On Sunday, news that a flight from Tel Aviv was about to land at the Makhachkala airport in the Muslim-majority Russian province of Dagestan led a mob to show up, some armed with knives, and search the incoming flight for Jews to attack. Fortunately, they had little success. Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt puts the incident in context:

On October 28, the Flamingo Hotel in Khasavyurt, Dagestan was stormed by a group of men looking for Jews. On October 29, the Jewish community center in Nalchik was set on fire—along with an inscription on one of its walls: ​​“Death to the Jews.” In Cherkessk, on Russian Telegram, [a group-message app], videos circulate of locals calling for Jews to leave the country.

All these places are located in the Russian Caucasus, not far from Chechnya, a quasi-autonomous province ruled by the viciously anti-Semitic Islamist Ramzan Kadyrov. Chizhik-Goldschmidt adds:

Note that the airport pogrom occurred three weeks after President Putin’s all-too-evenhanded comments on the Hamas massacre of October 7. It came after Russia’s UN Security Council resolution last week, which avoided mention of Hamas, and days after Moscow welcomed a delegation from Hamas, led by the official Moussa Abu Marzouk. . . . This is not long after a Moscow-based cryptocurrency exchange, Garantex, transferred $93 million to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which took part in the attacks on October 7.

Today, in the wake of the airport mob, the Russian press Secretary Dmitry Peskov has wasted no time in redirecting the blame and declaring that the airport attack was “Western meddling” intended to “divide Russia.”

But the Makhachkala airport scene was no backwater dream of a pogrom in some far-off republic. It is a whisper of something else, something far more sinister. That is, Russia’s attempt to direct its starved and war-devastated masses to blow off steam about the zhid as in times of old. It is the oldest trick in the book: let them focus on the Jew, not on the falling ruble and the rising cost of food, not on the failing war that has ravaged their sons. It is the Jew that is the problem.

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.