Hello and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your weekly foreign policy edition with me, Julia Ioffe. Happy New Year!

Last night, my amazing colleague Abby Livingston filled in for Peter Hamby with an excellent dispatch on how the Israel-Hamas war is radicalizing Gen Z staffers on the Hill, including people who didn’t care much about the issue of Israel-Palestine until October 7, and how their bosses don’t fully grasp the amount of disinformation they’re consuming on TikTok. If you haven’t read it yet, do.

Also, as the names on Jeffrey Epstein’s list start coming out, check out our own Tara Palmeri’s wrenching podcast, Broken, about the women whose lives Epstein destroyed, as well as her podcast about Ghislaine Maxwell and the Maxwell family.

Also also: a quick thought on the ouster of Harvard president Claudine Gay, ostensibly on plagiarism charges. We should understand what really happened: Gay is the latest casualty of the right-wing assault on higher education and efforts to diversify our universities, waged by activists like Christopher Rufo, who has been quite open and honest about exactly what he’s doing. The cause was then taken up by G.O.P. Rep. Elise Stefanik, who defended Trump in the wake of January 6 and has embraced the racist great replacement theory. Stefanik then swaddled this anti-Ivory Tower crusade in the veil of fighting antisemitism on campus—of which, by the way, there is plenty. (Stefanik, by the way, has also been honest about laying traps for the university presidents.) After Gay’s lawyerly evasions on the antisemitism answer, right-wingers (led by the conservative Washington Free Beacon) went after her in classic oppo-hunting style and, in a world where all of us have something unflattering to hide, they found it.

But I just want to say to my fellow Jews who are happy with Gay’s ouster as a stand against campus antisemitism: Be careful. We have been deftly used as a political football by people very happy to ally with American fascists who are, most often, antisemites themselves. Give them a few spins of the Earth, and we’ll find ourselves thrown under the train once again by people who defended chants of “Jews will not replace us”—and will do so again. Also, for those in our community who have been anxious about the rift that the war between Israel and Hamas has opened up between American Jews and Black Americans, serving up a Black scalp in the name of fighting antisemitism will only widen that chasm.

Read Gay’s powerful parting warning here.

Now, before I get to the rest, here’s Abby again from the Hill, which is now officially in 2024 mode…

• Hey, big spender: There is a lot of excitement among House Democrats about potentially narrowing the already razor-slim Republican majority by picking up a seat in the Feb. 13 special election to replace George Santos in New York’s 3rd District. According to figures shared with me, Democrats are on track to outspend Republicans in the race by a five-to-one margin. Yes, of course, these dollars may even out as we get nearer to the election, which will pit Democratic ex-Rep. Tom Suozzi against Republican Mazi Pilip. The race is so competitive that it could even serve as a harbinger for next fall’s general election. But here’s how the spending currently breaks down:

  Team Red: $950,000. So far, the N.R.C.C. has reserved $850,000 in broadcast and cable advertising, set to run between Jan. 16 and Election Day. The House G.O.P. campaign arm placed another $100,000 into a joint cable reservation with the Pilip campaign, which allows committee money to be used to secure below-market candidate rates for ads to run this week through January 15.

  Team Blue: $4.9 million. The House Democratic leadership-aligned House Majority PAC has bought $3.7 million in cable and broadcast spending, beginning on Jan. 30 and lasting through Election Day. The D.C.C.C., meanwhile, is currently up with $1 million in ads. Moreover, Suozzi, who had a head start launching his campaign, spent $164,000 on ads beginning in late December and lasting through this week.

  The disparity is obviously glaring, but it’s worth remembering that House Democrats and their friends like to reserve ads as early as possible in order to secure lower rates; Republicans and their allies historically prefer a wait-and-see approach, and often make later reservations. It’s also meaningful that both sides are spending on broadcast as well as cable, given that New York City’s media market is often prohibitively expensive for congressional campaigns. Investing in broadcast—still one of the most effective but also inefficient channels—means that both parties are taking this race seriously.

• Border trip: Speaker Mike Johnson led a delegation of about 60 House Republicans down to the border in Eagle Pass, Texas, on Wednesday, ratcheting up the political and media pressure surrounding border security negotiations. Five House Republicans—Andy Biggs, Eli Crane, Matt Gaetz, Bob Good, and Matt Rosendale—told Fox News they will “shut the border down, or we’ll shut the government down. We control the money.” That’s a big deal when Senate Republicans have signaled they would tie a border deal to funding Ukraine, and Johnson is working with a three-vote margin (soon to become a two-vote margin, once Bill Johnson follows through on his resignation).

  It’s hard to articulate how confusing and structurally difficult the coming weeks in Congress will be. There are, at present, two looming government funding deadlines, ongoing negotiations over Ukraine funding—and oh yeah, the Iowa caucuses set to take place on Jan. 15. Republicans say that public outrage over border crossings will enhance their leverage in each of those discussions, but Johnson’s trip (and the also-looming impeachment of D.H.S. chief Alejandro Mayorkas) is burning through limited time on the legislative calendar. As it stands, portions of the government could begin to shut down as early as January 20.

Not that that stopped anyone. Mark Regev, Bibi Netanyahu’s foreign press spokesman, went on MSNBC this morning to talk about the motivations of “whoever did this,” which sounds a lot like “asking for a friend.” “Obviously in Lebanon, there are many Hezbollah targets, but whoever did this strike was very surgical and went for a Hamas target because Israel is at war. … Whoever did this has a gripe with Hamas,” Regev said. “Whoever did this, it’s not an attack on the Lebanese state. It’s not an attack on the Hezbollah terrorist organization. Whoever did this, it’s an attack on Hamas, that’s very clear.”

Between the al-Arouri assassination and Israel’s announcement in the new year that it was pulling out five brigades from the Gaza Strip, it seems like the Israeli government—or “whoever did this”—is quietly bowing to the pressure from the Biden administration, which as I reported last month, leaned on Israel to wrap up the most intense military action in Gaza by the end of 2023 and shift to more targeted operations.

Personally, I’m surprised Israel hasn’t gone the Munich route earlier and focused on assassinations, however satisfying the razing of Gaza must feel to certain segments of Israeli society after the absolute horror of October 7. Israeli intelligence’s record of eliminating its enemies wherever they are has earned it the awe of spy agencies all over the world—as well as a hallowed place in antisemitic conspiracy lore as the pulsating core of the Jewish plot to take over the world. (I’ve heard people in the national security blob in D.C. refer to Mossad as the honey badgers of the Middle East.) The more surgical approach, as in Beirut, might also have allowed Israel to decapitate Hamas while limiting collateral damage and, crucially, retaining whatever sympathy it marshaled from the international community after October 7.

An Israeli newspaper reported earlier this week that Bibi’s government is in talks with Congo about the “voluntary” immigration of Palestinians there. Gila Gamliel, Israel’s intelligence minister and a Likud member, asked the world to support the “voluntary resettlement of Palestinians in Gaza, for humanitarian reasons, outside of the Strip.” Bibi himself told the families of Israeli hostages today that the “scenario of surrender and deportation” of Palestinians from Gaza has much to recommend it. And despite the assurances to the contrary that his government has made to the Biden administration, Bibi told these families that “we are not rejecting that possibility.”

To which Ben-Gvir, who has been happy for Israel to take billions in U.S. military aid (including in the form of guns for Israeli settlers), shot back that Israel is not a U.S. protectorate. “I really admire the United States of America but with all due respect, we are not another star in the American flag,” he tweeted—and doubled down on his proposal of “voluntary” relocation.

As I reported last month, there is no love lost between the Biden administration and Bibi and his lunatic retinue. In fact, most hope—quietly and off the record—that the end of this war will trigger the collapse of Bibi’s right-wing government and his final departure from the political stage. Statements like the one from Ben-Gvir don’t kindle any more fuzzy feelings in the White House, but there are some administration officials I’ve spoken to who don’t mind the insanity coming out of Jerusalem precisely because it shows that there is daylight between Bibi and Biden. This then allows the president to both support Israel while also highlighting that he is not doing so uncritically.

Whether that tightrope walk scores Biden any political points at home is yet to be determined. Voters have never been particularly deft at reading between the lines, and on an issue where opinions are so entrenched and views are so passionately held, it’s hard to imagine that this diplomatic dexterity won’t also get bent through the prism of partisanship.

Julia