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:

If there is to be a resolution to the conflict between the Jewish state and a putative Palestinian one, writes Jonathan Michanie, it won’t start with drawing lines on maps or restrictions on where Jews can build houses, but with the Palestinian Authority (PA) abandoning its official anti-Semitism. The PA can, in this regard, learn much from those Arab nations that have recently made peace with Israel: