Four years ago, a twenty-three-year-old Frenchman of Algerian descent named Mohamed Merah carried out three terror attacks over the course of a nine-day period, killing three French soldiers as well as four civilians, three of them children, at a Jewish day school. He was subsequently shot and killed by French police following a 30-hour siege. Reviewing a new French book that tells Merah’s story, John Rosenthal notes his “mind-boggling” success in avoiding French authorities, who had him on their radar well before the attacks:

Merah, like many of his acolytes, was the object of an “S” file identifying him as a threat to national security. He had long been under surveillance and he was repeatedly called in for questioning by both the police and the DCRI, the French domestic intelligence agency (since re-baptized as the DGSI). Indeed, in the end, his contact with the DCRI was so regular that the question can be raised as to whether French intelligence was not in fact attempting to use Merah as a willing or unwilling informant. . . .

The story of Mohamed Merah is, in effect, that of a train wreck waiting to happen or, to paraphrase his brother Abdelghani, a ticking time bomb waiting to explode—while French intelligence looked on.

Indeed, in conversation with negotiators during the siege of his apartment, Merah himself expressed amazement at the fact that he was able to carry out his attacks unhindered, attributing his success—and the failure of French authorities—to the will of Allah. . ..

[T]he blindness and downright confusion of French authorities is already evident during the eighteen months Merah spent in prison between December 2007 and October 2009 (which included a brief period of work release). Like so many of the current generation of French jihadists, Merah’s path to jihad passed through an extended phase of delinquency and petty crime. . . .

A cellmate [of Merah’s from one of his incarcerations] reports that “from morning to night” Merah would “blast” a CD featuring Islamic chants and “sounds of explosions.” Nonetheless, prison officials did not note any particular signs of radicalization. More astonishingly still, they appear to have been unaware that Merah was in fact already the subject of an “S” file flagging him as a threat.

While conventional wisdom in the Western press believes that the war with Hamas has left Jerusalem more isolated and scuttled chances of expanding the Abraham Accords, Gabriel Scheinmann points to a very different reality. He begins with Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on Israel last month, and the coalition that helped defend against it:

America’s Arab allies had, in various ways, provided intelligence and allowed U.S. and Israeli planes to operate in their airspace. Jordan, which has been vociferously attacking Israel’s conduct in Gaza for months, even publicly acknowledged that it shot down incoming Iranian projectiles. When the chips were down, the Arab coalition held and made clear where they stood in the broader Iranian war on Israel.

The successful batting away of the Iranian air assault also engendered awe in Israel’s air-defense capabilities, which have performed marvelously throughout the war. . . . Israel’s response to the Iranian night of missiles should give further courage to Saudi Arabia to codify its alignment. Israel . . . telegraphed clearly to Tehran that it could hit precise targets without its aircraft being endangered and that the threshold of a direct Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear or other sites had been breached.

The entire episode demonstrated that Israel can both hit Iranian sites and defend against an Iranian response. At a time when the United States is focused on de-escalation and restraint, Riyadh could see quite clearly that only Israel has both the capability and the will to deal with the Iranian threat.

It is impossible to know whether the renewed U.S.-Saudi-Israel negotiations will lead to a normalization deal in the immediate months ahead. . . . Regardless of the status of this deal, [however], or how difficult the war in Gaza may appear, America’s Arab allies have now become Israel’s.