On October 9, Moscow and Cairo announced that their navies are planning joint exercises in the Black Sea—a move clearly aimed at Turkey, which has a bitter enemy in Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and has increasingly run afoul of Vladimir Putin in Syria, the Caucasus, and Libya. Jerusalem’s interests lie with the pro-Israel Sisi against Turkey’s pro-Hamas Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but the situation is hardly straightforward. Jonathan Spyer explains:

In Israel, the rivalries between regional powers are generally understood to offer a certain advantage to Jerusalem, in that the power diplomatically closer to Israel (in this case Egypt) is likely to feel the need to cleave more closely to its allies in the face of a shared threat. The establishment of the East Mediterranean Gas Forum and its recent formalization as an international organization exemplify this process.

The efforts of Moscow to assert itself as a power in the eastern Mediterranean should sound a cautionary note, however. . . . Russia is strategically aligned in the Levant with Iran, Israel’s most implacable enemy. Russian weapons (via Iran and Syria) make up the bulk of the formidable arsenal assembled in the service of Iranian goals by Lebanese Hizballah. Russia is also a rival of Israel in the matter of gas exports to Europe. All this means that Russian efforts to leverage regional power rivalries to increase its own presence and influence are not a net positive for Jerusalem. From the Israeli point of view, while there is no enmity, the less Russia, the better.

The Russian entry into the picture, as elsewhere, is made possible by the absence of another major power. The EU can issue declarations, but it has no united force to deploy. The power that is absent in the eastern Mediterranean, and indeed whose absence makes possible both the Turkish aggression and the Russian attempt to “mediate,” is the United States.

When he called upon Hamas to end the war and release the hostages last week, the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas was also getting ready for a reshuffle within his regime. On Saturday, he appointed Hussein al-Sheikh deputy president of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which is intimately tied to the PA itself. Al-Sheikh would therefore succeed Abbas—who is eighty-nine and reportedly in ill health—as head of the PLO if he should die or become incapacitated, and be positioned to succeed him as head of the PA as well.

Al-Sheikh spent eleven years in an Israeli prison and, writes Maurice Hirsch, was involved in planning a 2002 Jerusalem suicide bombing that killed three. Moreover, Hirsch writes, he “does not enjoy broad Palestinian popularity or support.”

Still, by appointing Al-Sheikh, Abbas has taken a step in the internal reforms he inaugurated last year in the hope that he could prove to the Biden administration and other relevant players that the PA was up to the task of governing the Gaza Strip. Neomi Neumann writes:

Abbas’s motivation for reform also appears rooted in the need to meet the expectations of Arab and European donors without compromising his authority. On April 14, the EU foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas approved a three-year aid package worth 1.6 billion euros, including 620 million euros in direct budget support tied to reforms. Meanwhile, the French president Emmanuel Macron held a call with Abbas [earlier this month] and noted afterward that reforms are essential for the PA to be seen as a viable governing authority for Gaza—a telling remark given reports that Paris may soon recognize “the state of Palestine.”

In some cases, reforms appear targeted at specific regional partners. The idea of appointing a vice-president originated with Saudi Arabia.

In the near term, Abbas’s main goal appears to be preserving Arab and European support ahead of a major international conference in New York this June.