In 1942, a German mining executive got a message to Gerhard Riegner, a lawyer working for the Jewish World Congress in Switzerland, with concrete information about the mass-murder of Jews in Poland. Riegner rushed to the American consulate to convey the information to the U.S. State Department and to American Jewish leaders. But, as Sol Stern writes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s State Department “had been turned into a vipers’ nest regarding the plight of the European Jews,” and its initial reaction was to keep the information secret:

In the years before America entered the war, the Roosevelt administration ruled out political protest on behalf of Jews facing mounting persecution in Germany, because it wasn’t deemed to be in the “national interest”—that is, in the economic interests of a country still mired in the Great Depression. Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, an admirer of Mussolini and a known anti-Semite, then became the administration’s point man in charge of refugee policy. Long erected a maze of bureaucratic barriers (“paper walls,” as the historian David Wyman later called them), which made it impossible to fill even the very restrictive immigration quotas established by Republican administrations in the 1920s. Hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing the Nazis were effectively blocked from entering the United States.

In December 1940, the State Department disrupted an underground rescue network, led by the gallant journalist and Harvard literary editor Varian Fry, that helped over 1,000 Jewish artists and scholars escape the Nazis through southern France. Intent on maintaining proper diplomatic relations with France’s collaborationist Vichy government, the department viewed Fry’s unauthorized operation as a political nuisance. It refused to renew Fry’s passport and then requested the Vichy police to arrest him in Marseille and force his return to the U.S.

After the U.S. entered the war, the Roosevelt administration convinced itself that efforts to aid Jews trapped in occupied Europe would divert resources from the military campaign against the Axis powers. Thus when the Riegner cable arrived at the State Department on August 10, 1942, it was treated not merely with appropriate skepticism but also downright obstructionism. . . . Long [even] falsified documents about the extermination and then lied blatantly in public testimony about the total number of visas the department had granted to European Jews.

After examining this sorry history at length, Stern concludes with an “essential lesson” for America:

There can be no American greatness if there is no American moral leadership, a leadership that commands the United States to sometimes take risks, even at the expense of narrow definitions of the “national interest.” As we memorialize Auschwitz, we should honor the imperative in the question [posed by the novelist Dara Horn], “why didn’t everyone become Denmark?” and ask of ourselves—if not America, who?

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.