The city of Gondar in Ethiopia is home to only one synagogue, used by the Falash Mura community. As Cnaan Lipshiz explains, its members identify as the descendants of Ethiopian Jews who converted to Christianity around 200 years ago, sometimes under duress. In recent weeks, two flights brought a total of 300 members of the Falash Mura to settle in Israel, in an operation organized by the Jewish Agency for Israel and funded by a wide range of Jewish organizations.

Over the past 40 years, Israel has haltingly allowed thousands of Falash Mura to immigrate, with the aim of reuniting families of Ethiopian Jews in Israel and ultimately leaving none behind in Ethiopia, a poor African nation where the average life expectancy is 67 years. [Last week’s] flight is one of the first since Israel re-opened immigration for a small number of Falash Mura last year.

Kefale Tayachew Damtie, a father of six from Gondar, [and one of the expectant immigrants], has not seen his mother in years but has not told her that he’s coming. “I’ll do it right before I board the plane to Israel. I don’t want to disappoint her,” said Damtie, fifty-six, who lives with his wife and children in a rented 300-square-feet room with no running water.

“I have been waiting to leave because this is not my home. These are not my people. I am Jewish and Zion is my country,” said Damtie. [He] and his whole family wore their best clothes as they loaded their only possessions—a serving dish and some clothing—onto a pickup truck bound for Gondar airport, en route to Addis Ababa ahead of the final flight to Israel.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.