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

First of all, if you want a break from the horror unfurling in the Middle East, the fourth and penultimate episode of my podcast, “About A Boy,” drops tomorrow. It is a look at how Vladimir Putin went from a relative nobody to the Russian presidency, and how the lessons of the dvor helped him navigate the tumultuous 1990s—and even burnished his image among Russians. Take a listen. I’m biased, but I think it’s pretty damn good.

Second, I want to thank everyone who reached out to me in response to what I wrote last week. I was more than a little nervous writing it and hitting send, but your response has been overwhelmingly reassuring and a bright spot in an incredibly grim stretch. I’ll be honest. The news out of Israel and Gaza continues to paralyze me, with shock, with grief, with fear. Every single day brings worse news: a hospital in Gaza was bombed as I was writing this, killing at least 500 people—and there are conflicting reports about who is to blame. Hezbollah and Iran are threatening a second front, in Israel’s north. (One friend recently messaged to tease me that, apparently, a war in one region to which I have ancestral ties is not enough so God provided me with a second.)

I’ve stopped looking at social media, which is a cesspool of people tripping over themselves to opine and virtue signal and oversimplify. I’ve stuck instead to private conversations, checking in on friends and colleagues who have family in the region, both Israeli and Palestinian. These are people for whom this conflict is real and deeply painful, not just a chance to peacock their purity.

Still, it’s hard to escape the feeling that, in both the pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli camps, very few people truly care about the human beings on the other side. This feels like a deeply tribal moment: when one’s people are in danger, when there is such existential fear, there isn’t much bandwidth to care for people whose people are killing your people. I get it, but it’s not hard to see where this leads. I was talking earlier with a friend who had just come back to the U.S., heartsick, after reporting from Israel and Gaza, and we agreed that it felt like this was a kind of final battle. Kicking the can down the road, containment, waiting each other out—all of it had led to this explosion, and made it that much more powerful. It feels like this is a kind of lancing of the boil that has been at the core of this conflict for decades: two people with real and legitimate claims to the same, tiny, cursed stretch of land, two people who have each come to only want one state.

I also can’t escape the feeling that this was Hamas’s plan all along, to do something so horrific, so appalling, that an enraged Israel did exactly what it’s doing now, creating images of vast misery and bloodshed among Palestinians and thereby drawing the ire of the international community, turning Israel into a pariah state, and forcing it to withdraw from the occupied territories—or into a one-state solution. Perhaps it is to draw in Iran and Hezbollah and have a final battle to settle it once and for all. Who knows. But wherever this is going, there will be mountains of corpses before we get there.

My main column tonight is on the continuing fallout from the House Speaker drama, and whether aid for Israel will be tied to aid for Ukraine. But first, here’s Abby Livingston with a live update from Capitol Hill…

The number of defections was somewhat expected, but the makeup of the Jordan opposition stunned Republicans and Democrats alike: It seems the G.O.P. institutionalists finally found a hill they were willing to die on.

Perhaps the most notable holdout was the House Appropriations chair Kay Granger, a cautious member with clout to lose, who was the lone committee chair willing to stand up to Jordan. Three other major committee chairs folded in support of Jordan—Michael McCaul of Foreign Affairs, Mike Rogers of Armed Services, and Mike Turner at Intel—after they reportedly received assurances that Ukraine funding would not be lost. (After the G.O.P.’s most powerful hawks caved to Jordan—an unabashed skeptic of Ukraine war funding—it seemed to send a signal to the rank-and-file that it was time to get on the Jordan train.)

To be sure, Granger is term-limited in her post as chair, and is possibly headed towards retirement. But she has requested a waiver to stay on as chairwoman for another term, a request that remains outstanding from the McCarthy regime and will land with whomever is the eventual G.O.P. leader. Other traditional Republican-types proactively reached out to me to celebrate a rare win for a battered group. “Her career has been centered around funding the government,” a former Texas delegation chief of staff observed. “The biggest moments in Jim Jordan’s career—other than the whole insurrection, of course—have been about defunding the government. Today, Kay got her payback.”

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As the war between Israel and Hamas gets worse and worse, there has been a chorus of Republicans clamoring for more, more, more aid to Israel, all while holding fast to the position that Ukraine has had enough. As for the Biden administration’s proposal to link Ukraine and Israel aid, a source close to the House Freedom Caucus, which has grown increasingly hostile to funding Ukraine, said it would be “a massive issue” for the group of Republican representatives. “There is strong support for Israel, but there isn’t for the Ukraine conflict,” the source said. “Among the H.F.C., the sentiment is that there should be no more aid.”

But why? Why is aid to Ukraine and aid to Israel different in the minds of Republicans? “This is going to lead to some interesting conundrums because of the stands that have been taken on Ukraine,” one senior G.O.P. aide told me. “But Israel has been an ally for 75 years. Ukraine has not been. If Great Britain was attacked, we’d be going to war, because they’re a NATO ally. But if Mongolia is attacked, the response is going to be a little different. We’re not everybody’s allies, as hard as it is to say.” The aide added, “It’s apples and oranges. You don’t need to square that circle.”

Many Republicans reject that sort of linkage. “Israel has been a serious ally of the U.S. while Ukraine has been a hotbed of corruption,” the source close to the Freedom Caucus said. “If you look at the endgames for each conflict, Russia wants to control territory, and Hamas wants to eradicate Israel and all of the Jews living there. Giving parity to the two conflicts is absurd and most members feel that way.” Supporting Israel, the source explained, has been a smart investment that has paid off handsomely—a line I heard from other Republicans. Israel is a hotbed of technological innovation that has benefited America, it shares intelligence with the U.S., and, the source said, is “facing the same Islamic forces that are also a threat to the U.S.” Supporting Ukraine, on the other hand, “is only going to further escalate and lead to a nuclear war.”

Others, like Victoria Coates of the Heritage Foundation, are also confounded by the comparison between the two countries. “Israel does not have wealthy neighbors that can contribute to its defense,” Coates told me. “Ukraine does.” Coates, who was a former deputy national security advisor to Donald Trump and a foreign policy advisor to Ted Cruz, is not against helping Ukraine, but she, like many Republicans on the right, thinks Europe should be taking up more of the burden of funding their military. When I pointed out that Europe, taken together, provides more aid to Ukraine than America, she was unmoved. “That’s great, because the war is in Europe,” she shrugged. “I don’t see why it should be equal. The E.U. is not going to give anything to Israel and, as we’ve seen, it isn’t interested in countering China. Meanwhile, between Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, we could be facing a three-front war. If anything, the E.U. should take the bulk of it and free us up to take the other two.”

She also has an issue with the way she thinks the Biden administration is prosecuting the war in Ukraine. There is no oversight of how all that American money is spent, Coates claimed, and she thinks the policy goals of the Biden administration are not defined clearly enough. “What is our desired end state? Because ‘as long as it takes’ sounds like an endless black check,” she said. “They don’t know what they’re doing, they’re just hurling money at the wall. My issue isn’t with Ukraine, it’s with Biden and the only leverage we have over them is in the House. There’s no other way we can get them to respond.”

Perhaps the simpler explanation is that Donald Trump has come out against Ukraine and what he says, for the most part, goes. Said a source close to Senate Republican leadership, “House Republicans are fundamentally lazy and don’t say things that would get them primaried.” But now that Trump is on a rampage, slamming Bibi as “weak” and praising Hezbollah as “smart,” is that about to turn, too? Or will the decades of staunch, even zealous Republican support for Israel prove immune to the former president’s attacks?

Two things changed the Republican position on Israel. The first was the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and the second was the contemporaneous rise of the evangelical wing of the party. After that war, a number of pro-Israel organizations sprung up among American evangelicals, who were entering politics and getting cozy with the new, right-wing leadership in Israel, namely Menachem Begin. “There was a shared biblical way of talking about Israel, like referring to the West Bank as ‘Judea and Samaria,’” Hummel explained. “Jerry Falwell was all about settlements there, too, for two reasons. One was that he saw it as a fulfillment of prophecy, and two, it was reminiscent to him of America’s westward expansion and its pioneer days. There was a cultural affinity there.”

The days of the Moral Majority inevitably gave rise to the centrality of evangelicals to the Republican party during the post-9/11, George W. Bush, megachurch era. This was the spread to the grassroots of so-called Christian Zionism, the firm belief among evangelical Christians that support for Israel was theologically vital. The justifications for it vary. Some, like Falwell and the more traditional evangelicals, believe that, in order to hasten the second coming of Jesus Christ, there has to be an “in-gathering” of Jews in the Holy Land. In this vision, all Jews have to be repatriated to Israel, which would then trigger the Rapture: all Christians will go to heaven while the non-believers, Jews included, will be slaughtered here on earth.

A lot of the theology about Israel, though, connects to domestic politics. “Hagee will paint this bleak picture of, Oh, our morals have gone to hell, the L.G.B.T.Q. interests are dominating, and the solution to that is to support Israel, because God promises to bless those who bless Israel,” Hummel explained. “But by blessing Israel, God will bless America by bringing about a Christian revival and letting Christians occupy positions of power.”

Hagee’s organization, Christians United for Israel, or CUFI, has been perhaps the most important American Christian Zionist organization when it comes to Republican politics. Mike Pence is a frequent speaker at their events, so is Nikki Haley. CUFI was instrumental in pushing the Trump administration to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and Trump appointed Hagee’s son to his Intelligence Advisory Board. “CUFI has been the big game-changer in the last few decades,” Hummel said. “If you want to get anywhere on the national level, you need to get some kind of recognition by CUFI.”

Before, support for Israel was “reflexively bipartisan,” said the G.O.P. Senate aide. “It was like, ‘support Israel, support our troops, support moms and apple pie.’” But the rise of Christian Zionism on the right and the progressive, anti-Israel wing on the left have combined to undermine that kind of support: if support for Israel is linked to Republican culture war issues, it makes it harder for liberal Democrats to support. “Israel was a bipartisan issue, but there’s been an increasingly partisan valence to some of the activity, where groups like CUFI don’t even pretend to bring Democrats into their meetings,” Hummel argued. “They’re bundling pro-Israel views with culture war issues, and that make Israel a much more partisan issue.”

The reasons for Republican support of Israel, in other words, aren’t just political. Rather, the politics of it is also tied up with religion and the broader culture war issues, which makes it far harder to argue against. And, as one Republican foreign policy insider pointed out, even though the share of evangelicals in the population has declined, “They vote disproportionately Republican, they vote in primaries, and it’s not just their voters, it’s elected officials, too.” Mike Pompeo, a self-proclaimed evangelical, made one of his last visits as secretary of state to a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. There, he also visited a settler-owned winery that named a wine after him, a way of thanking Pompeo for his announcement that the Trump administration would not view settlements as violating international law.

Ukraine, on the other hand, isn’t bound to Republican primary voters by the bonds of eschatology. If anything, the fact that this country is striving to be European—a continent some evangelicals consider to be “an emerging part of the Beast” because of its secularism, socialism, and growing Muslim population—plays against it, as does the fact that it’s fighting Vladimir Putin, a man who plays up traditional values, says he’s fighting the L.G.B.T.Q. agenda in Ukraine and in Russia, and is very much a white Christian nationalist. It’s hard to fight that cultural affinity, even if only a very few American conservatives will admit it out loud.

Still, the Republican Senate aide was optimistic. “There is still bipartisan support for Ukraine,” they told me. “If you put it on the floor of the House, it’ll get 300 votes. It just doesn’t have 50 years of history [with the U.S.] that Israel does.”

Julia