As Israeli forces hunted for wanted men, weapons and explosives in the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin this week, after using aerial drones to blow up what they described as terrorist hubs there, the city was living up to its reputation as a center of militant defiance in the occupied West Bank.

To many Israelis, the city and its environs are a dreaded incubator of terrorism that has claimed many lives over the years. During the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, the Jenin refugee camp was a prime exporter of suicide bombers to Israeli cities. Israeli officials say that more than 50 shooting attacks on Israelis have emanated from the Jenin area this year, and that 19 militants have taken refuge in the camp after carrying out attacks since last fall.

To many Palestinians, Jenin, in the hilly northern reaches of the West Bank, is a heroic symbol of resilience and resistance against Israeli rule, and the rule of others who came before. That reputation was sealed in 2002, at the height of the second intifada, when the camp was the scene of a fierce, 10-day battle in which 52 Palestinians, around half of whom may have been civilians, according to the United Nations, and 23 Israeli soldiers were killed.

Yasir Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, coined a new name for the camp that year: “Jeningrad,” comparing it to the World War II battle of Stalingrad.

Since Monday, hundreds of Israeli commandos have taken part in the largest military incursion in many years in the area, scouring the crowded camp and killing at least 11 people. The military says it has discovered laboratories for manufacturing explosives and caches of weapons and explosive devices hidden inside buildings, under the narrow roads and even in pits underneath a mosque.

Israeli leaders indicated on Tuesday evening that the incursion was in its final stages and that the Israeli commandos were likely to withdraw from Jenin, possibly within hours. But given the history, analysts say it may not be long before they are back.

“Jenin is revered because it has provided the Palestinian collective memory with many examples of not just resistance but also of popular endorsement and solidarity,” said Nour Odeh, a Palestinian columnist and political analyst based in Ramallah. “It’s not a rich or industrial city,” she added, but a place with “a sense of common destiny and unity” where normally competing armed factions of a deeply divided Palestinian society and polity fight as one.

Jenin was the northernmost of 19 West Bank sites originally established to house some of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes in what is now Israel in the late 1940s — when the state of Israel was established and its Arab neighbors waged an unsuccessful war to crush it — and have never been allowed to return. The sites are still referred to as camps, but have become built-up towns or neighborhoods, though with generally substandard conditions.

In the Jenin camp, as many as 17,000 residents are crowded into an area of less than half a square mile, abutting the city of Jenin with about 40,000 people and just three miles from the line separating Israel from the West Bank. The United Nations says the camp has not only been plagued by violence, but has “one of the highest rates of unemployment and poverty” in the West Bank. In a year of escalating violence in the area, Israel has mounted frequent raids into Jenin to arrest Palestinians suspected of planning or carrying out attacks against Israelis. Many have turned deadly after setting off prolonged gun battles between troops and armed militants.

Jenin has become a bastion in the West Bank of Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls the Palestinian coastal enclave of Gaza, and of Islamic Jihad. Newer, unaffiliated militias have sprung up, made up of a new generation of gunmen, some of them born after the second Intifada ended in 2005, who act on their own initiative and do not answer to the established organizations.

Of the 11 Palestinians killed, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, by Israeli fire in the camp since early Monday, at least five have been claimed as fighters by militant groups, including a boy of 16. Israel says all those killed so far were combatants, though the affiliations of the other six remained unclear.

Israel’s right-wing government has sworn to take tougher action against Palestinian violence, while the Palestinian Authority, which is generally weak and unpopular, has all but abandoned policing the hotbeds of militancy in the northern West Bank, signaling a loss of control and adding to the atmosphere of lawlessness.

“Jenin is basically a countryside, rural town,” said Ehud Yaari, an Israel-based fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and co-author of the book “Intifada” about the first Palestinian uprising from 1987 to 1993, describing the city as “a kind of backwater.” It is off the beaten track for most Palestinians, and far from Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority, the body created in the 1990s that exercises limited self-rule over parts of the West Bank.

Years of neglect by the Palestinian Authority made Jenin an easy recruiting ground for the authority’s rivals in Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Mr. Yaari said, adding that those groups have recently flooded the area with weapons and money provided by their Iranian backers.

During the second Intifada, according to Israeli estimates, at least 28 suicide bombers set out from the Jenin camp.

Palestinian officials tried to cast the Israeli assault of 2002, part of a larger offensive in the West Bank, as a “massacre” with hundreds of Palestinian fatalities in the camp, a claim that the United Nations examined and rejected. But the legacy stuck.

Even before Israel existed as a state, Jenin became known as a center of rebellion in the late 1930s, during the Arab revolt against British rule and against Jewish immigration to Palestine. A British official was assassinated in his office in Jenin and in a reprisal attack, British forces blew up a quarter of the town.

After the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948-49, the West Bank came under Jordanian control. Then Israel captured it in the 1967 war and Jordan later renounced its claim to the territory. The Palestinian Authority nominally took over Jenin and other parts of the West Bank in the mid-1990s.

In 2005, hoping to reduce friction in the area and signal progress toward a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel dismantled four Jewish settlements around Jenin, the same year that it withdrew from the Gaza Strip. Jenin and the northern West Bank were then viewed by Israeli, Palestinian and international authorities as a kind of pilot program for Israeli disengagement from the occupied territory, and by some even as a potential prototype for a future Palestinian state. That model has since collapsed.

Israelis would routinely traverse the boundary to Jenin for shopping, car repairs and dental care but that has become more dangerous. Israel has restricted checkpoint crossings by Palestinians, so fewer of them enter Israel daily for work, according to the United Nations.

Israel has stepped up construction in Jewish settlements in the West Bank, a major point of friction. Palestinian gunmen often shoot at Israeli communities across the line.

And proximity to the boundary has another meaning for the Palestinian refugees in the Jenin camp, Ms. Odeh, the political analyst in Ramallah, said.

“The refugees there can literally look out the window and see where their fathers and grandparents were displaced from,” she said.

For the Whiteheads, an African American family living in the city of Baltimore, race is discussed at the dinner table. In the car on the way to work and school and games. In the backyard while the sons practice sports.

So when the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions at colleges and universities, effectively ending the practice known as affirmative action, the family began talking about it earnestly, echoing the range of emotions felt by people across the country who are invested in the ruling.

Though the result was anticipated, Karsonya Wise Whitehead, 54, a college professor, said she was so devastated that she had to sit down to process “the type of history being made at that moment.”

Her husband, Johnnie Whitehead, 59, the principal of a Christian school, said he took no joy in the ruling but was ambivalent about affirmative action. He is hopeful that it is no longer needed, but fears it is.

The eldest son, Kofi, 22, texted his brother Amir to share the news, and thought of the chilling effect it might have on the next generation of Black students. Amir, 20, felt that ending affirmative action was not wrong because admissions should be based upon merits only.

For the Whiteheads, the Supreme Court decision — seismic in its power to reorder the admissions process at elite colleges and universities — was another chapter in a broader discussion they had been having since their children were young.

Their conversation reflects, in some ways, the complex and shifting views among African Americans grappling with the question embedded in the nation’s every contemporary racial conflict, from reparations to the American justice system: How to deal with the legacy of slavery?

“This is part of our ongoing conversation about the tensions around racism and around race,” said Dr. Whitehead, who teaches African American studies and communications at Loyola University Maryland and is the executive director of the Karson Institute for Race, Peace and Social Justice at the college. “We’ve seen different iterations of: ‘What does it mean to be Black in America? Where do we fit into America? Whose America is this? And if we want to have equity, what does this equity look like?’”

The family’s early talks centered on making sure their sons were confident in who they were as young Black men. That gave way to other topics.

Kofi favors reparations but doesn’t know what the right amount of money should be for Black families whose ancestors were enslaved. Amir favors reparations in some form, too, saying, “We built this country, we deserve some part of it.” Dr. Whitehead is not only in support, but she believes it is the only way forward to address the historical debt. Mr. Whitehead said Black Americans deserved reparations, particularly since the country had paid others that it harmed, but did not see it as a way to solve racism.

When it comes to affirmative action, African Americans are broadly supportive of the policy.

According to a Pew Research Center report released last month, only 33 percent of American adults approve of race-conscious admissions at selective colleges. Forty-seven percent of African American adults say they approve.

The research also revealed that 28 percent of Black adults said others had assumed that they benefited unfairly from efforts to increase racial and ethnic diversity.

A separate NBC poll in April found about half of Americans agreed that an affirmative action program was still necessary “to counteract the effects of discrimination against minorities, and are a good idea as long as there are no rigid quotas.” Among African Americans, the number in support of that statement increased to about 77 percent.

The starkly different attitudes toward the merits of affirmative action were laid bare most profoundly in the words of the only two Black justices. Their written exchange mirrored how the landmark decision was discussed, debated and deconstructed among friends and families — including the Whiteheads — at dinner tables, in group chats and on social media.

Justices Clarence Thomas, who attended Yale, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who attended Harvard, challenged each other’s views, agreeing only on the existence of racial disparities but sharply disagreeing on how to address them.

“As she sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of Black Americans still determining our lives today,” wrote Justice Thomas, the nation’s second Black justice and a longtime critic of affirmative action.

Justice Jackson, in her dissent, said Justice Thomas “is somehow persuaded that these realities have no bearing on a fair assessment of ‘individual achievement,’” she wrote. In her opinion, the court’s conservative majority displayed a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” on the issue of race.

In some ways, the Whiteheads’ views of affirmative action aligned with both of the justices’ argument outlined on the pages of the ruling.

For Ms. Whitehead, a radio show host, author and the daughter of civil rights activists, the dismantling of affirmative action — rooted in the civil rights movement as part of federal policy to counteract discrimination — was a “gut punch.” She said she personally benefited from affirmative action as the first Black student in the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies program at the University of Notre Dame. She worries that the decision portends what is to come, shaping other aspects of life, including corporate hiring.

Mr. Whitehead said he understood the practice as a way to counter discrimination and mistreatment of African Americans. And, he said, if affirmative action is going to be abolished, legacy preferences should go, too.

“I’d like to believe that we are a nation that doesn’t have to have affirmative action, but I fear we still need it,” said Mr. Whitehead, who is also a teacher at Baltimore School of the Bible.

Kofi, the eldest son, who graduated from Rhodes College in May with an English degree, has a sensibility closer to his mother’s. He first began following the issue in high school after learning about a white student in Texas who sued the University of Texas at Austin for its use of race in admission decisions.

He sees last week’s ruling as both out of touch with the pervasiveness of modern racism and a blow to future generations of Black students looking to attend elite schools. And he chafes at the argument that college academic standards are lowered to create diverse campuses.

“Affirmative action is about opening the door to diverse backgrounds because that is what education and higher learning is about,” Kofi said. “It’s not about having 5,000 of the same kids in two-parent households and white picket fences who all come in and do the same thing. No. College and higher education is about bringing in different people so you can learn from each other.”

His younger brother Amir, who is a member of Lafayette College’s fencing team, sees it differently. A college sophomore who is studying economics, he began developing his political and socially conservative views as a middle school student during the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump.

While he and his mother’s views are the farthest apart, she said he was raised “to be an independent thinker.”

He agrees with the other members of his family that race, and the nation’s history of enslavement of Black people, undeniably affects the present day. But, he said he believed that affirmative action undermined the concept of earning admission based on qualifications rather than race.

“Affirmative action being taken away is not so much a bad thing, because I don’t think that anyone who is not qualified for something should get that purely based off their skin color,” said Amir, who noted that he included his race on his college application but did not include the subject in his personal essay.

“I am not saying the bar has been lowered,” he said. “I just feel as though sometimes, cases come down to race. I think that goes back to us, as a country, where everything is focused on race.”