Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

U.S. President Joe Biden delivers a prime-time address to the nation from the White House Oval Office Oct. 19, 2023. He put the Iranian regime on notice as he sought to explain the stakes in the Israel-Hamas war and in Ukraine.

Iran has confounded American presidents for decades, ever since the Islamic revolution of 1979 and the subsequent hostage crisis.

Now it’s President Joe Biden’s turn as he confronts turmoil in the Middle East following the recent assault on Israel by Hamas, the militant Islamist group based in the neighboring Gaza Strip.

Iran has long provided financial and operational support to Hamas, though U.S. officials say there’s no direct evidence that Iran was involved in the Oct. 7 attack. Iran is also helping Russia in its war on Ukraine as a supplier of drones and ammunition. On Friday, the Biden administration formally requested from Congress $105 billion in emergency funds, including for Israel, Ukraine, and humanitarian aid in Gaza.

In an address to the nation Thursday night – seeking to explain the stakes for Americans and for democracy in both conflicts – President Biden put the Iranian regime on notice.

“We’ll continue to hold them accountable,” Mr. Biden said, without providing specifics.

The president noted that Iran backs “other terrorist groups in the region.” There’s Hezbollah in south Lebanon, a more direct Iranian proxy than Hamas, threatening Israel from the north. Iran also backs the Houthis in Yemen and militants in Iraq and Syria.

Majid Asgaripour/West Asia News Agency/Reuters

Protesters attend an anti-Israel protest in Tehran, Iran, Oct. 18, 2023.

From Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan

But Mr. Biden, who prides himself on his foreign policy chops, has a tough legacy to overcome on Iran. And as he looks ahead to the 2024 election, the specter of the Democrats’ last one-term president, Jimmy Carter, hangs over him. The hostage crisis of 1979, when Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held more than 50 Americans for 444 days, weakened President Carter and helped lead to his defeat in the 1980 election.

“The lesson they took clearly was that they can play the U.S., they can outwit the U.S., they can out-hostage the U.S. – and that’s continued for 44 years,” says Abbas Milani, director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University.

President Ronald Reagan, Mr. Carter’s successor, was also bitten by Iran in the biggest scandal of his presidency – the Iran-Contra Affair – when the United States sold weapons to Iran in an effort to free U.S. hostages held in Lebanon.

Today, hostages are again on the line, with some 200 being held by Hamas in Gaza; about a dozen are believed to be American. On Friday, two American hostages were released by Hamas. And just last month, the U.S. and Iran engaged in a prisoner swap in a deal that included the unfreezing of $6 billion of Iranian oil assets now being held by Qatar. The funds were restricted for humanitarian use, but after the Hamas attack, the U.S. and Qatar agreed to deny Iran access to the money.

The stakes around Iran may never have been higher. A 2015 deal between Iran and major world powers, including the U.S., to restrict Iran’s nuclear weapons program is now effectively dead. President Donald Trump dropped out of the Obama-era agreement, and efforts by the Biden administration to revive it failed. The Iranian government has also become a key if transactional partner of both Russia and China as a counterbalance to the U.S. on the global stage.

AP

President Jimmy Carter prepares to address the American people on nationwide television from the Oval Office at the White House, April 25, 1980, in Washington, on the failed mission to rescue the Iran hostages.

“Iran has been a revisionist power, imbued by a certain anti-American ideology in a critical part of the world,” says Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It has also developed quite ingenious strategies of projecting its power on the cheap, most recently through the use of militias and proxies.”

What’s different about Iran, Dr. Takeyh says, is that “it never dispensed with its revolution even as the leadership changed and a new generation came to power. The original revolutionary values, a core aspect of which was anti-American, continued to animate the regime.”

Iran is “not a monolithic country”

Barbara Slavin, an Iran expert and distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington, warns against painting Iran with too broad a brush or believing that the U.S. is heading inexorably toward war with Iran. 

“This is not a monolithic country, not even monolithic politically, though we do have very, very hard-line factions in power now,” Ms. Slavin says. “And there are a lot of people in Iran who are sick at heart that their government is supporting an organization like Hamas.”

She notes that Iran is a country of more than 80 million people, and she rejects those who talk “blithely” about the U.S. or Israel attacking Iran. 

“Do they really understand what they would be doing and who they would be hurting?” Ms. Slavin asks. “Same as our sanctions policy, which is cruel and inhuman, and hurts ordinary people far more than the regime, which of course has a monopoly on hard-currency earnings.” 

Majid Asgaripour/West Asia News Agency/Reuters

Supporters of Palestinians light candles during a gathering in Tehran, Iran, Oct. 17, 2023.

Iran an easy target in U.S. politics

Since the 1979 hostage crisis, Iran has been an easy target in American politics. In 2002, President George W. Bush dubbed it part of an “axis of evil,” along with Iraq and North Korea. Today, the Biden administration continues to fight accusations that it’s soft on Iran, despite its strong show of support for Israel – including Mr. Biden’s trip to Tel Aviv on Wednesday, a first for an American president with Israel at war, and literal embrace of embattled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

At a Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday, Mr. Biden’s pick for ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, defended his record over the 2015 Iran nuclear deal amid tough questioning from Republicans. As Treasury secretary when the deal was negotiated, Mr. Lew was grilled over the provision that lifted sanctions against Iran. 

But Iran is not a “rational, economic player,” Mr. Lew said at his hearing. “You are dealing with an evil, malign government that funds its evil and malign activities first.”

Also on Wednesday, the day the remaining United Nations restrictions on Tehran’s ballistic missile program from the 2015 nuclear deal lapsed, the U.S. Treasury Department announced new sanctions on Iran’s ballistic missile and drone programs.

But that didn’t stop Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican candidate for president, from claiming Thursday on social media that Mr. Biden had “given Iran another gift by permitting a set of UN sanctions on Iran to expire.” 

Amid missile strikes, explosions, and a total siege, two things are clear for the Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip:

There is nowhere safe in Gaza.

And the only relief that can be found is in one another.  

Palestinians confronting an ongoing Israeli bombing campaign and the feeling they’ve been abandoned to face a war zone on their own are turning to each other to share what little shelter, water, and food they can.

In the south – the region to which the Israeli military urged 1.1 million residents of Gaza City and northern Gaza to evacuate as it ramped up its response to Hamas’ massacre of 1,400 Israelis – heavy bombing continued through Friday.

The border town of Rafah, where thousands of Palestinians and dual nationals have been waiting for the crossing into Egypt to open, continued to be hit with Israeli missile strikes. Israel says it is targeting Hamas positions, structures, and intelligence infrastructure.  

A series of Israeli airstrikes that hit residential areas in Rafah Thursday morning killed 30 people, according to eyewitnesses and the official Palestinian news agency, WAFA. As of Friday, Israel’s eight-day military campaign had killed more than 4,100 people, including more than 1,000 children, Palestinian health officials said.

Twenty trucks packed with humanitarian aid, which U.S. President Joe Biden had vowed would enter Gaza soon and which the United Nations’ World Health Organization described as a “drop in the ocean of need,” remained stalled on the Egyptian side of the border late Friday amid an impasse between Egypt and Israel over a cease-fire, aid distribution, weapons screening, and the exit of dual nationals.

Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters

Humanitarian aid from Jordan sits at the Arish airport as officials wait to deliver it to Gaza through the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, in Arish, Egypt, Oct. 20, 2023.

Speaking Friday at the Rafah crossing, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said the aid was facing “restrictions” from governments, without elaborating. 

“We are actively engaging with all the parties,” he said. “We need these trucks moving as soon as possible.”

Egyptian protesters gathered at the crossing, one of hundreds of protests across the Arab world, and shook the gates, demanding, “Open Rafah.”

Also Friday, an American mother and daughter taken hostage along with some 200 others in the Hamas incursion Oct. 7 were back in Israel after being released by Hamas. President Biden issued a statement thanking the governments of Qatar and Israel “for their partnership in this work.”

Meanwhile, Palestinian health officials said seven hospitals and 21 health centers ceased operations due to the lack of electricity and fuel. Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City was set to run out of fuel for its generator by late Friday, according to Doctors Without Borders, which warned that without electricity, “many patients will die.”

Sleeping in a hair salon

With nowhere to turn, Palestinian civilians are turning to each other and trying to share what little they have with strangers.

Compassion and generosity may not keep them safe, but residents say they believe this compassion is restoring some hope in a situation where little can be found. And they say it can save some lives – at least for one more day.

At the Tahrir Salon in Deir al-Balah, between salon chairs, next to curved sinks and cabinets packed with makeup, and below wall-mounted hair dryers, a dozen men sleep on mattresses on the floor.

Many had never entered a beauty salon in their lives. Now, with their wives and children sleeping in the upstairs room, it is their temporary home.   

Just a few weeks ago, entrepreneur Tahrir Atrash ran the most bustling women’s salon in this southern central Gaza town. Once famous for its manicures, hair-straightening, and bridal makeup, it is now known across Gaza as a safe haven.

Fatima Shbair/AP

Palestinians look for survivors in the rubble of a building destroyed by an Israeli strike, in the Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, Oct. 17, 2023.

Ms. Atrash, a 37-year-old mother of three, runs a makeshift evacuee shelter from her ground-floor salon and upstairs apartment, housing five families and 30 people in 2,150 square feet.

“People for people, neighbor for neighbor, friend for friend,” Ms. Atrash says of her philosophy as she cuts oranges for her live-in guests.

She opened the unexpected safehouse on the second day of the war on Oct. 8, when Israel’s military response to the Hamas massacre intensified in Gaza City and the upscale neighborhood of Rimali, where Ms. Atrash’s friend Fathiyya lived. She immediately extended an invitation to Fathiyya, whom she had met while taking a beautician course in Turkey in 2022, to stay with her.

When Israel dropped leaflets urging people in Gaza to head south, Fathiyya’s family members headed to seek shelter at schools run by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinians, which in less than 48 hours hosted thousands of people. She decided to stay with her friend.  

“I did not want to go to an UNRWA school; I had heard that they are overcrowded. I needed to feel home, to have some privacy,” says Fathiyya, who declined to give her family name. “I never imagined that friendship forged by a chance meeting would provide me with shelter in such a dire time.”

Donated bedding

As stories of other evacuees in need spread among family and acquaintances, Ms. Atrash opened her upstairs apartment as well, calling on relatives to donate blankets and mattresses for the daily arrival of evacuees.

Jihan Alajil, an acquaintance of Ms. Atrash, decided to take her son, pregnant daughter-in-law, and their three children to the Tahrir Salon after their Gaza City home was hit by what they say was white phosphorous. 

When they arrived, Ms. Atrash met them at the door with a simple welcoming message: “If this world is not enough to protect you, I will shelter you in my heart.”

“Her extraordinary acts of kindness gave me a glimmer of hope after I had lost it,” says Ms. Alajil.

When Azhar Abu Abdo and her family arrived in Deir al-Balah from Gaza City with nothing more than the clothes they were wearing, they were told there was one place to go: the salon.

“Tahrir’s acts during these trying times are a testament to the strength of the human spirit. She is a beacon of hope, inspiring others to extend a helping hand and reaffirming the importance of solidarity in times of crisis,” says Ms. Abu Abdo.

Other Palestinians in Gaza are opening seaside vacation rentals to families. And those with date palms and date farms are putting out boxes of freshly picked dates on the street for those that are hungry.

Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters

A young Palestinian with dual citizenship waits outside the Rafah border crossing with Egypt in the hope of getting permission to leave Gaza, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, Oct. 17, 2023.

Mohammed Emawi’s catering business used to churn out giant rice-and-chicken platters for weddings and other large events in southern Gaza.

Now he is using his stockpile of wood to cook for families without fuel who come to him with bags of dry goods and is also dipping into his own stock to feed people.  

With no refrigeration available across the besieged Gaza Strip, he has devised a system to send leftover food to hungry families in the area as fast as possible.

Today, his “communal kitchen” is taking food donations and becoming a hub for hungry people.

But, he warns, he is close to using up his stock of rice, and his generosity may be hard to maintain as food supplies dwindle and the aid impasse has yet to be broken.

Solar solution

Other Gaza residents are literally bringing light to where there is darkness, widespread in the Gaza Strip with power from Israel cut and fuel for generators running out.

Abdul Fattah Ibrahim, a Deir al-Balah resident who has four solar panels affixed to his roof, has opened up his home to strangers.

In the afternoon, people shuffle in and out nonstop with mobile phones, laptops, batteries, and battery-powered lights to get as much of a charge as possible before sunset.

“I noticed how people struggled during power outages,” Mr. Ibrahim says. “I realized I could make a positive impact by offering them a reliable charging solution.

“My solar power system has been a blessing, and I wanted to share that blessing with others,” he says.

Nabil Tawfiq, a local resident, is grateful: “With the blackout, I was worried about being unable to contact my family,” who live elsewhere in Gaza. “Thanks to Abdul Fattah’s solar panels, I can charge my phone and keep a light on.”

Editor's note: This story was updated to correct the spelling of the Palestinian news agency, WAFA.

After more than two weeks in Washington without a House speaker, it increasingly looks like a penchant for brinkmanship is undermining one of America’s major political parties.

Ohio Republican Jim Jordan – the second GOP speaker nominee since former Speaker Kevin McCarthy was removed from his post – lost a third floor vote Friday. Then, in a GOP meeting behind closed doors, he lost a secret ballot 112-86 that asked if he should continue as speaker-nominee. Now, with members headed home for the weekend, the search for a speaker of the House begins anew. The conference will reportedly accept nominations by noon Sunday, with a candidate forum planned for Monday evening.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden on Friday asked Congress for an emergency national security funding package of $105 billion for Ukraine, Israel, humanitarian aid for Gaza, and the U.S. southern border. The Senate could take up the measure as soon as next week, with Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer saying Thursday his chamber will “spring into action” to pass the request which would then, of course, send the package to the House. Also on the calendar is the approaching Nov. 17 deadline, when the federal government is set to run out of money. 

But unless the House settles on a speaker, it will be unable to act on any issues, foreign or domestic.

“We’re in a very bad place right now,” former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told reporters Friday, in what can best be described as an understatement. “This is getting chaotic.”

Today’s speakership fight has its roots in a brinkmanship mentality that’s been increasingly dominant in the Republican party for decades – a mentality that has only been strengthened by a political moment of deep partisanship and narrow margins. And with a right wing of the GOP that’s been poised to fight as much with its own party establishment as the Democratic party, this moment, in some ways, seems inevitable.

The result, however – an unprecedented speakerless House that seems irrevocably divided – may be as close to an actual constitutional crisis as anything in recent memory, say some experts. 

“It says in the Constitution that the House shall choose its speaker, and they’re not. They can’t. They won’t,” says Matthew Green, an expert on the speakership at Catholic University in Washington. “This is an inability to fulfill a core constitutional requirement. That seems like the definition of a constitutional crisis.”

Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters

Speaker of the House Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry (center) departs after his fellow Republicans in the speakerless House abandoned a backup plan to allow Representative McHenry to remain in his position until January, at the U.S. Capitol on Oct. 19, 2023.

Battles that hint at deeper problems

The House has struggled to choose speakers before, with the mid-19th century coming first to historians’ minds. Of the speakership races that took the most ballots, the top three took place within the span of about 10 years, between 1849 and 1859. The record, set in 1855, took 133 ballots. These battles, of course, were “indicative of deeper problems,” says Mr. Green, namely the issue of slavery that led to the Civil War. 

The difference now, say experts, is that the House’s divide is not defined by one political issue but rather the idea of governance itself.  

Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich pioneered the GOP’s “weaponization of the legislative branch” in the 1990s, says Julian Zelizer, a congressional historian at Princeton University. This strategy has only been reiterated by the past decade’s debt ceiling crises, when sending the nation into default became a “standard threat” of politics. This speaker chaos is an extension of that.

“Government is just not a priority for the party right now,” Professor Zelizer says. “As a result, a lot of members are willing to live in this situation without a leader of a chamber of Congress as war is unfolding. That’s what makes this different. The normalization of this approach to government.”

Take Thursday on Capitol Hill, for example.

Mr. Jordan announced his support for temporarily empowering acting Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry for the next month or two, a potential off-ramp to the current impasse which would give Mr. Jordan more time to try and flip remaining holdouts. Yet shortly after, several of his strongest supporters – some of them fellow members of the hard-line Freedom Caucus – announced they were adamantly against this idea.

“Republican voters worked too hard to give us the majority for us to enter some sort of temporary speakership,” Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene told reporters Thursday. “This conference is absolutely broken,” said Rep. Taylor Greene, a former Freedom Caucus member.

But rather than opposing a temporary speakership on procedural grounds, the departure here between Mr. Jordan’s statement and the responses by “Jordaneers” proves that the Ohio Republican’s speakership fight is a useful instrument in and of itself, says Liam Donovan, a former staffer for the National Republican Senatorial Committee and now a lobbyist. 

“Jordan doesn’t want to lose, but if you are Jordan’s backers, you are fine with him losing if you get to kick and scream about the ‘DC cartel’ keeping conservatives from winning,” says Mr. Donovan. “They are setting up options that only fulfill their narrative.” 

New hats in the ring

As of Friday afternoon, at least nine Republicans have jumped into – or are considering joining – the speaker race ahead of (yet another) candidate forum on Monday. Oklahoma Republican Kevin Hern, who previously considered a speaker run last week, announced that he will run, as did Georgia Republican Austin Scott, who ran a quixotic campaign in a closed door meeting last week. Other members reportedly running include: Majority Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota, Vice Conference Chair Mike Johnson of Louisiana, Freedom Caucus member Byron Donalds of Florida, and Texas Congressmen Jody Arrington and Pete Sessions. 

Congressman Hern used his relatively low profile as a selling point, when talking to reporters Friday afternoon. “There’s a lot of historical relationships that some [lawmakers] are not going to ever be able to work around, and I don’t have those negatives out there.”

This is the bet that some of these lower-profile candidates are making as they begin a weekend of phone calls to feel out support for their bid. Unlike House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (who was the GOP’s speaker-nominee earlier this week) or Mr. Jordan, they don’t have the same kind of relationship history with the conference that could thwart a campaign.

But the past few weeks have taken conference in-fighting to a new level. Not only has there been name-calling and social media unfollows, but some members have reported receiving death threats – both to themselves and family members – following their announcements that they would not support Mr. Jordan. 

“It’s just getting ugly,” says Mr. Green. 

What it will take for any candidate to emerge from these ashes with a winning majority remains unclear.

“Even if [the speakership] is solved in a month, it’s not as if all of this will go back to some default setting,” says Mr. Zelizer. “This is the new normal, and that’s what we have to put our minds around.”

Yuki Iwamura/AP

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators stop a pro-Israel demonstrator during a protest at Columbia University Oct. 12 in New York.

Emmanuel Ching felt a bit uneasy last week after he and other student leaders tried to hash out a statement about the Hamas assault on Israel on Oct. 7 and its massacre of nearly 1,400 Israeli civilians.

Student groups across the country continue to spark widespread outrage after expressing support, and even celebration, of the Hamas attacks. But Mr. Ching, a member of the executive board of GWDems at the George Washington University – the largest chapter of College Democrats in the country, with over 1,000 members – hoped his group would condemn the deliberate slaughter of civilians and kidnapping of nearly 200 others, among them children and the elderly, who were taken into Gaza as hostages.

As he texted with others in the board’s group chat, it soon became clear the student leaders could not reach a consensus. Some saw the words “unequivocally condemn” in the first draft as problematic. Others felt they weren’t qualified to speak out on the issue, while some worried that condemning Hamas would carry over to the larger cause of the Palestinian people. 

“Any organization that claims to support peace, that claims to pursue justice – especially an organization affiliated with the Democratic Party – should want to unequivocally condemn terrorism by a terrorist organization, and the fact that that had to be clarified was a little concerning,” Mr. Ching says.

But there’s a “broader trend” on college campuses, he says, that has made students trying to sort through and understand the longstanding conflict between Palestinians and Israelis more and more difficult.

“People see the other side as the epitome of evil,” he says. Instead of upholding the values of inquiry, dialogue, and good-faith discussions rooted in empirical fact-finding, college campuses have become places of fear. “I think there is a hesitation and an aversion to approaching this topic and to approaching discussing these issues and this conflict, because people are scared about how their opinions are going to be misconstrued,” Mr. Ching says.

Farewell to the marketplace of ideas?

Today, the college experience can seem like it has simply become an endless competition of moral opprobrium. Opposing sides castigate the other as holding, in effect, monstrous points of view – unfit to function within society.

As the Monitor reported earlier this year, thinkers on both the right and left have begun to doubt the very concept of a free “marketplace of ideas.” Conservatives, especially, say that American institutions of higher education have become hostile to their ideas to the point of out-and-out censure. 

Last year, for example, a host of student groups at the University of California Berkeley Law School each adopted a bylaw, first proposed by Berkeley’s Law Students for Justice in Palestine, that banned the invitation of any speaker who “expressed and continued to hold views or host/sponsor/promote events in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine.”

Many left-wing students, too, have for years employed the tactic of shouting down conservative or pro-Israel speakers when they appear on campus. Earlier this year, after Mr. Ching and others traveled to Israel to participate in a university-sponsored academic program, a pro-Palestinian student group posted his and others photos online, accusing them of endorsing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and colonialism. 

After widespread coverage of student support for the Hamas attacks and kidnappings, even if some included qualifications, there has been an equally furious response to, in effect, “cancel” those students. 

Paul Weaver/Sipa USA/Reuters

Members of the Penn State community hold signs at a pro-Palestinian demonstration in State College, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 12, 2023. Students for Justice in Palestine, a pro-Palestinian student organization, held protests at American college campuses to show solidarity with the Palestinian people.

This week at Harvard University, a large truck with digital billboards labeled “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites,” sponsored by Accuracy in Media, a conservative media advocacy group, drove through campus, digitally flashing the names and faces of students it said were members of 34 student groups that signed a statement saying they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

A number of online sites, too, published the personal information of students linked to these groups, the Harvard Crimson reported. The information included names with photos, class years, employment history, social media profiles, and hometowns.

Some hedge fund managers and law firm partners in New York said they would use this information to blacklist students who were members of these groups, and some began to rescind offers of employment.

“It’s time for the adults to take over, and that includes law firms looking for graduates to hire,” wrote Berkeley law professor Steven Davidoff Solomon in a much discussed opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal this week titled, “Don’t Hire My Anti-Semitic Law Students.” “If a student endorses hate, dehumanization or anti-Semitism, don’t hire him. When students face consequences for their actions, they straighten up.”

Tom Ginsburg, director of the University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, agrees that “those students, like anyone who engages in speech, are not immune from consequences for those things they say.”

But at the same time, the very idea of a higher education is at risk when threats of canceling or blacklisting become a part of educational relationships. It’s an implicit attempt to chill or silence opinions that violate one side’s sense of moral certainty and belief that certain ideas have no place on college campuses.

“There’s always been student agitation,” says Professor Ginsburg. “The world’s very unjust, and students are trying to figure it out. ... They should be able to try things out and not carry the weight of their future selves with their speech experiments.”

College presidents and administrators have sometimes been caught in the middle of the Manichean certainties expressed by both side in the larger debates surrounding the enduring conflicts between Palestinians and Israelis.

Some alumni and wealthy donors, especially in the Ivy Leagues, have withdrawn their money and support after saying administrators had failed to unequivocally condemn the Hamas attacks. Long-time donor and former Republican governor of Utah, Jon Huntsman, also a former board member at the University of Pennsylvania, told his alma mater his foundation would close its checkbook because of the university’s tepid response to the Hamas attacks.   

“The University’s silence in the face of reprehensible and historic Hamas evil against the people of Israel (when the only response should be outright condemnation) is a new low,” wrote Mr. Huntsman, a former U.S. ambassador, in a letter to UPenn President Liz Magill.

“Silence is antisemitism, and antisemitism is hate, the very thing higher ed was built to obviate,” he wrote. 

Such reactions, however, only tend to damage the idea of higher education as an essential arena for free inquiry and debate, and a place where students can rigorously explore ideas – an idea becoming more and more passe.

“Obviously, not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic,” says Professor Ginsburg. “That’s another trope that’s out there. But on the other side, there’s just very simplistic takes on Hamas. They’re not a pro-woman organization or a pro-gay organization, to say the least. Yet somehow, you get these people who think all good values always go together – if you’re pro-LGBT rights, you should be pro-Hamas. That’s a nutty position, obviously.” 

Still, it’s certainly true that college campuses have become generally overrepresented with aggressive pro-Palestinian sentiments, says Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. 

“In this case,” he says, “the pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist point of view has become very popular on campus. ... And a lot of university presidents who will privately say that they’re very pro-Israel and they’re utterly horrified by the behavior of Hamas, they’re kind of too scared of their own faculty, their own students, and their own administrators to say what they really think.”

Could fewer statements allow for more free speech?

Mr. Lukianoff believes academic environments would be much healthier if university presidents didn’t feel they have to make political statements on every issue, but to remain as politically neutral as possible. “The free speech actors on a campus are supposed to be the professors and the students,” he says.

“The value of freedom of speech is not that people always say good things, smart things, wise things, kind things,” he continues. “The value in freedom of speech is knowing what people really think and why.”

“My hope is, out of this very dark and worrisome time, at least people can open their eyes to how dysfunctional particularly elite campuses have become, that they’re afraid to have certain arguments, that they’re becoming doctrinaire and groupthink-y in their approach,” says Mr. Lukianoff, coauthor of the new book, “The Canceling of the American Mind.”

An educational climate rooted in so-called “cancel culture” has caused an uptick in campaigns to punish people for what would be First Amendment protected opinion in other settings. This, he adds, only creates a climate of fear. 

“This is potentially an opportunity for large scale reform that actually embraces debate, questions orthodoxies, and allows for freedom of speech,” he says.

Early in the morning, as the sunlight emerges timidly over the savanna, mist moves through intertwining forests and pasture. Guaviare, a region in Colombia, is a haven for hundreds of species of birds and an important archaeological site where cave paintings date back some 10,000 years. 

It’s also jaguar territory. Jaguars are the largest feline in Latin America and the third-largest in the world. In Colombia, jaguar habitats are under threat as forests shrink.

A jaguar corridor established by World Wide Fund for Nature Colombia connects the delicate ecosystems of this region: from Amazonian tropical forests to natural savannas. The corridor is maintained as a community monitoring project involving farmers and former combatants from FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army). They’ve joined forces along the corridor to protect jaguars – and forests. 

LUIS BERNARDO CANO

An aerial view shows a forested landscape of the jaguar corridor in Guaviare, Colombia. Guaviare has one of the highest rates of deforestation in the Colombian Amazon.

Guaviare faces one of the highest deforestation rates in Colombia. The rate has intensified in recent years with the expansion of livestock grazing and agricultural production following the demobilization of guerrilla groups. As their habitats have diminished, jaguars have become more likely to attack farm animals. A goal of the initiative is to foster a more harmonious coexistence between jaguars and local communities through monitoring the species and using tools such as electric fences to protect livestock. 

Residents make their living in areas such as ecotourism, nontimber forest products, livestock, and agriculture. Their knowledge of the territory and the vast number of species that inhabit it are crucial to conservation efforts. Trusting local knowledge is an essential step toward improving relations between humans and nature.

LUIS BERNARDO CANO

A bioacoustics team from WWF Colombia records sounds of the jungle in the jaguar corridor.

LUIS BERNARDO CANO

The WWF Colombia monitoring team meets with locals from the Sabanas de la Fuga community in Guaviare, Colombia, to establish monitoring methods and answer questions.

LUIS BERNARDO CANO

Julio Ambeida and Cesar Garcia, former FARC combatants, help install a microphone to record noises in the jungle. The recordings will help identify other species inhabiting this territory.

LUIS BERNARDO CANO

A former combatant of the FARC-EP armed group, Fredy, does a crawl test to determine the location and angle of a camera trap. He and other ex-fighters are part of Manatu, an ecological tourism project supporting the jaguar corridor.

LUIS BERNARDO CANO

An aerial photo shows a deforested area. As the forest shrinks, jaguars have less wildlife prey and are more likely to attack domestic animals in nearby farming communities.

LUIS BERNARDO CANO

Electric fences are one way to improve the relationship between ranchers and jaguars.

Reuters

Maria Corina Machado, candidate of the Vente's party in Venezuela's opposition primaries, and Freddy Superlano, candidate of the Voluntad Popular party, attend a debate with other candidates, in Caracas, Venezuela, July 12.

One after another, societies caught under autocratic or corrupt governments keep seeking road maps back to clean, stable democracy. Now it is Venezuela’s turn. On Sunday, its people have a possible opportunity to decide who they want to challenge President Nicolás Maduro in elections next year.

The weekend ballot is only a primary, but it could be transformative. That is because it is citizen-run. A group of civil society groups has set up voting stations while educating and mobilizing voters to choose a candidate among the opposition parties.

Attempts by the government to ban certain candidates have strengthened popular resolve for change. At rallies for María Corina Machado, a Yale-educated engineer whom polls predict as the likely winner on Sunday – despite being prohibited from running by the government – supporters chant, “We’re not afraid,” and “Until the end.”

“Within Venezuela ... there is a surprising level of faith in the potential of elections to bring political change and restore democracy,” wrote Mark Feierstein, a Latin America expert at the United States Institute of Peace, in Americas Quarterly.

This democratic vigor received a boost this week when the government signed a partial pact with opposition leaders on free elections next year. The agreement follows years of stop-start international attempts to coax Mr. Maduro to embrace a return to democracy. During a decade in power, the Venezuelan autocrat was increasingly isolated for corruption and human rights violations. The U.S., under both the Obama and Trump administrations, applied ever stricter sanctions.

But geopolitics favored a thaw. Venezuela sits on the world’s largest oil reserves. It is also a major source of migration. More than 7 million of its citizens have emigrated. In just September, roughly 50,000 sought entry across the U.S. southern border. A deal signed Tuesday brought immediate benefits. The Biden administration agreed to ease embargoes on Venezuelan oil and gas for at least six months. Both sides have also engaged in a prisoner swap.

Such reciprocal gestures underscore that the strength of punitive measures like sanctions resides in their wise use. “The power and integrity of United States sanctions derives not only from our ability to sanction bad actors, but also to delist them,” a senior official said in a State Department briefing on Wednesday. “Our ultimate goal with sanctions is to bring about positive change in behavior.”

In Venezuela, that includes encouraging a climate for fair elections, safe political opposition, thriving civil society activity, and unrestricted journalism. Although skeptics doubt Mr. Maduro will allow free elections next year, voters and democracy advocates see an opening.

“There is a great opportunity, but we have to do things right,” Henrique Capriles, a leading opposition leader, told El País after he was recently banned by Mr. Maduro from participating in this weekend’s poll. “The transition in Venezuela involves a recognition of the adversary, it involves dismantling this kind of all-or-nothing existentialism that has done us a lot of damage.”

Through sticks and carrots, states try to influence each other. Yet citizens build their own nations, drawing strength from qualities of selflessness and courage. A restoration of self-government in Venezuela is underway. It has started with ordinary people organizing their democracy from the grassroots without fear.