Following the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s recent address to the Knesset, in which he pressed Israel to “get off the fence” and provide military support to Ukraine, the Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger took to Twitter to suggest that U.S. aid to Jerusalem be conditioned on how much help it offers Kyiv. Benny Avni comments:

Adam Kinzinger thinks he’s found the real bad guy in the Ukraine crisis. Is it Russia? President Putin? Could it be President Zelensky? Or Communist China? According to the congressman from Illinois, it’s—wait for it—Israel. [The day after his original statement], Kinzinger’s Twitter fingers were itching again in a thread that feigned a bold position, acting as a brave man swimming against the wrong-headed tide. “So I grabbed the third rail of foreign policy today,” . . . he wrote.

Explaining his threat to cut aid, Mr. Kinzinger drove home his argument: “If we don’t want to attack Russia directly, then our leverage is in the world uniting in sanctions and assistance for the people of Ukraine. This includes everyone, and Israel doesn’t have a special exemption.”

Yet does the “no exemption” rule apply to everyone? Does it even apply to America? And is the “world” really united? [On Monday] in Brussels the European Union failed to agree on imposing oil sanctions on Russia.

Mr. Kinzinger, who serves on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, might have missed a crucial request Mr. Zelensky made as he memorably addressed Congress last week. As in his Knesset speech, the Ukrainian leader challenged America to increase arms deliveries—a call so far rebuffed by President Biden and Congress. Further, Mr. Zelensky asked America to lead an imposition of a no-fly zone over Ukraine’s skies. That request was also quickly rebuffed by the White House and most members of Congress.

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.