The UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), at the request of the Human Rights Council, has issued a “a database of all business enterprises involved in certain specified activities related to the Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” Stephen Daisley explains why the Council—whose members include Qatar, Pakistan, Libya, and Venezuela—is so concerned with commerce in this fictitious region:

[This] list doesn’t explicitly encourage the blackballing of companies mentioned. But it is a nod and a wink to the methods of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement. It’s too obvious to be clever but it’s still sly: a coycott, rather than a boycott.

BDS’s economic warfare against the Jewish state has had little success, but that’s not the point: a UN body is tacitly legitimizing its agenda and even doing the research for it. The UN’s obsession with this tiny strip of land on the shores of the Mediterranean has nothing to do with human rights. If Vlad the Impaler were around today, he’d be a special rapporteur on exsanguination and no one in Geneva would see anything untoward about it.

Israel can take care of itself. The people the UN harms when it works to isolate and delegitimize Israel are the Palestinians, and not just the 36,000 who work in the settlements. It rewards and reinforces the rejectionist mindset that has kept them stateless and will go on keeping them stateless. It tells them that their long, painful campaign of national self-harm is just and holds out false hope that it will one day triumph. It won’t. Israel is here to stay, and the priority of anyone who professes to be pro-Palestinian should be convincing the Palestinians to recognize that fact and, on that basis, finally accept offers of peace and statehood. If you care about Palestinian human rights, your efforts should be directed toward creating a Palestinian economy in which the companies listed by the OHCHR want to invest.

Until then, put [the] list to good use. Buy from, sell to, and invest in the very companies [it singles] out. . . . I appreciate some of you will have misgivings about getting mixed up with dangerous sorts like date-growers and pastry chefs, but trust me: it’s all for a good cause.

Yesterday I saw an unconfirmed report that the Biden administration has offered Israel a massive arms deal in exchange for a promise not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Even if the report is incorrect, there is plenty of other evidence that the White House has been trying to dissuade Jerusalem from mounting such an attack. The thinking behind this pressure is hard to fathom, as there is little Israel could do that would better serve American interests in the Middle East than putting some distance between the ayatollahs and nuclear weapons. Aaron MacLean explains why this is so, in the context of a broader discussion of strategic priorities in the Middle East and elsewhere:

If the Iran issue were satisfactorily adjusted in the direction of the American interest, the question of Israel’s security would become more manageable overnight. If a network of American partners enjoyed security against state predation, the proactive suppression of militarily less serious threats like Islamic State would be more easily organized—and indeed, such partners would be less vulnerable to the manipulation of powers external to the region.

[The Biden administration’s] commitment to escalation avoidance has had the odd effect of making the security situation in the region look a great deal as it would if America had actually withdrawn [from the Middle East].

Alternatively, we could project competence by effectively backing our Middle East partners in their competitions against their enemies, who are also our enemies, by ensuring a favorable overall balance of power in the region by means of our partnership network, and by preventing Iran from achieving nuclear status—even if it courts escalation with Iran in the shorter run.