Yesterday, the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the Knesset by video. Members of the Joint List, a parliamentary alliance of majority-Arab parties, decided as a group not to attend. The editors of the Jerusalem Post comment:

The only Jewish member in the faction, the Ḥadash MK Ofer Kassif, explained his position on Saturday night,: . . . “we hear in the Western media, and also here, day and night, that this war is the like war of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness. . . . But it isn’t. For years there were crimes against the Russian minority in Ukraine.”

Hadash is the current form of the Israeli Communist party. It is the biggest and most popular among Arab-Israelis. . . . In October 2020, the party officially voted against the approval of the Abraham Accords—the peace agreements with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. In October 2016, the party boycotted the funeral of Israel’s former president Shimon Peres, who won a Nobel Peace Prize and was one of the initiators of the Oslo Accords.

In December [2017], while Syrian President Bashar Assad was using chemical gas against his own people during the war in Syria, Ḥadash put out a statement supporting him and commending him for regaining control over the city of Aleppo. [In short], the Israeli Communist party sees the U.S. and its actions as the source of all evil as if the cold war is still going on.

Luckily, it seems that Israeli Arabs have an alternative—Ra’am—a party that wishes to advance their interests even at the cost of partnering with Israeli Zionist parties

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.