In April of 2018, the Durham city council adopted, by unanimous vote, a statement opposing “international exchanges with any country in which Durham officers receive military-style training.” The statement concluded with some generic declarations about racial justice, clarifying that “Black lives matter.” But it began with a quotation from the municipal police chief stating clearly “there has been no effort while I have served as chief of police to initiate or participate in any exchange to Israel, nor do I have any intention to do so.” This disclaimer points to the origins of the statement in a petition from an offshoot of Jewish Voice for Peace, a particularly vicious anti-Israel group. In his speech in favor of the resolution, Durham’s mayor made the connection to the Jewish state clear, as Sean Cooper reports:

“I want to start [by] speaking to the folks from Jewish Voice for Peace. I really mainly want to speak to the Jews in the room, my fellow Jews,” Mayor Steve Schewel told the crowd [at the city-council meeting].

As it turned out, rewriting the JVP petition—[which originated on the local university] campus—into the city-council resolution was the mayor’s own doing. He himself had penned the final draft of the document.

“I’m a Jew and I am a Zionist,” he declared. “I believe in the existence of a Jewish state. I fear for its survival. But I know the terrible traumas visiting on us as a people, we are now visiting on others in Gaza and on the West Bank,” the mayor claimed, somehow turning the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust into a motive for the infliction by Israel . . . of equivalent horrors on Palestinians, a charge for which there is zero evidence.

Many of Durham’s Jewish citizens attended the city-council session to voice their dissatisfaction at the resolution, which had been pushed onto the agenda with unusual rapidity and possible procedural irregularity—but their efforts proved to be too little, too late. Cooper notes the comments of Deborah Friedman, one of the most dedicated opponents of the resolution:

Friedman’s concerns . . . centered on the fear that condemning the Jews would bring out acts of bigotry throughout the city. “If you do something anti-Semitic, it lets others fly their flags. It energizes them,” she said. She saw her fears come to fruition when Minister Rafiq Zaidi of the Nation of Islam came forward [to speak in favor of the resolution]. “I thank the council very deeply from my heart because the movement that you have made to approve this petition was one against forces that are unseen,” he said.

Lest his point be missed, Zaidi began by speaking of “the synagogue of Satan” and concluded with a reference to the “inordinate control that some Jews have over the political system in this city.”

With a look of wide satisfaction on his face for entering his own take on the malignancy of the Jewish threat into public record, Zaidi sat down. . . . Kathryn Wolf [noted] in a published letter that, two weeks following the public hearing, posters began appearing in downtown Durham. “One showed a man pointing a gun at a bearded man with a long nose and kippah, saying, ‘Your ancestors threw off foreign oppression, time for you as well.’”

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 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.