In the column on the growing generational divide published in this space last week, I promised to follow up on some of the points I then made. This is what I have done this week. A long article was published on November 27 by The Washington Post that took up some of the issues I had focused on in my contribution last week. The article was written by Yasmeen Abutaleb and John Hudson and carried the title: “In White House, refit deepens on conflict. Biden’s handling of Israel-Gaza battle has divided his staffers.”

The name of the first author of this piece of writing is clearly a person of Arab origin. She and her co-author wrote about a meeting about 20 staffers requested with Presidents Biden’s top advisers. They were distressed by the way America — in particular the country’s president — had reacted to the October 7 attack by Hamas militants. The attack left 1,200 Israelis dead and a couple of hundreds dozens were brought back to Gaza by those who had managed to breach what were believed to be impenetrable defences the Israelis had built to prevent precisely this kind of attack. Some of those who penetrated Israel used hand gliders to fly over the fortified border between Israel and Gaza.

This group of staffers had three issues they wanted to bring to the attention of President Biden’s senior advisers. They wanted to know the administration’s strategy for curbing the number of civilian deaths, the message it planned to send about the conflict and its post-war vision for the region. The Biden advisers listened carefully and respectfully but fell back on familiar talking points. The staffers were told that the........

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