In France’s runoff presidential election, held on Sunday, the incumbent Emmanuel Macron beat out the far-right Marine Le Pen. Le Pen has changed her party’s tone since taking the reins from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen—an anti-Semite who has dabbled in Holocaust denial and defended the Vichy regime. But Ariel Kandel, writing on the eve of the election, argued that she represents a danger to both French Jewry and the Jewish state:

Marine Le Pen . . . is more sophisticated than her father. She understood that ahead of the election, it would benefit her to moderate her comments about Jews and Israel, letting others do the work—mainly . . . the Jewish former French TV pundit Eric Zemmour, who ran in the first round of the election and won 7.1 percent of the votes (which translates to nearly 2.5 million voters). Zemmour, who was convicted of inciting hatred in the past, claimed during the campaign that the Vichy government actually “protected Jews,” that Alfred Dreyfus was perhaps wrongfully exonerated, and called on his supporters to vote for Le Pen in the runoff.

Although Marine Le Pen kept silent in recent months in relation to Israel and Jews, she only did so because it served her temporary interests. Her views are established: she champions ridding the public sphere of all religious symbols, including Jewish symbols; she has supported a ban on kosher slaughter in France; declared she would prohibit Jews from holding dual citizenship; and contrary to the official position of the French government, she also doesn’t recognize France’s role in collaborating with the Nazis and sending its Jewish citizens to the concentration camps. . . . She has not abandoned her views, rather she has “hidden” them for the time being to appear less extreme.

There are those who claim that Le Pen is a friend of Israel, but this is a grave mistake. She espouses turning Jerusalem into a city with a special international status that would serve as the capital of the three major religions. For all intents and purposes, this means Jerusalem would no longer be under Israel’s control, rather subject to the whims of the United Nations.

Concluded in 1979, the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty ended nearly 30 years of intermittent warfare, and proved one of the most enduring and beneficial products of Middle East diplomacy. But Egypt may not have been upholding its end of the bargain, write Jonathan Schanzer and Mariam Wahba:

Article III, subsection two of the peace agreement’s preamble explicitly requires both parties “to ensure that that acts or threats of belligerency, hostility, or violence do not originate from and are not committed from within its territory.” This clause also mandates both parties to hold accountable any perpetrators of such acts.

Recent Israeli operations along the Philadelphi Corridor, the narrow strip of land bordering Egypt and Gaza, have uncovered multiple tunnels and access points used by Hamas—some in plain sight of Egyptian guard towers. While it could be argued that Egypt has lacked the capacity to tackle this problem, it is equally plausible that it lacks the will. Either way, it’s a serious problem.

Was Egypt motivated by money, amidst a steep and protracted economic decline in recent years? Did Cairo get paid off by Hamas, or its wealthy patron, Qatar? Did the Iranians play a role? Was Egypt threatened with violence and unrest by the Sinai’s Bedouin Union of Tribes, who are the primary profiteers of smuggling, if it did not allow the tunnels to operate? Or did the Sisi regime take part in this operation because of an ideological hatred of Israel?