Yair Rosenberg

Last week, Pod Save America, the popular podcast founded by former Obama-administration staffers, hosted the influencer and leftist provocateur Hasan Piker. A charismatic and pugnacious socialist streamer, Piker has become a flash point in a broader debate among Democrats over how far their party’s big tent ought to extend. Unsurprisingly, Piker’s hourlong interview generated controversy. Critics on the right and left highlighted his refusal to condemn Hamas.

Last Thursday, the CNN reporter Jeremy Diamond interrogated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a press conference in Jerusalem. This act of journalism was not unusual, but what happened next was. Diamond uploaded the exchange to social media, and the footage didn’t simply go viral—it became the locus of a mass digital delusion.

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When Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned today in protest of the Iran war, he blamed everyone except the person who launched it.

Just about the only thing that the administrations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump have agreed on is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was too timid to pull the trigger. “The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickenshit,” a senior Obama official told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in 2014, explaining that the Israeli leader was “scared to launch wars.

“It is not a biblical mandate that I have to worship Israel,” Carrie Prejean Boller told me today. The former Miss California USA turned social-media influencer was dismissed from President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission yesterday after drawing charges of anti-Semitism. But, she wanted to make clear, she regrets nothing—and has no intention of disappearing without a fight.
On Tuesday, the Religious Liberty Commission held its fifth hearing, in Washington, D.C.

For the past five years, Benjamin Netanyahu has been on trial for corruption, accused of accepting lavish gifts in exchange for political favors and of using his influence to pressure media moguls into giving him more favorable coverage. On Sunday, the Israeli leader formally asked the country’s president, Isaac Herzog, to let him off the hook, requesting a pardon before the court had even reached a verdict on the allegations. The brazen gambit immediately provoked sharp responses within Israel.

Is anti-Semitism in American political discourse actually just a carefully cultivated deception? Over the weekend, Elon Musk’s X revealed the location of every account on the site, and the results were eye-opening. Viral MAGA influencers ranting about “my tax dollars” funding foreign wars were exposed as Pakistani or Russian. Thirst traps of attractive Israeli soldiers turned out to be run by Indians. Heartbreaking stories of Gazan suffering were found to be posted from Europe.

When Donald Trump brokered the Abraham Accords in his first term, he heralded the normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab states as “the foundation for a comprehensive peace across the entire region.” In truth, the Accords were a diplomatic handshake between countries that had never fought a war. They did not resolve the region’s conflicts, and were not the seismic achievement that Trump presented them to be.

The two-year war between Israel and Hamas is at a precarious inflection point after a roller-coaster sequence of events over the past week. On Monday, President Donald Trump unveiled a 20-point plan for ending the war in Gaza, presenting it as a nonnegotiable ultimatum to Hamas. On Friday, Hamas said it would consider discussing the first 10 points, including releasing the hostages in their custody, and effectively sidestepped the rest of the points, including turning over its weapons.

One of the more poorly kept secrets of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that many of those involved would prefer to take all the land and have the other side disappear. A 2011 poll found that two-thirds of Palestinians believed that their real goal should not be a two-state solution, but rather using that arrangement as a prelude to establishing “one Palestinian state.” A 2016 survey found that nearly half of Israeli Jews agreed that “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.

To hear Tucker Carlson tell it, an American attack on Iran wasn’t just likely to precipitate World War III. It would do something worse: destroy Donald Trump’s presidency. “A strike on the Iranian nuclear sites will almost certainly result in thousands of American deaths at bases throughout the Middle East, and cost the United States tens of billions of dollars,” the conservative commentator wrote on X on March 17. “Trump ran for president as a peace candidate,” Carlson added on June 4.

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The latest round of the Israel-Iran war is over, and the immediate outcome appears decisive.

On October 7, 2023, Israel suffered the most catastrophic assault in its history when Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,000 people and took hundreds of others hostage. Almost a year later, Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, the most powerful militia in the world, along with the entire leadership of his organization.

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Updated at 5:44 p.m. ET on May 22, 2025.
When Hamas stormed across the Gaza border on October 7, 2023, it knew exactly what it was doing. The group had detailed maps of nearby Israeli military bases and forces, and quickly overran them. But the terrorist group did not stop there.

Donald Trump wants everyone to know that under no circumstances will he give up his special new plane. “Only a FOOL would not accept this gift on behalf of our Country,” the president wrote on Truth Social just before 3 a.m. local time yesterday in Saudi Arabia, insisting that the luxury jet given to him by Qatar would serve as a “temporary” Air Force One.

Today, Hamas freed Edan Alexander, its sole remaining living American hostage. The release was the result of a back-channel dialogue between the United States and the terrorist group ahead of Donald Trump’s arrival in the region this week. Announcing the news on social media, the president heralded the event not as a one-off, but as a step “to put an end to this very brutal war and return ALL living hostages and remains to their loved ones.

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If there’s one thing people thought they knew about Donald Trump’s second term, it was that he would take the fight to Iran.

When Israel and Hamas finally agreed to a cease-fire in January, many outside observers credited the agreement to Donald Trump’s commitment to peace. Unlike Joe Biden, the story went, America’s new president was willing to put the screws to Israel to compel quiet in Gaza and would keep the deal on track.
These claims completely misread the map. Trump was less interested in ending the war than in being able to say he’d gotten some hostages out by the time he was inaugurated.

The vice presidency has long been the booby prize of American politics. “My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived,” America’s first vice president, John Adams, lamented to his wife in 1793. J. D. Vance has been in office for only 48 days, but he has already found a better use for the largely ceremonial post than many of his predecessors: posting constantly on social media.

Last June, the popular UFC fighter Sean Strickland surprised onlookers when, immediately following a victory, he ducked into the audience and took a photo with a bystander: Donald Trump. “President Trump, you’re the man, bro,” Strickland declared in his post-match interview with Joe Rogan. “It is a damn travesty what they’re doing to you. I’ll be donating to you, my man. Let’s get it done.

Can Jewish space lasers protect America? At first glance, President Donald Trump seems to think so. The 2024 Republican Party platform had just 20 planks, consisting of only 277 words. Twelve of those words were: “BUILD A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY.” Since taking office, Trump has moved to make good on that pledge. On January 27, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promised swift action on the subject.

Last week, President-Elect Donald Trump nominated Morgan Ortagus, a longtime State Department official, to serve as a deputy special envoy for Middle East peace—and immediately undercut her. “Early on Morgan fought me for three years, but hopefully has learned her lesson,” Trump wrote when he announced her hire on Truth Social. “These things usually don’t work out, but she has strong Republican support, and I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for them.

The New York Times once dubbed the Princeton professor Robert George, who has guided Republican elites for decades, “the reigning brain of the Christian right.” Last year, he issued a stark warning to his ideological allies. “Each time we think the horrific virus of anti-Semitism has been extirpated, it reappears,” he wrote in May 2023. “A plea to my fellow Catholics—especially Catholic young people: Stay a million miles from this evil. Do not let it infect your thinking.

The Democratic National Convention is over, and the verdict is in: It was a remarkable heist. “They stole traditional Republican themes (faith, patriotism) and claimed them as their own,” the conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote. “Democrats Show That Republicans Aren’t the Only Ones Who Can Wrap Themselves in the Flag,” read a New York Times headline.

For weeks, American officials have referred to an “extraordinarily generous” offer made by Israel to secure a cease-fire and hostage deal with Hamas in Gaza. Today, President Joe Biden told the world what that offer actually is. Speaking from the White House, Biden laid out a multistage “Israeli proposal” for ending the current war and called on Hamas to accept its terms, and for the Israeli leadership to stand behind the deal despite internal right-wing pressure to fight on.

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As the Israel-Hamas war continues, breathless headlines sometimes conceal more than they reveal.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
David A. Graham: “The Stormy Daniels testimony spotlights Trump’s misogyny.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
“Another thing the Gentiles said about us was that we used the blood of murdered Christian children at the Passover festival,” the Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin wrote in The Atlantic in 1911. “Of course that was a wicked lie. It made me sick to think of such a thing.

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people… Screw your optics, I’m going in.” Those were the last words posted online by Robert Bowers before he massacred worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. It was the single deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history. In previous postings, Bowers explained the grievances that led him to commit mass murder.

When I first heard that Israeli civilians were being massacred on the country’s Gaza border, I thought of my friend Amir Tibon. Amir is an exceptionally talented journalist who is fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, and who has devoted his life and skills to humanistic coverage of what can often be a dehumanizing region. His writing includes award-winning reporting on efforts to achieve a two-state solution and a biography of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Like most politicians, former President Donald Trump marked the occasion of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, by passing along holiday greetings to American Jews. Unlike most politicians, Trump used the opportunity to threaten them.On Sunday evening, just as Rosh Hashanah was coming to a close, Trump posted a meme on his social-media platform, Truth Social, excoriating “liberal Jews” who had “voted to destroy America.