I’d like now to turn to the geopolitical questions at stake in the war in Israel. It may never be entirely clear why Hamas decided to plan last weekend’s assault, but it’s likely that factors distant from Israel’s borders came into play. Richard Kemp urges us to look as far afield as Moscow, and Vladimir Putin’s failure to subdue Ukraine:

Unwilling to take the fight directly to NATO, instead, Putin has been fomenting conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, Serbia and Kosovo, in West Africa, and now in Israel. . . . Just as Russia used Iran to supply large numbers of drones to attack Ukrainian civilians, it is now using Iran to encourage and enable these attacks in Israel. Iran is of course a more than willing partner whose leaders have repeatedly sworn death to Israel and America; as are its proxies in Gaza and also in Lebanon.

Iran has long been directing, training, funding, and supplying weapons to Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza as well as in Judea and Samaria, or the West Bank. Moscow too has maintained and developed connections with Palestinian terrorist groups and individual extremists, going back to Soviet days, when Putin himself as a KGB officer was dealing with Middle East terrorists, including during his time in Dresden.

Hamas leaders, including the terrorist boss Ismail Haniyeh, have made a number of visits to Moscow since the Ukraine war began, meeting with senior government officials including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. A delegation from their Gaza terrorist bedfellows, Islamic Jihad, led by its chief, Ziyad al-Nakhalah, also visited Moscow in March. Likewise, leaders of another Iranian proxy, Lebanese Hizballah, have been welcome guests in Moscow.

Turning back to the Jewish state and its immediate environs, Kemp adds another critical observation:

Israel cannot afford to show any weakness in this dire situation. Aside from the overriding need to protect its own people, other countries in the region, including Jordan, Egypt, and the UAE, depend on Israeli strength.

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.