Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your Tuesday foreign policy edition.

I’m back from my week off—spent it writing 20,000 words of my book, which is now basically done, thank god, but, boy, are my arms tired!—and back in the abyss that is the war in Gaza. At this point, it’s deeply telling that it felt like a relief to take a break from thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by thinking about Vladimir Putin and how life for women in the Russian penal system is not all that different from what it was in the Gulag.

People seem to have liked my reading list, so here’s another (short) one. My nightstand is currently piled high with books, but these two are next on the list: Iron Cage, by Palestinian American historian Rashid Khalidi, and Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò. The latter was recommended by a good friend who, like me, was frustrated by the American left’s reductivism in portraying the rest of the world as split similarly by concepts of whiteness and Blackness. She recommended I read this profile of Táíwò in New York magazine. I have also found myself thinking a lot about Israeli writer David Grossman’s gorgeous and haunting novel To the End of the Land, about an Israeli mother waiting to receive what she knows will be bad news about her son in the army.

The thing that stuck with me most this week, though, was this piece from Ha’aretz about an Israeli intelligence NCO who warned her superiors three times in the six months before October 7 about a coming Hamas attack on the kibbutzim in southern Israel. One Hamas drill, she told her commanding officers, ended with the words, “We have completed the murder of all the residents of the kibbutz.” (Sources who saw the NCO’s report told Ha’aretz that “in retrospect, reading the documents is chilling.”) All three of her reports were ultimately brushed off and dismissed as “imaginary.” The last time was just weeks before the attack. And, though neither the NCO nor her superiors are named, it’s hard to miss the fact that she was a woman and that the people pooh-poohing her increasingly specific and ominous warnings were men.

More thoughts on the Gaza war below, but first, the inimitable Abby Livingston with an update from the Hill…

• The Clinton Connection: Bill Clinton’s political activity on behalf of members of Congress, especially those who backed Hillary during her 2008 presidential campaign, continues to be an endlessly fascinating subplot in Democratic politics. To wit: On Tuesday, Bill joined his wife in endorsing Sheila Jackson Lee, the longtime Texas congresswoman who’s looking to trade Washington for a stint as Houston mayor.

  The Clintons have been fairly dormant campaigners in recent years: Bill had his time in the barrel during the #MeToo reckoning, and Hillary is still carrying around her 2016 baggage. But they continue to throw lifelines, such as they are, to Democrats and superdelegates who remained faithful to the Clinton machine during the 2008 primary knife fight with Barack Obama. (I’ve heard members describe having cellphones pressed to each ear, with Bill Clinton making his case on one line and Obama on the other.)

  Since then, Bill has systematically kept tabs on his wife’s loyalists, and hasn’t hesitated to campaign for them. Jackson Lee, in particular, never wavered—unlike many members of the Congressional Black Caucus who backed Obama in ’08—and the Clinton affection for her over the years has been hard to miss. Jackson Lee introduced Hillary on the 2016 campaign trail, and earned a speaking slot at that year’s convention. And Jackson Lee will need their help now—she’s down in the polls, and the election is in less than two weeks. But beyond Houston, Clinton’s engagement also raises the question: How involved will Bill be in campaigning for Democrats next year?

• Balloon Boy: A massive blowup effigy of George Santos was spotted bouncing around the Capitol lawn on Tuesday, in a bid to encourage members to finally “bounce” him out of office. The stunt, proudly sponsored by MoveOn, is unlikely to restore dignity to a situation that basically everyone in Congress considers a national disgrace. The delayed Santos expulsion is not a matter of conscience for members who’ve hesitated to throw him out—everybody on the Hill is over him. Rather, it’s rooted in preventing the expulsion process from being watered down to the point that it could be used as a weapon against political opponents, like the censure process has.

  Anyway, it seems like a foregone conclusion now that Santos will indeed get the bounce by Christmas, following the Ethics Committee’s brutal report on his alleged misdeeds. Congratulations to the consultants who must think they’re clever for having induced a few media organizations to treat the Santos balloon as breaking news.

• Disruption Tactics: Also along these lines: Down in Georgia, pro-Palestinian activists took a page from the Westboro playbook today at the late Rosalynn Carter’s memorial service. While the protests targeted Joe Biden, who was in attendance, the setting caused a stir outside a service commemorating the life and legacy of a first lady who spent her post-White House life literally building homes for the poor, promoting mental health, and advocating for women and children.

  It’s hard to detect any persuasion strategy in these sorts of tactics, which have encompassed blockading the D.N.C. (drawing comparisons to Jan. 6) when members were inside, putting body bags in front of the homes of officeholders like Gary Peters, and disrupting the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. But hey, they’ll be a hit on TikTok.

Details are emerging about the condition that Israeli hostages were kept in while in Hamas captivity. According to his relatives, a 12-year-old boy, Eitan Yahalomi, was held in solitary confinement for over two weeks and, after seeing his father murdered on October 7, was forced to watch Hamas videos recounting their atrocities that day over and over again. When he cried out, a gun was pointed at him to shut him up. Emily Hand, who turned nine in captivity, came back conditioned not to make noise, her father told CNN’s Clarissa Ward. Emily, her father said, now speaks in a barely audible whisper and sobs herself to sleep at night. Avigail Idan, who turned 4 in captivity, emerged an orphan. Her parents were killed on October 7—her father was shot while holding her— and she ran to neighbors who saved her while covered in his blood. An 84-year-old woman was released in dire condition: her pulse was 40 and her body temperature was 82 degrees Fahrenheit.

In the West Bank, Palestinian prisoners are being released to their families and, though the circumstances of their detention may have been different, their families hug them with the same joy and and the same tears. One is a teenager who emerged from prison with both arms in slings, his hands broken. Another is a young woman, Walaa Tanji, who says that after the October 7 Hamas attacks, conditions in the Ofer prison worsened drastically and that she was beaten and threatened with rape. Others, like 21-year-old Palestinian author and activist Ahed Tamimi, who has been held without charge and without access to her lawyer for three weeks, seem unlikely to be released anytime soon.

It’s hard not to notice, however, that many of the released prisoners and the crowds welcoming them are carrying Hamas flags and chanting their support for the group that set off this latest round of fighting. The war, which Israel says won’t end until Hamas is rooted out, has so far only boosted Hamas’s support in the West Bank. Tanji, whose mother was convicted in Israel of helping a failed suicide bomber, told PBS’s Nick Schifrin that she was happy about the October 7 attack, hoping that it would trigger the liberation of Palestinian land.

That’s hardly surprising. It would be far harder to imagine these people, freed from Israeli jails, where many—including minors—report being physically abused and held in solitary confinement, not emerging more defiant, more radicalized. And even if they had been skeptical of Hamas before, why wouldn’t their opinion of the group improve, given it was Hamas that secured their release? Moreover, several of the Palestinians released since Friday have told Western journalists that their release was bittersweet because they felt it had been paid for with the blood of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. How could it not feel that way?

Still, the images of the Palestinian prisoners’ release is emblematic of the problem Israel faces, in both the occupied West Bank and in Gaza. Sociologists have shown that Palestinian support for Hamas always increases during conflicts with Israel—and those previous flare-ups were nothing like this one. Anywhere from one-third to one-half of residential buildings in Gaza have been destroyed. Nearly the entire population of Gaza has been displaced. Hospitals are no longer functional, and France had to send a military ship to treat wounded Gazans offshore.

Yes, Gaza is an impossible battlefield for the I.D.F., and yes, Hamas deliberately embeds itself in civilian structures, including hospitals. But how much will that matter to the Palestinians who survive this war? If Israelis have been traumatized and hardened by October 7 and everything that flowed from it, if that event turned Israeli doves into hawks, what will happen to Palestinians in Gaza who are living through the kind of vivid, life-altering, and humiliating trauma that will haunt them and their children for years to come?

Over the years, I have heard left-leaning friends ask why Israelis, having emerged from the Holocaust and the violence of Europe, would perpetrate violence against Palestinians? But that kind of trauma, born of that kind of violence, doesn’t usually turn its victims into pacifists. Instead, it often makes them hyper-vigilant and defensive, operating always on the understandable assumption that more violence is around the corner. Why wouldn’t that same logic apply to Palestinians?

The Israeli government has said it won’t extend the pause in fighting too much longer and that it wants to cap the ceasefire at 10 days. Bibi—who ushered Elon Musk, a real bona fide antisemite, around the ruins of a kibbutz razed on October 7—has told Israeli troops that Israel will go all the way in eradicating Hamas. But what does that mean? How do you annihilate a group if, every time you fight them, you create more Hamas supporters? How do you solve militarily a problem that is, at its core, political and ideological? The Israeli government has compared Hamas to ISIS, but what if it’s more like the Taliban in its staying power? Or what if it is more like Fatah and the P.L.O., which, having been destroyed, now seem quaint in comparison to the groups that replaced them?

In Washington, the short ceasefire has, once again, pulled the conversation toward the question of what happens the day after this war ends. It’s hard to imagine that all the trauma the Israeli and Palestinian people have lived through in the last two months won’t breed more radicalization and mistrust. But if it doesn’t result in some kind of political solution, we will find ourselves back here again far, far too soon.

Julia