For three decades, Saeb Erekat—now secretary general of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—has served as the public face of the Palestinian cause and as Yasir Arafat’s chief negotiator. His frequent attempts to libel Israel, most notably with the canard that a pitched battle between the IDF and Palestinian soldiers in Jenin was a massacre of civilians, have had a particular staying power. Now he is being kept alive by an Israeli medical team. David Horovitz writes:

Infuriated by Benjamin Netanyahu’s annexation plans, the Palestinian leadership has severed most dealings with Israel, to the direct detriment of its people, notably refusing to accept the tax revenues that Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (PA) for Palestinian imports and exports. Most relevantly in Erekat’s case, the PA has canceled the arrangements by which Palestinians needing medical treatment not available in PA areas can be transferred to Israeli hospitals. These measures have not been reversed even though annexation is now indefinitely off the table; Israel and the UN, however, have formulated a mechanism, outflanking the PA, by which Palestinian patients are again being transferred to Israeli hospitals.

As I write, Saeb Erekat, sixty-five, is on life support at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center in Ein Kerem, suffering from COVID-19. Treating him, the hospital has said, is extremely complicated because he has a history of medical problems, including undergoing a lung transplant in 2017. The hospital said it has been reaching out to international experts for input.

There’s a whole world of tragedies, hypocrisies, ironies and, potentially, lessons in this story—about what genuine coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians could achieve. . . . What is certain is that a leading hospital in the state of Israel is doing everything in its power to give him that opportunity. Of course it is.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.