Yesterday, Benjamin Netanyahu met with his German counterpart Olaf Scholz; last week, he was in Rome meeting with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. The Israeli prime minister was also in Paris in February and is expected to visit Britain soon. While Netanyahu has received domestic criticism for being out of the country amid terrorist attacks and ongoing controversy over legal reform, his recent travel is in the service of an urgent, diplomatic purpose, according to Ron Ben-Yishai. That purpose is to shore up support for resisting Iran:

Netanyahu has apparently been attempting to convey to his European counterparts that weapons shipments coming out of the Islamic Republic are mostly meant for Moscow, to assist Russian efforts in the less-than-stellar military campaign against Ukraine. That in itself, Netanyahu says, compromises all of Europe. He has stressed to them that the technological and military cooperation between Russia and Iran is designed, among other things, to improve the accuracy and range of Iranian-made payload-carrying drones and anti-aircraft missiles to target the Ukrainians. In exchange, Iran gets a fresh supply of Russian fighter jets.

All of that will not only serve to prolong the war in Ukraine, but to make it easier for the Iranians to endanger shipping routes from the Persian Gulf to Europe, thus compromising the Israeli capability to defend the homeland effectively.

In comes Netanyahu’s wish for a weapons embargo on Iran, set by the UN Security Council, a move that could hamper Iranian efforts to secure the requisite military capabilities to mount such a threat. . . . Netanyahu, meanwhile, has no desire to be on Vladimir Putin’s bad side. Russian retaliation against Israel could come across in the form of banning the Israeli aviation from utilizing the Russian airspace, which could change the nature of Israeli commercial flights to southeast [and east] Asia. [Moscow] could also scramble communication frequencies and launch cyberattacks against 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.