Even before the Hyper Cacher terrorist attack in January, Sammy Ghozlan, a retired police commissioner who founded France’s leading organization for combating anti-Semitism, decided to move to Israel. (He continues his efforts from there.) Marie Brenner examines the rising tide of hatred:

This past year, Ghozlan’s frequent bulletins—detailing attacks in parks, schools attacked, synagogues torched, assaults on the Métro—have clogged the inboxes of reporters at Le Monde, Le Figaro, and Le Parisien, and of thousands of Jews throughout the [lower-class Paris suburbs known as the] banlieues. Ghozlan’s bulletins sometimes come twice a day, with claims that have also been backed up by hard numbers: according to a watchdog group, the Jewish Community Protection Service, or S.P.C.J., which reports statistics collected by the country’s Interior Ministry, there were 851 recorded anti-Semitic incidents in France in 2014, more than doubling the total from 2013. Ghozlan and his nineteen volunteers are on the front lines in the most troubled areas, documenting, trying to confirm, hoping to get a reporter or a police prefect or a court to take action. . . .

For Ghozlan, July 2014 was the tipping point, after years of escalating anti-Semitic violence: “There was no debate in our family. We all knew—it is time to go. Leaving is better than running away,” Ghozlan later told me. He would ultimately come to think of the [2014] summer riots as the predictors of the catastrophes that would play out six months later in the terror attacks at the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, three-quarters of a mile from the Place de la République, on January 7, 2015, and then, two days later, at Hyper Cacher, a kosher grocery store in the Porte de Vincennes neighborhood of eastern Paris. . . .

Not long after the attack on the Hyper Cacher, representatives of the Ministry of the Interior appeared [at Ghozlan’s house] on the Avenue Henri Barbusse in Le Blanc-Mesnil. They had come to alert Ghozlan that he would now have a security detail posted at his house at all times. Ghozlan’s tenants informed them, “Mr. Ghozlan has moved from France,” and gave them his new address in Israel.

When he called upon Hamas to end the war and release the hostages last week, the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas was also getting ready for a reshuffle within his regime. On Saturday, he appointed Hussein al-Sheikh deputy president of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which is intimately tied to the PA itself. Al-Sheikh would therefore succeed Abbas—who is eighty-nine and reportedly in ill health—as head of the PLO if he should die or become incapacitated, and be positioned to succeed him as head of the PA as well.

Al-Sheikh spent eleven years in an Israeli prison and, writes Maurice Hirsch, was involved in planning a 2002 Jerusalem suicide bombing that killed three. Moreover, Hirsch writes, he “does not enjoy broad Palestinian popularity or support.”

Still, by appointing Al-Sheikh, Abbas has taken a step in the internal reforms he inaugurated last year in the hope that he could prove to the Biden administration and other relevant players that the PA was up to the task of governing the Gaza Strip. Neomi Neumann writes:

Abbas’s motivation for reform also appears rooted in the need to meet the expectations of Arab and European donors without compromising his authority. On April 14, the EU foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas approved a three-year aid package worth 1.6 billion euros, including 620 million euros in direct budget support tied to reforms. Meanwhile, the French president Emmanuel Macron held a call with Abbas [earlier this month] and noted afterward that reforms are essential for the PA to be seen as a viable governing authority for Gaza—a telling remark given reports that Paris may soon recognize “the state of Palestine.”

In some cases, reforms appear targeted at specific regional partners. The idea of appointing a vice-president originated with Saudi Arabia.

In the near term, Abbas’s main goal appears to be preserving Arab and European support ahead of a major international conference in New York this June.