Below is a lightly edited excerpt of the conversation.
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Shadi Hamid: I think what bothers me isn’t just the policy of not putting pressure on [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, or not constraining the Israelis. It’s that [President] Biden and other senior U.S. officials don’t seem to talk about Palestinians with much sympathy, as if they’re fully equal human beings.
I think there’s something to be said for pretense. Even if we’re going to be full-throatedly behind Israel, I want us to at least pretend that we’re kind of balanced — just perform a little bit. America has always been good at acting, even if its policies suck. And there’s something positive about that — that if you’re doing something bad, you should at least feel guilty about it and not be so open about the badness. What’s weird here is that the U.S. isn’t even really pretending in the way that I’ve come to expect it to.
Alyssa Rosenberg: It’s just been disorienting. A lot of what I write about is children and families. And so [this war], rather than changing my feelings about America necessarily — I have found myself thinking about the world of children as a kind of stateless people. I think a lot about how kids are invoked in policy, but how their needs are not prioritized.
As a parent of young kids — my kids are 5 and 2 — when I’m reading about a baby with a traumatic amputation, when I’m reading about a 5-year-old who wasn’t bathed for 50 days and came home covered in lice … I feel this — just this agony over it.
Jason Rezaian: Hamas’s assault … attack … barbarism on Oct. 7 is indefensible. And it can be also true that the scale of the response is completely indefensible. What scares me about how this might have changed America — or is an indication of how we’re changing — is that you’re not really allowed to hold those two conflicting thoughts anymore. And that is a huge problem for the democracy that we all love. There needs to be a space for both of those things to be true, and for people in power to be able to stand up and say that.
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