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The House of Representatives passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act last week in a bipartisan vote of 320 to 91. “Antisemitism is on the rise,” it declares, and is “impacting Jewish students.”Bigotry against Jews is vile and warrants the nation’s attention. As President Joe Biden said Tuesday at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, “This hatred continues to lie deep in the hearts of too many people in the world and requires our continued vigilance.” But the Antisemitism Awareness Act is the wrong way to fight those ills. If passed by the Senate and signed into law, it would codify a controversial definition of anti-Semitism (among its 11 specific examples of anti-Semitic rhetoric: “The existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor”). And it would direct the Department of Education to consider that definition when judging complaints against colleges under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which says that no person, on the grounds of race, color, or national origin, can be “excluded from participation” in a program, denied its benefits, or “be subjected to discrimination.”Interpreting Title VI has always been difficult and contested, particularly when speech that is protected by the First Amendment is alleged to be discriminatory as well. The act should be rejected by the Senate. Its definition of anti-Semitism is too expansive to serve as a unifying standard in academia, and it doubles down on an approach to antidiscrimination that chills free speech while failing to reduce hate.[Conor Friedersdorf: How October 7 changed America’s free-speech culture]Title VI wasn’t originally intended to apply to Jewish students. Passed during the civil-rights movement to address resistance to basic equality for Black Americans, the law does not prohibit discrimination on the basis of religion, and Jews were not considered a race. Jewish students nonetheless confronted anti-Semitism on campus, and concerned observers began to argue that, when Jewish students were targeted as members of an ethnic group rather than as a religious group, Title VI should protect them.Kenneth L. Marcus helped make that happen. In 2004, while heading the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, he issued policy guidance to colleges clarifying that Jews would be subject to Title VI protections insofar as they were mistreated on the basis of ethnicity rather than religion. Shortly thereafter, in a law-review article fleshing out what would and wouldn’t violate the Title VI rights of Jewish students, he set forth standards that did not seem to threaten free speech, noting that things that students and teachers do or say on campus, “although arguably anti-Semitic, do not rise to the level of harassment.” These included “anti-Israel or anti-Zionist academic literature, Holocaust denial, anti-Zionist bias in programs of Middle East studies,” and “anti-Israel boycotts.” Student-on-student harassment “may be actionable,” he added, if it is “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive,” and negatively affects the “ability to receive an education.”Extending Title VI protections to Jews proved a positive and enduring civil-rights achievement. The Obama administration later endorsed it, as did President Donald Trump and President Biden. But over the years, general changes in how the Civil Rights Act is interpreted by bureaucrats have lowered the threshold for violations. “The Obama Administration pushed schools to address harassment before it ‘becomes severe or pervasive’ to prevent the creation of ‘a hostile environment,’” the Brookings Institution wrote in a 2020 analysis of Title IX, another section of the Civil Rights Act giving rise to jurisprudence that informed Title VI enforcement.Meanwhile, people intent on protecting Jewish students evolved in their thinking about anti-Semitism. They perceived a rise in attacks on Jews that were disguised as attacks on Israel. In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) adopted a working definition of anti-Semitism that offered 11 illustrations of it. It contained consensus examples, such as “calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews,” as well as more controversial examples that pertained to Israel, including: Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations. Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor. Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation. Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis. During the Trump administration, the Department of Education started using this new definition in Title VI complaints. That didn’t make it unlawful to say anything on campus defined as anti-Semitic. Rather, when studying whether a Jewish student had been mistreated because of their ethnicity, or for some reason not covered by Title VI, bureaucrats considered whether speech deemed relevant to the case met the definition of anti-Semitism.Still, free-speech advocates had good reason to worry. Suddenly, college administrators intent on minimizing exposure to Title VI investigations had a new incentive to crack down on even protected speech that the state defined as anti-Semitic. The IHRA definition was further entrenched in 2019, when Trump issued an “executive order on combating anti-Semitism” that told the government to adopt it. Biden did not rescind the order.If the Antisemitism Awareness Act passes, that approach, including the reliance on the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, will not only continue but will also be codified in law rather than subject to revision by future appointees at the Department of Education.Earlier this week, the Department of Education published a “Dear Colleague” letter suggesting that protected speech alone can give rise to a hostile campus environment that requires administrators to respond in some way, even if they cannot punish the speech in question. It states that “a university can, among other steps, communicate its opposition to stereotypical, derogatory opinions; provide counseling and support for students affected by harassment; or take steps to establish a welcoming and respectful school campus.” This seems to create an incentive for preemptive crackdowns on protected speech by administrators who want to avoid federal investigations. The guidance could lead to the hiring of still more administrators assigned to police speech, manage student concerns about it, and lead DEI-style initiatives aimed at anti-Semitism as distinct from anti-racism. That’s my prediction regardless of whether the Antisemitisim Awareness Act becomes law. When the House voted to pass it, proponents sought to alleviate concerns by noting that its definition of anti-Semitisim has been used by bureaucrats for years. Although true, that raises a tough question for the bill’s supporters: If the Department of Education has deployed that definition for six years, even as anti-Semitism exploded on campuses, why is putting that definition into law a promising way forward? It has clearly failed to prevent Jewish students from experiencing a hostile climate.So why entrench it, given the free-speech concerns? The law professor David Bernstein, a defender of the act, believes it would help address a double standard. Currently, he observes, Title VI is used as “an excuse to try to censor speech that offends woke sensibilities,” whereas “antisemitic speech that might contribute to a hostile environment is treated with much more equanimity.” That double standard is “illegal discrimination against Jewish students,” he writes. “Things won’t get any better,” he thinks, “unless the left is forced to apply the standards it pushes in favorable contexts to contexts it doesn’t like.”But this logic will only lead to escalation. The First Amendment expert Eugene Volokh offers a hypothetical example in a post explaining why he opposes the Antisemitism Awareness Act. Imagine that Kamala Harris is president, he writes, and enacts a statute that codifies examples of anti-Palestinian discrimination––such as denying Palestinians their right to self-determination, and comparing Palestinian attitudes toward Jews to those of the Nazis. Many people would be concerned that these examples “were likely to (and probably intended to) deter people from expressing their political views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Volokh points out.The Antisemitism Awareness Act is similarly objectionable. And if it passes constitutional muster, an analogous law to define anti-Palestinian bigotry is not only presumably lawful––it is, I think, likely to be proposed and passed into law one day. Both sides in the American debate over Israel and Palestine will have an ongoing incentive to lobby for new antidiscrimination standards, both to satisfy their understandable desire for equal treatment and to chill the speech of their rivals.“Antisemitism should be treated like other forms of bigotry,” Cathy Young argues in an essay for The Bulwark. “But the remedy for double standards is to move away from policies that police and penalize controversial or even offensive but non-harassing campus speech, not to extend those policies to more varieties of speech and more identities.”I agree.University administrators are constantly regulating speech that is protected by the First Amendment. In the name of antidiscrimination, deans at Ivy League universities have tried to police matters as trifling as edgy Halloween costumes and slang on law-school party flyers. I favor opposing discrimination. I favor protecting speech. Colleges are too inept at both projects to excel at either when vague, constantly reinterpreted regulations prompt continuous monitoring of speech.What if, instead of defining and suppressing mere speech about Israel and Palestine that crosses some threshold of bigotry, Americans recognized that colleges in a pluralistic, multiethnic society include lots of students who hold all sorts of discriminatory beliefs? And that part of being an educated person is learning how to respond to people with wrongheaded viewpoints, and even to persuade those people to abandon them?[Conor Friedersdorf: Free speech is not just for conservatives]After all, the problem is that people hold bigoted views, not that they say them aloud. Whatever happens with Title VI, and the Antisemitism Awareness Act’s attempts to entrench a particular approach to enforcing it, lots of people aligned with Palestine will continue to hold positions that many Jews understandably interpret as hostile. Lots of people aligned with Israel will continue to hold positions that many Palestinians understandably interpret as hostile. How could it be otherwise? If hostile-feeling positions become unsayable on campus even as they are widespread in society, academia will become irrelevant in a vital debate, denying all students the benefits of an uncensored education.That isn’t to denigrate all Title VI protections. Institutions of higher education that receive federal funds should treat all students, including Jews, equally, regardless of race, color, or national origin––and, for that matter, regardless of characteristics that Title VI does not address, such as religion, height, weight, attractiveness, partisan affiliation, dominant hand, and more. No student should be harassed each day, or blocked from walking across a quad, or shouted down when trying to participate in class discussions, for any reason.But when exposure to highly offensive speech or ideas is conflated with "severe” or “pervasive” harassment that prevents equal access to education, that false equivalence threatens the university itself. It destroys an institution’s ability to address the matters that most divide us.

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Getty Images The spiritual possibilities of alien encounters. If you’re into UFOs and aliens, the last five years or so have been fantastic. There’s been a big shift in the public discourse around UFOs and alien life, thanks in large part to a 2019 story published in the New York Times about reports of UFOs — also known as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) — off the East Coast a decade ago. Since then, the whole topic of UFOs feels considerably less fringe than it once did. We still don’t have anything like evidence of actual aliens, but it is, at least, a live question in a way it wasn’t before. I’m still inclined to believe that there are far more plausible explanations for UAPs that don’t involve extraterrestrial creatures. The possibility, however, that aliens might exist raises all sorts of fascinating questions. How would the discovery of extraterrestrial life change our world and our understanding of our place in it? And what if aliens are real but so unlike anything we can imagine that we can’t even begin to understand the implications? Diana Pasulka is a religious studies professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington and the author of two books on this topic. Her first book, American Cosmic, was focused on the religious dimensions of UFO mythology. The new one is called Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences, and it dives into the experiences of people who claim to have encountered alien life. I recently invited Pasulka to The Gray Area to talk about her research, the stories she’s heard from people who claim to have experienced UFOs, and how her views have evolved in surprising directions. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Sean Illing When you write in this book that UFO events are a “spiritual reality” for people, what does that mean? Diana Pasulka UFO events are transformative realities for the people who experience them. They’re not necessarily good — religious events are sometimes bad and sometimes good. I heard people talk about their experiences with UFOs and sometimes with what they called “beings associated with UFOs” and it sounded very similar to what I had been reading about in the Catholic historical record. I was finishing a book about the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, and I noticed that there were a lot of aerial events in the Catholic tradition, the historical record. There were no planes, there were no rockets back then. People were seeing things in the sky and they were interpreting them in various ways, one of which was these could be souls from purgatory or they could be houses of saints and things like that. I think we’re dealing with something here that isn’t necessarily a new religion so much as a new form of spirituality. Sean Illing So when people tell you that they’ve encountered aliens or they’ve been visited by angels, you really believe them? Diana Pasulka I believe that they believe it, but that doesn’t commit me to the belief that it happened. I’ll give you an example. Srinivasa Ramanujan was a very famous mathematician in the early 20th century from India, and he was a genius. And he believed these math calculations were whispered in his ear by his goddess, the goddess of his local region. I think she was a version of Lakshmi. So that’s a story that takes hold and gets repeated. Now, am I committed to the belief that Lakshmi gave Ramanujan that? No, I’m not. But I can definitely study that process, and I can study it in people today who say that they are experiencing aliens who are giving them this type of creative impulse, and I can leave aside the question of the objective existence of these entities. Sean Illing What’s the most “holy shit” thing you’ve seen or heard after 14 years of researching this? Diana Pasulka I would say it would be the experience of a pilot who had a sighting while he was flying and then saw something that appeared to be like a human face. And then he started to see this person in crowds. He would also see UFOs in daylight, but he wouldn’t tell anybody because he noticed that other people didn’t see them. And he also had burns. His eyes started to hurt. I asked a scientist about that and said, “What’s this effect?” And he said, “It was the effect of some type of radiation on his retinas.” So that was pretty weird! Sean Illing I just don’t know what to do with some of these stories and characters you profile in the book. The vividness of the accounts, the consistencies, the depth — it is puzzling, to say the least. It’s hard to believe there’s nothing to see here. Diana Pasulka Well, I agree with you. I mean, I started out as a complete nonbeliever. But when I met people who were in the space program or top researchers, one at Stanford, and there were so many of them, I was absolutely shocked. And that shock lasted for a couple of years. I’ve been studying this now for about 14 years, so that’s a long time. I actually believe these people. It’s definitely changed the way I look at the historical religions as well as what people are talking about today. We can only say that these people are having these experiences. Most of them will not come out and say that because of their jobs. There’s still a stigma and I don’t blame these people for not coming out publicly. I’m just not going to disbelieve them because I’ve met thousands of people who are credible witnesses, and the patterns are so similar. Sean Illing The skeptic in me says the will to believe is so strong in the human mind and we can sincerely convince ourselves of almost anything. I believe that the people you write about in the book believe the things they’re telling you to be true. But as you were saying, that doesn’t mean they’re true or it doesn’t mean that they’re reliably true. So to take one random example, there’s that guy you talked to who moved his family out of Los Angeles to live in some remote town because he got a message from Jupiter telling him to do so. That just sounds like the hallucinations of a confused person. Diana Pasulka I mean, what did the pilgrims do? Or what did people who had visions and thought that they needed to leave Egypt or go someplace because a god told them to? Or because they had a vision from an angel that told them to do this? This is how I see that type of thing. I see it as a continuation of a process that humans have experienced for thousands of years. It’s a fundamental religious impulse. That’s how I see it. Sean Illing A religious impulse, sure, but that’s separate from the question of truthfulness. And again, I may sound like I’m contradicting myself, but I’m just being honest about my own ambivalence. Despite what I just said about the will to believe being strong, I also think the will to hold on to our current worldview is strong because letting go of that means letting go of almost everything we take to be true — and that’s scary. So there are forces pushing in both directions here. For me, the only sensible position at this point is agnosticism. I’m open to the evidence, but there’s not enough yet. Diana Pasulka Yeah, I do think that. I also want to push back a little on what you said about the will to believe. It seems like most people don’t want to experience these things. That pilot didn’t want to experience that. He didn’t want to believe it. He was just going about his life, doing fine, and then everything gets turned upside down. He sees this face in the clouds and it’s almost mocking him. Who would want to experience that? This is also the case with people who claim to have seen angels or souls from purgatory in the 1600s or 1700s. They weren’t actually looking for that. I put one of those experiences in my book about purgatory, and it was this nun who saw an orb and it would come into her cell in the convent and she was terrified. And she told people in the convent, nobody believed her, but she kept to her story and finally Mother Teresa sat up with her and sure enough she saw the same thing. And so, they then interpreted that orb as a soul from purgatory and the whole convent prayed for weeks to get rid of it, and it finally disappeared. Sean Illing To get back to this broader question about the possibility of alien life, I’m not even going to ask if this discovery would be the most significant event in human history, because it obviously would be. But I do wonder what you think the most significant implication of that discovery would be for us as a species? Diana Pasulka For a person who has studied the historical religions, I would say that most people in the world believe in nonhuman intelligence because most people are religious. And so within various different religions, you have different forms of nonhuman intelligences that display themselves in different ways to people. It’s mostly people in the post-Enlightenment West who are disbelievers in that narrative. So it would absolutely be the most shocking event for us, and the implication would be something like a post-secular society. Sean Illing I’m not sure we’re nearly as secular as we think, but that’s another conversation. I guess I’d say this: What made the Copernican Revolution and the Darwinian Revolution so significant, not just scientifically but culturally, is that they decentered humanity. The claim to being a special animal with some unique significance fell apart. It turns out we’re part of the same historical process as everything else. But the discovery of alien life, if it were to happen in a way that would be impossible to deny, that would be the final step in the revolution opened up by Copernicus and Darwin. It would, in a terminal way, upend our sense of our own creaturely significance, which I think is a beautiful thing in some ways. But if the price of that discovery ends up being aliens showing up and destroying us, it’s totally not worth it. Diana Pasulka Yeah, that would be bad! Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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An Israeli reserve combat soldier takes part in a training drill on May 8, 2024, in the Golan Heights. | Amir Levy/Getty Images Israel and Hezbollah are trying to keep their fighting contained. But the conflict keeps escalating. If not for the ongoing carnage in Gaza, there’s a good chance the spiral of violence between Israel and the Lebanon-based military group Hezbollah would be the Middle Eastern conflict dominating the world’s attention right now. In the weeks leading up to the current Israeli offensive in Rafah, there was often more actual fighting happening on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon than in the south in Gaza. The fighting has been happening since the day after Hamas’s October 7 attacks, when Hezbollah launched guided rocket strikes against Israel in what it called “solidarity with the victorious Palestinian resistance.” Hezbollah has continually fired rockets and drones into Israel and in return, the Israeli military has launched air and military strikes against the group’s bases in Lebanon in response. Hamas and Hezbollah are both Iran-backed, anti-Israel militant groups, though they differ significantly in ideology and operational approach. In the first six months of the fighting, there were at least 4,400 combined strikes from both sides, according to the US-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). An estimated 250 Hezbollah members and 75 Lebanese civilians have been killed in the fighting, along with 20 Israelis — both civilians and soldiers. More than 60,000 residents of northern Israel have been displaced by the attacks, along with some 90,000 people in southern Lebanon. Those numbers may pale against the far larger death toll and refugee crisis caused by the fighting in Gaza, but the situation in the north could have been — and may yet be — far worse than it has been, given the military strength on both sides. The Israeli military is, for its size, one of the most powerful in the world, while Hezbollah is the best-armed non-state group in the world, with an arsenal of between 120,000 and 200,000 rockets and missiles and up to 30,000 active personnel and 20,000 reserves, according to CSIS estimates. If it wanted to, Hezbollah could cause far more damage on Israel than Hamas — which for comparison, had around 30,000 rockets before October 7 — ever could. While both sides have seemed to be trying to avoid escalating the fighting into a full-scale war as devastating as the one they fought in 2006, that doesn’t mean such a war won’t happen anyway. After the latest series of Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) airstrikes in Lebanon, in response to Hezbollah drone attacks on May 6 that killed two IDF soldiers, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant predicted a “hot summer” on the border. Considering that both sides supposedly don’t want escalation, they don’t appear to be doing anything to de-escalate. Which raises the question: How long can this very violent conflict stay under control? And what will it take to stop it from spilling over into something worse? Hezbollah and its evolution, briefly explained On November 3, 2023, nearly a month after the war began, Hassan Nasrallah, the cleric who has led Hezbollah since the early 1990s, finally addressed the conflict publicly. Amid widespread speculation that the group was about to escalate its involvement in the conflict — a worrying possibility, given Hezbollah’s military strength — Nasrallah told supporters, “Some claim that we are about to engage in the war. I’m telling you we have been engaged in this battle since October the 8th.” In other words, the group would continue doing what it had already been doing up until that point: keeping the pressure on Israel and forcing it to divert resources — according to some media reports, the IDF has more troops on the Lebanese border than in Gaza — while minimizing its own exposure to risk. Part of the challenge of understanding Hezbollah and what it may do comes from the group’s unique structure. Hezbollah is a hybrid organization that simultaneously acts as a military group fighting Israel, a proxy group acting on Iran’s behalf, a political party within Lebanon, and the de facto governing authority in parts of the country. Its origins date back to the early 1980s, when Israeli troops invaded and occupied part of southern Lebanon in an attempt to drive the Palestine Liberation Organization, then based there, out of the country. With the backing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, a group of Lebanese Shiite Muslims took up arms against the Israeli occupation, eventually taking the name Hezbollah, which means “Party of God.” Hezbollah became known globally for a series of dramatic terrorist attacks, including the bombings of the US embassy and Marine Corps barracks in Beirut in 1983 (the latter of which killed 241 US military personnel), the bombing of a Jewish Community Center in Argentina in 1994, and the 2005 assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Israel eventually withdrew its troops from Lebanon in 2000, but that didn’t end the conflict. In 2006, Hezbollah abducted two Israeli soldiers, sparking a two-month war during which Israeli troops invaded southern Lebanon and Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets at Israel. Including both combatants and civilians, more than 1,100 Lebanese and more than 160 Israelis were killed in the war, which ended in a stalemate, though both sides claimed victory. Hezbollah was also heavily involved in the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011, fighting on behalf of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s Iran-backed regime. It still has a significant military presence in Syria, which has periodically been targeted by Israeli airstrikes in recent years. That experience in Syria, according to many experts, transformed the group’s identity and is necessary to understanding its approach to the current war. Today, it’s a regional power player as much as a resistance movement. “Hezbollah’s mission has completely changed since 2006,” said Hanin Ghaddar, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of a recent book on the group. “In 2006, the mission was to fight Israel. However, their mission shifted when they went into Syria. Today their mission is to act as an insurance policy and a protective shield for Iran. Their job is actually to protect Iran’s interests, not to fight Israel.” In this respect, it differs from Hamas, which has also received weapons and funding from Iran but acts far more independently. (As it demonstrated in the October 7 attacks, which were likely undertaken without the explicit blessing of its Iranian sponsor.) Hamas is also a Sunni group, as opposed to Shiite Hezbollah, which put the two groups on opposite sides of the Syrian civil war, with Hamas backing the anti-Assad rebels. In recent years, however, they’ve patched things up, even reportedly maintaining a joint operations center in Lebanon during the last round of fighting in Gaza in 2021. But in contrast to Hamas, Hezbollah has been much more wary about direct confrontation with Israel. “They don’t see themselves with huge tank columns rolling into Galilee [in Northern Israel] toward Jerusalem,” Heiko Wimmen, a Lebanon-based analyst for the International Crisis Group, told Vox. “What they want is to build coalitions that constrain Israel’s actions and suffocate them, slowing building toward Israel collapsing from its own internal contradictions.” If nothing else, this approach has spared southern Lebanon the type of scenes now unfolding in Gaza. But recent events across the border have made that kind of slow approach harder to sustain. Why the fighting has escalated Israeli strikes since October 7 have killed some of Hezbollah’s most senior commanders — though Israel’s claims to have killed “half” of its commanders may be somewhat exaggerated. The early April strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus killed Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the Iranian general who was believed to be the group’s principal liaison with Iran and sat on its governing council. Even as it has sought to avoid a repeat of 2006, Hezbollah has already lost roughly the same number of fighters that were killed during that conflict, to say nothing of the humanitarian crisis faced by the tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians in the south forced from their homes by the fighting. Hasan Fneich/AFP via Getty Images Residents of the southern Lebanese village of Aita al-Shaab walk past debris caused by Israeli strikes on April 9, 2024. Considering the impact on its own strength and the areas it governs, the war so far has in many ways been the worst of both worlds for Hezbollah. “What they’re doing is just bringing damage to Lebanon without actually affecting anything in Israel,” said Ghaddar. Hezbollah might therefore hope to climb down off the escalation ladder and keep its powder dry for the next confrontation with Israel. Hezbollah officials have said they will likely stop their strikes against Israel if Hamas agrees to a ceasefire, unless Israel continues its strikes into Lebanon. Until then, it’s likely locked into the current cycle — unable to unilaterally stop its strikes without losing credibility with both its supporters and its Iranian patrons, but desperate to avoid incurring even greater losses. “Hezbollah has climbed a pretty high tree by committing themselves to fighting as long as the war in Gaza has not ended,” said Wimmen. Israel’s calculations In the days after the October 7 attacks, Israeli leaders received intelligence — false, as it turned out — that Hezbollah fighters were planning to cross the border into Israel in a multi-pronged attack. President Joe Biden reportedly had to talk Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu out of an all-out preemptive attack against the group inside Lebanon. Still, some senior officials, notably Defense Minister Gallant, have continued to push for more aggressive action against Hezbollah, which — notwithstanding the shocking events of October 7 — poses a much more serious military threat to Israel than Hamas ever did. Pressure on the Israeli government is growing from the tens of thousands of residents of northern Israel who remain displaced from their homes because of continual rocket attacks, forcing them to live with family, with friends, or in hotels. Even if the fighting were to stop, many say the fear of an October 7-style attack coming over the border would keep them from returning home. “We have two schools of thought on the issue in the security establishment here,” Nimrod Novik, a former foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Shimon Peres, now with the Israel Policy Forum, told Vox. “There’s one that from day one [after October 7] wanted to prioritize Lebanon given that the threat is far more serious than Hamas. Then there’s the other school that argues you’ve got to finish the job in Gaza, whatever that means.” Gallant has suggested that Israel could increase its strikes against Hezbollah during a Gaza ceasefire. He has said that Israeli strikes will continue, ceasefire or no, until Hezbollah pulls its forces back from the border. David Cohen/JINI via Xinhua People take cover near the site of a rocket attack from Lebanon, in Kiryat Shmona, northern Israel, May 5, 2024. That’s a scenario that the US desperately wants to avoid. A wider regional war could potentially draw in US forces, and Washington has made avoiding one a priority since October. This has included military steps to deter Hezbollah like dispatching Navy ships to the Eastern Mediterranean as well as diplomatic efforts to end the fighting between the two sides led by Special Envoy Amos Hochstein. But that hasn’t dispelled the threat: In late February, CNN reported that US officials were increasingly concerned that the IDF could launch a ground incursion into Lebanon. Novik told Vox he is worried that the “Israeli home front is not prepared for the kind of damage that Hezbollah can inflict” on Israel, given Hezbollah’s military capabilities, which are much more formidable than those of Hamas. The northern threat is likely also weighing on Israeli leaders’ minds in the wake of this week’s announcement from the White House that the US is pausing some weapons shipments to Israel due to concerns about its offensive in Rafah. Israeli officials have reacted to the announcement with defiance, with Netanyahu saying the country is prepared to “stand alone” if it has to. On Gaza, at least, Netanyahu could be right: Israel might have enough weapons in its own stocks and from other countries to continue the fight in the south. But if it has to wage a second war as well, its resources might become far more stretched. The best hope for peace is that both Israel and Hezbollah still have strong individual incentives to avoid a larger conflict. “Both sides know that an all-out war would be extremely destructive, quite possibly even more destructive than the previous war in 2006, and with very little plausible gain,” said Wimmen. But wars are not always started by rational calculation. Novik said it was still very possible that, despite both sides’ best efforts, “a missile that hits the wrong target and creates the number of casualties that the other side finds unacceptable could bring us into conflagration.” The longer the wars on both fronts drag on, the more likely that becomes.

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