The past several days have seen a spate of violent attacks on Jews across the United States, conducted in the name of the Palestinian cause. Among the most shocking were the brutal of beating of Joseph Borgen and the explosion of an incendiary device by gangs yelling anti-Israel and anti-Semitic slogans. The week before, Representatives Rashida Tlaib and André Carson appeared at an anti-Israel protest outside the State Department—organized by the Hamas-affiliated Council on American-Islamic Relations—where the latter accused the Jewish state of “ethnic cleansing.” While such rhetoric was echoed by other members of the progressive left, not to mention various celebrities, there has been little outrage, or even media coverage, of the violence to which it gives sanction. Seffi Kogan writes:

While anti-Zionist gangs beat up Jews in her city, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was providing a quasi-intellectual basis for their actions, defaming Israel as an apartheid state employing indiscriminate force in what she seems to think is a capricious quest to murder as many Palestinian children as possible, instead of a highly restrained military operation tightly targeted on terrorists. Ocasio-Cortez didn’t call for violence, but she carved out an area of respectability for a certain type of anti-Semitism, and others were only too happy to rush in, fists flying.

It turns out, if you ignore all evidence, turn Israel into the villain in your morality play, and insist that Americans have a “responsibility” to do something about Israel, the thing that they will do is beat up American Jews, throw rocks through the windows of American synagogues, and harass Jews who try to speak up on social media.

Senator Bernie Sanders published his own dangerous anti-Israel harangue, . . . which began, “No one is arguing that Israel . . . does not have the right to self-defense or to protect its people,” even as his own supporters were arguing just that on social media. The comedians John Oliver and Trevor Noah made the same case into their media megaphones, arguing that Israel was wrong to attack the terrorists aiming at Israeli civilians because Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system can prevent most (but not all) civilian deaths from Hamas rockets.

People like Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders (and too many other progressive members of Congress, unfortunately) are greatly concerned about whether Israel’s response to Palestinian terror meets a standard of acceptable “proportionality.” But what are the acceptable numbers in America of Jews assaulted and synagogues vandalized?

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.