On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous speech at the dedication of the military cemetery at Gettysburg; a few months later, at the request of the historian George Bancroft, he wrote down the text of the speech so that Bancroft could consult it in composing his history of the United States. Archivists have recently determined that the paper the president used was produced by Philp & Solomons, a Washington-based stationery company. But this is not the only connection between the company’s co-founder Adolphus Simeon Solomons and President Lincoln. Rachel Delia Benaim writes:

Solomons was one of the handful of Jews in Lincoln’s circle of friends and colleagues. (He also had good relationships with Ulysses S. Grant and Chester Arthur.) A practicing Jew from New York City, Solomons was born in 1826 to a British-immigrant father and an American-born mother. In his youth, he served in the New York State National Guard, and he grew up to be a prominent Jewish Republican.

It is believed that Lincoln was the first non-Jewish public figure for whom kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, was recited. In eulogizing Lincoln, Solomons is credited with saying “it was the Israelites’ privilege here, as well as elsewhere, to be the first to offer in their places of worship prayers for the repose of the soul of Mr. Lincoln.”

[Several years after Lincoln’s death], President Grant, who had attempted to expel the Jews from [the area occupied by his army] in 1862 but later expressed remorse for doing so, tried to appoint Solomons as governor of Washington, D.C., [but Solomons declined]. In 1881, Solomons co-founded the American Red Cross with Clara Barton and was appointed by President Arthur to represent the United States at the International Congress of the Red Cross in Geneva, Switzerland.

While conventional wisdom in the Western press believes that the war with Hamas has left Jerusalem more isolated and scuttled chances of expanding the Abraham Accords, Gabriel Scheinmann points to a very different reality. He begins with Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on Israel last month, and the coalition that helped defend against it:

America’s Arab allies had, in various ways, provided intelligence and allowed U.S. and Israeli planes to operate in their airspace. Jordan, which has been vociferously attacking Israel’s conduct in Gaza for months, even publicly acknowledged that it shot down incoming Iranian projectiles. When the chips were down, the Arab coalition held and made clear where they stood in the broader Iranian war on Israel.

The successful batting away of the Iranian air assault also engendered awe in Israel’s air-defense capabilities, which have performed marvelously throughout the war. . . . Israel’s response to the Iranian night of missiles should give further courage to Saudi Arabia to codify its alignment. Israel . . . telegraphed clearly to Tehran that it could hit precise targets without its aircraft being endangered and that the threshold of a direct Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear or other sites had been breached.

The entire episode demonstrated that Israel can both hit Iranian sites and defend against an Iranian response. At a time when the United States is focused on de-escalation and restraint, Riyadh could see quite clearly that only Israel has both the capability and the will to deal with the Iranian threat.

It is impossible to know whether the renewed U.S.-Saudi-Israel negotiations will lead to a normalization deal in the immediate months ahead. . . . Regardless of the status of this deal, [however], or how difficult the war in Gaza may appear, America’s Arab allies have now become Israel’s.