Last spring, the UN Human Right Council—where representatives of the world’s most brutal tyrannies gather to pass resolutions condemning the Jewish state—approved a new commission of inquiry to report on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Having secured funding from the General Assembly, the commission recently selected its members. Anne Bayefsky reports:

The identities of the inquisitors are Navi Pillay of South Africa, Miloon Kothari of India, and Chris Sidoti of Australia. . . . The three were appointed in July by then-council president Nazhat Shameem, a Muslim lawyer from Fiji. . . . The inquiry’s founding resolution was crafted at the behest of Islamic states and what the United Nations calls the “State of Palestine.” It spells out a number of fantastically broad tasks connected by one overarching goal: to turn the Jewish state into a global pariah.

The flagship enterprise of Pillay’s tenure was resurrecting the UN’s anti-Semitic hate-fest held in Durban in 2001 and reaffirming the slander of the racist Jewish state. Since then, she’s been preaching, “help end decades of Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people, . . . recognized as apartheid.”

Fellow inquiry member Kothari has . . . already reported on “the practice of ethnic cleansing and expulsion of land-based people and communities, as has historically been the case in Palestine.” And the root cause: the affront of Jews living in the Jewish homeland. Or in his words, “Israel’s long record of . . . implantation of settlers prior to and since its establishment as a state.”

To add to these assaults on language and moral reason is the third member, Chris Sidoti, whose record of advising the Palestinian Authority goes back to Yasir Arafat’s day.

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.”