Media

I’ve been very critical of Israel’s counterattack on Gaza, which appears to have killed a woman or child about once every eight minutes for the past three months. Many of my readers and friends disagree with these columns and are pained by what they see as my unfairness toward Israel. Too often, opinionated people bypass the most compelling arguments on the other side. Let me instead try to confront head-on the kinds of criticism I’ve received:

Two far-right members of Israel’s cabinet — the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich — caused an international uproar this week with their calls to depopulate Gaza. “If in Gaza there will be 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs and not two million the entire conversation on ‘the day after’ will look different,” said Smotrich, who called for most Gazan civilians to be resettled in other countries. The war, said Ben-Gvir, presents an “opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza,” facilitating Israeli settlement in the region.

Students and families will have to complete the already stressful process of choosing what college to attend under tighter deadlines and greater uncertainty than ever this year.

Three years after the Jan. 6 attack, Republicans are more sympathetic to those who stormed the U.S. Capitol and more likely to absolve Donald Trump of responsibility for the attack than they were in 2021, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll.

When House Majority Leader Steve Scalise endorsed former President Donald Trump on Tuesday, all eyes immediately turned to Majority Whip Tom Emmer, who hadn’t yet backed anyone in the presidential race. A day later, Emmer joined Speaker Mike Johnson, House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, NRCC Chair Richard Hudson, Scalise and dozens of fellow Republicans in throwing his support behind Trump.

WASHINGTON — U.S. representatives from Austin and other progressive Texans voted against a House resolution condemning antisemitism at university campuses and the "evasive and dismissive" response by elite higher education officials "to simply condemn such action." Congress on Wednesday in a bipartisan three-page resolution slapped back at the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, who, in a U.S. House hearing a week earlier, failed to condemn calls for genocide of Jews at their campuses, lawmakers say. The resolution calls for the university presidents' ouster and had almost total GOP support but only a little more than one-third from deeply divided Democrats.