South Africa recently declined an opportunity to execute a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Omar al-Bashir, the genocidal president of Sudan. Eugene Kontorovich notes the many layers of hypocrisy at play here:

[F]ew other countries reflect the Palestinians’ warped view of international law as [does] South Africa. It has become one of the Jewish state’s most vocal critics, always couching its criticisms in language of law and rights, while embracing monsters like Robert Mugabe, the scourge-for-life of neighboring Zimbabwe. One cannot help being struck by the number of South Africans, especially jurists, at the forefront of international legal efforts against Israel (especially at the UN), including [those] seeking prosecutions at the ICC—Richard Goldstone, John Dugard, Navi Pillay, Desmond Tutu. . . .

So it’s easier for a crate of Jordan Valley dates to get served with process for war crimes in South Africa than the perpetrator of one of the world’s greatest genocides. . . .

Ironically, Bashir’s impunity may only push the ICC to take a harder line on Israel. One would think that genocide . . . would generate enough international consensus and pressure for its prosecution to get a fugitive arrested. . . . But apparently genocide is not enough. So the ICC prosecutor will cast about for a role that will make the court generally useful and appreciated by the international community, [by seeking] out the lowest common denominator of international demand for prosecution. And that’s not prosecution for genocide, but for houses for Jews in Jerusalem. Even the Palestinian Authority and South Africa can get behind that.

Yesterday, the head of the Shin Bet—Israel’s internal security service—was in Washington meeting with officials from the State Department, CIA, and the White House itself. Among the topics no doubt discussed are rising tensions with Iran and the possibility that the latter, in order to defend its nuclear program, will instruct its network of proxies in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and even Iraq and Yemen to attack the Jewish state. Oved Lobel explores the history of this network, which, he argues, predates Iran’s Islamic Revolution—when Shiite radicals in Lebanon coordinated with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s movement in Iran:

An inextricably linked Iran-Syria-Palestinian axis has actually been in existence since the early 1970s, with Lebanon the geographical fulcrum of the relationship and Damascus serving as the primary operational headquarters. Lebanon, from the 1980s until 2005, was under the direct military control of Syria, which itself slowly transformed from an ally to a client of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The nexus among Damascus, Beirut, and the Palestinian territories should therefore always have been viewed as one front, both geographically and operationally. It’s clear that the multifront-war strategy was already in operation during the first intifada years, from 1987 to 1993.

[An] Iranian-organized conference in 1991, the first of many, . . . established the “Damascus 10”—an alliance of ten Palestinian factions that rejected any peace process with Israel. According to the former Hamas spokesperson and senior official Ibrahim Ghosheh, he spoke to then-Hizballah Secretary-General Abbas al-Musawi at the conference and coordinated Hizballah attacks from Lebanon in support of the intifada. Further important meetings between Hamas and the Iranian regime were held in 1999 and 2000, while the IRGC constantly met with its agents in Damascus to encourage coordinated attacks on Israel.

For some reason, Hizballah’s guerilla war against Israel in Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s was, and often still is, viewed as a separate phenomenon from the first intifada, when they were in fact two fronts in the same battle.

Israel opted for a perilous unconditional withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, which Hamas’s Ghosheh asserts was a “direct factor” in precipitating the start of the second intifada later that same year.