When war broke out in eastern Ukraine following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, Israel sent aid to the thousands of Jews who were displaced from the region. In the wake of that conflict, Ukraine’s small but vibrant Jewish community has been under severe stress. Officials from Israel’s defense and foreign ministries recently gathered to evaluate the potential wartime needs of Ukraine’s Jewish communities should Russia attack again. Last Friday, as Steven Hendrix, Shira Rubin, and David L. Stern note, an Israeli advisory urged citizens to leave the country immediately and said that it would begin to evacuate the family members of embassy staff.

The history of Judaism in Ukraine, going back more than a millennium, is both rich and tragic. Ḥasidism traces its roots to Ukrainian Jews, and the communities here have flourished in different periods of history. But they have suffered inconceivably brutal pogroms and mass killings at other times, including during the tsarist era, Communist revolutions, and the Holocaust.

More recently, Ukraine’s ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine has split a vibrant Jewish community of at least 30,000 people centered around the city of Donetsk, according to Pinchas Vishedski, who was the chief rabbi of the city until the war caused him to flee to Kyiv with many others.

Some members opted to stay in the east, Vishedski said, particularly older residents who felt it was too difficult to disrupt their lives. Many of them feel comfortable living in the Russian-dominated area. . . . But most of his former Jewish community members fled the fighting, with some heading immediately to Israel and others resettling elsewhere in Ukraine, mostly in and around Kyiv. Jewish relief agencies converted a youth summer camp near the capital into a refugee center for families that often arrived with little more than a suitcase, Branovsky said.

While conventional wisdom in the Western press believes that the war with Hamas has left Jerusalem more isolated and scuttled chances of expanding the Abraham Accords, Gabriel Scheinmann points to a very different reality. He begins with Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on Israel last month, and the coalition that helped defend against it:

America’s Arab allies had, in various ways, provided intelligence and allowed U.S. and Israeli planes to operate in their airspace. Jordan, which has been vociferously attacking Israel’s conduct in Gaza for months, even publicly acknowledged that it shot down incoming Iranian projectiles. When the chips were down, the Arab coalition held and made clear where they stood in the broader Iranian war on Israel.

The successful batting away of the Iranian air assault also engendered awe in Israel’s air-defense capabilities, which have performed marvelously throughout the war. . . . Israel’s response to the Iranian night of missiles should give further courage to Saudi Arabia to codify its alignment. Israel . . . telegraphed clearly to Tehran that it could hit precise targets without its aircraft being endangered and that the threshold of a direct Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear or other sites had been breached.

The entire episode demonstrated that Israel can both hit Iranian sites and defend against an Iranian response. At a time when the United States is focused on de-escalation and restraint, Riyadh could see quite clearly that only Israel has both the capability and the will to deal with the Iranian threat.

It is impossible to know whether the renewed U.S.-Saudi-Israel negotiations will lead to a normalization deal in the immediate months ahead. . . . Regardless of the status of this deal, [however], or how difficult the war in Gaza may appear, America’s Arab allies have now become Israel’s.