Last week, Airbnb—a company that arranges for short-term rentals over the Internet—announced that it would no longer list apartments belonging to Jews who live in the West Bank. David Harsanyi comments:

Airbnb has singled out Jews, and only Jews, as the one group in the world that is worthy of such censure. That’s what makes its boycott a naked act of corporate anti-Semitism. Airbnb says an entire team “struggled to come up with the right approach.” And the right approach evidently was to bar Jews from listing apartments and homes in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem. Airbnb is only targeting Jews—not the present government of Israel or the “Zionists” or any political entity—who live on disputed land. . . .

[But] don’t worry, you can still snag a “modern apartment studio” in the city-center of Sevastopol, Ukraine, annexed by Russia. And Airbnb will hook you up with a “cozy studio” near Gulshan-Baridhara in “Tibet, China”—formerly known simply as Tibet. Hey, Turkey has been depopulating Kurdish towns for decades, but Airbnb is there for you. . . .

The company claims that its decision was evaluated on “whether the existence of listings is contributing to existing human suffering.” Yet in countries with stateless minorities and oppressive regimes, a two-bedroom within walking distance of your favorite tourist attraction is almost surely available.

The notion that a glorified rental board believes it can ease human suffering is amusing. Jews will figure out a way to rent their homes. But the ideas Airbnb is helping normalize—namely, those of the . . . boycott, divest, and sanction movement (BDS)—are serious. Airbnb wants a judenfrei West Bank. In no other region in the world, and with no other conflict and no other ethnicity, race, or faith, would Americans openly accept this kind of prejudice.

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.”