When the unrest that has been striking so many American cities hit Kenosha, Wisconsin, someone spray painted “Free Palestine” on the driveway of Beth Hillel Temple. Jonathan Tobin observes:

Stacked up against the toll of dead and injured, the businesses and homes that have been destroyed along with the savings and lifetimes of hard work they represented, as well as the concerns about the shooting [by police of Jacob] Blake, a slogan scrawled on a sidewalk or even on the walls of synagogues or other Jewish institutions—as happened in Los Angeles during the post-George Floyd riots there three months ago—doesn’t amount to much.

But it is still important to ask why, with so much else going on, there seems almost always to be both time and effort available to lash out at symbols of the Jews.

[T]here is also no escaping the fact that the driving force behind the justifications for the Black Lives Matter protests and some of those protesting is a belief in “intersectionalism.” Intersectional ideology holds that, among other causes, the Palestinian war to eliminate Israel is a struggle of “indigenous people of color” against white colonialists [and thus] somehow analogous to the struggle for civil rights in the United States.

That this claim is a lie in every respect doesn’t make the notion any less toxic. Far-left groups that are loud and increasingly influential voices in American politics have promoted such ideas. That creates a national constituency for the demonization of Israel on college campuses, as well as in minority communities. Add to that the way it is amplified by sympathizers of the Nation of Islam, whose leader, Louis Farrakhan, is the leading purveyor of anti-Semitism in the African-American community, and you have a growing audience for claims that saying “free Palestine” is the moral equivalent of uttering slogans like “black lives matter.”

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”