When confronted with things like the 9/11 conspiracy theories frequently floated in Palestinian media, State Department officials are apt to respond with condescending remarks like “that’s just how Palestinians talk,” writes Stephen Flatow. The same attitude is on display in a particularly bizarre and incendiary email, mainly proposing U.S. encouragement of anti-Israel incitement, that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received from Thomas Pickering, a retired senior State Department official who was serving as her quasi-official adviser:

[Pickering] proposed that the U.S. should persuade NGOs to stir up Palestinian demonstrations against Israel, in order to pressure the Israelis to make more concessions. . . .

The racism part comes in with Pickering’s explanation as to why he prefers that the protesters be women. If Palestinian men take part, he explained, they might turn violent, . . . which would spoil Pickering’s whole plan of garnering world sympathy for the Palestinian cause.

Why was he so sure that Palestinian men would use violence? “On the Palestinian side, the male culture is to use force,” he wrote. . . .

Imagine if an Israeli official or an American Jewish leader asserted that Palestinian culture is inherently violent. Surely he would be denounced as a racist, ostracized from polite society, and forced to apologize publicly.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”