Last month, a scandal broke out when it became public knowledge that President Trump shared with the Russian foreign minister highly classified information—provided by Israel—about Islamic State’s plans to get bombs onto airplanes. The president was soon accused of jeopardizing Israeli and American intelligence operations against Islamic State (IS) by providing specifics about intelligence-gathering to an unfriendly nation.

What specifics in particular? Relying on information provided off-the-record by current and former U.S. officials, the New York Times undertook to disclose them. Israel, it reported, had been conducting an extremely sophisticated cyber-intelligence operation against IS that gave it access to detailed information about terror plots.

Now that this information has been published, writes Elliott Abrams, IS will surely be able to identify and guard against the “tool” that Israel is using to spy on its operations. Other countries, too, will likely be able to protect themselves against similar espionage, forcing Jerusalem to cease making use of a piece of software that likely took years to develop and could have otherwise yielded much more vital information.

It’s hard to tell how much damage was done, [by the president’s comments to his Russian guests], because he did not reveal how the information [about IS] was acquired. That task was left to the New York Times and to the American officials who leaked highly classified information to the Times. Those officials committed a crime. . . .

I don’t know whether the president’s disclosure infuriated Israelis, [as the Times reports], but I know that the Times’s unprincipled and irresponsible disclosure damaged not only Israel but our own safety. It helped IS. . . .

The officials who leaked to the Times leaked information of the highest sensitivity and classification, which is why I called it a crime. That leak, and the decision of the Times to print the story, endangers Israeli security and American security. To what end? What is achieved? . . .  [I]t’s just a small part of a campaign against Trump. And it seems advancing that cause, for the leakers and the newspaper, trumps our security and that of an ally.

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.