Today, a Russian court will hold a hearing regarding the government’s plans to shut down the national branch of the Jewish Agency, which assists Jews in moving to Israel. While the Agency has been under investigation by the Kremlin for three years, the move to shutter it has little to do with its supposed breaches of data-collection laws, and everything to do with geopolitics. Ron Ben-Yishai points first to the numerous airstrikes the IDF has conducted against Moscow’s Iranian allies in Syria:

The strikes, which exact a high price from the Syrian military, are increasingly raising the ire of President Bashar al-Assad, as they damage his image and apparent control of the area between Damascus and Aleppo. . . . Assad complains to Moscow that Israeli missiles and attacking aircraft are not shot at by the Russian forces despite their having the means to do so.

A senior Israeli source said Putin was concerned that he may lose his strategic hold on the eastern Mediterranean while at the peak of a conflict with the West. He is therefore more open to Assad’s demands and is pressuring Israel to stop its attacks on targets in Syria—launched to obstruct Iranian precision-weapons supplies [from being transported] through Syria to militias in Lebanon.

Ben-Yishai also notes that the escalation against the Jewish Agency came on the heels of Foreign Minister Yair Lapid’s accession to the Israeli premiership:

Lapid does not have a warm relationship with Putin. He had been outspoken in his criticism of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and during the recent visit by President Joe Biden announced that Israel would increase its assistance to Kyiv. Putin, it seems, does not forgive such positions, and that may be why Lapid—who hopes to appear as the kind of leader who could navigate opposing powers to advance Israel’s interests—is being targeted by Moscow.

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?