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

In September, Cypriot police narrowly foiled a plot by an Iranian agent to murder five Jewish businessman. This was but one of roughly a dozen similar operations that Tehran has conducted in Europe since 2015—on both Israeli or Jewish and American targets—which have left three dead. Matthew Karnitschnig traces the use of assassination as a strategic tool to the very beginning of the Islamic Republic, and explains its appeal:

In the West, assassination remains a last resort (think Osama bin Laden); in authoritarian states, it’s the first (who can forget the 2017 assassination by nerve agent of Kim Jong-nam, the playboy half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, upon his arrival in Kuala Lumpur?). For rogue states, even if the murder plots are thwarted, the regimes still win by instilling fear in their enemies’ hearts and minds. That helps explain the recent frequency. Over the course of a few months last year, Iran undertook a flurry of attacks from Latin America to Africa.

Whether such operations succeed or not, the countries behind them can be sure of one thing: they won’t be made to pay for trying. Over the years, the Russian and Iranian regimes have eliminated countless dissidents, traitors, and assorted other enemies (real and perceived) on the streets of Paris, Berlin, and even Washington, often in broad daylight. Others have been quietly abducted and sent home, where they faced sham trials and were then hanged for treason.

While there’s no shortage of criticism in the West in the wake of these crimes, there are rarely real consequences. That’s especially true in Europe, where leaders have looked the other way in the face of a variety of abuses in the hopes of reviving a deal to rein in Tehran’s nuclear-weapons program and renewing business ties.