There will be more to say about Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech yesterday, but now I’d like to focus on the behavior of two of Congress’s most prominent Jewish members. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, having bizarrely called for Israel to hold elections and vote Netanyahu out in March, refrained from taking a seat behind him at the podium. (Reportedly the two men nodded at each other but didn’t shake hands.) And then there is the Manhattan representative Jerrold Nadler, who on Tuesday announced on social media that he would attend the speech but believes that “Benjamin Netanyahu is the worst leader in Jewish history” since the 1st century BCE.

Seth Mandel comments:

Set aside the hysterical tone of Nadler’s post. Does anyone in Congress talk about any other ally this way? We have had a series of incompetent prime ministers in Britain over the past few years, one of whose term was outlived by a head of lettuce. We did not have members of Congress ranting about how Liz Truss was her country’s worst leader since Britain was Roman.

The Democratic party has made Israel so toxic that it is no longer possible to console ourselves with the fact that the overt anti-Semites are very few in number. Power is what matters, and Democratic floor leaders are terrified of the few but apparently scary bigmouths in the Squad and the legions of social-media trolls they command. This, despite one Squad member losing his primary last month and another in danger of meeting the same fate next month. You don’t have to join them; you can just beat them.

Relatedly, it matters that Nadler and Schumer are high-profile Jews. Every time they dare to say anything nice about Israel or the Jewish people, they now caveat it to hell and back. The incentives are materially worsened by doing so, because those with even less power know they’ll be hung out to dry by leadership if and when they show a smidgen of Jewish pride.

On the same day the cease-fire went into effect along the Israel-Lebanon border, rebel forces launched an unexpected offensive, and within a few days captured much of Aleppo. This lightening advance originated in the northwestern part of the country, which has been relatively quiet over the past four years, since Bashar al-Assad effectively gave up on restoring control over the remaining rebel enclaves in the area. The fighting comes at an inopportune moment for the powers that Damascus has called on for help in the past: Russia is bogged down in Ukraine and Hizballah has been shattered.

But the situation is extremely complex. David Wurmser points to the dangers that lie ahead:

The desolation wrought on Hizballah by Israel, and the humiliation inflicted on Iran, has not only left the Iranian axis exposed to Israeli power and further withering. It has altered the strategic tectonics of the Middle East. The story is not just Iran anymore. The region is showing the first signs of tremendous geopolitical change. And the plates are beginning to move.

The removal of the religious-totalitarian tyranny of the Iranian regime remains the greatest strategic imperative in the region for the United States and its allies, foremost among whom stands Israel. . . . However, as Iran’s regime descends into the graveyard of history, it is important not to neglect the emergence of other, new threats. navigating the new reality taking shape.

The retreat of the Syrian Assad regime from Aleppo in the face of Turkish-backed, partly Islamist rebels made from remnants of Islamic State is an early skirmish in this new strategic reality. Aleppo is falling to the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS—a descendant of Nusra Front led by Abu Mohammed al-Julani, himself a graduate of al-Qaeda’s system and cobbled together of IS elements. Behind this force is the power of nearby Turkey.