment lawyer argues the university’s role in a crisis should be shutting up.
The Israel-Hamas war has brought the long-simmering debates over free speech on college campuses to a boiling point.
If school leaders released statements, they were criticized — for not denouncing Hamas and antisemitism or for ignoring the Palestinian plight. On campus, both Jewish and Palestinian students say they aren’t getting support from administrators and staff. Campus protests have put pressure on school leaders to choose a side or curb student speech and behavior.
Emotions and fears are running high: Jewish students and student groups say they are fearful of antisemitism on campus. Palestinian students say they are facing Islamophobia and racism. Students who signed petitions that critics say supported Hamas in the wake of its October 7 attack are losing career opportunities or have been publicly named and investigated.
The leading group advocating for free speech on campus argues that the problem is not that universities are doing too little to stifle hateful speech; it’s that they have already done too much. Amid the major social and political catastrophes of the past decade, higher education institutions have strayed away from their mission: to foster dialogue and the flow of different ideas, said Alex Morey, the director of the campus rights advocacy program at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
Sometimes the free flow of dialogue can be uncomfortable, and FIRE often defends statements and individuals who are unpopular. Even as people on and off campus fear that heated rhetoric will lead to an increase in Islamophobic or antisemitic violence, Morey argues colleges should not stop their students from making statements that many find deeply upsetting or even dangerous. Instead, she said, colleges should focus on creating a safe environment where even jarring, hurtful, or racist notions can be discussed and debated.
It’s a lot to grapple with, and I talked to Morey about it all: school statements, student protests, faculty speech, whether words are violence, and why certain students are under more scrutiny than others. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Fabiola Cineas
What’s your broad assessment of how the conflict in the Middle East is playing out on college campuses?
Alex Morey
The zoom-out assessment is that it’s a really divisive topic. It’s a big controversy, whether you are looking at it on the ground in the Middle East, or if you are on a college campus. Wherever people are talking about what’s going on with Israelis and Palestinians, this is a hot-button issue.
Lots of people want to express their opinions about it, so it’s no surprise that on college campuses, we are seeing the same level of passion from students and faculty as we’re seeing from anybody who is confronting this long-running and really intractable conflict.
That said, FIRE is always urging colleges and universities and members of those communities, whether you’re a student or the president or a faculty member, to recognize the university’s very special role when it comes to confronting these problems. [Universities] are not corporations. [School leaders] are not politicians.
We have found in recent years that universities are acting a lot more like corporations when it comes to making statements about big political and social issues. They’re worrying about, “Well, how does this look for the brand?” or “If there’s controversy on campus, is that going to make legislators mad at us and take away our funding?” The focus has been removed from what we think is the core mission of the university, which is to foster debate and discussion. It is to welcome not just a diversity of students and faculty and help them thrive, but to also embrace a diversity of views. The college campus is the place to have people’s different authentic views come together, where we can have discussions in a scholarly and civil way. That isn’t a top priority for many universities, it seems, and that is a big mistake.
The Israel-Hamas conversation has seemed to wake administrators up, at least a bit, to the realization that if they continue their practice of taking firm sides on political and social issues, they will, repeatedly, arrive at places like this, where there are conflicts on which there is no “right” side.
Fabiola Cineas
You’re saying universities should not have come out to comment on Hamas’s attack on Israel or on Israel’s continued bombardment of Gaza. But we are now past that point at many schools, as you acknowledged.
Now some students and faculty members are facing consequences as part of this environment you describe in which universities are trying to be arbiters of right and wrong when it comes to speech and actions. In light of this, what are the foundational speech protections that students, faculty, and school leaders have on campus for speaking out on this issue?
Alex Morey
It depends on whether or not you’re on a public or private campus. Public campuses have to follow the First Amendment, which means students and faculty have broad First Amendment rights. Students can express their views on anything on campus. They can protest. They can hand out leaflets, or, in line with the university’s posting policies, hang up posters. They have broad First Amendment rights that would apply to anyone in society when they’re speaking off campus in their free time and in many of the areas on campus. There are exceptions for in the classroom. They can’t get up in the middle of class and be screaming or something because faculty also have First Amendment rights, including the right to academic freedom, which entails, among other things, the right for them to control their classroom.
Faculty also have strong academic freedom rights, which is like a corollary of the First Amendment, to make extramural commentary. That means that on their own time they can talk about things that are related to issues of public concern. So something as politically dicey as what’s happening in the Middle East is an incredibly important issue of public concern.
Administrators actually have fewer rights. Of course they have their rights as citizens when they’re off the clock, but because they are effectively employees of the university, their speech can be restricted in ways that we don’t see for faculty and students, who have much broader rights.
Private campuses that make free speech and academic freedom promises in their mission statements, which is most of them, have to keep those promises. These promises all basically say our students and faculty have free speech rights commensurate with the First Amendment.
Fabiola Cineas
And how does counterspeech fit into that framework of protections?
Alex Morey
Counterspeech is super important. The vision of the First Amendment is not just that people are allowed to say anything without the government suppressing it. It’s this idea that if we all talk together, we will have better outcomes for society. When somebody raises an idea that might be unpopular or wrongheaded or offensive, the idea is that other people will then lend their voices through counterspeech and say, “I disagree with that idea and here’s why. Here’s why my idea is better.”
Fabiola Cineas
That gets complicated in practice.
Alex Morey
There are some nuances that are really important, that illustrate how universities could be doing a better job of explaining this to students and faculty and deans who are in charge of making sure different speaking events and protests go off without a hitch.
One is that when students are speaking in open outdoor areas of campus, areas that function like a public square, if a heated back-and-forth occurs between students, that’s protected speech. We’ve been seeing this a lot in recent weeks, where there might be a pro-Israel protest on the quad and a pro-Palestinian student comes up and says, “You all are a bunch of jerks!” This is all protected as long as there is no physical altercation or true threat, which has a specific legal definition.
Then another situation we often see these issues raised is when it comes to invited speakers or situations where a student group has reserved a space for a speaker or their members to speak. There’s been a lot of confusion about, “Well, can’t a protest group come marching through this speech and shout it down? Isn’t that our free speech?” The Supreme Court has firmly said no, that’s called a heckler’s veto. It means if there is a particular forum that has been reserved for a particular type of speech, those students who are putting on that speaker or who are speaking, have the right to control that forum until they’re done speaking. What those protesters can do instead of censoring the speech is have space nearby outside the venue where they can protest contemporaneously.
Universities should support that kind of exchange and teach students it’s not actually free speech to shout down the speaker. They should facilitate that exchange of ideas. Relatedly, actions like ripping down posters also typically are not protected expression. Blocking access to or egress from buildings, trespassing, incitement — where you’re actively, intentionally encouraging someone to go commit a crime imminently and it’s likely that they will do it — those things are not protected. Most of what we see on campus is just students and some of the faculty having really heated debates and expressing opinions that a lot of people find hateful and offensive and that, without more, is all protected.
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Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
Fabiola Cineas
But I feel like since 2020, a facet of our society now — and this especially plays out on college campuses — is that students look to administrators’ and leaders’ messages to feel safe. There’s the example of how after 9/11, hate crimes against Muslims decreased after President Bush said that America will not tolerate Islamophobia. I spoke to the folks at Hillel International who told me Jewish students on campus don’t feel safe because they don’t believe they have the support of school leadership. A lawyer at Palestine Legal told me Muslim students don’t feel supported right now. And when they say support, it’s not necessarily like, are there more officers on campus to protect our safety, but it’s like, what is the administration communicating in its statement that can help us feel safe?
Alex Morey
This is probably the most important change that we need to see on campuses if we are going to have the kind of speech and debate climate that’s ideal in these university spaces.
There’s been a lot of research about how this generation of students is dealing with more mental health issues than in other generations. One reason is these students have had very intensive parenting that didn’t expose them to views or ideas that could upset them. Now when they get to campus, they have similar expectations, that they can go to someone to say, “Fix this for me, I’m upset.” But universities really need to help teach them that words and ideas are incredibly powerful, but so are they. They can confront a lot of these ideas with confidence.
They need the skills to understand, “Why is it important to listen to people that I might not agree with? What are the contours of listening to an idea that I disagree with? I am actually strong enough to be able to handle that, and, in fact, it’s so much better than when these ideas have to be pushed underground and they fester, that they turn into actual violence.”
There are benefits of genuinely confronting these ideas. We need to help students learn that while words and ideas are incredibly powerful, not only are they not “violence,” but, in fact, they’re the opposite of violence. And they are the best way that we, as humans, have ever devised to work out our problems without killing each other or without jailing each other.
Fabiola Cineas
Is all speech being treated the same right now? Are students who are speaking out in support of Israel being treated the same as students who speak out for Palestinian rights?
Alex Morey
It depends on who you ask. That’s the heart of all of the discussion of “hate speech” right now. Like, if you say, “Free Palestine,” then you must mean that you’re pro-Hamas. Or if you say, “release the hostages,” then that must mean you are cool with genocide in Gaza. Of course, it’s much more nuanced than that. A lot of people are justifying not wanting to talk to each other because they think these are just war criminals on both sides.
From a First Amendment perspective, there should be no value judgment on speech other than is it protected or not. And when we’re asking that question, we’re asking, should the government or the institution that promises First Amendment commitments, should we put them in charge of deciding which is the appropriate view to have on Israel-Palestine?
We think the key to navigating these incredibly divisive and polarized times that are now in front of us, unlike any time in the past, is to have universities not take a stance on these issues for exactly the reason you raise. At the University of Arizona recently, the president came out saying, “We condemn Hamas.” He also basically said, “I’m really nervous about the [Students for Justice in Palestine] chapter on our campus speaking up about Palestine and liberation, they’re going to do a rally on our campus and they have the right to do that, but I don’t really like it. It doesn’t align with our values.”
Then SJP immediately canceled the rally and said they didn’t feel safe doing it on campus. That was a grave situation in which nobody’s First Amendment rights were violated since everybody who was speaking and counterspeaking had the right to do that. But when that speech is coming from the institution itself, an institution that is supposed to embrace all views, the effect is that some views can be marginalized.
We’re seeing many situations of students being investigated, like Ryna Workman, who lost her big law job for saying Israel bears responsibility for the loss of life in Israel. NYU said they are investigating her. We are definitely seeing the pro-Palestinian type of speech being less popular writ large on many campuses. One thing universities can do to signal that they are not elevating some protected speech over other protected speech is for the institution itself to not start from a place of bias.
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Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
Fabiola Cineas
You mention that students who are articulating pro-Palestinian views are being disproportionately challenged on their speech. Why do you think that is?
Alex Morey
It’s probably because the pro-Palestinian students do feel more like the minority on most campuses, and because often they are. And so they feel less empowered and less supported by the university. If universities had come out and said, “We stand with the people of Gaza. End genocide now,” it might be a totally different situation where Palestinian students were feeling like their speech is the one that is important on campus.
And then in broader society, we’re not seeing employers take people’s jobs because they condemned Hamas. The people that stand with Gaza, they’re the ones losing their jobs. The US government is fully behind Israel. Beyond campus, there’s this sense that most people are generally pro-Israel at this moment. So students who are pro-Palestine probably feel like their speech is unpopular and we’re seeing that play out on campuses. I don’t think we’ve yet had a situation where a pro-Israel student or professor is facing some kind of censorship attempt from the university. I could be mistaken but there’s lots coming from the other direction.
Fabiola Cineas
What’s your assessment of how campus protests have played out? They appear to have gotten heated, with clashes between dueling protests. Jewish students are fearful that some pro-Palestine rallies have been antisemitic. There have been images of students with signs that say “keep the world clean” accompanied by an image of the Israeli flag in the trash. Palestinian students and advocates report being shut down.
Alex Morey
It’s all protected, as long as that’s all there is. As long as there is no true threat.
Fabiola Cineas
What is a true threat in this context?
Alex Morey
A true threat is a serious expression of an intent to commit unlawful violence that’s targeted toward a person or a specific group of people, like “Those people over there, we’re going to do something bad to them.” It’s a very high bar, so even stuff that people find very offensive or wrongheaded, like the Star of David in the trash can, is all protected unless there is some kind of substantial step that moves it toward meeting that true threat threshold.
Fabiola Cineas
And how are incitement and discriminatory harassment different?
Alex Morey
Incitement is a statement in which the speaker is asking people to commit an unlawful act of violence. Again, it has to be targeted in the way that a true threat would need to be targeted, and it also has to be likely to occur.
A lot of this generalized, very heated rhetoric around Israel and Palestine is not going to meet that high bar. It’s the same with discriminatory harassment. In higher ed, discriminatory harassment is only those unwelcome statements that are so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive. It is typically repetitive, targeted conduct or speech that is so serious that it deprives the victim of their ability to get an education at the university. So just walking around campus seeing a poster [with hateful language], that’s going to be upsetting. That’s going to make you want to speak out and counter that, but you can just walk away and still go to class.
Of course, universities can speak to campus communities and say, “Look, to the extent that our Jewish or Palestinian students are feeling unsupported or are worried that some of this speech might devolve into violence, here are the steps we’re taking.” And those steps can include ramping up security, providing the contact information for campus safety, and providing mental health resources, other health resources.
Universities can do what they can to make sure that they are creating a campus that’s not a tinderbox for violence. But beyond that, it is very important under the First Amendment that colleges and universities not try to sanitize or civilize a lot of this speech that is heated and passionate for a reason.
Fabiola Cineas
I am still trying to understand how really antisemitic or racist or Islamophobic/anti-Palestinian statements are akin to saying “Fuck the draft,” particularly in this climate.
Alex Morey
It’s a tough one. But I’ve got the answer for you. A lot of people are saying “hate speech isn’t protected speech.” But hate speech is protected speech because there is no legal definition of hate speech.
Israel thinks the Palestinians are engaging in hate speech and the Palestinians think Israel is engaging in hate speech. And who’s right? We can’t know. That’s sort of the idea that’s embraced by the First Amendment, that one man’s vulgarity is another man’s lyric.
Another example is stomping on the American flag. Some people think that we can all agree that stomping on the American flag is unpatriotic and hateful. But you could argue that the person stomping on the American flag loves America too, but maybe they don’t love how it’s being run right now and it’s their First Amendment right to raise those concerns.
The key Supreme Court case that talks about hate speech and why it has to be protected is Snyder v. Phelps, which is the Westboro Baptist Church case in which the church was outside military funerals with signs and shirts that said, “Thank God for dead soldiers” and “Fag troops.” The parents of some of these soldiers sued the church since they believed that the speech was so disgusting. The families believed that that kind of hate speech wasn’t protected.
But the Supreme Court unanimously said the church’s speech is protected. It’s because speech is so powerful. It can make people very upset. It can prompt people to do things and make change and raise their own voices in protest. In the US, we have a unique commitment to leaving debate as wide open as possible so that we don’t stifle debate.
Fabiola Cineas
Are there international comparisons that help us illustrate why America is so committed to protecting speech, even if it’s hate speech?
Alex Morey
There have been attempts in other countries, [in] Europe, France and Germany, in particular, to pass antisemitism laws that make it illegal to say stuff like “I hate the Jews.” But there are a couple of interesting things about those antisemitism laws, about how they don’t work.
One, we have seen uneven implementation of those laws. For example, when the Charlie Hebdo newsroom was shot up because they were making fun of the Prophet Muhammad, a lot of Muslims were saying they’ve been talking about issues that are important in the Muslim community but were being targeted under the antisemitism law. There have been Muslims put in jail for violating the antisemitism law when they were making statements like, “Maybe I can see why some of these Muslims are acting in violent ways.” Muslims have been jailed in France for that, but the Charlie Hebdo staff were making fun of Muslims and it was no big deal.
Separately, Germany has some of the strictest antisemitism laws, where you can’t make certain statements about Jews. And they’ve also got the biggest underground growing ultra-right Nazi crisis — that German authorities can’t keep track of — in the world because we don’t know where these Nazis are. They can’t say this stuff, but they still hold those views.
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Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
Fabiola Cineas
There’s the sense right now that this kind of hate speech is widespread, that students all across America are engaging in some kind of charged speech that is disrupting the ability of campuses to function right now. And the war in the Middle East is only intensifying. Is it the case that speech is getting worse on campuses because it is going unchecked?
Alex Morey
I think, broadly, those kinds of very extreme statements are not rampant on college campuses. I know we have seen an uptick in this really heated rhetoric in the last few weeks. But a lot of the pushback that I get during this free speech work is like, well, if we allow speech to be that free, then KKK groups are going to be popping up on campuses everywhere. That is not happening. Most people are decent people who want to have these conversations, so universities should be fostering them rather than taking action to silence students.
Fabiola Cineas
Can you talk about why you believe it feels so charged to call someone antisemitic right now, or to call someone a Zionist? Students are saying they’re afraid of being called one or the other, or are being called terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. Are these terms being weaponized in some way and why?
Alex Morey
The zeitgeist for many people is to take a single view that someone might have and extrapolate that to an extreme, and say, “Well, if you believe this one thing then you must believe all these other things.”
People are seeing that happening, and they’re very worried about being misunderstood. I don’t think there’s a lot of recognition in the world right now that people are more than just one particular view. We’re nuanced, complicated creatures. We’re afraid of what’s happening in our world right now and we want to be in our little boxes and look for any signal from other groups that they might be a danger to us.
Hezbollah and other Iran-backed groups support Hamas, but haven’t opened new fronts
In his first public statement about Israel’s war with Hamas, Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday indicated that the Shia militant group — though supportive of Hamas’ bloody October 7 attack on Israel — wouldn’t be opening up another front in the war just yet.
Hezbollah, which the US and other countries have designated as a terror group, has engaged in cross-border firefights with Israel since the October 7 attack. That’s not particularly new; there is regularly low-level conflict across the so-called Blue Line, the line of demarcation between Lebanon and Israel, which UN peacekeepers have been deployed to monitor since 2006. But given its proximity to the conflict and Hezbollah’s close affiliation with Iran, it’s a possible front to expand the war.
Lebanon is not the only place at risk of spillover conflict; Iran-backed militias have been attacking US forces in Iraq and Syria, launching 27 attacks at US bases since October 17 after several months without any such attacks. And the Houthis, an Iran-backed Shia group which controls much of southern Yemen, have lobbed missiles and drones in Israel’s direction, though those have been intercepted by US warships in the eastern Mediterranean, as well as by Israeli missile defense systems. “The Iranians are happy to activate their proxy groups and let other people do the fighting and dying — and frankly a lot of the proxy groups are happy to do the fighting and dying,” Jon Alterman, president of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Vox.
Iran, to varying degrees, funds and provides resources to each of these groups, as well as Hamas. “Iran’s relationship with other groups really fits onto a spectrum,” Ali Vaez, director of the Iran project at the International Crisis Group, told Vox. “At one side of the spectrum you have Hezbollah, because Iran’s relationship with Hezbollah is really like two NATO allies.” Hezbollah has only Iran as a state backer, while Hamas and militant groups in Iraq and Syria have relationships with other nations.
Though Nasrallah and Iranian leadership have praised Hamas’ attack and threatened retaliation for Israel’s aggressive bombing and ground campaign in Gaza — whether through a proxy group or outright — a “red line” for doing so isn’t clear nearly a month into the war.
All of these groups give Iran options about where and how it wants to send messages to its adversaries — the US and Israel — while ostensibly giving the Islamic Republic a measure of plausible deniability. But this tactic is not without risk, especially without direct diplomatic channels between the adversaries.
“To me, there are two ways this could expand: one is by calculation, and one is by miscalculation,” Alterman said. Iran likely would not want to attack Israel or the US decisively and directly, but an error or a step too far by Iran or any of its proxies could push the conflict outside the bounds of Gaza. “At a time of heightened alert … somebody’s missile could go awry, it may kill somebody. You could have commanders who are freelancing,” or working outside the directions of Iran or another proxy group,”anything can happen, and you can get yourself into a pretty rapid escalation pretty quickly.”
Hezbollah has fought Israel before — and it’s better-equipped now
Though none of the proxy groups would act without Iran’s go-ahead, Hezbollah is in lock-step with Iran ideologically and tactically; Nasrallah and his group are not acting independently. But Lebanon has its own longstanding conflict with Israel, and Hezbollah plays a big role in that.
Israelhas occupied the Shebaa farms area, which was once part of southern Lebanon, since 1967, and invaded southern Lebanon in 1978 and 1982, ultimately occupying part of the country south of the Litani river until 2000. Lebanon was in the midst of a brutal, sectarian civil war, and Hezbollah emerged in the early 1980s in part to serve and represent the Shia population in the south, which was being marginalized by the Lebanese Christian ruling minority as well as an influx of Sunni Muslim Palestinian refugees and resistance groups, upsetting Lebanon’s precarious political balance.
Over time, and with significant Iranian support, Hezbollah emerged as a potent political and militant force in southern Lebanon and on the national stage. Militarily, Hezbollah aimed to push the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) out of southern Lebanon. When Hezbollah in July 2006 fired rockets at Israeli positions and crossed the border to kill and kidnap IDF soldiers, Israel attacked Lebanon, setting off just over a month of war until a UN-mediated ceasefire took effect August 14.
Since that conflict, Hezbollah has grown its capabilities; Nasrallah claims his group has 100,000 fighters, thousands of whom have been honing their skills by supporting Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria over the past 12 years. Iran has also maintained its support, helping the group obtain a vast arsenal of rockets and artillery, including longer-range Iranian models with higher payloads. Hezbollah also now possesses the ability to retrofit older rockets and turn them into precision-guided missiles, according to Reuters. That means Hezbollah could fire deeper into Israel and target critical infrastructure.
Hezbollah is also a political actor, holding 62 seats as part of a coalition in Lebanon’s parliament. It lost a number of seats in the last round of elections and a war would be extremely unpopular in Lebanon, which is undergoing both a political and economic crisis; the country has been without a government for a year, and its currency, the lira, is at an all-time low value of 100,000 to the dollar. US officials have met with the Lebanese caretaker government in an effort to try and prevent the conflict from spreading into Lebanon.
Hezbollah maintaining power in Lebanon also means Iran keeping power in the country — power which it aims to deploy when necessary. “Once Iran needs to use Hezbollah, they will, despite what happens to Lebanon,” Hanin Ghaddar, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy told Vox. And though it has a larger ground force than Hamas “they would be running up against probably 100,000 fully alert, dug-in Israeli troops — and that is a suicidal mission,” James Jeffrey former US special envoy to the Coalition to Defeat ISIS, told Vox. For now, Iran has likely calculated the threat of Hezbollah’s increased missile arsenal is enough to keep Israel from taking significant action in Lebanon.
Hamas officials have met with Hezbollah senior leaders in Lebanon — and likely encouraged them to do more to support Hamas or otherwise challenge Israel, Ghaddar said. But whether they do so will depend entirely on Iran, Ghaddar said. “Hezbollah’s job today is to protect Iranian interests, not to support Hamas or the Palestinians.”
Though Hamas and Hezbollah do coordinate regarding attacks on Israel, Ghaddar said, “Hamas’ expectation was a lot more [support]” against Israel. “I think what happened is [Hamas] realized they are being thrown into the fire for Iran to establish certain political gains,” such as scuttling normalization processes between Israel and Arab states. ‘Hezbollah’s job is to protect these gains and help Iran use the Hezbollah threat to translate these gains into more political, economic gains. And Hamas really has been duped into this [conflict].”
More peripheral groups also present a risk
The US, meanwhile, has launched multiple airstrikes against proxy groups in Iraq and Syria since attacks on US installations resumed on October 17. But rather than real threats of a new front in the war, these and Houthi missiles launched toward Israel look more like a signal of Iran’s displeasure about Israel and the US’ military actions than they do a real threat of escalation — for now.
“There is a core network of Iranian-controlled groups in Iraq that run these front groups” which are carrying out rocket attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria, according to Phillip Smyth, an independent analyst who focuses on Hezbollah and jihadi groups in the region. Several core jihadi groups affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Force, or IRGC, are directing a number of front groups in Iraq and Syria.
These groups have been launching rocket attacks since about 2020, after the assassination of Qasem Suleimani, a revered leader in the Iranian military. Some of the groups have been around much longer — since 2005 at least — and are trusted allies of the Iranian regime. They’re unlikely to deviate from Iran’s strategy and interests in the region. But other, smaller front groups aren’t necessarily quite so closely aligned, Smyth said, and can sometimes mistakenly go off-course or outright flout Iran’s orders.
Hamas official Osama Hamdan did meet with the leader of the front group Asaib Ahl Al Haq, according to the UAE outlet the National. Hamdan told Lebanese pro-Iran TV channel Al Mayadeen that Hamas is ”looking forward to an important role to be played by Iraq for the Palestinian cause.”
But that meeting doesn’t signal that these front groups will do anything more than lob rockets at US military installations — unless Iran decides it serves their interest.
As for the Houthis, many factions of the group are intensely loyal to Iran, but they have their own interests, too — namely regaining control in Yemen. For 1,000 years a Zaydi Shia imamate ruled Yemen, but it was overthrown in 1962 and Yemen’s Zaydi Muslims — of which the Houthis are part — were stripped of their political power. The Houthi movement started in the 1990s, as a protest against increasing Saudi financial and religious power in northern Yemen. Iran and Hezbollah support the Houthis because they see the Houthis as part of a Shia revival and struggle against Sunni Islam.
Yemen has been in a brutal civil war between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed central government, creating the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, according to the UN. Though the Houthis have made gestures of solidarity with Hamas by launching rockets, they’re also unlikely to open up another front in the war simply because they have their own concerns, namely trying to negotiate a political settlement and officially end the conflict. There’s also the issue of serious, unrelenting poverty in Yemen and increased terrorist violence by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
Iran, for its part, also has significant domestic problems that make it difficult to imagine they’d risk direct conflict with the US and Israel; the government and the Supreme Leader are extremely unpopular, as evidenced by widespread protests over the past year. Surging poverty, unemployment, and inflation are further angering ordinary Iranians; open conflict isn’t likely to help the government’s problems.
Public sentiment in the US, though generally supportive of Israel, would not support further US involvement in the Middle East. And growing protests against the war and calls for an immediate ceasefire given the devastation Israel has brought on Palestinian civilians in Gaza are pushing US officials to de-escalate the conflict.
Israel has thus far ignored those calls —from the US, its neighbors, and from its own citizens. So far in the conflict IDF strikes have killed 9,488 Palestinians according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and 12 Hamas leaders, according to the IDF.
What history can — and can’t — tell us about the hope for a Gaza ceasefire.
The last time that Israel and Hamas engaged in hostilities that had the potential to ignite a larger war was in May 2021. At the time, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan flew to Cairo and worked with Egyptian officials to negotiate a ceasefire. He drew from his own experience: In November 2012, as an aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he and his Egyptian counterparts had locked in a ceasefire after a different outburst of conflict.
So I found it revealing about where this war currently stands, and how different it is from the past, when Clinton dismissed any possibility of a ceasefire while speaking last week at Rice University’s Baker Institute. “People who are calling for a ceasefire now do not understand Hamas. That is not possible,” she said. “It would be such a gift to Hamas, because they would spend whatever time there was a ceasefire in effect rebuilding their armaments, creating stronger positions to be able to fend off an eventual assault by the Israelis.”
Historically, these ceasefires have worked for both Israel and Hamas, until they haven’t.
But the previous logic of Israel-Hamas wars no longer holds after the October 7 attacks on Israel, in which 1,400 people were killed and 242 people were taken hostage. That has fundamentally altered Israel’s security thinking: It now wants to eliminate Hamas entirely. Israel’s existential catastrophe has changed its approach to security, as we’re seeing through its intensive bombardment of Gaza and its ongoing ground incursion, with more than 9,000 Palestinians killed, including 3,000 children.
“The technique before was to convince the Israelis that Hamas can be under control,” Nabeel Khoury, a career US diplomat focused on the Middle East who retired as a minister-counselor, told me. “Israelis are way beyond that. They want something much more radical than what happened in the past.”
The fact that nearly everyone powerful in the US is also rejecting a ceasefire now doesn’t mean one is impossible. What it shows is that Israel just doesn’t want one, period, and the US has largely followed Israel’s lead.
The old paradigm of ceasefires between Israel and Hamas appears to have been broken, but that doesn’t mean that the many examples of the two parties engaging in talks and upholding agreements are not relevant. Even with Israel locked in what it sees as an existential battle with Hamas, the door isn’t, and can’t be, totally closed to diplomacy.
There are lessons about who can exert pressure; who has the expertise to work with Hamas; how these talks happen behind closed doors; and, crucially, how the US can play a key role in Israel’s decision-making.
With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisting Friday that Israel will continue its military operations in Gaza “with full force,” it seems that a ceasefire will only come from a US initiative. Biden hinted as much and discussed the need for a humanitarian “pause” and the release of hostages when interrupted by a protester at a Minnesota event on Wednesday, and the next day Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to the Middle East. As the death toll among Palestinians has grown, the Biden administration has continually readjusted its language with a recognition of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and the need for a political process that would culminate in a Palestinian state.
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Jonathan Ernst/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
But perhaps the most important lesson to take from those ceasefires past is that they were, in a certain sense, failures: They couldn’t hold in the long-term because they were not tied to a bigger political framework that could lead to a Palestinian state alongside Israel. They ultimately proved unsatisfactory both for the situation of Palestinians in Gaza, and throughout the occupied territories, and for Israel’s own sense of security. That they were ceasefires alone meant they wouldn’t lead to anything that could secure the future for Israelis and Palestinians.
However this immediate violence ends — Israel declaring victory, a ceasefire, or something else — ultimately the war will only be resolved by difficult diplomacy and US leadership toward a Palestinian state.
How previous Israel-Hamas wars have ended, briefly explained
Since 2007, Hamas and the state of Israel have existed in a “violent equilibrium,” as Tareq Baconi of the Palestinian research network Al-Shabaka describes it. That year, Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip after winning the 2006 Palestinian elections; Israel then imposed a crippling blockade on the territory. That led to extreme rates of poverty in Gaza; over 60 percent of people need food assistance, and access to health care is extremely limited. About a quarter of Palestinians in Gaza, and nearly 80 percent of youth, are unemployed.
“What we see is every few years, or really every few months, a situation occurs where Hamas fires rockets at Israel, when the restrictions of the blockade become too stifling, and essentially force an escalation where a ceasefire is eventually negotiated, and Israel is forced to ease restrictions into the blockade,” Baconi said recently on The Dig podcast.
A review of the recent Israel-Hamas wars shows that after each conflict stopped, that violent equilibrium was restored. At times there were peace talks, but they were not really tied to a bigger political process that could lead to a larger settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009 lasted 22 days. In the conflict, 1,400 Palestinians, among them at least 759 civilians, were killed, as well as 10 Israeli soldiers and three civilians. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice worked to secure a ceasefire. “We need urgently to conclude a ceasefire that can endure and that can bring real security,” she told the UN on January 6, 2009. “This would begin a period of true calm that includes an end to rocket, mortar, and other attacks on Israelis, and allows for the cessation of Israel’s military offensive.”
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This all came on the eve of President Barack Obama coming into the White House. He initially prioritized talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and put limited pressure on Israel to halt the construction of new settlements in the occupied West Bank. Despite that, little progress was made.
That ceasefire held until November 2012, with an eight-day conflict between Israel and Hamas; 167 Palestinians and six Israelis died. Clinton was secretary of state, and Sullivan played a key role in negotiating a ceasefire.
That truce broke in the summer of 2014, when a 50-day war between Israel and Hamas left 2,251 Palestinians dead, among them 1,462 civilians, and 67 Israeli soldiers and six civilians. Talks between Israelis and Palestinians had collapsed the spring before and have not relaunched since.
Each time, the US and Egypt have played important roles in cementing these ceasefires, even as Egypt and Israel restricted movement in and out of the occupied territory of Gaza. Since the US designates Hamas a terrorist group, it depends on third parties for talks with the militant group. “Negotiating between Israel and Hamas has been one of the niche kind of activities that Egypt specialized in,” Ezzedine Choukri Fishere, a former Egyptian diplomat, told me. “For the last 16 years, the Egyptian policy on Gaza has been a stopgap — de-escalate.” In more recent years, Turkey and Qatar have also held indirect talks with Hamas.
When the Biden White House faced another Israel-Hamas conflict in May 2021, US officials followed the playbook from the two wars that happened under Obama — prevent UN Security Council resolutions and work the backchannel with Hamas. The war lasted 11 days in May 2021, killing 230 Palestinians and 12 Israelis. The lesson Biden took from the Obama years was that all clashes with Israel must happen in private if at all, that there should be no daylight between the countries, and that conflict between allies is detrimental to the point of being unbearable.
So Biden’s method to ending the May 2021 conflict was quiet diplomacy with Prime Minister Netanyahu. The US blocked United Nations resolutions and stood by Israel, to a point. Biden “held his tongue” when he learned that Netanyahu’s military operation had “no defined objective,” as journalist Franklin Foer recounts in his book The Last Politician. After four phone calls between the two leaders, Biden was blunt to Netanyahu: “Hey man, we’re out of runway here … It’s over.” And then it was.
What’s different this time
This Middle East war could last longer than any recent previous conflict between Israel and Hamas. The scope of Hamas’s attack, the ensuing Israeli bombardment and ground incursion, and the level of the death toll is already much more drastic than previous rounds of violence.
The understandable focus on the destruction of Gaza and the tremendous loss of human life there perhaps obscures what has really happened from an Israeli point of view. “I don’t think there’s enough appreciation of the impact of October 7,” Fishere, who is now a visiting professor at Dartmouth College, told me. “For Israel, this is a new moment. This is not a repetition.”
Netanyahu says Israel’s goals are the elimination of Hamas and the return of hostages.
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Gili Yaari/NurPhoto via Getty Images
But it’s not at all clear how Hamas could be removed with force alone — and should it be, what party would govern Gaza. US and Israeli officials have floated trial balloons in unattributed quotes to the press that include a new Palestinian Authority, Egypt stepping in, or a multinational force, and Biden has urged Israel not to take over the territory.
None of those would be good options. Any day-after plan for Gaza would require some buy-in from Hamas leadership — an agreement that its military wing and affiliated forces like Islamic Jihad would drop their weapons.
This is the paradox: The ferocity of October 7 has convinced Israeli leadership that it must utterly destroy Hamas, yet there is little evidence it can achieve that goal. In the past, Israel was satisfied with damaging the militant group before settling into a ceasefire state. But this time, Israel is not seeking the kind of cessation of hostilities that defined the end to four previous rounds of conflict. “The only possible ceasefire would be a ceasefire that disarmed Hamas,” Fishere says. “And I don’t think anybody can offer that.”
But there is another difference to this war: Hamas is holding 242 hostages, a number that dwarfs previous instances of hostage-taking. That gives Hamas leverage, and pretty much precludes Israel from agreeing to unilaterally stop its assault on Gaza.
In public, there seems to be no path forward: Hamas has said that it won’t negotiate over the hostages until there is a ceasefire, and Israel seems to say it would only go for a ceasefire with unconditional release of hostages.
What has been floated is a temporary ceasefire — a situation where Hamas’s hostages are exchanged, in essence, for a respite from the fighting and, likely, the release of Palestinian prisoners.
The exact mechanics of such exchanges are closely held secrets. The Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin worked directly with a Hamas interlocutor to secure the release of Gilad Shalit, who in 2011 was exchanged for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners and Hamas members. “Negotiating for the release of hostages may also be less popular this time around,” Baskin wrote in an opinion column for the New York Times earlier this month. The price for the hostages would be just as high as before.
Israel has a moral responsibility to bring home all of the hostages. Israel failed to provide security for them. The proposal: all of the hostages for all of the Palestinian prisoners is very difficult to accept but Israel must consider it & if yes, it has to be done quickly.
— Gershon Baskin جرشون باسكين (@gershonbaskin) October 30, 2023