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Turkey has suspended trade with Israel. The world’s top court is considering whether Israeli leaders have committed genocide. Protests have overtaken cities and campuses worldwide. Ireland and Spain say they will recognize Palestine as a state by the end of the month.

Even the United States — long Israel’s closest ally and benefactor — is threatening for the first time since the war began to withhold certain arms shipments.

Seven months after much of the world pledged its support to Israel following a Hamas-led terrorist attack, the country finds itself increasingly isolated. With a war that has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians and left Gaza on the verge of famine, any international good will that Israel amassed on Oct. 7 has been all but lost.

Of greatest concern to Israel: splintering relations with the United States. President Biden, once quiet about his expectations that Israel limit civilian deaths and increase access to humanitarian aid, has become more vocal amid partisan political pressure in an election year. This week, Mr. Biden said the United States was withholding delivery of 3,500 high-payload bombs.

His warning on Wednesday that the pause could extend to more weapons was his greatest break yet with Israel’s government. It suggested that the outrage coursing through capitals and campuses would continue to spread, and it has. On Friday, in a largely symbolic gesture, the United Nations General Assembly backed Palestine’s bid for U.N. membership, and thousands of demonstrators in Sweden protested against Israel’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday.

“If we need to stand alone,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said Thursday, both acknowledging and seeking to defy his country’s growing isolation, “we will stand alone.”

The backlash, which also extends to Israeli athletes and academics facing boycotts and protests, has stunned and confused Israelis, who are still reeling from Hamas’s October attacks and mostly see the war as justified. Many blame unchecked antisemitism and American party politics for Israel’s isolation. Others struggle to parse reasonable critique from selective virtue signaling.

They ask why more attention is not paid to Israeli victims, and why there are no protests against China’s persecution of Uyghurs or Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.

“Most Israelis, and this includes the leadership, are perplexed about the attitude of the world,” said Eytan Gilboa, a communications professor at Bar-Ilan University.

He argued that Israelis have a hard time understanding why some people at the protests on American campuses combine support for a Palestinian state with what he described as “calls for the elimination of Israel.”

“It’s the slow-motion formation of a pariah state,” said Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat.

But the complex, layered reproof from around the world cannot be ignored as just the whims of anti-Israel activists. Israel is facing real consequences, from security to economics.

And while the isolation is partly a byproduct of how Israel has prosecuted the war, analysts and former officials say it also reflects international frustration with the government’s restrictions on food aid, a shift in global politics that has pushed Israel down the priority list and the Israeli public’s narrow focus on its own pain.

Israel has endured the world’s glare before, shrugging off frequent criticism at the U.N. and an Arab boycott that lasted decades. Though Israel governs a spit of land no bigger than Maryland, it has always had a centripetal pull, placing its wars at the emotional center of global politics. But this is not 1948, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006 or 2014 — years with previous conflicts.

Before Oct. 7, most of Israel’s allies in the West were focused on Ukraine’s fight with Russia and the challenge of a more assertive China. The Middle East had largely fallen off the radar. Climate change was driving a retreat from oil. Israel and Saudi Arabia were openly discussing normalized relations even as Israel’s democracy had become more polarized and parochial.

At exactly that moment, Hamas struck and Israel retaliated.

Mr. Biden’s first response was complete solidarity: “My administration’s support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering,” he said on the day of the attacks. Other world leaders followed suit. The Israeli flag and its colors were projected on the Brandenburg Gate, 10 Downing Street and the Sydney Opera House.

Yet even as horrific details of Hamas’s murders and mutilation sowed nightmares, there were signs of concern about the government of Mr. Netanyahu and its absolutist approach.

Mr. Netanyahu’s promise to “demolish Hamas” struck many military strategists as too broad to be effective. And when Israeli forces began to pummel Gaza’s crowded cities with huge bombs, toppling buildings on families along with militants, support for Israel weakened.

Washington had been warning Israel to better protect civilians. Israel continued bombing. The United States and other countries pushed Israel to create corridors for aid. They demanded a plan for governing Gaza after the fighting. Israel intensified its assault on a territory roughly the size of Philadelphia, densely packed with two million people, many of them children, while keeping out most independent journalists, leaving image sharing to those under attack.

The results were dire: By late November, people were being killed in Gaza more quickly, according to experts, than in even the deadliest moments of the American-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were widely criticized by human rights groups.

Less than two months in, Israel was losing support in Europe and the United States — before student protests escalated into clashes with the police, before calls for divestment, before polling showed the war’s unpopularity affecting Mr. Biden’s chances for re-election.

After seven aid workers, many of them foreigners, from the World Central Kitchen were killed on April 1 and with children in Gaza dying of starvation, words like “genocide” and “evil” became more commonly applied to the campaign that Israel insisted was simply self-defense.

“The poor and impoverished people of Palestine were sentenced to death by Israel’s bombs,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said on Thursday, when he announced that his country, once Israel’s closest Muslim partner, would suspend trade.

Nimrod Novik, a former senior Israeli official and an analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, said there was no denying the government ignored both a moral and political imperative by pursuing a “stingy approach” to aid and a war plan with no vision for peace.

“Our government policy failed to live up to its claim that our war is with Hamas, not the Palestinian people,” Mr. Novik said.

The military says aid is slowed by security measures intended to restrict weapons smuggling. On Sunday, Hamas attacked one of the few border crossings from which aid is permitted to enter, killing four Israeli soldiers.

For many, it was a reminder that the context of Israeli life is still colored by the country’s own suffering. What Israelis discuss at dinner are friends called up to fight. What they see are cities and towns covered with the portraits of hostages unreturned, apps sending alerts for regular rocket attacks from Hezbollah along the northern border, and graffiti in Tel Aviv that reads, “Hamas = ISIS.”

“There is a total disconnect between how Israelis view the situation and how the world does,” Mr. Novik said. “Mentally, we are not in the seventh month since Oct. 7. Mentally, we are in Oct. 8.”

Many Israelis believe the international community is willfully ignoring their plight, with soldiers dying and groups widely viewed as terrorists firing on the country. In northern Israel, more than 100,000 people have been displaced from their homes by regular rocket fire. Children are not in school. Deep inside Israel’s borders, air-raid sirens pierce daily routines.

Genine Barel, a New Yorker who moved to Israel in the ’90s and now lives in Safed, the home of Kabbalah, or mystical Judaism, said it hurts to lose international sympathy.

“It would be bad enough if we were just going through this war, and the losses and the heartbreak,” she said, sitting in the empty restaurant of the hotel she owns with her husband where business has completely dried up. “But we are being vilified at the same time.”

“It’s as if you’re being picked on,” she added, “and accused of being a bully at the same time.”

Nathalie Rozens, 37, an actor and writer who grew up in Europe, said the discussion within Israel about the war had evolved to include more criticism. (A poll published Friday showed declining trust in Israel’s military leadership since March.) But outside the country, she said, Israelis are flattened into caricatures.

In her view, Israel’s critics fail to understand its nuances, that this is a place where many people loathe Mr. Netanyahu and lament the killing of innocents in Gaza, but have a sibling fighting there and are just two generations from the Holocaust’s attempted destruction of global Jewry.

Banning Israeli artists from festivals, protesting singers at Eurovision, refusing to fund Israeli films — “the pressure, in a way, hits the wrong people,” she said.

“I don’t feel aligned with this government and I’m Israeli,” she said. “There is no space for my voice inside the country and also not abroad.”

However dangerous Hamas or Hezbollah might be, many believe dwindling U.S. support for Israel would be far more catastrophic for the country. Israel needs America as a patron, and this government has “no patience, no consideration, no understanding of Israel’s status in the world,” said Nahum Barnea, a veteran columnist for Yedioth Ahronoth, an Israeli daily newspaper. “So they choose to ignore it.”

Total isolation still seems a long way off. Israel is not North Korea. Mr. Biden has said he would keep Israel supplied with defensive weapons, and Republicans have sided even more strongly with Israel. However, according to many international analysts, what Israelis want to see as a tremor may become a fault line as agitation with Israel continues to build.

“They’ve lost the young people,” said Ian Bremmer, an adjunct professor of international and public affairs at Columbia and the president of Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. “They weren’t around and don’t know the Holocaust. What they see is an incredibly powerful Israel that is engaging in a war for seven months and is indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinians.”

Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.

Two police cars idled across the street from the protest rally I was attending in front of the State Capitol in Austin, Texas, their red and blue lights flashing but their sirens silent. The police seemed more bored than annoyed. It was the early 2000s, and I had recently moved from Turkey to study at the University of Texas.

My fellow protesters were outraged. “This is what a police state looks like!” they started chanting.

I turned around, bewildered. Turkey was still emerging from the long shadow of the 1980 coup. For years, protests were suppressed, sometimes with deadly force. Even a whiff of disruption could get Istanbul shut down, with armored vehicles blocking major roads. Trust me, I said, this is not what a police state looks like.

When I told my friends back home that Americans thought it was outrageous for the police even to show up at a demonstration, it was considered yet more evidence that I had been recruited by the C.I.A.

“The American police showed up to a protest and did nothing?” one of my friends scoffed. “Just watched? No arrests? No heads bashed in?” Yeah, right.

In the two decades that have passed since then, American protests have changed a bit. America’s response to them has changed a great deal.

Many observers name Sept. 11 as the turning point when America’s police departments started becoming something more like a military force, but really, it was the Iraq War. That conflict turbocharged a policy that allowed police departments to get surplus military equipment at no charge. More than 8,000 local police departments have acquired over $7 billion worth of the kind of heavy equipment — mine-resistant armored vehicles, tactical gear, grenade launchers, weaponized aircraft, assault rifles — normally used in combat.

Why do places like Preston, Idaho (population 6,000), and Dundee, Mich. (pop. 8,000), need armored vehicles designed to withstand mines?

If you acquire it, it will likely be used. Police officers are a lot less likely to sit in cars and watch protests from a distance these days.

I stayed in academia and made political resistance around the world one of my primary fields of study. The one lesson I learned above all else is that a disproportionate crackdown is often a protest movement’s most powerful accelerant.

I saw it in Occupy Wall Street in 2011, when a video of penned-in women being pepper-sprayed at close range turned a little-known demonstration into an idea with nationwide reach. I saw it in Gezi Park, Istanbul, in 2013 when people hoping to save the park from demolition were tear-gassed and arrested, their small encampment burned. It helped generate protests that rocked the nation. I saw it in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, when troopers showing up to a grieving community with armored cars and sniper rifles caused the outrage that fueled a national movement. And just think of what the photographs of police officers turning dogs and hoses on peaceful marchers did for the civil rights movement.

The United States now stands at another such inflection point. Across the country, university administrators — as well as some students, parents, trustees, donors and elected officials — have grown frustrated by protests over the war in Gaza. That’s no surprise; the protests are intended to be disruptive. Will authority figures rise to the moment and respond to the challenge with skilled leadership befitting institutions of higher learning? Or will they panic and enforce crackdowns way out of proportion to any actual threat?

It’s not looking good so far. At the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, state police officers in riot gear carrying M4 carbines — the kind of weapons used in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan — and chemical-gas launchers were called in to disperse what many onlookers described as a small, peaceful group with a handful of tents. “None of these folks showed up when I lived on campus and white supremacists with tikki torches yelling ‘Jews will not replace us’ marched through campus as I hid my three kids,” Chad Wellmon, an associate professor at the university, wrote on social media.

At Dartmouth, police officers in riot gear were called in within hours after an encampment formed; in the ensuing confrontation they grabbed Annelise Orleck, the 65-year-old historian and former chair of Jewish studies, slammed her to the ground and arrested her. Until the Dartmouth community howled its objection, she was briefly banned from the campus where she had been teaching for 34 years. She still faces charges of criminal trespass.

At the University of Texas at Austin, officers in riot gear marched into campus on horses like the cavalry heading into war. At Indiana University, state police snipers were positioned on the roofs of campus buildings. Campus after campus is hosting similar scenes, including many pre-dawn raids on sleeping students. At Columbia University, an officer fired a gun. The N.Y.P.D. said it was an accident, and luckily nobody got hurt, but it’s not a comforting development.

It’s bad, and it’s getting worse. The ferocity of the crackdown exceeds the threat to public interest the encampments are accused of posing. It’s a violation of a longstanding social contract regarding how campuses handle demonstrations and a direct contradiction of the loving way that many colleges now depict campus activism of prior decades.

As hard as this may be to believe, absent the glare of publicity, these protests might have been unexceptional — the stuff of college life, for better or worse. Just last year, students at the University of California at Berkeley occupied a library slated for closing — bringing their tents, sleeping bags and air mattresses — for nearly three months. Congress didn’t see the need to hold hearings about it. In 2019, students at Johns Hopkins occupied a building for five weeks to protest the university’s contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its push for a private police force. Four students were arrested, but the administration quickly announced that the charges would be dropped. Why? Probably for the same reason that Police Chief Laurie Pritchett of Albany, Ga., once quietly arranged for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to be released from the city’s jail — against King’s wishes. He knew the clamor would subside and the protest would roll on to the next city.

I saw the utility of this approach when I was studying in Texas. When first a few dozen and eventually roughly 200 University of Texas students occupied an administration building overnight to protest the end of affirmative action in the state, the school’s administration extended an olive branch: a series of town halls in which to discuss the issue. The offer was good only if the students left the building, and so they did.

It was a de-escalation tactic that also served as an educational experience. The discussions were sometimes charged, but they produced ideas that helped the university expand its strategies to maintain racial diversity. Those strategies helped the university achieve better results than many comparable institutions.

I hear many people say that the current protests have gone too far for such niceties.

When members of a university community feel threatened it’s a serious problem. Antisemitism is real (as is racism against Muslims and Arabs), and some of the protesters’ tactics, like blocking other people’s passage, have clearly crossed a line. Certainly students who’ve been identified making threats of any kind should face consequences. But the solution to problems like these does not arrive wearing riot gear.

The truth is, protests are always messy, with incoherent or objectionable messages sometimes scattered in with eloquent pleas and impassioned testimony. The 1968 antiwar protesters may be celebrated now, but back then a lot of onlookers were horrified to hear people chanting in favor of a victory by Ho Chi Minh’s army. During the Iraq war, I attended demonstrations to which fringe political groups had managed to attach themselves, and I rolled my eyes at their unhinged slogans or crazy manifestoes.

There’s plenty of that going on here, too. I’m not a wide-eyed graduate student anymore. I’m well into the get-off-my-lawn stage of my career (and until recently, my office overlooked the lawn where Columbia’s protesters pitched their tents). I, too, am often tempted to get annoyed at these students — why this slogan, why this banner, why not something with broader appeal? Overall, however, I’ve been impressed by the sincerity of the protesters I’ve spoken to.

Judging from the new encampments springing up around the country, the harsh countermeasures of the last couple of weeks are counterproductive. But more than that, they are dangerous. Overreactions like this can lead to social breakdown — on both sides of the barricade.

In 2014, Hong Kong’s democracy movement was a textbook nonviolent mass protest — the organizers even named their group “Occupy Central With Love and Peace.” Their movement was crushed, and many organizers were given lengthy jail sentences or forced into exile. I was there for the second round of protests, in 2019. The new leaders were so young and so earnest. As the police kept using rubber bullets and tear gas, though, a small portion of the participants stopped talking about love and peace and started making Molotov cocktails.

You can see where all this is going in the astonishingly violent attack at U.C.L.A., where a pro-Israel mob charged at people at the encampment with sticks, chemical sprays and fireworks. (The university and law enforcement did not intervene for hours.) And these dangerous dynamics can spread beyond campuses. On Wednesday, a man in New York was charged with assault, accused of driving his car into a crowd of people holding signs and chanting.

Overreaction is dangerous in another way, too.

The University of Florida has now said that students will be suspended from campus (and employees will be fired) for offenses such as “littering,” building “chairs” and posting “unmanned signs.” I somehow doubt that’s going to be applied to undergraduates taking a nap under a tree or to tailgaters at a football game. Rather, I suspect the point is to prevent protests the administration dislikes. What kind of precedent is that? The first bullet fired at a campus protest was an accident. I worry that the next one may not be.

Around the world, authoritarian leaders and others are watching these developments. The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, even issued a statement condemning the U.S. for its treatment of “conscientious students and academics including anti-Zionist Jews at some prestigious American universities.” I didn’t know how to react at first. But eventually I had to admit to myself that the comparison to a police state isn’t quite as outrageous as it once seemed.

President Biden laid it out for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel long before letting the public know. In a conversation bristling with tension on Feb. 11, the president warned the prime minister against a major assault on the Gaza city of Rafah — and suggested that continued U.S. support would depend on how Israel proceeded.

It was an extraordinary moment. For the first time, the president who had so strongly backed Israel’s war against Hamas was essentially threatening to change course. The White House, however, kept the threat secret, making no mention of it in the official statement it released about the call. And indeed, the private warning, perhaps too subtle, fell on deaf ears.

Six days later, on Feb. 17, Mr. Biden heard from Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. The president’s chief diplomat was calling from his blue-and-white government plane as he was flying home from a security conference in Munich. Despite the president’s warning, Mr. Blinken reported that momentum for an invasion of Rafah was building. It could result in a humanitarian catastrophe, he feared. They had to draw a line.

At that point, the president headed down a road that would lead to the most serious collision between the United States and Israel in a generation. Three months later, the president has decided to follow through on his warning, leaving the two sides in a dramatic standoff. Mr. Biden has paused a shipment of 3,500 bombs and vowed to block the delivery of other offensive arms if Israel mounts a full-scale ground invasion of Rafah over his objections. Mr. Netanyahu responded defiantly, vowing to act even “if we need to stand alone.”

Mr. Biden’s journey to this moment of confrontation has been a long and tortured one, the culmination of a seven-month evolution — from a president who was so appalled by the Hamas-led terrorist attack on Oct. 7 that he pledged “rock solid and unwavering” support for Israel to an angry and exasperated president who has finally had it with an Israeli leadership that he believes is not listening to him.

“He has just gotten to a point where enough is enough,” said former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, a onetime Republican senator from Nebraska and a friend of Mr. Biden’s from their days together in Congress and President Barack Obama’s administration. “I think he felt he had to say something. He had to do something. He had to show some sign that he wasn’t going to continue this.”

Interviews with administration officials, members of Congress, Middle East analysts and others, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, indicate that the president’s decision came not as a sudden break but as the inexorable result of months of efforts to influence Israel’s behavior.

Ever since February, Mr. Biden has focused on Rafah and brought it up with Mr. Netanyahu again and again. A major strike in the densely populated city swelling with displaced masses seemed like a disastrous idea after many thousands had already been killed in the first months of the war in Gaza.

“I can’t support it,” he told Mr. Netanyahu, according to an official informed about their calls. “It will be a mess.”

The president argued that Yahya Sinwar, the military leader of Hamas and reputed mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack that killed 1,200 in Israel, actually wanted an Israeli invasion because it would produce many civilian deaths and further isolate Israel from the rest of the world.

To some degree, the Israelis have responded. Despite more than three months of vowing to invade Rafah, they have yet to actually do so beyond limited strikes, perhaps an indication that the chest beating is more about domestic politics or putting pressure on Hamas during cease-fire talks. Administration officials received some indications after Mr. Biden’s threat to cut off offensive weapons this past week that Israel may refrain from a full-fledged assault in favor of the more strategic approach favored by Americans, including targeted strikes on Hamas leadership and surgical raids.

If so, then the current clash between Washington and Jerusalem may yet be defused. Although Mr. Biden has delayed the delivery of 500-pound bombs and particularly destructive 2,000-pound bombs that could be used in an attack on Rafah, he has not stopped other weapons shipments, including one heading out this weekend with small-diameter 250-pound bombs.

“We’ve never told them they can’t operate in Rafah,” said John F. Kirby, a national security spokesman for the White House. “What we’ve told them is that the way they do it matters and that we won’t support a major ground operation and invasion smashing into Rafah with, you know, multiple divisions of forces in a ham-fisted, indiscriminate way.”

“But eliminating the threat of Hamas?” he continued. “Absolutely. They have every right to do that. And they’ll continue to have our support as they do that.”

From the beginning of the war in Gaza, Mr. Biden worried that Israel in its justifiable fury over the Hamas terrorist attack would, in the president’s view, go too far in response, much as he believes the United States made misjudgments in Afghanistan and Iraq after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Even as he voiced his own visceral outrage over the atrocities of Oct. 7, Mr. Biden soon faced pressure from within his own party to restrain Israel’s ferocious retaliation. Mr. Biden’s theory was always that he would have more influence speaking privately as Israel’s friend than by pushing its leaders publicly. While much of the criticism of Israel’s conduct of the war has focused on Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Biden recognized that the war has widespread support across Israel’s political spectrum, including from the prime minister’s opponents.

But over time, the president began expressing his frustrations publicly. He said as early as Nov. 24 during a Thanksgiving trip to Nantucket that the notion of imposing conditions on U.S. arms pressed by progressives was a “worthwhile thought,” although not one he was prepared to follow through on yet.

As weeks went by and civilian casualties in Gaza mounted, the president’s pique began slipping out at campaign events, where he tends to be more candid. At a fund-raiser on Dec. 12, he said that the Israelis had been engaging in “indiscriminate bombing,” a description typically associated with war crimes.

His anger at Mr. Netanyahu boiled over during a private Dec. 23 call that ended when the president hung up on the prime minister. “I’m done,” Mr. Biden said, slamming down the phone.

The administration was left with the impression that Israel expected to enter “phase C” of its war plan by the end of January, pulling most of its forces out of Gaza other than a single brigade and focusing more on targeted strikes from time to time. That suited Mr. Biden, who was eager to move on to reconstruction and possibly seal a broader deal with Saudi Arabia that would grant diplomatic recognition to Israel and transform the region.

But January came and went with no sign of combat coming to an end. Biden aides debated among themselves whether the Israelis had lied to them or were simply caught up in the unpredictable reality of war. On Feb. 8, Mr. Biden’s impatience flared when he told reporters that Israel’s attack on Gaza had been “over the top.” He signed a national security memorandum the same day meant to ensure that U.S. weapons would not be used in violation of international law.

Even so, Mr. Biden was the figure in his White House most resistant to pressure from the political left to do more to restrain Mr. Netanyahu, such as curbing arms sales. “Biden’s natural instinct is to cut him slack,” said Mr. Hagel — unlike his staff. “They’ve been more aggressive on this point than he has been. He’s been more cautious.”

After five decades in Washington, Mr. Biden is supremely confident in his own judgment on foreign policy and aides have learned not to push him to go somewhere they know he is not willing to go, even if they are more ready to change tacks than he is.

“Many of the people around him were becoming much more frustrated over time,” said Dennis B. Ross, a longtime Middle East peace negotiator who has worked with Mr. Biden and many of his advisers over the years. “Some of them felt it from the standpoint that Biden is taking a political hit and Bibi is reluctant to take any political hit” by backing off. “How is it that Biden is paying a price and this guy won’t?”

Among those more willing to shift policy earlier than the president was Mr. Blinken, who has been back and forth to the region seemingly nonstop since Oct. 7 and bears the brunt of complaints from Arab leaders upset at the war. While Mr. Blinken has long been a strong supporter of Israel, he came to feel that it was time to press Mr. Netanyahu and his war cabinet more strongly.

According to insiders, the discussion has not devolved into quarreling camps as in past administrations, but the president’s advisers have varying views. Seen as most aligned with Mr. Blinken are Vice President Kamala Harris and Jon Finer, the deputy national security adviser, while Brett McGurk, the president’s Middle East coordinator, who deals extensively with Israeli counterparts, is considered more attuned to their vantage point. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, is described as somewhere in the middle but leaning more toward Mr. Blinken’s perspective.

Probably no one on the team is closer to the president than Mr. Blinken, who has been in his orbit for more than 20 years, serving as staff director when Mr. Biden was top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and national security adviser when he was vice president. Mr. Blinken understands that pushing Mr. Biden is not the way to change his mind. Instead, the path to this moment has been a series of meetings, lunches, phone calls, all methodically providing information that might shift the president’s thinking.

“Tony is the one guy who can say things differently to him, but he will not say things differently to him in front of others,” said Mr. Ross. “I wouldn’t say he’s pushing. I think he goes in and reports, ‘Here’s what I’ve been hearing.’ That becomes part of the fact base on which Biden thinks about what he’s going to do.”

By March 7, Mr. Biden was thinking about another tough conversation with Mr. Netanyahu. Speaking with lawmakers on the floor of the House after his State of the Union address, the president was caught on a microphone saying he was going to have a “come-to-Jesus meeting” with the prime minister.

Two days later, speaking on MSNBC, he bemoaned “the innocent lives being lost” and suggested he had a “red line” without saying what it was. On March 15, the president praised a speech by Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, suggesting that Mr. Netanyahu step down. On March 25, Mr. Biden allowed a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire to pass without vetoing it, infuriating Mr. Netanyahu.

A turning point came on April 1 when Israeli forces mistakenly killed seven aid workers for World Central Kitchen. Mr. Biden was described as “outraged” and had a painful call with José Andrés, the celebrity chef and founder of the aid agency. Aides called that tragedy a “game changer” for the president.

In advance of another call with Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. McGurk told Israeli officials that the president was angry and went over a series of changes they should agree to make in response. When Mr. Biden got on the line on April 4, he again warned that he would reconsider his support unless Mr. Netanyahu changed course.

“Bibi, you’ve got to do more,” he said, using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname.

“Joe, I hear you,” he said.

The prime minister rattled off a range of things he would do to increase the flow of humanitarian aid, essentially what Mr. McGurk had suggested. The Israelis sent a five-page list of changes they would make; irritated Biden advisers realized it was basically the same list the Americans had given the Israelis months earlier without response.

This time, the president’s threat was included in the public statement about the call, which was drafted personally by Mr. Sullivan.

But even though Israel followed through on some of the commitments on humanitarian aid, Mr. Netanyahu was not backing down on Rafah.

In response to American pressure, the Israelis put together an extensive proposal to move a million people out of Rafah to spare them the conflict. But it would require hundreds of thousands of tents and massive quantities of food and water. Whether it was possible to implement was less than certain.

With no agreement, the president was forced to decide whether to allow a pending shipment of bombs that could be used in the attack. This time he said no. His advisers notified the Israelis, but did not tell the public or Congress, which had just passed $15 billion in new military aid for Israel. The idea was to make the point privately to Mr. Netanyahu without a public blowup. But the Israelis leaked the news, at which point Mr. Biden went public on CNN with his vow not to provide any weapons that could be used in a major Rafah operation.

The delay in the bomb shipment was a symbolic move. Other U.S. weapons are still flowing and the Israelis have enough to move ahead on their own. But with American college campuses erupting in political protest and a larger Middle East diplomatic initiative with Saudi Arabia in jeopardy, Mr. Biden decided to act.

“This combination of domestic imperative and strategic opportunity has driven Biden to a place he never expected to go,” said Martin S. Indyk, a two-time ambassador to Israel and former Middle East special envoy. “It’s the reason he’s speaking out forcefully and the reason he has issued the ultimatum.”

David E. Sanger contributed reporting.

After all-night air raid alarms, a weary Kharkiv woke up Saturday morning to a heavy gray sky and the disconcerting news that the Russian Army continued to press its advance on nearby Ukrainian territory.

All night, dull explosions from battlefields 40 miles away echoed across Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city. On Saturday morning, a day after Russian forces seized several villages along the border and Ukraine rushed reinforcements to the area, the ghostly wail of air raid sirens continued to drift over the city’s deserted parks and long, empty boulevards.

Thousands of people are fleeing the border areas and arriving at shelters in Kharkiv.

Tetiana Novikova is one of them.

Until Friday, she had spent her entire 55 years in Vovchansk, a small town near the Russian border. She was born there, married there, worked in a factory there and raised two children there.

But the shelling became so terrifying that she and her family made the painful decision to abandon the home they had lived in for decades. On Friday evening, she arrived with her elderly parents, shaken, hungry and a bit lost, at a Kharkiv school that has been turned into a displaced persons’ reception center.

The only people left in Vovchansk, Ms. Novikova said, “are the old and the disabled, and they can’t move.”

“If a missile hits where they live,” she added, “the streets will be full of dead bodies.”

More than two years into it, the war in Ukraine continues to find new zones of misery.

On Friday at dawn, Russian forces launched a complex assault that unleashed fighter jets, heavy artillery, ground troops and armor against a slice of Ukraine’s northeastern border with Russia that had been relatively quiet. Russian troops stormed across the frontier and captured several villages and a group of beleaguered Ukrainian soldiers, according to images widely circulating on social media.

By Saturday, Russian forces were still shelling Vovchansk but there had been no major change in the front line. Russia’s defense ministry claimed to have captured five border settlements that lie along two main axes that Moscow’s troops appear to have followed, but Ukraine’s general staff said its forces were fighting defensive battles and mounting “counteroffensive measures” around Vovchansk and another town, Lyptsi.

The Ukrainians referred to the border areas as the “gray zone,” meaning that the fighting was too intense and the situation too fluid to say who had control.

Military analysts believe the new offensive is unlikely to reach the streets of Kharkiv. The Ukrainian military has built elaborate defenses around the city — digging miles of trenches and sewing the landscape with glistening razor wire, mines and countless small cement pyramids that block tanks — “dragons’ teeth,” as the soldiers here call them.

But analysts agree that this attack comes at an especially difficult time for Ukraine. Its forces are worn out, stretched thin and running low on ammunition. Supplies from a long-delayed American aid package are only beginning to trickle to the front lines, and the Ukrainians are more vulnerable than they have been in months.

“It is likely the coming weeks will be a very grim affair for the Ukrainian ground forces in the east,” said Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general and fellow at the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based research group, in an initial assessment of the offensive.

“While the attacks at present appear to be small in scale,” he said, the purpose is to “dent Ukrainian morale — both civilian and military.”

“If the Ukrainians decide to hold ground at all costs, they will lose more of their increasingly smaller army,” he added.

The result, he said, could be “a severe test,” and “one of the toughest moments for Ukraine in the war so far.”

Russian forces sent reconnaissance and sabotage units across the border early Friday followed by devastating artillery strikes and aircraft bombs dropped deeper inside Ukrainian territory, according the Ukrainian news reports and the country’s ministry of defense. Video footage widely circulated on Ukrainian media channels revealed the aftermath in Vovchansk: fires, splintered trees and elegant, cream-colored buildings trimmed in white with giant holes punched through them and their walls turned into cascades of tumbling bricks.

With heavy shelling continuing and frontline reports patchy, it was difficult to assess on Saturday morning how much territory the Ukrainians may have lost. Some military analysts estimated that the Russian advance left them in control of at least 30 square kilometers.

American officials remained hopeful that Ukrainian troops would ultimately stop this Russian assault. For months, the Ukrainians have been preparing for it, and President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his overnight speech that Ukraine was sending reinforcements to the Kharkiv area.

Still, Ukraine must be careful how it responds, given how thin its troops are stretched. Russian forces have been slowly but steadily chewing through Ukrainian defenses 150 miles south, heading toward the small but strategically located town old factory town of Chasiv Yar. Recent reports indicate that Russian troops have advanced close enough to a critical highway to nearly cut Ukrainian supply lines to the town. The Russians attacked the norther border area precisely to distract the Ukrainian forces in this area, Ukrainian military officials said.

The northern border villages where fighting now rages have been fought over before. Vovchansk has experienced the full war cycle — occupied by Russian troops after the full-scale invasion in February 2022, liberated in September 2022 and sporadically shelled since then.

Life there, in recent days, has become untenable. There’s no phone service or electricity, and little food. All the shops are closed. Even the Ukrainian soldiers have left, residents reported, though Ukrainian officials have said their soldiers are managing to defend the town, perhaps from the outskirts.

“It’s impossible to go back,” Ms. Novikova said. “The Russians are destroying everything, she said. “They are erasing streets.”

While her family was hunkered down in their house on Friday, she said that a Russian aircraft bomb took out a nearby school. The blast wave shattered windows and rocked homes blocks away.

“And that’s just one bomb,” she said. “They are dropping dozens.”

Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed reporting from Kharkiv, and Marc Santora and Constant Méheut from Kyiv, Ukraine.

The rap battle between Drake and Kendrick Lamar is about more than whatever personal beefs these two men have with each other. As many have noted, it is a significant moment in hip-hop history, and not just because Mr. Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us,” released last week, has become the hip-hop song with the most plays on U.S. Spotify in a single day — surpassing the high set previously by Drake and Lil Baby.

What sets this rap battle apart from previous high-profile hip-hop feuds is its magnitude and implications for popular music. Hip-hop, born as an underground movement, has long been a global phenomenon, leading certain artists to blur the lines between authenticity and commercialization. The global pop audience has always been more drawn to a simplified hip-hop sound devoid of the complex lyrics and politicized messages that characterize “conscious” rap.

Mr. Lamar’s victory signals a resurgence of lyrically rich rap — and a return to the roots of hip-hop culture — all while establishing a new template for relevance in an era when content can go viral instantly on social media and streaming platforms. If Drake, who has become the face of rap’s mainstream pop faction, has lost this battle, that setback is not his alone.

Mr. Lamar’s ability to write layered and intricate lyrics has long been lauded. But this battle has brought new attention and enthusiasm to the particular artistic element at which he excels. Fans have scrambled to decipher his complex verses with each new release. (The website Genius, where users annotate lyrics, crashed from the volume of visitors investigating this feud.) Mr. Lamar’s apparent decision to remove copyright protections for “Not Like Us” has also enabled a wide dissemination of the track, allowing content creators to monetize posts featuring the song.

Removing these kind of constraints on the distribution of the song signals a new and savvy approach to marketing and sales in the music industry. It’s another facet of Mr. Lamar’s victory — enlisting countless unseen collaborators to spread his message and join his crusade.

Drake has been doing his best to counter and innovate. His second volley in the battle, “Taylor Made Freestyle,” incorporated A.I. to enlist two iconic figures from West Coast hip-hop: Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg. (Drake removed the song from social media after objections from Mr. Shakur’s estate). Drake also took direct aim at Mr. Lamar’s supposed lyrical prowess, taunting him to respond with a “quintuple entendre.”

Underestimating Mr. Lamar — who won a Pulitzer Prize for his album “DAMN.” — was a questionable move. Mr. Lamar’s response, “Euphoria,” arrived with the precision and effectiveness of a heat-seeking missile. The title “Euphoria” nods not only to the feeling but to the HBO series on which Drake has been an executive producer — a show known for its controversial portrayal of teenage sexuality, a parallel that underscores Mr. Lamar’s allegations that Drake harbors inappropriate infatuations.

In the arena of rap battles, entendres are wielded precisely because they imbue words with layers of meaning. Nowhere is this more evident than in the stark contrast between love and hate, the poles around which rap oscillates. In a pivotal moment in “Euphoria,” Mr. Lamar adopted the persona of the late rapper DMX, who in 2012 aired his grievances about Drake on “The Breakfast Club,” a radio show that was a cornerstone of hip-hop media. On the track, Mr. Lamar echoes DMX as he snarls at Drake, “I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk, I hate the way that you dress.”

Drake parried by questioning Mr. Lamar’s authenticity, characterizing his portrayal of Black empowerment as superficial and insincere. But Mr. Lamar swiftly retaliated, targeting Drake’s alleged cultural appropriation. Authenticity in hip-hop is often tied to a rapper’s ability to embody the distinctive sound of their hometown — something Drake, a Canadian of ambiguous racial identity, has skillfully transcended, crossing geographical and musical boundaries and incorporating regional sounds from across the United States, particularly the South.

In the closing lines of “Not Like Us,” Mr. Lamar zeros in on what he sees as Drake’s vulnerability. Mr. Lamar’s artistry shines through as he seamlessly weaves together social commentary and catchy rhythms. He begins by evoking the painful legacy of Black Americans in chains, then highlights Atlanta’s historical significance as a hub for the slave trade in the South — before drawing parallels to Drake’s exploitation of Southern rap culture for personal gain. His indictment culminates with a damning accusation: “You run to Atlanta when you need a few dollars,” he says. Drake is not a “colleague,” he’s a “colonizer.”

Through his incisive lyrics Mr. Lamar exposes the complexities of cultural identity and power dynamics within the rap industry — all while carrying the banner of lyrical rap. His verbal offensive proves the depth and staying power of hip-hop’s history and culture, with its legacy of lyrical dexterity and complexity.

Armed with these tools and talents, Mr. Lamar managed to topple Drake, and in the process has shown himself, by calling on hip-hop’s traditions, to be more relevant to the current moment. At least until the bell sounds to signal the next round.

Laurence Ralph is a professor of anthropology at Princeton and the author of “Sito: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him.”

Source photographs by Arturo Holmes/MG23 and Prince Williams, via Getty Images.

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On This Week’s Episode:

For years, Majid believed that if he could testify in court about what happened to him when he was held in a secret C.I.A. detention center known as a black site, a judge and jury would give him a break. Finally, he got a chance to see if he was right.

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For decades, Munch’s Make Believe Band at Chuck E. Cheese has performed for countless birthdays, end-of-season Little League parties and other celebrations. There’s been Chuck E. Cheese and Helen Henny on vocals, Mr. Munch on keys, Jasper T. Jowls on guitar, and Pasqually on drums.

The band of robot puppets has been a mainstay at the colorful pizzeria-arcade chain where children run amok and play games for prizes in between bites of pizza slices.

Their final curtain call is coming soon.

By the end of 2024, the animatronic performances — endearing and nostalgia-inducing, if perhaps slightly creepy to their audiences — will be phased out at all but two of the chain’s more than 400 locations in the United States: one in Los Angeles and another in Nanuet, N.Y. The departure of the band comes as Chuck E. Cheese undergoes what its chief executive, David McKillips, recently described as its largest and “most aggressive transformation.”

Out: Animatronic bands.

In: More screens, digital dance floors and trampoline gyms.

The coronavirus pandemic forced hundreds of Chuck E. Cheese locations to shutter, and the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the summer of 2020. Since then, its leaders have tried to adapt Chuck E. Cheese to a modern era — and children who might be more excited by screens than an old animatronic band with limited movement and shifty eyes.

“Kids are consuming entertainment differently than they were 10, 20 years ago,” Mr. McKillips said sitting in a booth at the Chuck E. Cheese in Hicksville, N.Y., on Long Island. “Kids, really of all ages, are consuming their entertainment on a screen.”

For now, Munch’s Make Believe Band still performs every day at the Hicksville location, which sometimes hosts as many as 20 birthday parties on a weekend day, starting as early at 8 a.m. But by the end of the summer, the band will have played its last show there.

Then the band will be removed and replaced by a Jumbotron-size TV, more seating and a digital dance floor. (Chuck E. Cheese declined to say what will happen to the animatronic figures after they are removed from hundreds of locations across the country.)

‘The band is in perfect condition.’

Not everyone wants more screens, trampolines and new games. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Kendall Maldonado, 12, of Queens, was dancing next to the band dressed in his own Chuck E. Cheese costume, taking in one of the final performances in Hicksville.

“I grew up on tickets and tokens,” said Kendall, a self-described “super fan,” who has visited dozens of Chuck E. Cheese locations across the New York area and one in Puerto Rico.

Kendall’s mother, Jennifer Molina, 43, said she brought Kendall to his first Chuck E. Cheese when he was 3. Like many young children, Kendall was initially slightly scared of Chuck E., but he later warmed up to the giant mouse.

“He’s been a fan ever since,” she said.

Ms. Molina said that Kendall wished the bands could stay.

“The band is in perfect condition,” Kendall said. “Sometimes kids hit them, which is mad disrespectful because they’re just doing their job and performing.”

Since Chuck E. Cheese announced in November that it would phase out Munch’s Make Believe Band, some parents have scrambled to take their children to the final performances.

Kaitlin Rubenstein, 30, the general manager of the Hicksville location and another in Hempstead, N.Y., said that some recorded videos of the band to preserve the memory.

Ms. Rubinstein said it was “bittersweet” to watch the band that had been a part of her childhood being retired.

“To go to Chuck E. Cheese on a Friday night,” she said, “that was a treat.”

At first, he was a coyote.

Chuck E. Cheese was started by Nolan Bushnell, a co-founder of the pioneering video game company Atari. In an interview with the Smithsonian Institution in 2017, Mr. Bushnell said his background in arcade games, which sold for about $1,500 to $2,000 per machine, sparked his desire to open a pizza joint with the games, each of which would collect up to $50,000 in coins in their lifetime.

Mr. Bushnell said he was also inspired by a family trip to Disneyland, and particularly the Tiki Room, an attraction with animatronic birds, tiki gods and flowers.

“We can do that,” Mr. Bushnell recalled thinking at the time. “But it’d be nice to have a mascot.”

At first, the mascot was supposed to be a coyote, and Mr. Bushnell was going to call his new business Coyote Pizza. Mr. Bushnell, who declined to be interviewed, told the Smithsonian that he went out and bought a costume of what he thought was a coyote.

“I took it to my engineers,” Mr. Bushnell said. “I said, ‘Make this guy talk.’”

But a problem arose: The costume Mr. Bushnell bought was not a coyote, but a rat with a tail.

“I’d never seen it below the waist,” he said.

Mr. Bushnell thought about keeping the rat costume, and changing the name of his restaurant and arcade to Rick’s Rat Pizza, but he was persuaded to avoid the optics of having “rat” in the name. Mr. Bushnell decided to name the place Chuck E. Cheese. (Charles Entertainment Cheese, according to the company.)

The first Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre opened on May 17, 1977, in San Jose, Calif. It was conceived as a place “where you could go and eat and play and have family time together,” Mr. McKillips said.

“The animatronics,” he added, “were a band that was playing cover songs and original music.”

The band has had different iterations, but Chuck E. Cheese, Helen Henny, Mr. Munch, Jasper T. Jowls and Pasqually have been mainstays. Some locations have had versions of the band called Studio C, with just Chuck E. playing solo.

The Chuck E. Cheese in the Northridge section of Los Angeles will retain its five-member band, while the location in Nanuet, N.Y., has a Studio C.

Today, Chuck E. Cheese has more than 600 locations in 16 countries, with more to come. The chain’s popularity drifted into pop culture, drawing loose references in video games, films and TV shows, including in an episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” in which the gang visits Risk E. Rat’s Pizza and Amusement Center.

The horror movie “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” released last year, follows a night security guard at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza as he battles a vengeful group of animatronic characters. The film was released a few weeks before Chuck E. Cheese announced the end of its animatronic bands, leading many to speculate that the horror movie spurred the company’s decision. The company said at the time that this was not the case.

Screens are ‘where the future is moving.’

For anyone born since about the mid-1970s, visiting a Chuck E. Cheese has felt like part of an American childhood. As the chain modernizes and ushers out its animatronic band, Kristy Linares, 33, the general manager of the Chuck E. Cheese in Paramus, N.J., said not much had changed.

The Paramus location no longer has an animatronic band and was recently renovated with more TVs, a digital dance floor and a trampoline gym, but Ms. Linares, who sometimes takes her children there, said that children still eat pizza and play games as always. “Chuck E. Cheese is still the same,” she said.

Employees said they had seen children shift their attention to screen-based games in recent years. Leana Gil, 17, a birthday party coordinator at the Paramus location, said she had noticed that children “gravitate toward things of their time,” citing a much-loved Paw Patrol game as an example.

Ms. Rubenstein, the general manager in Hempstead, said interactive screen games were a hit.

“That’s where the future is moving,” she said.

In another adaptation for the digital era, the chain is doing away with numbered hand stamp for visitors, which are checked at the exit to stop kids from wandering off or leaving with someone they did not arrive with. Instead, a family selfie will be taken at the entrance and checked at the exit.

On a recent Wednesday, Maricel de los Reyes took her son Sam to the Chuck E. Cheese in Paramus. It was their first visit there since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, and the first one without the band.

Did they miss it?

“No, I don’t think that was a big thing for us,” she said, as Sam walked off to play a game. “It was more the games, the food and just hanging out here.”

Heavy seasonal rains have set off flash floods across Afghanistan, killing at least 50 people in one province, leaving 100 more missing and displacing thousands of others on Friday, officials said.

The flood’s toll in the northern province of Baghlan, which appeared to have suffered the worst devastation on Friday, was likely to rise, said Hedayatullah Hamdard, the director of the provincial disaster management department. Most of the dead there were women and children, he said.

Flooding on Friday also killed at least one person in Badakhshan, a mountainous eastern province, where it destroyed homes, small dams and bridges and killed 2,000 livestock, the provincial diaster management department said.

Floods also occurred in the provinces of Ghor and Herat, in central and western Afghanistan, according to the Taliban government. Doctors were also being deployed in Parwan Province, north of Kabul, said Hekmatullah Shamim, the spokesman for the province’s governor, though details of the flood’s toll there were not immediately available.

Rescue teams were sending food, aid, medical teams and ambulances to the affected areas of Baghlan Province, said Sharafat Zaman, a spokesman for the Health Ministry.

Images published by the government on Saturday showed roads in Baghlan submerged in muddy water, with people trying to move vehicles that had been stuck in the sludge.

In recent years, Afghanistan has been experiencing a dire economic crisis, faced a spate of natural disasters, and dealt with the turmoil of war and clashes with its neighbor, Pakistan.

The wet conditions this year have been brought in part by the El Niño phenomenon, raising the risk of floods, which hinder crop production and the flow of food supplies, particularly in the country’s north and northeast, the International Rescue Committee said in a statement last week.

Flash floods from heavy rains inundated much of Afghanistan last month, killing more than 100 people, destroying more than 1,000 homes and ruining more than 60,000 acres of farmland, the group said.

The damage to roads, bridges and the power infrastructure could hinder the delivery of humanitarian aid there, it said. Floods are also economically devastating in a country where at least 80 percent of the population derives their income from agriculture, according to the United Nations.

“Any additional flooding will have a detrimental impact on large swaths of the population,” the International Rescue Committee said, “which are already reeling from an economic collapse, high levels of malnutrition and conflict.”

Justice Clarence Thomas denounced on Friday “the nastiness and the lies” that have shadowed him in recent years as public scrutiny has mounted over his wife’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election and luxury gifts he has accepted from billionaire friends.

It amounted to some of the most extensive public remarks he has made since revelations that he failed to disclose years of lavish trips from wealthy conservatives, like the Texas real estate magnate Harlan Crow, including on private jets and a superyacht.

“My wife and I, the last two or three years, just the nastiness and the lies,” said Justice Thomas, who did not specify what he was referring to in addressing a full ballroom of lawyers and judges gathered for a judicial conference in Alabama. “There’s certainly been a lot of negativity in our lives, my wife and I, over the last few years, but we choose not to focus on it.”

The justice faced calls for recusal after text messages and emails showed that his wife, Virginia Thomas, known as Ginni, sought to overturn the election, appealing to administration officials and lawmakers. Justice Thomas has continued to participate in a number of cases related to the 2020 election, including three about Jan. 6 on the docket this term.

The remarks were part of a wide-ranging conversation at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit Judicial Conference held at a luxury resort on the waters of Mobile Bay, a shallow inlet of the Gulf of Mexico.

Interviewed by a former clerk, Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, now a federal judge in Florida best known for overturning the Biden administration’s mask mandate, Justice Thomas reminisced about past years on the court, when he said it would have been impossible to imagine anyone leaking opinions. That appeared to be a reference to the 2022 leak of the draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization eliminating the constitutional right to abortion.

“We may have been a dysfunctional family, but we were a family,” he said. “And it would be inconceivable that anyone would leak an opinion of the court or do anything to intentionally harm one another.”

He expressed frustration with some of the current trends in the federal courts, including the practice of seeking sympathetic judges and the increasing use of emergency petitions that ask the Supreme Court to consider issues quickly.

He said cherry-picking judges, or forum-shopping, had led to situations where “a district judge can issue an injunction for the whole nation.” The emergency docket, where the justices often decide on issues, some of which are extremely consequential, without full briefing or oral argument, “short-circuits our process.”

The justice, who did not take questions and declined an interview request, appeared at ease, laughing and beaming as he pointed out his law clerks in the audience. He repeated several times that he and Ms. Thomas, who sat near the front of the ballroom in a bright pink floral tunic, try to ignore their critics.

“You don’t get to prevent people from doing horrible things or saying horrible things,” the justice said. “But one, you have to understand and accept the fact that they don’t, they can’t change you unless you permit that.”

Justice Thomas returned to many familiar themes, including his reluctance at becoming a judge and then a justice. He said he had never sought, or wanted, a public life but believed it to be his duty.

Before he was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, he said, “I was thinking of getting out of D.C. I had no interest in being in public life.”

“I wound up in this job,” he said. “And this is, we pray, to do whatever it was that God wanted me to do, what I was being called to do. But being in public life is not something I would have chosen to do.”

He peppered his remarks with references to his childhood in Georgia. He was born in Pin Point, a tiny enclave in the tidal wetlands near Savannah, and then grew up in the city, raised mainly by his grandparents.

He described how he tries to write clearly and plainly, avoiding word play and unnecessary flourishes because he wants those who do not practice the law, like the people he grew up with, to be able to understand the decisions of the Supreme Court.

Before he could finish an anecdote about walking with a friend in his old neighborhood in Georgia, he noted that the memory came from “before they started attacking my friends; I hope I still have some.”

The comment appeared to be a nod to the revelations about Mr. Crow. Justice Thomas has maintained that Mr. Crow is a longtime friend and that he did not act improperly.

Their relationship has raised eyebrows, in part because Mr. Crow purchased the justice’s mother’s home and funded a museum in Pin Point in a former seafood cannery where his mother worked as a crab picker.

Justice Thomas picked up another familiar refrain, detailing how he and Ms. Thomas love traveling in their motor coach because they get to interact with ordinary people.

“Especially in Washington, people pride themselves in being awful,” he said. “It’s a hideous place, as far as I’m concerned. Because the rest of the country, it’s one of the reasons we like R.V.-ing, you get to be around regular people who don’t pride themselves in doing harmful things, merely because they have the capacity to do it.”

He made no mention of an investigation that revealed that he borrowed more than a quarter of a million dollars from a wealthy friend to buy the 40-foot luxury motor coach.

He stressed that one of his long-term goals has been to try to make the court more representative of the country. He said he chooses law clerks from outside Ivy League schools, pointing to Judge Mizelle as an example.

The justice said he felt encouraged by the collegiality of the conference, lamenting how he could no longer mingle with attendees as easily as when he first joined the court.

“I didn’t need so much security back then,” he said.

All of the justices received increased security after the Dobbs leak. Several security officers were positioned around the ballroom and in the hallways.

Asked about any advice he wished he had received before becoming a judge, Justice Thomas said he was grateful for the support of the other justices, but said it has not been easy.

“If I knew more about the court, I would have stayed on the D.C. Circuit,” he said, to some laughter from the audience. “But we don’t get to choose that. We’re called to do something and we do it. But I think that the — I really would have preferred, if I could be selfish, to be on the D.C. Circuit. I think this court is a bit tougher of a haul.”