On November 19, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued instructions to his staff to identify those groups that support efforts to boycott the Jewish state—many of which happen to be nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) ostensibly devoted to defending human rights—and to ensure that they don’t receive federal funds. Gerald Steinberg explains:

There is ample evidence that the agendas of such groups and their impacts go far beyond straightforward criticism of [Israeli] policies, and venture into anti-Semitism. This problem has persisted at least since the 2001 NGO Forum of the infamous UN conference on racism in Durban—led in part by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International—at which anti-Semitism was very visible. The participants declared that their objective was the “complete isolation of Israel as an apartheid state.” In the two decades that followed, these groups have worked intensely to implement the goal of turning Israel into a rogue state.

From false accusations of “massacres” in Jenin in 2002 to the UN’s infamous Goldstone report on the Gaza war in 2009, and the repeat performance in 2014, to the UN Human Rights Council’s recent travesty of publishing a discriminatory blacklist, with many other examples, this powerful NGO network has led the way.

Officials of organizations who purport to promote human rights have repeatedly and obsessively singled out Israel for attack on social media, while systematically erasing the history of terror and rejection it has faced.

[Therefore] it is important that the State Department’s initiative be joined by both Democratic and Republican party leaders in the United States, and by Europeans. . . . Human rights, anti-Semitism, and the need to take a strong stand against campaigns that combine them are too important to be rejected on the basis of narrow political partisanship.

Most likely, it was the Israeli Air Force that attacked eastern Syria Monday night, apparently destroying a convoy carrying Iranian weapons. Yoav Limor comments:

Israel reportedly carried out 32 attacks in Syria in 2022, and since early 2023 it has already struck 25 times in the country—at the very least. . . . The Iranian-Israeli clash stands out in the wake of the dramatic events in the region, chiefly among them is the effort to strike a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and later on with various other Muslim-Sunni states. Iran is trying to torpedo this process and has even publicly warned Saudi Arabia not to “gamble on a losing horse” because Israel’s demise is near. Riyadh is unlikely to heed that demand, for its own reasons.

Despite the thaw in relations between the kingdom and the Islamic Republic—including the exchange of ambassadors—the Saudis remain very suspicious of the Iranians. A strategic manifestation of that is that Riyadh is trying to forge a defense pact with the U.S.; a tactical manifestation took place this week when Saudi soccer players refused to play a match in Iran because of a bust of the former Revolutionary Guard commander Qassem Suleimani, [a master terrorist whose militias have wreaked havoc throughout the Middle East, including within Saudi borders].

Of course, Israel is trying to bring Saudi Arabia into its orbit and to create a strong common front against Iran. The attack in Syria is ostensibly unrelated to the normalization process and is meant to prevent the terrorists on Israel’s northern border from laying their hands on sophisticated arms, but it nevertheless serves as a clear reminder for Riyadh that it must not scale back its fight against the constant danger posed by Iran.