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

If there is to be peace, Palestinians will have to unlearn the hatred of Israel they have imbibed during nearly two decades of Hamas rule. This will be a difficult task, but Cole Aronson argues, drawing on the experiences of World War II, that Israel has already gotten off to a strong start:

The population’s compliance can . . . be won by a new regime that satisfies its immediate material needs, even if that new regime is sponsored by a government until recently at war with the population’s former regime. Axis civilians were made needy through bombing. Peaceful compliance with the Allies became a good alternative to supporting violent resistance to the Allies.

Israel’s current campaign makes a moderate Gaza more likely, not less. Destroying Hamas not only deprives Islamists of the ability to rule—it proves the futility of armed resistance to Israel, a condition for peace. The destruction of buildings not only deprives Hamas of its hideouts. It also gives ordinary Palestinians strong reasons to shun groups planning to replicate Hamas’s behavior.